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

Chapter 101 Sitting Steadily on the Fishing Platform

In a male dormitory at the University of Washington.

The air was filled with the smell of leftover Domino's pizza, unwashed sneakers, and a hint of marijuana.

In the small living room outside, two young white men and a black guy were gathered around the television, pressing the controllers loudly as they played a game while spewing out greetings starting with "F".

Alex usually gets along very well with his three roommates, and they often copy each other's homework or cook for them.

But right now, all he feels is that the noise from those guys outside is giving him a headache.

He huddled on his bed, the curtains drawn tightly shut, with even the gaps clipped shut.

A small folding desk was set up on the bed, with a laptop on it.

At this moment, Alex had huge dark circles under his eyes. He stared at the dense tutorial on the screen, looking as if he were reading gibberish. His face was full of despair, and he looked like he was ready to throw the computer out the window at any moment.

"Holy shit—"

"What kind of hellish things are these?!"

He was really devastated.

Since agreeing to Lyon's request yesterday, he has been trying to contact the so-called relevant departments through some secret channels or special email addresses that he has learned from years of lurking on domestic forums.

He thought it would just be a matter of sending an email with the message, "I have something good, reply quickly."

The online tutorials told him that if he posted it directly like that, before it even reached China, the NSA's (National Security Agency) surveillance system would have already summoned him for questioning.

To securely send out Bill's sensitive data related to missile guidance, a complex encryption process had to be employed.

What is PGP encryption? Why can't the public and private keys be the same?

What is steganography? Why convert a piece of text data into hexadecimal and then insert it into the pixels of a landscape photo?

"I don't even know what a graphics card looks like or where it's plugged into the computer; all I know is that it can play games!"

"Now you want me to do cryptography? I'm a corpse collector, not James Bond!"

Alex felt like he was about to vomit blood.

As he awkwardly typed code on the keyboard, he fell into deep self-doubt.

Why is it so difficult to send a message back home?

Even if he really went through a lot of trouble to send this string of gibberish containing some of Old Bill's parameters to that supposedly official-backed secret email address, would anyone actually respond to him?

Would anyone really believe that a student in Seattle has a senior engineer at Raytheon just because he sent them a picture of a cat?

Just as Alex was about to give up and send the message Leon had sent him the night before in a password-protected compressed file, that was the end of it.

"Buzz".

My phone, which was lying next to me, suddenly vibrated.

The sender is Lyon.

Alex perked up and opened the text message.

He initially thought Leon was trying to urge him to hurry up, but the content of the text message surprised him.

The donor from last night had some underlying health conditions.

I just stopped by to pick up his medical records.

Let's find a place to eat, and I'll give you the medical records while we're at it.

Alex stared at the text message three times, his lips twitching involuntarily.

Good guy.

This is a riddle for people.

But Alex was a veteran who walked the line between the gray and black markets, and after a moment's thought, he immediately understood the subtext of Leon's words.

What did old Bill do before? He was a senior engineer at a Raytheon outsourced lab. What could his medical records possibly contain?

This is definitely the core data that was brought out.

Moreover, Lyon's current email style is completely different from his straightforward style last night, which clearly indicates that he has become wary.

"That madman—"

Alex threw his phone back on the table and covered his face in anguish.

"It's only been a morning, and you've already got your hands on something new? Do you buy your goods wholesale from the farmers' market?"

However, after the brief breakdown, it was clear that business came first. Alex swallowed hard and picked up his phone again.

He hesitated for a moment, then quickly replied with a single word:

[Approved.]

Evening in Seattle's Chinatown.

Lyon pushed open the door of a Sichuan restaurant called "Shuxiangyuan" and, led by a waiter, went straight to a secluded private room at the very back on the second floor.

Pushing open the door, Alex was already sitting inside, with an empty teapot in front of him, holding his head and sighing deeply.

"You look like you're hiding from debt collectors."

Leon pulled out a chair and sat down, casually flipping through the menu on the table. His initial nostalgic mood was instantly shattered by the numbers on it.

"Eighteen dollars for a plate of smashed cucumber? Thirty-five dollars for a small portion of Mapo Tofu? And then there's a 20% service charge?"

