Chapter 9: Infiltration
"I am very proud of your improved performance," his father said at the next evening meal in the Kim household.
Dr Kim had missed the evening meal on the day of the results as he'd had to work unexpectedly late at the hospital.
"I decided that I need to work hard," Taehyung explained.. "Taeyeon helped me a lot as well."
All the eyes in the room went to Taeyeon. She ignored the looks and continued on studiously making her way through the cuts of veal on her plate.
"You've done a good job helping your brother," Dr Kim complimented her.
Taemin butted in eagerly. "I gave him some help too."
Their stepfather squinted at him suspiciously before moving on.
"Well done to you as well. Is there anything you want Taehyung? You should be rewarded for your efforts."
Taehyung spent a moment thinking about it. What he wanted wasn't something his stepfather could buy him. He wanted the end of the segregation and the blood type system. Or to know if vampires really existed.
"There isn't anything I want," he said.
The queen of shopping also known as his stepmother, interrupted with her own suggestion.
"Your father can get you a Rolex, your watch is just some low end designer brand."
Taehyung's eyes flicked to his watch. It had been a birthday present a long time ago and he was still fond of it. The watch itself wasn't much to look at, but it did tell the time accurately and had lasted a long time.
"Let Taehyung decide," his father said. "If he doesn't want anything I can just take him out for a meal at a luxury restaurant."
"There's that place that's just opened up that sells gold encrusted caviar. Each ball of caviar is surrounded by a layer of gold and all the tableware is carved out of crystal."
Taehyung tried to keep his face as neutral as possible. Wherever this place was, it sounded like his stepmother's dream. She always seemed to prefer the gaudy signs of wealth rather than the subtle ones.
"That sounds like a waste of money," his stepfather said. "I'd prefer to take him to a place that serves good tasting food."
Taehyung saw Taeyeon's head perk up a little and knew her interest had been piqued by the mention of good food. He had come to understand that she really liked food and didn't care for anything with gold involved.
"You never care for the things I like," his stepmother pouted and wiped her face with a napkin, smearing her lipstick in the process. "Don't you care for our married life?"
That was something new. His foster parents never argued or at least, didn't argue in front of them. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that he had been feeling that there was strain between them recently.
"Darling, I just don't like wasting money on frivolous things," Dr Kim replied lightly. "Of course I care for our married life."
"Well if you say so," his stepmother replied. "I love you."
That was the most unenthusiastic declaration of love Taehyung had ever heard. Could his foster parents be on the verge of divorce? Could they even divorce? To his knowledge no one in the city had ever had a divorce.
"I don't mind going somewhere with good food," he said to change the flow of conversation.
His stepfather shot his wife a look that said 'I told you so' and turned back around to smile at him.
"Thank you Taehyung. I am proud of you. Maybe you can also get into SKY Castle University like Taeyeon."
It was then that Taehyung recalled that his stepsister was on track for the most prestigious educational place in the capital. Would she get access to the SKY Castle area of the city?
Perhaps the key to solving the mystery would be to ask his stepsister to help them. She was better placed than him for infiltration. Taehyung knew he would never be able to guess her stance on the government and segregation; she never gave anything away. He couldn't risk recruiting her.
"It's too early to say that. I've got a few years of school left before then," was the answer he settled on.
"Do you think I could get in?" Taemin asked cheerfully.
"Taemin… I've warned you about your sense of humour before," his stepfather said.
Their foster parents and any other adults didn't encourage comedy in any form. Taemin was the only person he knew that had managed to ignore that and still try to make jokes. Taehyung didn't normally find any of it funny, but he appreciated that Taemin still wanted to make people laugh despite the lack of encouragement.
***
"How come you didn't get to go on the trip to the government office when you were my age?" Taehyung asked his stepsister after dinner.
Taeyeon bit the top of her ice cream cone off with an intense look of concentration and didn't answer until she'd finished her mouthful. Apparently she had come to his room to ask about the trip, but all she had done so far was sit on his bed and eat ice cream.
"The trip didn't exist until last year so I didn't get the chance. We just got money instead. I spent mine on cake and didn't tell our parents. They ended up assuming I didn't get anything."
That explained why he didn't remember Taeyeon being awarded by the school for her exams two years before. It felt odd to know more about her now and see her true personality.
"Would you want to go?"
Taeyeon shrugged. "I don't know. It's probably going to be boring."
She had a definite point there. Taehyung had been given an itinerary for his trip and to him it sounded like the trip was just a chance for the government to directly recruit bright young minds into working for them.
"I don't know about that… there's some interesting sounding speeches…" his voice trailed off.
Taeyeon simply held out her hand and he passed over the itinerary.
"Well, at least you get a tour. Maybe you can get lost for a bit and miss the very compelling sounding speeches afterwards," she suggested after perusing it.
That was the technique that he was going for. It just wasn't for the reason she thought it would be for.
"Thanks for the advice," he said.
"Anytime," she said and reached over to give him a smack on the shoulder. Instead her nails somehow cut his exposed skin.
"My nails were sharper than I thought," she said and grabbed a tissue from the box on his desk. "Hold this here while I get a plaster."
She soon returned with a patterned plaster and lifted the blooded tissue off his shoulder. Taehyung winced when he saw how much blood was there. How sharp were her nails? He hadn't noticed her nail sharpness in the past.
