You're a US police officer, what are you thinking about going back to the East for?

Lyon turned the car out of the headquarters' underground parking garage, a few drops of moisture still clinging to the windshield, carried by the evening breeze.

Christmas is the day after tomorrow.

Lyon, with one hand on the steering wheel, gently exhaled.

For the past two weeks, he's been practically splitting himself in eight pieces, and the women around him haven't been idle either.

Mia was pinned to her desk by a mountain of documents, her dead fish eyes almost turning into black holes from exhaustion.

I didn't dare mention it when I saw it just now. We were talking about serious business the whole time. Mia saw that I finished talking as if nothing had happened and then went straight out. At that moment, Mia's eyes almost tore me apart.

Although Chloe doesn't need to use her brain, she still runs back and forth on the streets of the East and West Ends every day, ready to throw C4 at any time.

As for Sterling, that woman was so focused on her mayoral campaign that she practically dreamt of reciting her campaign speeches. Apart from that exchange on the yacht that "gave him a handle" to her, the two of them were basically playing political tai chi from afar.

It was indeed a bit too much to neglect them. If he didn't offer them something sweet to appease them, Leon was afraid their resentment would tear the ceiling down or cause them to die suddenly, turning into vengeful ghosts to haunt him in the middle of the night.

I need to sort out this mess as soon as possible and make time to spend with them on Christmas Day.

Back to the main topic,

It was too late. Unless someone set the City Hall building on fire, Harvey Clement was definitely not there. But that didn't matter; Lyon wasn't planning on going to a place where reporters might be lurking at any moment. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and took out his phone with the other, dialing Harvey's private number.

The phone rings until it automatically hangs up, and then the other party answers.

"Feed...feed?"

Harvey's voice was low and breathy, as if he had just been dragged out of bed.

"It's me," Leon said.

A rustling sound came from the other end of the phone, like someone suddenly sitting up and almost hitting their head on the wall.

"Officer Vance... damn... you scared me to death."

"What happened? Do I need to leave the safe house? Or did your people see something at the door?"

"Calm down, Harvey."

Lyon turned the steering wheel half a turn to the left, and the car steadily moved onto the main road.

"There's no assassin, and we're not asking you to move out overnight."

"I just wanted to confirm a few small things with you." There was a half-second silence on the other end of the phone, followed by a long "whoosh" from Harvey.

"You nearly scared my heart out of my throat. I thought someone was coming to kill me again." He took a couple more breaths.

"What is it?"

"I need you to act as a go-between and arrange for me to meet with some of the bigger union leaders in Seattle," Lyon said.

"Is this something you can do?"

"union?"

Harvey was clearly taken aback for a moment, then repeated it in an incredulous tone.

"Wait, Lyon, you've suddenly become interested in the union?"

"Don't tell me you're planning to do anything during their rally, like arresting them all and stuffing them into gas chambers. We are the Seattle democratic government, not the Seattle fascist military government."

"I'm not doing anything." Leon looked at the empty street ahead.

"It's just that some of my staff, after interacting with the citizens, discovered that they need to work to make a living, and this isn't a problem that can be solved simply by providing mutton soup and fixing water pumps."

"If you need to arrange jobs, the union is a good option." "As long as you don't cause trouble." Harvey's voice sounded a little more reassured.

"It's not difficult to simply meet. I can organize an informal small-scale tea party in the name of the acting mayor. It's more low-key than a formal meeting, and it won't attract much attention from the media."

"But I need to make that clear to you beforehand."

His speaking speed gradually returned to normal, and it seemed that once he returned to his politician's mindset, the sense of cowardice had been suppressed by at least half.

"How far we can talk depends on your communication skills. At most, I'm responsible for getting people to come and arranging the private room and drinks."

"I can't endorse your NGO in front of the union right now."

"Your organization's name is too new, and I don't know any of the people in it except you, and I don't even know you very well."

