The Design
Progress on the drama would take a little more time if they wanted the structure airtight.
Judging by the story that had emerged, Writer Choi Mi-hyeon—who always worked in lockstep with Director Kim Han-su—would handle the adaptation and the writing.
Director Kim Han-su and Writer Choi Mi-hyeon…
The thought of reuniting with the writer and director of his debut work left Yeon-woo with a strange, fresh swell of feeling.
If it goes into production, we could even promote it that way. That would work.
If Ryu Yeon-woo, Son Jin-uk, Director Kim, and Writer Choi came together again, they would at least lock down the viewers who had enjoyed Summer’s Closet.
The synopsis itself was solid enough, but if the finished script fell short of expectations, he fully intended to step in hard.
Saebyeol Entertainment actors would be starring and Saebyeol Media would be producing; they could not green-light a project on friendship or nostalgia alone.
I’m not just an actor anymore. I’m a producer too.
Yeon-woo set down the synopsis Director Kim had given him and stretched.
The theater company’s run was over, and the commercial shoot was still being coordinated, so his schedule had opened up.
Hmm. Time to clear the backlog.
The moment had come to bundle Jeong Tae-seon and James Choi together and send them both packing.
If we fold Byeon Hak-gyu into the same package while we’re at it, Baeksol will feel a real manpower vacuum in their grip on the entertainment side.
To keep them all on the palm of his hand and peel back their true faces one layer at a time, it was better to leave Byeon Hak-gyu of Plus10—whose systems they could already monitor in real time with the hacking tools—under watch for now.
Yeon-woo sat in his workshop chair and switched the mic back on.
“Looks like it’s about time to start cooking. Have you tracked down the small fry who were under ‘Hwang-geum’?”
The moment he finished, Han Hae-un’s answer came through.
“—The others were either cleaned up with Hwang-geum or we can still locate them. One of them, though—his trail’s gone cold. Sharp little bastard must have bolted overseas before the cleanup. Last destination was Minsk.”
“One of Hwang-geum’s men headed for Minsk right before he was taken care of…”
Yeon-woo stroked his chin, jotting something extra onto the operation order and revising the plan on the fly.
Minsk was the capital of Belarus.
The runaway subordinate of Hwang-geum had almost certainly chosen Eastern Europe on purpose—somewhere the NIS’s reach was thin, yet easy to move overland in any direction.
He had clearly prepared an escape route for exactly this kind of contingency.
“If one of Hwang-geum’s agents slipped the net, that actually makes things easier. We’ll use him.”
“—Hmm. Using him might be hard when even we can’t pin him down, Team Leader. Baeksol won’t find him either. Eastern Europe’s a blind spot for the NIS.”
It was a region with little strategic interest for Korea and no overseas teams stationed there from the old Soviet sphere; when the NIS needed information, they usually asked the Americans.
Baeksol would never request American cooperation over an internal matter of their own.
But Yeon-woo shook his head and added,
“That’s exactly what we use—the lack of information. These are the same people who just got their asses scorched trying to swallow LN. If internal intel on Jeong Tae-seon suddenly goes public, they’ll start getting paranoid and move in earnest to find the leak.”
They had erased every trace with meticulous care so far, so Baeksol would have a hard time finding the operatives from the Mokhwa Building—but there was no need to take unnecessary risks.
They already had proof that mid-tier actor Jeong Tae-seon had deliberately invited people to parties and engineered the drug scandals that ruined other actors, plus the smartphone records of him giving the orders himself.
But the delivery route for that information is what matters.
Baeksol must never be allowed to suspect that someone was controlling the whole affair.
Something seemed to click for Hae-un; his voice came back sharper.
“—Ah. So you want to make it look like the runaway was the one who tipped off the materials.”
“Exactly. Faking a cargo route so it looks like it came from Belarus is easy, right?”
“—Compared to forging entry-exit records, physical goods are trivial. Especially airmail.”
A large sea-freight manifest might be trickier because those channels were used for smuggling, but international postal items arriving by air had far weaker security.
What organization skilled enough to hack government agencies would bother hacking the Korea Post international mail network for profit?
When even immigration records could be cracked, planting false data in the postal service’s international system was child’s play.
“The prosecutor who handled the Jeon Gi-hun case last time did solid work. Doesn’t seem the type to fold under external pressure, and he had a sharp eye for finding the drugs hidden in that trunk.”
“—Prosecutor Kwon, the ‘Pit Bull.’ I’ll arrange for it to be assigned to him.”
Yeon-woo nodded at Hae-un’s words.
“Good. Let’s get busy. You take the Belarus side. Send me the info and messenger IDs of the reporters I’m currently running. I’ll handle the press.”
“—Understood.”
