Chapter 346: Henry's Doubt!

At this moment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

When Hank stood up from his chair, the chair kicked backward, hitting the filing cabinet behind him and emitting a dull metallic thud!

He grabbed the mobile phone from the table and then rushed out of the office!

The fluorescent lights in the hallway flickered above his head, making his shadow stretch long and short!

In the Command Center on the first floor, over a dozen surveillance screens were simultaneously playing real-time footage from inside and outside the Metropolitan Opera House.

When Hank pushed open the glass door, the technician on duty looked up at him once, then lowered his head to continue typing on the keyboard.

"Pull up the surveillance for the Metropolitan Opera House. The stage area. From the moment the crowd started rushing the stage, go back five minutes and forward ten minutes. Play it frame by frame."

The technician's fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard a few times, and the image on the largest screen switched.

The image quality was not very good.

Because it was the theater's security system, the camera resolution was only 1080p.

The angle was shot from diagonally above the stage, showing the full view of the stage and the first few rows of the audience.

The timestamp on the screen was ticking in the bottom right corner.

Hank stood in front of the screen, arms crossed over his chest, his body leaning slightly forward, like a leopard locking onto its prey.

The footage began to play.

The crowd surged up from the audience seating like a tide washing over a dam.

The human wall of security personnel was scattered.

Brian retreated, backing up to the side of the cardboard. Then—

"Stop," Hank said.

The technician pressed the pause key.

The image froze at the moment when the crowd had already surged onto the stage but had not yet completely surrounded Brian.

Hank leaned closer to the screen, his eyes narrowing.

Where is that guy?

He should be in the center-left position of the stage; before the crowd surged up, he was standing there, hands in his trouser pockets, facing the audience.

But now, in that image, in that center-left position on the stage, there were only a few audience members in evening wear and a suit jacket that had been squeezed onto the floor!

The suit jacket was not his.

The color was wrong.

"Play it forward. Normal speed."

The technician pressed the play key.

The footage continued.

The crowd grew larger and denser, like a mass of expanding dark clouds, completely filling the small patch of empty space in the center of the stage.

Brian was surrounded in the very middle, his face appearing and disappearing through the gaps in the crowd, his expression shifting from fear to blankness.

Chu Chen—if he was still on the stage—should be somewhere in that crowd.

But he was not in the footage.

"Rewind. Start from ten seconds before the crowd began to rush the stage, and slow it down to quarter speed."

The technician did as told.

The footage advanced at a speed so slow it was nearly frozen!

Chu Chen stood in the center of the stage, hands in his trouser pockets, the curve of his mouth clearly visible. The crowd surged up from the audience, the first person jumped onto the stage, then the second, then the third.

Chu Chen's body tilted slightly, as if giving way to the first person. Then—

Hank's finger pressed against the screen.

He leaned in until he was almost touching the LCD panel.

In that slow-motion moment, stretched to nearly two seconds!

Chu Chen's figure went from clear to blurry, from blurry to a mass of noise, and then from noise to transparent!

He didn't walk away, he didn't crouch down, he wasn't blocked!

But instead—

He truly disappeared!

Just like a watercolor painting on glass, with a basin of Water splashed from the other side, the pigment and moisture mixing, flowing, and then being completely washed away on the glass.

Not a single trace was left behind.

Hank straightened his body.

His finger moved away from the screen and clenched into a fist at his side.

He stared at the final frame frozen on "Chu Chen has disappeared," silent for three seconds.

Then he took his phone out of his pocket and dialed Henry's number.

"Boss!"

Henry's call was on speakerphone; he was in the elevator going down from the seventh floor. The elevator signal was poor, and the voice was intermittent.

"What happened? Hank."

"That guy disappeared from the stage again," Hank continued.

"How is that possible?"

"It's true. I checked the surveillance footage; in the previous frame he was there, and in the next frame his image was gone. There was no transition in between, no trajectory of movement. The whole person just suddenly—was gone." Hank's voice was very low, so low it was as if he were speaking to himself.

"I'm arriving at the Command Center immediately!"

As he spoke, the elevator arrived.

Henry stepped out of the elevator, his footsteps faltered for a moment, then he quickened his pace.

He walked through the first-floor lobby and headed toward the Command Center.

As the glass door slid open before him, Hank was standing in front of the largest surveillance screen, where the image frozen on the display was precisely the stage of the opera house.

After the two met face-to-face, Henry walked directly to the screen and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Hank.

"Play it for me."

The technician replayed the recording.

From when Chu Chen was still on the stage, to the crowd surging up, to his figure turning transparent in slow motion.

Henry did not speak, his hands behind his back, his spine held straight.

His complexion was very grim.

Before long, the footage finished playing; the technician stopped and looked back at him.

"Play it again."

The technician played it again.

Then Henry made him play it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time!

