Shin Jaewon called on Sunday.
Not Monday, as I had predicted. Sunday morning, at nine-seventeen, which was either a sign of a man who had spent the entire weekend unable to wait or a sign of a man who had spent the entire weekend calculating and had concluded that the earlier call was the strategically correct position. I had reviewed both possibilities on Saturday evening and concluded that the distinction, in practical terms, did not matter. What mattered was that he called.
His lawyer was a man named Attorney Hwang, from a firm in Gangnam that specialized in regulatory and administrative matters. He was professional, measured, and arrived to the point with impressive efficiency. His client, he said, wished to cooperate with the investigation in a way that would be appropriately acknowledged in any resulting proceedings. He used the word acknowledged three times. The third time, I wrote it down.
