Undercover 2

"Detective Ha? You came dressed like that? It's freezing out there!"

Haeyoung shot up from her seat the moment Seojin walked in, crossing the room in a few long strides. She grabbed Seojin's ice-cold hands and pulled her straight to the old wood-burning stove in the middle of the container, which was crackling and popping against the silence. Seojin sank into the folding chair in front of it and started thawing out.

"Stay there, I'll make you coffee."

Haeyoung tore open a packet of instant mix and poured it into a paper cup. She knew Seojin always needed coffee the moment she walked in. She lifted the aluminum kettle sitting on top of the stove and poured — her round glasses immediately fogged over with steam. She wiped them on the sleeve of her navy hoodie, then took them off entirely and, since she was at it, pulled her hair back out of her face and re-tied it. Then she tugged her hood up over her head. Nobody would have pegged Yoon Haeyoung as a cop. She looked more like a college student than anything else.

Inside was better than outside, but not by much. This was a makeshift operations base — a repurposed storage unit, technically, though in reality it was a shipping container that had been dragged out during last summer's renovation of the agency's annex building and never returned. There was no proper heating. The stove burned actual wood. The chief had told them to be grateful it wasn't coal briquettes, but even with the stove running all day, only the immediate area around it stayed warm. They'd been promised a proper operations room away from headquarters once the mission was underway. That was a month ago. Nothing since.

Seojin took the coffee Haeyoung handed her and sipped it slowly. The warmth spread from her palms inward, and between the cup and the stove, her body gradually came back to life. Her knuckles, which had barely moved in the cold, loosened. The blue tinge faded from her lips.

"Where is everyone? Lunch?"

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you go with them?"

"I'm still working through some research... I was going to eat in a bit."

She's hitting a wall, Seojin thought. There was no shortage of public information about San Group — the internet was full of it — but what the team needed wasn't public. So it made sense that Haeyoung, on loan from the Central Intelligence Division, was struggling.

"How did the interview go, Detective Ha?"

Seojin wasn't sure how to answer that.

"I was... late."

She looked up at Haeyoung, who was leaning back against the desk. Whatever answer she'd been expecting, that wasn't it. That was so unlike Seojin. Haeyoung's jaw dropped.

It happened just before Seojin walked into the company's gate. A scream — from the exact spot she'd been watching moments before. Seojin spun on instinct and ran toward it.

Yunha had tried to catch Soha before she went down, but the body was sliding out of her grip. The heavy coat made it worse — Yunha's hands kept slipping from Soha's waist and shoulders, losing purchase no matter where she grabbed. Seojin calculated the fall in a split second: hit the marble like that and it could mean a concussion. She sprinted, came around to Soha's other side, and caught her.

Yunha looked up, completely at a loss.

"We need to get her lying down. Over there."

Seojin nodded toward a rust-orange sofa about three meters to the left of the entrance. Yunha, still dazed, nodded and moved with her.

They got Soha onto the sofa. Seojin checked her pulse. Her hands were colder than ice. She switched on her phone flashlight and checked Soha's pupils — the brown irises contracted in response. Seojin exhaled slowly, something releasing in her chest. She shrugged off her blazer and draped it over Soha's lower half, then moved to the end of the sofa and slipped off Soha's shoes. Yunha had stepped away and was on the phone, calling someone. Seojin let her.

"Can you rub her arms and hands? Try to get some circulation going."

As she said it, Seojin started working on Soha's feet and legs herself.

The pulse was a little fast but not alarming. Pupils reactive. No head impact, so no concussion to worry about. The sudden collapse — probably too long in the cold. Seojin kept her hands moving and noticed, almost absently, that her own fingers felt colder for it.

"She's going to be okay. Keep going, don't stop."

"Right. Yes."

Yunha nodded, brow still creased. The people around them hadn't moved. Whether it was because both women were executives, or because Seojin had moved too fast for anyone to react, it was hard to say — but the lobby, which had been buzzing with noise, was now completely still. Everyone had frozen in place, watching the two of them work, like someone had called red light in a game of statues.

