The Chairman Who Did It All Himself, Chapter 35
"?"
If there was one easy, comfortable sentence that could fully expose what he felt, it was only a question mark.
"You little punk, pretending not to know?"
Realistically, there was no one who could know that he had regressed. Jeong Taeyang’s question had not struck anywhere deep enough to shake him.
If it had been something like, You know the future, don’t you? then he might have been rattled. But the answer to who are you was simple.
He was himself.
That fact had not changed. He was Do Jaehyun, and nothing more or less.
"What are you trying to hear?"
"That you’re not acting like yourself, little brother."
"Little brother?"
"Should I call you Taeseong’s friend instead?"
Jeong Taeyang’s expression and tone returned to normal.
"Was it when he was twenty? No, I mean Taeseong, not me. He got into Hankuk University, and the whole house was celebrating. I had just started making a living back then, maybe with only a couple of younger kids under me."
"Was it really worth throwing a party over?"
"Tsk. This is why rich, educated bastards are so damn annoying. Getting into Hankuk University is worth celebrating. And Hankuk University Law School at that? That’s the best faculty in Korea, isn’t it?"
He wasn’t wrong.
Do Jaehyun answered by giving a quiet nod.
"Whether it was studying or sports, Taeseong had never once finished anything but first. It would have been hard for him to keep that up even after entering the best university and best faculty in the country, but Taeseong was a little different."
"Different? If I remember right, Taeseong never ranked first in his class."
"He wouldn’t have. That’s not what I mean."
It was a memory, and a recollection, that had stayed buried deep inside Jeong Taeyang.
It was a story about Jeong Taeseong and Do Jaehyun.
"You know why Taeseong started kendo?"
"Beats me. I don’t know how he started, but if he won silver or gold at the National Sports Festival, then he must’ve had talent and put in serious work."
"He wasn’t any match for me with his bare hands."
"What?"
"Brothers can bicker, can’t they? We were arguing over some stupid reason I can’t even remember now, and the brat went and talked back to his older brother like he was something. He even kicked first."
That was a surprise.
Jeong Taeseong had that side to him?
"Being good at school and good at fighting only counts among kids your own age. The age gap between us was huge, so what was he thinking? I was trying to hold it in and let it go, but then the bastard went and said something about my mother."
"No way..."
"Yeah. That was exactly it. He asked if being the child of a concubine meant he could act like the eldest son."
"Then you must’ve beaten him like a dog on the hottest day of summer."
"Yeah. It was a miracle he didn’t break something. Anyway, after that he realized bare hands wouldn’t cut it, so he took up kendo right away. That’s why Taeseong always lived with one thought in his head. Whether it was studying or sports, there was no chance he could lose at both. One of the two, he would absolutely be the best at. He carried around that absurd, ungrounded confidence in his chest all the time."
"..."
"You get the picture, right?"
He remembered now.
In his first year, the top student for both semesters had been him. So that was what it meant when, after second semester finals, Jeong Taeseong asked if he knew how to work out, or if he had learned any martial arts.
"For a guy who never once came whining or crying to his older brother, he suddenly asked me to drink with him for the first time. And then he said that academics clearly weren’t enough, so he’d tried to put me in my place with something else, but after getting hit by me, he got beaten like a dog on the hottest day of summer."
"...I did go easy on him."
"That was going easy?"
Jeong Taeyang’s mouth curled into something vicious.
"A guy who had never studied kendo in his life was trying to provoke him by saying boxing or kendo, it doesn’t matter, if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. Of course he lost his mind."
"Well... back then, we were both young."
"He beat you up in a really fresh way."
Jeong Taeseong had been drinking soju like water when he told the story, and what he said had been something else entirely. With both eyes swollen up blue and puffy like night-dark bruises, he had asked what the hell had happened, and Taeseong had answered by grabbing a bamboo sword, tossing it straight into his face the moment they started, and then using his head protector to—
"Yeah, I took the head guard, grabbed it, and beat him senseless with it. How are you supposed to beat an experienced kendo guy at kendo?"
"Right. If it had ended there, it would’ve been lucky. But what really made Taeseong furious, what really made him feel insulted, came after that."
"Hm? There was something even worse than that?"
What on earth?
Had he really made a mistake big enough to set Jeong Taeseong’s heart on fire?
"Your whole tone was like some old man who’d already lived through everything, and you were talking like you were pressing people down from above, completely looking down on them..."
Jeong Taeyang cleared his throat once, then looked straight at him and went on.
"No matter what you do, you’ll never beat me. If someone can’t be made an enemy, then the smart thing is to make him a friend. You’re smart enough to understand that. Let’s meet again with a smile next time."
Ah...
He remembered. Those were the words Jeong Taeyang was imitating him with right now.
It was a perfect recreation of the tone and manner of speech he had had in his foolish twenty-year-old days.
It was childish enough to give him chills now, but back then, both he and Jeong Taeseong had probably thought it was cool.
"That was what you said. You remember, right?"
"...Yeah."
Ever since he had been given life again under the name of regression, this was the first time his face had turned this red.
"Embarrassing, isn’t it?"
Jeong Taeyang threw his own words right back at Do Jaehyun, just like Do Jaehyun had done in the car a little while earlier.
"..."
"After that, Taeseong would bring you up now and then. Academics, sports, even girls. Then one day you just vanished? He thought you probably went into the army, but he had no idea where you ended up."
"Hmm..."
It was exactly as Jeong Taeyang said.
