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

Chapter 164 The Mastermind Exposed (5k)

Lyon did not answer immediately.

He stared at the chat window on the screen, which represented an unknown deep web object, and reached up to touch the stubble that had just sprouted on his chin.

The person who handed over the USB drive was a ruthless special forces assassin. This kind of person, who takes orders on the dark web and puts their life on the line, would never communicate with endless complaints.

Moreover, his current background is "mission failed, barely survived".

As a professional assassin who has just experienced a life-or-death situation and feels cheated by his employer, it would be too strange for him to write a short essay of a few hundred words to complain to Clockwork. It would make him seem like an amateur eager to prove himself.

Too many words will be lost.

"type."

Leon, hands on the back of his gaming chair, gave the order: "First, send the code: [The gears are still turning]. Then press Enter and type: The intelligence is wrong. Mission failed. Give me the employer's true identity."

That's all, not a single punctuation mark is needed.

Kevin paused for a moment, his finger hovering in mid-air.

"Boss, is this...that's it?"

Kevin glanced back at Leon, somewhat uncertain: "Are we really going to insist on this?"

"The news is full of reports about unfinished buildings collapsing and terrorists."

"Why don't we make up a little escape story that fits the stereotype of those assassins to fool them?"

"Are you teaching me how to deal with criminals?" Leon raised his eyelids and glared at him like a knife.

Kevin immediately shrank back: "I mean—the other party might suspect this is too perfunctory—"

"The press release is just scrap paper written by the precinct's public relations department for the citizens of Seattle to see."

"A person like Clockwork, who can act as a high-level intermediary on the dark web, can definitely imagine the specific situation."

"

Leon leaned down, staring at the cursor on the screen: "If you were a hitman who had just lost all his teammates and only wanted to collect his debts from his sugar daddy, would you sit in front of your computer and describe in detail to the broker how a precast concrete slab turned your teammates into mincemeat?"

"Not explaining anything is the appropriate response in this situation."

"As for if the other party becomes suspicious and asks other questions, we'll deal with that later. Now, do as I say."

"That makes sense—I'll start right now."

Kevin stopped talking and turned his attention back to the screen.

He first opened a local, minimalist notepad next to him and carefully typed out the two lines that Leon had just read.

Next, he opened a program with a lock icon, pasted the two sentences into it, checked the "clock" public key, and checked "Use this machine's private key for additional signing".

"Decryption requires computing power, and so does encryption."

Kevin clicked the "Encrypt and Sign" button.

The old ThinkPad laptop fan suddenly emitted a roaring sound.

The screen flickered.

The two short lines of English words were instantly shredded and scattered by a massive and complex asymmetric encryption algorithm, and reassembled into a large section of garbled text that occupied half the screen, consisting of letters and numbers with no logic.

"Done."

Kevin pushed up his thick-rimmed glasses and pointed to the long string of characters: "Once the clockwork is received, its software will automatically verify the signature, confirming that it is definitely the owner of the USB drive speaking."

He selected the entire string of gibberish and right-clicked to copy it.

Then I switched to XMPP communication software and pasted this huge garbled text into the chat dialog box with "Clockwork".

He placed his right hand on the mouse, hovering the cursor over the paper airplane icon that represented sending, and looked up at Leon.

Lyon nodded slightly.

"Smack."

Kevin pressed the left mouse button hard.

The garbled text bubble popped up instantly on the right side of the chat window.

A green double checkmark immediately appeared below the status bar, indicating that the information had successfully reached the other party's server.

at the same time.

The suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, 2,600 miles from Seattle.

The city, known as the "insurance capital of the world," is experiencing a cold, freezing rain.

An unremarkable 2015 Toyota Camry slowly drove into a two-story wooden villa with a garage.

Arthur pulled out the car keys, picked up his briefcase, and opened the car door.

He was wearing a gray suit with a slightly wrinkled collar, his tie was half-loose, and he had heavy eye bags, looking like an ordinary white-collar worker who might suddenly die at his desk at any moment.

In fact, he truly was.

Arthur is a senior casualty actuary at a large life and property insurance company in Hartford.

His daily work involves sitting in a six-square-meter cubicle, typing away at a calculator while working on complex actuarial models.

If a Boeing 737 crashes, or a textile worker in Delaware gets caught in a machine and loses half his body, he needs to accurately calculate the minimum payout the company must make under the policy.

This made him virtually invisible in the company; no one would bother to chat with him much in the break room.

As Arthur reached for the car door, the cuff of his suit sleeve slipped down an inch.

On his wrist was a Vacheron Constantin Patrimony skeletonized tourbillon mechanical watch.

Through the sapphire crystal, the intricate metal gears inside are perfectly meshed and in operation, exuding a cold, expensive mechanical beauty.

This high-end, complex watch, worth over $200,000, is probably the most valuable and also the most incongruous thing Arthur owns.

