"Who did it? Someone above Stanfield?"
Russell asked with a dark expression, activating the spiritual seed within the chief's heart and making him tell the whole truth.
"No. There are indeed people behind Stanfield, and some of them have real influence, but if the police dared investigate him, they weren't afraid of those people interfering."
The chief helped Russell eliminate one wrong answer. "You're smart. You should be able to guess that investigating Stanfield is only the beginning—a signal. The key is catching the people behind him, so they aren't anything to fear. The police aren't afraid of them."
"Then who else could it be?"
"Everyone... from every direction..."
The chief spoke of the current terrible situation. "Just as I feared, what you did—killing more than two hundred assassins in the slums—has drawn widespread condemnation. Two councilmen have proposed that your habit of killing makes you unworthy of the Cross of Valor, and that you shouldn't even remain a police officer. They're worried that one day, you'll have some kind of psychotic episode and start shooting civilians."
"Councilmen? What does this have to do with them?" Russell asked, confused.
"It has a great deal to do with them. Those two councilmen oversee police affairs. They hold real power; they're not just dispensable mouthpieces."
Russell nodded. Then the question became: who had enough influence to make two councilmen personally target an ordinary little cop like him?
The answer was obvious: the Continental Hotel. More precisely, the people who ran the Continental Hotel.
Based on Russell's conversations with the assassins, the Continental Hotel had branches all over the world. Its influence was so vast that it seemed like something that could only exist in movies. Behind it stood a massive underground organization jointly established by criminal syndicates across the globe.
The High