After having been cleaned up, her bloody clothes were repced with scrubs, the kindest way to describe how she looked would be ‘A Mess’. Seulgi didn’t think that she knew just how badly hurt she was yet. She would learn, though.
Wendy’s blurry, unfocused gaze nearly saw them as they joined her in her room.
Frowning, trying to focus, “Seulgi?”
“I’m here,” nearly got stuck in her throat, but she managed to get it out.
Seulgi moved forward, trailed by Katie, and took her good hand. We skipped the first several things that she wanted to say. The polite nothings that were stupid, vapid, and worthless in this situation.
The nurse quietly said, “I just gave her a sedative, you have about 5 minutes before she is going back under.”
Seulgi nodded an acknowledgment and thanked the nurse as she left the room.
Looking back at her extremely damaged friend, she said, “If you wanted to see me tonight, you could have just called.”
This got the desired chuckle.
“I’ve called your parents. They are on the way. I’ll be picking them up from the airport and they will be staying with me.”
Katie chimed in with “I called the boss and told them what happened. Rest. You need to rest. We’ll take care of everything, including you.”
Wendy made a noise of understanding. Her smile became more and more unfocused over the next couple of minutes. With the power of the sedative, she was fighting a losing battle with consciousness.
Katie and Seulgi were unsure of how much of that she actually understood what she was told. Sometimes, the words didn’t matter. Wendy heard their voices. She knew she was safe and being taken care of. At this moment, that’s all that mattered to any of them.
Seulgi and Katie both took turns talking to her until Wendy’s gentle snores answered them.
Katie’s quiet sob shook Seulgi from her reverie. She took the younger woman in her arms and held her the way she would a child and let her cry herself out. She got some Kleenex wiped her face and cleaned her up a bit. She left the younger dy in the room for a moment with a quick “I’ll be right back.”
Seulgi fgged down a passing attendant and asked to speak to the nurse or doctor in charge of her friend. After a few moments, a sharp dy with a hurried and harried demeanor came up. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“Hi. I’m Kang Seulgi, your patient’s friend. I know that I am not family, but can you give me the information about where you are going to be taking her? Room number and whatever other things are necessary? Her parents are on the way, I’ll be picking them up from the airport and bringing them here. It would make it easier on them if I could bring them to her right away.”
“Hmmm. Let me see what I can find for you.” She left to go find the requested information.
Seulgi went back into the room to wait. There was not much to do while waiting. So, to distract both Katie and herself, she started asking the young woman some innocuous questions. When she met Wendy. Where they met. How did they become friends and the like.
Katie had to obviously change her mental gears to answer the questions. She was no longer exclusively focused on the injuries as much as her friend.
They met a couple of years ago at work. They were assigned to work on the same project together. There were some discrepancies in allocations of funds on a particur, and very rge, project. This task was given to her by the CEO personally. And equally discretely. No one was supposed to know about this. Evidently, this was a very big case and it involved some people high up the corporate dder. It was going to be ugly. Very ugly. It turned out that the project was very high profile and a government contract as well.
Wendy became a spook.
Wendy was tasked to find the discrepancies, and Katie was assigned as her assistant. Since Katie was still fairly new, very cute, and unassuming, she became Wendy’s hidden dagger. She was able to get information out of people without them knowing what they were doing or why. The amount of damning evidence was incredible, all acquired with an impish grin and a hearty ugh.
They worked together better than either of them had anticipated. Both of them managed to ferret out the issue, then they put that information into a report. That report went straight to the CEO, CFO, and other people at that level that the CEO told her to send the information to.
It actually scared Wendy more than a little when she was specifically told to keep the entire data set on a separate fsh drive and keep it secured. All of the before things made her nervous and hyper-aware of the importance of what she was involved in. That st bit is what had her scared. She tried to shield Katie as much as possible. That, of course, was impossible. She saw the data that was being put together. She didn’t know the names yet but had a good idea about the titles these people had.
Katie is a very smart girl. She quickly came to understand that some of these people could, and more importantly, would – make her disappear if they knew what these two were up to. Needless to say, operational security was paramount.
Still, no one worked in a vacuum. A few people who had figured out what was happening also had bones to grind with a few of these rotten people and started to surreptitiously to hand them, covertly of course, more information that widened the scope of the information that they already collected.
They already know that the ramifications of that report would shake up the company. And several other companies that were implicated as well.
The true scope of this was when the CEO came to her office with a hoard of Ministry of Justice types and simply said: “Give them the hard copies.”
She took out a key on a chain from around her neck, then had all of them follow her to where she hid the hard copies, the backups, and all of the extraneous things that she got after getting the report to the boss. It was an unmarked, medium-sized closet full of boxes. The boss blinked. The MoJ guys blinked. Wendy and Katie looked both terrified of these people and smug because of the work they did.
