SPLINTER SECT

North Korean terrorists unleash a devastating sarin-gas attack on Los Angeles: payback for US opposition to their homeland’s nuclear expansion. With casualties mounting and fear of future strikes on the rise, Mack Bolan follows the trail of violence to the zealous billionaire funding the deadly campaign. Taking him out—and saving thousands from an arsenal of suitcase bombs and biochemical weapons—will mean penetrating North Korea’s treacherous border. But the Executioner’s bloody pilgrimage won’t end until he sends this scum straight into the afterlife.

The house and grounds went dark, but Bolan knew exactly where his first three targets were.

Sweeping the muzzle of his scattergun across the patio, he triggered three quick twelve-gauge rounds, each blast spewing nine pellets of double-O buckshot, each pellet equivalent to a .33-caliber bullet.

His targets never knew what hit them, blown away and tumbling on the flagstone patio, awash in blood. Somewhere inside the house, a male voice shouted, challenging the sudden dark.

Light from the burning, melting generator shed showed Bolan where he had to go—rushing across the lawn through roiling smoke, past burning patches where napalm has set the grass on fire—and Chan stayed with him, matching stride for stride.

Whatever hell awaited them, they would be meeting it head-on.

Omega Cult

Don Pendleton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Staff Sergeant Robert James Miller Nari District, Afghanistan; January 25, 2008

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Dedication

Legend

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

Los Angeles, California

Jang Il-woo, age twenty-three, boarded the Metro Express Line 442 at the Hawthorne/Lennox Station, at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning, bound for downtown LA. No one aboard the train noticed the slender Korean expatriate dressed in a cheap business suit, horn-rimmed glasses and black wingtips. Just another of the city’s countless worker drones, bound for an office job downtown and none too happy that he still had four full days to work that week.

As the train filled, passing through twenty-seven stations on its way to the Staples Center multi-purpose sports arena and the looming skyscrapers beyond, Jang kept eye contact with his fellow passengers to a minimum, staring out the window beside him, counting down the final minutes of his life. The briefcase sat between his feet, its deadly secret hidden from the others traveling their last few miles toward doom.

Jang had no fear of death. He had resolved it through his prayers and other actions of devotion to the cause that ruled his life and had determined when that life on Earth should end. It comforted him to imagine what would follow his demise, the great leap forward for his homeland and the world at large.

A resident of the United States for nearly two years now, complete with green card, Jang had never actually planned to settle in the West. His course had been set more than a year before he applied for his US Permanent Resident Card and was accepted on the basis of his fabricated academic record, indicating he held a master’s degree in business management and mass communication from Seoul’s Chung-Ang University. His application also claimed a standing job offer from Choeusu Productions in Los Angeles, a public relations firm operating from a phone bank and post-office box in West Hollywood and had no living officers or formal personnel.

Within the anthill of Los Angeles, Jang was invisible.

That was about to change.

Inside his shiny briefcase Jang carried a twelve-pound aerosol dispenser filled with sarin: a colorless, odorless, liquid nerve agent listed as a weapon of mass destruction under international law. Stockpiling sarin had been banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, presently signed by all but five nations on Earth.

No matter. Any clever chemist could produce sarin, given the proper equipment and adequate supply of base materials.

Jang did not understand the chemistry, nor did he care to. All he had to do this Tuesday morning was to wait for a full car and loose the gas to do its lethal work. As he reached down to free the latches on his case, his mind echoed the last words spoken by his master, barely half an hour earlier: “Breathe deep, sleep well and wake in Paradise.”

* * *

CITY HALL, at 454 feet, was LA’s tallest building from 1928 to 1964, when a revised building code permitted the erection of taller downtown structures. Even after a four-year seismic retrofit between 1998 and 2001, it remained the tallest, base-isolated structure on Earth, employing one of the most reliable architectural methods devised to protect tenants from earthquakes.

Kim Jun-ha, age twenty-six, knew nothing of that history when he stepped onto city hall’s observation deck at 9:05 a.m. Taken for an Asian tourist by the citizens who saw him, branded by his backpack and the Nikon D5300 DSLR camera around his neck, he passed unnoticed on his ride up in the elevator, totally ignored by other Tuesday-morning sightseers as he began to circumnavigate the deck, peering across the hazy vista of a city doomed to die.

In his backpack Kim carried an aerosol dispersion device identical to one that would be opened by Jang Il-woo aboard the Metro Express. Unlike Jang, he also carried a Beretta 8000 semiautomatic pistol. It was tucked under his belt, beneath the plain gray hoodie that he wore. The pistol held sixteen rounds of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition. He carried no spare magazine; Kim knew he would not be needing one.

Step one of his assigned duty was to remove the aerosol device from his backpack, hold his breath while he opened the nozzle, then fling it as far as he could manage toward the teeming street below. The observation deck at city hall had no screens to dissuade him or to prevent determined suicides from jumping, just a chest-high railing to avoid potential litigation from an accidental fall.

Simple.

One of the tourists on the deck—a thin, blonde woman—saw him set his backpack down, extract the sarin canister and twist its only knob before letting it fly toward North Spring Street—a hurtling speck that left a trail of lethal gas and would shatter when it struck the pavement after seconds in free fall.

The blonde poked her male companion and shouted at Kim, “Hey! You can’t do that!”

“Of course I can.” Kim answered, shooting her in the face with his Beretta. Her friend fell next, as Kim Jun-ha proceeded on a circuit of the observation deck, blasting away at anyone he saw.

Along the way, he counted shots, remembering what he’d been told that morning before setting out: “Be sure to save one bullet for yourself.”

* * *

THE WILSHIRE FEDERAL BUILDING in Sawtelle, a westside unincorporated area surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, stood 259 feet high and housed the city’s FBI field office, Passport Agency, General Services Administration as well as other critical facilities.

Given the building’s purpose and the modern state of terrorism, foreign and domestic, its security precautions were rigorous. Armed guards in uniform command the lobby, funneling all arrivals through metal detectors and explosive “sniffers,” while their bags traveled along conveyor belts through finely tuned X-ray machines. In theory, no terrorist or lunatic opponent of the US government could clear those hurdles and proceed upstairs into the offices themselves.

No problem.

Son Na-eun, age twenty-one, did not intend to pass through Wilshire Federal’s security. For him, it was enough to simply breach the lobby, occupying space with all those workers, guards and their machines, to carry out the work he’d been assigned.

Like Jang Il-woo and Kim Jun-ha, Son carried an aerosol sarin dispenser—this one in a book bag—when he entered Wilshire Federal’s lobby at 9:20 a.m. on Tuesday. While a dozen other citizens lined up in front of him, Son set his bag on the lobby’s marble floor, opened its zipper and was reaching in to twist the canister’s dispersal knob when he was spotted by one of the guards in uniform.

“Heads up!” the guard cried out to his companions, reaching for his Glock sidearm. “Book bag!” And then, to Son, “Stand up and let me see your hands!”

