"Put your seal on it. You do not have any more time to waste, do you?"
I pushed the documents across the table.
Chairman Song of Daehwa Construction sat opposite me, trembling like a leaf.
"Team Leader Baek… isn't this too harsh? You're asking me to hand over everything, even the prime land in Pangyo!"
"Too harsh?"
I gave a short laugh and brought up the display on my tablet.
"Daehwa Construction's current debt-to-equity ratio is 520%. Your project financing loans coming due next week alone amount to 400 billion won."
The red graph on the screen plunged like a sheer cliff.
"Nine o'clock tomorrow morning. If we at Taeseong Securities refuse to extend those loans, Daehwa Construction will immediately default."
Chairman Song's face turned ashen in an instant.
The company he had spent his entire life building was on the verge of being dismantled by a single sheet of paper.
He wore the foolish expression of a man who understood that in his head but could not accept it in his heart.
"Make your choice. Will you leave with at least the title of honorary chairman?"
"Or will you face the press tomorrow morning on charges of accounting fraud?"
"Y-you devilish bastards…! Taeseong may be the country's largest conglomerate, but there is still such a thing as business ethics!"
"Business ethics are something well-fed men concern themselves with while digesting their meals."
I tapped my wristwatch.
"The chart tracing the flow of funds through your eldest son's shell company is already uploaded to the Financial Supervisory Service's tip submission page. All I have to do is press Send."
"……!"
"You have exactly three minutes. Sign it."
As I stepped out of the conference room, Assistant Manager Park from the task force hurried over from where he had been waiting.
"Well done, sir. I will send the acquisition documents straight to the legal team."
"Good. And close that Financial Supervisory Service submission page about Daehwa Construction's eldest son."
Assistant Manager Park flinched, his eyes widening.
"Pardon? You told the chairman all you had to do was press Send……."
"It was a bluff, you idiot. There was never any damned chart."
"What?"
I snorted and shoved the folder against his chest.
"We had a few photographs taken after I set a hostess-bar madam on their finance director. I bluffed him with those and got some hearsay out of him. We had no hard evidence."
"Oh……."
"You think the old man could keep his head when his own son was involved? He had a guilty conscience, so he scared himself into falling apart."
I loosened my tie roughly and headed toward the elevator.
Our secret task force operated under the Strategic Planning Office of Taeseong Group, the country's largest conglomerate.
Its public name was 'Management Improvement Team 2,' but in reality, it was a kennel of 'hounds' devoted to hostile M&A on behalf of the controlling family.
When it came to cutting off a target's air, we recognized no boundary between legal and illegal.
We bribed union officials to instigate strikes and slipped money to news outlets to spread malicious false reports.
Once the stock price hit bottom, we shorted the shares and bled the company dry.
Then we dug up every sordid secret the executives had—affairs, drugs, embezzlement, gambling—and forced them to the negotiating table with blackmail.
As I stepped into the elevator, I checked the balance of my Swiss shell company's account on my smartphone.
The bonus for the Daehwa Construction deal had arrived.
The leading digit had changed.
A satisfied smile spread across my lips.
'Business ethics? Corporate morality?'
Bullshit.
In capitalism, the most perfect morality was 'money,' and the surest ethical principle was 'victory.'
"Assistant Manager Park. Send the payoff we promised Daehwa Construction's union chairman to the Hong Kong laundering account. Tell him to keep his mouth shut and disappear overseas."
"Understood. But, sir, if Daehwa tries to use the illegal surveillance against us……."
"Let them."
I gave Assistant Manager Park a cold look through the narrowing gap between the elevator doors.
"If this goes to trial, I'll release everything, from the Song family's private lives to the kickbacks from their subcontractors. Do you think they can't work out who has more to lose?"
The enormous name of 'Taeseong' concealed the filth on my hands.
All I had to do was fetch whatever my master ordered and collect a generous bone for my trouble.
BZZT-
My phone vibrated briefly in my trouser pocket.
The caller was [Vice President Choi Kang-min].
