Chapter 13 — End of Line Bus 08

The deafening sound of sirens pierced the night. Under the high-pressure headlights casting dazzling white shadows in the hallway, three figures wearing security uniforms were running toward cabin 404. In their hands, they were holding electric batons that made a green crackling sound.

Huy hugged the backpack containing documents tightly to his chest, leaning close to the wall of the safe. He had no weapons and had never fought since his student days. The safety of both now depends entirely on the woman holding tightly to the iron bar next to the door.

"Turn off the flashlight!" Tue whispered, her voice as tense as a string.

The compartment was completely dark, with only a stream of light coming in from the slightly opened door.

The first security guard kicked open the door and rushed in, scanning with his flashlight haphazardly. Before his eyes could adjust to the darkness inside, Tue swung the iron bar from behind the door. Not a beautiful martial arts move like in the movies, but a strike full of survival instinct, aimed straight at the guard's knee.

A "crack" sound rang out accompanied by a pitiful scream. The guard fell to his knees, dropping the electric baton. Tue gave him another elbow to the neck, causing him to collapse to the floor unconscious. She quickly grabbed the electric baton and the walkie-talkie that fell next to him.

The two remaining guards outside the hallway stopped when they saw their comrades collapse. They pulled out rubber bullet guns and aimed at the dark space inside compartment 404.

"You rats, get out quickly!" One guy shouted.

Tue threw the iron bar into the dark corner of the room to create a distraction. As soon as the two guards opened fire towards the noise, she rushed out like a leopard. The electric baton in Tue's hand was pressed straight into the neck of the nearest man. He convulsed repeatedly and fell to the ground.

The third man backed away in panic, intending to raise his gun to shoot again, but Tue rushed forward and kicked the gun out of his hand. She turned around, delivered a side kick to his ribs, causing him to bend over in pain, then delivered another blow of the baton to his shoulder. He collapsed.

It all happened in less than fifteen seconds. There is no exuberance, just the brute strength and determination of a man accustomed to the rigors of the streets.

"Let's go!" Tue threw away the battery-drained baton and turned around to shout at Huy.

Huy rushed out of the compartment. They ran as fast as they could along corridor D. From the walkie-talkie that Tue stole, the security commander's voice rang out, ordering all forces to blockade the parking lot and main gate.

"We can't get out the old way!" Huy said while breathing heavily. "They're surrounding the wall just now."

Tue glanced around and discovered an electric forklift charging nearby. She jumped into the driver's seat, pulled out the plug, and turned on the ignition key, which was still in the ignition.

"Get in the car!"

As soon as Huy grabbed the bike's handle, Tue pushed the lever forward and stepped on the accelerator. The forklift roared and sped away, not towards the gate, but straight into the thin corrugated iron fence separating the warehouse from an empty lot behind.

"Hold on tight!"

*BAM!*

The forklift crashed through the fragile corrugated iron wall, creating a large hole. They rushed out into the open field, left the forklift stuck in a pile of scrap metal, and then ran as fast as they could into the dark night, toward the ditch where the motorbike was hidden.

Behind him, headlights and the sound of sniffer dogs began to chase. but the darkness and muddy terrain helped them buy a few more precious minutes. With their last efforts, the two pulled the motorbike out of the reeds, started the engine and sped away, blending into the night before the security team could approach.

Three o'clock in the morning. Automobile repair workshop in District 4.

Huy and Tue threw themselves onto the old tires, breathing heavily, their clothes disheveled, covered in mud and bleeding scratches. K was still sitting in front of the computer, his eyes never leaving the screen, drinking his fourth can of energy drink of the night.

"This is an antique," Huy took off his backpack, dumping red folders and design drawings made of yellowed A0 technical paper onto the greasy concrete floor.

Tue poured two large glasses of filtered water, drank it all in one gulp, then sat down to look at the papers. "Will this thing put Bui Thanh Long in jail?"

"Sure," Huy quickly flipped through each page of the contract, checking the signatures and red seal. "There is also a detailed appendix on the number of drums of radioactive medical waste. Huge volume. And here..."