Son raised his smiling face and told the guard, “Too late,” already opening the aerosol dispenser’s nozzle, breathing deeply as the gas dispersed.

He was the lucky one. A .40-caliber bullet drilled his forehead, slamming Son backward into oblivion before he could experience the first symptoms of poisoning, preventing proper operation of an enzyme that acted as the human body’s “off switch” for various glands and muscles. Without that cutoff, said glands and muscles were constantly stimulated, inducing swift unconsciousness, convulsions, paralysis and respiratory failure leading to death.

The guard who reached Son seconds later, gun in hand, was not so fortunate, nor were the others in the Wilshire Federal lobby, vomiting and gasping as they died.

1

Arlington, Virginia

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had been enjoying a rare few days of R and R, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, when a call came from the man he considered his closest living friend.

As he’d driven in from the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, the soldier wondered just how long it had been since he’d had a face-to-face with Hal Brognola. Not that long, he supposed. There was always some hotspot that demanded the Executioner’s special touch. He looked forward to the lunch date with the big Fed, a veteran honcho at the Department of Justice and Director of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm.

Now Bolan was seated at a booth in a slick chain restaurant, sipping a beer and glancing at his watch, noting with some concern that Brognola was twenty minutes late. Bolan had placed his order at the quarter-hour mark, checking his cell phone for a message from Brognola yet again and finding none.

Tied up, no problem, Bolan thought. At Justice, those things happened on a daily basis, covering a range of crimes from white-collar finagling to espionage, domestic and foreign terrorism, cyber theft, high-power drug deals and the patchwork quilt of global organized crime. A sudden call from anywhere on Earth could dump the day’s plans in a heartbeat, sending special agents and their bosses off on hazardous exploits they’d never planned.

So he would eat. If Brognola didn’t put in an appearance by the time he cleared his plate, he would leave and reach out to Stony Man to learn if anything was wrong, whether he should plan another rendezvous or just forget it.

It was his call, a failsafe built into the system when the Phoenix Program and the hardsite in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains were first established. Bolan had been “dead” then, publicly incinerated with his old war wagon in Manhattan’s Central Park, all trace of him erased from law-enforcement records if not from old newspaper files.

For all public intents and purposes the Executioner was now a part of history. On the record, he’d gone down fighting—but in truth, he’d never stopped. The list of criminals and terrorists who’d learned that to their sorrow was a long one, growing day by day.

While Bolan waited for his meal, he watched the flat-screen television mounted in a nearby corner of the restaurant. It was tuned in to CNN, the sound muted in favor of closed captioning so diners wouldn’t be distracted from their small talk if they chose to shut the news out of their minds. This afternoon, as for the past two days, the lead story on every channel with a news feed focused on Tuesday’s LA suicide attacks. By now the butcher’s bill had topped two hundred dead, including three “suspected” terrorists. Nearly half again that number had been confined to Southland hospitals, some of them not expected to survive.

Sarin was like that, ranked by toxicologists as twenty-six times more deadly than cyanide. Certain antidotes could save its victims, typically atropine and pralidoxime, but they had to be administered without delay. The greater any given victim’s personal exposure, the more rapidly they lapsed into the final, agonizing moments of their lives. That last stage was captured in mnemonics: the “Killer Bs” of bronchorrhea and bronchospasm, coupled with salivation, lacrimation, urination, defecation, gastrointestinal distress and emesis.

In short, it was one hell of a way to check out.

The three dead men who’d gassed LA had been young Korean immigrants. According to the media, all three had entered the United States through legal channels and were known to hold steady jobs. Beyond that, any information known to the LAPD, FBI or Homeland Security was strictly under wraps. And that naturally fueled rabid speculation on talk radio, websites dedicated to conspiracies and the kooky netherworld of the Dark Net where certifiable fanatics and false prophets rubbed shoulders with self-styled psychics, gunrunners and child pornographers.

Something for everyone, from sea to shining sea.

The Asian angle fueled no end of fervid speculation as to motive and the ultimate ID of whoever had devised the lethal plot. Coordination—a conspiracy by definition—couldn’t be denied. But how far did it reach? How high? Where were the roots of the attack? So far, China, Japan and both Koreas had been implicated by those claiming to be “in the know,” while others aimed accusing fingers at the US government in Washington. It was a “false flag” plot, they said, conceived by Democrats, Republicans, conservatives or liberals, to bring on Armageddon and a state of martial law ending with tyranny.

The waitress came with Bolan’s steaming plate and he dug in after he checked his watch once more. From long experience, he knew it would take him half an hour, give or take, to finish his lunch. If Brognola had not appeared by then...

A shadow fell across his table.

Bolan glanced up, found Brognola standing over him, frowning. “Sorry I couldn’t call,” he said. “This thing is getting out of hand.”

The big Fed sat across from Bolan at the small table for two. The waitress spotted him and circled back in the hope of doubling her tip. Brognola eyeballed Bolan’s plate and said, “I shouldn’t, but I’ll have the same. Light beer for me.”

When she was gone, Brognola took off his fedora, set it on a corner of the table to his left, and said, “Three guesses why we’re here.”

“Los Angeles,” Bolan replied.

“Got it in one. Have you been following what’s going on?”

“Only what’s on the news.”

“Tip of the iceberg,” Brognola declared. “We’ve got more than the media, as usual. It’s not as wacky as the crap you’ll find if you start Googling, but it’s bad enough.”

“Tell me.”

“First up...” The big Fed hesitated as his beer arrived. He sipped it and then forged ahead. “First up, all three of the known perps were South Korean nationals. They all applied for green cards through the US Embassy in Seoul, over a span of thirteen months, and got approval from the INS as LPRs—lawful permanent residents. All settled in LA and nailed down jobs with different companies. First glance, none seemed to be acquainted with the others.”

“But at second glance?” Bolan inquired.

“As you’d imagine, we’ve put all their lives under a microscope, cooperating with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and their National Police Agency. None of the doers resided in Seoul for more than a few weeks before they applied for their visas. All three came from different provinces. No shared addresses or employment in the capital. We did find something, though.”

“Which is?”

“Are you familiar with a cult called Omega Hoejung?” Brognola asked.

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“In English, that translates to the Omega Congregation, as in final. It was founded nineteen years ago by Shin Bon-jae, a self-made billionaire from Seoul who’s got his fingers in a couple thousand different pies from manufacturing and shipping on to journalism. In the States, he runs the Washington Inquirer, giving any major piece of news a right-wing twist. He sells himself as strictly anticommunist, in line with Rhee Syng-man from the Korean War, through Park Chung-hee, on down to Park Geun-hye. He hates the North Korean crowd and likes to talk about reunifying the Koreas under what he calls ‘benevolent autocracy.’ Dictatorship, in other words.”

“What’s the religious angle?” Bolan asked.