"I can use my old face to arrange meetings with them occasionally, but if I use it too often, people will start writing and reporting nonsense about me. I'm just the acting mayor, and I don't want to attract any more attention."

"And, Seattle still has a few strong unions: the service workers' union, the truck drivers' union, the construction industry union, and the docks."

"They may appear to be a group, but they are actually in complete disarray internally."

"They're idiots as a whole, but you don't have to think of them all as the worst. A lot of them are just after money, and some are kept by politicians and gangsters, but there are some who genuinely want to do something worthwhile."

"After all, if everyone is just trying to get by, and you don't hire people who actually do the work, then who are you going to take over the job?" "So, you can't just show up as if you want to recruit them the moment you meet them."

Leon didn't interrupt him, and casually rolled down the car window a little.

The night breeze blew into the car, taking away some of the warmth inside.

"Go on."

"People who actually get things done might buy into your NGO approach, while others will only talk about price." Harvey was getting into it now, and poured himself a glass of whiskey, taking a swig.

"The first guy you deal with is most likely a sly one who just wants you to donate money."

"Feed him well first, and then he will take you to meet the people who can actually help you."

"Okay, have your people arrange for all the people you can talk to to come out tomorrow, and I'll go meet them."

After Harvey said that, Lyon started to look forward to tomorrow.

I originally thought everyone in the union was a walking embodiment of justice, but I never expected to meet some people who actually do real work the next day.

Now, under the relentless pressure from the Deep Government, he has to compete with them for development. The more people he unites, the faster his power grows, and the more confident Lyon will be to confront the Deep Government head-on when they overturn the table.

Infiltration is mutual. The deep state can infiltrate its own police departments, and it can infiltrate people throughout Seattle, even attempting to infiltrate beyond Seattle. Ultimately, when everyone flips the table, it will spread across the entire United States. Please remember the only official website address for this novel: www.deqixs.org. The website owner has only this one website; other websites may be discontinued at any time.

"The second thing."

Lyon stopped the car at the red light and tapped the steering wheel with his fingers.

"I have some people here who need to be squeezed into the city hall."

"Can you arrange that?"

Harvey paused on the other end of the phone, not immediately saying "yes" or "no".

Leon could almost picture him looking like this: huddled on the sofa in the safe house, his phone pressed against his sweaty, chubby face, his other hand rubbing it back and forth.

"This is not an easy task, but it's not that difficult either," Harvey said slowly, organizing his thoughts.

"The city hall isn't owned by my family; I'm just a poor wretch temporarily staying in that building."

"If you want to place people inside, you can't just give me a list today and have people wearing name tags to work tomorrow."

"I reckon your people won't have time to take the city government's brain-dead employee exams, so they'll have to go through outsourcing contracts, volunteer programs, temporary work, or community service project coordinators—those kind of shady, half-legal paths."

"These channels are inherently flexible and loosely supervised. Your NGOs can take on outsourcing work from the city hall, such as community security campaigns, garbage collection coordination, and distribution of relief supplies." "Then, after your NGOs take on these outsourcing jobs, some of your people will be working on the streets, while others will be coordinating things in the city hall. This allows the latter group to gain access to the city hall."

"First, turn unfamiliar faces into temporary workers who have obtained city hall employee badges, and then gradually convert them into project-based employees."

"Even if an investigation is launched, all that will be found is that an NGO has taken over the municipal public services, and there is no evidence to prove that the government is giving you a back door."

Lyon raised an eyebrow.

This fat guy may be timid most of the time, but when it comes to his professional field, he can actually say a few reasonable things. No wonder he's a politician who's managed to get a seat on the city council.

"Just remember this. I'll give you the list tomorrow. You can use the list to prepare the radish pits."

"Won't something go wrong again?" Leon asked casually.

"No." Harvey answered quickly this time, but then added, "At least it won't leave from the City Hall side first."

"Having worked at the city hall for so many years, I know that assigning temporary positions to people is a basic skill for politicians."

