Chapter 73: 50kg of Sun-Dried Chili Powder

TL: LittlePeach

NIS Headquarters always keeps a standing roster of agents holding the position of analyst.

During normal working hours these people gathered together in a comfortable analysis room and handled routine general-affairs work; after clocking out, they stayed in the on-call quarters and remained on emergency standby.

Anyone taking leave absolutely required someone to cover their shift, so they couldn't even use their vacation days as they pleased.

"Supervisor Seong. Ever since you transferred over to handle the newly formed Team 5, your complexion's been looking bright lately. Your face is practically glowing."

"Huh? Oh, ahem. Is it that obvious?"

"Of course it's obvious."

"Heh heh."

The work an analyst does tends to be vast and varied.

Tracking down and delivering the intelligence the black agents grinding it out all over the world need, brokering connections with related agencies, providing supplies and boltholes, and so on, they held the role of communicating most closely with the field agents from within headquarters.

Aside from the fact that they had to man the lines twenty-four hours a day, it was a perfect job in every way.

"So how does it feel, getting out of the Northeast Three Provinces team?"

"Mmm. Honestly, it feels like I can finally breathe."

"Right? What is there even to say. That place is no place for a human being to live."

Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon, up until two weeks ago, had been an analyst attached to the Special Operations Group's Team 3, Northeast Three Provinces.

The infamous Northeast Three Provinces.

That place was where every kind of human specimen imaginable, North Korea and China and Russia plus the Triads, Korean-Chinese, North Korean defectors, all gathered to commit vicious crimes and incidents day and night without distinction.

That was why, even with as many as six analysts rotating shifts around the clock, every day left them wrung dry.

'What did you say? Russian mafia and North Korean State Security Department agents made contact just now? Where? Why?'

'The Rabbit Hole we stashed in Shenyang got busted by Shenyang Public Security? No, seriously, why?'

She only had to close her eyes for a second and the scene rose up vivid before her.

Back when she'd been a rookie analyst herself, the sight of her senior Northeast Three Provinces analysts wailing in a corner of the analysis room with their heads in their hands.

But what about her now?

Even now she was relaxed enough to keep a coffee straw in her mouth.

Slurrrp.

"So what's the Team 5 leader actually like?"

"I haven't gotten a single call from him yet. I only know he's somewhere in Cambodia; I have no idea where he is or what he's doing."

"Yeah? I heard he's a young guy, but he must be a real old-school field type."

"Old-school?"

"You know how it is, right? Every now and then you get one of those lone-wolf types who can't be bothered to work through their analyst."

"That's right. I think that's exactly it."

At the words of her senior analyst from the Southeast Asia team, Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon nodded along in agreement.

Honestly, the moment she'd been assigned as Team 5's dedicated analyst, she'd been braced and tense inside, wondering whether something was about to blow up.

And yet, several days into the posting with not a word of contact, she'd reached the point of being bewildered instead.

'For an old-school type... I bet he's really good-looking.'

She'd heard his voice once before.

During the Sinuiju operation, she'd been in the analysis room too, after all.

Back then he had shot dead the State Security Department's External Intelligence Bureau director, rescued the kidnapped tourists, and then secured the Minister of People's Armed Forces; that whole outrageous chain of events was still fresh in her mind.

Sipping her coffee, she broke into a soft smile.

"Thanks to him, every single day for me is peaceful and quiet, and I love it."

Wishing this sweet peace would last forever, she was in the very middle of a leisurely stretch when it happened.

Brrrring!

"Huh?"

"Oh, what's that. Isn't that the Team 5 leader's line?"

"I-it is."

"Speak of the devil. Hurry up and answer it."

The landline phone flashed red and rang shrilly.

Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon scrambled back to her seat.

Swishing coffee around to rinse her mouth and straightening her posture, she snatched up the receiver.

"Yes, Yangpum Trading. How may I help you?"

-Thanks for all your hard work. This is the owner of Taepyeong Mill.

Taepyeong Mill, the Team 5 leader's code name.

The principle was that, except on emergency lines that were thoroughly encrypted and had guaranteed comms security, all conversations were conducted using pre-agreed codes like this in case of wiretapping.

Nerves on edge for the hidden meaning of whatever conversation was about to follow, Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon opened up the notepad on her computer.

-I heard you were urgently looking for a batch of sun-dried chili powder the other day. That right?