“That’s been the major snag for people trying to decide what Shin’s really about. He’s both a guru and a CEO, which seems to be a contradiction, but he’s made it work for him so far. Worldwide, he has an estimated quarter-million followers, most of them living in East Asia. But they have a good-size group in Russia—five, six thousand by most estimates—and you can find them all around the States. Maybe another six or seven thousand known to follow Shin’s lead work in upper levels of his companies and follow all the Congregation’s rituals. It’s tax exempt on this side of the water, naturally, which is helpful when it comes to money laundering.”

“For what?”

“Pure speculation at this point. None of his people have been jailed for anything, as far as I can tell, but ATF reports persistent rumors of arms smuggling. Interpol and ICE suspect Shin’s got a hand in human trafficking, moving his people here and there around the world without the legal paperwork.”

“And this ties into LA how?”

“All three perps paid their dues to the Omega Congregation,” Brognola replied. When Bolan frowned, he added, “Sure, I know. Coincidence, some might suggest. And if it was a bigger sect—Buddhism or Catholicism, say—I might buy that. But from the records I’ve obtained, they only have about six hundred members of the Congregation anywhere in California. What are the odds that three of them would get their hands on sarin and coordinate attacks on the same day?”

“I’d call it slim to none,” Bolan replied.

“Which brings us here.” The big Fed paused again to thank the waitress for his meal and watched her walk away before resuming. “The Omega Congregation has its US headquarters in San Francisco, led by Lee Jay-hyun. Officially, he ranks below the founding leader as a je yeonghon. That’s ‘second soul.’ A rank applied to what you might call generals of the sect, each one in charge of operations for a given nation. Shin Bon-jae rules over all as cha ui yeonghon, the ‘primary soul.’ According to the Congregation’s doctrine, he was visited by Jesus Christ in person on his sixteenth birthday—Shin’s, not Christ’s—and was anointed as the leader of a new age leading to the Final Days.”

“So, an apocalyptic cult,” Bolan observed.

“We’ve seen how those worked out before, from Tokyo to Waco, Heaven’s Gate on to the Order of the Solar Temple. Some just kill themselves. Others, like Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, can’t wait to spread the death around.”

“How does that help a self-made billionaire?” Bolan inquired.

“Depends on what he’s thinking underneath. Is he an anticommunist in fact or something else? How would he profit from kick-starting the Apocalypse? There’s money in disasters if you play your cards right—think about the movement to rebuild a new, whiter New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina—and he might have something cooking with the North Korean crowd.”

“Where’s that come from?”

Brognola set his fork down long enough to take a CD from his pocket, sliding it across the table toward Bolan. “You’ll find details on there,” he said. “Long story short, the FBI thinks Lee Jay-hyun’s been meeting with a character named Park Hae-sung in Frisco. He’s another businessman from Seoul, ostensibly, but the Bureau and the Company suspect he’s working for the DPRK’s State Security Department.”

DPRK, Bolan knew, being the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Staunchly communist since 1946 and presently dominated by its roly-poly Supreme Leader, best known for sweeping human rights violations, random executions of his rivals and erratic threats of global nuclear holocaust.

“I’m guessing step one would be San Francisco?”

“That’s if you’re taking the mission,” Brognola answered.

Bolan pocketed the CD. “Sounds like it’s worth a closer look.”

“I ought to tell you this could wind up going transpacific.”

“Following the prey’s a part of hunting,” Bolan said.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport

BOLAN DROPPED HIS rental car in the agency’s parking lot and found his one-way ticket westward waiting at the airline’s window with three hours to spare before takeoff. He made it through security, booting up his laptop at the request of an inspector in a rumpled uniform, then hiked down to his flight’s appointed gate and found himself a corner seat, placing his carry-on in the adjacent chair so no one could sit next to him.

An earpiece for the laptop solved his problem with potential eavesdropping as Bolan slipped Brognola’s CD-ROM into the laptop’s slot and waited for its menu to appear. Four files popped up a moment later, labeled A through D.

The first broke down the history of the Omega Congregation, founded in July of 1998 by Shin Bon-jae. It started small, a curious religious sect that merged Shin’s nationalist stance on politics with the peculiar notion—previously under wraps it seemed—that he’d been visited by Jesus Christ in person, not just once but half a dozen times. The risen Lord allegedly suggested, then insisted, that Shin share his message with the masses, using the financial blessings already bestowed on him by God, to rally wide support for a reunion of the two Koreas after half a century. The chief means of achieving that reunion, Jesus said—through Shin—would be an arduous campaign of prayer.

Over time, a list of right-wing politicians had signed on to the Omega Congregation’s cause, lending their names and paying dues according to the status of their salaries. Meanwhile, the movement spread through lower levels of society, encouraged tacitly by Seoul’s prevailing leaders as a means to counteract threats and demands from its northern rival Kim Jong-il and his successor. The odd part, given its specific politics, was the Omega Congregation’s subsequent expansion through East Asia, into Europe, North America, and even to Australia, where a small but thriving chapter operated from an office suite in Melbourne.

Initially bankrolled by founder Shin via a paper company created for that purpose, the Omega Congregation was a self-supporting entity by August 1999, turning a profit—which, allegedly, it spent on missionary work—by April of 2000. Granted tax exemption as a bona fide religion in the States, it skated on the thin ice of political persuasion but survived investigations by Internal Revenue in 2002, ’04 and ’09. At that point high-priced lawyers formally protested federal harassment of the cult and won their case in 2011.

And it had been smooth sailing after that—at least, until three members of the sect released sarin nerve gas in LA

The list of dead, including terrorists, had reached 217 when Bolan checked the internet after arriving at his airport gate. At least three dozen more victims were critical, clinging to life in ICU, while close to ninety others were described by hospital authorities as being in “stable but guarded” condition.

It was not the worst terrorist attack in US history, but coming out of nowhere as it had, without a hint of any links to radical jihadists or homegrown fascist malcontents, it had taken the country and its leaders by complete surprise. No one had been alert for trouble from Korean immigrants, much less from those allied with a conservative religious sect.

File “B” relayed the history of Shin Bon-jae in greater detail than Brognola had provided over lunch. Born to humble parents in Gyeonggi Province in 1958, Shin made his way to Seoul as a teenager, worked various jobs to make ends meet, then came up with a stake from who knew where to buy a failing carpet factory. He’d turned the company around in record time and soon expanded. First to trucking, as a mode of transportation for his product, then diversifying into other types of manufacturing, founding a two-ship transport line that had expanded over time a hundredfold, and making lucrative investments with advice from certain wealthy friends in industry and politics. His first newspaper, Seoul’s Truth in Action, had been launched in 1970, spreading globally over the next twelve years as Shin founded affiliated papers on six continents, in nineteen languages.

His great conversion to religion, never indicated in his public statements previously, came a week after Shin’s fortieth birthday. On July 4, 1998, he was prepared to share the word. He put his money where his mouth was at the start, and was rewarded over time by one more profit-making branch of his empire. How many other bootstrap billionaires were ranked among the richest men on Earth and heralded by followers as an enlightened mouthpiece of Almighty God?

