46. Authorized Delivery
AUTHORIZED DELIVERY
LIAM — SEOUL
Early Tuesday afternoon, while the group carried out their last minute preparations, I walked around World Cup Stadium.
It had a security operations center that made S?o Paulo’s look like a storage room.
Four walls of monitors, two dedicated police liaison officers, a direct radio channel to each entrance checkpoint, and Jason’s team occupying every third workstation like they’d been here for years. Which some of them had.
I’d been here for six hours and I still wasn’t satisfied.
“Run the VIP access protocol again,” I said to the venue’s head of security, a former ROK Army officer named Seo who gave every indication of having heard this request too many times already and was managing it professionally.
“Executive and VIP credential holders enter through Gate 9, the west side entrance.” He pulled it up on screen.
A separate channel cut into the stadium’s outer wall, staffed by two venue officers and one Starhouse representative.
Shorter lines. No public contact. A private corridor leading directly to the executive suite level.
“Starhouse-issued credentials, verified against our VIP list. Facial recognition on entry.”
“Who compiled the VIP list?”
“The office of Park Eun-ji. She flagged it for our review yesterday.”
“How many names?”
“Two hundred and fourteen. Label executives, corporate sponsors, Starhouse board members, media. Plus family guests. The members’ personal invitees.”
Two hundred and fourteen people whose access was being managed by a Starhouse internal process that Sara Yoon had been embedded inside for eighteen months.
“I want to see the full list.”
Seo brought it up. I started at the top and worked down methodically, scanning for names I recognized, flagging anything that had been added in the last ten days.
Twenty-two late additions. I photographed each one, sent them to Richard with a priority flag.
“The family invitees,” I said. “Who handled those requests?”
Seo checked his notes. “Tour manager coordinates personal guest lists.”
Sunny I trusted. She’d been with Pryzm as long as they’d been a group.
In addition to being Jason’s wife, she had been re-vetted for Seoul along with everyone else who had direct member access.
She was also constitutionally incapable of dissembling; I’d watched her manage seven different crises on this tour and her face gave everything away.
I made a note anyway.
The equipment situation had been bothering me since the morning briefing, though, and when I found Sunny I went over it with her. We were in the corridor outside the security center, walking the route from the loading dock to the backstage wardrobe area with a schematic on my tablet.
“Walk me through equipment delivery.”
She fell into step beside me without hesitation. She’d been doing this long enough that a security professional asking logistics questions didn’t register as unusual.
“Hair and makeup supplies and costumes travel with us, in big cases that we have delivered to and from the planes. Du-ri and Wan-suk supervise that. If they run out of anything they are responsible for buying locally.”
“What else?”
“Starhouse rents any necessary extra equipment that the venue doesn’t provide. All that is done long in advance.” She paused to brush a long hair away from her face. “We usually license the pyrotechnics locally. Then any specialized lighting fixtures, rigging hardware, and so on.”
“How does that arrive?”
“We try to order from a single supply house so they coordinate deliveries. For tonight’s concert we hired everything from Hanseong Stage Systems.” She looked at her watch.
“They should be coming within the next half-hour. The drivers have delivery manifests and the contractor’s authorization code.
That’s how it’s always been done. Every show, every tour. ”
“Have the drivers been vetted for this concert specifically?”
A pause. “I don’t — I’d have to check with the contractor. It’s not standard practice.”
“Who has the contractor’s account details? The authorization codes, the routing information for this delivery?”
“Logistics operations. Which is—” She stopped.
“Which was the team Grace Han worked for as a translator.”
Sunny didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
I was feeling restless. I hated the idea that we were so completely in response mode; I was a Navy SEAL, after all, and I needed a mission.
“I want to look for Sara Yoon,” I told Aidan.
He looked at me. “And do what with her? Manhandle her into a police station?”
“I don’t know. I just hate waiting around for her to act.”
My husband knew me well enough not to argue. Instead he looked at his watch. “It’s three PM. Show’s at eight. You need to be back here at seven for the pre-show checks.”
I leaned over and kissed him. “I love you. See you later.”
As I walked back through the corridors of the stadium I pulled up the information we had on Sara Yoon on my iPad.
Every time we arrested one of her accomplices, she dropped connection with that person.
But she was smart enough to realize that eventually we’d make the connection to her.
So she probably wasn’t living in her apartment anymore.
I decided to go past there anyway, just to get a sense of how she was living. I grabbed one of the drivers who had been chauffeuring people around and gave him Sara’s address, then sat in the back seat of a Genesis 90 luxury sedan.
It only took us a few minutes along the highway to reach an apartment building in Mangwon-dong, very close to the stadium along the Han river.
Her building was probably about twenty years old, in a neighborhood of narrow residential streets opening onto busier commercial roads.
It was the right kind of neighborhood for a thirty-something woman with a good job in an arts-related area.
Nothing to raise suspicion at Starhouse that she was living above her means.
I left the car and driver waiting and walked around for a few minutes, getting a sense of the place. Intuitively I knew she wasn’t there, but it helped me understand her.
Though I was six-four and broad-shouldered, I had mastered the art of blending in among the people around me. I slouched and always put myself in the middle of a crowd, often groups of young office workers focused on their phones.
I knew from my notes that Sara was a Starbucks lover, so I ducked into the coffee shop closest to her apartment, located right next to the stall of an older woman selling vegetables.
I pulled up Sara’s picture on my phone. To me, she looked distinctive, with long hair dyed a bright blonde, and I hoped one of the baristas might recognize her.
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.
“Clear.”
Jason checked the identification for the driver and his assistant, and stayed with the stadium’s operations manager while he and the driver went over the manifest.
“Everything matches,” Jason said. “Start unloading.”
I watched as the cases were rolled in. Jason and I watched several of the larger cases being opened in case someone was inside one. Lighting fixtures. Audio cables. Spare microphones. The pyrotechnics in boxes with bright red warning labels.
When everything had been unloaded, I looked at Jason, dissatisfied.
Jason didn’t answer immediately. He shook hands with the driver, who climbed back into the cab and started the truck.
“Either we’re chasing ghosts,” I said, “or Sara Yoon has another plan.”