Hae-un sent Yeon-woo the details of the reporters who had been fed stories, along with the messenger IDs those reporters knew only as an anonymous tipster.
“All right. Time to handle the job the Team Leader gave me.”
Hae-un stepped into the workspace he had set up in one corner of his home.
Then he began hacking the Belarusian postal system and the Korea Post international mail linkage network, inserting the necessary data.
An international package departing Belarus and arriving addressed to Criminal Division 3 of the Seoul Northern District Prosecutors’ Office.
Following the actual route a real package would take, he entered the real names of the handlers along that path and the processing timestamps into the system.
Now it was time to build the physical object.
A quick online search, a few photos pulled, and he started printing.
“Hmm, Belarus… They still use stamps. I like the classic touch. Same stock the Russians use.”
He pulled Russian stamp paper from a drawer and began printing.
Then he switched on the desk lamp and fitted a loupe over his eye.
A loupe was a magnifying eyepiece used for examining details too fine for the naked eye—the kind jewelers used for appraising stones or surgeons used for delicate work.
Hae-un affixed the printed Belarusian stamps to an international document envelope and began carefully inking the postmark used by the Minsk post office over them.
What a wonderful world. The internet makes everything so easy. This blog owner is doing long-distance with a Belarusian guy.
Plenty of people assumed that a fully computerized modern society made forgery harder than in the past.
In reality, it had become easier.
Once you solved the digital records through hacking, the internet was overflowing with every scrap of information you could want. Even the exact postmark used by a post office in Minsk, Belarus—a place he had never set foot in—was only a few clicks away.
That was why the FBI’s budget for forgery detection kept climbing every year.
Thanks to a blogger exchanging letters with her boyfriend in Minsk, Hae-un finished a flawless envelope that looked as if it had departed from Minsk.
Inside that document envelope he placed a USB and supporting papers that had been manufactured not in Minsk, Belarus, but in Seoul, Republic of Korea.
This would be more than enough to prove every atrocity James Choi and mid-tier actor Jeong Tae-seon had committed.
“You nameless agent who used to work under Hwang-geum. I’m going to file one public-interest tip in your name. It’s all for a good cause, so don’t feel too wronged. I hope Baeksol never catches you.”
Meanwhile, Yeon-woo used the information Hae-un had sent to contact the reporters.
He instructed them that a major scoop would be coming soon, and that in the meantime they were to run special features stirring up the celebrities who had recently retired over drug scandals.
First, An Jun-ho needs to take some heat online.
He had never been that famous to begin with, and the drug case that buried him had been so bland and low-impact that, coldly speaking, his name recognition barely scraped B-list.
Even if the truth about Jeong Tae-seon shakes the entire country, that will probably be the end of it.
Most of the public would not spare a second thought for the rookie actors Jeong Tae-seon had used and discarded.
That was why the groundwork was necessary.
When you grill a steak, you salt it in advance. You have to throw on so much coarse salt it makes you worry it’s going to be too salty—that’s how you get it to taste right.
Netizens, by nature, were no different from a pack of hyenas prowling for prey.
The moment something happened, they chewed, tore, tasted, and savored.
They kept chewing until the blood ran freely—and if it later turned out that what they had been devouring was not “justice” after all?
Pot mentality.
A pot that heated fast and cooled fast had high thermal conductivity.
Objects with high thermal conductivity cooled quickly and heated quickly, but they also transferred heat to other objects just as fast.
Once the scalding pot learned the “fact” called a fact-check, public opinion would swing hard into sympathy for An Jun-ho.
The instant they realized the hate comments they had left and the iron hammers they had brought down on the “guilty” had been wrong, they would frantically repost articles and flood every community with related threads in a desperate bid to wash away the guilt.
And before long, articles calling for self-reflection began appearing online.
As the coverage hammered the entertainment industry’s drug problem from every angle—recent cases and old ones alike—even newspapers Yeon-woo did not control jumped on the bandwagon and started running their own pieces.
Public opinion took shape, and the community reaction, of course, turned ugly.
Naturally, every community began chewing, tearing, tasting, and savoring.
When a community was plastered with praise for something, dissenters appeared and the topic quickly shifted to the next piece of bait; interest died fast.
But when a community was plastered with condemnation, the firepower lasted a long time.
Going against a wave of hate alone usually meant getting torn apart yourself, so most users simply joined the pile-on.
Browsing the communities, Yeon-woo smiled.
“Heating up nicely.”
Burn hotter.
The stronger the fire, the better the heat would conduct and bring the next pot to a boil.
And only a few days later, a package carrying the scent of Minsk, Belarus—manufactured in Seoul—arrived at Criminal Division 3 of the Seoul Northern District Prosecutors’ Office.