Crime-Ridden District
While Yeon-woo watched the concert, the operatives drove the black van serving as their operations vehicle toward the district they intended to investigate.
"Check your personal firearms thoroughly. The security situation is extremely bad, so if anything goes down, take preemptive action at your own discretion."
"Understood."
At Kim Su-hyeok's words, Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon nodded and double-checked the body armor they were wearing and the pistols holstered at their hips.
The area they were about to enter was a district of such extreme insecurity that even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised tourists not to set foot there.
Cracolândia — translated into Korean, it meant "the land of crack."
As they circled the darkened streets once in the black van, surveying the scene, they saw people everywhere walking with their hips thrust back, swaying like zombies as they stared blankly into empty air. The side effects of the drugs had already begun stiffening the muscles throughout their bodies, forcing them into that posture. In other words — addicts.
The operatives parked at the boundary line into the high-crime zone and climbed out. Dressed head to toe in black, each of them pulled a cap or beanie low over their eyes.
"Report to HQ every thirty minutes. You two infiltrate Cracolândia and locate the targets."
"Yes, sir."
Having absorbed Kim Su-hyeok's orders, Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon nodded and vanished into the pitch-black darkness between the buildings.
In truth, for all that it was called a high-crime zone, most of what went on was petty street crime — snatching smartphones and running, or two-man teams on motorcycles waving pistols they didn't even have the guts to fire, shaking down passersby for their handbags. That level of insecurity could be extremely dangerous for ordinary tourists, but to the operatives, it was laughable.
Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon may have been the junior members among the operatives currently working together, but they were still veterans who had fought through urban combat where bullets whistled past their faces every second, and who had emergency-landed at a closed airport to extract stranded nationals from a country locked in civil war, moving through the war zone as casually as if it were their own backyard.
That was why Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon walked the dark night streets of the high-crime zone with confident strides. And still, no one approached them.
It made sense. The more you lived in a place like this, the sharper your instincts for survival became. Even the destitute of Cracolândia — people who sat under tents that looked ready to collapse in a stiff breeze, snorting the cheapest, most addictive street drugs that cost only a few hundred won a hit — had street smarts. Two East Asian men walking through this neighborhood with unhesitating, confident steps and terrifying eyes were the kind of people you absolutely did not mess with. Whether they were Chinese gangsters, yakuza, or North Koreans, nobody could say — but the safest course was to look away and mind your own business.
"Hmm. We need to blend in to gather intel, but the bastards are catching on and going to ground."
"We'll stake out a stairwell in some building. When things get noisy, we tail them quietly."
Lee Gyu-jin nodded at Park Jung-hyeon's suggestion. Once the operation was underway, Park Jung-hyeon had stopped making those absurd remarks about being hungry or craving gukbap — which was reassuringly professional of him.
Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon had entered the high-crime zone to find this neighborhood's low-level thugs. Mapping their movements as thoroughly as possible was the pair's mission. Any arms dealer with real clout in this district would inevitably be run by a criminal organization. The only way to find them was to start at the very bottom and work their way up.
Meanwhile, Kim Su-hyeok was driving separately through various parts of São Paulo, scouting locations that a criminal organization might use as a base of operations and mapping the surrounding geography.
This really is Brazil. These guys have set up shop right behind a police station.
He could see men loitering near a fire burning in a steel drum, one hand each shoved inside their jackets as they prowled the area. That hand inside the jacket almost certainly held a gun. And the five-story building behind them had men constantly coming and going — far too much traffic for any ordinary residential building.
Kim Su-hyeok marked the location on his map and moved on.
After the concert, on the ride back to the hotel, Yeon-woo pressed his throbbing temples and spoke.
"Whew. Being in the audience is pretty exhausting too."
"Still, it was pretty fun, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. I knew a lot of the songs."
Ever since getting wrecked at song-guessing while filming Saebyeol Family, he had been listening mainly to Top 100 tracks — so he recognized quite a few of the songs that came up at the concert. Thanks to that, Yeon-woo had been able to hum and sing along.
Every time the broadcast cameras caught Yeon-woo lip-syncing along with the performers on stage, fans would have been mass-producing short clip videos in real time. On the other hand, it was a tremendous relief that only the video went out and no one could actually hear him sing. The only person suffering a full-blown pupil tremor from Yeon-woo's dissonance — which somehow cut straight through the noise of the concert hall — was Kim Min-su, sitting right next to him.
"Are you hungry at all?"
"I'm fine. What about you, Min-su hyung?"
"Hmm, I think I'll order something once we get to the hotel."
"SL Electronics is covering all the expenses anyway, so go ahead and order as much room service as you want. We've got to get our money's worth."
Kim Min-su nodded at Yeon-woo's words. Looking at him more carefully, Yeon-woo noticed that Min-su seemed to have put on a fair bit of weight since they had arrived at Guarulhos Airport.
"I see you've already been putting that into practice."
"That I have. Brazilian food suits me pretty well, actually. Ah, it'd be perfect if I just had some gochujang, though…"
At Kim Min-su's words, Yeon-woo thought of the tube of gochujang sitting in his suitcase — something he always packed but had never once used.
"I've got tube gochujang. I'll give it to you at the hotel."
"Oh, gochujang? Really?"
"Yeah. My mother always tells me to pack it for overseas schedules, so I bring it every time."
