The Sun to my Moon

Chapter 7: Strategy

Go Hae-ri returned in under an hour, which could mean that the meeting had either gone very well or very badly.

Cha Dal-geon, who had been watching for her out the window, met her by the elevator. "How'd your meeting with Gang Boojangnim go?" he asked.

"It went well," she said, sounding extremely self-satisfied. He'd almost say she seemed smug, but Hae-ri didn't really do smug. That was more his territory. "I got what I wanted."

"What was that?" he asked, falling into step beside her.

"I got the Director to agree that Vagabond will focus on the Blue Shark case exclusively from here on out."

Dal-geon stopped dead, honestly shocked. "What about new cases that come in?"

She paused in her march towards the bullpen and turned to face him. "We're going to farm them out among the other teams. I'll review them as they come in and will make recommendations as to the best way to reassign them."

Dal-geon took a moment to process this. This was good news, for him. It was exactly what he would have wanted, had the choice been presented to him. For some reason, though, the idea of Hae-ri arguing with the Director in favor of it was somewhat discomfiting. "I'm surprised you were able to convince him to do that."

"He wasn't happy about it," Hae-ri conceded.

"How did you persuade him?"

"I pointed out to him that this is the highest profile case the NIS has ever had. The fact that we haven't been able to catch South Korea's most notorious serial killer is an embarrassment to us. Edward Park is a sophisticated murderer with lots of powerful connections and seemingly unlimited resources, so going after him with anything less than the full weight of Vagabond isn't going to get the job done. Catching him is going to require complex strategic thinking and the full attention of the entire team. We've been splitting our focus too long, and that's a big part of why we haven't made the progress we'd like on the case."

"And he bought that?"

"He did when I framed it by saying that we're not just trying to catch Edward Park, which would be a huge win for the NIS in and of itself, we're trying to bring down his entire network. I told him to do that, we need dedicated resources for the task. I convinced Gang Boojangnim that if the FBI had this case, they'd have a team of ten people on it full time. He wasn't crazy about the comparison, but he said he'd consider hiring extra staff to support the other teams to pick up the slack on the new cases that we normally would have handled."

"Nicely done, Hae-ri Go!" Dal-geon said approvingly, outstretched his hands expecting their trademarked High Five which Hae-ri took with a nervous smile.

"But there's more."

He raised an eyebrow. "Mwo?"

"I told Gang Boojangnjm neither I nor any member of my team would be providing him with status updates on the case until the case is closed."

He stared at her. "How did you manage that?"

She shrugged. "I told him I didn't trust him. I told him no one outside my team was above suspicion, including him."

Interesting. He'd never had much use for Gang Joo-cheol, himself, and he had had his suspicions from time to time about whether he might have been a mole for Edward Park, but then, he was suspicious of everyone. For the most part, however, he had always assumed the man was a harmless narcissist. The fact that Hae-ri had independently formed her own suspicions about Gang Joo-cheol cast the situation in a different light.

"What else did you say to him?"

"I told him until I can be one hundred percent certain he will never leak information to Edward Park, it isn't safe to share updates on our progress even within the NIS. I said if he isn't working for Edward Park, I'm sure he can appreciate the need to take every precaution against moles within the department, given what happened with Han Ki-soo and Kim Ho-sik. And if he is working for Edward Park, I'm going to make it as hard as possible for him to get anything useful to report back to his boss."