He was the second son of the family that owned Taeseong Group, and the master who had raised me to the top of this filthy dogfight.
Until that moment, I had believed I would always lead the hunt from the predators' side.
The hound is boiled once the rabbit is dead (discarded once its usefulness is spent).
Back then, I had no idea how miserably a hunting hound could have its head cut off once the hunt was over.
The penthouse on the top floor of Taeseong Hotel.
As I opened the door to Choi Kang-min's private room, acrid cigar smoke washed over me.
"Good work, Team Leader Baek. You stripped Daehwa Construction bare very neatly."
Vice President Choi Kang-min spoke as he poured whiskey into a crystal glass.
He was the real power behind Taeseong Group and my direct superior, a man much like me—no, even more ruthless than I was.
"As instructed, I routed ownership of the Pangyo land through the Hong Kong shell company. The funds cannot be traced."
"Yes, your work has always been impeccable. You were someone I could always count on. Which brings me to something."
Choi Kang-min slid a glass of whiskey toward me and lowered his voice.
"The prosecutors' Special Investigations Division has been making some troubling moves lately. It seems they've picked up quite a trail on my elder brother Tae-young, the eldest son."
"Has Executive Director Choi Tae-young caused trouble with subcontractor kickbacks again?"
"I need you to clean up that incompetent fool's shit one last time."
My hand stopped in midair as I reached for the whiskey glass.
"The money used to bribe Daehwa Construction's union, the records of our payments to the press, all the illegal surveillance and wiretapping material we've accumulated."
Choi Kang-min's serpentine gaze pinned me in place.
"We've arranged for all of it to turn up on your personal computer and in accounts held under borrowed names. It will all be your doing, and yours alone."
The shock felt like a hammer blow to the back of my head.
But I betrayed no sign of panic as my mind raced.
My office must already have been searched, and all my personal accounts frozen.
Every escape route had been sealed off before I even entered this room.
"So you're cutting me loose to cover your tracks?"
"Let's call it a 'rational decision' to protect Taeseong. Take the fall for the group just this once."
Choi Kang-min remained perfectly at ease.
"I'll get your sentence reduced to the minimum. Once you're out, you'll never have to work another day in your life."
What a load of shit.
If I meekly admitted to the charges and went to prison, I would end my days in a solitary detention cell, my death disguised as a 'suicide by hanging out of guilt.'
"I wonder why you bother with such an elaborate lie. You intend to snap my neck and hang me up as soon as I enter the detention center anyway."
The smile lingering on Choi Kang-min's lips froze at my provocation.
His hound had understood the situation and was baring its teeth.
He gave a faint laugh and ground his cigar into the ashtray.
"I do appreciate how quick you are. If you'd walked out quietly, I would have sent you off cleanly, without any bloodshed. Well, it can't be helped."
CREAK—.
I heard the heavy door open behind me.
I did not need to turn around to know who it was.
Director Kwon Young-cheol, Choi Kang-min's shadow and the enforcer who handled all his dirty work.
"Team Leader Baek. You were an excellent hound for our family. You fetched whatever we sent you after. But……."
Choi Kang-min drained the rest of his whiskey in a single swallow.
"You've rolled in too much filth now. The stench is so strong that I can't let you live any longer."
As Choi Kang-min pronounced his chilling sentence, Kwon Young-cheol's enormous shadow fell over my head.
"It will hurt less if you do not resist, Team Leader Baek."
Director Kwon Young-cheol's metallic voice scraped against my ear.
I suppressed the urge to leap to my feet.
Then I leaned back against the sofa without hesitation.
I had no intention of groveling for my life.
I had no hope of defeating a professional hunter like Director Kwon, nor any way to break through the private soldiers guarding the door.
It was the same perfect blind spot into which I had driven countless targets.
Now I was the one trapped inside it.
"Vice President. No…… Choi Kang-min, you son of a bitch."
Choi Kang-min turned from the window.
"I'll go to hell first and wait for you th……."
"Thanks for your service."
