A broker? Me?

Thud! Thud!

Ah Yura’s heart beat roughly.

The heart that had gone small in front of the goblin lord lurched again.

A broker!

There are a fair number of colleagues among the Jo and Jang attorneys working as brokers.

There is a great deal of talk behind their backs, and in fact they are the operatives everybody dreams of being.

To take broker work on you have to meet the right client.

Most people look for a broker in order to move secret funds abroad and run them there.

Jo and Jang is a body providing a service for the protection of the wealth of the Korean upper-class mainstream.

They help with what each side needs, grow alongside them, and earn money for it.

Large-scale development sites, share-price manipulation, state civil engineering, and more besides than can be counted.

On any business of tens of billions at the least, a broker is involved without exception.

Ah Yura is still a junior attorney.

Even at senior level, only those with the ability are chosen as brokers.

“What sort of……”

“I need overseas private equity funds. Investment corporations in three jurisdictions will do — the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, Panama.”

“……!!”

The territories called TAX HAVEN.

Money laundering, funds tied to crimes of every kind, funds from financial offences, are run through them.

Every country makes an effort to block the routes, and it still stops at form.

America, Europe, China, Russia and the rest.

Wealthy people in every country in the world run their funds so that nothing ever shows.

The tax havens meet their needs perfectly.

Domestic users run to tens of thousands.

The National Tax Service is not unaware of it, and there is no other way.

Without exposure by whistleblowers who take justice’s side, they cannot be caught.

On the other side of that, it would be no exaggeration to say that Jo and Jang operates as a specialist broker-supply firm.

“Thank you, but…… I don’t have the standing yet. Broker opportunities are given at senior level and above.”

It is true.

Ah Yura accepted the reality and stepped back.

She is not in a position to do it because she wants to.

Even inside the Jo and Jang organisation it is an area that moves in secret.

A broker request to a fresh-hatched chick of a lawyer is a poisoned chalice.

“You can do it.”

“……??”

The crown prince turned the whisky glass round and round and took a swallow.

Haryun Group or not, he’s a high school pupil and he’s using tax havens already?

The lives of the Korean chaebol houses are still beyond anything she can picture.

“To be honest, I could set them up myself. There are plenty of firms on the internet supplying tax haven paper companies. The basic package came to thirteen hundred dollars, and the comprehensive bulletproofing service to about twenty-three hundred.”

He knows that?

Jo and Jang has particular firms of its own that it uses.

They take a service charge on top of the base price.

And on top of that they take a separate fee for bulletproofing inside Korea.

“Do you know why I named you as my broker, Attorney Ah?”

“……”

She does not.

Ah Yura wonders about that herself.

Today is only the fourth time she has seen his face.

It is not as though this were the third meeting and a confession due, the way they do it in Japan.

The table she had come to for a drink has grown into something else.

It has become a table where she has had an interview with a goblin and now a broker offer.

Ah Yura, who is thoroughly practical, was confused.

“Wh— why?”

Ah Yura asked it.

Ha Tae-ung turns to look at her.

This is maddening. I’m not a child……

The crown prince’s face, meeting hers, is a fraud.

They say the finishing touch to any outfit is the face, and even so——

Meet his eyes and it is enough to fall straight into obsessive fandom.

The colour rose in Ah Yura’s face and went red.

The alcohol she had just drunk had come up on her all at once.

“Because there’s a bond.”

“……”

“I’ll grow you.”

“……??”

“The more clients you have with large funds, the more solid your position will be, surely? And I hear Jo and Jang runs on results.”

He’ll grow me?

An enormous offer she had not foreseen.

A hand held out by Haryun Group’s crown prince.

“Attorney.”

The crown prince’s soft voice put a tickle into Ah Yura’s ear.

“Rich people are outstanding at converting knowledge they have learned, wisdom they have taken in, and luck that has come in front of them, into wealth.”

Converting?

The crown prince’s advice, which she is hearing for the first time, went in and stayed.

“I was the same. Knowledge, wisdom, luck and understanding as well, all built up. I am converting all of it into wealth at present. And in that process I need an assistant I can trust. On that count, you have been chosen as my first assistant, Attorney Ah.”

“Am I…… somebody you can trust?”

Ah Yura sincerely wondered.

A fourth meeting, and they have barely exchanged a few words.

Trickle.

The crown prince filled Ah Yura’s emptied glass with whisky.

“I trust the energy a person gives off.”

“Energy?”

“Would it do to call it something like light? A bright golden energy comes off you, Attorney Ah.”

“……”

“It means that up to now, through your life, you have built up a good account in money.”

What is this? Surely he isn’t a— a shaman too?

The crown prince is twenty now.

They are certainly not the sort of things that come out of a young man’s mouth.

Shff.

The crown prince filled his own glass too.

And straightened his back and set himself squarely.

“Attorney.”

A pleasant low voice that makes her concentrate on him.

“Yes……”

Ah Yura answered as though shy.

It does not matter to her if he is a shaman.

The atmosphere as it stands is enough on its own.

A fine man’s offer to grow her into a power broker.

A table where a man and a woman sit side by side over cognac and the king’s drink, as though she had come by a scent she likes.

They pass back and forth a private offer only the two of them know.

Snap. Ting.

Her eyes met his, and glass met glass.

And.

“When we’ve drunk this, we……”

W— we?

Swallow.

Ah Yura swallowed on a dry throat.

The whisky bar J&W, where she is spending time with the crown prince.

What am I going to do……

Holding her glass, Ah Yura fell into deep thought.

“Still young. Hn.”

The drinking with Attorney Ah Yura finished without trouble.

She is a woman in her late twenties, and take away the lawyer and she is younger than I am.

I was put through it harder in the world.

And decisively, I am no longer the charity case I was in the past, living beaten down.

As I had expected to some degree, a second meeting with the goblin lord came about.

And a god’s word, which I was given.

“As I please!”

Exactly what I wanted to hear.

The reason a second run at the same life came to me like this was plain.

Justly, and as I mean it!

“Attorney Ah Yura. You chose well.”

She drank the last glass together with me.

The ritual act of agreeing to become a comrade in the same boat.

I do not trust Jo and Jang.

Which is exactly why an assistant inside it is needed.

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin cannot be trusted.

The light of the energy he gives off is not the colour I want.

Attorney Ah Yura, whose force is clear, has to be grown.

The method is simple.

Money!

“Their own world will be in an uproar by about now.”

Several hundred pupils watched it.

The moment they got home they will have run their mouths to their parents about what happened at school.

The speed at which a rumour spreads among upper-class people, faster than wind.

“With luck…… somebody in the Ha house will get to know.”

I came out of the whisky bar and walked the night streets.

The road home is good for a walk.

A few days more and it is June.

Summer proper is a long way from starting, and the daytime temperature is high already.

The humidity is not up yet, so it is a clear late-night walk.

While I was at it I went a full circuit of the path round Seokchon Lake.

Blew off the drink and put my thoughts in order.

Today too went past in a rush, with any number of things laid over each other.

The ease of it, felt inside the quiet.

Ding!

The walk finished and I got into the lift.

I went through the concierge room and used the residents’ lift.

The Latte Signiel, perfect enough in its way on the security side.

Ping.

The lift moved at speed.

Tramp, tramp.

I stepped out of the lift as it arrived.

And at the moment I turned toward the front door.

“Excuse me……”

Somebody called me from behind.

(End of Chapter 76)