Less than an hour later and thoroughly annoyed by the latest snag in her plans, Irene walked into Seokjin’s old aircraft facility to straighten things out. She really should have seen this coming, the other three were criminals after all. It wouldn’t have taken much for someone to hijack the real files and send fake ones out. Truth be told, her money was on Wendy.

Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said this place was abandoned, she thought as she walked down an old hallway filled with broken pieces of electrical equipment. She paused when she heard Wendy’s voice coming from the room to her left. Maybe it wasn’t as abandoned as she thought.

“You wanna tell me what happened to the designs?” Wendy clearly sounded agitated. And from the sounds of things she wasn’t alone.

“What makes you think I know what happened?” Seulgi scoffed. Of course Seulgi was here too. But the question Irene wanted to answer was why? Had Seokjin contacted them all about the missing plans?

Wendy growled, “Look screw you dude! I bet you did it when we were coming down from the elevator.”

“Oh yeah, that totally makes sense, doesn’t it? You had the file in your grubby little hands the whole time!” Seulgi’s voice was tense and Irene knew she should probably announce her arrival and break up their argument before someone did something they would regret.

“Hold up there Cujo, I did my part, I transferred the files.” Irene turned the corner to see Wendy holding Seulgi up at gunpoint and her shoulders sagged. She really didn’t want to have to defuse this.

“You better get that gun out of my face,” Seulgi hissed, standing up to Wendy despite her being at a disadvantage.

“Or what? What are you gonna do?”

“…or else I’m gonna feed it to you,” Wendy replied weakly, looking cautiously at the hitter. She knew exactly what Seulgi was capable of.

“HEY!” Irene shouted, turning the corner to break up the brewing fight. Seulgi turned to look at her and Wendy immediately turned the gun on Irene.

“Were you the one?” Seulgi questioned, her head tilted in confusion. “You’re the only one here who’s played both sides.”

“You seem pretty relaxed for a woman with a gun pointed at her,” Irene said, ignoring the question.

Seulgi gazed sideways at Wendy and shrugged. “The safety’s on.”

“Like I’m gonna fall for that,” Wendy taunted her.

“No, no, actually she’s right,” Irene replied blithely. “The safety is on.”

Wendy’s eyes widened and she dropped her stance to look at the gun. While she was distracted Irene grabbed it and wrenched it out of the other woman’s grasp. She could have sworn she heard Wendy whine.

With that situation defused, Irene turned to Seulgi. “You armed?”

“I don’t like guns,” the hitter said, looking pointedly past Irene to a space just behind her. Without missing a beat, Irene flicked the safety off and whirled around to point the gun at Yeri, who had somehow snuck behind them all without making a sound. The two circled each other for a minute, waiting for the other to make the first move.

“My money’s not in my account,” Yeri accused, not taking her eyes off Irene. She walked around Wendy, raising her gun as Irene lowered hers. “That makes me very sad.”

Irene knew she was playing with fire here. Out of all of them, Yeri was the one most likely to take this betrayal personally. And she was the one most likely to shoot someone out of pettiness. Irene needed to play this correctly.

“Okay, Yeri,” she soothed the younger girl, slowly reaching out to lower the blonde’s gun. “Now we can talk about this like rational adults.” Everyone was here, while Seokjin was not. That sent off alarm bells in Irene’s head. So she posed a question to her partners. “Would you all come here to get paid?”

“Hell no,” was Wendy’s response, acting like it should have been obvious. “Transfer of funds, global economy and all that.”

“It’s supposed to be a walk-away,” Seulgi said slowly catching on to what Irene was saying. “I’m never supposed to see you guys again.”

Irene huffed under her breath. They’d been played. “Then the only reason you guys are here is because you didn’t get paid and now you’re pissed off.”

“You wouldn’t be?” Wendy asked.

Irene laughed sardonically. She couldn’t believe it, she had been so focused on finding out which one of them had betrayed the others that she didn’t stop to think about the obvious answer. “I mean, matter of fact the only way to get us all in the same place at the same time is to tell us that we’re not. Getting. Paid.”