After five times, Henry turned around to face Hank, the expression on his face very complex.

"If I remember correctly, he disappeared the same way when he was in London," Henry said.

Hank nodded: "That's right, from inside the containment circle. Forty SAS operators. Twelve SWAT officers. Four snipers. Four helicopters. Thermal imaging, multispectral, infrared. All locked onto him. Then he vanished. In the end, the technical analysis report from the London Metropolitan Police wrote only three words: 'Cause unknown'."

Henry turned his head and looked back at the stage on the screen.

The crowd was still surging in the footage, Brian was nowhere to be seen, security personnel were desperately trying to separate the crowd, some people were screaming, some were crying.

"What about the live stream of their program?" Henry asked suddenly.

Hank was stunned for a moment, then immediately turned to look at the technician. "Is the live stream still on?"

The technician's fingers flew across the keyboard for a few moments and pulled up Chu Chen's live stream page.

At this moment, because the tracking had been lost, Chu Chen's live stream room was playing advertisements.

The barrage of comments was a dense, dark mass.

The barrage in the live stream room had gone through a process of erupting, stalling, and then erupting again in the first minute after Chu Chen disappeared.

At first, it was an overwhelming deluge of "Where is he?", "Where is Chu Chen?", "Where did he go?"—these question marks scrolled across the screen at a speed of tens of thousands per second, turning the entire screen into a white blizzard composed of question marks and exclamation points!

On Twitter.

#SimulatedCrime, this hashtag surged to number one globally after Chu Chen disappeared!

No one knew where Chu Chen's "next stage" would be, but everyone was guessing!

Some said the Louvre Museum in Paris, some said the Vatican in Rome, some said the National Museum in Tokyo, some said the Sydney Opera House!

Every guess was retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, every retweeted tweet was followed by thousands of comments, and every comment was saying the same sentence: "No matter where he goes next, I'm watching."

The trending list on Weibo underwent a complete reshuffle in the third minute after Chu Chen disappeared!

In the top fifty, thirty-seven were related to Chu Chen!

Ranked first was "Chu Chen Disappears", ranked second was "See You at the Next Stage", ranked third was "Metropolitan Opera House", and ranked fourth was "He Ran Away Again"!

A user posted a Weibo under the topic "See You at the Next Stage" that received five million likes: "Mom asked me why I'm kneeling while looking at my phone!"

The "FindChuChen" subreddit on Reddit was flooded with eight million new posts in the fourth minute after Chu Chen disappeared.

The moderator posted a final pinned post before the server crashed: "Stop looking. He is no longer there. He was never there." Below this post, among more than three thousand replies, the one with the most likes had only four words: "Then where the fuck is he?"

J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Command Center.

Henry stood before that massive video wall, his hands behind his back.

His gaze shifted from one screen to another.

Aerial photos of the Metropolitan Opera House, surveillance of the surrounding blocks, internal footage from the United Health Annual Meeting, that live stream page with the black screen—

The images on all the screens were operating normally, and all the information was telling him the same result: Chu Chen was gone.

Hank stood two steps behind him, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was on the phone with the New York Branch, his voice kept very low, but his speaking speed was fast.

After hanging up the phone, he walked to Henry's side.

"The New York Branch searched every entrance and exit of the opera house. No traces of Chu Chen leaving were found. The surveillance footage at the doors was replayed three times; from the moment the crowd began to stir until now, not a single person who left matches Chu Chen's physical characteristics. The lockdown of all passages was completed before the riot occurred. Theoretically, it is impossible for him to have left that building."

Henry did not turn back: "Theoretically... then what about in reality?"

Hank was silent for a moment: "Director, I think Dr. Li is right—he isn't using our systems, he is using our cognition. In our cognition, for a person to leave a locked-down building, they must pass through a door, window, passage, or any physically existing exit, but what if his method isn't on this list?"

"When does Dr. Li's plane arrive?"

"In about an hour and a half."

Henry glanced at the circular clock on the wall.

The second hand was ticking away, each tick taking away a second, and each second was pushing him and his Bureau into a deeper fog.

He walked back behind his desk, sat down, crossed his hands on the desktop, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.

"When they arrive, hold a meeting immediately. Before that—"

He opened his eyes and looked up at Hank.

"Find him. No matter what method you use."

Hank nodded once, turned, and walked out.

The glass door closed behind him with a soft, muffled sound.

The Command Center became quiet again.

Only the sound of the technician typing on the keyboard and the humming of the server cooling fans!

Henry's gaze passed through the glass wall and landed on the tightly closed fire door at the end of the corridor.

The door is red, and on it is a white "EXIT" sign emitting a faint green light.

He looked at that door, looking for a long time.

He was thinking about a question—a question that even he himself felt was absurd.

Will Chu Chen walk out through that door?

Or is it that he does not need a door at all?