Chairman Cha Wonseok's Legacy, Part Three
"You were pretty popular in there."
"I've always had a bit of a following. Anyway, you handled yourself well. Who would have thought that man would actually show up."
"Oh—the one from earlier?"
"Park Mingi. He's filth. I married you so I wouldn't have to get tangled up with him."
"No wonder he didn't look like an ordinary man."
The smell of blood, a black aura, and a killing intent that flashed like drawn steel. This was a man who had taken lives before.
"Be careful. Park Mingi runs with gangsters. He won't let this go."
"So does that come with hazard pay?"
"Are you always this optimistic? It's dangerous. For the time being, take Secretary Na with you wherever you go."
"And what good does being pessimistic do me?"
"I should have kept my mouth shut."
Cha Jiyeon stole a glance at the seat beside her, then turned her face straight ahead.
"Was there any real substance at The Meeting?"
"There was. We agreed to a joint marketing campaign with Saengsong this summer, and if it goes well, a technology partnership looks possible. Amju might even take our products on an OEM basis."
"Oh-ho."
"It looks like nothing more than rich kids socializing, doesn't it? The Saengsong and Amju families don't show up for no reason. That room is a stage for business."
"Well, then putting up with the discomfort meant something."
"Thank you. Thanks to you, I got through my debut in one piece, so you don't have to come next time."
"How could I stay away? There were plenty of men circling you like hawks. You're my wife. I have to look after you."
He said it lightly, but Seonggi felt as if he had seized a chance that would not come twice. If not for Park Mingi, he might have made contact with far more of them.
"Let's not get too lost in the role-play. We only married on a contract. And from what I saw tonight, quite a few women seemed to like you."
"They were staring, all right. One even sat down beside me on purpose. Luna Kim, was that her name?"
"Most of them know this marriage is a cover, so of course they do. And Luna Kim is no ordinary woman."
"That woman?"
"She's the CEO of Wonmart's Korea branch. Wonmart never puts a non-American in charge of a branch, not even here. That alone tells you her ability is exceptional. There's already talk that Wonmart is building an online mall to crack the Korean market."
"The Korean market is small. I doubt it would do them much good."
"Korean-made goods are the trend right now. China's Aladdin and Tamu aren't trying to enter this market for nothing. If it sells in Korea, it sells around the world."
"Aha."
"Have you always been this interested in business? Listening to you, I almost thought I was talking with the directors."
"I need to make money."
"Is what you've already made so little? From Grandfather's estate you hold 0.2 percent of Gwangmyeong Corporation. That alone should be worth at least ten billion won."
"That's stock, not cash. And from what I've seen, the Yangpyeong Mansion has no shortage of places for money to leak."
"If you need anything, say so. I can at least cover a stipend to keep up your standing."
"I'm fine."
How long am I supposed to play the fake husband and live off what I'm given?
"Thank you."
"Pardon?"
Caught off guard, Cha Jiyeon turned wide eyes on him.
"I mean my parents' house. I should have been the one seeing to that. Still, thank you. I'll pay the money back before long."
"You don't have to pay it back, so don't trouble yourself over it. Legally, we are husband and wife."
She said it, then smiled, bright and sudden. Beautiful. She was truly beautiful. If only she weren't such a narcissist. If only she weren't an alpha girl. Hell—narcissist or alpha girl, if they were truly married. If he could wake every morning to this woman's face. Seonggi swallowed, hard.
The hour was late, but Seonggi had left his room on the second floor and was roaming between the living room and the study. Something was here. His instincts insisted that something was wrong, and yet his mind could not name what.
Chairman Cha Wonseok had given him the number 1106, and he had already brought the key up from the warehouse. If anything had been hidden, it would be inside the Yangpyeong Mansion. The second son, Cha Gihyeok, was said to have torn the basement apart in his search.
Seonggi himself had gone through the house several times and found nothing concealed. Even so, his instincts were sending a powerful signal that something here was not as it should be, and so he kept passing back and forth between the living room and the study, looking.
What is it? What's off? Something about this feels wrong.
Then, without warning, a clock began to chime. Dong. Dong. Dong...
The grandfather clock...!
