Interlocking Blocks
"So you're saying they opened a bank account under your name, hyung, and those people deposit money into it every month?"
"Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. It's a bit scary and suspicious, sure, but I've been taking their money for over two years now."
"What if you get mixed up in some kind of crime?"
The man chatting familiarly with Lee Hyeong-rak, calling him hyung, was Kim Su-hyeok.
He had already spent several days disguised as a homeless man, casually inserting himself into conversations. To recreate the distinctive smell, he had even sprayed fermented anchovy sauce inside his clothes.
Lee Hyeong-rak, who had dropped his guard enough to start treating Kim Su-hyeok like a brother, snorted and answered.
"What would guys like us get mixed up in? If we die, we die. And if we end up eating prison food, at least we'd have a place to sleep and meals provided. Sounds pretty good to me."
At first he had been wary of the new face, and the homeless men seemed to have their own territories, so he had thrown his weight around a bit. But people living on the streets were fundamentally cut off from society and isolated for long stretches, starved for any scrap of human warmth. Lee Hyeong-rak quickly latched onto Kim Su-hyeok and started pouring out stories no one had even asked for.
Kim Su-hyeok nodded slightly at his words.
"Haah, you're right about that. Whether we eat the free meals out here or go inside and eat prison food, it's all the same. And the weather's about to get cold soon."
Lee Hyeong-rak hesitated, then continued.
"Kim. In winter, those people come and... Ah, never mind."
Watching Lee Hyeong-rak trail off, Kim Su-hyeok quietly turned his head and looked up at a tall building on the main road.
"If you've got good info, don't share it. Keep it to yourself. Talking with you for a bit, hyung, you seem like a really warm-hearted guy."
He didn't press the man who was trailing off. People always wanted to talk more when told not to.
As Kim Su-hyeok kept his mouth shut and stared into the distance, Lee Hyeong-rak fidgeted and then opened his mouth.
"Well, you know, those people would probably be happy if they took one more guy along. I dunno."
Having decided to talk, Lee Hyeong-rak started in. When Kim Su-hyeok just stared at him silently, he continued.
"Around the end of November, those people load us into a van and take us somewhere. Then we work at that factory all winter, eating and sleeping there, and they let us go around spring. They give us a decent amount of money too."
"They take guys like us, provide room and board, and put us to work? But why only in winter? Construction work has more openings in spring and fall."
"It ain't regular work. We handle some kinda medicine."
Kim Su-hyeok looked at him steadily.
"Aigoo, hyung must've studied more than I thought. Working at a pharmaceutical company or something."
"No, not that kind of medicine. The dangerous kind."
"...You mean drugs?"
"Shh! Someone might hear! It's just my guess."
Seeing Lee Hyeong-rak put his grimy, dirt-caked hand to his mouth and glance around, Kim Su-hyeok laughed inwardly. Who would listen to a homeless man rambling? Even now, people heading into the subway were giving the two of them a wide berth as they sat near the entrance, worried they might catch some disease.
"So hyung, what kind of work do you do when you get there?"
"All sorts of stuff come into the factory. TVs, refrigerators, even actual edible cakes and stuffed animals. All kinds of things, and every single one of them has bags of white powder hidden inside. We just cut them open and tear them apart, find the drug bags inside, and stack them neatly on one side. That's all."
"Doesn't sound too hard."
"Of course it's easy money. That's why I go every year even knowing I'll be locked up for months."
Then Han Hae-un's voice came through the earpiece hidden under Kim Su-hyeok's shaggy wig.
Kim Su-hyeok nodded and asked Lee Hyeong-rak again.
"So is that factory somewhere out in the mountains?"
"I don't really know either. When we go, they always blindfold us and put us in the van for a few dozen minutes. It spins around so much I get carsick, and I never get carsick. Once you're in, you eat and sleep there, so you can't leave until spring."
"Wow, thorough. They even use blindfolds?"
Lee Hyeong-rak thought for a moment, nodded, and continued.
"Ah, but last year when we went in and came out, the blindfold was a bit loose so I saw the ground a little. It wasn't the mountains, but it didn't seem like Seoul either. The pavement had those old sidewalk blocks still laid down. People like us who live on the streets pay close attention to the ground. They were those slightly zigzag interlocking blocks—green and red ones."
Kim Su-hyeok pointed somewhere with his finger.
"Blocks like those?"
At the pedestrian traffic island at the intersection he indicated, there were the common square sidewalk blocks.
"Ah, not those. Lately they don't lay those kinds much. Oh, and there's a room with a ventilation shaft where we smoke. Sometimes through the vent you can hear airplanes flying by."