A bolt of realization shot through everyone’s expressions almost at the same time. Irene would have laughed if they weren’t in such a dire situation.

As one, all four of them turned tail and ran. Irene reached one of the docking bay doors first and with Yeri’s help she managed to open the garage, directing them all out. Wendy tripped on the top stair and Seulgi pulled the hacker roughly to her feet.

“Let’s go, let’s go, everyone out!” Irene yelled, making sure everyone had gotten out of the building.

Just as she ducked under the half-open door the entire building exploded in a ball of flame.

XXX

Irene woke with a start, the bright white lights and rhythmic beeping around her telling her that she was in the hospital. She tried to lift her arm only find that she’d been handcuffed to the bed. Ugh, her head was killing her. At least she’d gotten out of that building explosion alive. She groaned.  

“You don’t like hospitals,” Seulgi observed from across the room. The hitter was also handcuffed to a chair, looking bored out of her mind.

“Not really, no,” Irene replied, sinking back down onto the bed. She hated everything about hospitals, from the fluorescent lighting that made her eyes ache to the antiseptic smells that assaulted her nose. They also reminded her of her wife’s last moments, which was something she did not need to relive.

“It’s about time, unnie! Wendy unnie and I were wondering when you’d wake up.” a cheerful voice drifted through the vent above Irene’s bed.

“What the--?” Irene craned her neck to look at the vent. That sounded like Yeri.

“The cops and firemen got there just as we were waking up,” the maknae explained from the room next door. She paced around the room, tossing her handcuffs from hand to hand. Pouting petulantly and still handcuffed to the other bed was Wendy.

“Where are we?” was Irene’s next question, her brain already going into overdrive to find a way out of this situation.

“Hospital just outside Seoul,” this time it was Wendy’s voice that floated through the vent. She lifted her wrist to signal Yeri to break her out of the handcuffs but the blonde ignored her.  “The local cops responded to the explosion.”

Irene blinked. Then they might still have a chance…”Have we been processed?”

Seulgi waved her ink-covered fingertips, “They faxed our prints to the National Police Headquarters.”

“Dude, if the NPH runs us we’re fifty shades of ed,” Wendy complained.

“How long do we have?” Yeri asked softly.

Wendy ran the numbers in her head, “Thirty, thirty-five minutes tops depending on the software.”

Seulgi sighed, “They printed us twenty minutes ago. So unless we get out of here in the next ten minutes we all go to jail.”

Irene slumped back down, thinking about how she could possibly manage to escape from this one. It didn’t look good. “Yeah, yeah. Just…give me a moment to think.”

“I can take these cops,” Seulgi said a moment later, tugging against the handcuffs to test their strength.

“Don’t you dare,” Yeri warned from next door. “You kill anyone and you screw up my getaway.”

“Hey, I’m still handcuffed here. I can’t even go to the bathroom,” Wendy added.

All of their talking was just making Irene’s head hurt even more. But maybe, just maybe if all of them worked together… “Yeri! Get me a phone. We’re going to get out of here together.”

Seulgi shook her head emphatically, “No, look this was a onetime deal.”

Irene gritted her teeth. “Look, guys, here’s your problem. You all know what you can do individually. But I know what you all can do, so that gives me the edge and gives me the plan.”

Yeri sat down on her bed. “I don’t trust these unnies though.”

Irene paused. “Do you trust me?”

There was silence for a brief moment until Seulgi answered. “Of course. You’re an honest woman.”

That settled it then. “Yeri, phone.”

Yeri sighed from the other room, “Ugh, this is gonna .”

She stuck her fingers down and bent over.

Wendy gagged. “Oh, ew! Yeri!”

A few minutes later Yeri was lying handcuffed to her hospital bed while a doctor leaned over her, checking her temperature.

“Nausea could mean a concussion. If you feel any more after effects or blurred vision, tell the policeman right away.”

