Chapter 1078: Bad News and More Bad News

"Have you heard of me?" Jack raised his eyebrows when 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 on his face that was somewhat inconsistent with his age.

"In fact, until yesterday I had been working at the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., and had never been out on a mission.

They suddenly took me to New York yesterday, and Mr. David Rossi and Ms. Dana Moger told me about the situation here and introduced me to you.

But before that, I did hear some rumors in the lab, but they were just small rumors circulating among us, that someone rushed into a fire in Dallas to rescue a baby with a pierced heart and successfully kept it alive.

And armored vehicles loaded with explosives destroyed the entire Central Park."

After he got in the car, he talked a lot. Although what he said was a bit outrageous and strange, Jack could still distinguish his own "great achievements" from it.

It seemed that this chemical weapons expert might have been holding back too much in the laboratory, and his desire to talk was too strong, so Jack had to interrupt him when he started to analyze whether the mutant ogres really existed.

"Doctor, uh, Stanley, the lucky person who survived a punctured heart is an adult male. In addition to his own luck, he was successfully rescued thanks to the military doctor who was present at the time.

A baby was rescued from the fire by its mother, who used her body to protect the stroller."

After simply refuting the rumor, Jack also made a joke, "Please don't spread these things anymore. I still want to keep some mystery so that I can write it in my memoirs after I retire."

Stanley looked at Jack's overly youthful and handsome face and couldn't help but make a joke, "Then I sincerely hope that you can retire a few years earlier, so that maybe I can read your memoirs before I die. I believe it will be very interesting."

After the joke, the Suboban also drove out of Osan Air Force 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 is a colorless and odorless oily liquid that decomposes a small amount of thiol when stored for a long time, so it actually has a slight odor.

But usually by the time you smell this odor, it's not long before your respiratory muscles stop working.

This stuff is like champagne, when the monks were making wine, a secondary fermentation occurred accidentally, which mixed in carbon dioxide bubbles.

It was obvious that the chemical weapons expert's thoughts were a little off track. When he was about to change the subject to somewhere else, Jack had to force the topic back to the point.

"Stop, stop, Stanley. We are talking about VX, not champagne. If you want to have a drink, wait until we solve this trouble. I will treat you to the best wine here and authentic Cuban cigars."

"Oh, sorry, I was a little too excited." Stanley scratched his head embarrassedly, and then his face became serious.

"A tablespoon of VX poured on the ground can kill all living things within a radius of 100 feet, and because of its relatively stable volatility, its effectiveness can last for several days and nights.

In 1968, the military conducted a test using an F4 Phantom fighter jet to spray VX. Unfortunately, one of the cans malfunctioned during the test.

About 9 kilograms of the poison drifted to a valley about 32 kilometers away from the test site, killing more than 6000 goats. The valley was not allowed to reopen until half a year later.

He paused when he said this, until Jack, who was driving, turned his head and looked at him, and then continued, "Although they call me a chemical weapons expert, I would rather this thing had never been invented."

-

An expert is worthy of being an expert. After inspecting the scene and reading 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 the other party's 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 he was able to get to this point with only the simple equipment on site. If luck is not taken into account, he must have presided over similar work countless times throughout the process.

He has memorized every key step and found a suitable alternative plan. Otherwise, if he is not careful during the operation, there will be no signs of life within a few kilometers. "

After listening to him for so long and not revealing a single piece of key information, Jack suppressed the urge to roll his eyes and asked, "So, what stage has he reached? How long will it take to get the finished product? Can you infer the ultimate dose of VX that the other party can obtain?"

"For the last step, I don't think the other party will be able to find a suitable chiral separation reagent. I guess he will use high performance liquid chromatography combined with a chiral preparative column for preparation. In that case, the amount of the final product will not be too large.

In terms of time, we can only obtain about one kilogram of high-purity VX in three days, and that’s about the limit.”

Fortunately, this person didn't have the problem of breathing heavily. Although he used a lot of terms that Jack couldn't understand, he still gave the answer he wanted. It was just that as he said, "not too much", even someone who was not good at math could directly convert the result.

"That is to say, if we simply convert it based on the lethal dose of 10 milligrams, they will be able to obtain enough VX to kill at least people in three days."

"That's the theory, if you don't consider the actual spreading conditions." Stanley nodded in agreement and added.

"However, the nature of VX is too stable. Even if we use the explosive dispersion method, only a small amount will be decomposed by high temperature."

In other words, the other party does not need to modify any missiles at all. They can just find two drones for spreading pesticides to do the job. If the weather conditions are right, they can just fly to high altitude and detonate them.

Jack sighed deeply, "Yes, I already know about this.

The good news is that their expert in blasting died in last night's explosion. The bad news is that everyone in their organization has a military background, so making simple explosives is not a problem."

The slightly fat man was the culprit behind the remote-controlled bomb on the streets of Manhattan. The man with the ponytail was an engineering expert. He was the one who used a self-destructing drone to injure Clay and Hannah.

The CIA eventually used sodium thiopental and psychological suggestion to get him to confess some of the information. However, the military officer in charge of guarding him was so careless that he was strangled to death by the ponytailed man with a torn sheet this morning due to a mistake.

The DEA's estimate was quite accurate. According to the ponytailed man's confession before his death, Zhang Mingjun did have a sum of money in the hands of the youngest son of a Korean chaebol, totaling one billion US dollars.

This billion dollars has long been laundered and has been kept in various forms, such as stocks, bonds, funds and even Bitcoin of large companies.

More than a month ago, Zhang Mingjun and his men found the chaebol's youngest son and gave him a month to convert the assets into cash and deposit them into a secret account in a Swiss bank.

Tomorrow night is the time Zhang Mingjun has agreed to come again to pick up the electronic key to this secret account. The location is in the top floor box of a nightclub in Cheongdam-dong.

Jack's guesses were basically correct. The ten billion was used as bait to lure out the important man.

Because it's not just Jang Min-jun and Kim Cheol-soo, the chemical expert who made the VX poison. Almost all of their families, including the man with the ponytail and the slightly plump man, mysteriously disappeared or died accidentally after a "political storm."

"Perhaps I can help." Stanley volunteered, "Based on the remains of some containers found at the scene, I tend to think they will use atomization to spread the virus.

Whether it's an IED or an aerosol-dispersal device, dealing with those is my specialty."