“He was taken in?”

“Yes. Hyungnim.”

“Why?”

“The Sokcho branch prosecutors applied for a warrant. Embezzlement and breach of trust, they say.”

“Fuck!”

Bang!

Kang Hongdong drove his foot into the desk.

The whites of his eyes had come up red.

The money riding on this!

A particular order had come in from a large organisation working out of Seoul.

The chief of Pacific Fisheries and Director Ha Donghwi!

The content of it was to tie the two of them up properly.

Players were put into the casino to get the work started.

At first they ran Yang Susan daily-payment loans at low interest.

Now, of course, adjusted upward to high.

They drew Ha Donghwi’s surety out of him, put the seal on it and handed a large sum across.

Standing guarantee for another man’s debt has no force in law, but in the private lending market the illegal is the law.

A while later word came again from the Seoul side.

The order was to move Yang Susan out of the country and leave Ha Donghwi in it, stripped clean.

It was easy enough work, and it went wrong at a point nobody had allowed for.

“You can’t get him out?”

“Inspector Oh says the sum is large. And that the prosecutors above have moved…….”

“Not Sokcho — Chuncheon?”

“It looks that way.”

“Why? Have the prosecutor bastards nothing to do with themselves, this is fucking ridiculous.”

Kang Hongdong’s stomach turned that a job about to close had gone wrong.

“What shall we do?”

“Ha Donghwi! If we just get hold of that bastard…….”

His head crowded, Kang Hongdong fell to thinking.

A doubt came to him about why Yang Susan, who was about to slip out of the country, had suddenly been taken in.

The uneasy feel of it gave him a headache.

Even so, orders have to be followed.

It is a job ordered by a director of a large Seoul organisation who had pushed work his way when things were hard.

The trade is not what it was, but they had taken hold of big money on demolition sites and through their grip on the trade unions.

In the good days, strike-breaking crews and demolition muscle had been their main line of income as well.

Kang Hongdong had gone up to Seoul in the days when he knew nothing and learned the work roughly.

Once it had settled into his hands he came back and set himself up in Sokcho.

The organisation’s director hyungnim of that time watched his back, and he could carry his neck stiff.

For that much, a request from a Seoul hyungnim — which is an order — cannot be refused.

—One shot and life is made~♬ Aracha-cha, make it two~♪

The ringtone on Kang Hongdong’s smartphone went off loudly.

“The old man doesn’t even sleep…….”

He checked the screen and it was his father calling.

Kang Hongdong’s face twisted as he saw who it was.

Father and son they may be, but there are not many points of contact between the two.

Parents whose words and whose actions never once matched.

With parents who gave him nothing to trust all through his growing years, Kang Hongdong went crooked.

They lived like animals themselves, committing every kind of illegality, and to a Kang Hongdong going off the line they handed abuse and violence and told him to live straight.

In the end he could not bear it, ran from home, made a success of himself after a fashion in Seoul, and came home in glory.

Backed by a large Seoul-based organisation, he started in private lending and built a name along the east coast.

Sokcho and Gangneung are his main ground.

To Kang Hongdong his father now is a bone with no meat on it that he still cannot bring himself to throw away.

He cannot bear the sight of him, but the strange sameness that comes across through the blood cannot be helped.

And on top of that the size of the property in the man’s hands is considerable.

The person of his father he disliked; the man’s money he liked.

“Yes. Father.”

—Hongdong-a~

His father’s voice, drunk as usual.

“What is it you want?”

Kang Hongdong asked it sourly.

—Do a job for me.

“A job?”

—I gave it to your brother and he’s no use at all.

What’s this? Hongcheol’s been dropped?

A brother who, being the eldest son, has always been quietly angling for the inheritance.

By the feel of it he has been marked by their father.

“What is it?”

Kang Hongdong asked as though it were nothing to him.

A father who looks unlikely to make old bones, sunk in drink and women.

Whenever the father dies, the property is set to come to him.

—You know that flower shop woman renting in our building?

