SK Asset 7
Na Dohyung had gone to settle the parking fee, and Choi Seonggi was walking back to where he had left the car.
Three men in black suits stood ahead of him, far too massive to pass for hotel security. When Seonggi turned to take another way around, two more in the same black suits were already blocking the path behind him. The builds on them were pure organized crime.
"You have business with me?"
"We've got business. Sure we do."
A familiar face stepped out from between the two hulks. Park Mingi.
"So it was you. What, you hauled a whole crew out here just to beat me down?"
"You've watched too many movies. Let's go somewhere quiet and talk."
"If you were worth talking to, you wouldn't have brought these lumps."
"Lumps? Boss, mind if I soften this bastard up first?"
One of them flared at the word.
"Do as you like. He needs a little education."
Park Mingi said it with a smile.
"You heard him. Don't kill him—go easy!"
"You can go hard!"
Seonggi said it at his ease, hands still in his pockets. Beside Park Mingi, one of the lumps—Yoo Jeongman of the Gyeolsapa—was trembling head to toe. He was swallowing his temper.
There were always types who got cocky like that. Phantoms who had picked up a little martial arts somewhere, swaggered until a few teeth got knocked loose, and then begged to be spared. Just looking at them sent his rage boiling past anything he could stand.
I'll make you shit blood today.
He muttered it and was just about to jerk his chin at the men behind him.
"Boss! What's going on?"
In that instant Na Dohyung came up beside Choi Seonggi.
"Hell if I know. Says he wants to talk, but he brought the lumps. Guess he wants to converse with his fists."
"Please step back, Boss. I'll handle this."
"Yeah, I was about to. At that level, Secretary Na can take them alone, can't he?"
Na Dohyung narrowed his eyes and looked at him.
"What, too much for you?"
"No, sir."
"They're not like the loan sharks. In their own heads they're professional fighters. Gangster trash."
"They're all the same in the end. That's President Park Mingi, isn't it? You really think you can pull this in a hotel garage covered in cameras?"
Na Dohyung said it looking straight at him, but Park Mingi pretended not to hear. He stood off to the side, picking at his ear. If a fight started, it had nothing to do with him.
"Hey! These brothers say they need a massage. What are you standing around for?"
At Yoo Jeongman's word, the lumps grinned and closed the distance.
"Give me a moment. I'll have this cleaned up in five minutes."
"Three."
"Sorry? You said they were more dangerous than the loan sharks. Gangster trash."
"Exactly. A man ought to show some improvement."
Seonggi's indifferent tone left Na Dohyung speechless. Did saying it just make it so? Those lumps looked as if they wouldn't even feel a hit to a vital point.
"Pile on!"
The lumps came charging in a rush. Na Dohyung launched himself in the same instant and drove a knee up into the jaw of the man in front. Crack. The man dropped. Na Dohyung landed and was just finding his center when another came swinging both arms at him, the air breaking around the blows.
He raised his guard to cover his face and, in the same motion, whipped a low kick into the man's thigh. Two kicks landed, each hard enough to snap a baseball bat.
"Aaaagh!"
The man screamed, clutched his leg, and collapsed where he stood.
"Not bad."
Seonggi clapped from where he had tucked himself between the cars. Why a man cheering from the sidelines should look so damn irritating, Na Dohyung couldn't say.
"Kill him!"
One of the lumps hurled his whole body at him. The plan was simple: get a hold of Na Dohyung, and the other two would finish him. But Na Dohyung slipped his torso aside and hooked a leg, and the man, unable to manage his own weight, went sprawling flat on the concrete.
In that opening, two more charged at once. A clean impact sounded, and one of them toppled like a dead tree—Na Dohyung's crisp roundhouse had caught him on the temple.
In the same instant, the last one got his hands on Na Dohyung.
"Ghhh..."
