Nominal: Hou Liangping blocking the door? He was slapped away!

Lu Yike's temporary workstation at the provincial department.

The screen displays access control records retrieved from the Political and Legal Affairs Commission system.

At 3:17 PM on the day Chu Pingshan was suspended, a black minivan with a Haizhou license plate was allowed to pass through the turnstile on the east side of the provincial party committee compound. At 3:22 PM, the driver swiped a temporary card to enter the building. The vehicle left at 4:08 PM.

Temporary card registration field - blank.

The person who came did not leave a name.

Lu Yike printed out the screenshot and placed it on the table alongside a copy of the tattered black book. The line Chu Pingshan had written read, "The person Sha Ruijin met that day."

The timing matched, and the license plate matched.

But the person's identity cannot be found on paper.

She sent Qi Tongwei a message: We're close, just need to verify my identity.

……

Late at night, in a safe house.

Lin Huahua paced back and forth on the first floor, a walkie-talkie clipped to her waist. People were positioned in three directions outside.

At two o'clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door.

"Gas company, routine maintenance."

Lin Huahua looked out through the peephole. Two people, wearing blue work clothes, were holding wrenches.

There was no prior notice and no work order number.

She leaned against the wall and pressed the intercom button. "Two people on the east side, possibly in disguise."

Thirty seconds later, the personnel deployed to flank the man from both sides. Seeing the situation was turning against him, the man in blue was pinned to the ground before he could even raise his wrench.

After half an hour of questioning, one of them softened his stance.

"Someone offered 500,000 for the access control hours of this house. They want everything: what time the shift changes, what time the patrols start, etc."

Lin Huahua pressed further, "Who paid for it?"

"I don't know. It was transferred via WeChat, and the phone is switched off when I call it. But the instructions came from an email address."

Lin Huahua had seen that email address suffix before.

After reviewing the data, the technical department confirmed that the sending IP address pointed to the public terminal in the provincial department.

Internal moles and external assassins are now working in sync for the second time.

……

Late at night, in the old alley east of Jingzhou city.

When Gao Yuliang opened the door, he was wearing an old cotton-padded jacket and holding a half-cup of overnight tea.

Qi Tongwei stood outside the door and recounted two things: an official document and a witness in danger.

"A combination of measures." Gao Yuliang placed the tea on the threshold. "The procedure forces you to hand over the person; if you do, you die. If you don't, you're violating the procedure, and they'll use that to impeach you."

Qi Tongwei remained silent, waiting for him to continue.

Gao Yuliang looked up at him. "The second key—witness protection plus terrorism-related charges, a double lock. Then transfer the person to the joint military-civilian protection point."

"Military sluice?"

"Military matters are beyond the jurisdiction of the provincial party committee," Gao Yuliang said in a low voice. "Shen Zhong approves a note, and the person is out of Sha Ruijin's firing range."

Qi Tongwei turned and left.

When they reached the alley entrance, Gao Yuliang called out from behind, "Have Zhou Weiguo use a letter, not a phone call. Letters have stubs, but phone calls don't. They'll be needed for future lawsuits."

The next morning, Zhou Weiguo's encrypted letter arrived at the provincial department.

Shen Zhong approved the establishment of a joint military-civilian protection point. The finance manager was transferred overnight.

Sha Ruijin's official document was typed in an empty space.

The program's strangulation mechanism was broken in the first round.

But the person behind that public terminal is still sitting in an office in the provincial department, the address of which is unknown.

---

When Du Bozhong came to his door, Qi Tongwei was at the provincial department looking at the tea shop's tracking report.

There was a knock on the door three times, and Lu Yike led his men in. Du Bozhong was in his early fifties, with rough, large hands and nails stained with indelible black engine oil.

Without exchanging pleasantries, he took a business card from his suit pocket and placed it on the table.

"The person who handled the acquisition came from Haizhou about six months ago."

The front of the business card was blank, with no name or title. Qi Tongwei turned it over, and on the back was a string of handwritten codes.

QC-2.

Qi Tongwei's finger hovered over those words for two seconds without moving.

"What kind of person is this?"