Thus far, there’d been no hint of Shin or his hand-picked lieutenants preaching violence, although the Congregation’s doctrine did maintain that the reunion of fractured Korea might require apocalyptic sacrifice. In Seoul, such rhetoric was not unusual: leaders of South Korea had been talking war since 1948 and—unknown to most Americans—illegal border crossings by the troops of first president Rhee Syng-man had motivated North Korea’s Kim Il-sung to order an invasion of the South in 1950, starting the Korean War and ultimately drawing Red China into the fight. Outside Korea, Congregation speakers kept it on the down-low, pressing would-be members to donate whatever they or their extended families could spare to help the cause.

File “C” picked up with Lee Jay-hyun, Shin’s front man in America. At thirty-two, he’d climbed the Congregation’s ladder rapidly, from raw recruit to office aide in Seoul, promoted once again after he’d saved Shin’s life from a demented gunman in October 2002 outside the cult’s Heavenly Palace in central Seoul’s Jongno-gu district. Elevated to the august rank of second soul, Lee soon turned up in San Francisco with a work visa identifying him as a religious missionary. One year later that had been converted to a green card naming him as a permanent resident of the US.

Lee’s church and headquarters in San Francisco was located in Ashbury Heights, on a hill south of the once-notorious Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Bolan had pegged it as one of his first stops when he reached the coast.

File “D” was sparse but interesting, focused on Park Hae-sung, reputed businessman from Seoul, suspected—as Brognola had explained—of being an illegal agent of North Korea’s State Security Department. Since North Korea had no consulates in the United States, the FBI and CIA had no hard proof of any links between Park and the SSD, but agents of the National Security Agency claimed he was in contact with Pyongyang via covert telephones and radio broadcasts, pending decryption that would give an indication of their contents.

Evidence that would have bolstered an indictment: zero.

It was one more thing for Bolan to determine when he got to San Francisco, and he hoped he wouldn’t leave his heart—or body—there when he was done.

2

San Francisco International Airport

Bolan’s nonstop flight from Reagan National to Frisco by the Bay consumed five hours’ airtime, plus thirty minutes for takeoff and landing. He’d covered 2,439 miles and four time zones, touching down officially two hours after takeoff from Virginia. Add another hour to get off the plane, collect his rented Volkswagen Passat and find his way out of the airport, and he still felt as if he’d lost time.

Unknown to Bolan’s airport rental agent, the Passat she gave him had been arranged through Stony Man with a contract associate in San Francisco. The four-door sedan came fully loaded from the factory, but in its trunk were certain items not anticipated by the manufacturer or rental company. Bolan discovered them after he pulled into the deserted corner of a shopping center parking lot in San Bruno and opened the trunk.

The trunk contained two standard duffel bags. In one, he found an M-4 carbine with a telescoping stock, an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, an AN/PEQ-2 Target Pointer/Illuminator/Aiming Light and twenty spare 30-round magazines filled with 5.56 mm NATO rounds.

The second bag held Bolan’s sidearms and the holsters to support them: a DE44CA—Desert Eagle .44 Magnum California—the Israeli pistol’s only model certified for sale inside the Golden State, and a Beretta 93-R selective-fire handgun. While deemed obsolete by military purists, last manufactured in 1993, the 93-R had served Bolan well in the past. Included in the second bag were two dozen 20-round Beretta magazines and an equal number of 8-round mags for the big Desert Eagle.

By the time he left San Bruno, westbound into San Francisco proper, Bolan was dressed to kill with the Beretta in fast-draw armpit leather, gun beneath his left arm, two spare magazines beneath his right. The other weapons rode behind him on the Passat’s floorboards, within arm’s reach of the driver’s seat. If he was stopped by the police—unlikely, but an outside possibility—his driver’s license from Virginia, made out to “Matthew Cooper,” would withstand a visual inspection and a check for warrants through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. If the probe went any further, his employment record as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical concern in Arlington was also verifiable by phone, routed to Stony Man.

The point, of course, was not to be discovered, stopped or questioned by authorities.

Right now, though, Bolan’s problem was a church of sorts, allegedly connected to the massacres committed by three of its members in Los Angeles, 347 miles southeast of San Francisco. That, and the alleged link between Lee Jay-hyun’s Omega Congregation and a rumored spy for North Korea.

Bolan personally had no quarrel with any doctrine, sect or cult until they crossed the line belief into criminal action. No churchgoer himself, he had a broad view of morality as such and privately disagreed with many statutes punishing crimes the law labeled malum prohibitum—“wrong” simply because they were prohibited—rather than malum in se—“evil in itself.” He did not disapprove of gambling, prostitution and the like for their own sake, but cracked down hard wherever victimless crimes were employed by evil men to fatten felonious coffers and promote more sinister activities: extortion, murder, human trafficking, enslavement of the innocent with drugs or terrorism.

And when Bolan drew a line, it was a dead line in the classic Old West sense.

His enemies who crossed it generally wound up dead.

Ashbury Heights, San Francisco

AMERICAN HEADQUARTERS FOR the Omega Congregation stood on Delmar Street, west of Buena Vista Park. Stately homes in the neighborhood listed with Realtors for a median price of $2.6 million and normally sold for an average $1.2 million after various negotiations, light-years away from nearby Haight-Ashbury with its 1967 Summer of Love reputation and its swift decline thereafter into hard drugs, occupation by the outlaw biker gangs and frequent raids by the police and Feds. The 1970s brought renovations and an unexpected renaissance of standup comedy, but “Hashbury” still lagged far behind its gentrified southern neighbor in terms of outward style and dependable property values.

Ashbury Heights, in short, had been the perfect place for Lee Jay-hyun to plant the seeds of the Omega Congregation and watch them bloom.

Not that his neighbors were receptive to a new Eastern religion springing up among them, with the automatic stigma that attached to gurus, chanting, incense and the like. They had already watched the Hare Krishna movement from a cautious distance, noting its devolution from a peaceful group of peaceful supplicants in saffron robes into public charges of blackmail and extortion, embezzlement, even gunrunning and murder. And those were Hindus, members of a widespread, prominent religion in the East.

With that in mind, what were the WASPs of Ashbury supposed to make of a newfangled sect arriving in their midst full-blown, without a hint of warning from Korea?

Still, after a rocky start, most residents had made their peace with the Omega Congregation, noting that its members did not panhandle or proselytize on the streets or in malls, inflicting themselves upon strangers. No strange smells or noises emanated from their house on Delmar Street that would have sent property owners running to their pricey lawyers with a public nuisance claim. Police were never summoned to Lee’s address.

This day, a guest was closeted with Lee inside his third-floor office at the combination house and temple. Lee was seated in a high-backed swivel chair behind an elevated desk carved from jatoba—called “Brazilian cherry” in the States—extracted from the dwindling Amazonian rainforest. Facing him, his smaller chair designed to let Lee peer down his short nose at any visitors, sat Park Hae-sung.

