Chapter 150 Awareness

The focus shifts back to the entrance on the first floor of the apartment building.

The two men in suits whom K mistook for "third-rate idiots" were not actually there to see Leon, or rather, not yet.

They were sent by Raytheon: former FBI agent Victor and former Air Force intelligence officer Carter.

At this moment, the faces of these two elite agents were even more unpleasant than if they had swallowed flies.

The situation spiraled completely out of control after they followed orders from headquarters to splurge money in Seattle's underworld through gangs like Big T and offer a bounty for William McIntyre (Old Bill).

A generous reward will surely attract brave men, but it will also inevitably attract fools.

The huge sum of money—tens of thousands of dollars in reward for finding someone and thousands of dollars in tips—drove the drug addicts, pimps, and low-level thugs on the streets of Seattle into a frenzy.

These past two days, Victor and Carter's private phone lines have been ringing off the hook.

These idiots will come up with any ridiculous lie just to scam a few thousand yuan in information fees.

Some people swore they saw old Bill fighting with stray dogs for hamburgers under a bridge, others said they saw him being taken to a basement by a gang to make drugs, and one high-drug addict even said that old Bill had built a spaceship and flown back to Mars.

Victor and Carter, carrying large sums of cash, followed their sworn informants to countless stinking junkyards and abandoned factories, only to find either completely unfamiliar, crazy old men or simply deserted dead ends.

But they were helpless.

All of Old Bill's electronic traces have been erased, leaving them with only this most primitive human wave tactic. If they don't verify this junk information, their investigation will be completely stalled, and they won't be able to report back to headquarters.

Just half an hour ago, a street thug came running up confidently with a clue, saying that he had seen a homeless man who looked a lot like the white old man in the photo, who had been loitering near this old apartment complex.

So, the two of them had no choice but to suppress their annoyance at being treated like an ATM again and drive there.

Victor stood outside the glass window and looked at the old man in the duty room who was wearing reading glasses and filling in a word puzzle with his head down.

He took a deep breath, adjusted his facial expression, put on what he considered a very approachable and elite smile, stepped forward, and gently tapped the glass of the duty room with his finger.

"Knock knock".

Mr. Harry, who was engrossed in filling in the word puzzle, stopped writing, looked up, and glanced somewhat impatiently at the two uninvited guests in expensive suits outside the window.

Victor pulled a photo of old Bill from his suit pocket, showing him at work, and stuck it on the glass, trying to make his tone sound friendly and professional.

"Excuse me, sir. Have you seen the elderly white man in the photo in the neighborhood recently?"

"He's bankrupt now, and he looks like a homeless person, with messy hair and a scruffy beard. He's probably around sixty years old."

"His full name is William McIntyre, but everyone usually calls him Old Bill."

Grandpa Harry took off his reading glasses, held them in his hand, squinted, and stared at the photo for a long time.

Then, he looked up at Victor with a blank expression and asked loudly:

"Huh? What's wrong with you?"

Victor's smile faltered slightly, but he maintained a polite tone and repeated clearly, "Old Bill."

Grandpa Harry frowned and tilted his ear: "Grandpa what?"

Victor's eye twitched involuntarily. He took a deep breath, and the professional fake smile on his face began to stiffen.

"Old Bill, sir."

The old man nodded in sudden understanding, then asked again:

"What Bill?"

"..."

A vein bulged visibly on Victor's forehead.

Why would a former senior FBI counterintelligence officer and Raytheon's security chief, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, be standing in front of a run-down apartment in Seattle, playing this kind of idiotic crossword puzzle with a hard-of-hearing doorman?

What the hell did I do to deserve this suffering?!

"Sir, please take a rest."

Victor completely gave up on his plan to discuss the name with Uncle Harry. He put the photo back in his pocket and pointed to the tightly closed electronic sensor door next to him:

"No need to remember his name. Just open the door for us, and we'll go up and ask the resident ourselves."

"That won't work."

Upon hearing that he was to be allowed in, Uncle Harry's hearing instantly returned to normal. He immediately put his reading glasses back on and refused with a stern face.

"You two, dressed to the nines, come to my apartment building looking for a homeless person?"

"How am I supposed to know what you're up to? If I let you in and you cause trouble, who's responsible when the police come? You can't just open the gate like that."

Carter, standing to the side and behind Victor, couldn't hold back any longer as he watched his usually decisive and efficient superior, who had driven a suspect to the brink of suicide, being rendered speechless by a mere gatekeeper.

He quickly turned his head, covered his mouth tightly with one hand, his shoulders trembled violently, and hissing sounds came from his nose.

Victor turned around abruptly and glared at Carter with a fierce look that seemed to say, "If you laugh again, I'll shove you into a cesspool."

