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

Chapter 220 Intelligence Transfer

Lyon sat on the wooden chair, listened to these words, and nodded calmly.

He knew he had completely won this psychological battle.

This former Pfizer executive has been cornered, and now all it takes is to give him a slightly more palatable way out, and he will naturally back down.

However, Lyon himself only had a superficial understanding of the specific research environment and medical status in the East.

Before he transmigrated, he was just an ordinary citizen, so he couldn't exactly bring up irrelevant things like "we can use our medical insurance cards to see a doctor in our area."

So, Leon turned his head slightly and looked at the guy who had been hiding in the corner of the baptismal room, trying to make himself inconspicuous.

Alex.

Leon raised his hand and casually beckoned, "Come here. Tell this former researcher what the medical and scientific research environment is like back home."

Alex, who was leaning against the wall in a daze, suddenly felt a jolt.

He stared wide-eyed, his eyes already adorned with heavy dark circles, and pointed incredulously at his own nose.

"I?"

Alex let out a wail.

"Dude, you want me, a slacker who almost failed Molecular Biology in my final exams, to educate Pfizer researchers about the nation's scientific research capabilities?"

"Are you trying to publicly execute me?!"

"Just say it when I tell you to."

Lyon interrupted him, "You're a biology major, show some professional competence."

Alex swallowed hard and forced himself to move to the marble countertop.

Christopher squinted, looking the fat man wearing two masks up and down with a suspicious gaze.

He still vividly remembered Alex's previous idiotic remarks about "chloroplast rejection".

"Uh...cough cough."

Alex felt a chill run down his spine from the stare. He cleared his throat and his brain began to work frantically, trying to scavenge something useful from his meager professional knowledge and memories of watching domestic news.

"Um—about the issue of medical soil, you don't need to worry at all."

17

Alex rubbed his hands together, his tone becoming strangely proud.

"Although we don't have the same tradition as your America of using homeless people as free guinea pigs or prescribing opioids to the poor for large-scale live experiments, our cutting-edge technology has always lagged behind yours."

He curled his lip, making no attempt to hide his complaints about the American underclass as a body collector.

"However, we have an advantage that you absolutely cannot match: our large population base and a massive amount of highly concentrated clinical medical records."

Alex got more and more into talking, and even started gesturing wildly.

"When you conduct a clinical trial here, you have to send Google Maps all over the world to get subsidies for finding a few hundred rare disease samples."

"But in our top-tier tertiary hospitals, the number of rare and difficult cases that a department head might have in his hands is probably more than that of an entire Pfizer research and development center."

Christopher frowned slightly but did not refute it. It was true that there were indeed many people from the East.

Moreover, as an industry insider, he had to admit that the vast and concentrated clinical data was indeed invaluable for the development of targeted drugs.

"As for what you're talking about—the research environment."

Alex scratched the back of his head.

"What era are we living in? Do you still think we're using rudimentary methods to smelt steel back in the day?"

"Go check the first authors of recent Nature and Cell journals and see how many of them have names spelled out in pinyin."

He looked at Christopher and began to spout nonsense with a straight face.

"Besides, that CRISPR vector you're working on—even if you go there and find that they're lacking this or that, wouldn't that just highlight your value?"

Alex spread his hands and presented a peculiar logic with self-assurance.

"Think about it, if you go to a lab where everything is perfect, you'll just be a high-level employee at best."

"But if you go over there and lead them to break through the technological barriers, then you'll be a pioneer!"

"Not only will your name be on the patent, but they might even put a bronze statue of you at the entrance of the lab."

Lyon sat beside Alex, listening to his sales pitch, a mixture of coaxing and deception, and couldn't help but twitch his lips.

Christopher's expression became quite interesting after hearing this.

He looked at the fat man in front of him who was full of nonsense and had no elite temperament. Although he felt that the other man's words were full of logical loopholes and flaws, the phrase "founding father" really hit his sweet spot as a scholar.

Christopher took a deep breath and lay back down on the marble table.

He stared at the moldy ceiling, and finally slowly closed his eyes.

"If you can get me out of this damn country."

Christopher's voice relaxed completely, sounding somewhat tired. "Then I'll go and see if your soil can actually grow my stuff."

Lyon looked at Christopher, who had completely given up and closed his eyes on the marble table, and silently exhaled through his mask.

He turned his head and exchanged a glance with Alex, who was standing next to him.

The two exchanged a knowing look in the dimly lit baptismal room.

Although the process was full of off-topic nonsense, the result was good, and this technological pledge worth hundreds of billions of dollars has been completely secured.

