Darkstone Code

Horn sat at the table, wolfing down fast food—burgers, fries, hot dogs, plus some beef nuggets.

These things were practically "street-side treasures." In Bupen, this fast-paced city, no one felt they were particularly low-class.

It was an interesting thing.

The well-dressed people on Bupen’s streets refused to eat in the cheap diners by the roadside, yet they didn’t mind spending a buck or so on a hot dog to settle their lunch.

So on Bupen’s streets, from noon until around six in the evening, all kinds of food trucks could be seen everywhere.

"Did you abuse him?" The Military man in charge of the interrogation had barely come in before he couldn’t help but use a folder to cover his mouth and quietly ask the FBI officer beside him.

For an interrogation this important, every second of footage would be preserved.

If nothing went wrong, fine; but if something did, every step of the process would be reviewed, including the conversations between the interrogators themselves, which would also be recorded.

The FBI and the Military both had lip-reading experts; covering up a bit was also out of consideration for not letting certain developments spread.

They couldn’t let everyone know he’d said that. It would be like the Bureau really did abuse suspects!

The FBI officer shook his head. "We don’t have a habit of abusing suspects."

He cast a thoughtful glance at the Military’s interrogation specialist. He’d heard the Military people were very fond of torture; most of the people taken away by the Military either ended up successfully convicted, thrown into prison to live a deathless, half-alive existence—

Or they simply vanished from public sight altogether.

As if sensing something in the half-colleague’s gaze, the Military’s interrogation expert smiled and withdrew his eyes.

Several doors controlled by Soldiers were opened; the Military Major walked in, along with the FBI personnel.

Everything on them—especially anything that could be lethal—had already been stripped away.

They didn’t even have a pencil; all recording was handled by the people monitoring from outside.

To ensure Horn’s safety, the Federation Government had already gone to great lengths.

After the two of them entered the room, they didn’t disturb Horn, but simply watched him finish everything in front of him.

When he ate, there was something peculiar about him, as if... these things were extraordinarily delicious, exquisitely tasty, impossible to refuse!

Only when he finally let out a satisfied sigh from his throat did that lazy sound carry a quality people called "a sense of security."

He licked the sauce off his fingers. "I’m sorry. I’ve hardly eaten anything for quite some time..."

After he discovered the people the Duncan Clan had sent to catch him, he had been hiding in the water tower.

The other side seemed convinced he was still in that little town. Without leaving the town limits, they kept searching outward around it.

When the first round of searches ended, he thought that was it. He hadn’t expected them to start a second, a third time!

A few times, those people even climbed up the water tower. Fortunately his disguise was good enough.

He hadn’t sealed the entire water tower. If people outside couldn’t see anything inside, they would certainly be deeply suspicious.

He deliberately opened a gap in the upper part of the tank, so from above you could see what was inside the water tower.

Moss, some kind of rotten sediment, and stagnant, lifeless water.

As for him, he used visual misdirection to hide himself in a spot between the tank and the base of the tower.

The entrance had to be accessed through the bottom pipes. After those people searched a few times and found nothing, they left.

If they had chosen to smash the water tower, or drain all the water, they would have discovered that in fact a reasonable portion of the space had been concealed.

This was something Horn had paid a considerable price to prepare. Using his identity as a Paradise Island developer, he secretly arranged for this water tower to be built, then deliberately sabotaged and abandoned it.

A few years were enough to make it look like it had been there for ages.

If those people had gone to ask the old folks in town, they might have gotten an answer—at least a hint: the time when this water tower was built was not as long ago as people imagined!

But all that was in the past. In that cramped space, Horn had been hiding for a long time. The food he’d stored would only last a few days, but they searched the area for a full week, which meant he had almost nothing to eat in the last few days.

If they hadn’t simply been unable to find Horn and started to suspect he had really left, they might have kept searching.

After they left, Horn immediately bought a ticket to Bupen. Under the circumstances, those people wouldn’t think he’d still head for Bupen, so no one tried to stop or arrest him along the way.

After he turned himself in, he was locked up here, and his whole body finally relaxed.

He knew where those people came from, and he knew why they were looking for him.

As one of the front-facing roles controlled by the Duncan Clan, he was not a complete puppet either.