Yeri nodded compliantly, shooting the doctor a weak smile. She knew she could play people with her charms and innocent-looking face. The doctor and nurse left the room and as soon as they were out of earshot, Yeri leapt out of bed, dismantling her handcuffs and holding up a stolen smart phone triumphantly. Next to her, Wendy did the same.

Yeri held up the keys she stole off the policeman’s belt and tossed them to Wendy, who unlocked her handcuffs and began typing. Yeri strode across the room to the vent and whistled for Irene. “Unnie! We got it.”

Thankful that the handcuffs gave her just enough room to slide over to the vent and take the proffered phone, Irene grabbed the other phone and turned to Seulgi. “Okay, so the trick here is to give them exactly what they want. They want a phone call? We’ll give them a phone call.”

She tossed the phone to Seulgi. “How’s your satoori?

XXX

It turned out that Seulgi wasn’t half bad with a Daegu accent, though Irene probably could have done better.

“This is Detective Park Seojin with National Police Headquarters. We’ve received the prints you sent us. The problem I have is that they’re sending up red flags all over the place and I’ve got my superior from Seoul on the line to speak with you. Can you please hold on a moment?”

Irene was impressed by the younger woman’s acting skills. Hell, if Seulgi hadn’t been a hitter she might have been able to rival Sooyoung’s acting with a little practice.

Next door, Yeri was taking picture after picture on her stolen smart phone while Wendy played with an image editing app. It would take all four of them to get out of this unscathed.

Seulgi tossed the phone to Irene, who calmly placed it to her ear and addressed the policeman. “Yes, Officer? This is Director Bae, NPH. Is our woman all right?”

“Um, I’m sorry I don’t follow.”

“Officer, I need you to listen to me. The woman that you’ve arrested is one of ours. She’s been in deep cover for three years.”

It was a stretch, but if the policeman fell for this they were basically home clear. A notion which came to pass a second later when the man on the other line let out an awed breath. “Seriously?”

“That’s correct. In fact, you should be receiving a fax any moment now confirming what I’m telling you.”

Even though Irene couldn’t see her, Wendy sent a thumbs-up toward the vent and sent her files to the hospital printer.

The officer on the other end of the line moved the phone away from his ear as his partner came rushing down the hallway, holding an official-looking fax.  

“Most of what I’ve just told you is classified Mr…”

“Jungkook. Officer Jeon Jungkook.” God, Irene felt bad for this poor rookie. He’d probably wind up without a job at the end of shift.

“Officer Jeon. I need to know I can trust you. Can I?” She lowered her voice to what she hoped was a slightly ier-sounding tone. Most men loved to think they were important. Especially in front of a woman.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Ten minutes later, Wendy walked out of the hospital, leading Seulgi into a police cruiser she’d been lent, courtesy of the poor pair of officers they’d just conned. Irene and Yeri were already inside, and as Wendy guided Seulgi into the backseat she not-so-subtly let the other woman’s head smack the top of the door frame. Seulgi turned to growl at Wendy but was stopped by Irene.

“Keep it together, children.”

“Yea, just walk it off Seulgi,” Wendy said snidely, approaching the driver’s side door and getting in.

As they left, Irene looked in the rearview mirror and noticed a nurse coming out to talk to the two police officers.

It was a damn good thing The NPH usually took forever to get back to local law enforcement.

XXX

That night at one of Wendy’s lofts the four of them gathered in the living room with a couple of pizzas and beer.

“All right you guys can stay here until you find flights to wherever it is you’re headed next,” Wendy said, grabbing her third slice of pizza and looking something up on her computer.

“I’m going to beat Seokjin so bad that he’s going to regret even contacting me,” Seulgi all but snarled, angrily devouring her slice and downing a beer.

Yeri shook her head, “Good luck, unnie. You won’t get within a hundred meters of him, he knows your face.” She tilted her head. “He knows all of our faces.”

“He tried to kill us,” Seulgi argued.

“More importantly, he didn’t pay us,” Yeri added, picking the black olives off her pizza.

Seulgi leaned forward, “How is that more important, we almost died.”

Yeri shrugged, taking a bite of her pizza. “I take that personally.”

“There’s something wrong with you.”

