Killer (2)
Byeon Dong-jin.
He had started out in middle school with the Suwon Daemyung-pa, then, after the organization collapsed, enlisted in the ground unit of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces Information Command’s Special Missions Battalion.
But during training, he slashed Kang-hae’s face with a knife—the very face of the man who had once saved his life—and was kicked out.
After that, he made a new start with the Pyeongtaek Lion Gang.
He drifted into a cosmetics pyramid scheme, got hit with an eight-month prison term for assault and fraud, and in prison caught the eye of a nationwide gangster boss, whom he went to work for.
After serving that short sentence, he headed to the Philippines.
His job there was to run a VIP junket room at Okada Man*la and lend money at predatory rates.
But there were already plenty of Korean gangsters operating in the Philippines.
Among them were former Pyeongtaek Lion Gang members—the same men Byeon Dong-jin had once called his brothers.
Whenever they ran into him on the street, they picked fights.
“You bat-faced bastard.”
“You filthy son of a bitch who switched crews three times.”
“That bastard would trade his own mother and father if it got him ahead.”
So he killed them.
The two-year senior from the Lion Gang who had looked out for him the most, the one who had called him a bat.
He was twenty-two years old then.
That senior never came to him in his dreams.
Guilt never made him shiver, either.
On the contrary, Byeon Dong-jin wanted to kill more people.
For one human being to kill another was nothing special.
If you were unlucky, you could be walking down the street and die from a flowerpot falling from a second-story window, couldn’t you?
Fuck it. This or that—it’s all the same.
That was what Byeon Dong-jin thought.
And so he became addicted to the sight of human blood.
Even in fights where there was no need to kill, he killed.
Getting a gun in the Philippines was easier than ordering coffee at Starx, but he never once used one.
He preferred knives, especially machetes.
He loved the rasping sound of metal parting skin, of blade biting through organs and bone.
When he grew tired of knives, he would douse a body in kerosene and light it.
But because of his cruelty, his organization had been driven to the brink.
Byeon Dong-jin never listened to a damn thing anyone said, and in the end they cut him loose.
When word spread that he was no longer with the organization, people who bore him grudges came hunting for revenge.
Eventually, Byeon Dong-jin fled to Hong Kong.
There he lived buried in the skirts of women who sold their bodies at Fuji Tower, and from them he was introduced to a contract killer.
That was how Byeon Dong-jin became a killer for hire.
And Ha Seok-jun thought that the Byeon Dong-jin he was seeing after all these years had changed a great deal.
He had always looked like a thug, but now he looked like some starving beast.
From the hollow eyes to the strange aura around him, he didn’t even seem human anymore.
“We’re not close enough to exchange pleasantries.”
Ha Seok-jun’s voice was cold.
When Byeon Dong-jin had slashed Kang-hae’s face with a knife in the past, Ha Seok-jun had been the company commander at the Information Command.
The instructors had wanted to send Byeon Dong-jin to the Army prison then, but Ha Seok-jun, who was company commander at the time, had fought tooth and nail to bury the incident.
He’d done it because he was afraid it might affect his promotion.
And recently, after spending time around Kang-hae, he had come to regret it.
Whenever Ha Seok-jun saw the knife scar on Kang-hae’s jaw, that thought came back to him.
Living selfishly could leave a huge scar on someone else.
“Then let’s cut to the point.”
“How about you just disappear without saying another word.”
“How is it that a major in the Republic of Korea Army is gambling in a casino, Major Ha Seok-jun?”
“……!”
On the way to Macau, Byeon Dong-jin had received detailed information from his client.
He had obtained everything—identities of the people accompanying Na Kang-hae, their call records, even their financial transactions.
And then he learned that Ha Seok-jun had withdrawn money from an ATM inside the Venexian Casino.
A fine piece of bait.
Ha Seok-jun was speechless at Byeon Dong-jin’s words.
Whether to ask how he knew came later.
By nature, Ha Seok-jun was timid, and now he was swallowed up by anxiety.