Her eyes went wide.

Sun-dried chili powder.

That was code for a field agent having seized a certain quantity or more of methamphetamine-class narcotics.

"Yes. That's right. Is it the spicy chili powder?"

-It's spicy. Very spicy.

Spicy meant high purity.

Very spicy meant it was in the form of raw crystalline product, close to one hundred percent purity.

Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon felt her mouth go dry and swallowed hard.

"Thank you for preparing the batch. How much would we be able to receive, roughly?"

-I've got quite a few places to send it, so I can't spare you much; this batch comes to about fifty.

"...Grams?"

-No. Fifty kilograms.

Crash.

Lightning struck the head that had been rolling along so smoothly until now.

In other words, didn't that mean he'd secured and seized a full fifty kilograms of ninety-nine-percent-purity meth in Cambodia?

Her face went white.

"F-fifty kilos?"

For a moment she wondered whether she'd genuinely misheard, whether she'd picked up a call meant for some actual neighborhood mill by mistake.

Fifty kilograms, by street value alone, came to two hundred billion won, enough for a full one point eight million people to dose all at once.

-Yes. Fifty kilograms. So, uh, where should I have this couriered? Or should I send it as freight?

"I-I'll, I'll t-text you a forwarding address, s-so. Could you, uh, s-submit the freight there for now? We'll send a collection team over your way..."

-Got it. Send the address, then. Keep up the good work.

Click.

She'd have liked to hear a bit more explanation, but the call was cut off with heartbreaking coolness.

Utterly dumbstruck, Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon just sat there for a while, receiver in hand, mouthing air like a fish.

"...Fifty kilos?"

As far as she knew, the single-seizure narcotics record set most recently was the eighteen kilos busted last year.

And even that had been three people planning to split it into six kilos each, so strictly speaking the figure was six kilos.

And now fifty kilos.

And by one person, at that?

"Wow... No wonder it was so quiet. He went and picked up a live bomb somewhere."

The senior analyst who'd been eavesdropping on the call beside her stared at Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon with a horrified expression.

Then, apparently not wanting to get tangled up in it, he started edging away.

"My condolences, Supervisor Seong. Looks like you're in for a rough few days."

"Ah..."

That was exactly it.

When she hadn't even been told the front-and-back circumstances of what had happened in the field, how on earth was she supposed to write up the report to submit to the group director right now?

And not only that, the prosecutors and police, obviously, but also Customs, the courts, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, and every other body that would take custody of the goods, inspect them, and analyze them, there were easily more than half a dozen related agencies she'd have to blanket with cooperation requests.

And how was she supposed to work out a transport route to bring this staggering quantity safely into the country?

The situation was dizzying and hopeless.

"C-could you please help me out a little? I'm the only one on Team 5..."

"Whoops. Something I've got to do just came to mind, so I'll be off."

"Ah, ahh..."

At the retreating back of the departing analyst, Supervisor Seong Ji-yeon crumpled into a look of pure despair, as if she'd lost the whole world.

An unprecedented situation had planted a bomb right over her head.

*****

The day after every incident had wrapped up.

The two agents who'd gone to scout the Mango Farm in Sihanoukville returned to the hideout with satisfied faces.

"...What exactly is this, right now?"

"It's meth."

"For meth to be in this kind of quantity..."

"I weighed it, and it came out to exactly fifty kilos."

"...."

An aluminum trunk packed to the brim without a single gap.

What filled it was something shaped like white bricks.

Lumps of high-purity crystalline meth.

Everyone was too busy peering into that aluminum trunk in a daze to do anything else.

"I already contacted the headquarters analyst, so they'll be sending a collection team before long."

The two of them blinked their dumbstruck eyes and, for lack of anything better, turned to look at Sparrow No. 10.

But Sparrow No. 10 had already spent the entire day being thoroughly appalled, and looked as if he no longer had the energy to say anything to their reaction.

"Wh-where in the world did you, uh, uh-uh-uh, where did you get this?"

"Picked it up off the street."

"No, team leader... Please, seriously, enough with the jokes now."

"I'm not joking, though."

Apparently a detailed explanation was in order.

Then again, how does one pick fifty kilos' worth of drugs up off the street?

I roughly recalled the memory of last night.

'I am Le Wei of the Shanyuan Society!'

'Zhang Chen of the Hongmen Society is here!'