“Yes. That smoking-hot woman.”

—The bitch took me for nothing!

Fuck. Stuffing pills down himself every day, of course he turns into a dog in heat.

His father, Kang Deuksu, who had started going right off the rails the moment his mother was admitted to the care home.

“And so?”

—Sort her out. Make her kneel in front of me!

“Father! What sort of world do you think this…….”

—I’ll give you the new building in Joyang-dong!

“……!!”

The mood in Sokcho property lately is not ordinary.

You sleep and get up and it has jumped again.

A new building in Joyang-dong would fetch five billion easily.

“Heh heh. Father, I’ll see to it myself.”

—That’s it! You know a thing or two. Heh heh.

Two men, father and son, with nothing to tell between them.

—Only, that bitch’s husband is…….

His father, Kang Deuksu, who had begun with such spirit, let the end of it fade.

“Yes, go on. What is it?”

—You know the one. The son Haryun Group threw out, some years back.

“Sorry?”

—That bitch’s husband is Ha Donghwi, the son who was thrown out of the group.

“H-Ha Donghwi??”

The Korean client, with the look of a man badly startled.

The truth is that Isabella had taken the work without giving her full name.

She is a member of a noble house.

There are not more than a few hundred of them, and thirty per cent of the land of England is theirs.

The authority of the nobility, which has not disappeared even in the twenty-first century, stood where it always had.

The firm’s formal name is Royal Hales.

It was made for the purpose of building and managing the nobility’s slush funds.

The house’s own capital has been increased through the firm as well.

The scale of the slush funds of the nobility and of European, Middle Eastern and Chinese VIPs is beyond an ordinary person’s imagining.

The size of the Korean client’s commission was not the sort of work Isabella would come out for herself.

It was because she had been so deeply taken with Korean culture that she came to handle the client and travel at the same time.

And from that client Isabella felt an interest she had not expected.

A client a good deal younger than her, with an idol’s looks.

He refused her investment proposal.

Instead…… an agent?

How much would do it?

At the client’s words Isabella almost burst out laughing.

If her father and the people of her house had seen this, they would not have left the client in front of her alone.

Even she does not know the full size of the Hales family’s assets.

And to somebody like that, how much would do it?

“Name it.”

“……??”

“Whatever figure you ask, I’ll meet it.”

“……!!”

Isabella, fluent in Korean.

The client’s line shocked her.

It is the sort of talk that goes back and forth in K-films and dramas.

The kind of thing an enormous rich man can throw at a protagonist who is nothing of the sort.

He means to pay in coin…….

Coin, at present falling to the floor.

But it is one of the assets the house has its eye on.

“A thousand bitcoin or so, as a down payment…….”

“Deal.”

“……!!”

Coin worth nearly twenty million dollars at the present rate.

Has he done the arithmetic?

He throws the word out without hesitating.

Isabella was thrown.

The agent proposal does not appear to be a joke.

Gooseflesh came up on her skin.

Doing a broker’s work and being an agent run on different lines.

Not a middleman’s part but an agent’s — the part of a secretary who prepares the whole of a life.

All at once the daughter of the house of Hales is in a position to become a strange Eastern man’s secretary.

“Shall we draw up the contract?”

“A-are you serious?”

“Is it not enough?”

“……”

He is a man whose thinking cannot be read at all.

A trust carried in the voice, where the face alone gives no way of judging.

At the refined voice Isabella killed even the sound of her breathing.

The moment of her complete defeat.

“Shall we shake on it?”

“Sorry?”

“From this moment you have to become my persona.”

What on earth is he talking about!

The man’s words, as though a word-spirit with sorcerous power had settled into them.

Shff.

He put his hand straight out in front of her.

Isabella took hold of it without meaning to.

Crackle-zzzt!

The moment the palms met, a fierce energy came across out of his hand, as though a current were running in it.

“Haa…….”

A low sound forced its way out between Isabella’s lips.

(End of Chapter 103)