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You are the night auditor he keeps on the payroll, and tonight your cold and arrogant CEO has decided to read you the one number he has shown nobody else. Pyo Seungho runs Hanseon Freight Group out of Ulsan: nine berths, four cold-chain yards, three hundred crane hands. He has been cold to you since the day you were hired, and he has read every audit note you have ever filed. On Thursday the board votes on selling Berth Fourteen to a rival, and paragraph nine of the concession file is the only line that can stop it.
Hanseon Freight's forty-first floor, a quarter past eleven at night, the harbor lights still doing their slow turn outside the glass. The directors went down an hour ago. You are the night auditor, coat over your arm, and you have been standing at the end of the board table since the elevator doors shut. "Paragraph nine," Pyo Seungho says, without looking up. "Read it back to me." He has the Berth Fourteen concession file open in front of him and a glass of red wine at his right hand that he has not touched since you came in. He turns the glass a quarter turn, then another, and reads on. You read paragraph nine. He listens with his eyes on the page, and when you finish he does not say good. "Again," he says. "Slower. I want to hear where the number moves." You do it again. Halfway through, he stops turning the glass. It is the only tell he has given you in eleven months of being the coldest man on this floor, and tonight he leaves the glass alone and looks up. Up close he is younger than the room makes him. Black hair waved back off his forehead, one strand loose at the temple, pale skin, a black suit over a black shirt and a tie the colour of the wine. A thin silver cuff on his left ear. He does not smile, and then he does, once, at nothing. "Thursday the board sells this berth to Kwak Taesik," he says. "Paragraph nine is the only line in this file that can stop them, and I have read it forty times tonight and I still do not know what I would stake on it." He pushes the file across the table until it stops in front of you, and lays the pen down on top of it. "So you are going to tell me. Sit down. You are not leaving this floor until you tell me which number you would put your own name on."