Minhwa and Kang Hojung
"The American side handed the kickback over to Hojung in Bitcoin bought with untraceable slush funds. Kang Hojung converted that Bitcoin to cash and parked it in an overseas account."
Crooks always stashed their money in overseas accounts the second they got the chance—Swiss ones, more often than not. It was practically a law of nature. While that thought ran through my head, Myeongsuk kept talking.
"We intercepted the money before the deposit went through."
"What?"
It was huge. The kind of thing you only saw in dramas. And even if the money was dirty, was it really all right to just snatch someone else's cash? Was it even possible? I also couldn't imagine Kang Hojung taking the loss of that much money lying down. A jolt of fear went through me—what if he hired muscle or a hitman, the way they did in the movies, and came after us?
"W-wait. You said it was an enormous sum. You stole that much money and you think he's just going to sit still? Aren't we about to get dragged into something massive?"
Myeongsuk, Jeongmi, and Yongjin didn't look anywhere near as rattled as I felt. Myeongsuk spoke with an easy expression.
"Of course he won't sit still. We're not idiots, so we didn't use some crude method. And honestly, if we'd handled it that simply, we never would have gotten the money out in the first place."
I looked at her, something off about the whole thing.
"You've been saying 'we' this whole time. Were all three of you in on it from the start?"
Yongjin clapped me on the shoulder.
"'In on it'? We're not some gang of villains. But yeah, we planned it together from the beginning. Though these two did by far the bulk of the work."
Myeongsuk dipped her head slightly.
"Yongjin filled the gaps we couldn't cover with his connections. We couldn't have done this without that."
What was this? They were talking like they'd pulled off some grand heist. I still had no idea what was going on. I waved a hand between the three of them as they sat there warmly praising one another.
"Hold on. I still don't understand a damn thing. Explain it to me step by step."
Myeongsuk nodded and turned to me.
"Of course. But please understand that there are still parts I can't explain to all of you. I believe the day will come when I can tell you everything, but for now I think it's a little premature."
Having laid that groundwork, Myeongsuk began.
"I first learned about Minhwa while I was looking into something. More precisely, I learned about her husband, Kang Hojung. The man was involved in every kind of garbage you can imagine—his name came up, directly or indirectly, in one scandal after another. The fact that no one could touch him only meant he had real power. And if you dig a little deeper, the source of that power was his father-in-law—Minhwa's father."
Myeongsuk paused and shifted in her seat.
"He's built some of it himself by now, but it started with her father. Even though he's retired, his influence is still considerable. Once I knew about Minhwa, I approached her with the goal of recruiting her—and she joined us surprisingly easily. It didn't take long to see that, for all her outward appearance, she was drowning in loneliness and emptiness. I figured if I could just get her far enough to hear Jisin's words, she wouldn't be able to help falling into Cheonsiman-gyo. And Jisin didn't disappoint me. His gift really is extraordinary."
Myeongsuk looked at me and gave a thumbs-up. I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to feel proud or mortified.
"Just as I'd expected, she fell head over heels for Cheonsiman-gyo. One day Minhwa came to me and said she wanted to find herself. She had walked the path her parents laid out without resistance through her teens, and that momentum carried her into adulthood living exactly as they wished. Given the family's power and wealth, that path was a flower-strewn road, a stairway to heaven—there was no real reason to rebel. She had always been able to claim the highest seats in society simply by following the road her parents made, so she decided that road was the right one and never even imagined another life. Her circle was packed with people who wanted something from her, and she went through life believing they all genuinely cared for her. Marriage was the same. She thought marrying the man her parents wanted was the correct thing to do, and the truth is she'd never had a real romance even as a student."
Some of this I'd heard from Minhwa herself; the rest I could have guessed. Naive if you wanted to call it that, foolish if you preferred—that was the life Minhwa had lived.
"The marriage she'd hoped for never came. There was no love from her husband, and no maternal feeling for the child born of that marriage either. Even so, she still tried, in her own way, to build a life. She threw herself into the school parents' association, did volunteer work here and there, tried to expand her community. Masked people still swarmed around her, and she took it as the natural order of things. Then she heard Jisin's words, and her eyes began to open. The truths she had vaguely sensed as she grew older, the ones she had closed her eyes to and denied—she finally found the courage to face them and move forward. She had already known her husband was keeping a second household, already known he was committing all kinds of evil in society, but she had buried those truths. Now she was forcing herself to meet them head-on, healing herself with Jisin's words whenever the despair and pain hit. Once she believed she could overcome it, Minhwa went and preached to her parents. Her father had been floundering in a swamp of regret for decades, so it wasn't hard to get him to come to our gatherings. And of course, he ended up in tears listening to Jisin."
When Myeongsuk stopped, a hush settled over the room. Everyone was holding their breath at a story that could have come out of a novel. I felt the weight of it more than anyone. The dark shadows that had flickered at the edges of Minhwa's seemingly perfect life suddenly made sense, and I wondered if she was still clawing her way out of that pit even now. Her almost foolishly innocent smile rose in my mind, and my chest ached. Realizing that even a woman living in such abundance carried an emptiness no ordinary person could imagine made me feel, keenly, that there were other forms of suffering in the world.
Myeongsuk took in the strange atmosphere among us and pressed on.
"Minhwa's father was tormented by his past. It was already far too late, but he said he wanted to ease the pain that had been passed down even to her. I decided the time was right and made a proposal. If Minhwa was ever going to live happily, the cancer at the root of it all had to be cut out—and I told him Cheonsiman-gyo could do that. He said he would pay any price if only it could be done. That price, he made clear, included his own judgment—and every last scrap of the fortune he had gathered by dishonest means."
I cut in.
"Cheonsiman-gyo? Us? How?"
Myeongsuk turned to me with a smile.
"Jisin has already done what only Jisin could do. And we've finished our part as well."
"Me? What did I do?"
Jeongmi smiled at me too.
"In this whole affair, Jisin did the most important work of all."
Yongjin chimed in.
"That's right. If our Jisin hadn't taken hold of their hearts, we never could have even started."
I was still completely lost.
"I have no idea what any of that means. Spell it out. So what did we—no, what did you people do to that husband?"
Myeongsuk answered.
"As I said earlier, we took the one thing Kang Hojung loves more than anything in the world. Money. An unimaginable amount of it. He had staked everything he had on this gamble. Through Minhwa's father, we learned exactly how Hojung had gotten into the project and how he'd been stockpiling his slush funds all this time. He kept a paper company in Hong Kong for laundering money. Minhwa's father knew every detail of its existence. This time, too, he planned to cash out the Bitcoin through that company and park it in a Swiss account. There was a bit of a gamble on our end. If he'd used a different method this time, we never would have pulled it off."