Chapter 2 - The Contents of the GreasepaperThe heavy mahogany doors of the private study were locked from the inside.
Maya sat wrapped in a wool blanket three sizes too big for her, a steaming bowl of beef bone soup (sulongtang) resting between her small palms. She hadn't touched the meat, but she had drunk half the broth before looking up at the man sitting across from her.
Kang Tae-jin had unfolded the greasy newspaper.
Inside lay a heavy, tarnished silver pocket watch—the case scratched, the crystal cracked, but the engraving on the back still legible: K.T.J. — Incheon, 1998.
It was the watch he had pawned to Sarah for fifty thousand won on a rainy Tuesday night when he didn't have enough money to buy penicillin for his dying brother. He had tried to buy it back a week later, but the clinic had been raided, the building demolished, and Sarah gone without a trace.
He had spent twenty years believing the watch was at the bottom of the Yellow Sea.
"She kept it in a tin box under her bed," Maya said, her voice small against the roaring fire. "She told me that if the bad men ever came for us, or if my legs stopped working like yours did, I had to bring it to the man on the mountain."
Tae-jin’s head snapped up. His gray eyes bored into hers. "What did you say about my legs?"
"Grandma said your legs didn't break because of the bullets," Maya said, setting her soup bowl down with a quiet clink. "She said they broke because you forgot how to stand for anything other than yourself."
Ryu Dong-hyun, standing silently by the heavy oak door, flinched. No one spoke to the Chairman that way. In the past decade, two men had ended up in the Han River for raising their voices in this very room.
Tae-jin, however, didn't yell. Instead, a strange, grim smile touched the corner of his scarred mouth—a look of dark amusement mixed with disbelief.
"She told you that?"
"Every night," Maya nodded. "While she was cleaning hotel rooms until her hands bled. She told me about the boy in Incheon who wanted to rule the world, and how he left his heart in a clinic basement because he was scared to feel anything."
Tae-jin looked back down at the silver watch. He pressed the stem. The spring clicked, and the inner lid popped open. Inside, tucked behind the tiny brass gears, wasn't a mechanism—it was a microfilm chip, no larger than a postage stamp, sealed in yellowed tape.
The microchip from the Incheon harbor master's office. The one the South Korean intelligence agency had spent thirty years looking for. The one that proved the founding capital of the Black Dragon Syndicate hadn't been earned through legitimate shipping, but through a multi-billion-dollar state corruption scandal involving three sitting cabinet ministers who were still alive, still powerful, and currently running for the upcoming presidential election.
If that chip went public, the entire political landscape of Seoul would implode by morning.
"Chairman," Ryu Dong-hyun murmured, leaning over the desk. "If she brought that here... others know she has it. Sarah wouldn't have kept it alone for thirty years without someone else knowing where it was hidden."
Before Tae-jin could answer, the security monitor on the mahogany desk flickered.
Gate camera three—the eastern ridge trail—lit up with infrared movement.
Not deer. Not snow ghosts.
Four figures, dressed in heavy black tactical gear, moving with professional, military precision through the blizzard, climbing the steep perimeter wall like spiders.
May you like
Tae-jin looked at the screen, then down at the little girl eating soup by his fire.
The trap had already sprung.