The man bent his waist with monstrous strength, and a cry tore out of him. Na Dohyung answered by driving his forehead into the man's face again and again. Blood burst from the nose. The nasal bone gave. Still the man clung on with vicious stubbornness, and in that span the two Na Dohyung had already dropped got back to their feet and closed in.
"Aaaagh!"
His all-or-nothing headbutt slammed into the space between the man's eyes, and the one holding him folded like a phantom.
The other two were already on him, and there was nowhere left to slip. He barely guarded the incoming fists and, whenever a gap opened, drove his own fist through it. He was the one landing the blows, and yet he was being forced onto the back foot. His whole body was buried in flesh; the only vital points still in the open were a temple and the philtrum. For their size, the men moved fast.
"Nngh..."
A fist would have done nothing to that right flank, so he drove his knee into it, and one man buckled. Before Na Dohyung could reset his balance, the one still standing wrapped his neck and locked in a guillotine choke. He tucked his chin so the arm couldn't dig into his throat, but the fight was as good as over.
"Kill this bastard!"
With the shout, another man drew a knife. The moment the blade moved for Na Dohyung's side, he saw what was coming and squeezed his eyes shut. In a span no longer than a blink, scenes from the life he had lived flickered through his head like a panorama.
"Gyaaaah!"
But the scream came from the wrong place. At first even Na Dohyung didn't understand what had happened. When he opened his eyes, the man with the knife had stabbed not him, but the lump who had the guillotine locked around his neck.
"Why—why'd you stab me, you son of a bitch!"
The man thrashed on the ground, screaming.
"I—I didn't—that guy kicked me!"
Somehow Choi Seonggi was standing right beside the man with the knife, grinning wide.
"Secretary Na, this is disappointing. If I hadn't stepped in, you were about to take a knife."
"I'm sorry, Boss."
"And why aren't you hitting the vital points?"
"Those men are nothing but fat and muscle. They don't have vital points."
It wasn't that he had refused to hit them. Their bodies were swollen thick with flesh and muscle, and there was no vital point worth striking. He had tried the solar plexus. He had tried a liver shot. There hadn't even been any impact.
"What do you mean they don't have any?"
"I'll kill you, you bastard!"
The lump with the knife lunged to stab Seonggi. There was a sickening crunch.
"Ghk—ghhk... gyaaaaah..."
Kicked square between the legs, the man rolled across the pavement. The sight was so horrific that Na Dohyung turned his head on pure reflex.
"You just kick them here."
Seonggi glanced at the man writhing in agony, then soccer-kicked him full in the face. The man went out cold. The lumps already on the ground had watched the whole thing.
"A man waving a knife around deserves at least that much courtesy. Relax. I'm not going to kick the rest of you, so don't piss yourselves."
Without quite meaning to, the lumps on the ground let out quiet sighs of relief.
"All right. Shall we talk? Hey! You said you wanted a conversation."
When Seonggi turned, Park Mingi was already a long way off.
"Later."
He turned his back, tossed the word over his shoulder, and fled into the hotel.
"Vile little bastard. Leaves his men and runs off alone."
"I learned something again today, Boss."
"Secretary Na, you need a lot more conditioning. If it really comes down to it, at least carry a telescopic baton."
Seonggi slipped his hands into his pockets and walked on ahead, and Na Dohyung followed.
Black Mamba.
That legend was probably Choi Seonggi. Na Dohyung was growing more certain of it by the moment. The gunshot scars along his flank and thigh. Fighting skill that was anything but ordinary. And above all, that bold, utterly unhurried attitude.
Five gangsters running wild with knives, and he still had that kind of ease. It meant a thing like this was truly nothing to him—that he had walked the line between life and death as casually as sitting down to a meal.
"Why do you keep sneaking looks at me?"
"Ah—it's nothing."
Their eyes met in the rearview mirror, and Na Dohyung looked away.
"Boss, what's that white shopping bag in the back seat?"
"Ah, this? A gift. A disability welfare group sent it to thank me for a donation."
