The clock on Min-ji's monitor ticked over to 11:45 AM. The chessboard was set.
Samseong Station, a major nexus connecting to the COEX mall and a hub of corporate headquarters, was a surging river of humanity. Office workers in sharp suits rushed to lunch appointments, tourists stared up at the massive digital advertisements, and shoppers moved with a determined rhythm. It was the perfect environment for a ghost to operate in—a place of constant, anonymous motion.
Deep within that chaos, Yoo-jin's pieces were moving into position.
One of Kang's men, a wiry operative with forgettable features, leaned against a pillar, posing as a bored commuter scrolling through his phone. His eyes, however, never stopped moving, scanning the crowd with a practiced, sweeping gaze. A hundred feet away, a woman from the team sat at a small table in a crowded bakery, a laptop open before her. To any observer, she was just another office worker on a coffee break. But inside her oversized handbag, sophisticated signal-interception equipment was quietly humming, mapping the local cellular traffic. They, and a half-dozen others like them, were the invisible eyes and ears of the operation.
At 11:50, the bait was released into the water. Jo Min-su, his face a pale mask of terror, was escorted down the escalator into the station's main concourse. His cheap clothes from the night before had been replaced with clean, generic ones. His visible bruises had been covered with concealer. To the casual observer, he looked like any other nervous, harried man. But the wire taped to his chest and the tiny camera hidden in a button on his shirt transmitted his every heartbeat and frightened glance back to the command center. One of Yoo-jin's men, posing as a concerned friend, walked beside him, a hand on his elbow, seemingly guiding him but in reality ensuring he didn't bolt.
In the anonymous office, the atmosphere was electric with a taut, silent pressure. Min-ji's primary monitor was now a mosaic of sixteen different camera feeds, a dizzying array of angles showing every major choke point and locker bank in the station. She was a digital puppeteer, her fingers dancing across her keyboard as she switched views, zoomed in on suspicious faces, and ran license plates of vehicles passing the station entrances.
Ahn Da-eun sat silently on the sofa, a stoic, unreadable observer. She had not spoken a word since she arrived, but her presence was a constant weight in the room. She watched the screens with an unnerving intensity, her gaze missing nothing.
Gyu-ri's cynical voice crackled over the secure comms link, a constant stream of unsolicited, often brilliant, analysis. "Look at that man by the ticket machine. The one pretending to be confused. He's been there for five minutes. Too long. He's a plant, but he's too obvious. He's a distraction. Ignore him."
Min-ji's voice was the calm center of the storm. "Team Alpha, subject is approaching the locker bank B-wing. Heart rate is one-forty and climbing. He's terrified."
"Good," Gyu-ri's voice purred from the speakers. "Ryu will read that as authentic fear of the pickup. He won't suspect the fear is actually of us. Now, forget the bait. Look for the observer. Ryu always has an observer. Someone who isn't watching the target, but watching the people who might be watching the target. Find the calmest person in the room. That's your man."
On the screens, Jo Min-su arrived at the designated locker bank. His hands trembled so violently he could barely fit the key into the lock. He fumbled with it for a few agonizing seconds before the small metal door finally swung open. Inside, just as he'd been told, was a simple, non-descript black backpack. It looked neither heavy nor light. It was utterly anonymous. He took it out, his movements jerky, and swung the locker door shut with a loud clang that echoed in the command center.
The exchange had been made. But the critical question remained: who had left the package?
"Scrubbing footage," Min-ji announced, her voice tight. She isolated the camera feed pointed directly at locker C-37 and rapidly rewound the last hour of footage. The crowd moved backward in a blur of motion. She slowed it down. "Got it. Twelve minutes ago."
On the screen, a figure appeared. It was impossible to identify. They wore the generic blue uniform of a package courier service, complete with a baseball cap pulled low and a disposable face mask covering the rest of their features. The figure walked briskly to the locker, placed the bag inside, locked it, and then immediately turned and disappeared back into the surging crowd. The entire action took less than fifteen seconds.
"A decoy," Gyu-ri scoffed over the comms. "A dead end. A nobody courier paid in cash. The real operative isn't the one who drops the bag. The real operative is the one who confirms the pickup has been made cleanly. He's watching right now."
Jo Min-su, now clutching the backpack to his chest as if it were a bomb, began to walk. He moved aimlessly at first, heading towards the main exit as instructed. Team Alpha, the two men assigned to shadow him, followed at a discreet distance, melting into the crowd behind him. The first phase was complete.
"The clock is ticking, Yoo-jin," Gyu-ri's voice warned. "Someone in that station is about to make a move. They have to confirm the package is away. They have to report back to Ryu."
Yoo-jin's eyes darted across the mosaic of screens, searching, his mind racing. He was looking for the anomaly, the person Gyu-ri had described, the one who was too calm. And then Min-ji found him.
"I've got someone," she said, her voice sharp with discovery. She highlighted one of the sixteen video feeds, blowing it up to fill the main screen. The camera was positioned on one of the subway platforms, looking across the tracks to the opposite platform. "Male, late twenties, unremarkable clothes, glasses. He's been sitting on that bench for the last twenty minutes, pretending to read a book."
The camera zoomed in. The man was a picture of commuter boredom.
"Just now, when Jo Min-su began moving towards the exit, the subject put his book away," Min-ji narrated, her voice quickening. "He's not moving towards the exit. He's moving parallel to it. He's following Team Alpha. He's not watching the bait; he's watching our watchers."
"That's him," Gyu-ri said with definitive certainty. "That's our man. Clever bastard."
A jolt of adrenaline shot through Yoo-jin. This was it. The first tangible piece of Ryu's network. "Team Bravo," he said into his own microphone, his voice steady and commanding. "You have your target. He is on platform four, heading east. You have visual confirmation from Overwatch. Let Team Alpha and the package go. Your priority is the new target. Follow him. I want to know where he goes, who he meets, where he sleeps. Let's see where this little rat leads us."
The chase was on. On the monitors, they watched as the man on the platform casually boarded an arriving train, blending in with the exiting and entering passengers. Two members of Team Bravo, a man and a woman who had been posing as a couple, boarded the same car a few doors down. The hunt had moved into its next, more dangerous phase. A wave of relief washed through the command center. They had a lead. They were back in the game.