There was a grandfather clock in the second-floor study. And why should that be obvious? What madman put a chiming clock in a study, a room where a person was meant to read and concentrate? The tick of the mechanism was loud, and the bell, when it struck, was enough to startle anyone. Tick. Tock. Tick...
Seonggi approached it. The clock was mahogany, some two meters tall, and it had to weigh fifty kilograms at the very least. He opened the case and looked inside. It was wound by key, and the winding tool sat fitted into a little compartment. The hands were ornate, and every numeral on the face had been carved in relief.
"Hm?"
On a whim, he pressed a number. It sank inward, then slowly rose back into place.
"Found it."
He waited for the face to reset, then pressed again. He pushed 1, and when the numeral rose once more, he pushed 1 a second time. Then, in place of 0, he pressed 12, and after that, 6.
A heavy chime answered. Deng.
Chrrrk. Chrrrk. Chrrrk... The bookcase—no, the wall built as one piece with the bookcase—began to move. Because the shelves and the wall were a single structure, he had never even imagined they could shift. Of the three cases, the center one sank backward, then slid away behind the shelf to its left with a low grind.
"Whoa..."
A massive black vault had revealed itself, and the sound of wonder left him before he could stop it. It looked very old. A dial sat on the door, and beside it a keyhole. Seonggi fetched the key he had found in the warehouse, fitted it into the lock, turned it, and spun the dial to 1106.
Thunk! With a bright, satisfying sound, the vault door opened.
"Ghk—!"
The sight stole the breath from his lungs. A meter wide, a meter eight tall, some eighty centimeters deep, and packed to the walls. There were four shelves in all, and the one that seized his eye first was the bottom.
"How many is this? One, two, three..."
About three hundred one-kilogram gold bars. At the current market price, the pile cleared sixty billion won without effort, and given a little more time the price of gold would climb without a ceiling.
The shelf above it was crammed with banded cash—Korean won, dollars, euros, yuan, and yen heaped in stacks. That compartment was the widest of them; it had clearly been built to hold as much paper money as possible. Seonggi pulled the bundles out and counted them one by one. Each currency had been packed as straps of a hundred bills, then bound again in sets of ten. The won came to roughly a hundred such bundles, about five billion won. The dollars were a hundred bundles of one hundred thousand each: ten million dollars, roughly fourteen billion won. The euros were much the same, ten million euros, about seventeen billion won. The yuan came to ten million, around two billion won, and the yen was one billion yen, about ten billion won.
Converted into won, the cash alone totaled forty-eight billion. An astonishing sum, and yet, measured against Chairman Cha Wonseok's scale, almost modest. Most likely it was emergency money he had set aside.
The shelf above the cash was full of papers, a thick sheaf printed with the words Gwangmyeong Corporation Stock Certificate. The lost paper securities of Gwangmyeong Corporation—fourteen percent of the company—had been sitting here all along.
And on the top shelf lay an envelope, with a USB drive and something like a ledger beside it.
"Forgive me, Grandfather. I was so blinded by the gold and the cash that I found your letter last."
The guilt was absurd, and he knew it. Who, with their eyes turned inside out by gold and money, was going to notice a letter? He opened the envelope, and it was exactly what he had expected.
To whoever finds this.
Congratulations!
I gathered here, little by little, the money I set aside over the years. I paid my taxes properly and earned it cleanly, so you needn't worry.
I had hoped the one to find this would be you, Jinpyo. But you don't even come to see your father, so the chances are high it isn't you.
In any case, whoever is reading this, please put it to good use. Just one thing: look after the places I have sponsored all this time. And take good care of my son, Yohan.
Then I will have no regrets. Spend it as you please.
The Bitcoin wallet passphrase is "spend it as you please."
— Cha Wonseok
"Hahahaha..."
He couldn't help it. The laughter broke out of him.
"Understood, Grandfather. I'll put it to good use."
Forty-eight billion won in cash, sixty billion in gold bars, and paper securities that, even by a rough count, came to something like ten trillion. In a single moment Choi Seonggi had become a tycoon of staggering scale. The blood seemed to boil through his whole body. He wanted to shout, but Madam Go and Director Shim might wake, so he kept quiet.
He opened the ledger that had lain beneath the letter. Dates, times, places, and the names of everyone the old man had met were written out in detail, and every entry was from ten years ago. It looked like a record of bribes paid into political and business circles.
