Hong had gone to the conductor’s compartment with the excuse that he was changing his final destination. The conductor—playing middleman—had arranged a helicopter pick up. He was the conductor. Slowing the train just enough for Hong to jump off safely would’ve been easy. The train would have been approaching Irkutsk at the time. No one would have found it strange or suspicious that the train was slowing down—Taekjoo certainly hadn’t.
Hong left in a helicopter, and the train continued to Irkutsk. Even if someone came after Hong at that point, he would already be far gone. The conductor, an accomplice, would head toward Moscow. And to everyone else, it would seem like nothing happened—a perfect crime.
All of this went down while Taekjoo lingered by the restroom. He was devastated. He had known he might miss Hong, but not like this. Not in this way. Not after everything he had done. His frustration boiled over, and he took it out on Zhenya.
“And you just watched him go?”
“What should I have done? Shot down a flying helicopter?”
It was an impossible scenario, but this was no ordinary man. This was Zhenya. Taekjoo felt like he could have if he wanted to. He could picture Zhenya swatting the helicopter out of the sky like a fly. It was hard to believe Zhenya had let Hong slip when the man was right in front of him.
Once Zhenya set his sights on something, he never let it slip away—Taekjoo knew that. If something or someone got away, it would only be because Zhenya let it happen. At least, that was the Zhenya Taekjoo had seen and known. And Taekjoo wasn’t wrong. Zhenya quickly acknowledged that he had let Hong escape.
“I let him go because we don’t need to stop him right now. We also don’t need to let anyone know that Hong has someone tailing him.”
“How could you be so confident?”
Taekjoo snapped. Zhenya chucked something at him. Taekjoo caught it, and when he looked down, he saw a GPS location tracker. On the screen, a red dot blinked on a map.
“What’s this?”
“My confidence.”
“You put a bug on Hong?”
“That would be too easy for them to notice.”
“Then, what?”
“I fed it to him.”
“You what—fed it to him?”
“I observed what he ate for the past few days—just a bit of bread. He clearly wasn’t a fan of Russian cuisine. When other Asians around him started eating Chinese instant noodles, he seemed quite interested. So I asked the snack vendor lady for a little favor.”
Zhenya had used her to slip a micro-tracking device inside Hong. To an Asian man who had been surviving on nothing but bread for days, a bowl of hot soup would have felt like a real meal, maybe a salvation. And if that soup had a little kick to it, it would have easily softened Hong, making him let his guard down. As a Korean, Kwon Taekjoo could relate to the man all too well.
Taekjoo hated to admit it, but Zhenya had made the right call. If they had restrained Hong Yeowook by force, the Bogdanov party would have found out about the two. In that case, the mafia might have abandoned their initial plan to protect their secrecy.
Letting Hong go and following him was the more productive strategy. The goal of this mission wasn’t to stop Bogdanov from getting in touch with Hong but to confirm the existence and identity of SS-29.
“It definitely lasts a day,” said Zhenya.
It also meant that they only had a day. By the time Hong had defecated what he had eaten, the GPS tracker would be useless. All Taekjoo could do was keep his fingers crossed and hope that Hong would reach SS-29 before his next bowel movement.
The red dot kept drifting southeast. The traffic sign outside the window told Taekjoo that they were heading toward Lake Baikal. It could be Hong’s final destination—or just another stop along the way. Taekjoo had no way to know for sure. The good news was that they were getting closer and closer to the red dot.
The off-road vehicle Taekjoo and Zhenya were in raced across the vast, empty field. The road was empty—no people, no cars, nothing. Taekjoo suddenly felt lightheaded. He might have bled too much from the attack.
A dense army of cedar trees flanked both sides of the road. Snow covered their dry branches, heightening the solemnity of the scene. It was a world of nothing but glistening snow and trees.
Soon, even the cedar forest gave way to an endless horizon of snow. The piled-up snow blurred the lines between the road and its surroundings. It felt both liberating and suffocating, like a boundless whiteness with no end in sight—beautiful, yet desperate.
