Chapter 104: Eagle Agent

TL: LittlePeach

“Seunim. I’m going out for a little while. A sunbae from work called and asked me to grab a bite.”

I told her some last-minute plans had come up late at night and stepped off the veranda.

At that, Deokun seunim came out to see me off with an oddly pleased expression.

“Is that so? What a relief.”

“A relief? What do you mean?”

“You stay at the temple every day and never go out to meet anyone. To tell the truth, I was rather worried about your social life.”

“Oh.”

She had never said anything about it, but apparently she had been quietly worrying.

Feeling awkward beneath Deokun seunim’s warm gaze, I headed straight for a long-established tavern near Eungam Station.

‘Is this the place?’

A small tavern near Eungam Station.

Tiny private rooms were packed closely together inside, and with no one around, the place was utterly quiet.

“Excuse me.”

“Come in.”

When I headed deep into the establishment, the man who had arrived before me welcomed me.

Surprisingly, he was dressed in brightly colored hiking clothes, looking like an ordinary middle-aged man from the neighborhood.

Fortunately, I looked like an equally shabby unemployed bum from around the neighborhood, so we were even.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Director. I’m the Team 5 leader.”

“Right. Team Leader Kang Hae-chan. I’m Yang Ui-jin.”

A face I had never seen before, but a voice I knew well.

A middle-aged man with gentle features and a kind smile.

This was Director Yang Ui-jin.

‘Tsk.’

The NIS executives I had met tended to give off similar impressions.

Team Leader Choi Min-sik, Group Director Oh Dong-cheol, even Deputy Director Kim Jin-taek.

They all tended to look rather high-strung.

Was that why?

‘I can’t get a read on him.’

His unusually kind expression somehow felt even more frightening.

My shoulders naturally tensed.

“I never expected you to come all the way here in person.”

“Take that as a sign of how important the matter is.”

I had been a little worried about the soundproofing, but the moment the door closed, all outside noise vanished.

Apparently, the NIS kept a whole list of restaurants with soundproofing this good.

“What matter was important enough for you to come all the way here yourself?”

“Good grief. It hasn’t even been a minute since you sat down.”

“Ah.”

“Since we’ve gone to the trouble of meeting face-to-face, why don’t we relax and have a drink?”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

As though admonishing me, he picked up the bottle of sake that had already been set out.

“Relax those shoulders, too. Now that we’re both off work, aren’t we just a pair of neighborhood loafers?”

“Well, if you put it that way....”

I relaxed my shoulders as he suggested.

Then we sat across from each other and casually filled our glasses.

“I heard the place you’re staying at is a small Buddhist temple. May I ask how you came to be staying there?”

As we each sipped our drinks, Director Yang Ui-jin abruptly asked about something surprisingly personal.

It felt a little like I was being subjected to a background check, but I saw no reason to show it.

“The seunim there was an old friend of my late grandmother. She treats me like her own grandson, so I treat her like my own grandmother as well.”

“I see. Having even one place in this world to lean on is a wonderful thing. Without that, life becomes very exhausting. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I would.”

We spent quite a while picking at the food and exchanging idle small talk.

Perhaps because I had spoken so candidly, Director Yang Ui-jin began talking about himself as well.

Things like how he had one daughter, and how the two of them were both so busy that they hardly ever got to see each other.

Then, at some point, he casually brought up the real reason for our meeting.

“Thanks to that ingenious suggestion of yours, Secretary Pak Mun-ju at the North Korean embassy in Italy successfully completed his defection to our side last night.”

“Oh.”

“I assume you got the idea from the defection of the minister in the UK? Frankly, I felt like I’d taken one square on the chin.”

“Haha. That’s right. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you beforehand.”

“No. You handled it properly, according to procedure.”

Things had moved even faster than I had expected.

But judging from the smile on Director Yang Ui-jin’s face, he had not come all the way here simply to tell me this news.

“Building on that ingenious idea of yours, we decided to scale the whole operation up worldwide. Using the defections of diplomats in Italy and the UK as justification, the Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau agents stationed around the world are already moving. They’re all simultaneously visiting North Korean diplomats and quietly sounding them out about whether they’re willing to defect.”

“Oh.... Is that safe?”

“An embargo is in place on every defection operation currently underway. That’s why North Korea hasn’t been able to respond in time. If Pyongyang had sensed anything unusual, they would have dispatched inspectors en masse. We haven’t seen any sign of that whatsoever.”

Director Yang Ui-jin smiled with satisfaction and took a sip from his glass.

“What if even one of those North Korean diplomats reports it back home?”

“Even if one does, we’re only talking about a day or two. Once we complete all the operations and meaningful results start pouring in, it’ll already be too late even if they send inspectors.”

One little pebble rolling out of Naples was causing a landslide throughout North Korea’s entire diplomatic network.

One piece of information I had brought back had produced results on this scale.

I couldn’t help but marvel.

“Does that have anything to do with why you called me out here so urgently?”

Even so, I had the feeling we were still nowhere near the heart of the matter.

When I asked him outright, Director Yang Ui-jin idly toyed with his empty glass.

“It isn’t entirely unrelated. When you called me from Italy, do you remember warning me about the possibility that agents from the Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau might be slacking off on the job?”

“Of course.”

