The Doctor Who Used Acupuncture to Strike It Rich
Two weeks had passed since I’d opened the clinic.
And my feelings about it were simple.
Something’s gone a little wrong here.
Sitting on a stool behind the counter, I stared down at the clinic’s work phone.
Dozens of missed calls were stacked up on the screen. The notifications had piled so high they were practically covering the display.
I reached out and opened the appointment page on the counter computer.
That, too, was fully booked. The empty slots on the calendar were already packed tight all the way out to two weeks from now.
I definitely didn’t do a single bit of advertising.
It made no sense.
I hadn’t handed out flyers or run ads of any kind.
I hadn’t even bothered to make a decent website, and I’d entered the clinic on maps with all the care of someone doodling in the margin of a notebook.
On top of that, insurance didn’t cover it, and each session cost more than two hundred dollars.
New patients were capped at six a day, and that was only on the four days a week I was open. One hundred percent by appointment, one-on-one treatment only.
By all rights, the place should have been a ghost town.
It was expensive, unfriendly, and nearly impossible to get into—basically the sort of clinic that acted like it was doing patients a favor by existing.
Wouldn’t it be normal for nobody to come?
Of course, that was just wishful thinking on my part.
Every day, the missed calls grew; the next day, there were more.
Then patients who’d already come once started bringing friends, follow-up appointments ballooned, and the whole schedule began slipping backward like a tide.
It got bad enough that people started showing up and knocking on the door without warning.
I finally searched around, wondering how the hell word of mouth alone could have spread this far, and found the answer.
Reviews of my clinic were popping up constantly on local community boards and mom cafés.
[No insurance, and it’s pricey, but the acupuncture works insanely well.]
No website, no marketing, and yet every review was glowing.
And to top it off, with only a limited number of daily appointments, people had to phone in for an open run just to get a slot?
Put all that together and it became the kind of marketing that made people salivate.
“...Unbelievable.”
With a dry laugh, I pulled open the stack of papers in my drawer.
It was a bundle of materials Campbell’s side had sent through an employee not long ago.
Inside were brief summaries of a few side jobs assigned to me, along with estimated durations and rough compensation, all dressed up in the form of medical seminars.
“Hmm...”
I looked back and forth between the documents and the reservation calendar on my phone.
Luckily, the clinic was only accepting bookings up to two weeks in advance.
If I picked the right job, I could just fit the clinic schedule around it.
Maybe this works out after all. If I disappear for a few months, things should calm down a little.
I nodded and shut the file.
For now, I had to prepare for the day’s patients, who were already about to descend on me.
“My lower back always feels heavy and stiff. If I sit for too long, it feels like I’ll die the second I stand up...”
The first patient of the day was a man in his fifties.
I silently sterilized the site and inserted the silver needle.
About ten minutes later, I removed it and wiped the spot with an alcohol swab.
The man carefully rose from the treatment bed.
As if it were habit, he put a hand on his lower back, slowly twisted his waist, then bent his upper body forward.
And almost immediately, his expression changed in a strange way.
“Huh...?”
While I explained the aftercare, the man kept twisting his torso from side to side as if he couldn’t make sense of what had just happened to him.
He looked like his brain couldn’t quite catch up with his body.
“If you’re able to, come back next week.”
For the record, I was using as little inner energy as possible when I treated people.
At the very least, I wanted to avoid the kind of miracle cure I’d produced on the first day, when someone had improved drastically in a single shot.
Even so, this was still far more effective than a normal clinic’s treatment.
In fact, because people needed several visits before it was considered “done,” my follow-up rate was going through the roof.
...Jesus, I’m going to lose my mind.
I let out a long sigh inside my head and called in the next patient.
Still, once you added the price of the needles and herbs together, I was making plenty of money.
***
In front of a commercial building in Clarendon, Cole McKinnon checked the address on his navigation system and pulled over at the curb.
This is the clinic Lee runs?
No matter how hard he thought about it, the guy was impossible to pin down.
He shot guns and killed people like it was a side gig, and somehow in the middle of all that, he ran a clinic.
One of the biggest lunatics in the CIA.
That was McKinnon’s assessment of Dohyun.
Still, he was skilled, the kind of man you could trust with your back. A funny bastard, if not exactly likable.
Jingle.
He opened the glass door and stepped inside, where a faint herbal smell, like medicinal ingredients, pricked at his nose.
Two or three people were already sitting in the waiting area, and the phone behind the counter kept ringing over and over.
McKinnon swept the room once and let out a crooked laugh.
“Hah.”
He’d been told the place was running quietly.
From what he could see, it was already fucked. It was loud as hell.
The people waiting glanced at him cautiously.
Whether it was his size or the roughness of his face, they seemed to lower their eyes the moment they met his.
McKinnon didn’t pay much attention. He exhaled slowly and leaned a hip against the counter.
“This way, please.”
Just then, the treatment room door opened and Dohyun came walking out.
After seeing off a patient, he spotted McKinnon and lifted a hand in a cheerful wave.
