Chapter 350: What They Can Do Is Only Wait!

On the screen, where Chu Chen had just been standing, only a few audience members in evening wear and a suit jacket knocked to the ground remained.

The suit jacket was black, but it was not the same one Chu Chen had been wearing—the cut of the lapels was different, and the width of the shoulder lines did not match.

Henry drew a small circle over that spot with the red dot of a laser pointer.

"Between two frames, he vanished. No movement trajectory, no obstructions, no leaving from the edge of the frame. He was simply there in the previous frame, and gone in the next."

The people from the Expert Group crowded in front of the screen.

Liu Xuemin leaned in the closest, the blue light of the screen reflecting off the lenses of his silver-rimmed glasses.

His gaze shifted from the spot where Chu Chen had vanished to the faces of the surrounding audience, then to the cardboard, lighting, and curtains in the background.

He watched for about ten seconds, then straightened up and turned his head to look at Henry.

"What about the other camera angles?"

Hank took over, tapping his fingers on the console a few times, and the screen switched to a view from another angle.

This camera was filming from directly in front of the stage, with a lower angle and a wider field of view, showing the full stage and the first five rows of the audience.

"This is the main camera for the live broadcast, 4K resolution, 60 frames per second. It's twice as detailed as the security system's surveillance."

As Hank spoke, he played the recording from the same time period.

The footage played once at normal speed, then once more at quarter speed.

In the slow-motion footage, the process of Chu Chen's body going from clear to blurry, and from blurry to transparent, was stretched out to nearly one second.

But that process was not a gradual transition—it wasn't "he slowly disappeared," but rather "he was complete in one frame, and gone in the next."

That "blurry" transition was not a change in his body; it was a compensation error caused by the camera's automatic white balance when the crowd surged forward!

"After slowing it down four times, we saw a detail." Hank froze the frame where Chu Chen vanished and zoomed in five times.

The screen became pixelated; that was the inevitable result of enlarging a digital image.

But even in the pixels, one could clearly see—the pixels in that position showed no traces of "movement" before or after Chu Chen vanished!

If a person had left the frame quickly within the time of one frame, his image would have left a motion blur in that frame!

But he did not leave any motion blur!

If he had been blocked by some object, the object blocking him would have created a change in the occlusion relationship within the frame!

Yet, no obvious change was seen in the video.

Lin Xu's voice came from the Expert Group, not loud, but very steady: "Sir, could you let me see the raw file?"

Hank glanced at her.

Li Changyu nodded from the side.

Hank vacated a spot at the console, and Shui Ge stepped over.

He took a USB flash drive out of his bag and plugged it into the console's USB port.

His own software was installed on the flash drive; there was no need to install anything on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's system.

After plugging in the flash drive, Lin Xu quickly pulled up the image analysis program she had written herself.

This program was her invention, specifically designed to analyze whether there were any anomalies in video data.

Once the program finished loading, it scanned the raw video file from beginning to end, over and over again.

Finally, a red prompt box popped up on the screen.

The red prompt box contained only one line of text: "No anomaly detected." No anomaly detected!

Lin Xu stared at that line of text for two seconds, then reset the parameters, turned the sensitivity to the maximum, and let the program run again.

But after this run finished, it was still the same result!

She turned around and shook her head at Liu Xuemin.

Liu Xuemin nodded in response.

The ringing of phones, the sound of keyboards, and the noisy chatter of walkie-talkies in the Command Center seemed to fade away at that moment.

In the end, it was Henry who broke the silence.

His voice was low, but his tone carried that unique calmness of a commander who maintains order even in a predicament.

"We didn't just check the stage surveillance. The city-wide search and investigation have been going on for three hours. All surveillance within a three-kilometer radius of the Metropolitan Opera House—street cameras, traffic cameras, commercial security surveillance, bank ATM cameras—have all been retrieved. The technical team is analyzing them frame by frame."

Immediately after, Hank added from the side: "All personnel leaving the theater have undergone identity verification. The lockdown was completed before the crowd began to riot, and every person who left had to pass through three checkpoints: the first was the theater exit, the second was the perimeter police, and the third was the neighborhood traffic control. Every checkpoint has surveillance footage, and we have watched every piece of footage. We did not find Chu Chen."

"What about the subway?" Chen Xiong's voice came from the Expert Group, carrying that persistent questioning typical of an old policeman who would not let any detail go.

"The subway station was closed the moment the riot broke out. All entrances were guarded by police. No footage of him entering the subway station was found." Hank's answer was without hesitation; he had already gone over these questions in his mind countless times.

"Underground passages? Sewers? Connecting corridors between buildings?" Zhou Yun also spoke up.

"We have looked at the architectural blueprints of the Metropolitan Opera House three times. All exits, entrances, passages, utility shafts, ventilation ducts, and basement connection points—everything has been searched. No traces of anyone passing through were found. No footprints, no fingerprints, no physical evidence whatsoever."

Zhou Yun closed his mouth.

His gaze fell on that empty spot on the stage on the screen, like someone lost in the desert looking at the horizon—knowing where the direction was, but not knowing where the path was.

The next second, Liu Xuemin said:

"So, our information is summarized as follows. First, Chu Chen was on stage, in front of 2,800 people, and completed a transfer from Brian's account to Monica's account. The financial system did not trigger an alarm, and the banking system left no traces of being hacked. Second, after the transfer was completed, in front of 2,800 people and tens of millions of live broadcast viewers worldwide, he vanished from the stage. Surveillance footage shows he did not leave, but simply vanished. The city-wide search and investigation have not found any trace of him."

He paused, his gaze shifting from Henry's face to Hank's, to Li Changyu's, and finally landing on the empty stage on the screen.

"This is exactly consistent with the situation we encountered in London before..."

Henry's hands moved away from the seams of his trousers and slid into his pockets.

His back remained straight, but the lines of his shoulders sank slightly, like a building that had stood in the wind for a long time, the strength supporting it being drained away bit by bit.

"What should we do next?" Henry suddenly asked.

Everything happening right now had far exceeded his understanding.

Otherwise, the head of the FBI would not have asked such a helpless question.

Liu Xuemin did not answer. He walked back to the screen, looked at the empty stage for a long time, and finally opened his mouth: "He has really caused a huge disaster this time; the entire American banking system will likely collapse overnight..."

"It's not just the United States; the financial and trade transaction systems of the entire world could be affected." Henry's voice finally had a hint of fluctuation.

"Once the stock market opens tomorrow, Huaqi Yinhang's stock will definitely be suspended, and the crisis of confidence in other banks will also lead to obstacles in credit business," Li Changyu added.

The clock on the wall of the Command Center ticked away.

Every time the second hand jumped, it was telling everyone: Chu Chen was still in this world, in some place they did not know, doing something they did not know.

And all they could do was wait!

Wait for him to appear.

Wait for him to tell them where the "next stage" is!