Ever After

Struggle

Seri sat in her hotel room across from Agent Ko, with Team Manager Hong hovering next to her. She had already asked him to sit, but the manager seemed too worked up to do so.

"They put a cloth around my mouth to keep me from screaming, and covered my eyes, too. I think two or three men put me in the car. When they took the eye mask off, I was in a small room. No windows, concrete floor and wall." She was recounting her harrowing experience to Agent Ko, after having given a statement to local police. According to the police, the kidnappers had taken her to a basement apartment located in a known mobster area. "I wasn't tied down or anything. They sat me down on a chair. The men were all wearing masks. One of them spoke Korean – I could tell he was quite young – and he was in charge of talking to me. He was Chinese, had a North Korean accent. They spent a long time questioning me and making threats to get the violinist's name out of me."

"Threats... physical threats?" Agent Ko asked, concern evident in his face.

"No, no. They were given instructions not to. They knew I was high-profile, that it wouldn't benefit them to leave any evidence."

"How did you know that?"

"I speak some Mandarin. I overheard them discussing it when they thought I didn't understand." Her hands trembled a little as she remembered the conversation between the men.

"There are ways to violate her without leaving physical evidence, too," one of the men had sneered. They darted glances at her from the corner.

"No. We keep this clean. She seems like she'll give up the information easily anyway, a privileged little princess like her," the man who seemed to be the boss said. "It'll be a quick job."

Seri had decided that the safest path would be to play the part of the sobbing, panicky princess, even though her instinct was to spit in their faces.

"I didn't know you spoke Mandarin," Agent Ko seemed impressed. "Please, continue."

She sipped her glass of water to calm her nerves. "They had a lot of discussions in the corner; they didn't seem all that organized. From what I gathered the North Korean diplomats tend to contact them whenever they need a job done in Shanghai but don't want to get their hands dirty. Then after a while... this was after a lot of talking, mind you. I guess it must be difficult to be a kidnapper who's not allowed to leave any physical marks. They could only go on about how no one knew where I was, how they'd leave me there for days and days without water or food. About how it would benefit me to give them the information now rather than later, when they could escalate their actions. Anyway, after quite a lot of that one of their lookouts suddenly ran into the room and said that the police were in the building." Despite her glib tone, Seri could still remember the constricted feeling in her chest and the onset of very real panic, since she had believed their words at the time. "I'm not sure how exactly the police knew I was there. They said something about Manager Hong calling them...?"

They both turned expectantly to Manager Hong, who straightened at the attention. "Agent Ko was the one who called me to say you were missing, daepyonim. He said to think of anything that could help. I wasn't sure if it was still working but I suddenly thought of that GPS tracker app you made us download, back when that crazy stalker was trying to kill you in Seoul. So I turned it on and there was your location! I couldn't believe it."

"Ah, those hooligans took my phone away from me, but I guess they forgot to switch it off," Seri surmised with a smirk. "They started scrambling when they heard the police were nearby. They had emptied the room once the police found me."

"Well. That situation was resolved more easily than I thought," Agent Ko said.

"I'd say they weren't 100% committed to the cause. Although their loyalty to the North Koreans didn't seem to come purely from money... " Seri said.