“You came in through the back way?” Lee asked.

“As always,” Park replied.

“And took the usual precautions to avoid a tail?”

“Of course.”

Both knew that Park was subject to surveillance by a list of US law-enforcement agencies. So far, they hadn’t laid a glove on him, but that was not from lack of trying. Park assumed his phones were tapped, relying on bulk purchases of burner cells from Walmart that he deemed untraceable, routing his rare emails through an anonymous server based in Denmark. Whenever possible, he spoke to Lee in person, the most risky mode of all.

“My guess is that you wish to talk about Los Angeles,” Lee said.

“Indeed,” Park replied. “We need to follow up with more attacks.”

“I’ve spoken to my master,” Lee replied.

“You actually call him master?” Park cut in, a challenge in his tone.

“It’s only fitting for a man in his position,” Lee replied.”

“If you say so, comrade.”

“I’ve told you more than once, I’m not a communist,” Lee said.

“And yet, you’re helping us. You and your holy master.”

“It is unwise to mock a man in his own house,” Lee cautioned Park.

“No mockery intended, I assure you. You must understand that I was raised to treat religion—all religions—with the same disdain. Marx says they are the opiate of peasants, used by their true masters, the industrial elite, to hold them in positions of subservience.”

“If you wish to quote your manifesto, should I answer you with texts from the Bhagavad-Gītā?” Lee asked.

“Let us spare each other from that fruitless argument,” Park said, “and focus on our business together.”

“Very well. My primary soul is concerned about the heat resulting from the LA incidents. All three participants have been connected to the Omega Congregation, as you know.”

“And did we not expect that?” Park seemed disappointed by Lee’s answer. “It was planned to paint the three as infiltrators planted in your cult—”

“Our sect,” Lee said, correcting him.

“My most sincere apology.” Park’s contrition was nowhere evident in his demeanor or his voice. “Three infiltrators in your sect, planted by South Korea’s NIS.”

Park referred to the National Intelligence Service, initially launched as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in 1961. It was renamed the Agency for National Security Planning twenty years later, finally switching to the NIS label in 1999 without revising much in its outlook or former methods of collecting information.

“That is one of Master Shin’s primary difficulties with the plan. Observers know the NIS has worked with the Omega Congregation time and time again. Why would they suddenly subvert us? Far more likely would be sabotage by your own agency.”

“Logic need not confuse the matter,” Park replied. “Perhaps the move was made by rogues within the NIS. Who knows? Who even cares? A bit of speculation in the Washington Inquirer and your master’s other news outlets should set the stage for what comes next.”

“And none of that shall happen without full approval from the primary soul, as you knew well enough when we began.”

“He was on amenable terms at that stage.”

“And he still may be, but the reaction to Los Angeles, although expected, has included calls in Congress for a full investigation of the Congregation. That jeopardizes my relationship to you, as well as your remaining in America.”

“We take precautions, do we not?” Park asked.

“And yet I hear from one of my people employed with San Francisco PD that federal agents are always watching you.”

“Which is exactly why we take precautions,” Park replied, sounding a trifle testy now.

“But risks are multiplied today. Nothing seems innocent, nothing coincidental, since the sarin was released.”

“You’re having second thoughts,” Park said. “Buyer’s remorse. That is unwise.”

“I hope that is not meant to be a threat,” Lee cautioned Park.

“Of course not, brother.”

“We are not brothers until you have joined the Congregation, Captain.”

“I do not use that title here,” Park said. “Hardly at all, in fact, except on ceremonial occasions in Pyongyang.”

“It still applies, however, does it not?”

Park dipped his head, humble acknowledgment of his rank in the SSD. “But I do not command you or the Congregation. I suggest continuing a course of action that we have agreed upon, while you appear to have cold feet.”

“That is an American expression I have never fully understood,” Lee said.

“It means—”

“I know its meaning,” Lee cut off his guest. “It is the pointless reference to feet I do not grasp.”

“Americans,” Park answered back. “What can I say?”

“Indeed.” They might have shared a laugh at that, if their present dilemma weren’t so serious.

Lee forged ahead, telling his visitor, “I simply doubt the wisdom of a new offensive now, so soon after the first.”

“Momentum is our goal. How else can we—”

“Propel our sundered nation into action,” Lee completed it for Park. “I know. But if the final vote from Master Shin is negative...”

“You’ll ask him one more time, at least, won’t you?” Park pressed.

“I will, tonight. But don’t expect a miracle.”

“Aren’t miracles the province of religion?” Park inquired.

And now Lee had to laugh at that. He had no more sincere devotion to the Omega Congregation than he had to Scientology or any New Age sect created as a tax dodge by its authors. All the mumbo-jumbo Lee espoused and parroted was simply propaganda dictated by Shin Bon-jae from Seoul, a means toward ultimate reunion of Korea’s separated nations.

“If we’re finished here...” Lee said.

“For now.” Park rose from his chair while Lee remained seated behind his desk, a modern small-scale potentate. “But we shall speak again, and soon.”

“As always, Captain Park, I shall be looking forward to it. In the meantime, I shall speak to Shin and let you know what he decides.”

“And I shall pass on his decision to my headquarters. No doubt, if he reneges at this point, Pyongyang will be disappointed.”

Meaning furious, and both men knew what that meant. The Supreme Leader did not take bad news well. He valued blind obedience and punished those who crossed him, whether it was a minute infraction of some order or a major breach of protocol. Forgiveness was not part of the vocabulary taught to him by his notoriously brutal father.

Lee did not wish to make an enemy of North Korea’s leader, but neither did he relish acting as a Judas to his master, Shin Bon-jae. Lee owed his present wealth and status to the founder of the Omega Congregation and could not forget that lightly.

On the other hand, he realized, there was a clear and present danger that his role within the cult would lead to his destruction as police closed in on those responsible for the Los Angeles attacks.

Was there a third alternative, between betrayal of his master and an all-out war with Pyongyang?

That would require more thought and Lee knew he was swiftly running out of time.

* * *

BOLAN HAD THE place staked out, his VW Passat parked on a corner that permitted him to see the front door of the Congregation’s headquarters and to watch the entrance of a narrow alley at the rear, designed for garbage pickups but also available for private entry through the three-story building’s back door. When Park Hae-sung emerged from that alley, driving a gray Mercedes-Benz, Bolan knew him on sight and gave the North Korean half a block before he started following.

No one knew better than Mack Bolan how the various US intelligence agencies had failed his country over time. Indeed, Bolan had even fought against rogue members of the CIA when they’d stormed Stony Man Farm, killing the second great love of his life and leaving other members of the Farm team gravely injured. Still, for all of that, he did not automatically discount their naming of a foreign national in the United States as something more than a respectable and straitlaced businessman.

Hard evidence condemning Park Hae-sung? So far, by Hal Brognola’s own admission, it was slim to nonexistent, but the smell was there, and Bolan had himself confirmed Park’s link to Lee Jay-hyun’s chapter of the Omega Congregation. Was it mere coincidence the two men meeting within two days of the sarin slaughter in Los Angeles?

