CH 115

The duty officer selected the clip. “Just this bit?”

Yan Suizhi reached out and pointed at a few more. “As well as the ten minutes before and after it. Loop the three videos.” 

Befuddled, the duty officer did as he was told. After picking them out, the footage that was being looped became significantly shorter. The duty officer believed that since they were focusing on these videos, then there must be some detail that he was looking out for.

Self-believing himself to be a quick-witted guy, he asked, “Then what about the playback speed? Do you want to slow it down? You can choose to zoom in as well; it’s just that night vision footage might not turn out well when magnified.”

The manager’s thoughts were also running along the same tangent. He nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah, set it slower and zoom in a bit. Let our guests have a good look.”

In all honesty, he was already sure that this Young Master Joe was mistaken. After all, it was very normal for someone who hadn’t been sleeping well to space out for a moment. However, this wasn’t something that he could say out loud. He had to let Young Master Joe watch it a few more times and drop the matter himself. 

The manager secretly darted a glance at Joe, thinking this to himself.

Yet, Yan Suizhi said, “It’s not necessary.”

He pointed at the playback speed annotated on the corner of the screen. “Set it to the fastest speed. You don’t have to focus on a localised area; open the panoramic view.”

The duty officer and the hotel manager exchanged a look, stupefied, but in the principle of customer is king, they still did as they were told.

The playback was cranked all the way up. At this speed, the tree branches at the foot of the wall, swaying in the wind, twitched every few seconds or so like they had a muscle cramp.

The first playback soon came to an end. There was still no flash of light at ‘the sixth room’.

Young Master Joe had thrown in the towel by now. He scratched his cheek, laughing drily, “About that…”

But Gu Yan pressed a palm downwards in the air, indicating for him not to speak for now. 

“Huh?” Joe leaned over.

Gu Yan told the duty officer, “Could I trouble you to replay the video of the corridor; at the same speed, panoramic view. If convenient, play it side by side with this view from outside the building.”

“What’s happening?” Young Master Joe said, “did he find something?”

“He could have.” Gu Yan didn’t expound on it, but he’d roughly gotten a sense of what Yan Suizhi was trying to do. “It still needs to be confirmed.” 

Joe, “…”

Whenever he hung out with this bunch of lawyers, Young Master Joe deeply suspected that he must be completely pea-brained if he wasn’t blind.

But, as it was, the person he liked was a lawyer, his best friend was a lawyer, and the person his best friend liked was also a damn lawyer.

He had probably been struck by some kind of arcane curse. 

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Similarly, using the fastest possible playback speed, the security guards making their rounds turned into a ghostly shadow. The light in the corridor oscillated between luminance and dimness, but other than that, there was still nothing. 

Young Master Joe watched with rapt attention for ten minutes before accepting the tragic truth that he was fucking blind.

Yan Suizhi said, “That’ll do. I got it now.”

The duty officer was startled, hurriedly tapping the pause button.

Yan Suizhi tapped the screen, saying confidently, “Between these two ten-minute clips, one of them is fake.” 

“Ah?” The manager gave a start.

Yan Suizhi said, “The corridor lighting is off.”

“What do you mean?” The manager hastily got the duty officer to playback these two clips another time, then found that the light in the corridor was marginally brighter in-between the clips.

This change was so subtle that it couldn’t be noticed unless the video was played at a high speed, and flitted by so quickly that only Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan, who had made the requests, could just barely catch the flicker in the light. 

Even so, it was still easy to be overlooked. After all, people normally would concentrate on finding suspicious figures rather than paying attention to the brightness.

At Yan Suizhi’s mention, the manager also softly went “eh?”

The lights in this hotel’s corridors were the same as those used by most hotels in the alliance. They were the brightest between 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., subsequently dimming with the passage of time in a process so gradual that, before you knew it, it had long turned dark.

There were rarely staccatos as it happened; it was silent and smooth. 

“Oh, you’re right. Why did it flicker for no reason? Did someone touch the lights? Or turned something off? Or on?” The manager could perceive that this subtle flicker of light was a critical clue, yet for a time was unable to discern exactly what was wrong.

Yan Suizhi had a word with the duty officer and took over the playback controller, rewinding the video. When they got back to that subtle brightening of the scene, he hit the pause button. 

He said, “One of these two clips is a duplicate.”

Someone had supplanted the first ten minutes of footage into the latter ten minutes. 

This was why the soundlessly dimming lights in the first footage would brighten marginally at the start of the second footage, then repeating that imperceptible process of dimming again.

There wasn’t anyone in the corridor. There was nothing moving and no object of reference. Apart from the security personnel on patrol, the rest of the night was like a still image.

So, whoever planted the video must have thought that it wouldn’t be an issue to repeat the clip. Apart from grasping the timing of the security patrols, it could hardly be noticed.

Yet, it coincidentally got waylaid by Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan. 

