Chapter 62: The Phnom Penh Chase

TL: LittlePeach

After that day, my daily routine in Cambodia became simple.

Once I'd set up new lodgings near Temple Coffee, I commuted to the café every morning.

A Hawaiian shirt and designer-brand sunglasses.

Looking, from any angle, like an unimpeachable tourist.

Once I'd claimed table 5 out on the sun-baked terrace, I'd sip my coffee at a leisurely pace and read straight through a book.

A conversation textbook I'd made a point of packing before leaving Korea.

[Suosdey! Cambodia, You Too Can Sound Like a Native in One Month!]

Then, when mealtime rolled around, I'd eat, come back, and read the same book at the same table.

I ran this routine for about two days, and by the third the staff had my coconut latte mixed and waiting before I even arrived.

Which brought me to today, day four.

Slurp, slurp.

The coconut latte was really sweet.

"Nice weather."

As best I could guess, the Southeast Asia Team definitely didn't care for me.

Not that I had any idea why.

Whether this was plain territorial hazing, a test of wills, or an attempt to break me in, I couldn't say.

'Doesn't much matter either way.'

In cases like this, my approach was simple.

If I get antsy about it, the other side only gets a bigger kick out of it.

So after the first day, I made no calls and sent no texts.

'They'll start getting curious soon enough.'

When I play it this way, the other side gets a little puzzled.

Why isn't he getting in touch? Did he just give up?

And so, little by little, doubts about me start to creep in.

From that point on, they're the ones who get antsy, hoping I'll react somehow, anyhow.

There's a famous saying that fits this exactly.

'The criminal returns to the scene of the crime.'

Having reported in to Temple Coffee as always, I read behind my sunglasses just like any other day.

Then, mid-stretch, I let my gaze drift lazily down over the street below the terrace.

That was when an uneasy prickle ran down my spine.

'That guy.'

Across from Temple Coffee, in a shaded spot wedged between narrow alleys.

A few small street-food stalls stood there.

A place where no small number of tourists bought a slushie or a fruit juice to kill some time before moving on.

'Pretty sure he's snuck a look at me about five times now.'

There was a man tucked in one corner of a stall, sucking down a juice.

Swarthy skin, cheap plastic sunglasses, a fluttering Hawaiian shirt, dressed like a tourist by every measure.

He was glancing idly around, as if taking in the street.

Then, a slow slide.

His gaze, which had been sweeping the area, flicked up and grazed past me.

'Let's run a little test.'

I made a show of it, opening my mouth in a wide yawn, then rose from my seat.

Then I strolled out of the café at an easy pace, off to an early lunch.

The moment I stepped out the ground-floor door, sure enough.

'Gone?'

The man had vanished without a trace, off to who knew where in the meantime.

Sure, maybe he'd just happened to leave right then, pure coincidence.

But the truth is, in the line of work we're in, "coincidence" might as well be a word that doesn't exist.

'I've got his face memorized.'

Once I'm certain, everything after that gets very simple.

I found a restaurant nearby, knocked out lunch in a hurry, then came back to the Temple Coffee terrace and ordered a coconut latte.

And there I was, pretending to crack open my book again while methodically scanning out over the terrace.

'Knew it.'

The man who'd disappeared somewhere a moment ago had caught my eye again.

This time he was parked on a stool at a stall in a different direction.

Not so much as touching the watermelon juice he'd ordered, just pretending to take in the sights at his leisure.

Then came the moment his sunglasses flicked past me once more.

'Dead to rights.'

The instant my mind was made up, I got to my feet and stared down over the terrace.

It was around mealtime, so there weren't many people passing by.

There was nothing more to think about.

Leap!

I hurled myself out past the terrace railing and into the air.

"!"

The man's face flipped all on its own in shock.

Of course, anyone who spotted a person plummeting straight down off a third-floor café terrace would make exactly that face.

Falling through the air, cutting the wind, I met the man's eyes and grinned.

Whump.

A picture-perfect superhero landing, no less.

"Ee, eeeeeek!"

"D-did a person just fall?!"

