Deal Breaker - Chapter 67
The cigarette he hadn’t even smoked halfway was crushed into the ashtray. No matter how much Kanghyeon had been through thick and thin, this kind of thing was a first in his life. He was utterly confused. He dragged a hand roughly down his face and groaned.
In the first place, why did you resolve s****l desire during guiding.
Setting aside the fact that it had felt good, this didn’t seem right. After maintaining a careful balance for six years, the shock of it all collapsing because he couldn’t endure a single moment was immense.
She’s young, and she goes into heat every time she guides, so you should have held back.
The fact that he himself lost his reason under the influence of guiding wasn’t that important. It felt like he had committed those acts because he felt a desire toward Hyeji that went beyond simple lust.
“Sir… Would you… like to touch my b*****s?”
The moment he became certain that Hyeji didn’t have another man, despite thinking she did, he had fallen apart. Why would a woman with a boyfriend act like that toward me. S*x practice, my a*s. What kind of practice do you need for sucking b*****s. She was simply being more proactive than usual because she liked s*x with him.
Noh Hyeji, you are not quitting. Right, he was worried that Hyeji might quit being a Guide out of guilt toward her boyfriend. Noh Hyeji, don’t date or anything like that. Money’s the best. Isn’t it?
Looking back, the fact that he had felt relieved thinking that way made him look like a horrifying monster. That night, while he devoured Hyeji’s body like a beast crazed with lust, he was also burning another desire in one corner of his mind.
See. I feel possessive toward Hyeji.
Noh Hyeji liked money, but she wasn’t the type to put her own greed first even if it harmed others. So even though he knew she wouldn’t try to dominate him for money, he had drawn a line until now because of a primal fear that she might still end up holding his leash herself.
But now he had to draw a line because of his own possessiveness. Before, he had been in a precarious situation, but now Hyeji had become the one in danger.
Kanghyeon muttered as he took out and lit another cigarette.
It’ll cool down. If we don’t see each other for a while, the possessiveness will cool down.
He smoked maybe once a month at most, but the people he had met here thought he was a chain smoker. It was when the third cigarette butt was crushed into the ashtray.
[ Mr. Han, room 302. ]
His temporary Guide stuck his head out past the balcony door and told him there was a meeting at the intelligence team’s operations headquarters. The team members who had been gathered at the dining table were all heading out of the restaurant.
The objective of this operation was to rescue activists from Doctors Without Borders who had been kidnapped by an armed group in Libya over a year ago. The operation was presented as being led by the Libyan military, but in reality, NATO was the command cener. It was said to be part of the operations conducted in North Africa to put an end to Islamic extremist terror, but it was unusual for NATO to step in over the kidnapping of NGO activists.
Of course, once he heard that one of the kidnapped activists was the son of a certain U.S. senator with deep ties in defense and foreign affairs, it didn’t seem so unusual anymore.
‘Did the ransom negotiations not go well?’
If word got out that a senator who might one day aim for the presidency had conducted money dealings with enemies, it would be fatal, so perhaps he had chosen the official route of spending someone else’s money.
Still, that son had it rough. If he had just been the son of a wealthy family, he would have been released long ago after paying up. The sons of ambitious, rigid public officials sometimes get driven into harsher suffering than others. Kanghyeon felt a sense of kinship with a stranger whose name and face he barely knew.
Kanghyeon’s main role in this operation was pinpointing the exact location of the hostages. Yesterday, he had been tasked with interrogating a high-ranking member of the armed group who had been captured by another team.
Extracting the hidden location of the hostages had been easier than expected. The man, who had resisted the entire time, spilled everything smoothly after a single suggestion. Go to a small village in a valley near the Algerian border and find the entrance to an underground bunker hidden in an abandoned building. The hostages were hidden in that bunker.
Verification through mind reading matched the testimony exactly. He also knew the hostages’ faces precisely. The faces of known armed group leaders were also present in the man’s memories. The identity of the witness was certain, so the testimony was reliable.
And yet, Kanghyeon kept feeling uneasy.
It fit together too well. As if someone had artificially arranged it that way.
Risking a rampage, he dug directly into the deepest parts of the man’s memories, and found that they were damaged. Drugs, or physical trauma. Memory damage was common, but still, it left him with a sour taste in his mouth.
While rummaging through memories down to the smallest details, even into other people’s private lives he had no desire to know, he found something suspicious. Behind the hostage’s face was a shattered glass window. Beyond it stood several massive smokestacks. And the surrounding scenery, where those smokestacks stood alongside rusted transmission towers. It was an abandoned power plant.
At that moment, Kanghyeon’s intuition spoke. That’s the place. The other memories are a smokescreen.