"A meticulous man."
Traces from a decade past. A ledger like this was useless. Better to throw it away. And yet—wait. The fortune of Chairman Cha Wonseok, the man who had built Gwangmyeong Group into the fifth-largest conglomerate in the country, amounted to only a hundred billion won? No. Once the stock certificates were counted, the figure became astronomical. Of course the inheritance had already settled real estate, shares, and businesses running into the tens of trillions. Even so, there was no chance the chairman had saved only this much.
He hurried back to his room, turned on his laptop, and plugged in the USB.
"They said you were a curious man, Grandfather. You kept up with the trends, too."
Just as he had expected, a cryptocurrency wallet was on the drive. He entered the passphrase in English—spend it as you please—and the wallet opened.
"Nngh..."
He had to pound his knee with his fist to keep the groan from escaping.
1,005.
One thousand and five bitcoins. Even a rough calculation made his head swim. At a hundred million won apiece, that was already more than a hundred billion.
"Waaaaah..."
Seonggi flopped onto his back across the bed. As the price of bringing the late chairman, Cha Wonseok, back to life, he had come into a fortune too vast to see the end of.
"You knew Chairman Cha Wonseok had hidden a massive treasure?"
"Yes... of course. I'm his secretary."
"I wondered, and there it is..."
Of course he would have known. Na Dohyung had moved as Cha Wonseok's hands and feet for nearly ten years, close enough that the chairman had even told him where the warehouse with the vault key was kept. It would have been stranger if he hadn't known.
Seonggi hesitated a moment over whether to tell him, then decided he would. Keeping silent would only cost him the man's trust later.
"Did you find it?" Na Dohyung asked as he drove, as if it were nothing at all.
"Yeah. I found it."
"Congratulations."
"This isn't only my celebration. Secretary Na, congratulations to you too!"
"Sir?"
One way or another, the moment had come to bind Na Dohyung to him.
"How much did you receive from Grandfather's estate?"
"Looking after my mother and my younger siblings was already more kindness than I deserved, and still he gave me a billion won. I refused. I said I didn't need it. But the chairman insisted... He told me to live happily alongside you, sir, and pressed it into my hands."
"And your salary?"
"A little under two hundred million won."
"From now on, make it five hundred million!"
"Sir?"
"And open the bag!"
Na Dohyung opened the bag on the passenger seat. It was full of banded cash.
"What is this?"
"Your share. A billion won."
"...This is far too much. Even if you didn't give me anything like this, I would still do my utmost..."
"Your second sibling got into medical school, didn't they? And the eldest is studying in the States... That costs a fortune. Take it and use it."
"B-Boss."
"It isn't free! We hunted that treasure together. A partner gets his share!"
"Even so... it's too much."
"Don't argue anymore. I took far more than that for myself."
"Understood."
The light changed, and the car pulled forward again. Seonggi was on his way to meet Attorney Jeong Byeonghwan.
The last time they had spoken, Attorney Jeong Byeonghwan and Lee Gukjin, CEO of GJ Asset, had told him to establish a corporation. Now he thought he understood why. They had already caught the scent of something—or else Chairman Cha Wonseok had dropped them a hint before he died.
"And Secretary Na!"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you know someone named Yohan? Cha Yohan."
"Th-that is..."
Na Dohyung flicked a glance at him through the rearview mirror.
"You can tell me. Grandfather asked me to look after him."
"Ah... truly?"
"Yes."
Only then, as if a weight had lifted, did Na Dohyung speak.
"Chairman Cha Jinpyo knows, but no one else must ever find out. Cha Yohan is... a person with certain problems."
"They said he's Grandfather's son. So he'd be an uncle to me?"
"As you may have guessed, Mr. Cha Yohan is not of the direct line. Strictly speaking, he is Chairman Cha Jinpyo's half-brother."
"Then he must be getting on in years. Is he ill?"
"He does have an illness, yes. And the problem is... hah."
Na Dohyung steadied his breath and went on.
"This year, he is twenty-two."
"What? How old? Twenty-two? Then how old was Grandfather when he had him?"
That meant the old man had fathered a son pushing seventy. At the sheer absurdity of it, Seonggi's mouth fell open.
This grandfather really lived without leaving a single thing undone. Not one.