Lyon couldn't help but click his tongue and threw the menu back on the table: "Why don't these bosses just rob a bank? Back home, this money would be enough for me to eat several meals with grilled fish at a night market stall."

"You—sigh—"

Alex was too lazy to even bother explaining where exactly Lyon was in China.

"This is America, brother. As long as you add the word 'authentic,' even robbery is legal."

Alex gave a wry smile, not in the mood to discuss prices. He lowered his voice and leaned forward: "Where are the things?"

Leon took the silver Seagate hard drive from the inside pocket of his jacket, placed it on the table, covered it with his palm, and gently pushed it in front of Alex.

"Old Bill's complete medical records."

Leon's voice was soft: "Besides the algorithms in his head, there are also some original test logs from the Raytheon lab that weren't destroyed in time. With that, it's enough to prove his worth."

Alex stared at the hard drive as if it were a nuclear bomb about to explode. He swallowed hard and quickly shoved it deep into his backpack.

"Dude, this stuff is great, but I've hit a roadblock."

Alex scratched his already messy hair, looking utterly hopeless: "I spent the whole afternoon in my dorm researching encrypted communications, PGP, the Onion Network—I feel like my brain is about to be burned dry."

"I wanted to connect with relevant domestic departments without alerting the US surveillance network. This was much more difficult than I had imagined."

"I've even been thinking, why don't I just buy a plane ticket to San Francisco or Washington, D.C., and dump this thing right in the consulate or embassy yard? Wouldn't that be the most direct way?"

Don't do anything stupid.

Lyon immediately interrupted his dangerous thought, his eyes becoming extremely serious: "Going to the consulate to renew your passport or apply for a replacement visa is no problem, but if you're carrying this level of classified information, you're just going to your death."

"Do you think this is a vegetable market? Around the embassies and consulates of various countries, there are more FBI counterintelligence agents and CIA informants than flies, both overt and covert."

"An ordinary international student who also works as a body collector suddenly ran to the consulate in a panic and even tried to hand over an unidentified package."

"Do you believe it or not, the moment you step out the door, a black SUV will drag you away at the next traffic light and you'll vanish into thin air?"

Alex felt a chill run down his spine, and cold sweat instantly broke out.

"What should I do then? I can't just keep this thing as a family heirloom, can I?"

Lyon didn't answer directly. Instead, he picked up his teacup, took a sip, and asked in return, "You said before that you're a blogger? Tell me more, what do you usually post on domestic platforms?"

"Just... vent your frustrations."

Alex was a little confused, but he still confessed honestly: "You know, there are always some people in the country who have never been abroad who have unrealistic fantasies about America."

"I'll talk about the tragic cases I encountered when I was collecting bodies, such as the deaths of people in rented rooms because they couldn't afford insulin, or some even more tragic ones."

"Let's shatter the filters created by these public intellectuals, and also take a sarcastic look at the 'happy education' and 'zero-yuan shopping' practices here."

Lyon's eyes lit up slightly after hearing this.

"That's enough."

He tapped his fingers lightly on the table, his thoughts gradually becoming clearer: "Alex, you're underestimating the domestic security agencies."

"A blogger who lives overseas and specializes in exposing the dark side of American society, and also has access to various unnatural death scenes."

"If your account has a certain amount of traffic, it's highly likely that it's already on their following list."

"This identity itself has extremely high sensitivity to public opinion and potential intelligence value."

Leon looked at Alex with a confident air: "So, you don't need to wander the world looking for them like a headless fly."

"Use what you learned this afternoon to encrypt the most crucial, identity-proving small piece of data on your hard drive, or even just the directory itself, into gibberish, and then stuff it into a picture of Seattle."

"Use your blogger account to post a seemingly ordinary update. For example, something like: 'The rain in Seattle has finally stopped,' or other nonsense."

"As long as they keep watching you, their online screening system will automatically analyze the images you upload."

Once they discover that the image contains military-grade encrypted data —

Leon smiled. "Trust me, they'll come looking for you. And in a way that's absolutely safe and you'd never even imagine."

"So, don't rush. The more you rush these things, the more likely you are to make mistakes. We have the best leverage right now, so we just need to sit back and wait."