Meanwhile, Gu Zheng continued his questioning.
"Have you established all of Chief Engineer Xu's movements before the attack?"
"We looked into that already. He was attacked on his way home from work. For the two days before the attack and on the day itself, he went to and from work as usual. Before that, Chief Engineer Xu spent a week on a business trip to Capital City."
"Capital City? What was the trip for?"
"A symposium on metal materials!"
"Who went with Chief Engineer Xu?"
An hour later, Gu Zheng met Xiao Zhang, a technician who worked under Chief Engineer Xu.
"Were you with Chief Engineer Xu the entire time during the symposium?"
"Yes! Chief Engineer Xu and I shared a room and attended the meetings together."
"Did anything unusual happen during the symposium?"
Xiao Zhang thought for a moment. "Nothing unusual, except that on the last day, we visited Taipingmen Square and the Great Man Memorial Hall. Then we... we came back!"
It seemed Xiao Zhang had no useful leads either.
Around noon, Gu Zheng found an opportunity to make an encrypted phone call.
He asked whether the documents transferred from Shizhuang were complete, and whether anything was missing or had been overlooked.
The person on the other end confirmed that everything was complete. The factory had preserved the documents very well.
For security reasons, the classified production assignment had already been allocated to another factory of the same type in a different region.
Gu Zheng could now establish that the attack might not have been directly connected to the Dawn Project.
The attackers had not targeted the documents.
Nor was Xu Changyi irreplaceable.
There had to be another reason they had killed him in such a gruesome way.
On the third day, October 26.
Gu Zheng and Song