...In the current situation, those were all pretty much useless memories.

Instead, I moistened my lips and set about recreating a plausible story.

"So first off, the Shanyuan Society and the Hongmen Society suddenly went to war. The Hongmen fired first, raining RPG rockets down on the apartment complex, and the Shanyuan dug in and defended with machine guns."

The story starts, first of all, from the all-out war between the Shanyuan Society and the Hongmen Society.

Up to the part where Sparrow No. 10, who'd been surveilling the Shanyuan Society's movements from the Aeon Mall department store, made an emergency call to summon me, and the two of us watched the spectacle before evacuating, was exactly as I remembered it.

After that, the trouble started from the part where I sent Sparrow No. 10 back to the hideout first, then ducked into the department store restroom to urgently take care of some big business, and came back out.

"On my way out of the restroom at the department store, this black sedan suddenly came shooting out of the entrance to the apartment complex."

But honestly, at this point, coming up with excuses was starting to be a real pain too.

So I decided to just spill whatever came to mind.

"But that sedan took a direct hit from an RPG rocket the Hongmen fired and went tumbling everywhere. The crushed back seat split wide open, and this carrier came clattering out of it and slid right up to my feet, would you believe it?"

"...."

"Figured it might be something important, so I grabbed it and ran for now. Opened it up later, and it was meth. The person riding in that sedan was probably somebody around the level of the Irobuchi-kai's branch chief. Looked like the war between the Shanyuan and the Hongmen was about to get the plant raided, so he tried to grab just the goods and run, and that's how it ended up."

"...."

"This is something I heard from a junkie I got friendly with the other day, but he said that until they build the new Cambodia plant, these guys are going to dump the product they've already produced in the Philippines onto the market. I'm guessing this is probably that product."

The agents just stared blankly at me, dazed.

An outrageous coincidence layered over sound reasoning, so it seemed my flawless scenario had blown the agents' minds.

'It's working.'

Along with my acting skills, which had reached the level of the divine, I could feel that my bullshitting skills had also improved by leaps and bounds.

Truly, the plain and self-evident king of bullshit.

With the evidence sitting right there in front of them, they couldn't very well refuse to believe my lie.

"And as for the Shanyuan Society, I don't think you have to worry about them anymore. I took a quick look at dawn yesterday, and there's no reaction from them at all now. The apartment's all collapsed, and the members are mostly dead or fled, from the looks of it."

Just then, Crane No. 22, who had stepped out for a moment to make a call to check on the Shanyuan Society's status, returned to the hideout.

He wet his lips first, a dumbfounded look on his face.

"This is something I just heard from a local asset... Last night, some lunatic rammed a car into the Hongmen Society's building and blew it up. And the driver turned out to be an assassin from the Shanyuan side, so the Hongmen went straight into retaliation against the Shanyuan."

"Whoops. That kind of thing happened?"

"Yes. The building partially collapsed, but the flames burned out partway thanks to the sprinklers, apparently. Damage aside, it seems the two organizations had a pretty deep, long-standing grudge."

I have no idea where he dug up the information, but he was quick on his feet.

While I widened my eyes, pretending to be impressed, the eyes of the other agents who'd heard the report slowly narrowed.

"...But, I feel like I saw that exact same trick somewhere recently?"

"N-now that you mention it, me too..."

At that moment, the three agents' heads creaked around toward me.

Blatant, fixed stares, as if struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu.

I had no particular intention of hiding it.

"I couldn't help it. I had to go."

"...."

"But I set up separate alibis for everything, so you don't have to worry too much."

"No, the alibi isn't the problem..."

At my confident confession, the agents didn't bother to hide their bewildered expressions in the slightest.

They seemed unable to believe that, thanks to my sowing of discord, two fearsome Triad organizations had suffered near-annihilating, catastrophic damage.

Anyhow.

"When the reward money comes in from this, I'll buy you all a meal."

"...."

With this all-out war, the Shanyuan Society at least had been dealt near-annihilating damage.

The Hongmen Society, dragged into my scheme, had probably taken a fair amount of damage too, but it likely wasn't to the point of mutual destruction.

As I sat there feeling pleased with myself, Crane No. 22 asked me with a face full of suspicion.

"...Team leader, are you by any chance aware of something?"

"Of what?"

"That a person only gets one life."

"Oh, you're right. It had completely slipped my mind..."