"As long as you don't stuff dozens of people who look like they just robbed a convenience store, or who couldn't read when they joined the company, or who don't even know their own names..."

"Then when registering, your people should write 'Reintegration Plan for Vulnerable Groups' or some kind of community re-employment plan, whatever you write, just don't write 'Loyal Warriors of the Republic'."

"That's enough, stop scaring yourselves. We're just ordinary people," Leon joked. "Great, is there anything else?" Harvey's voice lightened a bit.

"That's all, go to sleep." After saying that, Leon hung up the phone. The car started moving again, and Leon, with one hand on the steering wheel, drove towards the bowling alley in the seventh block.

……

At the end of the second-floor corridor of the bowling alley, in a small storage room that was originally used to store cleaning tools.

The mop and bucket were moved to a corner, replaced by a rickety folding table and a plastic chair.

Lane Holloway sat on a plastic chair with an old pair of headphones on his head.

He stared at a laptop in front of him, his right hand holding the mouse, dragging it across the timeline of the editing software.

This storage room was one he specifically asked Lao Han for when he was assigning rooms.

The place was so small that it could only fit a cot, but because it was so small, it was a single room. Once the door was locked, no one could see what he was doing.

The screen displayed a rough video, accompanied by audio he had just recorded in the basement.

"We must never allow them to have political demands beyond economic ones."

Ryan pressed the spacebar, pausing the audio. He typed a few words on the subtitle track and then pressed play.

"Some lords might ask: If I had given them a few good meals at the beginning, would they not have revolted?"

"Wrong. If they are well-fed, they will have the leisure to think, which may lead them to make political demands."

"In other words, they would be thinking of overthrowing the lords and taking over the reins."

"This is a thought that must never be allowed to arise."

"Therefore, as a proper master, one should further exploit them, let them go hungry, so hungry that all they can think about is bread, so hungry that they think of noodle soup when they open their eyes and rye when they close them."

"Even if they do revolt, their first reaction will only be to raise economic demands."

"For example, by opening granaries and distributing grain, people could obtain more land, more grain, and less grain to hand over to the government."

"They won't shout 'The lord should step down' because they're too tired to think about it, and besides, the lord has an army, but they're not well-fed and don't have the strength to fight."

"You need to find the right balance."

Ryan dragged the progress bar to the next audio segment.

"If we've already maintained order well, but the farmers still take to the streets, how do we deal with them?" "The best way is never to hang them all; we need to divide and disintegrate them from within."

"I've already given a simple example. Now if you look closely at the queues on the street, you'll see that they weren't originally aligned."

"There were a few radicals among them who clung to their pitchforks and refused to let go."

"There are also quite a few moderates who are afraid of death and want to talk. They always have illusions and think that if they can get the lord to come out and say a few words, ask for a rent reduction, and then everyone will disperse."

"So, you talk to them."

"Win over the moderates, the more sincere the talks, the better. It doesn't matter if the conditions are good, and it's also good to have plenty of drinks."

"If the moderates waver even once, they'll end up arguing with each other on their way back."

"At the same time, we can't talk to the radicals and die-hards; we need to fight them to the bitter end."

"These hardliners usually have clear political views and try to make everyone believe in them. The reason why the team can move forward is entirely due to the rhetoric they spout."

"You must believe that ordinary farmers or supporters do not have a clear stance; some of them are even illiterate."

"They can only see very superficial things, such as I am hungry, and they do not have enough analytical skills, which is what is called conformity."

"They lack sufficient thinking ability, so a leader must put forward clear propositions for them in order to make the troops fight to the end. This is the importance of the leader." "Therefore, based on the fundamental conflict between lords and peasants, the leader will directly decide the specific demands of the uprising. If the leader is a radical, the demands of the uprising will become to hang the lord and divide the land equally."

"If the leader is a weak moderate who dares not fight to the end, the demands of the rebels will be nothing more than forcing the lord to negotiate and open the granaries."

