"Have you heard of me?" Jack raised an eyebrow as he helped him stuff the duffel bag into the Suburban.
"Ah, no, not before." Stanley put his hand on the passenger door, a shy expression that didn't suit his age.
"Actually, until yesterday, I was working at the FBI lab in Washington, and I'd never been out on a field mission.
Yesterday, they suddenly whisked me away to New York, and Mr. David Rossi and Ms. Dana Moger explained the situation here and introduced me to you.
I did hear some rumors at the lab before that, but they were just small, internal gossip. There were rumors about someone rushing into a fire in Dallas to rescue a baby with a punctured heart and successfully keeping it alive.
There were also rumors about someone driving an armored vehicle loaded with explosives and destroying Central Park."
He spoke nonstop as soon as he got in the car. Although his stories were a bit outrageous and bizarre, Jack could still discern his own "achievements" from them.
It seemed the chemical weapons expert had been pent up in the lab for too long, his urge to speak out a bit too strongly. Jack had no choice but to interrupt him just as he began to analyze the existence of the mutant ogre.
"Doctor, uh, Stanley, the lucky person who survived a punctured heart was an adult male. His rescue was not only due to his own luck, but also thanks to the military doctor who was present at the time.
A baby was indeed rescued during the fire; its mother protected the stroller with her own body."
After briefly dispelling the rumors, Jack joked, "Please don't spread these stories anymore. I want to preserve some mystery so I can include it in my memoirs after I retire."
Stanley looked at Jack's overly youthful and handsome face and couldn't help but joke, "Then I sincerely hope you can retire a few years sooner. That way, perhaps I can read your memoirs before I die. I'm sure it will be very interesting."
The joke was over, and the Suboban pulled out of Osan Air Base. Jack straightened his face and asked, "So, Stanley, how much do you know about VX?"
"VX is an accidental product of an insecticide development experiment in 1952. It's a colorless and odorless oily liquid. When stored for a long time, it will decompose into a small amount of thiol, so it actually has a slightly smelly smell.
But usually when you smell this smell, it's not long before the respiratory muscles stop working.
This thing is like champagne. When the monks were brewing wine, a secondary fermentation accidentally occurred, which caused carbon dioxide bubbles to be mixed in."
Obviously, the chemical weapons expert's thoughts were a little off, and when he was about to turn the topic to somewhere unknown, Jack had to force himself back to the topic.
"Stop, stop, Stanley, we are talking about VX, not champagne. If you want to have a drink, I will treat you to the best wine here and authentic Cuban cigars after we solve this trouble."
"Oh, sorry, I was a little too excited." Stanley scratched his head a little embarrassedly, and then his face became serious.
"A tablespoon of VX poured on the ground can kill all living things within a radius of one hundred feet, and because of its relatively stable volatility, its effectiveness can last for several days and nights.
In 1968, the military conducted an experiment using an F4 Phantom fighter jet to spray VX. Unfortunately, a canister malfunctioned during the experiment.
About 9 kilograms of the agent drifted into a valley about 32 kilometers away from the test site, killing more than 6,000 goats. The valley was not allowed to reopen until half a year later."
He paused when he said this, and waited until Jack, who was driving, turned his head and looked at him, before continuing, "Although they call me a chemical weapons expert, I wish this thing had never been invented."
-
Experts are worthy of being experts. After inspecting the scene and flipping through several chemical analysis reports, Stanley dived into the military laboratory.
An hour and a half later, he left the laboratory and told Jack, who had been waiting outside, "Although I don't know his identity, this guy is definitely a top expert in this field.
I roughly reverse-engineered his synthesis process. The intermediate product itself is highly toxic, and to have reached this point with only the rudimentary equipment on site, if luck isn't factored in, he must have overseen countless similar operations.
He's thoroughly memorized every key step and has devised suitable alternatives. Otherwise, even a single misstep would have wiped out all signs of life within a few kilometers.
After hearing him talk for so long without revealing a single crucial piece of information, Jack forced himself to suppress the urge to roll his eyes and ask, "So, what stage is he at, and how long until he reaches the finished product? Can you deduce the ultimate VX dosage they can achieve?"
"The last step, but I don't think they'll be able to find a suitable chiral resolution reagent. I suspect they'll use HPLC with chiral preparative columns, which means the final product won't be very large.
As for time, three days is the maximum they can produce, about one kilogram of high-purity VX, and that's pretty much the limit."
This person finally stopped panting. Though he spoke a bunch of jargon Jack didn't understand, he still gave the answer he wanted. His "not much" was enough for even someone with limited math skills to calculate. "
In other words, if we simply calculate the lethal dose based on 10 milligrams, in three days they'll have enough VX to kill at least 100,000 people."
"That's the theory, if you don't consider actual dispersal conditions," Stanley nodded in agreement, then added.
"But VX is so stable that even with explosive dispersion, only a small amount will break down at high temperatures."
This meant they didn't need to modify any missiles at all; a couple of pesticide-spraying drones would do the trick. If the weather conditions were right, they could even fly them high in the sky and detonate them.
Jack sighed deeply. "Yes, I already know that."
The good news is that their expert blaster died in last night's explosion. The bad news is that everyone in their organization has a military background, so making simple explosives is no problem. "
The slightly overweight man was the one who had previously detonated the remote-controlled bomb on the streets of Manhattan. The ponytailed man was an engineering expert, and it was he who had injured Clay and Hannah with the self-destructing drone.
The CIA ultimately used sodium thiopental and psychological suggestion to get him to confess some of the details, but the military guards were too sloppy, and this morning, due to a mistake, the ponytailed man strangled himself to death with a torn sheet.
The DEA's estimate was quite accurate. According to the ponytailed man's confession before his death, Jang Myeong-jun indeed had a sum of $1 billion in the hands of the youngest son of a South Korean chaebol.
This $1 billion had long been laundered and stored in various forms, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and even Bitcoin.
Over a month ago, Jang Myeong-jun and his men tracked down the chaebol's son and gave him a month to convert these assets into cash and deposit them into a secret account at a Swiss bank.
Tomorrow night was the time Jang Myeong-jun had agreed to return to retrieve the electronic key to this secret account, located in the penthouse of a nightclub in Cheongdam-dong.
Jack's guess was almost correct: the $1 billion was bait to lure out the keyholder.
Not only Jang Min-jun and Kim Cheol-su, the chemist who created VX, but also the ponytailed man and the slightly overweight man, almost all of their families had mysteriously disappeared or died in accidents following a "political upheaval."
"Perhaps I can help." Stanley volunteered, "Based on the container debris found at the scene, I tend to think they used aerosol dispersal.
Whether it's improvised explosive devices or aerosol dispersal devices, handling them is my specialty."
(End of Chapter)