Chapter 148: Ding Ruilong Must Die!

Chapter 148: Ding Ruilong Must Die!

Li Maoren knew exactly who the man surnamed Qu was.

That Wu Chen could name him at all showed he understood the competition among the great families at the highest levels to a remarkable depth. More to the point, Wu Chen claimed to have dirt on him.

From the beginning Li Maoren had believed Wu Chen was lying. He had only feared that he might not be.

But the more names Wu Chen produced, the more credible his words became.

Because the larger a lie grew, and the more people it drew in, the easier it was to break open.

Who tells a lie that can be disproved almost at once?

There would be no point in it. Their private conversation today would become meaningless.

Li Maoren studied Wu Chen and took the measure of the young man in front of him afresh.

Wu Chen had been calm and unhurried from the first. That bearing alone was not something a twenty-two-year-old should possess.

Li Maoren had the sense that the man sitting opposite him was not a young man at all, but an old fox who spoke slowly and had thought through everything.

The room fell silent.

Li Maoren sat slowly back down. He had steadied himself—or at least deliberately buried what he felt.

“Let’s hear it,” he said, expressionless. “You know dirt on Qu Qiangmin?”

“Eleven years ago, when Qu Qiangmin was the number-two official in Dongji Province, up in the northeast, he gave Donglong Real Estate Group a clear road through the bidding for construction projects in the provincial capital’s High-Tech Zone, and sold them land at a giveaway price,” Wu Chen began at once. “Ten years ago Donglong Real Estate’s capital chain broke and the company went bankrupt. Several of the projects it was building in the High-Tech Zone, including office towers in the core district, were left unfinished.”

“After that, Donglong Real Estate’s boss, Qiao Jingsheng, jumped to his death.”

“Development in the High-Tech Zone ran into serious trouble as a result. To deal with the unfinished projects, Qu Qiangmin used his connections to bring in Zhenlong Group from Xiangjiang. Zhenlong Real Estate, a Zhenlong Group subsidiary, took over Donglong’s unfinished buildings and carried them through to completion.”

“Everyone knows why nobody wants an unfinished development: there’s no profit in it. Residential blocks especially—they’ve already been presold, they can’t be sold a second time. Yet Zhenlong Real Estate took them on anyway, willing to lose money to see them finished.”

Wu Chen stopped and gave Li Maoren a smile that said plainly he knew the man understood.

Li Maoren did understand.

Wu Chen had gone into no detail, and Li Maoren followed all of it: the web of interest between Qu Qiangmin and Donglong Real Estate; whether Qiao Jingsheng had truly killed himself; and precisely what Qu Qiangmin—or rather the power standing behind Qu Qiangmin—had given Zhenlong Group in return for taking that wreckage off their hands.

Li Maoren knew Qu Qiangmin had no powerful family behind him. He came out of an intellectual household and was, personally, extremely able.

But he was the Dou family’s son-in-law.

The Dou family had once been formidable. At their height they could stand alongside houses like the Lis and the Dings. But once the family’s number-one figure died of cancer in his sixties—far too early—the house had begun its slide, with no strong generation ready to take up the weight. Their son-in-law, unexpectedly, had advanced steadily, one solid step after another, his political career running remarkably smooth.

So afterward the Dou family had thrown its full strength behind him.

Qu Qiangmin was not a live-in son-in-law in the ordinary sense, and his standing within the Dou family was by no means low. Even so, his son and daughter did not carry his surname. They carried Dou.

Li Maoren understood all of this. Wu Chen had only to speak and he could draw the rest himself.

But none of it mattered.

Inside those tangled webs of relation, touching any one man, investigating any one man, moved everyone around him. They shielded one another. They were bound together by shared interests. Move on them, and they would seal off every avenue of investigation and strike back savagely.

So unless someone could produce decisive, unanswerable evidence in a single stroke, nobody could touch them.

“Evidence?” Li Maoren asked, curt.

Wu Chen smiled, took out his phone, entered something deftly with one hand, and tapped Send.

Ding!

Li Maoren’s phone chimed.

“Check your messages,” Wu Chen said.