“It’s not only this portion,” Gu Yan pointed at the continually looping video of the building facade. “There’s a duplicate in these as well.”

He gently patted Yan Suizhi’s hand, taking the playback controller, splitting the videos from the surveillance on the building facade. He placed the videos of 3:00 a.m. and 3:10 a.m. side by side with each other, letting them run in tandem.

This was a million times more intuitive, because in the two videos, except for the different time stamps annotated in its corners, everything else matched up exactly. When the flowering tree at the foot of the wall on the left twitched twice, the one on the right twitched twice as well.

The lawn on the left rippled, and so did the one on the right. 

Gu Yan turned his head over and said to Joe, “So, you weren’t wrong last night.”

The reason why they didn’t see the flash of light was precisely that the video when it appeared had been replaced.

The manager was shaken!

The surveillance footage had even been replaced; how could this be anything so simple! 

“What should we do?” The manager paced around like a headless fly for a while, his hand groping his empty collar.

After a moment, he suddenly recovered, putting his arms on the back of the chair and asking the duty officer, “Were you also on shift last night?”

How could the duty officer dare assume this responsibility; he waved his hand wildly. “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. I took over at 6 a.m. Barry was on shift last night.”

“Just him?” The manager frowned. He asked, “Isn’t it a rule that night shifts have to be taken by two people?” 

He projected the screen of his smart device, pulling up the schedule. “Wasn’t it supposed to be Barry and Dan last night?”

“Yes, it’s usually two.” The duty officer stammered, “But… but there are special circumstances from time to time and it’s okay to request leave from the team leader… There isn’t really much to do in the control room at night, after all.”

The manager’s face turned dark.

The duty officer also hastened to explain, “It doesn’t really happen often. Usually, the team leader will find someone else to fill in or do it himself. But there have been a lot of infections lately. Manpower is a bit tight, so… So, last time the team leader sought you out, saying that there really weren’t enough hands to go around, and asked for advice on what to do if there could only be one person at night. You said to just… put up with it for now and that you’ve asked HR to hire more men.” 

Once starting, it was hard to stop. After the first night of ‘putting up with it’, the second night would come all too soon.

The manager wasn’t an unreasonable man. Prompted by the duty officer, he did seem to remember such a thing. He awkwardly stood frozen on the spot for a while, then cursed under his breath in chagrin.

“What’s the situation? Can you find him?”

The manager nodded furiously. “Don’t worry about it! The staff dormitories are right across. I’ll call the team leader and get him to bring Barry over.” 

As he spoke, he dialled a comms over. When the other end picked up, he asked sharply, “Where are you? Why was there only Barry on duty last night? What about Dan?”

“Rash?”

“Drug addiction?”

“What’s all that noise. I don’t care where you are now; quickly call Barry over. I’ll be waiting for him in the control room. You come along too!” 

Yan Suizhi reminded, “Keep it quiet for now.”

The manager responded in assent and passed on the message to that unlucky team leader.

He hung up the line and, after considering it, got the duty officer to loop the footage again. There were three such duplicate clips; the corridor took up two, one from 3:00 a.m. to 3:10 a.m., the other from 3:40 a.m. to 3:50 a.m., while the last duplicate clip was of the building facade from 3:10 a.m. to 3:20 a.m.

“So…” the manager said, slightly apprehensive, “If there really was an unidentified person, coming roughly a few minutes after three and leaving around four-ten, then, the light that you saw, Mr. Joe…” 

“From what I remember, I think it appeared around three-ten. It could have been three-eleven or twelve as well, I can’t say for sure.” 

“Is there any surveillance from other angles?” Joe mulled over it and asked the manager. “Such as from a higher vantage, facing the window?”

The manager shook his head. “We can’t shoot from that angle. No guest would want to have monitoring pointing into their room. It’s just these, and even then we still receive a few complaints every year. It’s hard to please everyone.”

There was a joke that wasn’t quite a joke: The top three places in the alliance with the least surveillance installed were Wine City, Redstone, and De Carma. 

The famous run-down planet, the famous political hub, and the famous money-squandering den.

The first was because no one cared; the latter two were because there were always people objecting to being monitored.

The manager fretted for five minutes before finally receiving a call from the team leader. And right after listening to a sentence, he cried out—

“Barry has disappeared? What do you mean? Is he not in the dormitories?” 

He shot a glance at Yan Suizhi and the others, motioning to them not to panic, then spoke to the team leader on the other end of the line, “What about other places, have you checked them yet? How many times have you tried calling him? You didn’t manage to connect once at all?”

“Keep searching!”

Five minutes later, there was a knock on the door to the control room.

A man in a hotel uniform, bearing the name tag which identified him as the head of the hotel security, slammed the door shut behind him. He came to the manager with a pale face, saying, “I looked all over. I really can’t find him.”