The cafeteria took up about half of the ground floor, but Miran didn’t linger once she’d snatched up a sandwich.  She couldn’t see the rest of her division, in any case – they were probably either eating elsewhere, as there were various alcoves and informal spaces on every floor where people could meet and talk (and eat), or had already finished – and probably wouldn’t have hung around even if she did, from the pure perspective of actually getting things done.

Cramming the sandwich into , Miran headed up to the tech department, hoping that Yugyeom would be in.  He was, and so was a lot of his department.  Miran wondered briefly if they were robots rather than human.  She could see at least twenty of them eating in front of their screens.

Yugyeom  looked tired as he sipped at a coffee, hands still in a pair of thin black leather gloves and cheeks still blue from the outdoors.  It looked like he’d decided to venture further afield than most for the drink, and probably because he wanted fresh air and knew he’d be cooped up at the computer all day long.  She tried not to stare at the gloves.  Would the rogue really be that obvious?

But then again, there was no way of identifying the gloves worn beyond what Jongdae had told her.  They weren’t even necessarily dark in colour if Yixing was right that the black thread had been used for decoration rather than stitching, and it was cold enough for everybody to be wearing gloves at the moment.  She was basically looking at confiscating the gloves of around six hundred people and checking them for a strand of missing black thread, and the gloves might not even exist any longer.  It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.

Yugyeom distracted her by holding up two memory sticks, one red and one blue.

“This one,” he said, holding out the red one, “is the original.  The blue is the copy.”

“Red original.  Blue copy.”  Miran nodded.  “Got it.”

Yugyeom handed them over and turned back towards his computer, letting out a loud yawn.

“Oh, and Yugyeom?”

“Hmm?”  He didn’t look around at her.

“Who’s the best person to go to for security camera footage and general security from yesterday?”

“Woohyun,” he said.  “Or possibly Taemin or Naeun.  I think they’re all eating lunch at the moment.”

Realising that was the most she was going to get out of him, Miran thanked him and retreated.  She had no idea who Taemin and Naeun were yet as she hadn’t got that far with the files, so she decided it would be best to go to Woohyun on that one.  That said, delivering the memory stick to the COO was probably a priority and something she ought to do first right now.

Plenty of people were still sitting around on the landing benches and in alcoves as Miran made her way up to the sixth floor, and to her horror, Junmyeon spotted and cornered her on the landing of the fifth.

“Well,” he purred from behind her.  “I hear the hotshot is, in fact, a hot shot.”

Miran was almost tempted to take out her pistol and ask him if he wanted her to prove it to his face, but she managed to restrain herself as she turned around.

“Kim Junmyeon.  Please leave me alone.  It’s only my third day and I don’t want to be filing a harassment case.”

He held up his hands.  “It was a harmless compliment.”

“Don’t compliment me, then,” Miran snapped.

Junmyeon shrugged, his tone suddenly becoming his normal business one – although Miran would have been hard pressed to label it normal since it was only about the third time she’d heard it.  “I really don’t see anything wrong with praising a person for their achievements, whether they’re male or female.”

Miran was taken aback – until his eyes suddenly raked over her and he took a step forward.

“Of course, it helps a lot when a woman is exceptionally beautiful—”

Miran ran.  She blamed society – as she had done all through university – for making people like Junmyeon assume that what he was doing was okay, but she didn’t have time to sit around and protest it in the office, at least, not that day.  At some point, when she’d actually made progress on one of her missions, she’d be able to afford to.

She hadn’t got more than a few steps across the landing, though, before she collided with somebody running in the opposite direction and they both went reeling to the floor.  There was a cry of “oh my God, Eunbi, are you all right?” before a third person tripped over them and there was paper everywhere.  As Miran sat up, she realised that the memory sticks were no longer in her hand.

The woman Kyungsoo had been comforting in the shooting range was sitting teary eyed to Miran’s left, clutching at her ankle.  The other one, who had tripped over Miran and was hastily trying to stash paper back into an arch file from her position on the floor, looked oddly familiar, though Miran couldn’t initially place her.  Within seconds, people were swarming around them.  Miran saw Junmyeon helping the third woman to her feet in an unusual display of concern, though most people were buzzing around Eunbi or helping to collect papers for the other woman.  She tried to get up herself, but quickly forgot about that when white hot pain shot through her ankle and she adopted a position similar to Eunbi’s.  The fall had twisted it.

All of a sudden, she was on her feet, a handsome young agent with tanned skin smiling at her.

“You okay?” he checked as he steadied her, and then happily allowed her to lean on his shoulder when the pain took her by surprise again.

“Twisted,” she told him.

“I don’t blame you for running,” he said.  “Junmyeon can be a bit of a creep.  A harmless one, yes, but still a creep.”  He held out his fist and opened it up.  The blue memory stick was resting in his palm.  “I think you dropped this, by the way.”

Miran almost snatched it back.  “Thank you, er….”  She hesitated, unsure what to address him as.

“Jongin,” he told her with a smile.  “I hear you’re a great shot.  Well, actually, I saw you earlier.  I pity the man who points a gun at you.”

Miran flushed with embarrassment at his reference to her aiming skills with a pistol.

“I’m Miran,” she told him pointlessly, because it was obvious he already knew, and she tucked the memory stick into her pocket.  “By the way, have you seen a red memory stick?  I had two….”

Jongin immediately started scouring the floor with his eyes, but he was beaten to it by the woman Junmyeon had helped to her feet suddenly popping up.

“I’m so, so sorry!” she babbled.  “Anyway, here, I think you dropped this – oh God, I’ve gotta run or Chaerin’s gonna killed me – these reports were due before lunch….”

She was gone before Miran could even thank her, her fingers closing convulsively around the red memory stick that had just been into her hands.  The crowd was beginning to disperse.

“Reckon you can get to where you’re going okay?” Jongin asked.  Miran tested the weight on her foot before nodded.  “I’ll leave you to it, then.  Nice to finally meet you after hearing all the gossip.”

As suddenly as he’d shown up, he was gone again.  Seeing Junmyeon looking around for her now that the other woman was gone, Miran slipped away too and headed on up to Shin Hyesung’s office.

The COO was thankfully in, sparing Miran the dilemma of whether or not she was permitted to waltz in through a locked door thanks to her specialised key card when she’d be entering a superior’s office unannounced.  Shin Hyesung looked absolutely exhausted, and he was still clutching the landline phone in his hand, shaking his head, when Miran popped her own head around the door.  He waved her in, mumbling something about the “bloody MoD” and “uncompromising b*ggers in government”.  Miran decided it was best not to ask.

“How’s it going?” he asked her glumly as she dropped into the seat opposite him.  “It’s much messier than I ever thought it would be and there was a serious screw up on protection measures around Oh Sehun.  I need to talk to Changmin about that.”

Miran grimaced.  “From what I can make out, there was a massive power outage and one of the coroners said that all but one of the guards down on that level were killed with poisoned darts and the last one had his neck broken.  It was clearly premeditated and either miscalculated on the part of the killer as the coroner reckons the killer misjudged the number of guards by two and was planning on killing Oh Sehun from a distance, or it was over-calculated.  The only reason I say that is because it’s also evident Oh Sehun was still handcuffed to a chair when he was killed, and yet he was found un-handcuffed away from the chair.  The rogue or mole or whatever is clearly just screwing with us.”

COO Shin finally hung up the phone.  “Sadly, the fact that this person is bold enough to hid amid the confusion of elaborate lies isn’t really going to single anybody out.  That’s a fundamental part out our job here.”

“I know.”