Baeksol
During the company dinner, Yeon-woo heard from the director that construction had finished on a specialized filming set in Daejeon — the facility that would house the production of Star Beyond the River starting from episode twelve.
The drama ran sixteen episodes in its main run, with a seventeenth special episode slotted in if the ratings held. As things stood, they had finished everything through the early portion of episode eleven, along with some of the later material Yeon-woo had already shot — including the ending sequence of him racing across the desert.
That left a considerable stretch of the remaining schedule to be filmed at the Daejeon set.
"This break is so the director can head down first and get a feel for the framing," Yeon-woo said. "Since it's Daejeon anyway, I figured I'd stop by."
"Oh — so you're going in two days?"
"Come on, this isn't a shoot. You don't need to come. I'm really going alone."
Min-su laughed, catching the preemptive strike for what it was, and said he'd take the vacation and rest properly for once.
Yeon-woo nodded, then added, "Come to think of it, once we start shooting at the set I'll be commuting from my parents' place for a few days. You can take the whole stretch off, hyung."
"Absolutely not. Commute or not, I'm picking you up. Emergencies, everything else — that's what I'm here for."
Min-su shook his head with flat finality. Yeon-woo smiled. From the day Min-su had first been assigned to him two years ago, the man had never once wavered in his sense of duty.
"When you head home tomorrow and watch the broadcast with your family, I'm looking forward to their reaction," Min-su said. "The movie hasn't even opened yet, so this'll be the first time they see you as a lead."
Yeon-woo hadn't given it much thought, but Min-su's words sparked a flicker of curiosity. During Summer's Closet he had been a lead, yes, but a secondary male lead with relatively limited screen time — and his little sister So-hyun had been deep in her teenage phase, barricaded in her room and barely coming out.
"You're right. Now that you mention it, I am looking forward to it."
By the time they finished talking they had arrived at the officetel. Yeon-woo said goodbye to Min-su and went up.
Before showering he plugged in his phone and left it powered on. Even after he stepped out of the shower, it kept buzzing without pause.
The screen was flooded with missed calls and messages — dozens of them. Most were from acquaintances and people in the industry.
Among them, one app icon blinked with a notification count.
It was the secure messaging app he used exclusively with Han Hae-un.
The first message had come a little over four hours ago. If Hae-un had left Busan then, he would be arriving in Seoul any minute.
Sleep, it seemed, would have to wait.
Yeon-woo pulled his clothes back on, headed out, and sent a reply as he went.
He sent the location of a quiet park near the officetel and arrived first to wait. Before long, headlights swept across the parking lot as a silver SUV pulled in.
Hae-un's car.
Yeon-woo approached as the driver's door opened and Han Hae-un stepped out.
"Good work."
Hae-un gave a small nod at the greeting.
"He certainly wasn't an easy man to meet."
"Let's walk and talk."
As they moved through the park, Hae-un began with his encounter with Old Man Baek.
A few hours earlier. A hood had been pulled over Han Hae-un's head, and Old Man Baek's men were moving him somewhere unknown.
Blinded, he was loaded into a vehicle. Two solidly built men flanked him on either side, pinning him in place, while Old Man Baek's voice drifted from the rearmost seat.
"What is your connection to Mr. Jeon?"
"I owe him a personal debt. I'm assisting him because of it."
Hae-un had anticipated the question and prepared his story around Jeon Su-hwan in advance, so the answer came without hesitation.
Old Man Baek's voice returned at once.
"He's not the type to send someone else. He usually handles things himself."
"He's currently in a high-risk zone. Getting in and out isn't simple."
Whether the old man had fully dropped his suspicion or not, his tone gave nothing away. He fell silent after that, and the car drove on for a long time.
Feels like we're holding under seventy kilometers an hour. Local roads only, then. Too many turns for the distance — they're deliberately taking the long way from where we started, on my account.
Kidnapped or not, Hae-un's habits kicked in. He reasoned calmly, filing every detail away one by one.
In the back, Old Man Baek's phone buzzed occasionally. He took the calls without speaking, listening only to whatever came through the receiver. Hae-un strained to catch the other end, but nothing reached him.
Circling around while they cross-check whether I'm lying.
Eventually the car stopped. The two giants on either side hauled Hae-un up what felt like an endless flight of stairs. He sensed the shift to an interior space, and then the hood came off.
Ornate furniture filled his vision — the kind of living room that belonged to a chaebol chairman on a television drama.
Old Man Baek sat in the seat of honor and raised his one remaining arm, gesturing toward a chair.
