“Drink a little slower.”
“...”
I tried to stop Team Leader Hwang Onyu,
but Team Leader Hwang Onyu stubbornly knocked back another shot of soju anyway.
It seemed like something bad had happened.
“What is it? Did something happen? Why are you drinking like this?”
“Things happen every day. It’s the NIS, after all. If nothing happened, it wouldn’t be the NIS.”
Even so, Hwang Onyu forced a smile and tried to brush it off as if it were nothing.
He spoke as though this sort of thing happened every day, like it was no big deal.
“I called you here to thank you for the useful intel, so what’s with this atmosphere? Makes me feel like I came to the wrong place.”
I was the one who had arranged this gathering today.
I’d called Team Leader Hwang Onyu out because I was grateful and wanted to buy him a drink.
The information Hwang Onyu had given me had been extremely useful in bringing down Taerim.
The flow of funds between affiliates, Yun Taegyeom’s competitors, things like that.
I could have gotten my hands on it if I tried, but it was information that would have taken quite a bit of time. Thanks to Hwang Onyu, I’d obtained it easily.
So I called him out to buy him a drink, and now he was just pouring alcohol down his throat like some guy who’d been dumped.
Sip it, damn it. It’s expensive.
“Don’t worry about it. It has nothing to do with you.”
What the hell?
What kind of fresh psycho is this?
Wasn’t that obvious?
Of course it had nothing to do with me.
Did saying something obvious while pretending to be considerate suddenly make it considerate?
He was the one who ruined the mood, and now he was telling me not to worry about it.
Was this bastard a psychopath too?
If it was something he could act fine about from the start, he shouldn’t have let it show.
He gave off every sign that something was wrong, and now he was saying it was fine.
“What happened?”
Still, I asked him again.
They say sorrow shared is sorrow halved, don’t they?
To be honest, I wasn’t interested in Hwang Onyu’s sorrow, but I was interested in breakups.
If he really got dumped, I could make fun of him.
That would actually be nice.
I wanted to tease this gorilla-like Hwang Onyu.
If he started bawling, I’d have to record it.
“There is something. Something insanely annoying.”
Hwang Onyu’s expression as he answered was not good.
It didn’t seem like an ordinary matter.
Did I ask for nothing?
“What is it? Why are you so serious?”
“It’s nothing much, but things got twisted and became serious. We’ll have no choice but to take a beating without any guard up.”
“What is it? Say it so I can understand. You’re making me curious.”
He was sitting right in front of me, frowning like hell, but even when I asked what was wrong, he wouldn’t answer.
And then he told me not to worry about it.
Was he really a psychopath?
After hesitating, Hwang Onyu finally answered.
“Classified.”
Fuck.
Just hearing that word made my blood pressure rise.
They’d been screwed so hard because of classified this and classified that, and now it was classified again.
This bastard was trying to pick a fight with me.
I fed him expensive liquor and now he was going off-beat on purpose, wasn’t he?
“Classified again? Bullshit. Does the NIS need to get screwed over by ‘classified’ one more time before you people come to your senses?”
My voice sharpened.
“Sorry. It’s a habit.”
I did understand Hwang Onyu’s position, at least a little.
Hiding secrets was ingrained into him.
Not only had he trained to withstand torture,
he’d even been trained not to reveal secrets in his sleep.
Even if his heart felt otherwise, the words didn’t come out easily.
But because his mind was complicated, it inevitably showed on his face.
I’d received that training too, so I understood somewhat.
But not in front of me.
After hesitating for a moment, Hwang Onyu looked around.
He seemed worried the conversation might leak, so I reassured him.
“Don’t worry. I’ve turned on an anti-eavesdropping jammer around us.”
At my words, Hwang Onyu’s eyes widened slightly before returning to normal.
His face said, Who the hell are you to carry around an anti-eavesdropping device?
But the surprise only lasted a moment.
Now, it seemed that no matter what I did, he just accepted it as one of those things.
He seemed to have given up on defining what kind of person I was.
“Japan filed an unofficial protest.”
“Japan?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? What did they say? That Dokdo is their territory?”
At the mention of Dokdo, the serious Hwang Onyu burst out laughing in one shot.
Looks like I caught him off guard.
There are many things Japan does to piss us off,
but Dokdo is one of those items that pisses us off on a regular cycle, isn’t it?
“Heh. No, not that. They’re saying the radar we developed is their technology.”
“Pfft. What? What kind of dogshit are they spouting?”
I spoke confidently, but even so, there was a corner of unease in my heart.
So I quietly asked again.
“But did we steal it?”
This sort of thing had to be clarified for sure.
If we really did steal it, then we should just keep our mouths shut.
“As if we stole it. Their security is ridiculously strict too. The radar really was developed by us.”
“Then what’s the problem? We developed it. There shouldn’t be any issue.”
I couldn’t understand why Hwang Onyu was agonizing over such a simple matter.
