Chapter 13 — Room 404 Sea View

Nhi's mother's tape recording had an additional section in the second electrical box, which Vu found when re-checking the entire backup electrical system along the north cliff, an area the group had never thoroughly surveyed before because they thought it was only related to normal walkway lighting. This tape is shorter than the first, but the recording quality is much better. Her mother's voice is so clear that Nhi feels like she is standing right in front of her.

"The ocean door is jammed. There are three people in the warehouse. I'll open it manually."

The whole group sat quietly in the studio listening to the tape again, no one said anything in the first few seconds after the voice rang out. A man's voice answered through the walkie-talkie, the sound was a bit distorted due to the distance, saying he needed to wait for the official rescue team to arrive to assist according to safety procedures. Nhi's mother answered immediately, without hesitation: the water was rising quickly in the warehouse, there was no time to wait.

Then there was the sound of a rope being stretched, the sound of glass shattering, and a name being called loudly and urgently: “Son.”

After listening, Dat sat for a long time in silence, his hands covering his head, unable to say anything. Son is his cousin, who was recorded missing in official records that year. Hearing his brother's name called out in a dire situation, after eighteen years of only knowing it through cold lines on paperwork, was an experience he could not have prepared for.

“Are you okay?” Nhi asked, placing her hand on his shoulder.

Dat nodded slowly, not entirely convincingly, but signaled that he wanted to continue listening to the rest of the meeting instead of stopping.

The district hospital records, officially extracted by Dat's lawyer team after weeks of requests, contained an unnamed male patient who was hospitalized that night in critical condition and then transferred by military vehicle to a higher-level hospital, an unusual detail because normally civilian emergencies are not given priority for transport by military vehicles unless there is a special request. The code on the patient's bracelet, also recorded in the archives, matches the code on the rescue ticket that Mr. Tu has kept for the past eighteen years along with the watch.

Nhi did not dare to confirm whether the unnamed patient was Son or not, although all signs pointed to that possibility. Dat wanted to immediately find the full medical records, but the hospital archivist informed that the records from that period had been transferred to another regional archive according to long-term storage regulations, requiring more time and administrative procedures to retrieve.

Ms. Hanh, in a private meeting with Nhi and her lawyer after hearing about the new tape, admitted that her father had received news that a survivor had been taken out of the warehouse that night, but did not write it down in the official report for fear of having to admit that the warehouse was locked from the outside, a detail that could cause her family to face criminal liability if considered intentionally dangerous.

“He chose to stay silent to protect himself,” she said, her voice shaking, no longer as defensive as before. “I don't justify it, but I understand why you did it, even though I wish you hadn't.”

Vu, while checking the entire electrical cable system around room 404 again with more specialized measuring equipment, discovered that the cut on the signal light cable was not caused by a landslide as previously confirmed, but was a cut. clean, performed after the official rescue team has left the scene, based on analysis of the oxidation level of the metal surface at the cut compared to the surrounding intact cable sections.

He, who used to work on the project but left before Nhi joined, named Huy, has now moved to another company but still keeps in touch with some old colleagues, helping the team find the electrician who was in charge of this area at that time. The electrician, now retired, clearly remembers being asked to cut off the signal lights to avoid the hotel from clearly seeing the large crack spreading on the embankment, a temporary concealment measure before an official treatment plan was put in place.

“Who asked you to turn off the lights?” Nhi asked, when the electrician was invited to answer directly in front of the survey group.

“Hotel manager at that time,” he replied, his voice somewhat hesitant because of his age and because he had to remember an incident that had passed so long ago. "He said it was only a temporary measure and would restore it after the embankment was repaired. But then the landslide happened that night, before anyone could fix anything."

Nhi recorded all of her testimony in the official minutes, without asking the electrician who should take the blame, understanding that he was just the one carrying out an order in a chain of decisions much larger than the scope of his personal responsibility. The evidence is forming an increasingly clear chain, but still missing her mother's final moments, the end of the story that no documents to date have been able to fully confirm.

Linh, through the call that night when Nhi recounted the entire day's events, said that her mother might have chosen to stay to save people and then not have time to escape before the embankment completely collapsed. Nhi replied that she accepted that possibility as one of the most plausible scenarios based on the available evidence, but she did not accept that anyone would call the entire series of events “a simple accident,” as the old official report had described it for eighteen years.

After the call with Linh, Nhi sat alone in her rented apartment, replayed the second recording on her personal computer, heard her mother calling Son's name over and over again, trying to catch any nuance of emotion hidden in that voice — fear, determination, or both at the same time. She found no clear answer, only a vague certainty that her mother, in that moment, had acted without hesitation.

The next morning, Dat sent a text message to the group, announcing that he had contacted the higher level hospital where the unnamed patient was transferred that night. Archived records confirm that the patient was hospitalized with multiple injuries, in a deep coma, and was treated for three weeks before being discharged, but the contact address listed in the records is a bogus address, possibly because the patient was not alert enough to provide accurate information, or because someone intentionally made a false statement to avoid being traced.

"If it was Son," Dat said at the morning meeting, his voice both hopeful and cautious, "then he would have survived. But why has no one in my family ever heard from him in eighteen years?"

Vu offers another possibility to consider: perhaps because the injury was too severe, the patient lost partial or complete memory, was unable to find his family, and no one in the health system at that time had enough resources. or the motivation to track down relatives for an unknown patient amid the chaos after a disaster.

Nhi records all possibilities on file, not ruling out any direction before having more definitive evidence. She asked the team of lawyers to help track down the patient's discharge records to see if there was a record of where he was transferred to next, a clue that could lead directly to determining the true identity after nearly two decades.

“This could be the biggest turning point ever,” Vu said, looking around at the group sitting around the conference table, each wearing a different expression of hope and worry. “But we need to prepare ourselves for both possibilities — finding the person, or discovering the last trace has long disappeared.”

Dat nodded and took a deep breath to regain composure. “I understand,” he said. “But at least now, I have something concrete to look for, instead of just having a name stamped 'missing' for eighteen years with no explanation.”

In the afternoon, the team of lawyers sent a preliminary response: the unnamed patient's discharge record stated that the next transfer location was a rehabilitation center in a neighboring province, specializing in receiving patients with severe traumatic brain injuries without identified relatives. This center was closed nearly a decade ago, and the records were transferred to the provincial health department for storage according to regulations.

Nhi immediately drafted a document requesting an excerpt of the file, enclosing all relevant documents to prove Dat's family's legal connection to the case that needed to be looked up. She knew the administrative process might take weeks more, but at least now they had a concrete lead to pursue, instead of just stopping at an anonymous name on a hospital bed eighteen years ago.

“We'll find out,” she told Dat when the meeting ended, placing her hand on his shoulder again. “Maybe not as fast as we want, but we'll figure it out.”

Dat nodded, for the first time in many days, a ray of hope actually appeared on his face, replacing the tension and anger that had followed him since the first days of the survey project.