I get stronger by sunbathing, just like Superman.

He put his hand on Buster's shoulder, leaned close to his ear, and calmly said:

"I'll be flying to the Russian Federation in three hours. Hopefully, when I come back, I'll see the gem on my desk, otherwise..."

"Understood, boss."

After Buster finished speaking, he strode away with the other two.

Watching Buster's departing figure, the middle-aged man's expression instantly turned from gentle to cold.

He took an expensive bottle of red wine from the wine rack, poured himself half a glass, and then picked out a vinyl record and put it into the gramophone…

Accompanied by melodious music, a middle-aged man, holding a wine glass and with his eyes slightly narrowed, began to dance gracefully and lightly on the messy floor...

I accidentally stepped on the remote control on the ground, and a video popped up on the big screen, which seemed to be recording footage of an ongoing experiment.

In the video, a Mediterranean man in a white lab coat is speaking to the camera in fluent Russian, while behind him is a young woman in a white bodysuit, who is strapped to a metal frame.

Soon, the Mediterranean man left the frame, and the camera focused on the woman in white who was fixed to the metal bed frame. She had a slender figure and long, smooth black hair, but her eyes and mouth were tightly bound by thick leather straps, making it impossible to see her face. Two devices resembling headphones were also fixed to her ears.

In the video, the woman is struggling. Although she cannot make a sound, as her struggles become more intense, the metal frame behind her begins to deform, and the metal locks on her wrists are loosening and cracking.

嘣…

With a soft crack, the metal clasp on her right wrist, which was about ten centimeters thick, snapped off!

Just then, the woman in the white coat reappeared in the frame and pressed a button on a machine next to her. The device on the woman's ears immediately lit up with red lights.

At the same time, the woman's struggling movements suddenly stopped, and she began to convulse and tremble uncontrollably...

After about a minute, the woman started bleeding from her nose, and white foam oozed from her mouth. She seemed to have lost her incredible strength and became weak and feeble.

Then the person in the white coat reappeared, showing the camera a black, square object about the size of an egg, with several tangled red and green wires on it. In his other hand, he held a device about the size of a lighter, resembling a remote control…

It's obvious... this is a remote-controlled bomb.

Immediately afterwards, the man in the white coat unbuckled the belt around the woman's mouth and stuffed the bomb into it. At this point, she was completely powerless to resist...

The man in the white coat then gagged her with a belt, and even fastened an additional metal buckle on the outside. He then jogged to a position about ten meters behind the woman, and seemingly feeling it wasn't safe enough... he continued running back a few more meters...

Then, holding the remote control high in one hand, and extending a finger with the other hand…

I pressed it...

The screen went black, and the television suddenly dimmed.

It turns out that one of my toes had accidentally stepped on the remote control on the floor again...

……

After leaving the castle, Buster and his companions got into a Hummer and drove down the mountain. Lyra, the only woman among the three, glanced back with disgust at the castle's direction, muttered "madman," and muttered angrily in a low voice:

"I really wish I could shoot him in the head!"

"I agree with your proposal..."

The person who answered the phone was named Sain, a burly man with a thick beard who was 1.95 meters tall and weighed over 200 pounds. He was the other member of the trio and was currently sitting in the driver's seat, holding the steering wheel.

"Believe me, I want to do this even more than you do."

Sitting in the back, Buster, wearing sunglasses and gazing into the distance as if admiring the scenery, spoke casually.

"But we're not like those amateur guys, and we don't do things that way..."

Our goal is money, and he has money, lots of money... so he's the boss...

"But where are we going to find jewels? That count's body has long been fed to sharks! There probably won't even be any bones left!"

Lyra thought bitterly, believing that the middle-aged man with the mustache was asking them to do an impossible task.

"I know someone who might be able to help us find the gem..."

Buster answered with a relaxed expression, but did not continue.

Lyra's eyes flickered, her anger seemingly subsided somewhat, and she looked at the confident Buster and asked softly:

"If you actually find the gem... what will you do? That thing is worth over five billion pounds..."

Her meaning was clear: if they really found the gems, why didn't they just sell them? There were plenty of wealthy sellers in the Middle East with plenty of money.

However, Buster shook his head, then took out his phone, pulled up a document, and handed it to Lyra. Lyra took the phone with some confusion and began to read it…

The screen displays an old file, titled "Top Secret," documenting a bizarre incident that occurred fifty years ago, in 1970…

Located in the Caribbean islands, the 'Iron Cage Prison' was one of the largest and most heavily guarded prisons in Europe at the time, housing only the most notorious and vicious criminals...

Overnight, more than 10,000 people, including prison guards, mysteriously disappeared, and the entire prison was stained red with blood, forming pools of blood...

