The Plotters. Un-su Kim

that he stood no chance of getting anywhere near the people who actually operated the gears of the plotting world.

      After Chu trashed the office and stole a ledger that he couldn’t possibly have had any use for, a group of men turned up in Old Raccoon’s library. One of the men was Hanja. Though he looked like any other boss of a security company, he ran a corporate-style contracting firm, making money not only from government agencies and corporations but also from whatever he could gain from the black market. The meat-market dealers were nothing but small-time hoodlums to Hanja, so the fact that they were at the same meeting showed just how rattled and pissed off Chu had made everyone. Hanja sat on the couch, looking like he’d just taken a bite out of a giant turd.

      When Old Raccoon took his seat, the meat-market dealers all started talking at once.

      “I’m losing it, I tell you. What the fuck does Chu want anyway? We have to know what he wants if we’re going to sweet-talk him, or trick him out into the open. Either way, let’s do something, dammit.”

      “That’s what I’ve been saying. Why isn’t that lunatic talking? Someone cut out his tongue or what? If it’s cash he wants, he should say he wants cash. If his feelings got hurt, he should say so. If he’s angry, he should say he’s angry. But he’s gotta say something. He can’t just bust in, smash everything to shit, and leave.”

      “I swear, he’s cost me an arm and a leg. He’s killed three of my guys already. And it doesn’t stop there! I had to pay to get rid of their bodies, as well. Fuck, man. Bear’s the only one benefiting from this. But why is Chu only going after my guys? There are way worse guys here than me.”

      “Look in a mirror lately? Who here is worse than you?”

      “Hey, did any of you write him an IOU? You have to pay cash. Cash! Chu hates IOUs!”

      Old Raccoon sat in the middle, looking amused. Why? Especially considering that Chu could walk in at any moment and shove a knife in his stomach.

      “The scholars of the Joseon dynasty had a saying,” Old Raccoon said with a smile. “‘There’s no telling which way a frog or King Heungseon will leap.’ They could just as easily have been speaking of our predicament.”

      “What do you think Chu is up to?” Choi the Butcher asked. Choi hired out illegal Chinese immigrants of Korean descent as cheap labor.

      “How would I know what that lunatic is thinking? Maybe he wants to slit my throat. Or yours.”

      “Let’s offer a reward.” Hanja, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner, finally spoke up. “To whoever provides information to help us find him. That’ll get people moving. Detectives will want a piece of the action, too.”

      “Money? Are we all pitching in equally?” Choi asked.

      “Fuck no.” Minari Pak, whose office had been trashed by Chu, gave Hanja a sidelong glance and grumbled. “Some people in this room do a hell of a lot more business than the rest, so what’s this crap about equal? Don’t you know how much damage he did to my place.”

      Hanja silenced them with two words.

      “I’ll pay.”

      He wasn’t showing off. He just wanted to put an end to the meeting. The other men looked annoyed at Hanja’s cockiness, but it was obvious they were relieved.

      “The saying goes that kindness starts with having a full larder, and that must certainly be true of our generous and wealthy friend here.” The sarcasm in Old Raccoon’s voice was unmistakable as he looked at Hanja.

      Hanja smiled broadly at Old Raccoon and said, “What can I say? Unlike you, I’m not picky. If you ask me to do a job, I do it. I work hard. In earnest. And in silence.”

      Ironically, the overthrow of three decades of military dictatorship, a return to democratically elected civilian presidencies, and the brisk advent of democratization led to a major boom in the assassination industry. During the era of dictatorship, assassinations were clandestine operations carried out by a small number of plotters, hit men expertly trained by the government or the military, and highly experienced and trustworthy contractors. In fact, there wasn’t even enough action to call it an industry. Those who knew about the plotting world or were involved in it were few, and there was never that much work. The military, for the most part, had no interest in plotters. Those were untroubled and unenlightened times when you could pack a troublemaker into your jeep with their whole family watching, lock them away in the basement of a building on Namsan Mountain, beat them until they were half-crippled, and send them back home, without hearing a peep out of anyone. Why bother with a highly skilled plotter?

      What sped up the assassination industry was the new regime of democratically elected civilian administrations that sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like. As Deng Xiaoping once said, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black as long as it catches mice.” The problem was that the newly democratic government couldn’t use that basement on Namsan to beat the crap out of loudmouthed pains in the ass. And so, in order to avoid the eyes of the people and the press, to avoid generating evidence of their own complex chain of command and execution, and to avoid any future responsibility, they started doing business on the sly with contractors. And thus began the age of outsourcing. It was cheaper and simpler than taking care of it themselves, but best of all, there was less cleanup. On the rare occasion that the shit did hit the fan, the government was safe and clear of it. While contractors were being hauled off to jail, all they had to do was look shocked and appalled in front of the news cameras and say things like “What a terrible and unfortunate tragedy!”

      The boom really took off when corporations followed the state’s lead in outsourcing to plotters. Corporations generated far more work than the state, and the contractors’ primary clientele shifted from public to private. As the jobs increased, small, lesser-known start-ups began to crowd in, and washed-up assassins, gangsters, retired servicemen, and former homicide detectives, who were tired of working for peanuts, swarmed to the meat market. And, like an alligator, Hanja waited just below the surface, eyeing the scene closely and observing the changes, biding his time. While Old Raccoon faded out of relevance, unable to perceive the shifting tides, this dandy with a Stanford MBA secretly cultivated his own team of plotters and mercenaries under the cover of a perfectly legal security company.

      The principles of the market hadn’t changed since it first sprang into being. Whoever provided a better service at a lower price was the winner. Hanja knew that. While Old Raccoon was cooped up in his library, reading encyclopedias and reminiscing about all the goodies that had fallen into his lap back in the days of dictatorship, and the meat market’s third-rate contractors were too blind with greed over the scraps to do their work properly and were being hauled off to prison, Hanja was building his modern network of businessmen and officials, recruiting experts from every field, and employing high-quality plotters. He transformed the once-messy, free-for-all plotting world into a clean, convenient supermarket. You half-expected to be beckoned inside by beautiful models hired to wave and smile and say “Right this way!” and “Who can we kill for you today?” So, no matter how big a stink the meat-market dealers made, Hanja now ruled this world.

      The long, boring meeting ground on with no decisions made other than to offer a bounty. It was less a meeting than a gripe session about Chu. Reseng stepped outside to have a smoke. As he was taking a deep drag, Hanja joined him.

      Reseng offered him a cigarette.

      “I quit. I can’t stand things that stink anymore.”

      Reseng raised an eyebrow in amusement.

      Hanja took a gold-plated case out of his suit pocket and offered him a business card.

      “Call me. Let’s have dinner sometime. We’re family, after all.”

      Reseng stared at Hanja’s long, pale fingers before taking the card. Hanja left without rejoining the meeting. Why did Hanja