However, given his outfit and demeanor, which strongly suggest he's a corporate slave, no one would suspect he's wearing the real thing.

Arthur pushed open the door and tossed his briefcase onto the shoe cabinet in the entryway.

He didn't even turn on the main light in the living room; he just used the light from the streetlights outside the window to walk to the refrigerator in the kitchen and take out a bottle of sugar-free cola.

After closing the refrigerator door, his gaze fell on the smart thermostat on the wall.

In the lower right corner of the thermostat's LCD screen, the °F symbol representing Fahrenheit is flashing faintly at a fixed frequency of once every two seconds.

Arthur's hand, holding the can of Coke, suddenly froze in mid-air. The sluggishness and fatigue of the day vanished instantly from his ordinary face.

"They're here."

He casually placed the Coke on the counter and turned to walk to the wooden door leading to the basement.

Open the ordinary brass spherical lock and push the door open. Hidden on the inner side of the wall behind the door is an inconspicuous retinal scanner.

He leaned closer, and the red light swept across his right eye.

"Click".

A heavy, soundproof steel door popped open.

Arthur went down the wooden stairs to the basement.

There are no windows here, and the independent air ducts of the central air conditioning system maintain the temperature at around 15 degrees Celsius.

On the iron frame in the very center, there was a tower server with no chassis, and the motherboard and cables were completely exposed.

Next to it was a stainless steel table with a monitor and a mechanical keyboard on it.

Arthur pulled out a chair and sat down, placing his hands on the keyboard.

He tapped a few times, activating the Whoni secure operating system, which was custom-built on the Linux platform.

This system comes with two isolated virtual machines. Even if one of them is compromised by a Trojan, it will never be able to read the real network hardware serial number on the machine.

The screen lights up, displaying only a dull black terminal window.

Arthur quickly entered a 32-character garbled password and mounted the private key vault.

He then pulled up the encrypted data packet that he had just retrieved from the proxy server.

A large bloat of gibberish appeared on the screen, beginning with —————BEGINPGPMESSAGE—————.

He pressed Enter to use his private key to decrypt the code.

Two seconds later, the verification program displayed a message at the bottom of the garbled text: [Signature verification successful. Source: Ghost.]

Immediately afterwards, the encrypted shell was completely stripped away under the high-speed processing of this bare server.

A line of unformatted green characters appeared in the center of the text box.

The gears are still turning.

The intelligence was wrong. The mission failed. Give me my employer's true identity.

Arthur glanced at the steady trajectory of the second hand on his watch. He was the dark web middleman codenamed "Clockwork," controlling the core gears of the money and intelligence flow between numerous employers and assassins.

A few hours earlier, while he was sitting at his desk at the insurance company, he saw a news notification on his phone about a violent explosion and collapse of an unfinished building in the suburbs of Seattle.

Not only that, the beautiful female chief of the Seattle police station featured in the news also boasted on television that the police had found the remains of an anti-materiel sniper rifle and a large amount of detonated C4 explosives in the ruins.

Arthur, or as he should now be called Clockwork, thought that the unfortunate squad, along with their electronic devices, had all been turned into mincemeat under the precast concrete slab.

Then, he took his hands off the keyboard, rested his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers under his chin, stared at the two lines of text on the screen, and fell into deep thought.

"The ghost is still alive? And luckily, it found a working computer?"

Arthur murmured something under his breath and slowly shook his head.

He felt that the possibility was extremely low.

More likely, it's that some technical department within the Seattle Police Department, or that damned target himself, found something among the pieces of flesh in the rubble.

Right now, the other party is using a disguised bridge and private key to lure him in.

As a high-level intermediary in the dark web network, Arthur's income structure mainly involves taking from both ends.

On the one hand, he charged employers who placed assassination orders exorbitant fees for fund transfers and anonymity guarantees.

On the other hand, when the assassin team that takes the job asks him to verify the background of the client in order to prevent being double-crossed or trapped, he will feel at ease accepting another substantial intelligence investigation fee.

Of course, under normal circumstances, the information he confirms cannot be directly handed over to the person taking the order. At most, he can give a warning that there is a problem with the order, or give some vague information about the employer.

In the underworld, revealing one's patron's identity is an absolute taboo. Breaking the rules can lead to anything from ruining one's reputation to unknowingly dying in one's own bathtub.

That's what they say, but the information coming from the other side of the screen was wrong, which gave Arthur a lot of room to maneuver.

He pulled up the order cache logs in the backend and glanced at the original task information.

When the employer placed the order, he only described Lyon as a somewhat troublesome street cop who had just been promoted to ACU.

But as it stands now, it's complete nonsense.

By deliberately concealing the danger of the target, it is clear that the employer has breached the contract first.

This not only resulted in the execution team being buried alive on the spot, but also put Arthur, the middleman responsible for acting as guarantor, at great risk of exposure.

Since this deal has already fallen through, let's maximize the profits.