Beneath the sheer stockings, Soha's feet were rough. Blue-tinged marks — bruises or tendons, it was hard to tell — ran across them, and years of heels had pushed her toes out of shape. How long had she been rubbing them? The skin, which had felt like marble at first, was finally starting to warm. But Soha hadn't come around yet. The hands kept moving.

A few minutes passed. Then heavy footsteps on the emergency stairs — five or six broad-shouldered men jogged in, earpieces in, expressions rigid. Security. The one at the front dropped straight to one knee beside Soha and started running through the same checks Seojin had already done. Another man, slightly shorter than the rest, stopped in front of Yunha and bowed his head.

Yunha stood up, the crease still between her brows.

"I called ages ago. Why are you so late?"

Her voice didn't rise, but it shook slightly — somewhere between panic and fury and something that might have been relief trying to get through.

"We're sorry, the elevator—"

"Forget it."

It was then that Seojin glanced at the time. She caught the clock on the far wall over Yunha's shoulder, past the tight expression, past the slight tremor in her voice.

I'm done.

The man who'd checked on Soha had turned toward Seojin and was starting to ask her something, but she couldn't afford to answer. Using the sudden crowd of security as cover, she retrieved her blazer, slipped out, and headed for the gate. She was already fifteen minutes late — but the staff who had watched everything unfold from their frozen positions had at least let her through. One of them made sure to mention, as she passed, that being late might still count against her. And being late meant she'd had less time than everyone else to make any kind of impression.

By the time she finished explaining all of this, Haeyoung's expression had settled into something pained.

"That's rough. So I guess we're looking at Plan B?"

They both knew what it meant when you were late to the open recruitment interview for one of the most sought-after companies in the country. It was over before it started. Which meant Seojin was going to get an earful from the chief — and the operation was going to Plan B.

Right. The operation.

The team was a special investigations unit assembled specifically to probe a drug case spreading outward from Itaewon, Seoul: Seojin and Jeongwoo from the Metropolitan Investigation Unit's serious crimes division, Haeyoung on secondment from Central Intelligence, and Eunkyung Kang, pulled from the Financial Crimes Investigation Unit. The reason these four specifically was that all of them had worked together on a narcotics team a few years back.

Central had been watching closely and had approved Haeyoung's transfer without delay — because a few months earlier, the son of a leading presidential candidate had died of a drug overdose. It hadn't been reported publicly. Within the agency, only a handful of people knew. The supply route for the drugs had traced back to Itaewon, a neighborhood that had seen a sharp rise in overdose deaths recently.

It was last winter — a few months ago, snow coming down hard — that Seojin and the team had been staking out Itaewon. They'd picked up a thread and followed it to a meeting point, then split into two groups: one tailing the organization's members who'd come out of a club, the other following the contact separately.

When the contact walked into San Group's parking structure, they couldn't believe it. That lot required an employee card to enter. Why San Group? The thought arrived at the same moment as a cold certainty that this was going to get a lot bigger. It did. Within days of the report going up, the special unit was formally assembled.

From that point on, Seojin, Jeongwoo, and Eunkyung had studied like their lives depended on it — preparing for the open recruitment exam. That was Plan A: get inside and extract information from within. Ordinarily that was the Intelligence Division's work, but the team couldn't afford to burn their only IT resource on it, so the rest of them had thrown themselves into it instead. They hadn't gone in with high expectations — the preparation had been short, and both the application and the interview were long shots. But even one person on the inside could make a difference, and the chief had agreed it was worth attempting. If a company of that size was actively facilitating drug distribution, it was only a matter of time before the drugs went mainstream. Seojin couldn't make sense of the motive — but she'd seen it with her own eyes, and she couldn't unsee it. Breaking the street organization would do nothing; they'd just find another channel. It wasn't even clear yet whether the supply was flowing from the organization to the company or the other way around. That's why they needed someone inside.

Eunkyung had been cut at the paper screening. Seojin and Jeongwoo had barely scraped through to the aptitude test and interview stage. And now Seojin had been late.

That left Jeongwoo.

The odds were not good. Not good at all.