LITMIR.BIZ

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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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