Reporter Cheptokralsky was killed under very mysterious circumstances. In appearance, there are all the signs of a tragedy based on love passion, but Ardov is confused by the details. It is they who lead to the discovery of a carefully planned international scam, for the sake of which a sophisticated criminal is ready not only to deal with the detective himself, but also to drag an entire empire into war. To destroy the criminal plan, Ilya Alekseevich will have to beat the gendarmerie department, which seriously believed in the inevitability of the coming war, which the newspapers have been repeating for a week now.