As a soldier—and worse, while on duty—gambling in a casino was the sort of thing that could become a major obstacle in his path.
“Wouldn’t it be a waste to strip you of your uniform over something you’ve done this long?”
“…….”
“How about we make a deal?”
“What kind of deal……?”
“You’re staying at the same hotel as Na Kang-hae, right? Just hand over the key card.”
“……!”
“Then nothing will happen to you.”
“…….”
At that moment, Ha Seok-jun remembered the phone call he had had with Ko Jeong-un before Byeon Dong-jin approached him.
Maybe this was the threat Ko Jeong-un had mentioned.
The old general’s words echoed in Ha Seok-jun’s ears.
[Your job is to survive.]
[Whatever happens to the two of them, do not move on your own.]
[Even if they die, you must survive. And the moment it happens, begin the investigation there. You must not let a single piece of evidence or a single witness slip through your fingers.]
Maybe this was an opportunity.
Something happened to Kang-hae, and he himself would be the one to investigate it.
Of course, in the process, he would become a participant too……
After a moment of hesitation, Ha Seok-jun finally put a hand in his pocket.
Then he fumbled around for something.
Byeon Dong-jin smiled in a sleazy, knowing way, as if he’d seen this coming.
A moment later, Ha Seok-jun pulled his hand back out.
Not with a card, but with a clenched fist.
Then, slowly, he raised his middle finger.
“What can I say? I’d rather give you this than a card.”
“Heh, heh, heh.”
Laugher burst from Byeon Dong-jin’s mouth.
He found Ha Seok-jun genuinely funny.
“What, did you catch some sort of friendship bug? You’ve only been running together for a few days.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, since you’re the kind of bastard who’d stab the face of the man who saved your life.”
“Thing is, I already got the card.”
“What?”
“How many people working in a casino do you think aren’t blind to money? There are plenty who’d hand over a room key for a few bills.”
“…….”
“Originally, I was going to handle this cleanly at the hotel. But I changed my mind a little while ago.”
“……?”
“Now I’m curious whether Na Kang-hae feels the same way about you.”
With those words, Byeon Dong-jin pulled a syringe from his pocket and drove it into Ha Seok-jun’s abdomen.
At once, Ha Seok-jun’s throat swelled.
Within moments, he could hardly breathe, as though he were having an asthma attack.
“Cough, cough, cough…….”
Byeon Dong-jin wrapped an arm around him and shouted, “Help me!”
The security guards nearby moved toward them.
They were men Byeon Dong-jin had already paid.
Unable to speak because his throat had closed up, Ha Seok-jun was loaded into Byeon Dong-jin’s car, which had been parked in front of the first-floor lobby.
Shortly after, the car carrying Ha Seok-jun drove out of the Venexian Casino.
* * *
Venexian Casino, VIP room.
Miki Ho stared across the table at Seong Ha-yeong.
“How exactly can you help me?”
His gaze was sharper than before.
There was a hard edge in it, a warning that if she spoke even a little nonsense, he would get up and walk away.
“I know you’re fighting your siblings over MS Holdings shares right now.”
“……!”
Stephen Ho, Miki Ho’s father, had had four wives and seventeen children in his lifetime.
While Stephen Ho was alive, the siblings’ relationships had not been bad.
At least on the surface.
But the moment Stephen Ho died, as if they had all been waiting for it, the war to seize MS Holdings began.
MS Holdings was the holding company Stephen Ho had established. It owned Macau’s flagship casinos, including Grand Lisboa and Casino Lisboa.
Before he died, Stephen Ho divided his holdings in MS Holdings among his seventeen children.
But his children were not the only ones with stakes in the company.
There were also the triads Stephen Ho had used as his hands and feet, and the people who ran businesses with his support.
Threats and bribery did not work on them.
They were the sort who had spent decades doing Stephen Ho’s dirty work under Stephen Ho’s command.
Every day, intrigue and betrayal ran rampant among the siblings.
At times, Miki Ho found himself with the strange sensation that he had become the protagonist of a Chinese palace drama he used to watch as a child.