"From what I saw, it's just an invitation and a lot of crude little things. If it's awkward to deal with, shall I throw them out?"
"No... how could I? The people who made these put their lives into them."
They did look as if they had been made with real effort, but the precision and the finishing fell short, as you would expect. Most of them were small dolls, keychains, refrigerator magnets, and the like. Some had loose stitches. Some of the knots were sloppy.
There was nowhere to use them, and no one to give them to. Carry them around and they would only be a burden. Even so, when he thought of someone with a disability pouring everything they had into making even one, he couldn't bring himself to throw them away. By making them, those people were proving—to themselves—that they were useful. That they could produce something.
"The more I look at you, Boss, the more remarkable you seem."
"Finished analyzing me already?"
"Not analyzing, exactly. It's just remarkable. I'm sorry—speaking as if a subordinate were passing judgment."
"I don't think of Secretary Na as a subordinate. Speak freely."
"I can't tell what kind of person you are. That's what makes it stranger. At first you seemed like an unemployed man with nothing to his name, and yet you're at ease. You're lean, but you fight well. You look cold, and yet you're warm and thoughtful. So I'm confused."
"People, Secretary Na."
"Yes."
"The harder you are to read, the better. Get yourself typed, and people go, ah, so he's that kind of man, pass judgment, and treat you accordingly. But someone who can't be typed—people never stop paying attention to him."
"I see. I learned something again today."
A method that worked on everyone else, and failed with only one person. No—two. Cha Jiyeon and Cha Yohan. The two of them were exactly alike in doing precisely as they pleased.
They had spent the whole day stuck together, and somewhere along the way he had grown close to Na Dohyung, almost like a brother. He didn't know what lay ahead, but it was a relief to have a colleague he could trust to watch his back.
When they got back to the house in Yangpyeong, Cha Yohan was not in his room. In Yangpyeong, nine at night was the dead of night. He must have gone out walking with Moneyball. He was certainly nothing like an ordinary person.
Seonggi changed his clothes and stepped into Cha Yohan's room. The computer was on.
"Let's see how much he's made."
Kuyom HTS was a platform that could trade both the Korean and American markets. He pulled up the balance.
"Ha! Hahaha... haha... son of a—"
He couldn't believe what was in front of him. He had first given the boy a hundred million won, then another nine hundred million, bringing the capital under management to one billion. Not even a week had passed, and that billion sat at nearly ten.
Was that even possible? One billion into ten billion?
It was a figure common sense refused to accept. A thousand-percent return in a single week—could such a thing exist? Even when the most powerful AI alive ran a simulated portfolio, the return came out around ten percent, and that was a full month's profit added together.
He had watched Cha Yohan trade. One trade every ten seconds at the slowest; three or four when he was busy. He barely touched the mouse, punching tickers into the number pad on the keyboard alone. He had every ticker memorized, of course, and unless he had also memorized every function and hotkey in Kuyom HTS, that kind of speed was impossible. Watching him do the same thing in the American market, he had to have the American names memorized too.
When Seonggi clicked out of the Kuyom window, news pages and search histories were still up, and a notebook beside the computer was packed edge to edge. Global trends and variables, spikes and crashes in raw materials, new bills in the major powers, government policy—everything Cha Yohan judged important was organized in dense lines. More astonishing still, he had distilled all of it down to its core and separately logged ten variables, every single day.
No genius alive, and no superintelligent machine, could produce a return like this. It simply didn't make sense.
The trade history showed thousands of transactions in a single day. At that volume, shouldn't Kuyom Securities be sending him a plaque of thanks for the fortune they were raking in on commissions? The fees alone would be an astronomical sum. From what he could see, winning trades and losing trades each made up about half. So how had he taken a thousand-percent profit? It was something common sense could not explain.
"Snoop."
Cha Yohan, back from his walk, was standing in the doorway with his eyes half-lidded, glaring at Choi Seonggi.