LITMIR.BIZ

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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,

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