American comic book: I, with my abundant martial virtue, love to do good to others.

Chapter 742 Route Planning

He looked at it for two seconds, then turned and left.

My phone vibrated on the table.

It's not Gwen, it's not Victoria, it's the department's duty number.

Lynn picked it up and glanced at the caller's name.

Drake.

He pressed the answer button, but before he could even say "feed," a barrage of words came crashing down on him.

"Where are you?"

"Just got home."

"Don't take off your clothes, just come straight here. Technical room, now."

Lynn paused. Drake was the federal head of technical coordination, in his forties, bald, with two children, who never worked overtime and never allowed anyone else to. When he said "now," it meant that things were no longer under anyone's control.

"What case?" Lynn asked.

"A kidnapping. It happened at four in the morning. The victim's name was Harrison Wayne, 62 years old, chairman of the Wayne Group, you've probably heard of him."

Lynn had certainly heard of him. The Wayne Group dealt in military, energy, and high-end logistics, and had collaborated with the federal government on numerous occasions. Harrison Wayne's name appeared frequently in internal documents, but usually in the procurement contracts and background check sections, not in criminal reports.

Where was the person abducted?

"Long Island. His private residence in Old Westbury. At 3:58 a.m., the security system was cut off and restored four minutes later. When it was restored, Wayne was no longer in the bedroom. His wife was unharmed and not even awake. The nanny heard the commotion and called the police. By the time the police arrived, he was already out of Nassau County."

Lynn had already reached the entrance hall, and with one hand pulled down the coat she had just taken off.

Who is the hostage-taker? Do you have any information?

"Yes." Drake's voice lowered by half an octave. "That's why I called you instead of someone else. The traces and residual biological information extracted from the scene—let me tell you first, conclusion one points to no ordinary criminal organization. Lynn is a mutant. At least two, very likely more than three."

Lynn paused for a moment as she pulled the door shut.

The door was already ajar, and air rushed in from the corridor, carrying the smell of cooking oil from someone's breakfast.

"Sure?"

"The federal team arrived at the scene at 4:30, and the technical team conducted a rapid screening. There were vitrification marks on the walls of the second-floor corridor caused by high temperatures. It wasn't a fire or an explosion; it was a localized, instantaneous, and directional high temperature. Wayne's bedroom door lock had melted from the inside. Preliminary analysis results of the metal structure at the edge of the melt point are in, and they match what you saw last time..."

"I know," Lynn interrupted him.

The details of that case can't be discussed over the phone. He knows better than anyone how sensitive that line of work is.

"Come to the tech lab now," Drake said. "All the materials are here. Wayne Enterprises are here, and the state troopers are here too. It's chaotic. The federal government put me in charge of the tech side, but they need someone who can handle both sides for the manhunt. Your last case overlapped with this one."

"I didn't say that matter was over."

"I know you didn't say it was over. But this is a real hostage situation. The hostage is 62 years old, has a heart condition, and didn't bring his medication."

They headed south, and their last confirmed location is southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike, near Camden. Their direction is clear: they're heading south, likely towards the Mexican border.

Lynn had already left the house and was going down the stairs. One of the motion-activated lights in the stairwell was broken, so he was walking in the dark, the light from his phone screen illuminating his face and half of the wall.

Did they make any demands?

"Not yet. Four hours have passed, and there's been no contact. No ransom demands, no political statements, nothing at all."

"Then this is no ordinary hijacking."

"Yes," Drake said, "that's even more worrying. Come here, quickly."

The phone hangs up.

Lynn stuffed her phone into her pocket, hurried down the last half-floor of stairs, and pushed open the door. The sunlight outside was brighter than it had been half an hour ago, and there were more people on the street. A woman pushing a stroller was walking from one end of the sidewalk to the other, and the baby in the stroller, wearing a yellow hat, swayed back and forth in the morning breeze.

He stood downstairs at the apartment building and hailed a taxi that had just dropped off a passenger.

"Federal Square," he said.

The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror: "Are you serious? Going to Federation Square at this hour?"

"Seriously."

The car drove off.