"I tried a new manicure set," she admitted and showed him the guilty nail in question."The metal part of the nail art here came loose and it's got a sharp edge."
As she spoke she neatly placed the plaster on his shoulder and passed him a sherbert lemon from her pocket.
"Have some sugar," she said. "Make sure to get some sleep. You've got a special day tomorrow."
***
"Tomorrow is a special day," was the line RM opened the meeting with. "V is going somewhere important."
He opened a beat up looking briefcase and rustled around it. Taehyung knew it was going to be tools for his infiltration donated by the main branch of the resistance.
"I've been asked to give these to you. These have to be placed in different locations."
RM held up several USB drives, each had a different colour. Taehyung swallowed nervously. The sight of the memory sticks drove home how important his task was going to be.
"Wait," Suga interjected. "I don't have much computer knowledge, but I do know some things. V won't have any opportunity to retrieve them and someone is going to notice that's there's mysterious USB drives being left in computers around the government offices. Then they'll start suspecting outsiders and we don't want V to get caught."
RM folded his arms and raised his eyebrows.
"That is correct," he answered. "That was the original plan that the main resistance had for V. However, the computer genius working for them had a more complex idea that should work better."
The subject of the conversation swallowed his fear again. The moment he had been told the plan, he hadn't liked it. It was the government office, of course someone was going to notice strange devices quite quickly and he would be suspected. Whoever the computer genius was, they had his back.
"These USB drives will transmit anything they find to a computer owned by the computer expert and then when it's finished, the drive will self destruct. There will be some melted plastic, but nothing to say that it was a USB drive. The speed of data transmission is predicted to be very fast."
"So everything has been taken into consideration?" Suga asked with a worried glance at Taehyung.
RM nodded.
"We've done our best to make this run as smooth as possible. If V can't place anything anywhere, at least he can give us images from his concealed camera to give us an idea of the floor plan for future reference. Here's the camera- it's disguised as a button. Sew it on something when you get back."
Taehyung picked up the USB drives and the button that was actually a camera with a lighter feeling in his heart. He was being looked after. He wasn't going to get caught.
"Did you tell our higher ups about the vampire theory?" Jin asked.
Their leader scratched his neck nervously.
"I did. They were skeptical to say the least. It was agreed that it did make some sort of sense. I pointed out my suspicions that O, B and A types are being phased out and they agreed. They've been experimenting with getting people to miss the roll call and the government has never followed up on them like they used to."
The implications of that were obvious to Taehyung. If the government couldn't be bothered to check up on people missing out on the roll call, they really didn't care about the lower blood types before. He used to hear stories about people being arrested for missing their attendance. To hear that didn't happen anymore added to the theory that they didn't need the lower types anymore.
***
"So here is the meeting room. Bang Si Hyuk comes here everyday," the tour guide announced with a very obvious air of pride. "Our ruler is very diligent."
Taehyung repressed an eye roll. If he didn't have a secret mission, this trip would have been extremely boring. He would have fallen asleep in the induction lecture a long ago. He did take a photo of the room anyway with his button camera.
"This is the server room," the guide pointed to the next room in passing. "There's a lot of information stored in this building so it's a big room."
Those words woke Taehyung up and he noted its position in the corridor and what floor they were on. It was probably his best bet for the place to obtain data. He aimed his button camera at the floor sign as well. He had been advised to photograph any directional signs in the building to help with the floor plan.
"The next room is full of our advertising experts, let's go in," the guide continued on and pushed open another door which opened out into a large room.
Taehyung knew immediately that he had found the people that made propaganda. The large poster of Bang Si Hyuk was quite the obvious indication. He followed his group into the room and paused at the nearest computer. There might be some interesting things on the computer of someone that made propaganda.
He used one of his feet to discreetly loosen the shoelace on the other shoe and bent down to act like he was tying it. He snaked one hand to the back of the computer and jammed one of his memory sticks into the USB slot at the back of the computer.
Their group spent twenty minutes in the office ooh and ahhing over all the poster and CFs. Taehyung kept one eye on what he was supposed to be watching and on the USB. He saw it melt and fall onto the floor at the end of the last video. No one noticed it and all it looked like when he left was a green stain on the floor. Whoever made it was a genius.
The next USB went into a computer in the Statistics Office. They had been taken there to show the perfect no crime rate statistics. Taehyung didn't believe that, but his mind was more on placing the USB.
Afterwards they were awarded with a brief ten minute break to go to the toilets and eat snacks. Taehyung knew this was his only chance to get into the server room.
He hung behind in the toilets claiming to need a dump and waited until his classmates left without him. Then he walked down the corridor and into the stairwell to get to the next floor. He peeped out cautiously and relaxed when he saw no one was around.
Taehyung checked his watch. He had five minutes to get back to the group. There was a little flexibility in that he could pretend to have been having a long dump, but if it too much, it would be suspicious.
The door to the room was luckily unlocked which was good because he didn't have anything to pick it with. It had been decided that concealing a lock pick was too dangerous. The room was very cold and highly air conditioned. He looked around quickly for somewhere to put the USB.
He found a place to insert the USB that seemed right in the server in the floor. The USB became warm so he knew it was transmitting something as it should be. Taehyung stood up again and turned to leave.
Then he lost control of his senses and floor was suddenly right next to his face. His eyes started to close.
Dimly he realised that someone had come up behind him and hit his head.
He had been caught.
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