"But why do those people take hyung to do the work? Why don't they just do it themselves?"
Lee Hyeong-rak scratched his head.
"Hell if I know. I just do what I'm told, take the pocket change, buy cigarettes and soju. What would I know? Ah, but after doing that work, my skin gets weirdly itchy and my head feels dizzy. It gets better again through spring and summer though."
Yeon-woo stroked his chin as he listened to the information Kim Su-hyeok was extracting.
"Hmm. Zigzag sidewalk blocks and airplane sounds..."
Yeon-woo nodded at the data Han Hae-un sent. Photos of the sidewalk blocks designed to interlock in a crooked pattern appeared. They had still been common through the early to mid-2010s, but after road maintenance projects they had largely disappeared from Seoul and the major metropolitan cities.
"If he heard airplane sounds through a ventilation shaft, that means ventilation only happens through vents, so it's likely underground. And he would have heard the takeoff and landing noise, so it's quite close to an airport. At least within a five-kilometer radius of the runway."
"Probably. Incheon Airport requires crossing Yeongjong Bridge, so there'd be a traffic record every time."
Taking Lee Hyeong-rak from Seoul by car, Wonju Airport or Cheongju Airport would be far too distant. Lee Hyeong-rak had said the vehicle spun around enough to make him carsick, which meant they weren't driving far on the highway. The area around Gimpo Airport was the highest probability by far.
"We'll have to quietly comb through that area."
They had incinerated the entire overseas shipment coming in from Okinawa. Of course, since the producers Baeksol dealt with were still intact, the warehouses and facilities would be restored soon enough. To keep hitting them hard in the meantime, they needed to attack the factory Lee Hyeong-rak went to every winter.
Unlike Okinawa, Baeksol's domestic base didn't require risky, violent methods like infiltrating and setting fires. They could cleanly resolve it through the law.
"If we raid the site, arrest the people inside as flagrant offenders, and seize the evidence, even Baeksol won't be able to immediately cover it up."
Yeon-woo looked at the calendar. Parabola's crank-in wasn't far off.
Next week the drama filming will probably start, so it'd be best to wrap this up before then.
Looking at the screen, Yeon-woo spoke regarding Kim Su-hyeok.
"I think we've squeezed everything we can out of the homeless guy. Pull Kim Su-hyeok out. He's looking more haggard by the second. From now on, the investigation line will be searching the Gimpo Airport area."
Yeon-woo knew better than anyone the hardships of disguising as a beggar, having done it many times in his past life. People instinctively avoided things that smelled and looked filthy, and even if they saw them, they quickly erased them from their minds. That was why they had often used homeless identities for operations—but the hardest part wasn't the cold or the hunger.
More than anything, the smell must be tough.
In a closed space a strong odor numbed the nose within minutes so you stopped noticing it, but out in the open like that, constantly hit by the wind, the stench kept stabbing at your nostrils. The fermented anchovy sauce sprayed inside his clothes would be bad enough from his own smell, but Lee Hyeong-rak's reek after years of living on the streets would make it even worse.
At Han Hae-un's order, Kim Su-hyeok's voice came through the screen.
Somehow Kim Su-hyeok's voice sounded cheerful.
Until Parabola's filming began, Yeon-woo practiced his acting while giving investigation instructions in between. There was no need to go out to the field himself and wander around staring only at sidewalk blocks.
From when he had been Jay in Sketch, there was a method he had learned from Nari in the film.
I can check things to a certain extent with internet street view and only secretly explore the suspicious places at night.
In the old days he would have had to run around that whole wide area on foot, but the world had gotten remarkably convenient even for intelligence work.
After wandering the roads via street view for a long time examining the ground, he found several sidewalks still laid with the interlocking blocks Lee Hyeong-rak had mentioned.
Hmm, strange. Everywhere around has been replaced with new-style blocks, so why are these places still the old sidewalk blocks?
Looking up related information for the investigation, he found that urban landscape projects with names like "Design Seoul Streets" or "Road Renaissance" had long since replaced the old sidewalk blocks with more refined designs.
Yeon-woo immediately passed the locations he found to the agents through Han Hae-un. And that night, through the agents who headed to the addresses Yeon-woo sent, they learned why the old blocks were still being used.
Starting with Lee Gyu-jin's report, Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon, who arrived at the other locations, filed the same report. Yeon-woo and Han Hae-un nodded at the findings.
"The contractors must have found the administrative processing and safety-management audits annoying, so they just skipped those sections in the work."
Still, thanks to that, they could easily find the facilities the bastards had hidden domestically.
They had already played with firecrackers. Now it was time to plow up the ground.