If he were just an idiot, the Duncan Clan wouldn’t look twice at him.

He had his own talents and brains. He didn’t immediately confess anything, but waited for the situation to keep fermenting.

He had been kept here for three days now, and it looked like things had pretty much ripened. The people in charge of interrogating him were no longer just from the FBI; the Military had shown up as well.

That meant the Duncan Clan’s secret "negotiation plan" with the Federation Government had likely fallen through, or at the very least, it hadn’t made any real progress.

And this, precisely, was the best time to start talking.

Once he had confirmed the Federation Government’s stance, he naturally had to stand on their side.

"What is it you want to know from me?" Horn wiped his mouth with a napkin, then looked over at the Military men.

If you wanted to move against the Duncan Clan, relying on the FBI alone wasn’t going to work.

They might perform very well in the investigative phase, but when it came time to actually move, it was no longer that safe.

The Duncan Clan’s penetration of the Federation Government had exceeded people’s imagination. A large number of Federation Government officials had received the Duncan Clan’s "support," directly or indirectly; the entire government system was no longer all that secure.

That included right now: the Duncan Clan already knew Horn had turned himself in, and they even knew he was being held here.

There were plenty of people willing to take certain risks to pass messages for them. After all, what you could gain by helping them sometimes outweighed a lifetime’s earnings at the FBI.

Sometimes far more!

But the Military was different. The Duncan Clan’s infiltration of the Military was far weaker than their infiltration of government agencies. In some respects, the Military was the "property" of certain other families.

They would never allow anyone else to get their hands into that field!!

The Military was the real main force!

The Major put some files down on the table and took the seat opposite Horn. "Is Jeruno the one behind Paradise Island?"

Very direct, going straight for the core at the outset.

Horn thought for a moment, then shook his head. "If you’re hoping to nail Mr. Jeruno straight off from this, I’m definitely going to disappoint you."

"I know the Duncan Clan very well. I know their methods. If we slip even a hair—just a hair!"

Horn smiled faintly. "They’ll find a way to turn all our efforts into smoke. So I’ll tell you truthfully what I know, but if you want me to start throwing around random accusations, I’m sorry, I can’t do that."

No need to think too hard about it: if they wanted to topple the Duncan Clan, they had to ensure judicial fairness and justice, at least on the surface.

Because the entire trial process required jury participation. And as long as people were involved, there would always be variables that could be controlled.

The jury system was far from perfect, because jurors couldn’t represent all the people of the Federation, nor could they represent justice in this world!

They could be manipulated, and then hand down wrong judgments.

If a key witness lied about certain things, then in the jurors’ eyes, everything he said afterward might become untrustworthy.

The Major nodded. "Then tell me how you were in contact with the Duncan Clan..."

This story had to start eight years ago, right at the end stage of the world war, when the whole world was full of people fleeing, and in the chaos of war, if someone went missing, no one would really notice.

Horn White had started out by smuggling people, bringing them from other countries into the Federation and charging fifteen hundred a head.

He’d done that business for quite a long time and could be said to have quickly made his first pot of gold.

Later, somehow, a young man from the Duncan Clan found out about his business. Then that man contacted him and became his partner.

His smuggling operation began to upgrade. Besides ordinary smuggling, he now had another task: collecting certain "samples" for that young Duncan clansman.

Sometimes it was young, beautiful women; sometimes it was handsome young men; sometimes it was...

The Duncan young man paid a lot of money for these samples. The profits far exceeded what he made from simple smuggling.

More importantly, with that young Duncan clansman’s business card, Horn could easily get meetings with most of the government officials he wanted to see, and these people would even give him some face.

A successful Merchant needed more than a ruthless streak; he also had to be good at seizing opportunities.

Their business grew bigger and bigger. It was only then that Horn realized he wasn’t the only smuggling outfit working with the Duncan Clan—there were many others!

On top of that, they had their own slave-catching teams. The numbers involved were staggering!

After the war ended, both the size and the volume of smuggling flows dropped, and business became much harder to do.

Then one day, Horn’s contact suddenly asked if he was interested in a construction job.

For Horn, whose smuggling business was slowing down, as long as there was enough profit, it didn’t matter whether it was smuggling or putting up a building—he was in!