Page 116 of K-Pop Double Life

I went up to a guy who looked a lot like Jin—slim, oval-faced, handsome, with a badge on his shirt that read “I speak English.”

“I’m supposed to meet my friend,” I said. I showed him the picture. “Have you seen her around?”

He looked at it, and shook his head, but he called over another barista and spoke to her in Korean. She answered, and he translated for me. “She changed her hair. Now black with blonde tips,” he said.

“Thanks.” I ordered a venti cappuccino and sipped it as I walked around. The area had a quiet, lived-in feeling, but I was struck by the contrast between fashionable young Seoul and the older neighborhood underneath it.

On the way back to the sedan, I called the guy in the Seoul office of Interpol I had spoken with when we arrived, and told him what I’d learned about Sara’s change of hair color. He said he’d make a note of it. I also texted Aidan to have it on record.

She was probably staying at a hotel in the neighborhood, because it was close to the stadium, but a quick online search told me there were way too many for me to canvass on my own. Reluctantly, I gave up and directed the driver to take me back to the stadium.

Richard came through once again. None of the late VIP additions were problematic. I finally understood what had been bothering me about the equipment delivery, and I found Aidan in the security center, watching the monitor feeds with the particular stillness that meant he was doing math.

I went back to the question I’d raised with Sunny before I left. “Equipment delivery,” I said. “Additional equipment, including pyrotechnics, comes from a vendor. The drivers are vetted by the contractor, not individually by us. Authorization codes managed through the logistics team that Grace Han had access to for eighteen months.”

I set my tablet on the desk between us. “If you needed to get someone or something into this stadium past every checkpoint we have, and you’d spent the last year and a half learning how this operation works from the inside, that’s how you’d do it.”

Aidan studied the schematic I’d pulled up. The loading dock. The wardrobe corridor. The single inspection point, staffed by a venue logistics coordinator who was checking manifests, not individual faces.

“You think she’s in the truck,” he said.

“I think if I were her, that’s where I’d be.”

“Or someone working for her.”

“Same problem.”

He was quiet for a moment. “We can intercept the delivery. Pull the drivers, verify every person and every piece of cargo before it comes through the dock.”

“I’ve already asked Jason to hold the vehicles at the street until we’ve done a full check.” I looked at the screen. “But here’s what I can’t answer. We’ve removed Grace from the situation. But someone on the truck may be another one of Sara Yoon’s operatives.”

“Which means she has another way in.”

“Or the truck was never the point. It’s a distraction. We focus on the loading dock, we pull people to cover it, and something moves somewhere else while we’re looking at the wrong door.”

Aidan was quiet for a long moment.

“So we watch the truck and everything else,” he said.

“We watch everything. We always watch everything.” I pulled up the full venue layout, every entrance, every corridor, every credentialed access point, the VIP gate on the west side, the technical access routes under the stage. “We just don’t assume that finding one vulnerability means we’ve found the only one.”

He looked at the screen for a while. Then he said, quietly, “Jin agreed to the concert because we told him we’d end it here.”

“I know.”

“We have to end it here.”

“I know.”

I sighed. “I’m going to meet Jason to inspect the equipment delivery.”

When I arrived at the loading dock, Jason was already there. “The equipment truck’s due in five minutes.”

The driver backed the truck in, and joined his assistant at the rear gate. Both of them wore white cotton medical masks over their faces, as so many Koreans still did, even with Covid years in the past. And both wore black ball caps covering their hair, probably a precaution against getting it caught on a piece of equipment.

I nodded. Covid had hit France hard, and I knew many people back home who still wore masks. Road cases filled the trailer from floor to ceiling, each labeled for lighting, sound, video, or staging.

One of the Korean guards finished checking beneath the truck with an inspection mirror and straightened.