Omega Cult

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.

1 (#u98cd5ef5-cc7b-55d8-ad33-f3e3240764e9)

Arlington, Virginia

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had been enjoying a rare few days of R and R, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, when a call came from the man he considered his closest living friend.

As he’d driven in from the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, the soldier wondered just how long it had been since he’d had a face-to-face with Hal Brognola. Not that long, he supposed. There was always some hotspot that demanded the Executioner’s special touch. He looked forward to the lunch date with the big Fed, a veteran honcho at the Department of Justice and Director of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm.

Now Bolan was seated at a booth in a slick chain restaurant, sipping a beer and glancing at his watch, noting with some concern that Brognola was twenty minutes late. Bolan had placed his order at the quarter-hour mark, checking his cell phone for a message from Brognola yet again and finding none.

Tied up, no problem, Bolan thought. At Justice, those things happened on a daily basis, covering a range of crimes from white-collar finagling to espionage, domestic and foreign terrorism, cyber theft, high-power drug deals and the patchwork quilt of global organized crime. A sudden call from anywhere on Earth could dump the day’s plans in a heartbeat, sending special agents and their bosses off on hazardous exploits they’d never planned.

So he would eat. If Brognola didn’t put in an appearance by the time he cleared his plate, he would leave and reach out to Stony Man to learn if anything was wrong, whether he should plan another rendezvous or just forget it.

It was his call, a failsafe built into the system when the Phoenix Program and the hardsite in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains were first established. Bolan had been “dead” then, publicly incinerated with his old war wagon in Manhattan’s Central Park, all trace of him erased from law-enforcement records if not from old newspaper files.

For all public intents and purposes the Executioner was now a part of history. On the record, he’d gone down fighting—but in truth, he’d never stopped. The list of criminals and terrorists who’d learned that to their sorrow was a long one, growing day by day.

While Bolan waited for his meal, he watched the flat-screen television mounted in a nearby corner of the restaurant. It was tuned in to CNN, the sound muted in favor of closed captioning so diners wouldn’t be distracted from their small talk if they chose to shut the news out of their minds. This afternoon, as for the past two days, the lead story on every channel with a news feed focused on Tuesday’s LA suicide attacks. By now the butcher’s bill had topped two hundred dead, including three “suspected” terrorists. Nearly half again that number had been confined to Southland hospitals, some of them not expected to survive.

Sarin was like that, ranked by toxicologists as twenty-six times more deadly than cyanide. Certain antidotes could save its victims, typically atropine and pralidoxime, but they had to be administered without delay. The greater any given victim’s personal exposure, the more rapidly they lapsed into the final, agonizing moments of their lives. That last stage was captured in mnemonics: the “Killer Bs” of bronchorrhea and bronchospasm, coupled with salivation, lacrimation, urination, defecation, gastrointestinal distress and emesis.

In short, it was one hell of a way to check out.

The three dead men who’d gassed LA had been young Korean immigrants. According to the media, all three had entered the United States through legal channels and were known to hold steady jobs. Beyond that, any information known to the LAPD, FBI or Homeland Security was strictly under wraps. And that naturally fueled rabid speculation on talk radio, websites dedicated to conspiracies and the kooky netherworld of the Dark Net where certifiable fanatics and false prophets rubbed shoulders with self-styled psychics, gunrunners and child pornographers.

Something for everyone, from sea to shining sea.

The Asian angle fueled no end of fervid speculation as to motive and the ultimate ID of whoever had devised the lethal plot. Coordination—a conspiracy by definition—couldn’t be denied. But how far did it reach? How high? Where were the roots of the attack? So far, China, Japan and both Koreas had been implicated by those claiming to be “in the know,” while others aimed accusing fingers at the US government in Washington. It was a “false flag” plot, they said, conceived by Democrats, Republicans, conservatives or liberals, to bring on Armageddon and a state of martial law ending with tyranny.

The waitress came with Bolan’s steaming plate and he dug in after he checked his watch once more. From long experience, he knew it would take him half an hour, give or take, to finish his lunch. If Brognola had not appeared by then...

A shadow fell across his table.

Bolan glanced up, found Brognola standing over him, frowning. “Sorry I couldn’t call,” he said. “This thing is getting out of hand.”

The big Fed sat across from Bolan at the small table for two. The waitress spotted him and circled back in the hope of doubling her tip. Brognola eyeballed Bolan’s plate and said, “I shouldn’t, but I’ll have the same. Light beer for me.”

When she was gone, Brognola took off his fedora, set it on a corner of the table to his left, and said, “Three guesses why we’re here.”

“Los Angeles,” Bolan replied.

“Got it in one. Have you been following what’s going on?”

“Only what’s on the news.”

“Tip of the iceberg,” Brognola declared. “We’ve got more than the media, as usual. It’s not as wacky as the crap you’ll find if you start Googling, but it’s bad enough.”