Kim Min-su crowed with delight at the unexpected gochujang. The local food was tasty enough, but something about it left a greasy aftertaste that made him desperately crave the sharp heat of Korean spice.
They chatted about this and that until the car arrived at the hotel. Yeon-woo went up to the hotel room with Kim Min-su, found the gochujang in his suitcase, and handed it over.
"You really did pack gochujang!"
"I don't eat it anyway, so feel free to use it all. I'm not feeling great tonight, so I'm going straight to bed. If anyone tries to reach me overnight, handle it for me and let me know tomorrow."
Yeon-woo had been massaging his temples even in the car on the way back, so Kim Min-su nodded.
"Yes, sir. Rest well. I'll hang a Do Not Disturb card on the door on my way out."
"Thank you."
He would be issuing operational orders all night, so any interruptions would be a problem. Kim Min-su had said he would hang a so-called DND card — a Do Not Disturb card — on the doorknob on his way out, so no one would bother Yeon-woo until morning.
The moment Kim Min-su left the room with the gochujang, Yeon-woo opened his laptop on the bed and spoke to Han Hae-un.
"Schedule's done. Any results from the operatives?"
"Yes. As you instructed, Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon have entered Cracolândia and are tailing several lowlifes, mapping their primary routes."
"Good. Those neighborhood thugs always fence the goods they pickpocket during the day that same night. They know perfectly well there's nothing to gain by holding onto them. Let's reverse-trace along that route."
"Understood. Lee Gyu-jin is on Channel 4, Park Jung-hyeon on Channel 5."
At Han Hae-un's words, Yeon-woo operated the laptop and brought up the live video feeds the operatives were transmitting in real time.
"Has Kim Su-hyeok found anything?"
"He's identified several locations suspected of being organizational bases, but he hasn't determined which of them belong to the arms dealers yet."
"Mm. We'll find that out in the next phase, as planned."
Connecting to Channel 2 on the laptop brought up the feeds from the operations vehicle and Kim Su-hyeok. Looking over the points Kim Su-hyeok had marked on the map during his survey, Yeon-woo nodded.
"He found quite a few. This should be enough. If he keeps poking around, they might catch on — tell Kim Su-hyeok to link up with the other two."
"Yes. Issuing the order now."
Han Hae-un immediately relayed the instruction to Kim Su-hyeok, who U-turned the vehicle and headed for the high-crime zone where the other two operatives were.
"How's the video delay?"
"Even with the best equipment, it's pretty severe. Running at around 1,170 milliseconds of lag right now."
Given that Han Hae-un was on the opposite side of the planet in Korea, a certain amount of delay was inevitable. With Han Hae-un receiving video and audio roughly a second behind, it was better for Yeon-woo — who was on the ground — to issue direct orders in an emergency. In the field, a single second's difference could mean the difference between life and death when things turned critical.
Well, this isn't a battlefield. It probably won't come to that.
While Kim Su-hyeok was linking up with the other two operatives, the targets they had been tailing entered a building. Han Hae-un scratched the back of his head as he tried to look up the building online.
How bad does the security have to be for that street to not even have Street View…? And this is the capital.
Comparing aerial photos was useless — every surrounding building looked more or less the same. There was no choice. The operatives would have to do it the hard way.
"Photograph the exact address of the building the targets entered."
"Roger."
As Lee Gyu-jin approached the building, a man guarding the entrance shoved a hand into his left pocket and came toward him. There was almost certainly a gun in that pocket.
Looking around with a deliberately clueless expression, Lee Gyu-jin played the part of a lost tourist and walked toward the approaching man first. Of course, behind him, Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon were concealed in the darkness with the man in their sights — so if he tried anything stupid, he would end up looking like a honeycomb.
"Excuse me, could I ask for directions? I think I've gotten lost."
He asked in English, and the other man seemed to understand well enough, answering with the heavy accent characteristic of Latin languages.
"Stupid bastard. You picked a real bad place to get lost. If you don't clear out of here fast, those vagrants over there drooling at you will strip you down to the last hair on your head."
Lee Gyu-jin pretended to be frightened, turning his body so that his left wrist — the one wearing the watch — faced the building entrance, and asked again.
"Which way do I go to find a street with taxis? I've been wandering around this area for a while and I haven't seen a single one."
The man looked him up and down, clicked his tongue, and pointed in one direction.
"Run that way for about ten minutes. You'll get close to Bom Retiro — Koreatown. If you value your life, run like hell."
"Th-thank you."
In the meantime, Han Hae-un had pulled the address from the camera footage.
"Alameda Nothmann, Campos Elíseos, São Paulo. Address confirmed. The building owner is listed as Igor Cavaleta."
Yeon-woo stroked his chin at Han Hae-un's report.
"Check if that name is on Interpol's Red Notice list."
"What? If he were on the Red Notice list, he wouldn't put the building under his own name, would he?"
Yeon-woo shook his head.
"South America is a place that defies common sense. Just run the search."
"Understood."
A few minutes later, Han Hae-un's reply came back.
"…It's a hit. Smuggling, human trafficking — quite the résumé."
"South American types treat notoriety as a form of prestige, so they take their own names seriously."
Of course, the man wasn't the top dog who ran this entire district — but he had enough of a reputation that reverse-tracing from Igor Cavaleta should lead them to the illegal arms dealer within a day or two.