Carter shuddered, immediately stood up straight, and forced back his laughter, his face turning bright red.

Victor turned around, looked at the unyielding Uncle Harry, and his brain raced as he immediately came up with a prepared explanation.

"Listen, sir. We are not bad people."

Victor put on a sincere expression and said through the glass:

"We are the HR personnel of the tech company he used to work for. This old man used to be one of our key technical staff, but he was fired due to some misunderstanding."

"The company now realizes it can't do without him and wants to rehire him with double the salary. We've been looking for him for a long time, and we heard he'd been seen around here, so we came to try our luck."

Upon hearing this, Uncle Harry gave them a suspicious look.

In fact, the moment Victor stuck the photo on the glass, Uncle Harry had already recognized it.

Isn't this the homeless man who, on the night of Halloween when it was raining and freezing cold, was secretly put into the apartment building's stairwell to avoid the rain and get some warmth, pretending to be reading the newspaper and not seeing him?

But he was just a doorman, and had no idea that this homeless man used to be a missile engineer, let alone that he was now involved in some transnational military secret leak.

In his mind, since these two men in suits were sent by his former boss to ask him to come back to work, this was definitely a great thing.

Having a proper job is better than begging on the streets in the dead of winter, right?

"Oh... a return offer, huh? I see."

Uncle Harry's attitude softened noticeably; he nodded and muttered something.

"Alright then."

"That homeless man did come here."

Grandpa Harry reached out and pressed the access control switch on the table, saying at the same time:

"But that happened a while ago. I only saw him through the glass at the door, and he came in to take shelter from the rain for a while."

"As for where he went afterward, which floor he went to, and which door he left through, I have no idea. You can try your luck if you go up there."

"Click".

The electronic lock on the apartment door made a crisp unlocking sound.

"Thanks."

Victor stopped wasting words with Uncle Harry, pushed open the door, and strode into the dimly lit corridor on the first floor of the apartment with Carter.

……

On a relatively secluded street in Seattle, a Ford Explorer without any police markings was parked on the side of the road with its engine off.

The air pressure inside the carriage was extremely low.

Lyon sat in the driver's seat, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, his brow furrowed so deeply it could trap a fly.

He turned his head and stared intently at Chloe, who was sitting in the passenger seat, with a look that seemed to want to devour her alive.

Just ten minutes ago, he took these two new recruits to the street to test their mettle and handle a simple police situation involving a few street thugs collecting protection money.

As a result, the suspect was caught, but the process was absolutely mind-boggling.

That seemingly refined scoundrel, Simon, didn't break any rules.

This guy came from the Major Crimes Unit, after all; he knows how to circumvent the Ministry of the Interior's scrutiny.

But the way he interrogated that gang leader was absolutely perverse.

After that seemingly refined scoundrel pinned the gang leader against the wall and handcuffed him, he leaned close to the gang leader's ear and, in an extremely gentle, even slightly sticky, perverted ASMR-like breathy voice, gave the gang leader a piece of his mind.

Simon told him the exact timeframe when, if he were arrested today, his family would be evicted from their home and left homeless in a few months without his drug money.

In less than two minutes, the thug who had been spewing profanities starting with "F" was so scared that he wet his pants, cried like a 200-pound child, and knelt on the ground, saying he was willing to confess anything.

That's fine, even though it's perverted, at least it's compliant with regulations.

But what did Chloe do?

When several street thugs approached her wielding baseball bats and hurling insults, the girl, annoyed by their noise, drew her sidearm and emptied half a magazine into the air!

In the United States, it is a serious violation of regulations for police to fire shots into the air.

Because gravity exists, if a bullet fired from the sky falls back down and pierces the skull of an innocent civilian, the blame should fall entirely on the police officer who fired the shot.

If that area hadn't been an open space without any tall buildings, and if the thugs hadn't been so frightened by the gunfire that they knelt on the ground and surrendered with their heads in their hands, this whole thing would have been impossible to resolve.

"Have you lost your mind?"

"Don't you know that police officers are strictly prohibited from firing shots into the air?!"

Lyon gritted his teeth, suppressing his anger, and reprimanded:

"Fire into the air? Do you think this is a war zone in the Middle East? Or do you think you're a cowboy in the Wild West?"

"If a falling bullet kills a passerby, I'll have to write a 10-page report explaining the excessive use of force!"

"I'm sorry, boss..."

"I used to be used to it when I was in the army. Those militants would behave as soon as they heard gunfire... I promise I will aim first before firing next time."

Chloe huddled in the passenger seat.

She was already petite at only 1.6 meters tall, and now she hugged her knees with both hands, shrinking herself into a small ball.