Taekjoo’s eyes darted around, looking for any sign of life. Soon, he spotted a flock of sheep. Due to the severe cold in the region, their coats were especially long and thick. The wooden houses that appeared every now and then had steep roofs, built to endure massive piles of snow.
After tearing through the vast whiteness, Taekjoo gradually grasped that they were deep in the heart of Siberia.
“How’s your head? It’s stapled.”
Zhenya asked out of the blue. Taekjoo looked at him in the mirror and met his gaze, his hand unconsciously touching his bandaged head.
Taekjoo had no idea what had hit him, but the blow was strong enough that he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn his skull had cracked. The bandage barely had any blood on it—the staples must be holding up well. Only one bothered him at the moment: who had done the stapling?
A doctor for sure. It has to be a doctor, of course. There was no way a train that long didn’t have medical staff. Then again, maybe Taekjoo had been rushed to a hospital the moment they reached Irkutsk. The more he searched for a rational explanation, the faster his anxiety snowballed.
“Who did it?”
“I did.”
It was the last answer Taekjoo wanted to hear. The thought of being completely unconscious in Zhenya’s hands gave Taekjoo the chills. He could practically picture the look on Zhenya’s face as he stapled Taekjoo’s head shut. It explained why he was asking how Taekjoo was doing, which was very unlike him.
Zhenya kept rambling, diving into things Taekjoo never asked to hear, like the state of Taekjoo’s skull when Zhenya first found him, how much blood he had lost, what the weapon used to strike him looked like, and what it was like to staple human flesh. The more Zhenya talked, the more Taekjoo’s head throbbed. He had to change the topic and stop Zhenya from giving more graphic details.
“Anyway, did you get to say goodbye to Louise?”
“Who?” asked Zhenya.
“What do you mean who? You know, that soon-to-be-married French woman. I thought you liked her.”
“I did?”
Zhenya looked genuinely baffled, like he had no idea what Taekjoo was talking about. He even pointed at himself as he asked, unable to believe what he had just heard. Why was he playing dumb all of a sudden?
“You said you never sleep with the same woman twice—yet you slept with her three times.”
Taekjoo was getting irritated. He couldn’t understand why he had to be the one explaining all this to Zhenya. His irritation appeared on his face, and Zhenya caught it in the mirror. He smirked. That’s it? Zhenya mumbled, his tone quite careless.
“Strictly speaking, she was your type,” Zhenya added.
“What?”
“You said you like your women with some meat on them. She looked like your type.”
Was he seriously saying he went after Louise just because she fit the type Taekjoo had made up on a whim?
Suddenly, the past couple of days flashed before Taekjoo’s eyes like a movie reel, especially that last night on the train, entangled with Zhenya and Louise, too weak to resist their temptation. Taekjoo vividly remembered the damn look on Zhenya’s face after he’d smeared another person’s face with his cum.
Taekjoo rolled down the window in the backseat. The icy wind howled outside, merciless and unrelenting. It tugged at his hair, the bandage on his head, and his clothes—whipping them around in the wind. He stared into the distance, trying to rein in his anger. He shut his eyes tight for a moment. When he opened them again, they burned with a determination that hadn’t been there before.
“I never got to see for myself, since you’re so hell-bent on hiding your body. Tell me—are there abs under there or not?”
Taekjoo asked, his jaw clenched. Every word came out through clenched teeth. Zhenya’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror at the sudden question.
“Out of nowhere? Where is this coming from?” he asked.
“This is coming from I’m going to beat the crap out of you once the mission is completed.”
That was a declaration of war. Zhenya was silent for a moment, then burst into laughter. Taekjoo was dead serious, but someone clearly wasn’t taking his threat the same way. The bastard kept laughing for a good while, then finally stopped—and rolled the backseat window back up.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
His lips stayed curled in a smile.