The JW Security Team
"Originally, Seyeon Group, our Bando Jewelry, and SG Global were a triangular alliance! Seyeon Group would mine the precious metal ore, Bando Jewelry would process it and sell it on the Korean domestic market, and SG Global would sell it overseas. If it wasn't moving in Korea, SG Global pushed it abroad. If it wasn't moving overseas, we sold it here."
Jung Jinwoo regarded Noh Gyeong-se without a trace of emotion.
In the seat beside him, Jo Seong-gi was staring off elsewhere, looking thoroughly uninterested.
"Then one day Chairman Kim Gwang-deok summoned me and your late father, President Jo Hwan-gyu... He said there was a newborn, and if one of us took the child in and raised it, he'd look after our businesses from then on. I wasn't even married yet, so I couldn't raise a kid. Your father adopted you! Thanks to that, SG Global got to buy raw stones cheap and sell them at a premium, and the company took off..."
That child would have been Jung Jinwoo.
"But not long after, Seyeon Group ended up merging with Hyogwang Group. Chairman Kim Gwang-deok said he'd be the one swallowing them up... but after a while, it turned out he'd been swallowed by Chairman Kwak Junggap instead... And after that... the benefits SG Global had been getting from Hyoyeon Group dried up considerably. They were probably still getting the raw stones cheaper than we were, though..."
So the moment Chairman Kim Gwang-deok left Jung Jinwoo at the orphanage, he had immediately handed him off to one of his own subcontractors. If Jinwoo had remained at the orphanage even a little longer, his father Jung In-seok might have found him with ease.
The discrimination had probably begun after the merger, once the company became Hyoyeon Group. They had been promised enormous profits from Seyeon Group if they simply raised the child well... but once it became Hyoyeon Group, those benefits evaporated. And they never put him up for re-adoption because they couldn't bear to lose even the scraps of preferential treatment they were still receiving.
His late adoptive parents had moved with utterly ruthless self-interest. They couldn't abandon him, and they had to raise him... but he wasn't much use. So they had simply kept him around.
Everything made sense now. Why they had gone so far as to adopt him, only to raise him as a second-class child.
"Why did you marry me off, then?"
"You? Well... you two liked each other and got married! Didn't you?"
Feigning ignorance when he knew perfectly well.
"If you want my help, you'll tell me the truth."
"R-right... ahem."
Only then did Noh Gyeong-se clear his throat and try to shift the mood.
"Around that time... Bando Jewelry and SG Global were competing fiercely... We'd only been selling domestically, so we started selling overseas, and SG Global, which had only been selling overseas, started selling domestically... Both of us took massive losses going at each other. So when we became in-laws, we made a gentleman's agreement not to poach each other's rice bowls... to help each other out, you know."
And in the process, he probably got to dump that promiscuous, out-of-control daughter of his without a second thought.
Jo Seong-gi snickered to himself as he listened. He already knew most of this, but it was the first time he had heard it laid out so specifically, so directly.
Jung Jinwoo simply nodded in silence.
"Now then, there's something I'd like to ask of you..."
"Lee-seon... is Lee-seon doing well?"
Noh Gyeong-se, who had been about to launch into his real request, flinched.
"Of course she is... Though with the business struggling lately, we've had to cut back on her snacks and send her to a cheap neighborhood kindergarten..."
They had parted when she was about ten months old, hadn't they? Three years had passed, so she would be four now — five or six by Korean reckoning.
He had thought he could shake it all off and live a new life... but the moment anyone mentioned that adorable baby, Lee-seon, a lump rose in his throat. He couldn't help it.
"Want to see a photo? Here, look..."
He pulled out his phone and showed a picture of Lee-seon.
The baby face was still there. She was riding a bicycle, eating ice cream, running around.
The corners of Jung Jinwoo's mouth lifted before he even realized it. She seemed to have grown up well, even through all of this.
"Lee-seon keeps asking why she doesn't have a daddy! The kid's growing up... she's a little adult now, a little adult. You... want to see Lee-seon sometime?"
Noh Gyeong-se's words snapped Jung Jinwoo back to his senses.
If he had let his guard down even a little more... he would have sunk right back into that filthy swamp of the past.
"What do you need me to do?"
"It's nothing major... Just tell the president of JW Development about our situation! That Hwang Seong-sik bastard took five hundred million won of our money and ran. We got scammed. He promised us a Cambodian alluvial gold claim, took the money, then pulled a con and disappeared."
Jinwoo knew it was two hundred and fifty million. And now he was inflating it again. And the person who had reported that fact to the company in the first place — trying to hog it all for himself — had been Jinwoo. Not that they wouldn't have found out even if he hadn't said a word.
"That's something you should settle through the courts."
"The bastard's denying everything — how are we supposed to take that to court? And we can't exactly sue JW Development either... If JW Development would just show us a little consideration and share some of the alluvial gold claims... that'd do it. We're so broke these days we can't even feed Lee-seon proper snacks. If not for us, then for Lee-seon's sake... put in a good word, would you?"