"...."

Anyway.

With this, the single biggest reason I'd been dispatched to Cambodia had, in effect, cleanly vanished.

Then, all of a sudden, a strange feeling came rushing in.

'What is this? Why is one corner of my head itching like this?'

The feeling that I'd missed something important...

*****

At the same time.

Phnom Penh International Airport, Cambodia.

The moment they stepped out beyond the automatic doors, the humid heat surging in made all three men scrunch up their faces at once.

"Ugh."

"Whoa, it's hot, it's hot."

"Can't even breathe."

The advance team from the Metropolitan Investigation Unit, Busan Metropolitan Police Agency, Republic of Korea.

The team leader, Squad Chief Oh Do-hwan, flapped the front of his shirt and clicked his tongue.

The two detectives who came out behind him were likewise busy wiping away the sweat streaming down.

"Squad chief. Should we grab a taxi first?"

"Yeah, let's just go somewhere for now. At this rate we'll get heatstroke and die in the line of duty."

They'd finished localizing their disguises, in their own way.

Garish, tacky Hawaiian shirts, right down to the shorts.

By any measure, they were Korean tourists on a Southeast Asia package tour.

"Taxi, taxi!"

Before long the three of them flagged down a taxi loitering in front of the airport.

Squad Chief Oh Do-hwan sat in the passenger seat and spat out the destination he'd memorized in advance.

"Aeon Mall. Sen Sok. Okay?"

At that, the taxi driver's expression turned peculiar as he glanced at the rearview mirror.

Gripping the wheel with one hand, he waved the other as if troubled.

"Dangerous, dangerous. No Aeon Mall."

At his broken English, the youngest detective, seated in the back, quickly lowered his head and covered his mouth.

"Squad chief! The taxi driver says he can't go there. Doesn't know what it is, but says it's dangerous."

"I know that much English, you little bastard. You think I'm deaf? Of course a Triad gangster den is going to be dangerous. Tell him we'll pay double."

"Got it. Hey. Double, double."

The youngest detective pulled a few crisp dollar bills from his wallet and held them out.

At that the taxi driver reluctantly gulped and stepped on the gas.

"Ah, I say, dangerous."

"Okay, okay. Good, good."

The taxi headed off toward the destination once again.

But the closer the taxi got to the destination, the more the scenery outside the window soon unfolded in a way completely unlike what they'd expected.

Setting aside that there wasn't a soul walking the streets, fire trucks and trucks blaring sirens streamed past without cease.

An acrid, smoky smell gradually seeped in until it reverberated inside the car.

"Here. Stop. No more go."

In the end the taxi came to a halt in front of a barricade far from the department store intersection.

The driver waved his hands as if he wouldn't go a step further if it killed him, and the three detectives climbed out with sour expressions.

"What the. Why's the whole road blocked off?"

"We were definitely told there's a huge apartment complex beyond that western intersection past the department store over there..."

The youngest detective took the lead, walking with a map app open on his phone.

Then, as the three of them cast their gazes beyond a loosely strung police line, their steps came to an abrupt, simultaneous halt, as if by prior agreement.

"...No way."

"Good grief..."

The three detectives' mouths fell open at the same time.

In the spot where a massive apartment complex said to house five hundred people should have stood, there instead remained a gaunt concrete skeleton, gaping and empty.

The apartment building's outer walls had blown apart as if hit by a bombing, the rebar innards laid completely bare, and burned-out pickup trucks and SUVs lay strewn across the road in hideous shapes.

"...Did a war break out here or something?"

It was the moment the toil of the MIU advance team, who had flown all the way to Cambodia full of ambition at the news of a large-scale voice-phishing operation targeting Korea, evaporated into nothing.

And at the same time.

"...Hey, aren't those guys standing over there looking clueless the Yeonggwang Gang?"

"Huh? Looks like it? Lee Jin-cheol and his flunkies."

"Shouldn't we arrest them?"

"You idiot. We don't even have a warrant, so what are we supposed to arrest them with..."

Not far off, there were Yeonggwang Gang members wearing the exact same dumbstruck expressions as the detectives.

"At yesterday's briefing they definitely said it was right here..."

The Yeonggwang Gang boss Lee Jin-cheol was likewise denying the reality before his eyes, staring up at the skeletal remains of the apartment with a stunned face.

*****

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