The Korean Police
A villa on the outskirts of Istanbul.
In the short while I had been over in Gaia, the repairs and the cleaning were finished. Furniture and appliances had been brought in through the lawyer, and the house was ready to use as it stood.
The first thing I did was put a transit point in order behind the villa. I raised screens around it to cut off the view and graded the ground so a truck could pass.
Once the point was set, I took the Lincoln SUV I had waiting and drove into the city. Intelligence first. The target this time was a mafia outfit said to be operating in Istanbul, and I entered the city on the guidance of the man who had become Istanbul Slave No. 1.
In front of a club downtown.
"That club is one of the places the organization runs. It's among the biggest in Istanbul, and prostitution and drug sales usually go on in there together."
"Yeah? And how do we draw the members out?"
"There's a contact for drug deals. Call it, and they'll show."
"Is that so. How much do they usually move?"
"Usually thirty to fifty kilograms a transaction."
"Good. Then get in touch. Tell them we want to deal. The quantity is three hundred kilograms."
"Sir? That much? They won't have money on that scale."
"Not your worry. Do as you're told. And tell them we'll take half the usual price. Make them bite the bait."
"Ah. Yes, sir."
Even at half price, the wholesale figure cleared four million euros. Whether they could raise that kind of money was an open question, but I had hammered them down to half—they would scrape it together somehow. Men like that always did.
I tossed out the bait, and while I waited on the appointed day I booked a plane ticket for myself alone. Two months after leaving Korea, I was heading back.
I had decided to go home. The decision turned on a single text.
Come to think of it, I really had gone too long without a word. She didn't even know I had taken a leave of absence; as far as she knew, I was simply away on an overseas business trip. This was as good a time as any to tie up what had been left hanging and clear my head, so I made up my mind to return.
Incheon Airport.
Two months, was it? Korea, after so long, felt new.
The first time I had set out from here for Cairo, I had been halfway to giving up on everything. When I came back, took my leave, and set out again, there had been a thrill in it, but the fear had been just as large. Now, though, the feeling it stirred was unmistakably different from before. Obvious enough. The man I had been then and the man I was now were not the same. The world was as it had been. What had changed was the one looking at a world that hadn't.
I nearly went looking for a bus, then turned on my heel. Most of my assets were still tied up in physical goods, true enough—but I was, by any measure, a man worth over ten billion won. I caught a taxi and rode it straight home.
The newly built apartment I had just moved into was clean. It was a new place, yes, but she would also have been sweeping and wiping her son's home every day.
Evening came, and when Mom got home she met me—arrived without a word of warning—with a face full of surprise and delight. A dinner thrown together in a flash, and I ate until I was ready to burst, washed up clean, and slept.
Life in the other world wasn't bad. Dozens of slaves, for my convenience, swept the tent and the camp clean every day, laid out my bedding, served my meals, and waited on me through the night besides. Even so, home was still the best thing there was.
Once this expedition up through Europa was finished, I would have to travel toward the Korean peninsula again. If I secured a gate point with a direct line to Korea, it would come in handy whenever things got urgent.
Partly to get over the jet lag, I rested at home for a few days. On the third day of that, an unexpected call came in. The other party was the police.
"Yes. There are a few things we'd like to ask about your wife, who was reported missing. When would you have time? It would be better if we could meet and talk."
I headed for a café near the house at the appointed time. Inside, the detective who recognized me raised a hand first.
"Over here."
I went over and sat down across from him.
"Good to meet you. I'm Detective Choi Changsik, with the Violent Crimes Unit at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency."
"Sorry? The Violent Crimes Unit?"
When the call first came in I had assumed it was just the police. Violent Crimes.
"Yes. We heard you'd returned and reached out in a hurry to meet. There are a few things I'd like to ask."
The brief greetings ended, and the reason he had come was exactly what I had expected: the disappearance of my ex-wife, Go Yumi. But if that had been all, there would have been no cause for Violent Crimes to step in. A missing-person report on Park Dongseon had been added, and in the course of the investigation the two disappearances had been found to be connected. Word got out that both had vanished in Cairo, and while the police kept digging, another missing-person case was filed on top of them—an employee of the company's overseas subsidiary, a man named Hassan. Mystery piled on mystery, and once a request went in for an international joint investigation, the case was transferred to Violent Crimes at last.
Detective Choi asked his question.
"So. You're saying you never saw Ms. Go Yumi in Cairo. Nor Mr. Park Dongseon. And yet it's strange. We checked with the company, and they said the reason Mr. Park left the country had to do with you."
"I heard about it late myself. Something came up on my end, and Senior Park came out to help. And honestly, I only learned Go Yumi had come to Cairo after I got back. We were in the middle of a divorce, yes. Even so, I couldn't very well pretend not to know someone who'd suddenly gone silent."
"So that's why you went back to Cairo. Then, if I may—can you tell me what this matter of yours was, the one Mr. Park came in for?"
"That... it's company confidential. You'd be better off asking HR."
At times like this, the smart move was to hand it off to the company.