Her loose, golden curls cascaded down her cheeks, her legs, clad in black stockings, were pressed together in a pitiful manner, and her deep blue eyes gazed at Leon with a watery look, her lips slightly parted. His face clearly showed that he had given in.

His pitiful appearance made it seem as if Leon was bullying a minor girl.

Leon clicked his tongue, feeling like he'd punched a cotton ball.

Is this guy really someone who has served in a U.S. Army combat engineer battalion stationed in the Middle East?

But Lyon immediately replayed Chloe's action of drawing her gun in his mind.

Drawing the gun, loading it, raising it – the entire movement was fluid and seamless, demonstrating incredible muscle memory, with no unnecessary hesitation or slack.

This girl is definitely not a simple, naive newbie; the military and SWAT resumes couldn't possibly be faked.

If he were to be fooled by her pitiful appearance and drag her out of the car to beat her up, given her petite size and reckless ruthlessness, he might have a hard time dealing with her if he didn't go all out.

"Stop putting on that pitiful act, it won't work on me," Leon warned coldly, just about to continue setting the rules.

"Buzz—Buzz—"

His phone, which was in the watch face storage compartment, suddenly vibrated.

Lyon picked up his phone and glanced at the screen.

These are the hidden cameras he installed at the entrance of his old apartment building, and the motion capture alarms sent by the smart peephole connected to his door.

Someone rang the doorbell of his old apartment.

Lyon opened the monitoring app.

The screen showed a view of the corridor.

Two white men dressed in expensive, dark, custom-made suits were standing in front of his wooden door.

One of them had just withdrawn his hand from ringing the doorbell, while the other was cautiously surveying the corridor.

Lyon's eyes sharpened instantly, and his previous languor and helplessness vanished.

These two people are definitely not his weird neighbors who can't even afford to pay their rent.

He had just smuggled two core engineers from Raytheon and Boeing out of the country when this guy who looked like a secret agent found his place.

Lyon's nerves immediately tensed up.

Chloe, sitting in the passenger seat, keenly sensed the change in the atmosphere inside the car.

Seeing the way Leon was staring intently at his phone screen, she immediately dropped her feigned distress.

"What's wrong, boss?"

Chloe leaned forward, curiously wanting to see Lyon's phone screen:

"Judging by how nervous you are, has your ex-girlfriend come knocking on your door demanding child support?"

Leon shoved her head away, his eyes still glued to the screen, and replied irritably:

"Shut up and stay put. Or I'll make you my ex-girlfriend right now."

Wow.

Chloe wasn't scared at all; instead, she raised an eyebrow and smoothly continued the conversation, "So fast? Don't you need to treat me to a taco first as a formality?"

The two engaged in a surprisingly harmonious, pointless banter, without any sense of unease between superiors and subordinates.

Lyon didn't have time to chat with her. He exited the surveillance footage and opened a community tenant contact group on his phone.

This group was created by the apartment manager, Harry, to facilitate notifications about water and power outages.

The latest message in the group was a group broadcast sent by the administrator, Uncle Harry.

[Hey everyone, has anyone seen a white homeless man named William McIntyre (Old Bill)?]

He came to our apartment to take shelter from the rain a while ago. Now his former boss has sent two HR people to him, saying they want to rehire him with a high salary.

If anyone has seen this, please tell me at the security office on the first floor. This could be a life-changing event!

Lyon looked at the message and rubbed his temples, feeling a bit of a headache.

This old man usually seems quite shrewd, so how did he get tricked into revealing information like this? He even went so far as to enthusiastically help spread the word in the group chat to find the person.

He leaned back in the driver's seat, quickly replaying the scene from Halloween night in his mind.

Old Bill had sneaked into the hallway to avoid the rain and happened to run into a Mexican deliveryman. The two got into a struggle. He opened the door and subdued the deliveryman.

Throughout the entire process, old Bill had absolutely no contact with any of the other neighbors in the apartment.

Even if Uncle Harry told the two men in suits about Old Bill's past presence, they would only know that Old Bill had briefly stayed in this building.

These two strangers couldn't possibly have directly obtained evidence linking Old Bill to themselves, the tenant. The neighbors knew nothing and naturally wouldn't implicate them.

When they ring their own doorbells now, they are most likely just conducting door-to-door checks and visits.

But this is still a dangerous sign.

The lack of direct evidence does not mean that the other party will not notice him.

He is the head of the anti-crime task force who just happened to move out at this critical juncture and has recently risen to prominence.

If those two agents had any common sense, they could have checked the identity of the tenant behind that door, and their names would soon have come to the attention of Raytheon's security department.