Frowning, Li Maoren drew out his phone and opened it.

Only a string of numbers.

“A bank account number?” He glanced at Wu Chen, brow furrowed.

“The account holder is a woman. If the money hasn’t moved in the last few days, there should be a nine-figure sum in it.” Wu Chen smiled at him. “You can start by finding out who she is and what she has to do with Qu Qiangmin, then trace the funds moving in and out of that account. I don’t need to spell it out for you, do I?”

Li Maoren’s expression shifted again.

Of course Wu Chen did not need to spell it out. He knew perfectly well how a thing like this was investigated.

What mattered was what Wu Chen’s words implied.

That account was very likely the final resting place of Qu Qiangmin’s dirty money.

Which was terrifying.

Genuinely terrifying.

How could Wu Chen simply know an account that secret?

Li Maoren understood one thing with perfect clarity: investigating a matter like this from the front, unpicking it thread by thread, would be extraordinarily difficult. Layer upon layer of resistance. But find the endpoint and work backward from it, and everything became vastly, vastly simpler.

With the Dong family’s weight behind it, if they got hold of leverage like this on Qu Qiangmin, Qu Qiangmin would have no chance of turning anything around.

“One more thing. Look into the woman who holds that account carefully. She knows how Qiao Jingsheng really died, and she knows why Donglong Real Estate’s capital chain suddenly broke and the company went under. It’s really… quite interesting.” Wu Chen smiled again.

Li Maoren scarcely heard him.

He did not need Wu Chen to tell him how to investigate.

He simply looked at Wu Chen, his mind filled with a single question.

Who exactly was Wu Chen?

How could he possibly know these things?

In this much detail?

Down to the final account where the money sat?

How much did he know about the affairs of the great families?

From the moment he met Wu Chen, Li Maoren had been revising his estimate of the young man’s background upward, again and again.

And now, at last, he could make no sense of it at all.

He could not even guess.

By any logic, no one man could know this much across so many different things.

More frightening still, Wu Chen was twenty-two.

Li Maoren was silent a long while.

He looked once more at the account number in the message, put his phone away without expression, and raised his eyes to Wu Chen again.

“What exactly do you want?”

The ultimate question.

What did Wu Chen actually want?

“I want Ding Ruilong dead.” Wu Chen smiled, but he said it in earnest, because it was the truth.

“All of this… simply because of Ding Ruilong?” It struck Li Maoren suddenly that Wu Chen’s aim was too simple. Bringing these matters into the light could set the Ding, Li, Sun, Dong, and Dou families to war, to new alliances, to a wholesale reshuffling of position.

That was all?

“That’s right.” Then Wu Chen turned it back on him. “What else? If I know as much as this, why would I put myself in danger otherwise?”

“Because your daughter really is that appealing.”

Wu Chen answered his own question, his eyes still serious. “Because I like her. Because I want to. I don’t want anyone interfering with us. Ding Ruilong dares to fight me for my woman. If I don’t kill him, he’ll come and kill me. One of us has to die. This ends only with death.”

“So—Ding Ruilong has to die.”

That said, he smiled again, easy and untroubled.

Li Maoren watched him in silence.

A long moment passed before he spoke.

“Do you have dirt on anyone in the Wei family?”

“I do,” Wu Chen said.

“Tell me.”

“Why should I?” Wu Chen returned.

Li Maoren’s expression tightened.

“For the next six months, don’t come to Donghai and interfere with Ruobing and me. Then I’ll tell you.” Wu Chen named his condition with a smile.

“…Done.” After a brief silence, Li Maoren agreed.

…

Out in the corridor beyond the suite.

Under the eyes of a great many bodyguards, Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai had been circling outside the suite door for two full hours and more. The siblings had tried to use the hidden surveillance system to see what Wu Chen and their father were discussing inside, but Wu Chen had stripped the cameras out, and there was nothing to watch.

So they had come back to the corridor and waited by the door.

More than two hours.

They had been talking that long, and were still not finished.

Both were desperately anxious.

Creak.

The suite door opened.

Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai both snapped their heads up toward it.