Chapter 141: Collaborator (5)

Reporter Ahn Su-Jin was momentarily dumbfounded.

“Pardon? What do you mean, Director?” she asked.

“I’m saying we should just bury this Kim Chi-Yeol case. Write up an apology article saying your sources were wrong, and just leave it to die down.”

“No, wait, Director. How does that make any sense? You’re joking, right?”

If it was a joke, then it was a very bad one. It made no sense to just wrap it up as something that never happened when they had very clear evidence of the incident. However, the director did not budge despite Su-Jin’s strong assertion. Rather...

“This is all for your sake, so just keep your mouth shut.”

“...”

Su-Jin was lost for words, However, she became certain of one thing; the director was being pressured to stay silent by someone. She immediately realized who that someone was.

It was either Kim Chi-Yeol, or his father Kim Han-Gyo backing him up.

“Do you remember what you’d told me when I first went out to the scene as a reporter? You said that a reporter’s job was to, by all means, let the public know of the whole truth, and it was not up to us, but the public to make their own judgments and evaluations of the incident,” Su-Jin remarked.

“...”

“You were my role model who I aspired to be one day, but... I guess not anymore.”

Su-Jin sprang up from her seat. The director couldn’t say a word as she violently swung open the door to leave his office, because he wasn’t able to deny her words.

***

Now that Su-Jin was unable to publish the article, she could only rely on one person to help her: the masked woman.

‘But it’s not like I can contact Miss Kang.’

Su-Jin did not know her number. However, she did know the number of someone who was very close to her, Ma Yeong-Jun. Su-Jin sent Yeong-Jun a detailed text of the situation that she was in.

She still had no idea of whether or not the person who had given her the USB worked with Yeong-Jun, so she wasn’t sure if he would help her.

‘I can only wait.’

She decided to leave it all to luck.

***

As Kang Ra-Eun was taking care of business at Levanche, someone came to her office.

“Do you have time right now?”

Ra-Eun was rather surprised by Yeong-Jun’s visit.

“Didn’t you say you had external business to attend to today?” she asked.

She thought something was off when Yeong-Jun, who had gone down to the underground parking lot with his men, had suddenly come back up. He showed Ra-Eun the text that he had received from Su-Jin.

She said as she read the SOS message that Su-Jin had sent, “No wonder she hadn’t published any more articles.”

At this point in time, Kim Han-Gyo would have enough power to control one measly news agency. Not just that, the news agency that Su-Jin was affiliated with wasn’t very large; it was small enough to crumble with enough pressure from the political world. They could not handle such power at their current size.

“Looks like Kim Chi-Yeol went on the attack. What do you want to do?” Yeong-Jun asked.

He was thinking that it was best to just retreat this time, but that went against Ra-Eun’s way of doing things. She was incapable of retreating.

Slam!

Ra-Eun slammed down on her table with her hand and smiled as if this was actually a good thing.

“Then I guess we should reciprocate.”

If they were attacked, they would attack back. Yeong-Jun smiled at Ra-Eun’s declaration of war. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

.

‘I knew I made the right choice to work with her,’ he thought.

***

The director of Su-Jin’s news agency was still in the building despite it being far past the time to go home. It had been a while since he had stayed in the agency building for this long.

‘It reminds me of old times.’

Back when he was a rookie reporter, he was so busy that he couldn’t even tell the difference between night and day sometimes, much less days. Although he was not so busy anymore, he was busy in a different way today.

Su-Jin’s words unconsciously popped up in his head while he was reminiscing about his days as a rookie reporter. A reporter’s job was to let the public know the whole truth by all means, and it was not up to them, but the public to make their own judgments and evaluations of an incident.

Incitement and the perversion of truth could be considered the two greatest factors that gave birth to what were called ‘tabloids’ these days. Even the director himself knew that they had a duty to show the public the complete, unadulterated truth. But just as Su-Jin had expected, not even he, the director, had the power to resist the pressure from higher authority.

He laughed in exasperation. He despised himself for even having a momentary thought that it would be better to stay silent instead of spreading lies to the public.

“I guess I have no right to call myself a reporter.”

As he smiled in self-scorn, he heard a knock on the door. The knocks sounded much heavier than usual. The director reflexively checked the time; it was 11:30 PM. There was no way any employees were still in the building. Could one of the reporters have come back after going to a news scene without his knowledge?