In the end, the struggle had split into two camps.
Stacy Ho, the eldest daughter of the first wife, and Miki Ho, the eldest son of the fourth wife.
But Miki Ho’s share was pitifully small.
So in the end, he had even joined hands with the Sands Group in Las Vegas, a company his father had loathed until the day he died.
The Sands Group bought up MS Holdings shares.
But the other side had not sat still, either.
In the end, the key to the half-siblings’ struggle was not Stephen Ho’s children but the people who held the shares and moved at his beck and call.
Only by bringing them over to his side could he rise to the top of MS Holdings.
That was the assignment left to Miki Ho.
“Among the people who held shares in MS Holdings, there are some with close ties to North Korea. And I have the materials on them.”
During his lifetime, Stephen Ho had maintained extremely close relations with North Korea.
In the 1980s, North Korea, trying to solve its foreign currency shortage and open its economy, pushed to establish joint banks with foreign partners.
Then in 1989, it founded Chosun Joint Venture Bank, the first of its kind in North Korea, through a joint investment with a foreign entity.
Officially, it was said that the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan and Stephen Ho had split the investment costs equally, but Stephen Ho had also contributed to the funding.
Not only that, but when North Korea established its first casino in the Rajin-Sonbong zone in 1999, he secretly poured in a massive amount of money as well.
“What kind of materials?”
Miki Ho asked, looking at Seong Ha-yeong.
“Your father didn’t just invest in North Korea while he was alive.”
“…….”
As Seong Ha-yeong said, Stephen Ho had not merely exchanged money with North Korea.
Oil and luxury goods needed by North Korea were loaded onto ships owned by Stephen Ho and sent to Nampo Port, while from North Korea the empty containers came back filled with counterfeit money, drugs, and weapons.
Of course, it was Stephen Ho’s men who carried all of that out.
And after Stephen Ho died, they were still doing it.
But it was a dangerous business.
In Beijing, there were plenty who disapproved of the triads reaching even into the oil trade, and they were constantly on the lookout for a chance to cut their throats.
And Miki Ho knew that the people holding MS Holdings shares were still engaged in illegal transactions with North Korea.
If he could find proof of that, he could put shackles on them.
But they never left evidence lying around so easily.
Then a woman from Korea had said she could provide the materials.
“How did you get them?”
“I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you I have them.”
“You wouldn’t be giving them to me for nothing, I assume…….”
“That’s right.”
“What do you want?”
“Get me a smuggling boat into Korea.”
“You don’t mean the two of you are going to take it?”
“No. It’s for a North Korean.”
That was why Seong Ha-yeong had approached Miki Ho.
There was no way to bring Cho Gwang-il of Unit 35 and Baek Kang, whom Cho Gwang-il would find, into Korea except by smuggling them in.
“Are they people connected to the North Korean government?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“…….”
Miki Ho fell into thought.
If they were connected to the North Korean government, it could become a problem later.
But Seong Ha-yeong’s offer was sweet enough to justify the risk.
In the end, Miki Ho decided to accept her proposal.
“On a day like this, we can’t leave out the alcohol.”
Miki Ho called over a casino server outside and ordered wine.
A little later, the server came back with the bottle and glasses.
“Château Margaux. A 1983 vintage.”
After taking a sip, Seong Ha-yeong said as much.
Château Margaux from 1983 was a wine that cost well over ten million won a bottle, and Miki Ho was startled to see that she had identified not only the wine but the year it had been produced.
“Just who are you, Ms. Jane?”
Miki Ho asked with an unreadable expression.
And Kang-hae was no different.
As a former army lieutenant in his mid-twenties now working in the National Security Office, he knew far too much to be believable.
Buzz—
Buzz—
Then Kang-hae’s phone rang.
Two messages arrived one after the other from an unknown number.
Seong Ha-yeong turned to look at Kang-hae.
And she saw his expression go cold and hard as he checked the message.
One photograph of Ha Seok-jun, drenched in blood.
And beneath it, an address somewhere in Macau.
It had been sent by Byeon Dong-jin.