Special Committee for National Reconstitution (1)
"I'm back, Pavel."
"Good heavens—where did you come from…?"
"Hmm… from the shadows?"
Once I had finished everything that needed doing at the Pyeongsan nuclear facility, I returned the way I had come—by car. The only real difference between the outbound trip and the return was that this time I used Blink to drop straight into the vehicle.
From Pavel's perspective, waiting in the driver's seat, a surge of magic traces had suddenly rippled through the air and then I had simply popped into existence in the back seat. It was hardly strange that he would ask, half-stunned. Had I appeared without so much as a radio call to warn him I was coming—nothing but a sudden flare of magic—Pavel would have thrown a punch at the unknown signature on pure reflex. Twisted witch that I was, the kind who found thrills and adrenaline in having her body torn apart mid-combat, I still saw no reason to put my face in the path of that fist.
Through the rearview mirror I could see Pavel's expression of pure disbelief. I laughed—ahaha—and sank into the seat. Our head of security already knew I did whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like it. Instead of pressing further, Pavel asked about the mission.
"Is the work finished, my lady?"
"Yeah. I'll need to weigh it properly, but roughly a hundred kilos of plutonium. I wiped the relevant people's memories clean with Charm, and I fed Benjamin Ashford to the key personnel as well."
"That's a relief. Nothing of note happened on my end while I waited."
"Really? I half-expected as much, but hearing it directly is even more reassuring."
With that, everything that had happened today became a secret known only to members of the organization—and only those of a certain rank at that. As far as the Korean personnel involved were concerned, they would learn the truth only on the day those nuclear weapons were actually used.
It would be rather amusing if a warhead hit its target dead-on and still failed to trigger fission. I wondered whether they might end up like North Korea in the original history—firing off missiles day after day only to be ignored, buried under larger headlines.
No… wait. Outside of the United States, no one even knows the Republic of Korea has nuclear weapons yet…
That meant any Korean nuclear strike would almost certainly come as a surprise. In other words, if they launched a missile in a surprise attack and the thing inside turned out to be a dud, the backlash would be all the more ferocious. They would be laughed at, and the side that had nearly been hit by a nuclear attack would be livid beyond reason. From that perspective, it was better for everyone if the nuclear weapons stockpiled at the Pyeongsan facility never saw actual combat use.
"My lady—that blood…"
Shortly after I gave Pavel the order to drive, he caught sight of the bloodstains on my dress in the rearview mirror and his face went pale with alarm.
"Ah, this? Don't worry. It's not mine."
They were spatters from when I had slashed open a Korean mage's flesh with Baramil in the deepest underground chamber where I had seized the plutonium. I was still wearing the same outfit I had fought in. Not that I could have changed clothes down there—and there had been no particular reason to.
I fluttered the fabric Pavel had pointed out and glanced down to examine it. A long, straight smear ran from my chest all the way to my waist. Now that the fighting was over and I could finally look at myself with a clear head, I could understand why the head of security had been so startled. A wash or two would not be enough to save this dress.
I had wiped the blood from my face, but the spatters on the dress itself were beyond casual remedy. Then again, things were different now. Mid-combat I had not had the luxury of distinguishing myself from my opponent carefully enough to use Substitution or Blink for something so trivial—but in this calm moment, it was perfectly doable.
Still sunk into the seat, I spread my shadows around me. In the rearview mirror, my form grew hazy as it was gradually replaced by shadow, and Pavel looked on with open confusion.
"My lady, what are you…?"
"Hold on. I'll change and be right back."
Wrapping my entire body in shadow, I activated Substitution. The target was not my body itself, but the clothes a short distance away—the bloodstained dress, and everything underneath it: undergarments, shoes, the lot. Outside of a fight that demanded every scrap of attention from body and mind, setting a magic range with millimeter precision was trivial for me.
From the pocket dimension I summoned another set of clothes I had prepared in advance—again including undergarments and shoes. The brief spell passed; I reeled Shattenmädchen back in, and I was cleanly dressed.
"Hmm. Not bad at all."
The outfit I had changed into was, for all practical purposes, the same formal suit I usually wore. When in doubt, that was always the safest choice.