Alex slumped his shoulders in relief.

He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, pulled up the double mask that had slipped down to his nose, and turned to push open the wooden door of the baptismal room.

"Alright, now that we've reached an agreement, let's quickly pack up and get ready to leave with our men."

Alex muttered, "The musty smell in this awful place is giving me a headache. I need to go back and take a shower. Later I have to go check on the lamb with Hassan—"

"etc."

Leon remained seated, interrupting him coldly.

Alex's hand was already on the doorknob, and he turned around in confusion.

Lyon pointed out the door, towards the direction of the central hall.

"Have you forgotten something?"

Lyon looked at him. "Pastor Thomas specifically instructed you about this outside."

"Those homeless people on the church floor who have already died are waiting for you to add twenty dollars to each one and take them away so they can exchange the money to buy gauze at the shady clinic."

Alex's relaxed expression froze instantly.

Holy crap!

Alex let out a desperate scream, "Brother! I came in your car, but the refrigerated truck didn't come! Am I supposed to gather all those homeless people in by hand?!"

That's your business problem, not mine.

Leon stood up, brushed the dust off his jacket, and said, "The priest just saved our man; now it's his turn to need your help. Get to work, mortician."

late at night.

Near the University of Washington, there is an undeveloped, secluded grove of trees.

The cold night wind rustled through the dry branches, making a soft, rustling sound.

Occasionally, container trucks would whiz by on the distant highway, their headlights flashing briefly at the edge of the woods.

Alex, wearing a thick black hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled low, like a drug addict caught in the act, trudged through the fallen leaves until he reached a section of abandoned brick wall deep in the woods.

He cautiously looked around, making sure there were no followers behind him, not even a homeless person in sight, before taking out a small flashlight with a red plastic filter from his pocket.

A faint red light shone on an inconspicuous crack in the brick wall at the bottom.

Alex crouched down, curling his body into a ball.

He pulled a tiny roll of paper tightly wrapped in waterproof paper from the inside pocket of his hoodie.

This was his standard procedure for handing over dead emails to his superiors as a grassroots executor of the Eastern Intelligence Network.

-

Just two hours ago, he was sitting at his computer desk in his dorm room, listening to his roommate Jamal chanting botanical incantations over hallucinogenic mushrooms on the balcony, while he himself was biting his pen and miserably writing intelligence on a special water-soluble paper no bigger than the palm of his hand.

He condensed everything that happened today onto that piece of paper.

Alex held the waterproof paper roll in his hand and, by the faint red light, went over what he had written in his mind once more.

In the first half of the note, he reported the spoils of the explosion to his superiors:

[Leon, now using the alias RayFong, intercepted a high-value target.]

Christopher, a former researcher at Pfizer's research and development center.

Master the core technologies of next-generation CRISPR gene editing vectors, including LNP-specific polypeptide ligand modification and off-target rate control algorithms.

The target has gone bankrupt and is now under our control. We have completed the initial recruitment and he has agreed to go to the East.

Please assess its technical value and prepare the receiving channel.

Alex's hands were shaking as he wrote this. He, a complete academic failure who didn't even know how to write a graduation thesis, was actually reporting biological secrets worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the national intelligence agency.

In the latter part of the note, he added information about Pastor Thomas's situation and Leon's request, which he found utterly absurd:

[Additional intelligence: The target is seriously injured and was sutured by Reverend Thomas of St. Jude Church.]

Thomas, formerly the chief of both cardiothoracic and trauma surgery at Englewood Hospital, is now a down-on-his-luck pastor and possesses significant medical logistical value.

[Note: RayFong is familiar with Eastern political theories.]

He asked me to buy an English paperback copy of Mao Zedong's Selected Works and give it to Pastor Thomas, who was on the verge of collapse from trying to treat homeless people, in an attempt to reshape his thinking.

Whether or not to provide it requires instructions from higher authorities.

Alex took a deep breath, stuffed the waterproof paper roll into the deepest part of the brick joint, and then sealed it tightly with a piece of moss-covered broken brick.

After doing all this, he patted the dirt off his hands and stood up.

"What the hell is this English version of Mao Zedong's Selected Works?!"

Alex hunched his shoulders in the cold wind and muttered a complaint in Chinese that only he could hear, "I'm just an international student in America collecting corpses, and I'm out in the woods at night spying and planting intelligence. Not only do I have to report on gene-editing technology, but I also have to report my 'red book' to the organization—this is unbearable."

He sighed, stuffed the red flashlight back into his pocket, put his hands in his hoodie pockets, and quickly disappeared into the night outside the woods.