He had chosen a different path from his classmates. While the others were mostly preparing for the bar exam or the civil service exam, what had captured his mind was something else.
The National Intelligence Service, NIS.
Like other state exams, it selected talent through testing in intelligence studies and related subjects. But the most important thing in the NIS exam was, oddly enough, not the score.
It was family background.
It might be hard to imagine now, in the 2020s, but back then words like anti-communism and anti-North Korea were both serious and common. So the biggest condition for becoming an NIS agent was that, if not everyone out to the seventh or eighth cousin, then every direct relative up to the eighth or tenth degree had to have absolutely nothing to do with North Korea. Not a single one.
In fact, in the year he took the NIS exam, there had been a friend who passed as second-place overall, only to be dropped after the interview.
The reason was that his maternal grandmother’s cousin had defected to the North during the Korean War.
"The NIS. I was in a black ops role there."
"Oh-ho. Are you even allowed to say that? Isn’t that classified? Or something like that?"
"It was dissolved. Honestly, nobody would believe me if I said I was a former NIS black ops agent, and you’re not asking what mission I handled anyway."
"What mission were you on?"
"Have you ever heard of the Intelligence Command?"
"Intelligence Command? Something like the Special Warfare Command?"
"Similar, but a little different."
Ah. A mistake.
When he had been facing death, one of the comrades he had served with as an agent and soldier had come to visit him in the hospital. Back then, he had said that it was no longer called an espionage unit, but the Intelligence Command. Without realizing it, his memories of the past and the present had mixed together, and the error slipped out.
"Special Warfare Command is short for Special Warfare Command, right? Then Intelligence Command would be something like Intelligence Command?"
Fortunately, Jeong Taeyang, a gangster and former criminal, had never served in the military, so he failed to catch the mistake. In truth, it was the kind of thing even many men who had completed ordinary service would have missed.
"Have you ever heard of North Korean infiltration agents?"
"Wait... are you a spy?"
"No, those are southern infiltration agents... I mean northern infiltration agents."
"Ah..."
"There are units called HID and UDU. They’re intelligence units under the Army and Navy, and I worked in something similar. There are only a few publicly known, but there are three or four more units like that, and I was with one of those. If you ask me what I did there, I can’t tell you."
"So you didn’t actually join the NIS?"
"People in power are usually cowards. That’s why they never really trust anyone. There’s no way they wouldn’t keep an eye on intelligence units."
Do Jaehyun’s mouth curled faintly.
"NIS black agents don’t have official identities. They can create dozens of fake identities, but military covert units and intelligence unit agents can do much the same."
"Hmm... so you’re someone from the NIS who was dispatched to an intelligence unit?"
"Something like that. Now, can we stop the background check from the old days here?"
"That’s why it makes even less sense."
"What does?"
"The Do Jaehyun Taeseong talked about seemed like the kind of guy who could absolutely apply to the NIS or an intelligence unit. And a guy who lived in that world would naturally be quiet, reserved..."
"It may be a prejudice, but in my experience, a person’s nature doesn’t change that easily."
"Aren’t you just prejudiced?"
"A guy not even thirty suddenly shows up and devours the Red Dog Faction, then wipes out the Baekho Faction and the Kim Hasa Faction. And he does it in a short span of just a few months, so secretly and perfectly that even the police and prosecutors don’t notice. But that’s exactly why it makes sense to me even more."
Taking a left-turn signal, Jeong Taeyang turned the wheel left as he continued.
"When I first met you, you stood there in front of me and the old man from the Kim Hasa Faction without batting an eye. It was exactly what Taeseong had told me. That confidence, looking down on people from above, like some old man who had already lived through everything, not showing even the slightest fear of death or failure. But then you weren’t like that with the people around you. That’s where I couldn’t make sense of you."
"Make sense of me..."
"If the people around you matter, then keeping your distance is the right thing to do."
"Like you do, hyung?"
"Well, I don’t care. What crazy thug in his right mind would take down a riot police captain and a police chief?"
Jeong Taeyang shrugged and tossed the question back at him.
"Right?"
Before long, the car Jeong Taeyang was driving had entered Gangnam.
"This damn district has never been open twenty-four hours a day in its life. It took forty minutes to come twenty kilometers, and now you’re telling me it’ll take twenty minutes to go two kilometers? That’s too much."
"Sounds like a happy complaint to me."
"No, I’m serious, I’m exhausted."
Even as he grumbled, Jeong Taeyang did not seem to hate the bustle of Gangnam.
"I’ve been talking too much nonsense, so let this older brother give you one sincere piece of advice."
At last, they reached the point.
"You’re too bright for no reason. Sometimes you joke in ways that don’t fit the mood, and sometimes you toss out black-comedy lines. Pick one."
"Pick one?"
"I don’t know whether the version of you who crushed the Baekho Faction and the Kim Hasa Faction was your real self, or whether the one I’m seeing now, making cheap jokes and messing around, is the real you. But from where I’m standing, you’re neither one nor the other. Someday..."
Jeong Taeyang suddenly swung the wheel down a narrow side street on a road that was jammed tight with traffic.
"That half-baked attitude of yours might end up crippling you."
"...Maybe."
"Tsk. Still trying to keep up that cool act until the end."
Jeong Taeyang’s car stopped. It was such a quiet back street in the middle of Gangnam that it hardly seemed possible there could be so few people here.
"We’re here. Get out. Chairman Cheon of Johwa Group is inside."