"I keep telling you, talking to this guy won't do a thing."
"That's not true, man. You don't know how kind-hearted Jo is... She was his daughter once, wasn't she? You think he'd just stand by and let his own daughter go hungry and poorly dressed?"
Without a flicker of emotion, Jung Jinwoo nodded as if he understood.
"I'll pass along what you've told me. But I can't promise you'll get the result you want. In exchange, I need you to promise me one thing."
"What's that?"
"Don't cause a scene at the company entrance next time."
"Ah, well... I noticed all the executives seem to go straight in through the underground parking garage. If you help us and it still doesn't work out, well, nothing we can do... Then we'll have to go the legal route."
"I'll be going, then."
Jung Jinwoo gave a slight bow and stood. Then he walked out of the café without looking back.
"See? I told you it was pointless..."
"That's because you don't understand... This is all about people... If it reaches the executives' ears, who knows? They might just do us a favor. If we go around saying we got scammed by Hwang Seong-sik, who used to be a director at JW Development... that's a headache for them too."
Noh Gyeong-se had a devil's instinct for other people's sore spots.
"......"
He had to tell Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok about the meeting with Noh Gyeong-se and Jo Seong-gi.
"I'm not sure. I'm still thinking it over."
He could sense that Ko Yoon-seok, on the other end of the line, was turning it over as well.
"I don't have so much as a fingernail's worth of regret about the past. There's just one thing. For a while, I believed a child named Lee-seon was my own, so I want her to grow up healthy and well. Lee-seon is the one thing that weighs on me."
"That's exactly what worries me."
That was what troubled him. If she had been his biological daughter... he would have taken her and raised her himself. She wasn't his biological daughter, but he had spent a year with her believing that she was. He had cut ties coldly — but feelings for a child do not simply vanish.
"That's why I called you, Vice Chairman."
"I thought as much..."
Meaning: give them a share of the alluvial gold claims and let Bando Jewelry and SG Global make a living.
"Hahaha... so we make them disappear?"
Sign a formal contract, hand over the gold mine, send them to Cambodia, and quietly bury them?
So if they were given the placer mining rights, they would vanish on their own?
Sometimes the things Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok said were terrifying. Like now.
"No. Their safety has to be guaranteed. Making people disappear isn't my way of doing things."
"Pardon?"
"Talking with you has helped me decide what to do. Let's sell the mining rights to both companies. Tell them to put up five billion won each. And guarantee their safety. Not a portion of a tributary — tell them they'll get an entire tributary."
"I set the price to be burdensome. When they see a lump of gold right in front of them, they'll overreach. They'll have to assemble a mining team, and they'll have to build lodging, a cafeteria, and the rest of the infrastructure for that team. Ah, and if it's just those two companies, it'll be too obvious, so throw in a few more as well. And include Hyoyeon Development. We might as well work on them while we're at it."
They were going to do the job anyway, so they might as well do it all at once. Hardly an "idea."
"Yes. As you said, Vice Chairman, I can't leave Lee-seon with a mother and grandparents like that. There's a great-aunt on that side of the family who lives alone. She's in her sixties and still in good health. She seemed to be the only decent person in that household — a very kind and warm woman. I think it would be best to leave Lee-seon's upbringing to her."
Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok spoke in a firm tone.
Jung Jinwoo nodded as he listened. He was right. There was a line to how far sympathy and pity could take you. Arranging for Lee-seon's great-aunt to raise her was the most Jung Jinwoo could do.
Jinwoo had no intention of being chained to the past. He was willing to slowly, even if a little belatedly, put things in order.
"I understand, Vice Chairman. I feel the same way. First, please put together an investigation team on Noh Mira and Jo Seong-gi."
Jung Jinwoo smiled as he answered.
"There's no need to put together an investigation team for him. The man has more than enough problems as it is..."
"Remember what?"
"Yes. I was quite shocked at the time."
"......"
He was speechless. It wasn't limited to the power elite?
"'We'? You mean it's not just you, Vice Chairman — there's more than one of you?"
"Shadow too? Is Shadow part of the JW Security Team?"
"Haaaah..."
It was a chilling thing to hear. Shadow alone was frightening enough. And there was an entire team that specialized in that work.
Then again, for a company the size of JW Corporation, it would have been stranger if there weren't one. When Oh Se-eun's uncle, Oh Hyeongseok, had dragged Jinwoo out to Yangpyeong, hadn't a special warfare expert and a security team been dispatched?
"Please send me the evidence collected on Noh Mira, Jo Seong-gi, and Noh Gyeong-se."
"Haaaah..."
There were moments like this when he was forced to recognize the position he occupied. A seat of power far too vast for any one individual to wield — a place from which he could decide the lives and deaths of countless people, a place from which his decisions could change the world.