"So you can use it that way as well."
I adjusted a few pieces that had settled slightly off-center—a bra strap fixed a little uncomfortably on my shoulder, a skirt that had ridden up—and answered Pavel.
"It would be hard to use mid-battle… but then again, there's never a reason to change clothes in the middle of a fight, so it doesn't matter."
Pavel and I drove the pre-dawn highway back to Seoul. I checked thoroughly for tails; nothing had latched onto us.
I would have liked to pull out the plutonium the moment we arrived and inspect it with my own eyes, but unfortunately the organization still lacked sufficient related facilities in the Republic of Korea. Had this been Britain, I could have used the authority of the British government to begin converting the plutonium into nuclear artillery shells on the spot.
"Shall we send it at once?"
The moment we returned to the hotel, Delis asked me that question in my suite. She had apparently stayed up until dawn waiting for me.
"Yeah. Is everything ready?"
"Of course. People from the embassy are already here. All I need is for you to cast a perception-interference spell on Pavel."
"As reliable as ever. I was right to leave this to you, Delis."
The fact that I could not examine the plutonium here did not mean I had to sit idle until I returned to Britain. Embassies stationed in each country, under the Vienna Convention, could exchange a special class of mail that was not subject to inspection by either the sending or receiving state—the so-called diplomatic pouch. Before flying out from Britain, I had already sent specialized containers capable of storing radioactive material to the British Embassy in Seoul.
I intended to transfer most of the roughly one hundred kilos of plutonium into those containers, leaving only a small portion aside, and then ship the lot to Britain via diplomatic pouch. That way, the nuclear artillery shells could be prepared to match my return schedule. From my perspective, where every single day counted, cutting wasted time like this was the better option.
"All right, Pavel. I'll put a perception-interference spell on you."
"As you wish."
I cast the spell so that the embassy staff would mistake Pavel for the Minister of Magic. To the employees of the British Embassy in Seoul, it would look as though the Minister of Magic, his secretary, and a single "young" mage handling the practical work beneath them were carrying out a classified operation.
When it came time to transfer the plutonium into the radiation-storage containers, I did not need to worry about leakage. Ordinarily one would have to don lead-lined protective gear and work with extreme care—but I had Shattenmädchen. All I had to do was infiltrate the interior of each container with shadow and use Blink. The process of transferring the plutonium was essentially the reverse of the theft I had carried out at the Pyeongsan facility.
What emerged were a dozen or so boxes of carefully portioned plutonium. Within a fortnight, they would be processed into the weapons I wanted and waiting for me.
With the plutonium dispatched to Britain, I no longer had any particular business remaining in Korea for the time being. Negotiations over the redevelopment of Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City with Ham Cheon-ho, the representative director of Cheonma Sangsa, could be left to the Governor of Hong Kong, his staff, and the organization's local branch members. The rest of the miscellaneous work was the same—mostly financial matters handled by Finance Minister Oleg Lazarev, the kind of business that involved money.
Whether you can really call transactions of tens of billions of won "miscellaneous work" is another question…
By this point, of course, we had already liquidated most of our holdings on the Korean stock market and shifted them to Hong Kong. That decision had been driven entirely by the "abnormality" of the Korean market. I recalled the Finance Minister nearly in tears as he declared, "I cannot roll money alongside idiots and morons!" Direct investment by the organization had decreased somewhat from that point on, but a number of derivatives positions remained, so the Finance Department's work had not been fully wound down.
In any case, all of it was work that could be left to my subordinates. None of it required my personal attention.
The next item on the schedule was to move to the neighboring country and meet with Her Imperial Highness—to reaffirm the organization's exclusive position over the Japanese Communist Party and further tighten the encirclement pressing the Reds in the Far East.
That plan, however, fell apart from the very start. Strictly speaking, calling it "fallen apart" was a slight stretch, since no date had been firmly set—but a reason for me to remain in Korea had suddenly reappeared.
"Who wants to see me…?"
"The Chairman of the Republic of Korea's Special Committee for National Reconstitution. The man claims he has come bearing a message from the President."