Jefferson Hotel, Manhattan, New York.

The Japanese Consul General is confident: "Not only in the East, but also in the world, the most esoteric, most complex, and the most advanced intellectual competition - Go." ”

"Go is an invention of the Chinese and should belong to the whole world. Over the years, scientists in Europe and the United States began to learn the game of Go. When I was a student at Cambridge, I also taught my teacher the art of Go. ”

A Chinese, a Japanese, in a banquet hall in New York, spoke in the most elegant English, and the Americans present were amazed.

"Mr. Li, I'm glad that you are also a chess friend, and I want to play a game with you."

Li Longsheng frowned, seeing the pride in the Japanese consul general's eyebrows, he couldn't help but agree: "When and where?" ”

"Tonight, here!"

The Japanese consul general in New York, who was strong-blooded, actually proposed to compete with the world intellectual contest champion Li Takamori in Go. The head of the Chinese delegation is also a chess friend, and he thinks that since he is a person with outstanding intelligence, he is by no means an ordinary person who plays chess. If this genius defeats the other side and destroys the prestige of the Japanese, he can also win more support from American public opinion.

The hotel has a presidential suite, which is arranged as a game room. Guess first, the Japanese consul general will go first. Li Longsheng responded according to the conventional layout, a few back and forth, and was surprised to find that the opponent's chess strength was profound, far from being comparable to amateurs, and the overall situation was beyond ordinary people.

It turned out that this consul general was a child of a nobleman, and he had been worshipping the chess master Ben Yinfang Xiurong since he was a child, and if he hadn't been sent to study abroad, he would have almost become a professional chess player.

The head of the Chinese delegation saw the way out and sweated for Li Longsheng. At the critical juncture, Li Longsheng made a clever move to immediately defuse the opponent's offensive, but let the Japanese consul general fall into a long examination.

The long test for Go players is to calculate countless possibilities in the mind. Every possibility leads to dozens of moves, and the possibilities are endless. The possibility of a whole game of Go, theoretically 3 to the 361st power, is definitely astronomical. Therefore, the master long test is like a super complex mathematical formula mental arithmetic. In ancient times, there was no countdown, and it often lasted an entire day and night, and many famous games took several days.

The head of the regiment waited for a full hour before the Japanese consul general made a call, which seemed to be careless, and when the bystanders carefully analyzed it, it was a shock. Sure enough, it was Li Longsheng's turn on the other side to fall into a long thought......

This time it wasn't even more than an hour. The head of the delegation was an old diplomat, who worked as an interpreter for Li Hongzhang's visit to Europe when he was young, and witnessed the dialogue between Li Hongzhang and Bismarck, two iron-blooded prime ministers. He was yawning, his eyelids were squinting, and it was too late to look at his pocket watch. If the current situation develops, the showdown will not end until tomorrow morning. He also asked the two sides if they were willing to stop the chess, stay in the guest room to rest, and fight again tomorrow morning. The Japanese consul general and Li Longsheng were in unison against it, and both were confident that the battle would end before dawn.

The old head assigned two secretaries to stay, stay up all night to serve the opponents, and rested first.

When he returned to the guest room on the top floor, he was just about to fall asleep, and his heart became extremely irritable. Looking at the carpet and windows of the room, there seem to be signs of someone moving. Alertly, he opened the closet, revealing a large safe.

Stuffed in the key, turned the combination lock, and in the cabinet lay a black suitcase with two Chinese characters printed on the shell: files.

The file box is densely packed with materials, mostly in English, French and German, with a small amount in Chinese and Japanese.

"A false alarm!"

The old head wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, and was about to close the safe again, when he felt a coldness in his throat, and the taste of some metal cut deep into the trachea.

He saw blood.

Splattered blood on the safe and file box, and then he turned back to see a blood-dripping dagger first.

The snow-white ivory handle is inlaid with a raden pattern of "white rainbow through the sun".

He died, and before he could see the Assassin's face, he had fallen into the eternal abyss of night, in New York, in Manhattan.

A pair of feet stepped over the corpse lying on the carpet, and a pair of hands reached into the safe, pulling out the heavy file box.

As soon as the assassin walked out of the door with the file box in his hand, the entire hotel was filled with sirens.

At first glance it sounds like a fire alarm that almost pierces people's eardrums. In the presidential suite on the top floor of the Jefferson Hotel, Li Longsheng in the game room had just dropped a white piece, and the Japanese consul general opposite had turned pale, not only frightened by the sound of the siren, but also because the situation in the chess game had been turned upside down.