Strangely, the reinforcements that arrived at the scene found no bodies, not even a single limb.

There was only one person, a prisoner in a prison uniform, sitting blankly in the middle of the pool of blood, not responding to the rescuers in front of him...

Lyra continued swiping the screen, and a slightly blurry photo appeared, taken by someone at the scene. But as she recognized the person in the photo, her eyes widened...

The prisoner in the photo was about forty years old, but those two small mustaches... she couldn't help but feel that he looked familiar...

"This...how is this possible?!"

Leila turned to look at Buster in disbelief, but the latter took off his sunglasses and curled the corners of his mouth.

"Laila... my darling, nothing is impossible in this world..."

He then grabbed the woman in front of him and kissed her...

Looking at the two people entwined in the rearview mirror, Sain inexplicably felt goosebumps...

Chapter Twelve: The Three-Eyed Man

"Mr. O'Brien! Wake up! Mr. O'Brien!"

Amidst a series of knocking sounds and the sound of someone calling his name, Dylan, who had been slumped over the table, abruptly looked up. His full name was Dylan O'Brien…

"How...can I go back now?"

Rubbing his sleepy eyes, Dylan asked the man across from him who had woken him up, a man in a sharp suit with slicked-back hair.

"Mr. O'Brien, this is the twenty-seventh time you've asked this in three days. I'm sorry, but my answer is still the same..."

Not yet…

Dylan's face remained expressionless upon hearing the reply, his eyes glazed over, as if he had become numb.

The day after he disembarked, after giving his statement to the police, he found Mr. Smith, the Earl of Rodriguez's butler, resigned from his job, packed his things, and returned to his old home, an apartment in southwest Edinburgh.

He planned to rest for a few days, adjust his mind and body, and then go to a place where no one knew him, find an ordinary job... marry a beautiful woman, have a son and a daughter, and live out his ordinary life like that...

Unexpectedly, as soon as he got off the plane, he was stopped by a group of people in suits who looked imposing. They claimed to be agents of the security bureau and showed their identification. Dylan, who had intended to resist, obediently let them take him away.

I never expected that this trip would end up taking me to the interrogation room for three whole days!

In the interrogation room, Dylan looked incredibly haggard, as if he had aged several years, while the man in the suit opposite him was still asking the same questions he had already answered hundreds of times…

What exactly did he see on the cruise ship that night?

At first, it was just a normal inquiry, and Dylan honestly told him everything he had seen. Then the other party continued to ask the same questions in a different order.

Dylan knew this was a common interrogation method used by intelligence agencies to test whether someone was lying, but when it came to being questioned like this over and over again, it was truly torture for him…

They wouldn't give him food or allow him to wash up; he could only drink water, and they wouldn't even give him a cigarette. Just before Dylan was about to break down and explode in anger, the interrogation room door was suddenly pushed open, and a tall, short-haired Black woman dressed in professional attire walked in, with a folder tucked under her arm.

As soon as the woman entered, the man in the suit who had asked the question stood up and stepped aside.

"You're Dylan O'Brien?"

"I am, and who are you?"

Dylan looked the dark-skinned woman up and down and quickly labeled her in his mind as 'difficult to get along with'.

The woman's cold face was like an iceberg. She glanced sharply at Dylan, who looked like a homeless man, but did not answer him. Instead, she began to look through the folder in her hand.

"Dylan O'Brien... an Edinburgh native, joined the army at nineteen and retired at thirty-three. He has extensive experience in field operations, having participated in numerous deep-sea operations against enemy territory. He has also participated in international counter-terrorism operations, personally apprehending criminal group leaders, and was awarded the Royal Medal of Valor..."

Your future should have been bright, but look at you now... it seems you're planning to go back to your hometown and find a factory job?

As the woman loudly recited her military service record and mocked him, Dylan simply curled his lip indifferently.

"So what if it is? It's none of your business."

"It's relevant now."

The woman casually tossed his file aside, then leaned forward slowly, hands on the table, and whispered:

"Don't you want to know... what exactly we saw on the cruise ship that night?"

Upon hearing this, Dylan abandoned his lazy demeanor and his expression turned serious…

"What is it? Tell me! What exactly am I seeing?"

The woman suddenly straightened up, left a message, and turned to walk outside.

"I'm just giving you a chance to figure it out yourself. If you do, go to 170 19th Avenue at 9 a.m. tomorrow, someone will meet you... Oh, and..."

The woman stopped again, turned around and looked at Dylan, saying:

"My name is Amanda Waller... Remember my name, you'll be my boss from now on, by the way..."

You can go back now…