"Understood."
"Um—has anything been confirmed in Cairo? I still can't reach them. Honestly, I need to get the lawsuit wrapped up."
"We're coordinating with the Cairo police at the moment. If there's anything we need to confirm, we'll be in touch. It's a bother, I know, but your cooperation is what will help us find the two of them."
"Of course. The thing is, I may have to head overseas again soon. I'm not sure I'll have the time."
"Would that be Cairo?"
"No. This time I'm planning to go to Turkey."
"Might I ask what for?"
"A personal matter. Some travel as well."
"All right. We'll contact you again."
Detective Choi was the first to rise and take his leave.
When the meeting was over and he returned to the station, Detective Han Sohee was there to meet him with a question. She was an attractive detective in her early thirties. In the Violent Crimes Unit she mainly took sex-crime cases, and she had a reputation as something of a veteran.
"Did the meeting go all right?"
"Hard to say. The joints of the story sit oddly loose, and yet the whole thing doesn't actually come apart."
"How so?"
Detective Choi sat and opened the case notebook. In it were photographs of Go Yumi and Park Dongseon, and the personal details of two more, recently passed along from Egypt. Four faces, four names—and at the center of them, stuck in place, the photograph of Kang Chung-sik, the man he had met today.
"Ordinary."
"So it might not be him, right? He's got that newly assigned apartment, and he was in the middle of divorcing Go Yumi for cheating on him. The fault's on her side. If he just sits tight, he gets the divorce, a job at a major company, and a brand-new apartment in a new city—everything people dream about. Why would he go out of his way to get rid of an ex-wife he doesn't need? And call her all the way to Cairo to do it? As for the local staff, the findings actually make Kang Chung-sik look more like the victim."
"That's exactly why. I sat with it. A way to make every one of these pieces lock together."
"Did something come of it? A picture that holds?"
"The more I turned it over, the more I got to thinking. What if Kang Chung-sik was never the perpetrator to begin with?"
"Not the perpetrator?"
"Yeah. The way it's playing out, Go Yumi and Park Dongseon look like they were having an affair."
"That much is true. Their movements line up. But Kang Chung-sik seemed like he didn't know. Looking at the suit he filed to identify the other party in the affair—if he doesn't even know that party is Park Dongseon, there's no reason for him to deal with both of them, is there?"
"Right. Now flip it. What about from Park Dongseon's side? Once that identity check went in, wouldn't it have weighed on him, being exposed as the man in the affair?"
"You can't be serious. So Park Dongseon and Go Yumi conspired against Kang Chung-sik?"
"If Kang Chung-sik died, or disappeared, the divorce suit gets dropped on its own, and that new apartment becomes Go Yumi's. Park Dongseon's carrying some personal debt, isn't he? The two of them set up house, he clears his debts, and he gets to bury the fact of the affair."
"Ah. So Park Dongseon sweet-talked that local employee into trying to eliminate Kang Chung-sik."
"If you reason from what the Cairo police turned up, there's Amin, who went missing along with the employee named Hassan. Quite a criminal record. Did time, even. The two of them took a commission from Park Dongseon to deal with Kang Chung-sik, and they failed. And if Kang Chung-sik found that out... On the timeline, Park Dongseon left the country first, and not long after, Go Yumi followed."
"So the two locals who failed to take him out got caught by Kang Chung-sik instead and gave up whoever was behind it. Once he knew, he eliminated Park Dongseon—and when he learned what there was between him and Go Yumi, he called her in and eliminated her too?"
"Go Yumi's card charges. She was living pretty well at a luxury hotel in Cairo. The photos she put on Instagram, too... like someone who'd come on a trip. If they lured her out using Park Dongseon's phone, then Go Yumi, who didn't know a thing, would've just been enjoying herself as if she were on vacation."
"Wow. If that's true... he handled several people by himself. The man's a lot more than he looks."
"That's why it landed with us. An ordinary case never would have."
This one had been brought up by Detective Choi himself from a frontline precinct. His gut told him something was buried in it.
"And yet. To look at him, he's just some office worker with a gut."
"You never know what's inside a man. Least of all a man who's been betrayed."
"But how do you mean to investigate it? If the whole thing happened in Cairo, the traces and the evidence are all over there. And I hear the mood on the Cairo side isn't exactly good."
They had already sent an official request to the Cairo police asking for cooperation. But in Egypt, where the population growth rate ranked among the highest in the world, no one was inclined to treat the disappearance of grown men as important—especially when one of them was a bottom-rung man with a criminal record. Nor did the Cairo authorities, who lived off the tourist trade, have any desire to go poking openly into cases of missing foreigners.
"That's the problem."
"The theory sounds good. But can you actually get a warrant on that? Not unless something else breaks."
"Something else?"
"Say, for instance, another person goes missing somewhere around him."
I was home, sitting on the sofa and idling on my phone, when a call came in. Mom.
"Hey. What's going on? Aren't you supposed to be at work? Huh? What? Uncle? He got cleaned out in a jeonse scam—somebody took his whole housing deposit?"