Chapter 298 - 230: Identity Verification

Chapter 298: Chapter 230: Identity Verification

Chen Lin called out.

The two men, who had been hard at work, immediately looked up.

"President Chen, what is it?"

"A moment ago, someone claiming to be a special correspondent for the Asia-Pacific region of *Nature* magazine called me. Her name is Natasha," Chen Lin said as he typed keywords into the search bar. "She wants to meet for an interview."

"*Nature*?" Bai Qian’s eyes lit up. "That’s great news! President Chen, are you going to be featured in a *Nature* exclusive?"

"Great news? I doubt it."

Chen Lin rolled his eyes.

"Have you two forgotten about that last scammer who pretended to be a doctor from Stanford?"

Hearing this, the expressions on Bai Qian and Pan Si’s faces changed simultaneously.

"President Chen, are you saying..." Pan Si pushed up his glasses, his expression grave. "This one is a fake, too?"

"Hard to say, but something feels off."

Chen Lin pointed at the screen.

"I just searched for the official website for *Nature*’s Asia-Pacific region. The domain exists, but I couldn’t find this ’Natasha Volkov’ on their public list of reporters."

"I’m going to email their editorial department’s official address right now to verify."

With that, Chen Lin’s fingers flew across the keyboard. CLACK CLACK CLACK. He wrote a brief, concise email in English and sent it to the public contact address listed on the *Nature* website, asking if they had such a special correspondent and if the email address she provided was authentic.

After sending the email, Chen Lin turned around and looked at everyone in the office with a serious expression.

"Everyone, I need you all to be extra vigilant lately."

"No matter who it is, even if they approach us—or cozy up to you to ask about technical details—under the most official or authoritative-sounding pretenses."

"Don’t trust them so easily!"

"You must verify their identity first, or just pass them directly to me to handle."

"Especially you, Dr. Bai and Dr. Pan. The two of you hold the core code, so you have to be extremely careful."

"Understood, President Chen!"

Everyone nodded solemnly.

...

「Meanwhile, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the banks of the Hai River in Jinmen.」

Inside a luxurious executive suite.

Natasha was sitting on a sofa by the window, holding the phone she had just hung up.

The sweet, intellectual, and even slightly worshipful expression on her face had vanished without a trace.

In its place was a face as cold as frost and a pair of eyes gleaming with shrewdness and calculation.

She tossed the phone aside, picked up a glass of red wine from the table and took a sip, then glanced toward the corner of the room.

A young man in a gray hoodie and headphones sat there, his hands flying across two laptops.

"This Chen Lin is even harder to deal with than his file suggested."

Natasha swirled the wine in her glass, her tone icy.

"He’s extremely cautious. I deliberately used some verbal tactics to test him, trying to use my ’special correspondent’ identity to arrange a meeting, but he didn’t take the bait at all."

"Moreover, the moment he hung up, I’m sure he went to verify my identity."

The young man in the corner didn’t even turn his head. His fingers were a blur on the keyboard as a waterfall of green code cascaded down the screen.

He chuckled, his voice raspy.

"Don’t worry, Natasha."

"Miss Elena anticipated this."

"Our people have already done a little ’work’ on the low-level routing of the *Nature* Asia-Pacific mail server."

"Any email inquiring about the name ’Natasha Volkov’ will be intercepted and will automatically trigger our preset response script."

"At the same time, we’ve created a complete, forged digital file for you on a defunct subdomain of *Nature*’s website."

"Even if he checks, all he’ll find is that you are indeed a senior special correspondent for *Nature* who was just transferred from the London Headquarters to exclusively cover cutting-edge technology news in Asia."

With that, the young man hit the Enter key.

"Done."

"That Chen Lin just sent his inquiry to the official email address."

"Our ’official reply’ has already been sent."

The young man swiveled his chair around to face Natasha, a mocking smile on his face.

"In this world of networks, we are the ones who define the truth."

Hearing this, the corners of Natasha’s mouth curved into a satisfied smile.

She stood up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down on the bustling city below. Her eyes glinted with the light of a predator that has spotted its prey.

"Excellent."

"As long as we’ve dispelled his initial suspicions, he probably won’t see me as a threat anymore, even if he’s still unwilling to meet."

"Next week..."

"Once he gets back from the Imperial Capital, we’ll have plenty of opportunities."

...

「Yanhai Company.」

Chen Lin had just finished explaining a mathematical optimization principle for the sparse attention mechanism to Bai Qian when an email notification suddenly popped up in the bottom-right corner of his computer screen.

[New Mail: Re: Inquiry regarding Ms. Natasha Volkov]

From: Nature APAC Editorial Office <[email protected]>

’They replied so quickly?’

Chen Lin was a little surprised.

Large organizations were notoriously inefficient, so he was surprised to get an instant reply.

He clicked open the email.

The content of the email was very formal, written in standard business English.

It roughly said:

[Dear Professor Chen Lin:

Thank you for your correspondence.

We can confirm that Ms. Natasha Volkov is indeed a senior special correspondent for the Asia-Pacific region of *Nature* magazine. Her recent series of reports on technological innovation in Asia has been very well-received by our readers.

Attached you will find a copy of her digital press credentials, as well as links to some of her past representative reports.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions.

Sincerely,

The *Nature* Asia-Pacific Editorial Office]

Chen Lin carefully read the email one more time, then clicked the links in the attachment.

The links led to a very official-looking webpage that did indeed have Natasha’s photo—a stunning, cold-looking woman of mixed heritage.

For some reason, Chen Lin felt that the woman’s features looked vaguely familiar.

But he couldn’t quite place her at the moment.

Below her photo were several bylined articles—in-depth reports on cutting-edge fields like quantum computing and biomedicine, all written in a sophisticated style with detailed data.

’So she’s real?’

Chen Lin leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin.

’Could I be overthinking this?’

’Is it really just that I’ve been getting a lot of attention lately, so *Nature* wants to ride the wave?’

’Or maybe Professor Tang, even though he hasn’t published a paper, was bragging to people in his circle and let something slip?’

Chen Lin stared at the screen for a long time. The knot of tension in his mind had loosened slightly, but it hadn’t disappeared completely.

It was his intuition.

That same indescribable gut feeling.

The timing of the call, the woman’s tone of voice, her eagerness to meet... something about it all just felt strange.

’Even if she is real, there’s no rush.’

Chen Lin closed the email window.

He had already explicitly refused to meet this week anyway.

Everything could wait until after he returned from the Imperial Capital next week, where he would attend the National Science and Technology Award Conference, meet with various influential figures, and finalize the matter of the "Ten Thousand Talents Program."

’Enough thinking. Time to get to work!’

Chen Lin shook his head, pushing the matter to the back of his mind for the time being.

"Dr. Bai, have you implemented the code for that sparse matrix multiplication yet?"

"I’m on it! President Chen, there’s an indexing logic here that I’m not quite sure about..."

"Let me see."

The office once again filled with the sound of clacking keyboards and lively discussion.

Outside, the winter sun set over the streets of Jinmen, coating the city in a layer of gold.