Chapter 8

When she heard her daughter was home, Cha Mi-yeon hurried to meet her at the front door.

“I’m home.”
“You’re very late. Did you have a good time?”
“Yes. Thanks to you, Mother, I had a lovely time.”
“Good. It rather looked that way.”

Cha Mi-yeon congratulated herself on her own good instincts, since today’s meeting between the two of them had been her handiwork. The reporters prowling for prey would love the story of a young man and woman who met for the first time at a charity event and grew close over tea-ceremony lessons. It deserved praise as a cultured, dignified courtship, nothing like the way young people carried on these days.

“That’s my daughter. Never disappoints, does she?”

With solid backing for his next run riding on it, this match had come to matter more to her husband than anything else, and lately he was so on edge that every single day felt to Cha Mi-yeon like sitting on a bed of nails. And yet Seo-ha was doing far better than expected. She had not been pleased, at first, to get tangled up with the girl, but the child had turned out worth taking in.

“I hear you even went over to his house.”

Seo-ha had assumed word of her leaving the Dahyang Tea House would already have come in, but learning that her adoptive mother knew more than that made her falter for an instant.

“Ah…. Yes. He served me milk, of all things.”
“Milk, with the Dahyang Tea House’s fine teas right there? He’s a funny one, that boy.”

Seo-ha had mentioned even a trifle like that on purpose, as though in confidence, and now she laughed along with Cha Mi-yeon.

“Chairwoman, there’s a call for you.”

Cha Mi-yeon headed the Light-Sharing Foundation, whose main business was support for the visually impaired, and had planned the recent charity fundraiser too. A successful actress in her day, she set enormous store by how she looked to other people, and her marriage to Yun Jeong-hwan, an ambitious politician, had only made it worse. His ultimate goal was the presidency of the Republic of Korea, so Cha Mi-yeon took it for granted that the First Lady’s seat would fall to her. That was why she had set up the foundation, too.

“Secretary, you’re still here. Do take the call, Mother. Oh, and is tomorrow’s interview still on schedule?”
“Mm. It’ll go ahead as planned. You look tired. Get a good rest.”

Seo-ha was tired, it was true. Being with Han Jun-hyeok wore her out several times over with the tension alone, and his voice replayed itself in her head unbidden.

‘From tomorrow one of my people will be on you. If you don’t like it, then put any thought of going out of your head.’

Whoever had made that call was surely one of his people. He had struck her as a man who did exactly what he said, and since nothing concerning her could move forward without her adoptive mother, he no doubt meant to make it watertight.

Just then, something else he had said surfaced.

‘Our place.’

There was nothing strange about the words, and yet something inside her stirred quietly at them. Whether her heart was wavering or she was merely exhausted, Seo-ha could not tell.

Seochon lay west of Gyeongbokgung Palace, at the foot of Mount Inwangsan.

Tucked away down one of its quiet alleys, the ‘Light-Sharing Foundation’ office occupied a two-story building, an old hanok mansion neatly remodeled¹. Today a women’s magazine for older readers, put out by a newspaper, was coming for an interview. At times like this Seo-ha always had to stand at her adoptive mother’s side like a free gift thrown in with the purchase, and today was no exception.

“You retired in a blaze of glory, going from top actress to a politician’s wife. And now you give back to society as chairwoman of the Light-Sharing Foundation. That turn in your life is always a talking point. Was there some driving force behind it?”

Cha Mi-yeon answered the reporter’s question in earnest.

“As you may know, I too once found myself in a dark tunnel with nothing visible ahead. A story of loss that ran from miscarriage to stillbirth and ended in infertility.”

The reporter nodded, seeming to understand Cha Mi-yeon’s pain.

“At a time like that, if someone else reaches a hand out to you, a whole life can change. For me that was… one child.”
“You mean your adopted daughter?”
“Yes. That frail little thing gripped my hand so tightly, determined to live…. It must have been from that day. That I made up my mind to live for someone else as well.”

Cha Mi-yeon lowered her long lashes and let the words hang. She knew well how much power a silence like that lends to the words around it.