“The problem is that there’s no data to prove it?”
“Data, my ass. If we developed it, that’s enough. And don’t you usually keep that kind of data safe? Like on a server or something.”
In movies, they always keep it safely on some server, don’t they?
And then spies like Tom Cruise come and steal it.
“We do keep it safe. But because of some crazy bastard, it disappeared.”
Hwang Onyu glanced at me once.
“Ah! You know him too. Sin Junggi. The reason we went to the Philippines was to catch Sin Junggi, remember?”
“What?”
I was genuinely shocked.
Why was Sin Junggi coming up here?
These guys didn’t know that I currently had Sin Junggi.
After Simon named a price of ten million dollars for Sin Junggi’s ransom, there had been no contact whatsoever.
That had been the end of it.
But from my perspective, since I had Sin Junggi with me, it felt like one of my own had caused trouble for no reason.
Even if it was trouble he caused before I took him in, I still felt strangely guilty.
I myself hadn’t really done anything wrong, but it felt like I had.
And that was making things difficult for Korea.
Was this what it felt like to sell out your country?
Now I couldn’t laugh this off as someone else’s problem while eating popcorn.
I had to help clear my country’s false accusation.
Even if I couldn’t solve it directly,
at the very least, I could ask Sin Junggi about it.
All of a sudden, I became proactive about this case.
“Why Sin Junggi? What did Sin Junggi do?”
In my urgency, I asked Hwang Onyu.
Hwang Onyu looked at me with a strange gaze.
Then he erased the suspicion from his eyes and answered.
“What Sin Junggi took with him and went into hiding with back then was that.”
“What?”
“Next-generation radar development technology. Codename Project Mangwol.”
Mangwol...
Mangwol...
I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere...
Ah! It was the word Sin Junggi used when he threatened me.
He said he had Mangwol.
When he tried to coax me over and over, asking if I wasn’t tempted by the data, the word he used was Mangwol.
Of course, I hadn’t cared at all.
Because I didn’t even know what Mangwol was.
Turns out it was impressive technology.
Enough to cause an international dispute.
But why was this coming up here?
Let’s calmly figure out the situation.
So Hwang Onyu wouldn’t misunderstand.
“Hasn’t it been a while since Sin Junggi disappeared? If he copied the technology, wouldn’t they have said something back then?”
“Exactly. I don’t know either. I don’t know why it’s suddenly coming up now.”
“But isn’t that kind of data backed up two or three times?”
“It is. It is, but that meticulous son of a bitch Sin Junggi deleted all of those too. He set up scheduled deletions. We never even imagined it.”
As if he was truly sick and tired of it, Hwang Onyu downed the drink in front of him all at once.
I told you to sip it.
I said it was expensive.
“Heh. That Sin Junggi bastard really is insane.”
It did make me laugh a little.
It was just like Sin Junggi.
A consistent psycho bastard.
“Honestly, it’s really not a big deal. We don’t even need the contents. Just records saying, ‘We began development for these reasons.’ ‘We changed direction because of this problem.’ ‘We ran this many tests.’ Even that much would be enough. With only that, we could make Japan shut up completely. But we don’t have it. It’s frustrating.”
“It must be frustrating.”
It really did sound frustrating.
If you didn’t cheat but got treated like you did just because you scored well on a test, wouldn’t that be unfair?
And then when they told you to bring proof that you studied, your mom had thrown it all out with the waste paper.
How unfair would that be?
You studied properly,
your score gets treated as zero,
and you even get framed as a thief.
It would make anyone angry.
“Seriously, because we don’t have that, we can’t prove that we developed it. This kind of thing is originally developed in top secret, you know. From someone else’s perspective, it might look like the technology just fell out of the sky.”
Hwang Onyu objectively explained the current situation.
“So, all you need is the development log for Project Mangwol?”
“That’s right. If we have that, it’s game over.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Japan will go around badmouthing us here and there. ‘Those guys stole our technology.’ Like that.”
“That’d be damn annoying.”
“Yeah. Extremely annoying.”
After talking with Hwang Onyu, there was nothing difficult about it.
All we needed was that development log.
Then it was easy.
I just had to go to the Philippines, get the Mangwol data from Sin Junggi, and give it to Team Leader Hwang.
Nothing hard about it.
Let’s go. To the Philippines.
*******
Unity Town.
When I visited Unity Town for the first time in a while, the whole place stirred.
As soon as I passed through the entrance of Unity Town, people were lined up on both sides.
They stood there holding bouquets and banners.
‘I really hate this kind of thing.’
I’d planned to come and go quietly.
I only meant to meet Sin Junggi and take the data.
Scott.
That crazy bastard.
The culprit was 100% Scott.
Scott had probably leaked it in advance.
He was always diligent about useless things.
If only he worked like this when it actually mattered.
I glared at Scott.
Scott gave me a pleased smile.
“I paid a bit of attention to this.”