Lynn leaned back in his seat, opened his emails, and glanced at the photos Gwen had sent. He didn't open them, just confirmed they were still there. Then he locked the screen, closed his eyes, and mentally reviewed everything Drake had just said.

Long Island. 4 AM. Security system shut down for four minutes. Signs of high temperature. Bedroom door lock melted from the inside. At least two mutants, possibly more than three. No requirements. Head south. Towards Mexico.

He opened his eyes and looked at the street scene rushing past the car window.

This was not a spur-of-the-moment hijacking. Disconnecting the security system requires prior knowledge of the residence's security architecture; melting down the door locks requires precise control and location; and the choice of escape route indicates that someone had planned it. Four hours without any demands is even more abnormal—if the hijacking wasn't for negotiation, then it was for something else entirely.

What else?

As the car drove past the road sign for New Jersey, sunlight suddenly streamed through the gaps between the tall buildings and shone directly into the car window, illuminating the back of Lynn's left hand and making the slightly upturned edge of the dressing almost transparent.

He turned his hand over so that his palm was facing up.

The wound that almost ruined his hand yesterday was still throbbing faintly under the dressing.

The taxi arrived at Federal Square forty minutes later.

Lynn paid the fare, got out of the car, and entered the building through a side door. The corridor was much more crowded than usual for a weekend. Several unfamiliar faces stood in the elevator lobby, each wearing a different colored visitor badge. He could recognize the Wayne Group employees at a glance—their suits were too expensive, their expressions too tense, and their posture too much like they were waiting for a quarterly report at a board meeting. The state police were easy to spot; the badges on their uniforms gleamed coldly under the corridor's fluorescent lights.

He walked through the crowd, didn't greet anyone, and went straight to the third floor.

The door to the technical room was open.

It was even more cramped inside than the hallway. Three rows of long tables were arranged in a U-shape, each table holding at least two monitors. Data cables and power cords dangled from the tabletops, forming a black tangled mess on the floor. Four large screens hung on the wall, two lit and two dark. On the two lit screens, the left side displayed screenshots of surveillance footage along the New Jersey Turnpike, and the right side showed a floor plan of a private residence on Long Island, with the bedroom marked by a red dot.

Drake stood at the opening of the U-shaped table, holding a cup of now-cold coffee, talking to a young woman in a dark gray suit. The woman was probably around thirty-five or thirty-six years old, with her hair tightly tied up, her lips pressed into a line, and she was holding a tablet, her index finger constantly swiping across the screen.

Drake saw Lynn and waved.

Lynn walked over.

"Lynn, this is Patricia Hall, the security chief of Wayne Enterprises. Ms. Hall, this is Lynn, the special agent in charge of coordination on our side."

Hall glanced at him, her gaze sweeping over him for about 0.5 seconds, and then her expression remained unchanged. It wasn't that she didn't see him; she saw him but didn't think it mattered.

"I need to know when you can bring him back," she said. "Mr. Wayne has less than 24 hours' worth of heart medication left."

"We are confirming his exact location," Drake said.

"Confirmed." Hall repeated the word, his disbelief barely contained in a punctuation mark. "You started confirming at four o'clock, and it's been almost five hours now, and besides the fact that he went south," there's no concrete information.

My men were already in Philadelphia two hours ago.

Lynn didn't respond to her words, but turned to look at Drake.

"Where are the materials on site?"

Drake walked to the nearest table, pulled the top folder from a pile of files, and handed it to him. The cover was blank, and inside were about twenty pages of paper. The top page contained the Long Island Police Department's first dispatch report, followed by the Federal Technical Team's preliminary report, and then photo printouts.

Lynn opened the book. The first page was a photograph of the second-floor hallway of the house. The scars on the walls were clearer under the high-definition lens than Drake had described on the phone. They weren't the black of fire, nor the craters left by an explosion; they were a texture similar to melted and solidified glass—the original paint and plasterboard on the walls had turned into a translucent crystalline substance under extreme heat, and after cooling, it resembled an uneven glaze.