It was a short, dry farewell.
An instant later, I felt a leather strap tighten brutally around my neck.
"Ghk……!"
My air was cut off in an instant, and my vision flickered.
Against that merciless strength, even my instinctive struggle amounted to no more than an insect's twitching.
The leather strap crushed my blood vessels and collapsed my windpipe.
'Fuck. Is this really how it ends?'
I felt none of those paltry emotions, like outrage or anger.
I, too, had climbed to the top with countless people's leashes in my hands.
A disposable tool was being discarded after serving its purpose. That was simply the natural order of capitalism.
If I had a single regret, it was this.
Every scrap of flesh I had torn away had ended up filling Choi Kang-min's belly.
'If, by some chance, I am given just one more opportunity…….'
Then I would become a wolf that tore out its master's throat, instead of a hound.
As my consciousness faded, I seared the sight of Choi Kang-min leisurely drinking whiskey into my retinas.
CRUNCH—.
With a hideous sound of something rupturing, my world sank into absolute darkness.
***
"Hey! New hire! Baek Do-jin!"
A piercing shout battered my eardrums.
My eyes flew open.
"Hah, hah……!"
Air tore into my lungs in ragged gasps.
The suffocating pain and the cold touch of the leather strap vanished in an instant, but my whole body shook from the lingering traces of death burned into my mind.
"Are you going to get moving or not?"
My blurred vision slowly came into focus.
The first things I saw were drab gray partitions and bulky CRT monitors.
A man was pounding on my desk, his plump cheeks quivering.
It was Manager Oh, my direct superior when I had first joined the company, a man buried in the depths of my memory.
'What is this? The afterlife? Or is my life flashing before my eyes just before I die?'
My mind ground to a halt under the crushing confusion.
Without thinking, I fumbled for my neck.
My crushed windpipe was intact, and my skin was smooth, without a single scar.
The pulse and warmth beneath my fingertips were frighteningly real.
My trembling gaze shifted to the old desk calendar in one corner.
[October 1997]
A stiff blue employee ID hung against my chest.
[Taeseong Group Strategic Planning Office, New Employee Baek Do-jin]
The impossible date left me breathless.
Kwon Young-cheol's brute strength, the cracking of my neck bones, even Choi Kang-min's sneer.
It was all still vivid, yet the scene before me belonged to roughly thirty years in the past.
'Have I…… really gone back in time?'
My heart, which had been pounding as though it might burst at this unbelievable reality, gradually slowed.
In the wake of that overwhelming bewilderment, my monstrously honed reason reared its head and began assessing the situation at a frenzied pace.
This was neither a hallucination nor the afterlife.
I was back at the starting point, when they had first begun raising me as Taeseong's hound.
I had returned completely to being a new employee in my early twenties.
'October 1997.'
A monumental turning point flashed through my mind.
It was exactly one month before South Korea's national default and the announcement of the IMF foreign exchange crisis.
A time of despair that would drive people across the country out onto the streets and up onto the bridges over the Han River.
But my mind held thirty years of precise data on the future economy.
This horrific disaster was the perfect opportunity for me to legally 'multiply my money.'
My gaze dropped to the 'Taeseong Group employee ID' hanging against my chest.
A university graduate joining a major corporation earned 1.1 million won a month.
In the lax financial system of 1997, the name of a major corporation alone was enough to open the door to loans with practically no limits.
I would take out the largest unsecured loan my employee ID could secure, then head straight to a currency exchange and buy up dollars.
"Hey! Baek Do-jin! Can't you hear me?! The department head is fucking furious because you used the wrong document approval form, and you're sitting here dozing off?!"
I bowed obsequiously to Manager Oh with an amiable smile.
"Ah, yes. I will correct it right away."
But the eyes reflected in the monitor's black screen glittered coldly.
Just wait, Choi Kang-min.
You will see exactly how a hound tears out its master's throat.
You will see how I rip apart Taeseong Group, which all of you are so proud of, from the ground up and devour it.
I will make certain you see every last detail.