Should I really keep dragging this bastard around with me?
I became seriously worried.
Now that things had turned out this way, I couldn’t just pass by.
I had no choice but to get out, meet their eyes, and shake their hands.
They looked like they had waited a long time, so I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know and pass them by.
It wasn’t as if I’d only done this once or twice.
I got out naturally, greeted them, took pictures with them, and gave autographs.
It was something I always did.
But then,
the person at the very end.
That’s Kwon Jua, isn’t it?
For a moment, my mind went blank.
I hadn’t expected Kwon Jua to be here.
It was true that I had sent Kwon Jua to Unity Town,
but I still hadn’t thought she would actually be here.
Unity Town and Kwon Jua didn’t really match.
And wasn’t she supposed to be at the hospital right now?
Why was she out here?
Why now, of all times?
But Kwon Jua’s expression was strange.
The look in her eyes was no joke.
She looked seriously sulky about something.
I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I was just greeting people.
It was nothing.
It was nothing, so... why was I this uneasy?
I hadn’t done anything wrong, but it felt like I had.
A danger signal rang.
But I didn’t know where the danger signal was coming from.
I didn’t know what the problem was.
Oppa, you know what day it is today, right?
Oppa, do you notice anything different about me?
What exactly are you sorry for?
Oppa, you did something wrong to me, didn’t you?
That kind of feeling.
I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was anxious.
At times like this, first, retreat.
Let’s meet Sin Junggi first.
I mouthed “Later” to Kwon Jua, then moved on and went to meet Sin Junggi.
.
.
.
“Where is it? Project Mangwol.”
“Pardon?”
Sin Junggi’s expression changed in an instant.
His body also stiffened rigidly.
The kid turned strange.
He seemed broken.
“Give it to me.”
“Pardon? What?”
Sin Junggi asked back with a blank expression.
Had making weapons in Mindanao turned him stupid?
“Project Mangwol. I’m telling you to give me that.”
“Why?”
Was he serious?
Had he really become stupid?
“Because I need it!! They say Korea is being treated like a thief because they don’t have that. Just give me the development log.”
“...”
Sin Junggi, still looking like an idiot, kept his mouth firmly shut and said nothing.
Was he unable to give it to me because he still hadn’t sold it?
I’m saying I don’t need the blueprints.
I’m saying I only need the development log.
“Just give me the development log. You don’t need the development log to sell Mangwol. Sell the Mangwol blueprints for a high price. Instead, just give me the development log. At the very least, we have to stop Korea from becoming a thief. You didn’t bring the data out because you wanted to make Korea into a thief, did you?”
“That’s true, but...”
His words trailed off.
“Hurry up and give it to me.”
“......”
But Sin Junggi just stood there silently.
“Hey? What’s wrong with you? Hurry up and give it to me. I’m not asking for all of it. I’m just asking for the development log. Just copy it for me. Is that hard? It’s not like I’m asking for the blueprints.”
“......”
“Hey? What is seriously wrong with you?”
“I don’t have it...”
Sin Junggi answered with difficulty.
“Huh?”
“I said I don’t have it.”
For a moment, it felt like something snapped in my head.
It felt like something I had trusted in had collapsed.
“What the hell are you talking about? You said you had it. You said you were going to sell it and make money.”
“I... lost it.”
“What did you say?”
Sin Junggi’s stupid remark made me angry.
Was he even aware of what he had stolen and what he had lost?
How could he say he lost it so easily?
Unbelievable.
Beating the hell out of Sin Junggi was something to do later. Right now, I had to find it first.
A long time had passed, but we still had to search as much as we could.
We had to at least follow the traces.
“Where, how? How did you lose it?”
“...I was afraid I might lose it, so I had a molar specially made... But it fell out while I was getting beaten up. I guess it wasn’t embedded as deeply as I thought.”
Sin Junggi struggled to speak.
No wonder this bastard had always sung about how he’d become rich by selling Mangwol,
how he’d leave this place once he sold it,
but even after time passed, he never left.
I thought he stayed because he liked it here,
but that wasn’t it.
He wasn’t here because he liked it. He was here because he didn’t have the data.
He had no money.
He couldn’t sell it.
The data hadn’t been with him from the start.
A consistent psychopath bastard, as always.
“When was that?”
“When I first got beaten by Jason.”
Jason?
Then that would be when Simon first rescued Sin Junggi.
At those words,
something came to mind.
The strange object Simon had handed me.
The object that looked like a molar.
I remembered him saying it was a tooth spies used to swallow poison when they were caught.
I hurriedly rummaged through my inventory.
‘Huh? It’s here.’
Pretending to take it out of my bag, I pulled out the molar.
When I took the molar out of my bag, Sin Junggi was so shocked he collapsed.
“That... That’s it.”
Haa.
I had it.
Project Mangwol had been in my hands from the very beginning.
From the start until now.
‘Done.’
Now the Republic of Korea could avoid becoming a thief.