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

Chapter 221 New Scout Post (3k)

late at night.

In another student apartment building less than 200 meters from Alex's dormitory.

The main light in the room was off; only a computer screen displaying an AFK (away from keyboard) interface for an MMORPG game emitted a faint blue light.

The heavy blackout curtains were drawn tightly shut, leaving only a gap less than two fingers wide in the very center.

A high-powered telescope with low-light night vision capability is steadily mounted behind this gap.

Zhao Ying looked away from the eyepiece of the binoculars and rubbed her sore eyes.

She was wearing an oversized gray hooded sweatshirt with a loose neckline, revealing a small patch of her delicate collarbone.

She had long, black hair that reached her waist, which she had tied into a ponytail with a rubber band because she was too lazy to style it. A few strands of hair fell across her fair and delicate profile.

Her lower body was covered by a pair of loose shorts, and her two fair legs, without any excess fat, were casually crossed together. She also wore a pair of fluffy bunny slippers on her feet, making her look like a miserable female international student in the United States who was staying up all night to finish her thesis.

She turned her head and, in the dim light of the computer screen, looked at Li Kai, who was sprawled out on the sofa, snoring.

Li Kai was wearing a crumpled T-shirt with an anime print, and even had one slipper on his feet, while the other was lying under the coffee table.

The coffee table was piled high with leftover pizza boxes and empty Coke cans.

Zhao Ying walked over and kicked Li Kai's shin without any hesitation.

"Hey, wake up. Don't sleep."

Li Kai grunted, rolled over, and tried to bury his face in the sofa cushions to avoid the harassment.

"Stop messing around—let me sleep for five more minutes, I just got a legendary item in my dream—"

"Your orange gear is going to explode!"

Zhao Ying increased the force, kicking him directly in the thigh bone. "Time to do the laundry! Get up and get to work!"

Upon hearing the words "washing clothes," Li Kai jolted awake, his previously dazed brain instantly activating.

He suddenly jumped up from the sofa, pulling on his numb arm and gasping in pain.

"Did you really wash it?"

Li Kai put on the black-rimmed glasses he had thrown on the table, then, while rubbing his arm, he shuffled to the gap in the curtains with his only remaining slipper and pressed his eye against the binoculars.

In the shot, on the familiar balcony two hundred meters away, a red flannel shirt hangs forlornly on the far left of the clothes rack.

In the rules of espionage, they are called visual signal bits.

Li Kai and Zhao Ying would never act like secret agents in movies, wearing sharp black suits and sunglasses to read newspapers in the park. That kind of Hollywood-style spy behavior would only lead to a quick death in reality.

Their only role here is to act as eyes.

The target is a red shirt hanging on the balcony; this is called "doing laundry."

It means that the dead mail box has been filled out, or the intelligence is ready and ready for handover.

Seeing this shirt meant that Li Kai and Zhao Ying had completed half of their work.

They would never actually go near that damn mailbox; in fact, they didn't even know which trash can or under which tree it was in Seattle.

All they need to do is transmit the "signal has appeared" status to the next level of contact through some covert and traceless method, notifying them to "collect the laundry".

In fact, in the initial intelligence exchanges, Dongfang did not go to the extravagance of arranging for someone to keep watch on Alex's balcony from the opposite building 24 hours a day.

But ever since Bill and Arthur, the two core military personnel, successfully boarded the ship and evacuated, even though they have not yet reached the other side, the Eastern leadership has realized the terrifying value of this Seattle route and immediately increased the operation budget significantly.

It was under those circumstances that Li Kai and Zhao Ying were quickly placed in this apartment building.

As mere observers, they only knew the rules about hanging clothes on balconies. They had no idea that the intelligence in that dead mailbox tonight contained the next-generation CRISPR gene-editing technology worth hundreds of billions of dollars, nor did they know that the source of the intelligence involved internal purges at Pfizer, let alone that behind this intelligence network stood Leon, the police killing machine who had slaughtered countless people in Seattle.

Even from their perspective, they weren't sure whether the overweight Asian guy who lived in the opposite dorm and always went out with dark circles under his eyes was a real agent.

Maybe that fat guy was just an outsider student hired by the secret agents to hang up his clothes on time?

Ignorance is the best camouflage for these grassroots agents.

"Confirmed, it's a red card."

Li Kai stepped away from the binoculars, scratched his hair, and let out a long sigh of relief.

To cover up this surveillance point, their identities were perfectly crafted: two full-time graduate students in the US who were comfortably spending their parents' money back home while idly passing the time in the US.

Unlike the unified postgraduate entrance examination in China, the application process for master's programs in the United States mainly considers GPA, letters of recommendation, and GRE scores.

This system provides a perfect excuse for many well-off international students to coast through life.

They can openly rent apartments and spend all day playing games and watching dramas without leaving home, and their unanimous message to their families is, "I'm preparing for the GRE to apply to good schools."

This kind of persona is everywhere around American universities; they're so ordinary that even the dorm supervisors don't bother to give them a second glance.

To make his performance more realistic, Li Kai even spent two thousand US dollars on a game for an online love interest last month, perfectly portraying the image of a rich, naive, and foolish second-generation otaku.

While other guys who play games are out having sex, he's still getting his coins stolen by white girls in the game. To everyone else, isn't he just a naive guy with too much money?

"Damn it, finally it's out! My eyes are practically blind from staring at it for days."

Li Kai walked to the coffee table, picked up a half-finished can of cola, and took a swig.

