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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.