Wendy interrupted their friendly spat and projected her laptop screen onto the wall behind them. Irene, Seulgi and Yeri paused their eating to look at what Wendy was showing them.

“Guys look at this. Seokjin’s story is ninety percent true. He is the head of BigHit, JYP’s biggest rival, but check out what my little web crawlers found.”

She pressed a button and a video popped up on the wall. One of JYP’s PR representatives was holding a press conference. “…we’ve lost research that we’ve been working on for over five years. Our servers have been sabotaged but make no mistake. We will pursue these perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law and with all the resources we have at our disposal. Thank you, no further questions.”

Irene stood up, taking a closer look at the representative. He was displaying none of the indicators of falsehood, so he was either telling the truth or JYP had hired some damn fantastic actors. Still, she couldn’t be sure. “Could be a cover story.”

“Good thing I made my own backups,” Wendy pulled up her copy of the plans they’d been hired to steal. In the moment they hadn’t gotten a good chance to look at them. “Yeah, look at the internal timestamps on this project. They’re dated 2014, 2015. And these are buried way deep in the code.”

“Speak simply for the rest of us idiots,” Seulgi said.

“There’s basically no way anyone could fake these.”

Seulgi’s eyes widened in understanding. “So we weren’t hired to steal the plans back?”

“No, we were just stealing them,” Yeri confirmed.

Wendy looked up from her screen, “So then why would Seokjin lie to us?”

Irene chuckled. This man was a genius, at least psychologically speaking. Not only had he used her deep-seated hatred towards SM to get her to work this job but he’d also managed to do the same for Seulgi, Wendy and Yeri.

“Because you’re thieves. If he hired you for a straight-up crime then you’d know he was a bad guy like you and you’d be suspicious. But you saw him as just another citizen in over his head and that’s why you didn’t see the betrayal coming.”

“So then why didn’t you see it coming?” Yeri asked innocently, sniffing the bottle of beer next to her and turning her nose up. She preferred soju.

“Because I’m no thief.”

Yeri opened as if to argue with Irene but Wendy stopped her with a shake of her head. “Okay, no more arguing. We made it out alive and I’ve bought tickets to London, Rome, Paris and Sao Paulo with the IDs you gave me.”

“You’re running,” Irene stated.

“Hell yeah, do you have a beter idea?” Wendy looked at her like she’d grown two heads. Why wouldn’t they run?”

“No, no not you,” Irene waved off Wendy’s question and turned back to Seokjin’s photo on the screen. “You’re running. Hiring us and then burning us was a high-risk play. He’s probably got everything tied to BigHit’s stock price like a cinderblock. There’s a shareholder meeting coming up…Look, we can’t let this guy have any time to cool down.”

Seulgi held up her hand, “You want to run a game on this guy?”

“Well yeah. I mean, how do you think I got most of my stolen merchandise back?” Irene replied. “Look at this guy, he’s greedy, he thinks he’s smart. That’s the best kind of mark.”

“He does think he got rid of us,” Yeri pointed out.   

“Element of surprise,” Wendy agreed. Slowly but surely Irene was dragging them back in.

“What’s in it for me?” Seulgi asked.

“Payback,” Irene said, and Seulgi’s eyes lit up. “And if it goes right, a lot of money. Are you guys with me?”

Wendy shrugged, “Totally, I was just gonna send like two thousand o magazines to his office but your plan sounds way better. My question is though, what’s in it for you?”

Irene couldn’t take her eyes off the picture of Seokjin. He looked so smug, like he’d won. She’d show him differently. 

“He used my wife. And besides, I hate losing.” She paused, tearing her eyes away from the screen. Irene knew she really shouldn’t be getting deeper into this. She should just count her losses and get away, revenge be damned. But it really rubbed her the wrong way that someone could manipulate her so easily just by bringing up her deceased wife. I really should work on that… “All right. We’re all in, now let’s go get us a Sooyoung.”

She turned tail and headed for the door without a moment’s hesitation. The others followed behind her like little ducklings.

“What the hell’s a Sooyoung?”