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…