Day Thirty-One · Monday 3 November He closed the faces with photographers. It should have occurred to him in the ballroom and it had not, which annoyed him for two days. Four consecutive years of the same evening, two firms covering all four, and neither of them had ever deleted anything, because no photographer in the history of the trade has ever deleted anything. He bought a licence for the whole of that year's set from the smaller of the two firms, as an adviser buying pictures of an event his employer had attended, which is a boring and entirely ordinary thing to do. Two thousand one hundred and six frames. Then he laid them against the seating plan, and against the account the hotel had raised for the wine, and against four years of the same faces standing in the same clusters. By the second evening he had names on all nine of the Kims. The quiet woman at the back of the group was Kim Ye-rin. Fifty-four. No seat on the board of anything. No signature on any filing. No title in any document he could find. And in sixteen of the twenty-three frames in which the family appeared, she was standing where she could see the doors. The one who kept fetching drinks was Kim Do-yun. * * * He had been wrong about Kim Do-yun and it took him about forty seconds with the photographs to find out. In the ballroom he had read it as weakness. A man who goes twice to the bar in four minutes, and laughs a quarter of a beat late, is a man who is not comfortable in the group he is standing in. Georgij had put him at the top of the pile on that basis, and had been rather pleased with himself for it. The frames said otherwise. Both of his routes to the bar took him past other people. Not the shortest way and not the same way twice. On the first trip he passed within a metre of two men from a shipping line. There was a frame of it, taken for somebody else entirely, in which he stood behind them with a glass in each hand and his head not quite turned. On the second trip he went round the long side, past a group of four, and stopped for nine seconds to say something to a waiter that took about three. And the laugh that came a quarter of a beat late came late because he was listening to something happening two metres behind him. Georgij sat with that for a while. He had been wrong about a man's character on four seconds of evidence, in a room he had spent three weeks preparing for. The only reason he had found out at all was that somebody else had happened to point a camera in the right direction. It was the second time in a fortnight that his reading of a person had been handed back to him with a correction on it. He wrote Kim Do-yun's name at the top of a clean page and did not put anything under it. * * * Day Thirty-Three · Wednesday 5 November Hanseong came out of the wrong drawer. He had been mapping shipping routes for a fortnight, because the Kims' logistics arm ran seven of them and he wanted to know which were profitable, which were sentimental and which existed because somebody's cousin lived in a port town. Route work means looking at everybody else on the same water. And on the third day of it, working down a list of operators who held berths on the same two lanes, he found a group that owned four routes and could not pay for them. Hanseong. Six months of capital going out. A board that had split into two halves that no longer sat in the same meetings, and had stopped pretending otherwise in March. Two separate rumours about money missing at a subsidiary, neither of them printed anywhere, both of them repeated by people who had no reason to talk to each other. And underneath all of it, four shipping routes with real berths and real slots and a genuine, unambiguous value. Georgij read the whole thing twice and then sat very still. Then he began to write. * * * Day Thirty-Four · Thursday 6 November He went to her on the second day of the writing, with eight pages of it done and nothing in his hands. He had thought about finishing it first and had decided against it inside about a minute. A man who arrives with nineteen finished pages is a man asking for a signature, and a man asking for a signature has already made the decision and is dressing it as a question. He put eight pages on her desk. No cover, no title, corrections in the margins in his own hand. "Hanseong," he said. "Four shipping routes, real berths, real slots. Six months of capital going out of the door. A board that split in March and has stopped pretending it hasn't. Two separate rumours about money missing at a subsidiary, from two mouths that have no reason to know each other." "And it's all true." "Every line of it, and where it isn't a fact it says what it is." He stayed where he was, at the corner of the desk, with his hands behind his back. "I want to give it to Park Sang-hoon on the eighteenth." Annie turned the first page over and did not read it. "Say the rest." "He will not tell me I am wrong about it. He does not correct people with sentences." Georgij said it flatly and without any decoration anywhere. "He will take the routes. He will take them in the next four to six weeks, because a split board sells cheaply and sells fast. He will have to put real money against them, and he will have to put it in early enough that he still believes it was his own idea." "How much?" "Between four hundred and six hundred billion for control, and it will not be the purchase that costs him. It will be what comes after." He turned his hand over. "Four routes with berths he cannot let go idle, in a group with no working board. He will spend the first three months finding out that nobody at Hanseong can sign anything, and while he is finding that out he will be paying slot fees on lanes that are running at sixty per cent." "And Incheon?" "And on the day he needs to be liquid enough to take a logistics company off a family under customs investigation, he will be a man with four routes and a fight." "That doesn't stop him." "No, Mistress. On its own it stops nothing at all." He said it immediately, because it was the correct objection and because she had reached it in about a second. "It buys weeks. Weeks are the only thing I can buy him out of." "Then say the whole shape of it." "There are three things and none of them works alone." He put one finger on the desk. "The first is money. What the Kims need is a balance sheet that survives an investigation. You put money behind them and you take back shares, security and a veto over routes. They keep the name. You get the control, and they will be told that in those words, by me, before anybody signs anything." A second finger. "The second is time, and that is Hanseong. He cannot move quickly and buy four routes in the same quarter, and he will buy the routes, because he cannot