Bolan was skeptical.

He trailed Park from Ashbury Heights, southwestward, through the Mission District to Portrero Hill, a residential district known for its panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay and city skyline. The fact that Park Hae-sung lived there—his address on Rhode Island Street confirmed by Hal Brognola’s file—told Bolan that, if not exactly rich, Park wasn’t strapped for cash.

Bolan tired of watching Park’s house after twenty minutes on the street, with no suspect arrivals dropping in, and decided his time was better spent preparing for a strike on Lee Jay-hyun and his cult’s headquarters. If his luck held, he might have time to question Lee concerning his relationship to Park. If not, he’d double back to Park’s address, confront the likely North Korean agent in his lair and squeeze the information out of him, by any means required.

His problem would be cracking the Omega Congregation’s headquarters. Not physically—Bolan had come equipped for that, except for lacking stun and frag grenades—but he’d already worked out an alternative to cover that deficiency. His main concern was missing knowledge of how many cultists occupied the building at a given time, their ages and sex, and how many of those were privy to details about the sarin murders in LA He guessed that only certain members of the sect, primarily its leadership, were in the know on that score. Whenever possible, Bolan worked hard to minimize unnecessary casualties.

The trick would be flushing most of the occupants outside while leaving him alone, however briefly, with the man in charge, then getting out again before a flying squad of cops rolled in to lock down the neighborhood.

It would be difficult and dangerous, but not impossible for a committed warrior with the skill to pull it off. Before he tackled the job, though, Bolan needed to shop for supplies.

Adjust. Adapt. Then act.

A combat soldier’s words to live by on the battleground.

While trailing Park, Bolan had spotted the supply outlets he’d need for his strike and guessed that he could be on site, ready to go, within the next half hour, give or take.

He twisted the VW’s ignition key and put the Passat through a tight, illegal U-turn with no traffic to oppose him, heading back the way he’d come to reach Ashbury Heights.

It wasn’t as if Lee Jay-hyun was sitting home and waiting for him, after all.

No one expected Bolan when it came to a takedown.

Surprise was elemental for the Executioner.

3

Ashbury Heights

It was cocktail hour on Delmar Street—the Molotov variety. In lieu of ready-made grenades, Bolan had finished his last-minute shopping and was ready to proceed as planned.

His first stop was a gas station, where he bought a two-gallon plastic can and filled it at the pump with regular unleaded. When he ducked inside to pay his tab, he added a box of fireplace matches, extra-long, together with a roll of black duct tape.

Next up, he hit a liquor store, bought two bottles of the cheapest red wine he could find and poured their contents into the store’s Dumpster before he got back in his car. A blotchy-faced transient, watching him desecrate the vino, simply shook his graying head and muttered, “That ain’t right, man. That ain’t right.”

From there Bolan drove to another block and parked behind a small mom-and-pop grocery—a dying breed in modern San Francisco. There, he filled the wine bottles with gasoline and wiped them down with the paper towels he’d taken from the gas station, leaving both the rumpled papers and the plastic gasoline can, now cleansed of fingerprints, as he drove off and headed to Delmar Street.

A block before he reached his destination, Bolan stopped again and finished off the cocktails, taping three long matches to each bottle so that their heads protruded well above the tape securing them in place.

Most amateurs built Molotovs as they had seen them made in movies, courtesy of Hollywood directors who, themselves, had never tried to set a house or any other edifice afire. They filled the bottles of their choice, often without regard to whether the thick glass would actually break on impact, then shoved cloth wicks into their necks and prepared to light and hurl them that way without thinking twice.

The problem with not thinking was that you could set yourself on fire, instead of whatever it was you planned to burn.

With gasoline and most other accelerants, it was the fumes that burn and not the raw liquid. Light up a sloppy Molotov cocktail too soon and it was fifty-fifty that the contents of the bottle, under mounting pressure, would ignite before you made your pitch, exploding in the thrower’s hand or near enough to douse him with an unexpected wave of searing flame. The burns might not be fatal but they almost certainly would be debilitating, leaving the potential arsonist to be arrested at the scene and carted off to some burn ward where he or she would writhe in agony while cops and fire inspectors questioned him in relays, lining up a trip to prison for the clumsy firebug.

Bolan’s plan eliminated chance, assuming he found the proper vantage point from which to hurl his fiery wakeup call.

And he already had a spot in mind.

Behind the house on Delmar Street there was a spacious fenced-in yard with trees, a swimming pool and hot tub for the faithful who had paid their rent, plus something that resembled a sauna. The fence was redwood, nothing tricky about scaling it, and Bolan was inside with cocktails clanking lightly in a shopping bag before anyone saw him from the house.

The good news: there were no lookouts or dogs patrolling the grounds. He was alone inside the yard, with access to the back door of the cult house free and clear.

Crouching behind a stately oak tree, Bolan struck one of his leftover matches and lit those attached to his first Molotov. He’d left a clear place for his gloved hand to grip the wine bottle and pitched it overhand, lofting it high atop Lee’s roof, where it exploded with a whoosh and set the shingles blazing over a dark dormer window. Runnels of liquid fire streaked down the shingles to the gutter, where they ran along the length of the third floor.

He primed the second cocktail, let it fly off to the right of his first pitch, then clutched his M-4 carbine close and jogged toward the back door.

* * *

AFTER INVESTING JUST over a million dollars of the Congregation’s money—meaning Shin Bon-jae’s—to buy his home and headquarters in San Francisco, Lee Jay-hyun had lobbied for an extra outlay on security. Aside from sensitive alarms on doors and windows, with the pass codes changed erratically, he’d modernized the building’s smoke alarms and sprinkler system to protect the house from random accidents as well as home invasions.

Thus it was that his first warning of attack came from the attic, where alarms began to beep and blare above his study, driving spikes of pain into his ears. Lee could not smell the smoke yet, but they’d never had a false alarm since moving in, so he jabbed a finger at the intercom that occupied a corner of his huge desk, barking out, “Security! The attic! Smoke alarm! Right now!”

He got a “Roger that” in return and pictured two of his disciples sprinting for the attic stairs with fire extinguishers in hand, prepared to save the day if there were any flames to douse. And if the situation was beyond them, God forbid, they would alert him to immediately summon help.

Not that Lee cared for the prospect of dialing 9-1-1 just now.

He and the Congregation were trapped in a law-enforcement spotlight since the gassings in Los Angeles, and while the various authorities had come up empty-handed in their first search of the cult’s headquarters, why should he invite them back with sledgehammers and axes to defile the place?

Lee awaited word from his men in the attic when, downstairs, he heard a different alarm start chiming from the ground floor. Glancing at a monitor beside his desktop intercom, he saw the floor plan of the building with the patio’s sliding-glass door blinking red.

Lee jabbed the intercom again, shouting, “Security! The TV room is open! Go at once! Report on how and why!”

