190: Chapter 189 Fang Zhiyuan hires a hitman for a million dollars, Gu Qianqian's life hangs by a thread!

Fang Zhiyuan walked up to them.

"I'm looking for Brother Hei Long."

The bald man on the left sized him up.

"Who are you?"

"Fang Zhiyuan. I spoke with Old Cai on the phone."

The bald man turned his head and said something through the crack in the door.

A raspy voice came from inside.

"Let him in."

The private room door was pushed open.

The air inside was stale, with smoke swirling around the light fixtures.

On a round table sat half a dozen beers, a plate of peanuts, and three mobile phones.

Behind the round table sat a man in his early forties, bald,

wearing a silver stud in his left ear and a thick chain around his neck.

A lit cigarette butt was clamped between his fingers.

This man was known as "Brother Hei Long" in the underground circles of Jinling's old city district.

No one knew his real name; he specialized in handling dirty work for the Shen Family that couldn't see the light of day.

Fang Zhiyuan walked to the front of the round table.

He took out the brown envelope and placed it on the table along with a black suitcase.

"One point two million."

Fang Zhiyuan's voice was hoarse.

"It's all here."

Brother Hei Long took a drag of his cigarette, and ash fell onto the peanuts.

He didn't touch the box, only lifting his eyelids slightly.

"What do you want done?"

Fang Zhiyuan licked his chapped lips.

"I want a person."

"Who?"

"The CEO of Qinsheng Group, Gu Qianqian."

Brother Hei Long exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked at Fang Zhiyuan through the haze for two seconds.

"A woman?"

"Yes."

"And the reason?"

"She cut off my livelihood and ruined my reputation! Now I'm even going to be locked up."

Fang Zhiyuan's hands gripped the edge of the table, his nails digging into the wood grain.

"My shares are gone, my reputation is gone, and now even my career is gone."

"I want to make her wish she were dead! Then I'll use her to negotiate terms with Qin Feng!"

"If he doesn't let me go, I'll make her die with me!"

Brother Hei Long flicked the cigarette butt, and the ash fell.

He leaned forward slightly, studying Fang Zhiyuan's face.

"Are you sure?"

Fang Zhiyuan's Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

"Sure."

Brother Hei Long unzipped the suitcase, looking at the neatly stacked red banknotes inside.

He casually pulled out a stack and thumbed through it.

"The price is sufficient."

Fang Zhiyuan's pupils dilated sharply.

"But there's one condition." Brother Hei Long held up a finger.

"Once the job is done, this has nothing to do with us."

"If you get caught, you'd better keep your mouth shut. Otherwise, I'll kill you before Qin Feng even gets the chance."

"We are only responsible for bringing the person to you. How you handle the aftermath, or even if that Qin Feng comes looking for you, we will help you resolve it."

"No problem!" Fang Zhiyuan agreed without hesitation.

Brother Hei Long zipped up the suitcase and pushed it to his side.

"Tonight, wait for my word."

...

Zhongshan International, study.

Qin Feng pulled out his chair and sat down at the desk.

The laptop screen was glowing, casting light onto his face.

With Hanhang Heavy Industry resolved today, only the matter of the trust fund remained.

The source of funds for that offshore trust fund registered in the Cayman Islands pointed in three directions; he had already cleared two of them.

The IP for the third direction hopped four times, finally landing on a proxy server located in Singapore.

Qin Feng directly utilized his Intermediate Hacking Technique.

In the terminal window, green characters scrolled down from the top of the screen, line after line.

He casually typed a few lines of code, launching a port-scanning script he had modified himself.

In just three seconds, the seven open ports on the target server were exposed.

To Qin Feng, this level of protection was no different from something written by an elementary student.

He called up the exploit module and typed a string of parameters into the command line.

The logs of the first-layer firewall were bypassed.

The second-layer intrusion detection system triggered an alarm,

but the obfuscated packets Qin Feng had injected in advance

had already disguised his access as a normal system maintenance request.

The alarm cleared automatically after three seconds without generating any risk alerts.

The third layer of encryption was RSA-2048.

Qin Feng didn't use brute force; instead, he used the server administrator's certificate cache file to extract the private key.

A rookie mistake.

A file directory tree popped up on the screen.

Qin Feng's fingers paused for a moment.

The folder contained seventeen layers of nested subdirectories, each encrypted with a different naming convention.

He spent four minutes writing a recursive decryption script to expand the entire directory tree.

In the bottom-most folder, there was only a single PDF.

Qin Feng clicked it open.

The trust fund's beneficiary information appeared vividly on the screen.

A name was written in the actual controller column.

Chu Zhengyang.

Qin Feng's eyebrows rose slightly as he performed a quick search.

Chu Zhengyang, the current head of the Beijing Chu Family.

The Chu Family ranked among the top five in Beijing's elite tycoon circles,

holding half of the energy industry chain in the North and maintaining deep, inscrutable ties with the military.