He pointed to the window across the street.

"There's a crazy Black guy living in the dorm across the hall, and I have to outsmart him every day!"

"Don't mention that black man."

Zhao Ying was changing her shoes in the entryway when she heard this and couldn't help but roll her eyes.

While keeping watch, the two were often tormented by Alex's roommate Jamal.

The day before yesterday afternoon, while Li Kai was on duty, Jamal suddenly ran out and hung a large red blackout cloth on the balcony.

The two men were so nervous they thought their superiors had changed the signal transmission rules and were waiting for further instructions.

After a whole day, the two discovered that the black man was actually growing mushrooms in the corner of the balcony just to block out the light.

Last night, the black man was clearly high on drugs. In the middle of the night, he went to the balcony and sang and danced to the moon.

As intelligence agents keeping watch, even if they thought the other person was acting crazy, they dared not ignore it, and worried that it might be some new body language signal.

So they spent half an hour taking notes on the black man's hip-shaking. After receiving no new information from their superiors, they realized from their notes that the black man seemed to be just imitating Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

Zhao Ying pulled a dark windproof jacket off the hook behind the door and put it on, zipping it all the way up to hide the smile on her face.

"Alright, stop complaining. If you really found out something you shouldn't know, do you think we'd still be sitting here eating pizza?"

"I'm going out for a bit. Tell the staff to 'collect the laundry.'"

She gripped the doorknob, turned to look at Ji Kai who was still rubbing his eyes, and her tone became serious.

"Get back to the window and keep it hanging there for now."

"Don't sleep until I get back. If anything changes, record it immediately."

"Okay, okay."

Li Kai waved his hand and dragged his feet back to sit on the chair behind the curtain gap. He had actually been monitoring the area by the window for 12 hours and had just been replaced by Zhao Ying.

"Hurry up and finish this quickly so I can get back to sleep."

Zhao Ying pushed open the door and quickly disappeared into the dim light of the apartment corridor.

Instead of taking the elevator, she went down the stairs in the emergency exit to the lobby on the first floor.

Pushing open the heavy glass door of the apartment, the cold wind of a late November night in Seattle instantly rushed into her collar.

Zhao Ying pulled the zipper of her windproof jacket up, put her hands in her pockets, and walked onto the sidewalk with her neck hunched.

The neighborhood around the University of Washington is considered one of the safer middle-class areas in Seattle.

But “better” is never an absolutely safe adjective in this country.

Especially at this time of day, there are hardly any normal pedestrians on the street.

Occasionally, a few sports cars with modified exhaust pipes roar past, or one or two homeless people huddled in the shadows on street corners, shivering in the cold wind from drug overdoses.

Even in school districts, it is definitely not a wise thing for a single woman to go out late at night.

But Zhao Ying didn't seem worried about that; her steps were very steady.

Her target was the 7-Eleven convenience store at the end of the block, its bright white neon lights gleaming.

But on her way to the convenience store, Zhao Ying naturally turned onto a side road when she reached an intersection.

This side road is dimly lit, with two streetlights broken. Even students who come out for a morning run usually don't walk this way.

This was a route that she and Li Kai had repeatedly scouted and confirmed on the first day they moved into the apartment building; it was a blind spot without any municipal surveillance cameras.

In the middle of the side road, near a corner of a brick wall covered in graffiti, stands a dilapidated coin-operated public telephone booth, with even the glass door half broken.

In an era where everyone has a smartphone, these old relics are completely ignored except by homeless people who might occasionally urinate in them.

Zhao Ying walked to the phone booth, frowned in disgust, and avoided a suspicious puddle of water on the ground.

She took a twenty-five-cent coin from her pocket and put it into the coin slot.

The sound of the coin rolling was exceptionally crisp in the quiet night.

Zhao Ying picked up the receiver, which smelled of cheap plastic and tobacco, and quickly pressed a string of numbers she knew by heart on the grime-covered buttons.

She didn't speak, and even her breathing was very soft.

A long electronic wait tone came from the receiver.

"beep"

As soon as the call connected, Zhao Ying pressed the hang-up button without hesitation.

"Click".

The coin was swallowed, and the call was cut off.

Zhao Ying hung the receiver back in its place, turned around and walked out of the phone booth.

The whole process took less than ten seconds.

She didn't actually know who was on the other end of the phone.

Perhaps it's a white truck driver who drives across state lines at night, parking his heavy truck at some desolate gas station and eating a hot dog; perhaps it's a homeless drunkard lying on a park bench pretending to be dead; or perhaps it's an illegal immigrant chopping vegetables in a Chinatown kitchen.

It does not matter.

The person in the subreddit, who doesn't even have a name, will immediately know it's time to pick up their "package" as soon as they hear a call from this public phone booth that connects and then immediately disconnects.

Without voice communication or physical contact, even if an agent were bored enough to check the call records, they would only find a dilapidated, unused phone booth, and the trail would be completely cut off there.

Zhao Ying put her hands back into the pockets of her windproof jacket, circled around the side road, and returned to the main road.

She pushed open the door of the 7-Eleven convenience store, and amidst the sound of the electronic bell hanging on the door, and under the drowsy gaze of the cashier, she walked to the shelf and took out two large bags of original flavor potato chips, and then went to the freezer to get a large two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola.

After paying, Zhao Ying carried the plastic bag, yawning as she slowly walked across the fallen leaves on the ground towards the international student dormitory.