Chapter 114: Mission: Impossible

TL: LittlePeach

When I wrapped up my report with a single sentence, Director Yang Ui-jin remained silent for a while, seemingly sorting through his thoughts.

After a brief silence.

“I see. That’s good news. You did well.”

“....”

He simply nodded.

I sipped the rest of my green tea and waited for his next question.

But no matter how long I waited, Director Yang Ui-jin merely watched me with a faint smile on his lips.

“Is there anything else you’d like to ask?”

“A field agent personally confirmed there were no problems. What more would I have to pry into?”

“That’s true.”

I shamelessly nodded.

Whether I had successfully passed his test or been written off as someone too useless to bother with, I had no way of knowing at this point.

If it wasn’t something I could reach a definite conclusion on right away anyway, the best thing to do was simply put it out of my mind.

Anyway.

Just as that peculiar battle of nerves continued.

Bang.

“Director Yang, got a minute?”

A man suddenly flung open the office door and walked in without even knocking.

He had a fairly rugged appearance, with a thick beard he seemed to have simply left to grow wild.

He came in irritably ruffling his hair, then spotted me sitting across from Director Yang Ui-jin and widened his eyes.

“Oh. Didn’t realize you had a guest.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing much. I’ve got a headache-inducing problem on my hands, so I figured I’d come mooch a cup of coffee off you. Nothing’s been going my way lately.”

Anyone who could barge into Director Yang Ui-jin’s office that casually was almost certainly another bureau director.

As I remained seated and glanced him over, the man likewise began studying my face with a puzzled expression.

“But this guy looks kind of familiar.... Have we met somewhere before?”

“You probably haven’t met him in person. He’s the Team 5 leader from our Special Operations Group.”

“...Oh? Ah, right! Yeah, I remember seeing his face in the profile the Deputy Director gave me.”

Unlike him, who immediately recognized me and brightened, I still had no idea who he was and could only blink in confusion.

Seeing my bewildered reaction, the man grinned and casually held out his hand.

“I heard our Taebaek Team got a hell of a lot of help from you last time. I’m Yun Tae-seong, director of the Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau.”

“Ah, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Kang Hae-chan.”

“Right, right.”

Somehow, my network of connections seemed to keep skipping right past the working level and shooting straight upward.

Yun Tae-seong, director of the Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau.

After Director Yang Ui-jin, I was now meeting yet another bureau director.

“This is perfect timing. I thought my head was going to explode from agonizing over this alone, and now the very person involved is sitting right here.”

He promptly dropped into an empty chair.

Director Yang Ui-jin hadn’t even offered him a seat yet.

As though this shameless behavior was nothing new, Director Yang Ui-jin smiled faintly and emptied two packets of instant coffee mix into a paper cup.

“I heard you were the unsung hero behind this recent mass defection operation for the diplomats. Apparently, the idea of simultaneously extracting North Korean embassy staff scattered around the world came from the Ri Jong-il defection.”

“All I did was toss one small stone. Weren’t you two directors and all the staffers at headquarters the ones who turned it into a landslide?”

“Heh heh. What, did you oil that tongue of yours with sesame oil? You sure know how to sweet-talk a man. I like you.”

Director Yun Tae-seong laughed heartily and waved a hand.

Just then, Director Yang Ui-jin set the strong cup of instant coffee down in front of him.

Slurp.

“Ahh. Anyway, that’s not the point. I wanted to pick your brain about something, since you seem to have a knack for coming up with clever ideas.”

“Pick my brain about....”

“Do you remember Pak Mun-ju, the secretary who worked at the North Korean embassy in Italy?”

“Of course.”

There was no way I could have forgotten him already.

Franco, the hit-and-run driver I had relentlessly hunted through Italy to avenge Vespa, and the drug boss of the Narancia Family.

Wasn’t Pak Mun-ju the man who had been meeting Franco back then to arrange a deal for North Korean drugs?

Director Yang Ui-jin had previously hinted to me that Pak Mun-ju, like Minister Ri Jong-il, had also defected to South Korea.

“I heard you personally caught Pak Mun-ju in the middle of drug trafficking.”

“That’s right.”

“And embarrassing as it is, during that intel operation you also uncovered the fact that one of our Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau agents, who was supposed to be monitoring Pak Mun-ju, had been slacking off on the job.”

“That’s also right.”

I tensed inwardly, wondering if any of the fallout might somehow come my way.

But Director Yun Tae-seong showed no sign of getting angry. He merely clicked his tongue with a bitter expression.

“Anyway, at first we thought this Pak Mun-ju bastard was just another diplomat making foreign currency for the regime by selling drugs in Italy, but once we dug into him, that wasn’t the case at all.”

He lowered his voice and finally got to the heart of the matter.

“The Kim family is believed to have no less than one billion dollars in slush funds hidden throughout Europe. That’s an astronomical sum of roughly one trillion won. Pak Mun-ju was the man managing a substantial portion of that money by splitting it up and cycling it through dozens of shell accounts under foreign nationals’ names. Turns out he was secretly serving as a section chief in Room 39 of the Workers’ Party at the same time.”

“Room 39?”

Room 39. There was no way I wouldn’t know such a famous organization.

The key clandestine department responsible for secretly managing and operating the North Korean supreme leader’s revolutionary funds, in other words, the Kim family’s personal slush fund.