help it." "And the third?" "The third is the only one that is urgent, and it is the one nobody has mentioned in this house." Georgij turned his hand over. "Customs has been sitting in that building for a fortnight. Their problem this month has nothing to do with who owns them. Their customers are leaving. Three cancellations last week, which Hana had on a terrace and did not think was the interesting part." He put one hand flat. "And you are one of the customers." Annie did not say anything to that, because there was nothing in it she did not know. "Six of your plants make specialty chemicals and coatings, and the two that matter make the intermediates that everything else in the group is built on." He said it in exactly the tone he had used for everything else. "Those intermediates arrive on a schedule, through four ports, and two of the routes that carry them exist because the Kims hold permits that took eleven years to get and that nobody is issuing again." "Go on." "A reactor that stops does not simply start again on Thursday." He put one finger down and left it there. "You lose the batch in it. You lose the two behind it. A plant that has been cold for a week is four weeks away from being useful again, and underneath every one of your supply contracts there is a delivery clause with a number in it, and the number is not there to be reasonable." "You have read my contracts." "I have read the eleven that are public, and I have read what your customers file, which is more useful. A man tells you a great deal more about his supplier when he is explaining himself to his own shareholders." He did not look away. "If that company goes to Park Sang-hoon, then in eighteen months a man who has spent this year buying his competitors decides what arrives at your plants and on which Tuesday. He would tell you, politely, once a quarter, what it costs that year." "Yes," said Annie. "I have known that since my fourth day in your house and it is the reason I have never once asked you why you care about a shipping family." "And customers come back for money." "Customers never come back for money. They come back because somebody they trust is standing next to you." He let that sit. "Which is Chairman Woo. Sixty years in that trade, a terminal at Yeongjong, and the last man in this city anybody would suspect of being anywhere he had not thought about first. If he puts his name next to theirs, on anything, for any reason, the cancellations stop that week." "And why would he?" "Because twice this year somebody has tried to buy his terminal and would not say who was behind him." Georgij said it flatly. "And because he told me at dinner that if he died on a Tuesday, his terminal would be sold within a year and split three ways, and one of the three would be Sang-hoon." Annie sat back. "You have not told me the part I asked for." "No, Mistress." "Then tell me now." "I am going to hand a man a document in which every single word is true," said Georgij, "so that he ruins himself on it." And then he smiled. It was not one he had built. It came up slowly, from somewhere behind the courtesy, and it took its time, and it was entirely without cruelty and entirely without apology, and it was the face of a man who has found work that suits him. It was also the first time in thirty-four days that he had aimed anything of the kind at her. He was aware of it about a second after it was on him, and he did not put it away, because putting it away would have been a second lie in a room where he had just refused the first one. Annie looked at him for rather longer than a moment. "Does it work because it is true?" "Yes. It works for no other reason. He has been lied to by professionals for fifteen years and he is very good at it. He has almost certainly never in his life been handed a paper that says this is a guess in the middle of it." "Could you have written it if it had not been true?" There it was. "I could have written something," said Georgij. "It would have been a different document with a hole in it somewhere, because they always have one. He would have found it in an hour and I would have found out about it in a year." He did not soften it. "But that is not the answer you asked for. The answer you asked for is no. I would not have written it." "Because you don't lie." "Because I don't lie, and because I would like that to go on being a thing I do not do, and because I have noticed that this is the first time it has ever been the more dangerous option." Annie did not say anything to that at all. She read the eight pages, properly, from the top, which took her four minutes, while he stood at the corner of the desk and did not fill any of it. Then she squared them and put them down. "Finish it," she said. * * * "There's a second thing." "Go on." "I need Hana in a room, and my preference is that she comes here." "You want her here," said Annie. "I want you to decide whether she comes here. Those are different and I'd like to give you the second one." Georgij stood at the corner of the desk with his hands behind his back. "May I put the cost of it in front of you first?" "Go on." "If she comes to this house, twenty-nine people know that Hana had dinner here. Mrs Seo, who I would trust with a great deal. Mr Baek and two of his kitchen. Ji-won and Eun-ju. Fourteen security, of whom Jang has been here a month and Bae I would be sorry to be wrong about." He said it flatly, as a list. "There are four of those twenty-nine I cannot read at all. One of them is a gardener who has not spoken to me in five weeks, and all that tells me is that he does not like what I am." "And outside?" "Outside it is fewer people and worse ones. A restaurant, a driver, a car standing somewhere, and a reason. A meeting in a restaurant needs a reason, and a reason can be wrong, and when a reason is wrong somebody goes looking for the right one." A small pause. "In this house it needs nothing. Two women who have known each other for twelve years had dinner. That explains itself and nobody has to do any work to believe it." "You've already decided." "I've already worked it out. That isn't the same thing, and it isn't mine to decide, and I have no wish for it to become mine." Annie looked at him for a moment. "There is one more thing on your list and you have not said it." "No." "Say it." "At the gala you and she did not exchange one word in five hours," said Georgij. "Both of you had arranged that in advance. Anybody who was watching that room and can count has that. If she comes up this drive on Thursday, then whatever the two of you were not doing at the Grand Hotel, you have stopped not doing." "Yes." "That's the whole of the cost." "Next Thursday," said Annie. * * *

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