“It turns out there really was a case of it. We confirmed that the agent who was supposed to be monitoring Secretary Pak Mun-ju had, contrary to his reports, been doing virtually no proper surveillance and was simply enjoying a vacation at his post.”

“Ah....”

“Thanks to your keen eye, we found that rotten wound before it had a chance to fester any further. Fortunate, wouldn’t you say?”

One rule of office life.

If you know something, pretend you don’t. If you don’t know something, pretend you don’t.

But once you pretend to know something you actually don’t, there is no escaping responsibility afterward.

I clicked my tongue inwardly.

“The Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau director is furious right now, raising hell about having that agent escorted under guard straight back to headquarters and making him answer for it.... But it suddenly made me wonder.”

Director Yang Ui-jin drained the half-full glass in one gulp.

“Can the Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau director himself really say with confidence that he bears no responsibility whatsoever? If he had caught it early enough, before a more serious failure occurred, the whole thing could have been prevented.”

I considered the question for a moment myself, but it was not an easy one to answer.

Someone at the level of bureau director would already have a mountain of work to deal with. He could hardly scrutinize the private lives of every rank-and-file agent and personally weigh every success and failure.

“It wasn’t something I should laugh off just because it happened in someone else’s department. It made me realize that this might be the right time for me to take a closer look at the agents under my own command as well.”

With that, Director Yang Ui-jin pulled a small notebook from the inside pocket of his hiking jacket and held it out to me.

When I took the notebook and stared blankly at it, he smiled.

“Any idea what’s inside?”

“....”

“Open it.”

I flipped through to a random page.

Flip, flip, flip.

Tap.

[Owl No. 2]

[Real name: Ji Nam-jin]

[Alias: Jang Sam]

[Current location: Room 404, Yahid Guest Rooms, near Bahonar Wharf, Bandar Abbas, Hormozgan Province, Iran]

[Notes: Currently working at a nearby restaurant. Failed twice to report cargo control numbers for freighters transporting North Korean Scud missiles]

I unconsciously sucked in a sharp breath.

The page I had randomly stopped on had unexpectedly revealed the full identity of a black agent.

The next page I turned to was no different.

[Owl No. 4]

[Real name: Oh Un-cheol]

[Alias: Jang Cheol]

[Current location: Unit 201, Yangsan Housing, 150-ro, Tumen City, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture]

[Notes: Two scheduled report videos missing within three months, resulting in additional server rebuild costs]

More identities sprang out at me with every page I turned.

One person per page.

[Owl No. 8]

[Real name: Lee Yong-jun]

[...]

[Notes: Former CIA. Some of the framing in U.S.-held photographs of the area near the Yalu River is strikingly similar. Suspected to be this agent’s work]

There was even someone I knew inside.

Owl No. 8.

It was a name I had not seen in a long time, but this was not how I had hoped to come across it again.

Director Yang Ui-jin took a long drink from his glass.

“The agents of our Special Operations Group are stationed in Russia, the Middle East, the Northeast Three Provinces, Southeast Asia, and other such sensitive border regions, carrying out their respective missions. They are people who struggle alone in the darkest shadows, without anyone’s help. I have no doubt that each and every one of them is doing the very best they can in their assigned position.”

NIS agents did not know one another’s identities.

Whenever we were deployed, we had to refer to one another using designated codes such as Kite, Sparrow, Owl, and Crane, and as a matter of principle, we were forbidden from forming personal relationships with one another.

As a black agent, there was no way I could fail to understand just how dangerous this notebook was.

He looked at me and continued in a gentle voice.

“Even so, the work still has to be done.... That notebook contains a list of agents in our Special Operations Group who have accumulated an unusual number of problems. I wrote them down without distinguishing between major and minor issues.”

After hearing his explanation, it became perfectly clear what he wanted from me.

I glanced up to find Director Yang Ui-jin steadily studying my expression.

“I’d like someone trustworthy to visit them personally and find out what’s causing those problems. With your abilities, I imagine you’re more than capable of it.”

“Why are you entrusting something this important to me?”

The work itself did not sound especially difficult.

All I had to do was roam around the world as I pleased and observe whether the agents scattered across various countries were slacking off on the job.

“Wouldn’t the Inspection Office normally handle something like this first?”

“Normally, I would have happily handed the matter off to internal inspection at headquarters and been done with it. But for some reason, I found myself wanting to entrust it to you. Just as you acted independently in Italy and achieved results beyond my expectations, I thought you might produce another unconventional result this time.”

In truth, once the Inspection Office started digging directly into a problem like this, there was often no going back.

The moment an agent was recalled to Korea for an internal inspection, not only would his current assignment be disrupted, but the intelligence network he had painstakingly built could collapse along with it.

That was why Director Yang Ui-jin wanted me, a fellow field agent, to approach them naturally, figure out what circumstances they were in, and use my discretion to straighten things out as needed.

“Remember this. The fact that I’m meeting you alone like this and telling you in secret means this is a direct order whose access is restricted to the Deputy Director and me.”

He tilted the bottle and filled his own glass to the brim.

Drip. Driip.

Before long, the ripples in the glass, filled carefully down to the very last drop, subsided.

“The Deputy Director and I sometimes jokingly call people assigned to this kind of work Eagle agents.”

Hearing that, I realized something.

There were several other people besides me who had been given missions like this.

*****

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