“Pak Mun-ju personally managed no less than five hundred million dollars. With his cooperation, we planned to transfer that money into the accounts of a dozen or so trading companies we had prepared in advance.”

Five hundred million dollars, well over five hundred billion won.

An astronomical amount of money.

But maybe I had been getting tangled up with huge sums too often lately?

‘That’d only buy three Macau hotels.’

Once I put it that way, it suddenly didn’t seem all that astonishing.

“Unfortunately, though, to move funds on the scale of five hundred million dollars, the account holder has to personally visit a Swiss bank branch.”

“Ah, hmm.”

“Right. I’m sure you’ve already figured out the problem. Pak Mun-ju is flat-out refusing. He practically started foaming at the mouth, asking if we were trying to send him to his death.”

That was only natural.

Soon, inspectors dispatched directly from Pyongyang were going to begin visiting embassies around the world and thoroughly investigating the movements of the diplomats who had defected.

And Secretary Pak Mun-ju had also secretly been serving as a section chief in Room 39.

Without question, his name would be sitting right at the top of North Korea’s assassination squads’ hit lists.

In a situation like this, telling him to personally visit a Swiss bank was practically the same as telling him to go out and die.

“We can’t exactly drag the man there by force, but we can’t just leave five hundred million dollars sitting there either.... This damn problem has me tearing my hair out these days.”

For a man complaining about losing his hair, Director Yun Tae-seong still had a rather impressive amount of it.

If Group Director Oh Dong-cheol, with his gleaming scalp, had heard him say that, he would undoubtedly have hated the man’s guts.

“So, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“Now that you’ve heard the situation, do you have any brilliant ideas?”

Director Yun Tae-seong’s eyes were practically shining as he looked at me, quite unlike his usual self.

He looked downright desperate, as though willing to clutch at any straw he could find.

“Well, I....”

Only a few solutions came to mind right away.

Like storming into a Swiss bank, showing off the Claymore strapped to my body, and threatening them to hand over the money?

Of course, if I did that, I’d immediately end up on an international terrorist watch list with Interpol relentlessly hunting me down.

“The only thing that comes to mind right now is having someone use special-effects makeup and go to Switzerland in his place.”

“Special-effects makeup?”

“Yes. Put on one of those silicone masks you see in movies and pretend to be Secretary Pak Mun-ju.”

As it happened, I had watched a movie on the flight back home.

And of all movies, it had been Mission: Impossible.

So, half joking and half serious, I tossed out what was frankly a ridiculous idea.

“Oh? That’s it!”

Director Yun Tae-seong’s eyes suddenly flew wide open.

Apparently, my silly suggestion had struck exactly the right chord with him.

“Why the hell didn’t I think of that sooner? We already have an entire special-effects makeup team sitting right there under the Support Department!”

As it happened, the NIS had a separate unit specializing in cover identities and special-effects makeup.

It existed to conceal a black agent’s real identity and appearance whenever they had no choice but to operate in a situation where their identity might be exposed.

“If we disguise one of our black agents as Pak Mun-ju and send him instead.... Hell, compared to sending Pak Mun-ju himself and worrying whether we can trust him, it would be much faster and cleaner to have one of our own handle the operation. Don’t you think?”

“Well, yes.”

“And whenever something similar happens in the future, we could use the same method again.... You really are a sharp one!”

“Haha. Thank you for the compliment.”

The rough operation outline he had cobbled together went something like this.

First, they would question Pak Mun-ju himself and obtain information on the route for accessing the bank, the transfer procedures, and everything else required.

Then they would disguise one of the black agents as Secretary Pak Mun-ju using special-effects makeup and dispatch him to the site.

That would not only eliminate the possibility of Pak Mun-ju having second thoughts and running off midway through the operation, but also put the job in the hands of someone far more reliable and capable.

Two birds with one stone.

“Good. I’ll contact the special-effects makeup team right now and tell them to start setting everything up....”

“Before that, let me ask you one thing.”

That was when Director Yang Ui-jin, who had quietly listened to the entire conversation, finally spoke up.

“Who exactly are you planning to assign this mission to?”

Director Yun Tae-seong, who had looked ready to bolt straight for the Deputy Director’s office, froze.

It almost seemed as though the profiles of countless agents flashed through his mind for a moment.

“Well, obviously, I’d pick one of the agents in our Diplomatic Mission Intelligence Bureau with roughly the same build....”

“What I mean is, who would willingly volunteer for that mission? Secretary Pak Mun-ju himself practically foamed at the mouth and refused because he didn’t want to walk to his death.”

“Hmm....”

“North Korean assassination squads may already be positioned all over Switzerland, waiting for him. Who in the world would willingly volunteer to walk into a death trap like that?”

It was a perfectly reasonable point.

Just as Pak Mun-ju had been horrified by Director Yun Tae-seong’s proposal, there was no way some lunatic would hum happily to himself while knowingly walking straight into a death trap.

“Wouldn’t you agree? What do you think?”

“Pardon?”

“About this mission.”

As though asking for my opinion, Director Yang Ui-jin shifted his gaze toward me.

The question came so suddenly that my answer slipped out on pure reflex, without ever passing through my brain.

“Sounds fun.”

Sounds fun, Mission: Impossible....

“...What?”

For once, even the perpetually composed Director Yang Ui-jin looked as though his brain had momentarily stopped working.

*****

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