style="font-size:15px;"> 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.
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