"That's why if the radicals and hardliners gain more power than the moderates and become the leaders of the uprising, their danger increases exponentially."

"So sometimes we need to assassinate hardliners and radicals directly to shut them up."

"The radicals were assassinated, the moderates were negotiated, and the remaining farmers or supporters without a clear stance were just following along anyway."

"Now that there's no one to lead the way and no one to provide food, and it's cold and we're hungry, we naturally follow the moderates' lead and go home."

Ryan typed the last line of subtitles and stopped the playback.

He rubbed his slightly stiff cheeks.

He spent two whole days brainstorming the copy for this issue of "Elite University Study" before he finally wrote it.

On the surface, it's about how medieval lords dealt with peasant uprisings, but anyone who has actually lived in the American underclass or participated in bankruptcy strikes can immediately tell what it's satirizing.

He clicked the export button.

The fan whirred heavily as he dragged the exported video file into a self-destructing chat application that didn't require real-name authentication and sent it to a contact in Portland. Two minutes later, a call request popped up in the lower right corner of the computer screen.

Ryan pressed the answer button.

"Video received." A deep male voice came through the earpiece, accompanied by the background noise of machinery.

That was his old friend, Old Huo. They had attended Democratic rallies together in Seattle before, but Old Huo became completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party and went to work as an assembly line worker in an auto parts factory in Portland.

During countless sleepless nights, the two exchanged various blocked links and e-books, thus completing their ideological awakening from the "wild Democratic Party" to the "Communist Party."

Old Huo didn't choose Portland randomly; it's about 175 miles from Seattle, a two-and-a-half to three-hour drive.

The three-hour drive ensured that he and Ryan wouldn't be caught by a group of police in the same city, and that they could meet up within half a day if needed.

Portland itself is a place where American left-wing ideology, anarchist protests, and various radical social movements are active.

Old Huo, disillusioned with hypocritical democracy and seeking a genuine theory of class struggle, chose to settle there after careful consideration of various factors.

"This video is really explosive," Lao Huo said.

"Isn't that 'wooing moderates and assassinating radicals' scenario you mentioned just the same old script from the 1960s and 70s when the FBI killed the Black Panther Party and then installed a few pastors who advocated peaceful protest as leaders?"

"Yes, including the heads of those big unions now." Ryan leaned against the cardboard box behind him and picked up a half-empty bottle of mineral water from the table. "The capitalists gave the strike leaders a raise and promised to increase their medical subsidies, so the moderates happily signed the return-to-work agreement."

"Nobody discusses the distribution of company profits, and the lower-level workers still ruin their lumbar spines on the assembly line."

"They've been playing this trick for a hundred years," Old Huo cursed on the other end of the line.

"But you've definitely gotten bolder lately."

"It's disguised as a radical left-wing supporter, seemingly mocking those self-proclaimed 'aristocrats' right-wing conservatives, but in reality, it's directly inserting its own agenda of class struggle."

"Without this cover, the video wouldn't even pass the review process; it would have been throttled or the account banned long ago," Ryan said in a low voice.

"Only by adopting that kind of left-wing rhetoric that mocks the right wing will the platform's algorithm push it to those bored Americans."

Old Huo chuckled on the other end of the phone.

"If those Democrats in China saw this, they'd probably accuse you of insulting farmers."

"Let them curse." Ryan clicked his teeth.

"I used to get criticized too. The more I was criticized, the more traffic I got, because the platform's traffic promotion is essentially based on the comment ratio. The higher the proportion of comments out of 100 people, the more traffic I get."

"I used this wording on purpose. Although I'm getting criticized, the platform won't think that the 'red hats' (maga hats) are untouchable. They'll just think that Democratic supporters are being sarcastic." "As for those who have figured it out, they'll naturally continue watching."

Old Huo paused for a moment on the other end of the phone, as if he were flipping through a computer.

"You said you went into a homeless shelter, how did it go?"

"That boss named Ray Fong, didn't you say he implemented some kind of 'no work, no food' rule? Is that really true?"