He turned to the second page. The lock on Wayne's bedroom door. It was an electronic lock with a stainless steel casing, but in the photo, its edges were deformed, as if something had pushed it outwards from the center, the metal liquefying and solidifying in a very short time, leaving a swirling texture on the surface. Similar marks were found on the door frame, indicating that the meltdown occurred while the door was locked.

"The lock melted from the inside," Lynn said.

"Yes." Drake leaned closer and pointed to a spot on the photo with his index finger. "Look at the direction of the fuse here. The heat source is directly behind the lock cylinder. This means that someone was standing inside the bedroom and opened the door from the inside."

"Where is Wayne's wife?"

"In the other half of the master suite. Separated by a walk-in closet and a door. She said she didn't hear anything."

Lynn turned two more pages. The next screen contained surveillance footage—the security cameras outside the house hadn't recorded anything during the four minutes the security system was shut down, but in the first frame after the system was restored, a dark SUV had appeared in Wayne's driveway. The model wasn't fully identified, but judging from the outline, it was likely an older Grand Cherokee. The car was facing south and already running.

"Where did this car come from?"

"A surveillance camera about 400 meters west of the residence captured it passing by at 3:52 a.m. Before that, we haven't found out where it entered the area from."

Lynn closed the folder.

"What about the route? You said on the phone that the last confirmed location was the New Jersey Turnpike, southbound."

Drake walked to the wall and swiped a few times on the screen to the left. The map of New Jersey zoomed in, showing a red line that started from Long Island, crossed Staten Island, entered New Jersey, and then headed south along a toll road, stopping near Camden.

"The license plate recognition system on the toll road captured the SUV's license plate at 4:31 a.m. After Wayne Group's security system was restored, Ms. Hall's team's first action was to lock onto Mr. Wayne's cell phone signal, but the phone was switched off at 4:12 a.m. The last known location was Staten Island."

"The license plate was photographed at 4:31, and the phone was turned off at 4:12." Lynn looked at the red line. "They knew the phone should be turned off, but they didn't remove the license plate."

"Either it was negligence," Drake said, "or they simply didn't care where they were going."

"The next one," Lynn said.

Hall, who had been silent the whole time, suddenly spoke up when he heard this.

Why are you so sure?

Lynn glanced at her.

"Because if they cared, they wouldn't have kidnapped one of the top 200 richest people in the US in the New York City area. If something happens to a target of this caliber, the entire law enforcement system in the Northeast will be mobilized. It's impossible to remain completely undetected. The fact that they accept this level of exposure shows that exposure itself is not something they want to avoid."

He looked at the map on the wall.

What they need to avoid is being caught up.

Hall's finger paused on the tablet. She looked at Lynn, this time her gaze lingering a little longer than before.

"You mean they don't mind if we know where they're going, they only mind if we're faster than them?"

"right."

Drake placed his coffee cup on the table, turned, pulled a sheet of paper from another table, and handed it to Lynn. The paper contained a name and a timestamp.

“We did facial recognition on the drivers from the tollbooth cameras,” Drake said. “The passenger in the front passenger seat was wearing a hat and a mask, so their face wasn’t visible. But the driver—” he tapped a screenshot on a piece of paper with his index finger, “wasn’t covering their face.”

Lynn looked down.

The screenshot shows a man's profile, around thirty years old, with dark skin, high cheekbones, and a sharp jawline.

He was wearing a dark hoodie, the hood undone, and his short, black hair lay flat against his scalp. He wore ordinary sunglasses, but judging from his forehead and brow bone visible through the lenses, his features possessed a distinctive quality that defied easy categorization—

It's not a typical facial structure; it's more like several genetic traits from different sources stitched together.

"What are the comparison results?" Lynn asked.

Drake hesitated for a moment.

"There's no official record that matches perfectly. But there's something interesting. In the old federal classification system, his facial features were associated with a code name—the individual corresponding to that code name was never officially identified, only appearing once in a field report three years ago. The report described an unidentified person who, in an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore, single-handedly stopped a smuggling truck attempting to escape; the report didn't specify what was in the truck. The survivor described him using a few words: 'very strong,' 'dark-eyed,' 'doesn't look like an ordinary person.'"