“Oh, McKinnon. You came?”
McKinnon had just started to open his mouth to answer that needlessly bright greeting when a timer went off inside the treatment room. Dohyun said quickly, “Shit. Hang on a second.”
And then he vanished back into the room.
McKinnon stared at the firmly closed treatment-room door.
Damn it.
In the end, he had no choice but to keep waiting alone in the lobby.
By the time the patients started sneaking glances at him and the awkward silence spread through the room...
Ring—
The phone on the counter rang.
McKinnon looked at it without interest. Unfortunately, the damned thing didn’t stop; it just kept ringing.
He could feel the patients in the waiting room watching him.
“Hmph.”
By the time the bell rang for the fifth time, McKinnon let out one more deep sigh, then clicked his tongue and picked up the receiver.
At the same time, he grabbed the business card lying next to the phone and checked the clinic name out of habit.
“Bon... Acupuncture & Wellness.”
His voice was much calmer and flatter than usual.
The other end immediately launched into a breathless reservation inquiry.
McKinnon glanced down at the appointment screen open on the counter computer.
Then, with practiced ease, he checked the date, found an open slot, and asked for the caller’s name and contact information.
“...Yes. Got it.”
Ridiculously, the whole process came to him so naturally it was almost embarrassing.
Years of moving from one country to another, keeping cover identities intact, had made this second nature.
McKinnon felt like an idiot for using that skill at this exact moment, and set the receiver down.
Tap tap tap.
Then he entered the appointment neatly into the schedule.
Perfectly clean. Satisfying, in its own way.
Click.
Only then did Dohyun emerge after finishing with the next patient.
He saw McKinnon sitting on the counter stool, and a strange expression crossed his face.
After checking the booking screen on the computer for a moment, he gave a snort of laughter and said, “Thanks.”
McKinnon looked at him in disbelief and mouthed the words without sound.
Fuck. What the hell am I even doing here?
But before he could get an answer to that question, the damn phone rang again.
As Dohyun led a waiting patient into the treatment room, he said, “Haha, just one more favor, okay? Sorry.”
Thud.
Was this bastard insane or what?
The words almost came out of McKinnon’s mouth, but he clamped his jaw shut.
The phone was ringing like crazy, and that fucking Doctor Lee had already gone back into the treatment room.
So in the end, he had no choice but to pick up the receiver again.
“...Bon Acupuncture & Wellness.”
In the end, McKinnon spent the entire afternoon behind the counter.
For a man with a massive frame and a face that looked like it had been carved out of broken stone, he apparently made quite an impression, because as the last patient was leaving, they asked Dohyun a quiet question.
“Is that man one of your staff too?”
After thinking about it for a moment, Dohyun answered, “He helps out from time to time.”
At that, McKinnon’s eyes turned dark and mean.
At last, when the last patient had gone and the clinic was empty with just the two of them left...
McKinnon shoved himself up from the counter stool and glared at Lee.
“You.”
His voice was low and flat.
Then he let out a breath.
“Fuck, hell. Forget it.”
Yeah. In the first place, this was his own fault for coming to find this crazy bastard.
He knew Lee well enough by now to accept that much.
***
After closing time. The treatment room, with only the two of them left.
McKinnon got to the point he’d originally come for.
“About the assignment.”
“Oh, the one Campbell sent? I read the details.”
At my mention of the materials I’d been given, McKinnon nodded and continued.
He was talking about the side job he’d been assigned to, the one in Italy, in Naples.
“If you’re free, I’d like you to take backup. I don’t feel like working with those shitheads.”
I thought it over briefly and asked, “What exactly would you need me to do there?”
“Simple. Go to Naples, keep a surveillance point the way you did before, secure the escape route... and then, when the time’s right, I’ll put a bullet in those mafia bastards’ heads, and you back me up while I’m moving. If it goes smoothly, it’ll end clean. Probably easier than Prague.”
It was a short explanation, but I could get a rough picture of the operation.
An assassination target, sabotage against a specific organization, unofficial data retrieval...
A standard strike mission for a SAC black operator.
I hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
I’d already owed McKinnon a few favors, and if I was going to do it anyway, working with him made things easier for me too.
“Sure. Then I’ll line up the schedule and fix the appointments around it.”
McKinnon looked at me with a deeply weary expression.
“I’m sure you will. Doctor Lee is a busy man.”
I could feel his opinion of my clinic situation radiating off him in waves.
Well, what could I do? It’s not like I’d wanted things to turn out this way.
“...I’m operating it carefully enough, in my own way.”
When I tossed that back at him lightly, McKinnon snorted and stood up.
As always, there wasn’t even a proper goodbye. He just looked exhausted and headed for the door like a man leaving work.
I watched his back with a grin, then checked the computer screen.
After a little thought, I started typing out what I’d post on the clinic door in two weeks.
[Closed due to overseas seminar attendance.]
Yeah, that should be enough, more or less.
Right. Let’s just make the next trip an Italian seminar, then.
---