Chapter 417: Do I Still Need to Open It?

Chapter 417: Do I Still Need to Open It?

Menghua Music. Fifth floor, north wing, the Trainee Department offices.

Ding!

The elevator doors opened. Su Lei, An Menglan, Wu Chen, and the others stepped out and started down the corridor toward the vocal coaches’ office. One bodyguard walked behind Su Lei; the other stayed with An Menglan.

Soon.

Wu Chen, An Menglan, Zhuang Xiaodie, Su Lei, and the two bodyguards, six people in all, entered the vocal coaches’ office. It was a large open-plan room, well appointed and well equipped, with so few workstations that it felt especially roomy.

There were only twelve desks in the whole office, and when Wu Chen and the others walked in, just five vocal coaches were there.

They went on farther in.

At the back stood another partition.

Behind it was a more private workspace, with better desks, chairs, and furnishings. This was Su Lei’s office.

He wasn’t only a vocal coach. He was also deputy head of the department, so he had a space of his own.

There was no point wasting words now that they were here. Su Lei went straight behind his desk, hauled a backpack out from underneath it, and took out his laptop.

He opened it, powered it on, typed in his password, then spun the laptop around on the desk so the screen faced Wu Chen.

He did it all in one smooth motion, without the slightest hesitation.

His face stayed expressionless throughout. He carried himself like a man with nothing on his conscience.

Wu Chen leaned in and ran a finger across the touchpad, then pulled over the chair on the opposite side of the desk and sat down. He browsed idly. The desktop was crowded with folders, all of them work documents and reports related to music.

An Menglan took a couple of steps and stood behind his chair, watching the screen.

She saw him open several folders, then use the search function to look for various audio file formats, apparently hunting for the leaked audio itself.

Nothing.

“Find anything?” Su Lei asked, expressionless.

“You did a pretty clean job deleting it,” Wu Chen said with a smile, glancing up at him.

“Mr. Morning Mist, if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. There’s no evidence on my computer, whatever you say. Please stop with the insinuations!” Su Lei had grown used to the pressure. He was even starting to push back.

“Is that so?” was all Wu Chen said. Then he turned back to the screen, still smiling.

Su Lei had no idea what to make of this young man. He knew who “Morning Mist” was: the non-celebrity singer behind “Antidote for the Soul.” This had to be him.

But.

Why had he suddenly turned up to “solve the case”?

And why did An Menglan seem to do as he said?

“Boss.” Su Lei gave up on Wu Chen and turned to An Menglan instead. “I know you suspect me now too. But you’ve seen for yourself. There’s no so-called evidence on my computer…”

“You’re in a hurry. Afraid I’ll find something?” Wu Chen cut in before An Menglan could answer.

Su Lei fell silent at once.

He didn’t want to look guilty.

Twenty-odd minutes later.

The vocal coaches’ office had filled up. The coaches outside the partition had overheard Su Lei. The partition blocked hardly any sound, and he had said the word “suspect.”

That was enough for them to realize Su Lei was under suspicion for the leak.

Right now the leak was the focus of the entire company. It was the first thing anyone would think of.

After that, word spread.

A number of senior executives came and went straight into the inner office behind the partition. Some middle managers came too, along with a few contracted singers who had yet to make a name for themselves.

But those were small fry in the company. With the top brass inside, they didn’t dare go in. They stayed in the outer room and talked in low voices. The partition wasn’t soundproof; they could hear what was happening on the other side.

Even the corridor outside was packed.

Some had come to watch the show. Others were waiting for an answer.

The leak had put the whole company on edge, and everyone wanted it settled as soon as possible. Morale at Menghua Music had always been excellent, which was exactly why the idea of a traitor had nearly everyone furious.

However.

For now, most of the people who had gathered believed Su Lei had been wrongly accused. They thought there must be some misunderstanding.

Su Lei had a good reputation at the company. His trainees did well, he had never caused trouble, and he was known as an honest man… How could it be him?

Behind the partition.

