Omega Cult

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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