“Back then I hated the person I was. I thought of myself as a loser, someone left behind. But raising my daughter, for the first time I felt like a decent person.”
“Of course. Adoption itself is hardly an easy decision, and your daughter was ill on top of it. Becoming a family can’t have been a simple process. How was it for you?”
“As I came to love my daughter, I stopped hating myself. In the end… it’s as good as saying my daughter saved me. She gave me a reason to live, at a time when I wanted to let go of everything.”

The reporter hesitated a moment, then added in a tone not quite admiring.

“So you feel you were the one saved, by a child. Usually people put it the other way around, the parent saving the child…. It’s striking.”

Cha Mi-yeon smiled gracefully and took Seo-ha’s hand fondly as she answered.

“That I could come this far is all thanks to Seo-ha. I could never have managed it alone.”

It was placed as exquisitely as the closing line of a play. Even so, that much Seo-ha could not dispute, since Cha Mi-yeon’s life truly had changed completely on her account. Only, as the price of that salvation, someone had to stay behind in the dark tunnel in her adoptive mother’s place.

The trouble was that the someone was Seo-ha herself.

On the outskirts of Pangyo Techno Valley in Seongnam stood a single gray five-story building. It had no signboard, only the company name engraved small on a metal panel beside the entrance.

Shield One Secure

Protection & Strategic Risk Consulting

At a glance from outside, it might pass for an asset management firm, but go up to the third floor and even the air changed. Rows of monitors lined a control room, and the doors opened only to individual authentication. In the conference room, which had not a single window, it felt as if someone were listening in on every breath. For all its quiet, the place lacked the rigid air peculiar to a private security facility.

The middle-aged man seated at one side of the conference room spoke first. He belonged to an unofficial diplomatic liaison team.

“Frankly… I took this for a foreign firm.”

Jun-hyeok looked at him across the table for a moment, then slid the prepared profile over as he spoke.

“Half our field agents are from foreign outfits, yes. We have a protection team drawn from PMCs, plus men from US military tactical support units. I started out overseas as a mercenary myself.”
“In the States?”
“I was with a private military company headquartered in Texas. Mostly embassy protection in war zones, civilian VIP protection, designing movement plans for senior corporate figures. That sort of thing.”

The client raised his eyebrows slightly.

“Are you out of the Korean special forces?”
“I served in the Army Special Warfare Command and was discharged. But I’m better at planning than fieldwork.”

Jun-hyeok turned one of the monitors around to show him. On the screen ran a 3D simulation of a VIP movement route, from a hotel on the outskirts in the United Arab Emirates to Dubai International Airport and on to an undisclosed location in Korea. Automatic computation had marked out everything along it: drones, lane control, analysis of the route’s intersection points, even the CCTV blind spots.

“You said this commission is for a senior figure staying here with family to be treated for a chronic illness, so the schedule inside Korea runs fairly long.”
“Yes. It may well run longer than expected. But if the illness became known, the risk inside the country would be considerable, so we want to avoid exposure as far as possible. That’s why we came to you on a recommendation.”
“Then instead of a protection and security team, we’ll use only a mobile surveillance team, adjusted to your schedule and movements. Keep communications to a dedicated encrypted app, and our field agents will be placed so that no one can tell they’re ours.”
“Ah, have you handled this sort of work often?”

Jun-hyeok gave a half smile and nodded as if it went without saying.

“It’s work we do like breathing.”

With the consultation over, Jun-hyeok saw the client’s man off and headed down to the first basement level, home to a physical training area called ‘P-Zone’. Treadmills and weight machines were just the basics; the space also held a combat training zone, mats for restraint-technique drills, and a virtual firing system for tactical practice.

Among the staff hard at their training, Jun-hyeok’s gaze stopped on a man whose sheer bulk looked better suited to an MMA ring.

“Park Jae-man. Out here.”

Solidly built and stubborn-looking, the man was the polar opposite of the lean Jun-hyeok.

“Ah, Boss, I haven’t filled today’s target quota yet….”
“You remember this, by any chance?”

Park Jae-man broke off mid-grumble, looked at the object lying on Jun-hyeok’s palm, and scratched the back of his head.