He put his hands back on the keyboard.

Seattle, Kevin's studio apartment.

The window of the XMPP communication software on the laptop screen suddenly flickered.

A brand new, giant garbled bubble popped up.

Kevin immediately stopped shaking his leg, skillfully right-clicked to copy it, and put it into the local decryption software to access the private key.

A line of green English characters was displayed:

So, we're not going to do this order?

"Boss, he's back." Kevin turned to look at Leon.

"Give him his exact words." Leon stared at the screen. "Type: Mission unfinished. Intelligence severely compromised. We were ripped off by our employer."

Kevin's fingers flew across the keyboard, completing a smooth encrypted signature process before sending it again.

This time, the reply came very quickly, and it was a long text.

After peeling back the layers of gibberish, a clockwork-like response popped up on the screen:

The employer used a highly mixed Monero account. However, the initial funding node was located in Seattle.

Cross-referencing revealed the source to a legitimate businessman in the western district. This individual owns a large-scale ocean logistics and warehousing business.

Not long ago, I lost a batch of goods in the industrial area, and my younger brother also died.

The employer concealed the target's level of danger, constituting a serious breach of contract.

This information is considered compensation. Whatever happens next, whether you demand breach of contract penalties or your life, it's none of my business.

A system notification follows immediately: [The other party has disconnected the current node].

Looking at the empty chat window, Kevin pushed up his glasses that had slipped off his nose, his face full of disbelief.

"Boss—you just gave it to us like that?"

Kevin turned and pointed at the screen, his tone puzzled: "This is a middleman on the dark web, and he didn't even ask us for a single penny in intelligence fees? Isn't that a bit too easy?"

Lyon stared at the familiar keywords "industrial zone" and "younger brother" on the screen.

Marcus King.

No wonder. So he came to avenge Darlis, the Blood Gang branch leader who died at his hands.

"Just because the other party isn't extorting money doesn't mean they're doing charity."

Lyon sneered: "This rat is definitely making excuses for embezzling money."

"As long as the blame for the mission failure is pinned on the sponsor, he, as the guarantor, will definitely have a way to forcibly swallow that astronomical reward."

Leon didn't care whether Clockwork had seen through his true identity.

Once we obtain the identity of the mastermind, all troubles can be resolved through physical means.

"Alright, you've finished your work, you can go home now."

Leon straightened up, reached for the USB drive and dog tag, and stuffed them into his inner pocket: "Unplug the drive, shut down the computer, and clear the memory. I wasn't here tonight, and you didn't touch any hacked system. Go back to playing on your computer."

"Understood, understood! Take care, boss!"

Kevin breathed a sigh of relief, wishing he could immediately send this big shot out so he could close the door and calm his turbulent emotions.

But as soon as he turned his head, he froze on the spot.

With one hand in his pocket and the other naturally reaching for the edge of the computer desk, Leon grabbed the base of the rare, limited-edition *Future* figurine and lifted her up.

"Boss! What are you doing?!"

Kevin's heart, which had just settled down, jumped into his throat, and he leaped up from his gaming chair.

"To prevent your loose tongue from letting in any more information, I've temporarily conscripted your princess."

Leon weighed the small, bright green plastic figure with twin ponytails in his hand, and issued a threat in a calm tone: "One month. As long as I don't hear a word about it outside, I'll return it to you intact next month."

"If the director or the internal affairs department finds out about tonight's events during this time—"

Leon gently stroked the little figure's bright green ponytail twice: "You'd better prepare to put together a jigsaw puzzle in the trash can."

"No!!!"

"My princess!!"

Kevin let out a pig-like scream, his hands flailing helplessly in mid-air, too afraid to snatch it forcefully for fear of breaking the plastic piece: "Boss, didn't we agree? I swear on my honor it will be kept absolutely confidential! Please give her back to me!"

"Your despicable personality is worthless to me. I only feel at ease when she's with me."

Leon completely ignored the anime otaku's breakdown, strode towards the apartment door, grabbed the doorknob, and tossed a large pancake at him.

"Stop howling."

"As long as you keep your mouth shut, I will not only return her to you in a month, but I will also directly approve a special technical maintenance fee from ACU's account for you. Use the money to buy any of your plastic figurines you want."

Upon hearing this, Kevin's howling immediately subsided, but his eyes remained fixed on the hostage in Leon's hands.

He chased after her to the doorframe, tears welling in his eyes as he gave his final instructions: "Boss! Don't put her in the car after you get back! The Seattle sun will make the figure yellow!"

Before Leon could reply, Kevin sped up like a nagging mother: "And another thing! Absolutely do not use alcohol wipes to clean her face! It will damage the paint! The clasps on the base are loose, so when you pick it up, don't just squeeze the skirt—"

Leon's eyes twitched uncontrollably as he watched Kevin still rambling on by the doorframe.

Without uttering a single word, he walked straight out the door and slammed it shut with a loud bang.