"Are they organized? Or are they just like any other charity, distributing meals and then disappearing?"

Ryan leaned back in his plastic chair, his eyes fixed on the editing interface on the screen.

"The approach does indeed show signs of being organized."

"It looks much more like a real organization than what we've seen in Chop before."

"They hold daily standing meetings with clear division of labor, and their efficiency is frighteningly high. There's no such nonsense as 'everyone speaks,' but you can still have a say when something comes up."

"Food was linked to labor, and sleeping places were allocated according to the individual."

"Those homeless people who used to only know how to beg for food and smoke marijuana are now lining up to work."

"However, I haven't heard any overly sensitive words during my stay here these past few days." Ryan scratched the stubble on his chin.

"No one mentioned 'class' or 'exploitation,' and I didn't hear any communist slogans."

"They only talk about working, eating, and following the rules."

"So who do you think they are? One of our own?" Old Huo asked.

I'm not sure.

Ryan sighed.

"The US government has done this kind of thing before."

"How many fake left-wing organizations did the FBI use for sting operations during its counterintelligence programs in the 1970s? How was the Black Panther Party infiltrated and brought down from within?"

"I'm afraid this outpost is also a spy nest, or a social experiment conducted by the FBI to lure out people like us who are dissatisfied with the system and deal with them in a concentrated manner."

"Even though the FBI raid on Psychedelic Cat was reported before... I'm still worried."

"I'm not sure if this place is like other underground communist organizations. If they're just far-right fascist groups disguised as efficient ones, I'd be asking for death if I showed myself."

"Until I can be 100% certain of their true background, I dare not reveal my thoughts. I can only continue to play dumb, edit the video, and keep observing." As soon as Ryan finished speaking, there were no footsteps coming from the carpet in the corridor outside the wooden door of the storage room, but the doorknob suddenly pressed down without warning.

"Click".

Ryan's muscles tensed instantly.

The door was pushed open.

Leon stood at the door, wearing a windbreaker, and transformed back into Ray's appearance.

He just parked his car in the alley behind the bowling alley and came up to inspect it.

As he walked down to the second-floor corridor, his extraordinary senses allowed him to clearly hear the extremely low-pitched conversation behind the door.

"A den of spies," "observation," and "political stance."

These fragmented words drifted into Leon's ears, and his first thought was that some spies had infiltrated the hideout and were hiding in a private room, reporting to the outside world.

Without any hesitation, he pressed down the doorknob and pushed the door open to enter.

Ryan was so startled that he jumped up from the plastic chair.

Almost instinctively, he lunged forward, using his body to shield the laptop screen, his right hand frantically trying to pull at the headphone cable. "Boss, boss," Ryan stammered when he saw it was Ray, forcing an awkward smile.

Ryan felt like his blood was freezing.

He didn't know how long the other person had been standing outside the door listening, nor whether the other person had seen what was on the screen.

Lyon stood at the door without moving, his gaze passing over Ryan's shoulder and locking onto the laptop.

Although Ryan's body blocked most of the screen, Leon's dynamic vision was terrifying. The moment the door opened, he had already taken in the entire scene on the screen.

The pause screen of the editing software is accompanied by several lines of large, bold white subtitles.

"Peasant uprising".

"Economic demands overshadow political demands."

"Divide the moderates and crack down on the die-hards."

Lyon's eyelids twitched slightly.

Looking at the middle-aged homeless man in front of him, who was tense and desperately protecting the computer with his body, he instantly connected the words he had heard outside the door with the subtitles on the screen.

The average American might not understand these things, but Lyon, who came from the East, had long been familiar with them and could basically understand the content of the video at a glance. Ryan felt a tightness in his throat, but his face didn't show it.

He held the edge of the small table with one hand, and instinctively reached behind him with the other, wanting to close the laptop directly.

Then he heard the boss's voice, in a normal tone:

"Still watching historical videos at this hour?"