Clack-clack-clack…

For the past twenty minutes, Wu Chen had done nothing but type.

He had downloaded programming tools off the internet and was writing code.

No one in the inner office, Su Lei included, knew what he was doing. None of them had studied computer science, and no programmers from the network department had come in.

So none of them could follow it.

The mood in the inner office had grown heavy. It had been going on for quite a while now.

“What are you…” An Menglan finally couldn’t hold back. She bent down behind him and asked softly, “What are you writing?”

“A program to recover deleted files,” Wu Chen said, still typing.

“You can even…” She had been about to say You can even program? but stopped herself. She had remembered that he’d graduated in computer science.

Beside them, Su Lei’s expression flickered at the words “recover deleted files,” then quickly settled again.

He hadn’t simply right-clicked, deleted, and emptied the Recycle Bin. He had researched it. He had been extremely careful. He had used a file shredder.

Shredded files couldn’t be recovered!

The thought had barely crossed his mind when Wu Chen spoke again.

“Every time Su Lei sends out information, he has a habit of wiping his activity records and shredding the files.” Wu Chen kept his eyes on the screen and went on typing as he talked, doing both at once without effort. “If it were an ordinary deletion, I wouldn’t need to write anything. I could recover it directly. Shredded files are a little more trouble, but they aren’t completely unrecoverable. Different file shredders use different algorithms, and none of them can achieve one hundred percent coverage when they calculate the original storage sectors. There’s always some deviation. So… in theory, all the program needs is offset-reading and fragment-analysis techniques, and recovery is still possible.”

He was practically muttering to himself.

Every word was Chinese, yet strung together, An Menglan couldn’t understand a thing.

What techniques?!

Su Lei didn’t understand either, but he caught the key phrase.

Recovery is still possible?!

He began to panic.

What Su Lei didn’t know was that Wu Chen was saying all this for his benefit. To scare him. Everything he’d said was true, but he had deliberately left out certain crucial details.

For instance: there was no guarantee he could recover all of it.

Not because his skills fell short.

Because of how file shredding worked. Short of physically destroying the hard drive, overwriting was the best way there was to erase a file.

Huge amounts of meaningless data were written over the original, again and again. After that, for an ordinary programmer, recovery simply wasn’t possible.

Wu Chen could do it because he was a world-class hacker. Exactly how much he could get back was hard to say.

Not that it mattered.

What mattered was making Su Lei confess.

Clack! Clack!

Wu Chen struck the keyboard twice more and stopped.

“Done.”

The program was finished.

It was an enormously complex, fully automated file-recovery program he had written during the thousand-year loop. Because he had written it before, and because his memory was extraordinary, all he’d done was type it out again without a single character wrong.

He slid a finger across the touchpad and clicked a few times.

A program with a crude-looking interface began to run.

A progress bar crept along… then the screen went black, flickered twice, and the computer shut itself down and started back up on its own.

Booting took a full minute. Even the login password was read and entered automatically.

Straight to the desktop.

Standing behind Wu Chen, An Menglan saw it at once. Several new folders had appeared on the desktop after the restart. One, in the upper-right corner, leapt out at her.

New Album Demo Blind Evaluation.

That folder had no business being on this computer.

It had been copied here!

An Menglan wasn’t the only one who saw it.

The other executives craned their necks and saw it too.

And Su Lei saw it most clearly of all.

Wu Chen gestured at the screen, turned to Su Lei, and smiled.

“Do I still need to open it?”

Su Lei went completely blank.

The color drained from his face.

Weren’t shredded files impossible to recover? Everything online said so!

How had he gotten them back?!

Su Lei began to shake. All the fear he’d been holding down came surging up at once. He was finished. He was going to prison. Leaking trade secrets, causing massive losses… he could spend the rest of his life behind bars!

Thud!

His knees gave out.

In front of everyone, he dropped to his knees before An Menglan.

“Boss! Boss, I was wrong! Boss! I… I lost my head! Please spare me, Boss! Please!”