"Sit. Looking up at you is hurting my neck."
Hae-un sat and opened the conversation based on the information and cautions Yeon-woo had given him.
"Team Leader Jeon Su-hwan asked me to tell you this: the time has come. Repay the debt you owe."
Old Man Baek's eyes widened for a moment, then settled back into blankness. He nodded.
"I see. So I can finally settle that debt."
He drummed the sofa armrest with his single hand, lost in thought, then spoke again.
"Incidentally — so his rank was team leader, was it? I never knew who he worked for, or what he did. We simply conducted the occasional transaction."
Hae-un opened his mouth, realizing the slip — but Old Man Baek cut him off first.
"Never mind. I have no desire to know. This old man is still breathing partly because he knows too much."
He lifted the stump of his missing arm and continued.
"And partly because he was too greedy — which is how I ended up like this."
Yeon-woo listened in silence, nodding along — until a glint of interest crossed his eyes.
"He brought up the arm? The old man's gotten soft while I wasn't looking. Volunteering personal history like that."
"Soft isn't the word I'd use. The presence rolling off him was something else."
Yeon-woo huffed a quiet laugh.
"So did you ask about Baeksol?"
Hae-un nodded heavily.
"Not much — but I got a lead. And it was exactly what we suspected."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. It's connected to the National Intelligence Service."
They had already half-inferred as much from the circumstances of Jeon Su-hwan and Baek Yu-hyeon's deaths in their past lives. Confirmation still left both of them with bitter expressions. Everything they had sacrificed — the devotion they had poured into their country — felt, in an instant, like something discarded.
Then Yeon-woo tilted his head.
"But if it really is tied to the NIS, something doesn't add up. How would Old Man Baek know about it when I never did?"
Hae-un nodded. The old man might have made guesses, but he had claimed not to know who Jeon Su-hwan was or what he did. Knowing about something even more shrouded — Baeksol — was strange.
"Strictly speaking, though, it's a little different."
"Different how?"
Hae-un paused a beat before continuing.
"Not the National Intelligence Service so much as the Agency for National Security Planning."
The Agency for National Security Planning. From 1981 to 1999, it had been the Republic of Korea's intelligence organ — the direct predecessor of the NIS.
Back in that room, Hae-un had asked:
"So you're saying you know of this person — or organization — called Baeksol, sir?"
The word from Hae-un's mouth had clearly been unexpected. Old Man Baek, who had been sunk in thought, finally spoke.
"I never thought I'd hear that name again at this stage of my life. But if that's the information he wants, then this old man will have to dig up some very old memories."
According to Old Man Baek, thirty years earlier — back when he had barely graduated from being a greenhorn in the underworld — the massive crackdown known as the War on Crime had swept the country. By sheer luck he had already been inside a prison cell, and so he slipped the net. By the time he got out, every underworld contact he had known was either half-crippled or had vanished without a trace.
"The name I heard then was Baeksol."
While Old Man Baek was gathering the scraps of the shattered underworld and building a new power base, a man came to see him. The visitor identified himself as an agent of the ANSP — an organization said to be able to bring down birds mid-flight — and delivered a threat: live only by the orders that came down under the name Baeksol, and he would be allowed to keep breathing.
But Old Man Baek, who had only just shed his rookie status before prison, had come out and thrived. Flushed with confidence, he had thrown the man out on his ear.
"That may have been the single greatest regret of my life — and at the same time, the best thing I ever did."
"Meaning?"
Old Man Baek shook his head, as if replaying the day.
"They all died. That same afternoon, several men showed up and pulled the trigger without a second's hesitation. I took multiple rounds in the shoulder and arm myself and barely managed to run."
State power was a terrifying thing. Shot and hunted, unable to walk into any hospital, he had found his way through underworld channels to an unlicensed doctor — and only survived by having the arm amputated.
"After that, I never once stepped into the open again. But I never lived as their slave, either."
That was why he called it both his greatest regret and, perhaps, the best decision of his life.
"I thought the mountains and rivers had changed enough times that all of it had faded into history. I never expected to hear that name again from a young man's mouth."
Yeon-woo absorbed the full account in silence, turning it over. Hae-un watched him, then spoke.
"I don't think the people Old Man Baek described ever really disappeared. They've just changed their shape somehow — we don't know into what."
"I joined the year after it became the NIS, and in twenty years on the job I never heard the name once. They've buried themselves carefully."
Thirty years ago…
The intelligence was so old that there was no telling what form the enemy had taken now. Still, for the first time, they had a real lead — and the outline of their opponent was beginning to take shape.