His mind’s eye saw more men racing to carry out his order. All members of the cult’s in-house security detachment had been duly trained and licensed to meet California standards for a team of private officers carrying licensed guns. They were as legal as the rent-a-cops employed at shopping malls, concerts and any other public venue that could be named, schooled over several weekends in the Justice Department at City College of San Francisco.

And, if required, they’d shoot to kill without an instant’s hesitation.

Lee supposed some resident of headquarters had heard the smoke alarms and rushed in from the yard, forgetting in his or her haste to cancel the back-door alarm. Thus, he was startled by the sound of gunfire from below—not the pop of pistols his guards habitually carried, but short, ripping bursts of automatic fire.

One more jab at the intercom, the red button this time, which would broadcast Lee’s voice throughout the house. “Intruders!” he called out to everyone inside the building. “Armed intruders on the premises! If you cannot evacuate, defend yourselves!”

Thinking, Good luck with that, you sheep, as he opened his right-hand desk drawer and retrieved the Heckler & Koch USP he kept hidden there. Chambered for powerful .40-caliber Smith & Wesson ammo, the piece, like all firearms within the house, was duly registered and licensed. Lee had practiced with it at a firing range until he had no doubt of his ability to score bull’s-eyes.

Of course, that was on paper, not a living man who came in shooting back at him.

Time for police, he thought, but still resisted picking up the telephone. He trusted his security detachment, to a point, but if they failed him, there was still his secret stairway leading to a strip of grass beside the house, where he could exit from the yard unseen by anyone inside.

Forcing himself to breathe and to seek a place of steely calm inside, deep down, Lee checked his pistol, making sure there was a live round in the chamber and another thirteen in its magazine, then sat at his desk and waited to find out what would happen next.

Should he call Park Hae-sung?

The notion died at birth. And if Lee summoned the authorities, their next search would include retrieval of his phone records, already captured once, though there had been no calls to Park listed on those. They’d been particularly careful to use burner cells and the ever-dwindling public telephones still found at random sites around the city. Discovery of contact through the bills would cinch the FBI’s suspicion of Park’s operations as an agent of the SSD and likely result in his arrest. What would happen to Lee then?

Better to exercise his right to self-defense under the US Constitution like a true American and take his chances—though, if Lee were honest with himself, he had to grant that he was frightened by the prospect.

Terrified, in fact.

Clutching his USP, he listened as the battle sounds drew closer, rising through his home’s floor toward the third, while he began to smell the tang of smoke.

* * *

TWO MEN RAN out through open sliding doors onto the patio, took one look at the man in black approaching with his guns and flung themselves into the swimming pool, perhaps with the misguided thought that chlorinated water would stop bullets.

Bolan left them paddling for their lives and mewling strangely like a pair of unhappy kittens, detouring from his first target—likely the kitchen door—and through the sliding portal they’d left open for him so fortuitously. He met no other members of the Congregation as he barged into a kind of sitting room, its furniture arranged to face what looked to be a fifty-two-inch Samsung LED TV mounted on the wall.

Whatever else the cult might preach, it must not call for separation from the media.

He left the flat-screen playing some demented game show to an empty house, crossing the room in four long strides to reach a door that granted access to a hallway running north and south. As he emerged into the corridor, a man’s voice shouted, “There!” and Bolan spun to find two bodybuilder types with shaved heads, wearing outfits that consisted of plaid shirts, both black-and-white, untucked above black slacks, and running shoes. Both carried semiauto pistols with a measure of authority, their muzzles aimed at Bolan.

“Stop right there and drop your weapon!” one of Lee’s defenders ordered.

Bolan did the next best thing: he stopped dead in his tracks and swung the M-4 in an ark to meet them, triggering two 3-round bursts fired from the hip.

The lookouts seemed to stumble then collided with each other like two actors in a slapstick sketch, rebounding from that contact to strike opposite walls before they slid to the floor, both smearing their respective walls with blood. The warrior didn’t stop to see if they were dead, but rather brushed past them, trusting in his aim and the impact of 5.56 mm tumblers traveling at 3,070 feet per second, striking with 1,325 foot-pounds of destructive energy.

From somewhere overhead—a set of hidden speakers, obviously—Bolan heard a male voice bellow, “Intruders! Armed intruders on the premises! If you cannot evacuate, defend yourselves!”

Terrific. Now, for all Bolan knew, the whole house was against him. Hoping a majority of tenants had already fled the burning structure, he pushed on to reach the stairs that served the mansion’s upper floors. There, he found a quartet of excited stragglers descending, but none was armed and no one made a move to oppose him, giving him a wide berth on the staircase as they passed.

Bolan slowed to watch them go, thinking one or more might try to jump him from behind, but they were solely focused on escaping to the street. The closer Bolan got to the top floor, the stronger the smell of smoke and charring wood from overhead.

Two more guards waited for him on the third-floor landing. Both had pistols, like their late comrades, but these two opened fire as soon as they saw Bolan. He dropped prone onto the stairs, aiming uphill, and stroked the M-4’s trigger twice to bring them tumbling down.

How many more?

It didn’t matter. Lee was somewhere up ahead, atop the house, and waiting for the Executioner.

* * *

LEE JAY-HYUN WAS TERRIFIED, sitting behind his desk, worried he might soil himself. As it turned out, waiting to face a gunman—maybe several—was altogether different from sitting in a padded chair, planning mass murder of however many strangers in a city several hundred miles away. This had immediacy to it, and the only death that he could think about was his.

Lee’s hand was sweating, fingers cramping, so he set the H&K pistol on his padded desktop blotter, flexed his fingers painfully and wiped his palm along the right thigh of his trousers. That done, and embarrassed by his gun hand’s trembling, he snatched up the weapon once again, thumbed back its hammer—pointless, since the pistol had a double-action trigger, but it made him feel better prepared—and braced its butt against the blotter, muzzle pointed at his office door.

From practice, Lee well knew the sidearm’s capabilities. Firing as fast as he could pull the trigger, it could empty its magazine in something like two seconds, if he did not fumble in his panic and release it. Aiming would be problematic. From the automatic fire he heard downstairs, Lee surmised there would be no time to use the three-dot tactical sight he had scored so well with on the firing range, standing with earmuffs on in air-conditioning and wholly unopposed by any other human being.

No. This would be kill or die. And, if his enemy was a professional of any quality, the outcome must be foreordained.

If Lee Jay-hyun had been a true religious man, instead of just a fraud using the Congregation as his cover for the moment, prayer might be an option. But to whom? And seeking what? Should he employ the great American vernacular Dear Lord, please do not let me get my ass shot off?

Preposterous. A more devout man might have called it blasphemous.

Hunkered behind his desk as if inside a foxhole, Lee strained his ears for any sound issued from the staircase or the third-floor landing. It was obvious that his security had failed him, the entire detachment likely slain by now. Their deaths presumptive meant no more to Lee Jay-hyun than any insect he might crush while strolling down a sunlit sidewalk. They were pawns who’d served their purpose in a losing game.

