The world of American TV series: Starting with the L.A. Patrol.

"It must be here. They must have been here before." Cassel muttered to himself, staring at the ceiling of the corridor.

Although the church does not ring bells at night, the sound of the fan of the large commercial exhaust system installed on the roof and connected to the restaurant downstairs can still be faintly heard through the sound-absorbing panels on the ceiling.

"Here." Brian pushed open a door and found something strange, then snapped his fingers at the two of them.

Unlike the slightly outdated guest rooms on both sides of the corridor, this room was completely opened up, without any partitions or windows, and looked like a large container.

The walls were covered with corrugated soundproof panels. Jack walked into the room and found that the floor was slightly sunken, which meant that there must be some soundproofing cotton or something underneath.

He raised his hand and tapped the wall. He guaranteed that even if a stun grenade was thrown inside, as long as the mezzanine door was closed, not much noise would be heard outside.

There were two single beds in the room. Cassel quickly walked over and picked up a reddish blond hair from the pillow, muttering, "They were imprisoned here before."

Jack sniffed. He didn't know if Kim used perfume, but he was very familiar with the smell of floral water. Alexis had pestered Hannah for several bottles of it.

Brian looked at the two single beds in the room with an inexplicable look in his eyes.

There were more and more doubts, and Jack's eyes stayed on a wired telephone placed on the floor in the middle of the room. This thing looked wrong no matter how he looked at it.

"Is the call going?" Cassel picked up the receiver and heard the beeping sound clearly, feeling unbelievable.

"They knew we would find this place." Brian said in a deep voice, looking at Jack.

The latter let out a light "hush" and turned the flashlight around the room carefully, finally stopping at a slightly raised area on the wall. Compared with the surrounding soundproof panels, it looked a bit abrupt.

Brian walked to the location where Jack's light was shining and used a dagger to cut a layer of wallpaper on the soundproofing board, revealing the bug underneath.

"Why?" Cassel asked silently with slightly exaggerated lip movements.

Jack didn't answer his question. He walked to the bug and imitated Brian's hoarse voice and said, "Hello? Stupid pig? Mahaba?"

After greeting in three languages, he switched back to English and said, "Whoever is listening, we just want to make one thing clear: you have already gotten the money you wanted, and those two girls have lost their value to you.

Since you left a telephone here, it means you are waiting for someone to find this place. Please contact us and tell us your conditions. We are the father of the two girls you kidnapped.

We came to Paris privately, there are no police here, and we don’t care about other legal issues, we just want our daughter back.”

Before Jack finished speaking, the phone rang in the room. Cassel couldn't wait to answer the phone, "Hello?"

"Tomorrow at 4pm, in the woods outside the Palace of Fontainebleau. The exact coordinates are as follows. 500 million euros. Only two of you are allowed to come. If we find a third person, the two girls will be dead."

The other party spoke in English with a strong Arabic accent and hung up the phone.

Before Cassel could say anything, Jack covered his mouth and dragged him out of the room.

-

"This place had long been set up as a detention center, but there were only two beds. This means they were probably only planning to kidnap two people at first, and only one of the three girls was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The three of them returned to the hotel and entered the room, and Brian finally spoke to break the silence.

"They didn't install network surveillance cameras that could easily expose their location like before, but instead used wiretaps connected to telephone lines. The telephones were also wired, so it was impossible to track them without advance preparation."

Jack implied that they were lured to Paris on purpose.

"What on earth is going on here?" Cassel sat on the bed, pulling his hair in pain. "There are both eavesdropping devices and anti-tracking devices. So are we actually dealing with a group of intelligence agents?"

"Are you sure you are not involved in any espionage incident?" Brian squatted in front of him and asked seriously.

Cassel's eyes widened, not understanding how this guy could dare to turn the tables. "Of course not. Aren't you the only person here who could be related to the spy?"

Brian shook his head and said nothing. Instead, Jack answered for him, "If the other party is targeting Brian, there is no need to go through so much trouble. His confidentiality level is not that high. After retirement, he has been with his family."

"Think carefully with your clever detective writer's mind. If you were to deal with Brian, would you have to go through so much trouble?"

“Of course not. Even if you want to kidnap Kim and lure him away from the United States to an unfamiliar area for convenience, there is no need to kidnap other people.

The 1500 million euros that those guys extorted from Sala's parents was just a cover, and the 500 million euros just now was the same. They just wanted to lure people to Paris to achieve other goals."

Castle got stuck while talking, his eyes getting wider and wider, "So, their real target is neither Sarah nor Kim, but Alexis?"

"Excluding all the impossibilities, this seems to be the only answer." Jack had a headache. He swore that there was no plot about Alexis being kidnapped in the first three seasons of "Castle" that he watched.

In the fourth season, he followed "Person of Interest" and basically skipped through the following seasons. He was quite impressed by a plot about time travel, but he really had no memory of the part about Alexis being kidnapped.

"But I'm nothing! Alexis has nothing to do with spies, and..." Cassel became less and less confident as he spoke, and fell into self-doubt for a while.

The ringing of a cell phone broke the stagnant air in the room. Cassel and Brian looked at Jack at the same time. In order to prevent being followed and exposing their identities, they did not bring cell phones on this trip. Only Jack brought two, one was his own FBI cell phone, and the other was left by a mysterious person.

It was Jack's FBI cell phone that rang. He picked it up and saw it was Beckett calling, so he turned on the speakerphone.

The policewoman found out two things. She found Roger Hansen's girlfriend and learned the guy's residence from her. The FBI searched a computer there and found many photos taken while tracking Alexis on the hard drive.

She also contacted Sera's mother privately. Sera is now being escorted back to New York, but the mother and daughter talked a lot about things in private.

According to Sarah's crying, during the kidnapping, two Arab women examined the three girls' bodies at the request of the kidnappers, which was extremely private.

After hanging up the phone, Jack and the two fathers looked at each other.