He spread a sheet of Block B foundation design drawing stamped "Original as-built drawing" on the floor. Besides, he asked K to print out a Phase 2 foundation design from the data on the hard drive that Dinh Trong Quy stole.

Huy held a flashlight to illuminate every detail on the two drawings. The more he looked, the tighter his eyebrows became.

"What's up?" K looked away from the screen and turned back to ask when he saw Huy's strange expression.

"Everyone come here and look," Huy pointed at the strange geometric symbols, as tiny as ants, drawn alternately along the main load-bearing foundation pillars on both drawings. They are not standard construction engineering symbols. "These slashes, circles, triangles... they appear again and again in the places that bear the greatest load of the building."

K curiously bent down and squinted his eyes. "It looks like some form of data encryption. Design engineers sometimes use unique symbols to hide sensitive parameters."

"Can you decode them?" Huy asked.

K nodded, took his phone to take a picture of the symbols, and then put them into an algorithm decoding software on the computer. Just ten minutes later, the numbers appeared.

These are the parameters of stress, curvature, and shear force. But they are not parameters for strengthening the foundation.

"Damn..." K muttered, his face pale. He is a hacker, familiar with dark conspiracies in cyberspace, but the truth behind these numbers makes him shudder. "These symbols are the equations for calculating inflection points and controlled collapse."

"What does that mean?" Tue asked, not understanding the technical language.

"Meaning," Huy looked up, his bloodshot eyes filled with extreme indignation. "The subsidence and weakening of the foundation is not a technical error. It is not an accident. It is not just a consequence of burying toxic waste. It is INTENTIONAL CALCULATION."

The entire car workshop space was silent, with only the sound of the rain outside.

Huy tapped his fingers on the numbers that K had just decoded. "They calculated that, with the load of sixty stories on the soft ground that had been hollowed out to bury the chemicals, combined with the gutted construction materials at these crucial weak points, Block B tower would begin to have serious cracks that could not be repaired. cured after exactly fifteen to twenty years of use."

"For what? What good is building a house to wait for it to collapse?" Tue couldn't believe his ears.

"That is Bui Thanh Long's cruelty," Huy gritted his teeth. "When a megaproject with tens of thousands of residents is declared dangerous and uninhabitable, the government will be forced to evacuate urgently. The building will be forced to be demolished. And who will be appointed or awarded the bid to demolish and re-establish a new urban area with huge budget support?"

"It's Dai Nam," K muttered in response. "A closed circle. Build and collect money from selling houses. Wait fifteen years for the house to break down, dismantle it, then collect money from the budget for reconstruction. New build, sell again. The dismantling of a 60-story building will create a huge amount of debris, forever burying the radioactive waste below that no one can dig up to check anymore. A perfect crime."

Their greed does not stop at a few hundred million dollars from the sale of their current apartment. They planned to siphon money from the people and the state budget for decades to come, by betting on the lives of tens of thousands of people.

And worse, Phase 2 of the super project, preparing to start construction this morning, is also designed with the same "collapse code", placed right on the city's underground water pocket.

Huy looked at his watch. Five o'clock in the morning. In just four hours, the groundbreaking ceremony for Phase 2 will take place with the participation of city officials and hundreds of media cameras. If the first blow of the hoe is dropped, blocking the project will become a hundred times more complicated politically and legally.

"We can't wait until 10 o'clock for K's data packet to automatically spread," Huy stood up, rolled up the original contracts and drawings and stuffed them back into his backpack. "At that time, the ceremony was over, the matter was over. Bui Thanh Long will have time to find a scapegoat."

"So what are you going to do?" Tue asked.

"I'll bring these straight to the groundbreaking ceremony." Huy smoothed his messy hair and slung his heavy backpack over his shoulder. "They want a grand ceremony in front of the media. I will give them a 'ceremony' that no one will forget."

Tue smirked, a smile mixed with recklessness and determination. She reached for the car keys. "Then go. I know a shortcut to Phase 2 grounds. No one can catch a bus if the person driving it doesn't want to stop."