"Wh-what the? Are they sh-shooting a movie?"

Leaving behind a handful of tourists freaking out at the sight of me dropping on them like a bolt from the blue.

"Hup!"

The instant I landed, I kicked off the ground and bolted straight for the man.

"Hgk! F-fuck!"

At that, the man went pale as a corpse and shot off running too.

The chase was on for real.

Tak, ta-ta-tak!

"Guh! Hagh!"

"Hoo. Hoo."

Just as I'd figured, the man was quick on his feet.

He clearly knew the area cold, slipping this way and that through the maze of narrow alleys like a loach.

But my running was no less impressive.

Just in case, I'd crammed the entire map of the area into my head, so I was predicting his nimble route perfectly.

"Eek! Ha, hagh!"

"Hoo, hoo."

Yeah, no wonder he was screaming.

The streets of Phnom Penh at the peak of the heat.

The sun-struck roads were sizzling like a well-heated frying pan, after all.

"Hagh! Hng! Nnngh!"

"Hoo. Hoo."

The man cut through the middle of a tourist spot packed with crowds.

He dove between souvenir shops strewn with knickknacks of every color.

He darted across the tables of a local eatery whose front and back doors stood wide open.

Then, as we swept past a tropical fruit market, a sweet smell brushed the tip of my nose.

"Hagh! Hagh!"

"Hoo. Hff."

In the meantime, the gap between us had closed to a hand's breadth.

That was when it happened.

"Nnk!"

Feigning a turn around a corner in the market, the man suddenly whipped his body around.

Then he threw out his hands, seizing my arm, hauling in tight against my shoulder.

Excellent timing, clean and economical form.

A judo shoulder throw.

Whump!

"Heave!"

"There we go."

In the moment he was relieved, certain he'd slammed me perfectly into the ground.

"Not so fast."

"Ngk?!"

I grabbed the man's wrist and yanked hard.

He lost his balance and toppled, sprawling on top of me.

After that it was simple.

I climbed straight up over his body like a spider and reversed our positions.

"Ghhk!"

A Russian-style wrestling par terre, locked in amid the shimmering heat haze.

Then I wound my arm deep around his neck, cinching in a guillotine choke there was no escaping.

"Kkh, gack!"

The man, throat crushed in the crook of my forearm, was thrashing and clawing at the ground. That was the moment.

"You son of a bitch! Let him go!"

Another man came bursting out from between a fruit stand and a stall.

Making no attempt to hide the murderous glare blazing in his eyes, he had a hand on his waistband, poised to draw a hidden weapon at any second.

Still sprawled on the ground, I grinned.

"Suosdey!"

"...."

"Hello there. You two are Southeast Asia Team agents, correct?"

Then I released the choke and gave a little wave.

"Pleasure to meet you. I'm still not familiar with the layout of Cambodia, so my greeting's a bit overdue."

"Hagh. Hagh...."

"...."

While the man freed from my choke crawled along the ground gasping for breath, I beamed at his wary partner.

"So glad you all gathered like this to give me a welcome."

At the sight of me delivering the greeting so brazenly, both agents' faces twisted up.

The faces of men who'd just realized I wasn't the type to roll over for their hazing.

*****

We left the Temple Coffee café and headed off to the far edge of Koreatown.

A cramped little back room tucked into a corner of a commercial block.

Their hideout, disguised as a secondhand bookshop.

Stepping inside, I found the walls papered all over with yellowed local Cambodian newspaper in place of wallpaper, giving off a musty smell of old paper.

"...Let me start with introductions. I'm Owl No. 11, squad leader of the Cambodia dispatch squad, and this fellow here is Sparrow No. 10."

A voice with a thick Daegu-accent lilt.

First things first, I plopped my rear down into an empty seat.

"Yes, pleasure to meet you. I'm Sparrow No. 7."

"...Sparrow?"

When I dropped the Sparrow codename without batting an eye, Owl No. 11 knit his brows.

"If you don't mind my asking, how long have you been with the NIS?"

"Not counting the probation period, about three months now, I'd say."