“Come in,” he said.

Creak.

As soon as he gave permission, his old office door slowly opened. He had not expected to see the person who had come in, because...

“Who might you be?”

...The person was completely unfamiliar to him. It was a large man with a threatening face, Ma Yeong-Jun.

Yeong-Jun explained to the man in his uniquely deep voice, “I’ve come to deliver a message.”

***

Kim Han-Gyo had dragged his exhausted self back home. His chauffeur bowed at a ninety-degree angle after opening the back seat door for him.

“I will see you tomorrow at 10 AM. Good night, Congressman Kim.”

Han-Gyo strongly patted the chauffeur’s shoulder twice without a word.

“Hm?”

His expression froze after entering his home through the front door. In the center of the large garden was an unknown woman in a mask standing still, staring at him. He laughed in bafflement as soon as he saw the woman.

“Has someone opened a masquerade ball at my house while I was away? I don’t recall doing so.”

Ra-Eun, the masked woman, did not respond to Han-Gyo’s joke. She tried her utmost hardest to quell the rage inside her after coming face to face with her archenemy alone after five years. She wanted nothing more than to turn that sneer of his into screams, but that was not the form of revenge that she had wanted.

If she wanted to kill Han-Gyo, she could do so right this instant. She only wanted one thing, and that was to topple everything that Han-Gyo built with her own hands.

Ra-Eun talked about why she was here.

“How does your wallet feel after buying off an entire news agency?”

One of Han-Gyo’s eyebrows twitched for two reasons. One was that the masked woman knew about the news agency that he had bought off, and the other was her voice. She was using a voice-changing machine to hide her identity, so Han-Gyo was not easily able to tell who the woman was.

Using a stand-in was honestly the safest method, but Ra-Eun had decided to go to Han-Gyo herself because it was a form of declaration of war against him. It would be a waste to leave such a crucial task to someone else.

“I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll be brief. The article about your son will soon be published,” Ra-Eun stated.

Han-Gyo expressed his doubt. “I don’t know who you are, but that has already been—”

“Did you not hear me? I said that it will soon be published.”

“...”

“You bought off the news agency that published the recent case about your son, didn’t you? That’s why I also did the exact same thing.”

Han-Gyo finally realized that something had gone wrong.

“How did you—”

“How did I buy them off? Isn’t it obvious?” Ra-Eun interjected. Her smile could be seen from the cracks of the mask. “I exploited a weakness.”

Letting one’s weakness be exposed to others was far more terrifying than money, since they would be ruined the moment that it was exposed. Of course, this didn’t apply to just the news agency that Su-Jin was part of.

“You’d best be careful too,” Ra-Eun warned.

She knew just as many of Han-Gyo’s weaknesses as she did of Chi-Yeol. Han-Gyo thought she was bluffing. Noticing that, Ra-Eun gave him a taste of what she had on him.

“I’m sure you know someone who’d been deeply involved in the corruption allegations of Chief Prosecutor Woo Han-Jun, right?”

“...”

“What else was there? Right, someone had royally messed with the attracting of funds to the Winter Olympics, and the social development grant for North Gyeongsang.”

Han-Gyo had something to do with all of them. Of course, these acts of corruption had never been publicized. Han-Gyo was shocked that Ra-Eun knew all of this.

He asked, “Is blackmailing me with all that your plan?”

“No, I simply said what popped up in my head. I have no intention of leaking them right now.”

“Why?”

Why not now? Ra-Eun’s answer was very simple.

“People don’t die just because they fall from two or three stories high, do they?”

Ra-Eun only had one goal; she would drop Han-Gyo once he had climbed much higher. She was playing the waiting game to completely end his career as a politician, a businessman, and everything else that he could fall back to.

Ra-Eun walked to the fence wall and warned him before vanishing.

“You’d better watch out. I’ll always be watching you.”

The reunion with her archenemy came to an end.

***

Like Ra-Eun had expected, detailed articles regarding the latest Kim Chi-Yeol case poured out soon after. Because of Ra-Eun’s blackmail, even Han-Gyo could do nothing but watch as the news spread across the country.

Ra-Eun expressed with a big smile as she read the article, “There’s no better medicine than this.”