Noon.
Small Cafeteria.
Today's main dishes were stir-fried pork with garlic shoots and scrambled eggs with chives. The air was thick with unpleasant cooking fumes that stung the nose. After getting his food, Dong Xuebin sat as usual with Tan Limei and Zhuangzi at the greasy little table by the window and dug in. Xu Yan, the key person, had been won over, but it was clearly too early to celebrate. If no one besides Deputy Director Xu spoke up for him, he still would not be able to compete with the two Guos.
The first step had gone smoothly. Who should he win over next?
With less than four days left, Dong Xuebin had to seize this final stretch of time and win over as many people as he could.
After lunch, Dong Xuebin returned to the General Office and analyzed the current situation. In the end, he settled on two more targets. The first was Deputy Director Yang Yizhong, whose education level was lower than his. Yang was also a Party Committee member, and since he had only recently transferred to the Chengxi Branch Bureau, he seemed uninvolved in the bureau's factions—a "free agent." Dong had heard that Yang's remarks at several Bureau Party Committee meetings had been fairly impartial. The second was Deputy Director Liu Hua. His personnel and organizational affiliation was still with the Ministry of State Security, and he was merely serving a temporary post here. He would likely be transferred back in a few months. He was relatively young and extremely low-key in both conduct and dealings with others. Rumor had it that he had never made any biased remarks at Party Committee meetings. He was practically invisible; hardly anyone ever saw him speak.
Mm, those two, then.
Dong Xuebin acted immediately. He pulled