"Interesting."

Qin Feng leaned back in his chair, tapping his fingers twice on the armrest.

A top-tier family of this caliber would actually use an offshore trust fund

to quietly infiltrate Jinling, and a clown like Wang Chao was actually just a minor lackey under him.

It turned out the person truly playing chess behind the scenes was far away in Beijing.

Qin Feng saved the PDF file to an encrypted partition, cleared his intrusion traces, and closed the terminal window.

Just then, his phone vibrated.

Qin Feng picked it up; it was a message sent by Gu Qianqian half an hour ago.

"The Hanhang asset inventory is finished. I'm bringing it back for you to look at."

This woman was working late again.

Qin Feng replied with a single word: "Okay."

He put the phone down and prepared to take a shower.

...

Tiansheng Building, underground parking level B2.

Gu Qianqian held her briefcase in her right hand and her car keys in her left.

Gu Qianqian pressed the unlock button on the key, and the Phantom's taillights flashed twice.

She pulled open the door and sat inside, tossing her briefcase onto the passenger seat before inserting the key and turning the ignition.

The W12 engine began to hum with a low rumble.

Gu Qianqian shifted into reverse, resting her right hand on the passenger seat headrest as she turned to look behind her.

Light appeared in the rearview mirror.

It wasn't from the dim yellow fluorescent tubes on the garage ceiling.

It was high beams.

Three sets.

They lit up simultaneously from behind the support pillars.

The white light hit her face, causing her pupils to constrict from the sting.

Gu Qianqian slammed on the brakes.

Three vans without license plates appeared; they were the most common silver-gray Wuling Hongguang models.

One blocked her directly from the front, while the other two flanked her from the side passages.

The three vehicles stopped at the same time, their high beams all aimed at the Phantom's driver's seat.

The engines didn't stop.

Gu Qianqian withdrew her hand from the passenger headrest and pressed the central locking button.

"Click."

All four doors locked simultaneously.

Her heart began to race, yet miraculously, her hands didn't tremble in the slightest.

Gu Qianqian forced herself to calm down, her mind racing.

This was definitely not an ordinary robbery; the other party was numerous and clearly came prepared.

Was it Li Haibo? Or that fool Fang Zhiyuan?

Or someone else? Regardless, she had to keep a clear head right now.

Gu Qianqian lowered her window by a two-centimeter crack—just enough for sound to pass through, but not enough for a hand to reach in.

"Who are you?"

The driver's door of the van directly in front opened, and a man in a black hoodie stepped out.

His hood was pulled low, obscuring his face.

He walked to the front of the Phantom's hood and looked at Gu Qianqian through the windshield.

"President Gu, someone has asked us to invite you for a little chat."

Gu Qianqian's left hand moved away from the steering wheel, feeling for her phone in the side pocket of her briefcase.

The briefcase happened to block the view of the passenger-side window.

"Who sent you?"

Gu Qianqian stared at the man in the black hoodie, her voice steadier than someone cornered by three vehicles should be.

"You don't need to know. Get out of the car and come with us; we won't hurt you."

"And if I don't get out?"

The man in the black hoodie tilted his head and jerked his chin toward the vans behind him.

The side door of the van on the left slid open with a loud thud, and four men jumped out.

The van on the right also opened its doors, and five more stepped out.

Including the people remaining in the front vehicle, over a dozen men were now standing in the underground garage.

Some held window-breaking hammers, while others carried iron pipes.

Gu Qianqian's right hand moved rapidly behind the briefcase.

The phone screen lit up; she didn't look down, her thumb sliding to the wechat interface by memory.

Qin Feng's chat window still showed that last "Okay."

Her thumb blind-typed four words on the keyboard.

"Blocked on B2."

Send.

Then she exited wechat, her thumb moving toward the dial pad.

"President Gu, put the phone down."

The man in the black hoodie took a step forward and slapped the hood of the car.

"You can call 110 if you want, but it takes twelve minutes for the nearest station to get here. How long do you think this glass can hold out?"

Gu Qianqian's thumb stopped on the dialing interface.

She didn't dial.

Not out of fear, but because the man was right.

"How much money do you want?"

The man in the black hoodie gave a short laugh.

"This isn't about money."

He stepped back two paces and nodded to the men beside him.

The first window-breaking hammer smashed against the rear left window of the driver's cabin.

"Bang!"

A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the surface of the tempered glass, but it didn't shatter through.

A second strike followed immediately.

The cracks spread across two-thirds of the entire pane.

Gu Qianqian's body leaned to the right, her heart rate soaring above 140, the veins in her temples throbbing.

She gripped her phone tightly, her nails digging into her palm.

A third strike.

The entire window became a milky-white mass of fragments, barely held together by the middle adhesive layer,

denting inward into the car by the size of a fist.

"One more swing and the glass is coming in," the man's voice drifted in through the window crack.

"President Gu, be sensible."