part eighty

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EXO COMEBACK EUREUREONG

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Re: hg: taekai spy au -- team kai -- 1370 words

[(Anonymous)]

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Re: hg: taekai spy au -- team kai -- 1370 words

[(Anonymous)]

Jongin turns twenty-seven and spends the day restless and morose, sulking around headquarters and pestering Soojung. He hasn't had shit to do since he returned from Afghanistan back in December. Jongdae's been in a meeting all day upstairs with the director of the NIS and isn't responding to any of the dozens of text messages Jongin sends.

"Jongin. Don't you have any hobbies? Friends?" Soojung snaps after he spends an hour doodling on her memo pad and sticking the results to her computer monitor with masking tape. He blinks.

"Aren't we friends?"

"You wish." She smiles patiently and plucks at a loose thread on the cuff of her blouse. "Showing up at my apartment drunk twice a year does not a friendship make, Jongin."

"That hurts." He puts his hands over his heart and composes his face into his best attempt at a pout. She rolls her eyes.

"Don't." She pulls his latest masterpiece aside so she can peer at the spreadsheet she's been working on. "Look. Go give your little friend a call. What was his name again? Chanyeol?"

"Little?" Jongin snorts. "You must be thinking of Kyungsoo. And I haven't—"

The door slams loudly against the wall when Jongdae flings it open. "Jongin! So glad you're here."

Soojung cringes, a hand across her face. "Can't you ever just come inside without making a scene?" she asks through her fingers. "I think you made a dent in the wall."

Baekhyun trails in behind Jongdae. He pauses to check the wall, palms caressing the plaster in careful deliberation before he turns. "No damage." He grins. "I think it bounced."

Soojung rolls her eyes so hard Jongin swears he can hear them knock around in her skull.

"Sorry, Soojung," Jongdae greets, waving a manila folder in Jongin's face. "You, you impatient asshole. Blowing up my phone when I'm in a meeting with the director of the NIS. I swear to God, Jongin, if you're not on fucking fire, don't call me that many times in a row." He pauses, face scrunched in thought. "Actually, even then—"

"I'm bored," Jongin interrupts. "I want a job."

Jongdae purses his lips. "Well, today's your lucky day." He gestures with the folder. "Let's go talk in the conference room. Soojung? Hold calls, okay? Unless it's the director, of course."

Soojung nods and returns to her work on the computer. Jongin trails behind Jongdae into the conference room. Baekhyun joins them after a moment, three cups of coffee balanced precariously between his slender fingers. He sets one each in front of Jongdae and Jongin and keeps the third one for himself, sipping tentatively at the scorching, bitter liquid.

"What is it?" Jongin prompts after an agonizing stretch of watching Jongdae blow steam off his coffee.

Jongdae looks at him from underneath his eyebrows. "There's been an uptick in the number of illegal guns seized on the streets lately."

Jongin hums in acknowledgment. He'd heard—the most recent shooting was only a few days ago, some young guy gunned down in an alley in Jongro. In a country where gun crime's mercifully rare, this many shootings this early in the year is unheard of. Last year there'd been a dozen total. It's only January and it's the second homicide in as many weeks. They're on track to break all sorts of records, an exponential growth in violent crime, most of which committed with black market weapons smuggled in from exporters in the Golden Triangle. Last week the news anchor on KBS dubbed Seoul 'the next New York' and every headline since has run with the terrifying notion that nobody's safe anymore.

Something's got to be done.

Which is how he finds himself the lone passenger of a KAI KUH-1 Surion chartered straight for Chiang Saen. The helicopter's capacity is closer to a dozen but he's still folded in half behind the pilot, headset crackling in his ear over the growling whir of the rotor above. Jongdae made all of the Kai jokes referencing his cover ID in between the salient details of his briefing.

Jongin's supposed to take a boat down the Mekong River and rendezvous with a local contact who's been monitoring the situation on the ground. If their intel is sound—which it seems to be—there's a shipment due out in two weeks. Jongin's got a narrow window to work with: establish contact with the local arms dealer and infiltrate his camp. He's got thirteen days to report specifics back to base. They need numbers: what, when. How much. Fourteen days and he'll be back on a helicopter much like this one, probably nursing a sunburn and complaining about the bug bites in places he can't reach to scratch.

The file on Lee Taemin is suspiciously light. Jongin thumbs through it a few times hoping to glean something but there's nothing. Korean-born, first showed up on Interpol's radar about a year and a half ago—accounts of some pale, pretty-faced kid organizing shipments of German-made Heckler & Koch MP5s and surplus M16A1s left over from the Vietnam War up the river to be smuggled into port cities: Macau, Kaohsiung, Busan, Incheon. That's it—guy's a fucking ghost. Jongdae's parting words echo in the back of his mind: "He's so far off the grid you're going to need a pair of tweezers to get him out of the jungle."




Taemin's camp is twenty miles inland from the river, a sprawl of a dozen or so makeshift huts and tents. It's temporary, built to pick up and move at a moment's notice. This is why it's so hard to pin him down: he doesn't stay in the same place for very long. He comes walking out of the jungle when Jongin arrives, looking for all the world like a hip young Seoulite with his pierced ears and his trendy combat boots, hair down past his shoulders. He doesn't look like an arms dealer. He doesn't even look old enough to drive.

"Hello!"

Jongin shades his eyes with the brim of his cap. This is the part he hates the most, the nagging doubt that skirts through his mind in the seconds before he introduces himself. It only lasts for a moment, the space in between two blinks, but every time it's enough to remind him to be careful. "Looking for Mungkorn." It's what the locals call him—Dragon. The kid in front of him looks more like a rabbit.

Still, Jongin knows looks can be deceiving. He's read Taemin's file from cover to cover—he's seen the lists of shipments and suspected contents, the estimated earnings. The incidental reports of violence. Lee Taemin's dangerous, a wild card. Unpredictable.

"That's me." He smiles warmly, eyes narrowing into cheerful crescents. "Who's asking?"

"Me. Uh—I'm Kai," Jongin says. "I've got some product to move to a customer in Gwangju. Heard you were the guy to talk to."

"I could be." His hands delve into the back pockets of his shorts. "What kind of product are we talking here?"

"A few crates of Mark 14's."

Taemin's eyebrows lift. "Shit. Where'd you get your hands on something like that?"

"I know a guy." Jongin shrugs. He sees the interest in Taemin's face—he's got him right where he wants him. "Fell off the back of a convoy in Afghanistan, if you know what I mean. Got 'em cheap and sold them for a good price. Just need to get them in the country."

"What did you say your name was?" Taemin frowns. "I thought I knew everyone in the trade around here, especially the ex-pats."

"Kai. I'm not from here—just passing through on my way home." Jongin licks his lips. He doesn't break eye contact, stares harder at Taemin. He lets everything else clear from his mind and focuses on being Kai, free lance arms dealer. "Just heard you're the best expediter for these kind of things."

"Where's home?" Taemin asks. "Gwangju?"

"No. Seoul," Jongin replies. Stick with what you know, Jongdae told him. The easiest lies to believe are the ones that are mostly true. "I'll pay."

"Of course you will." Taemin grins. "Let me take a look at what you've got and we'll talk terms."