Now it was down to him, the king—or bishop, if he gave the ranking role to Shin Bon-jae in Seoul—and he was cornered, out of moves. He could not zoom across the checkered playing field and strike from unexpected angles at his unknown enemy.

Once again, Lee felt the urge to call and caution Park Hae-sung. And once again, he quashed it. If he managed to survive somehow, the record of that call could finish him: prison for life without parole, perhaps death row, neither alternative appealing to him. On the other hand, if he did not emerge still breathing from this confrontation, why should he help Park escape?

With Master Shin, the damned son of a bitch from Pyongyang had convinced Lee to participate in the deranged Los Angeles attacks, promising the reunion of his sundered homeland as the ultimate reward.

Madness. Where had it gotten him so far?

Right here, clutching a pistol, waiting for the end, while all his wealth and future tax-exempt income circled the sucking drain.

Footsteps sounded outside, muffled by carpet but as clear as cadenced drumbeats to Lee’s tingling ears. He heard a lone, familiar floorboard creak, the footsteps pausing as his unknown adversary hesitated just outside his office door.

Lee almost started firing but knew he would be lucky if he grazed the enemy, much less disposed of him. There was a ringing in his ears, and it required a moment for the second soul of the Omega Congregation to decide that he was hearing distant sirens—fire trucks, possibly police—rushing toward Delmar Street in an attempt to save him.

Would they be in time?

His office door burst open, framed a figure clad in black, and Lee Jay-hyun began to fire his pistol like a man insane, no thought of aiming accurately, simply jerking at the trigger to unleash a hail of hollow-point rounds.

* * *

BOLAN SAW THE muzzle-flash before he heard the shot and dived headlong across the office threshold, landing on his stomach, his M-4 pointed toward a heavy desk. The gunman crouched behind it like a meerkat peeking from its burrow, somehow armed and dangerous.

How heavy was the desk? He knew of only one way to tell.

Bolan unleashed a stream of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, stitching a line of holes across the shiny, dark wood facing him At least a couple of the slugs hit home, punching the shooter backward, against the nearest wall. The gunman lost his pistol then. It tumbled into his bloody lap and down between his knees, while he sat gaping at the man whose shots had gutted him.

The man’s lips moved, the voice emerging from them speaking flawless English.

“Who are you?”

“Names aren’t important,” Bolan said, rising. “The point is I know you and Park Hae-sung. Hit like you are, you’ve got a chance to live. Tell me about your plans with him and I’ll take off. You take your chances with the law.”

“You’re not police?” Lee sounded almost sure of it, already.

“Not by a long shot,” Bolan confirmed.

“And if I tell you? What becomes of me?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Bolan replied. “Stonewall the cops or cut a deal. It’s all the same to me. I came for information, not your head. If that was what I wanted, you’d be dead by now.”

Lee nodded, almost absentmindedly, and wound up peering at the floor. Perhaps at something between his feet? Perhaps the gun he’d dropped?

“Say I believe you...” He was slurring words now, as he lost more blood. “Who shall protect me from the master?”

“Shin? You’ll be the least of his concerns,” Bolan said.

“You intend to slay the dragon?” Lee forced a smile and shook his head. “You are a fool.”

“Let me worry about that,” Bolan advised.

“A fool,” Lee said again, slumping forward as if swooning.

But as Bolan saw, Lee wasn’t fainting. Rather, he was straining, groping, toward the floor.

“That’s not the best idea you ever had,” Bolan growled, shouldering his M-4 carbine and lining up its sights.

“What else is left?” Lee challenged, pistol rising as he straightened.

Bolan shot him through the forehead, giving him a misty crimson halo. Any answers Bolan had hoped to gain were sprayed across the wall behind Lee’s chair.

Enough. Now it was down and out before the sirens closed off his retreat.

Bolan ran back along the third-floor hallway and down the stairs, past huddled bodies leaking on the runner, carmine darkening the claret fabric. Smoke roiled at his back, but no one intercepted him as he made the ground floor and retraced his steps into the TV room.

Outside, the cult acolytes who’d jumped into the pool still bobbed there, likely cold by now but still too frightened to crawl out. “Help’s on the way,” Bolan informed them as he passed. “Hang in there if you can.”

He slung his carbine, scaled the redwood fence and jogged to his rental car. There, he took time to hide the M-4 in its duffel bag, zipped that, then slid into the driver’s seat and took his time pulling away. If cops were following the fire trucks as he pictured, Bolan didn’t want to give them anything to chase.

His next stop was Portrero Hill, to have a talk with Park Hae-sung. Whatever information Lee had kept from him, Bolan would try to squeeze out of the North Korean. Failing that, at least he could eliminate one more link from the chain that bound Seoul and Pyongyang to the sarin gassings in Los Angeles.

Either way, it struck him now that there’d be no avoiding one more flight, at least—a long one westward to the Far East, one of those odd geographical anomalies Nature seemed to love.

The only way to tear the plot up by its roots was in the garden where foul hands had planted it to start with. How long since the Executioner had last stood on Korean soil? It didn’t matter now.

Evil had called him back. And duty.

Neither one could be ignored.

4

Portrero Hill, San Francisco

The telephone distracted Park Hae-sung from watching Jeopardy. It was a guilty pleasure for him, laughing at Americans who came on television, fumbling answers about their own homeland and the world at large. Even the winners, hailed by their eternal host as mental wizards, could not hold a candle to the average Korean schoolchild, North or South.

A dumpy woman who had claimed to be an English teacher rang in for a question about Africa. Her clue: the capital of Ethiopia.

Park was about to shout the answer when his cell phone buzzed. He snared the device and said, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” the caller said.

Instead of asking what that meant, Park recognized the voice. A member of the city’s so-called “finest,” a policeman who was pleased to take his money in exchange for information as required, though calling Park at home had been approved for only dire emergencies.

“What’s wrong?” Park asked.

“I’m looking at a fire right now,” the officer replied. “A three-alarmer by the looks of it.”

“And why tell me?”

“The house belongs to Lee Jay-hyun.”

Park bolted upright in his La-Z-Boy. “On fire, you say?”

“Half gone, at least. Firemen are fighting it, you know, but I’d call it a total loss or damn near to it.”

“What of Lee?”

“He hasn’t come out since I got here, and I came behind the first fire truck arriving. Maybe he got out before it all went up.”

“What is the cause?”

“Too soon to say,” the officer replied. “But we’ve got neighbors and some people from the house itself talking gunshots before they noticed any smoke or flames. Smells like a hit to me.”

“A raid?” Park pressed.

“That’s negative, amigo,” the lawman said, unaccountably lapsing from English into Spanish.

Idiot, Park thought.

“We didn’t hit the place, and neither did the Feds. Even if they came in and screwed it up, they’d still be swarming all over the place, and I’ve got nothing. This was someone else.”

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