"Headquarters told us for certain a team-leader-grade agent would be coming...."

"That's me. I'm the team leader of Team 5, formed on a reserve basis. Though for now I'm the only member."

"...."

Word of me apparently hadn't spread as far as Southeast Asia yet.

Then again, black agents not knowing each other's identities was the norm, so in the end they had to guess at each other's work from the codename alone.

But Sparrow? He had to be thinking, Is this guy messing with me?

His expression carried exactly that nuance.

"Are you two the only agents in Cambodia?"

"No. There are three of us currently dispatched to Cambodia. The last one has a target under separate surveillance right now, and we take turns keeping watch on that post."

Owl No. 11 pulled a bottle of cold water from the mini fridge in the corner of the hideout and held it out.

Sparrow No. 10, the one I'd choked out a moment ago, posted up at a slant by the entrance, as if to cut off my retreat.

Despite their wary stares, I chugged the water first thing.

"Let me ask you one thing before anything else. What in the world did you do back there?"

"Pfft. What do you mean, what did I do?"

"You dropped bare-bodied from a full three-story terrace, and here you are without a scratch...."

Owl No. 11 looked me up and down as he pressed the question.

It was the kind of question that seemed to ask why I was still alive and breathing.

I set down the half-finished water and smiled brightly.

"I've got solid bones, so my body's tough as nails."

"...Solid bones?"

"Yep. So for a height like that, as long as you break the fall halfway decently, it mostly works out."

When I gave a joking little shrug, Owl No. 11's face soured.

Then he glanced back at Sparrow No. 10 and went on.

"So how did you figure out that fellow over there was one of ours?"

"Just a hunch, I guess."

Honestly, there was no other way to explain it.

If I'd leapt off the terrace and grabbed a guy by the collar only for him to turn out to be a genuinely clueless tourist, things would've gotten pretty awkward.

But the way he'd bolted without a backward glance the moment I jumped, and the way his partner popped out the instant I started choking him, and so on.

It was only afterward that my hunch turned into certainty.

"...."

He'd asked everything he wanted to and still been left with nothing but unease.

Owl No. 11 heaved a deep sigh and nodded.

"Haah. Well, fine. Let's put this exhausting test of wills to rest."

It wasn't a test of wills, though....

When I smiled awkwardly, Owl No. 11 snorted with a sullen look.

"I'll lay it out for you straight. Right now every last one of us on the Southeast Asia Team holds no small grievance against NIS Headquarters."

"Hmm."

"So whatever mission brought you over to Cambodia, Team 5 Leader, we have absolutely no intention of cooperating with it. If they want to discipline us over this.... yes, we'll take it without complaint. If it comes to that, I suppose we'll just write our resignation letters."

His remark about a grievance against Headquarters gave me a rough sense of how things stood.

For whatever reason, the Southeast Asia Team was brimming with discontent toward NIS Headquarters, and I'd gotten swept up in the fallout.

Only a few days ago I'd been a low-level agent myself, but now that I'd been handed a team-leader post, in their eyes I was just another management type from Headquarters, same as the rest.

'Most of the world's problems, in the end, come down to communication.'

It might look complicated on the surface, but the situation was surprisingly simple.

Most of the trouble that flares up between the brass at Headquarters and the rank-and-file agents in the field stems, as always, from a lack of communication.

'Hey, Sunny Kick, you fucker! You won't rest till you've driven me clean out of my mind, will you?'

'Here. Have some vodka.'

'Spasibo!'

More often than not, things get resolved anticlimactically, just like that.

So maybe I could be of some use in the middle, one way or another.

'Looks like I'll be playing team leader the moment I walk in the door.'

As I sat there watching him with bright, curious eyes, maybe it stirred a sudden urge in him to unload.

"Hoo. Our main job is to pin down the locations of the drug cartels operating across Southeast Asia and trace their smuggling routes."

Owl No. 11 let out a heavy sigh and began his story.

*****

For 20 advance chapters, you can check out my Patreon here -->

If you enjoy this novel, please review and rate it at Novelupdates. Thanks! 😊