"He wore a hat, didn't talk much, and had a Handong accent," Du Bozhong recalled. "He had a round piece around his neck with no writing on it. I asked him what it was, but he didn't answer."

Lu Yike had already pulled up the photo of the tea shop next to her. Half a face, a badge on the neck.

The three lines matched: business card code, logistics park permit, and tea shop cash withdrawal person.

The same hand.

……

In the provincial department's technical office, Lu Yike laid out the three items side by side.

The lower half of a face in the tea shop's video footage. A magnified comparison of the neck emblem. A segment of Zhao Qinming's voiceprint extracted from a recorded phone conversation.

The technician finished the comparison and looked up at her. "The voiceprint and lip movement matching accuracy is 87%. The accent characteristics match the local area of ​​Handong—specifically, the area east of Luzhou."

Lu Yike put the report into the file bag and zipped it up.

His surname is Qin, he speaks with a Handong accent, he is a resident of Haizhou, and he wears a blank badge around his neck.

Half of the face has been pieced together. The area above the eyes is still obscured by the brim of the hat and the gap in the data.

That's enough. Enough to touch the net. Not enough to catch people.

……

trial room.

Lin Huahua interrogated Zhao Qinming for the fourth time, this time without asking about the route or the tea shop.

She pushed a glass of water towards her. "Your daughter is safe. We've arranged for someone to pick her up from school."

Zhao Qinming's hands were still trembling as he took the water, but his eyes were red.

"I have one more question for you." Lin Huahua sat down, her voice softening slightly. "When that middleman was on the phone, did you hear any other sounds? In the background?"

Zhao Qinming closed his eyes, and the veins on his forehead throbbed twice.

"Once," his voice was hoarse, "he answered another call and didn't hang up on me. They were yelling at him..."

"What did you say?"

Zhao Qinming swallowed hard. "He said, 'The one above said that the dirt from Handong shouldn't splash onto the page in the capital.'"

Lin Huahua's pen tip poked a dot on the paper and then stopped moving.

That page in Kyoto.

The four words fell to the ground, creating a crater deeper than anything Zhao Qinming had confessed.

……

After reading the interrogation transcript, Qi Tongwei remained silent. He circled the words "the page in Beijing" and uploaded it along with the entire transcript, encrypting it.

Fifteen minutes later, the weighty reply returned.

The fragments are collected and the original words are recorded. Do not ask any further questions about the page in the capital. Asking means death.

Three lines of text, no punctuation, the pen pressed so hard the paper was wrinkled.

Qi Tongwei placed his phone face down on the table and let out a long sigh.

The military's core authority. Handong manages the Handong area agency. The boundaries are drawn clearer than a knife.

He did not cross the line.

……

That evening, Li Dakang's brown paper bag arrived again.

The Hong Kong freeze order has been updated. In the list of shell company entities associated with the frozen accounts, a name has appeared prominently in the seventh line—an empty shell company with the same name as the logistics park permit "QC-2".

The outer side is now closed.

Qi Tongwei wrote five lines on the whiteboard: Zhao Qinming's confession, Du Bozhong's business card, tea shop image logo, overseas freeze letter, and logistics park secret account approval slip.

Five lines converge, all pointing to the same person.

"The evidence for the Hantong area agency is complete." Lu Yike confirmed it while standing next to the whiteboard.

Qi Tongwei didn't reply. He was looking at his phone.

Du Bozhong's message: "Director Qi, my wife and children are being followed. There's a van parked outside, and I took a picture of the license plate."

He sent the address to Lin Huahua. "Pick them up. Du Bozhong's whole family is being transferred to the protected area."

Lin Huahua responded and went out.

Lu Yike looked at the half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the whiteboard. "The net's been found, should we buy it or not?"

Qi Tongwei put down the whiteboard marker.

"We haven't caught the person behind that terminal in the provincial department." He turned around. "If we close the net now, he'll send out a message and Haizhou will flee overnight."

Lu Yike was silent for two seconds. "Then we'll wait."

"Wait." Qi Tongwei stared at the print of half a face. "I won't look at the top half of the face for now. First, dig this half of the face, along with the net, out of the soil in Handong."