The Japanese consul general hurriedly got up: "I'm sorry, this siren is terrible!" I suggest that tonight's game ends here, and everyone must find a way to get out of the hotel. ”

"Who wins and who loses?" Li Longsheng didn't care about any alarm, he looked directly into the eyes of the Japanese consul general, and at the moment when the other party was about to surrender and beg for mercy, he stood up gracefully and actually wiped out the entire chess game, "Okay, this is the end, there is no difference between victory and defeat." ”

This seems to be a rude and rude behavior, but it is enough to give the opponent a step, and the consul general nodded in shame: "Mr. Li, thank you very much for your care!" ”

The Japanese Consul General in New York walked to the ground floor, only to find that the door was tightly locked, and the porter said that there was nothing he could do. The front desk attendant said that he had called the police, but instead of a fire, there was a homicide.

Qin Beiyang was running wildly in the corridor of the hotel, and Jiu Se followed behind him. He bumped into Ouyang Anna at the corner of the stairs. Her face was pale, and she clung to the railing and gasped, saying, "Something is wrong!" ”

Moments later, they broke into one of the largest rooms of the Chinese diplomatic delegation and found the head lying in a pool of blood.

Qin Beiyang squatted down and touched the old leader's carotid artery, and checked the throat that was still bleeding - it was cut by a dagger.

"They're in New York?!"

"Assassins?"

Ouyang Anna frowned, and found that the large safe in the closet was open, and the suitcase where the files were stored was missing.

"The second batch of Chinese delegations, which crossed more than half the world and went to Paris via the United States, is to escort this file box!" Anna was so anxious that she almost cried, "If these files are stolen, we will not have to go to Paris." ”

Qin Beiyang grabbed her arm: "Don't worry! What dossier? ”

"In order to recapture Qingdao, Mr. Gu Weijun, the Chinese minister to the United States, will deliver a speech at the Paris Peace Conference. The Presidium requested information from China and asked for a large number of diplomatic archives as evidence. The stakes were so high that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a second group of delegations, carrying a cipher file box containing top-secret archives on Shandong, Manchuria, Mongolia, and other issues, including the secret treaties signed between China and Japan, many of which were signed by Yuan Shikai and never made public. ”

"This is the file box that will decide the fate of China?"

"At least the fate of Shandong and Qingdao will be decided." Ouyang Anna looked at the corpse of the old regiment leader, usually the girl was so frightened that she screamed and fled, "The Chinese Legation in the United States also has a batch of archives involving the secret promises of the US government, which are crucial to winning the support of President Wilson. We had to make a detour to the United States, gather all the information, and then set off for Paris. Along the way, we were very careful, and the head of the regiment himself kept the file box, which had to be stored in a safe. We installed an alarm in the file box and connected it to the hotel's alarm system. If someone steals the file box, just walk out of the room and the alarm will be triggered, automatically locking all the doors. ”

"The murderer and the file box are still in this hotel at the moment?"

"If we're not out of luck."

In the corridor outside, the Chinese diplomatic delegation had already arrived, and the little king was naked, pulling his suspenders as he walked, knowing that something was wrong.

Qin Beiyang squatted down and stared at the eyes of the tomb beast in the town: "Nine colors, nine colors, do you know the murderous aura of the assassin?" ”

At the sound of an order, the nine colors were like a hunting dog out of the cage, and the whole hotel resounded with its hooves. The Tomb Beast does not have the olfactory organs of animals, but it has a keen sense of perception.

The prey is in this building.

Nine Colors searched up and down, breaking into every room, including the restaurant, bar, and kitchen, before rushing to the roof.

How forgot the rooftop!

Qin Beiyang hid a Tang knife behind his back, and found a figure on the roof.

The man was about to lower the rope and descend along the outer wall of the hotel. Seeing Qin Beiyang and Jiuse approaching, the other party gave up vertical landing. If someone cuts the rope, they will fall to their death in mid-air – the Jefferson Hotel is twenty stories tall.

"Assassin!"

Qin Beiyang shouted out in Chinese, and under the neon lights of New York, he saw a face with a scar on the right side.

His name is Ah Hai, and he killed Qin Beiyang's adoptive mother nine years ago.

He's alive.

He carried a file box in his hand.

The scar on his face appears to have been transformed into an X-shaped coat of arms that glitters in the night sky of New York.