Page 114 of K-Pop Double Life

Several fans began chanting his name. Others shouted Gamsahamnida, Sang-hoon-ssi!, which was Korean for thank you. One woman was openly sobbing while holding a poster showing the photograph that had already spread around the world, Sang-hoon bleeding in the backstage area.

“Everybody loves a hero,” Liam muttered to me.

“Until they don’t.”

“True.”

One young woman with furry rabbit ears over her head held up a sign covered in rainbow hearts and Korean writing. I nodded toward it and turned to Sunny beside me. “What does that say?”

She smiled. “Jin and Sang-hoon forever.” Then she sighed. “I hope the Starhouse executives are as welcoming.”

A few feet away, another fan had a banner that simply read REMEMBER YOUR FANS. The contrast wasn’t subtle.

I scanned faces instead of signs. Hands. Bags. Anything that looked out of place.

I didn’t see anything, but then, I didn’t have much experience with the kind of crowds Pryzm attracted.

We moved across the pavement in tight formation, the members surrounded by security, fans screaming from behind barriers. Jin walked in the center, Sang-hoon close beside him, both of them looking exhausted.

Questions started flying from the media pack clustered behind a second barrier. I couldn’t understand the rapid Korean, but Sunny translated. “They want to know how Jin is feeling, if the concert will go on. And if Sang-hoon has a statement.”

The group ignored them all, until one young man with the logo of a TV station on his jacket shouted something. “He wants to know if the relationship rumors are true,” Sunny told me.

The noise shifted and it was like a bubble opened up around Jin and Sang-hoon. Jin stopped walking and turned to the reporter. He lifted his hand and Sang-hoon’s up together, and fans screamed. Every phone in sight seemed to tilt toward Jin and Sang-hoon at the same moment.

Jin turned and continued walking behind Jason toward the stadium entrance. But I saw Sang-hoon’s attention snap immediately to the crowd.

The entrance was less than fifty yards away. Suddenly it felt much farther.

46

AUTHORIZED DELIVERY

LIAM — SEOUL

Early Tuesday afternoon, while the group carried out their last minute preparations, I walked around World Cup Stadium. It had a security operations center that made São Paulo’s look like a storage room. Four walls of monitors, two dedicated police liaison officers, a direct radio channel to each entrance checkpoint, and Jason’s team occupying every third workstation like they’d been here for years. Which some of them had.

I’d been here for six hours and I still wasn’t satisfied.

“Run the VIP access protocol again,” I said to the venue’s head of security, a former ROK Army officer named Seo who gave every indication of having heard this request too many times already and was managing it professionally.

“Executive and VIP credential holders enter through Gate 9, the west side entrance.” He pulled it up on screen. A separate channel cut into the stadium’s outer wall, staffed by two venue officers and one Starhouse representative. Shorter lines. No public contact. A private corridor leading directly to the executive suite level. “Starhouse-issued credentials, verified against our VIP list. Facial recognition on entry.”

“Who compiled the VIP list?”

“The office of Park Eun-ji. She flagged it for our review yesterday.”

“How many names?”

“Two hundred and fourteen. Label executives, corporate sponsors, Starhouse board members, media. Plus family guests. The members’ personal invitees.”

Two hundred and fourteen people whose access was being managed by a Starhouse internal process that Sara Yoon had been embedded inside for eighteen months.

“I want to see the full list.”

Seo brought it up. I started at the top and worked down methodically, scanning for names I recognized, flagging anything that had been added in the last ten days.

Twenty-two late additions. I photographed each one, sent them to Richard with a priority flag.