3

      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 the bottles of their choice, often without regard to whether the thick glass would actually break on impact, then shoved cloth wicks into their necks and prepared to light and hurl them that way without thinking twice.

      The problem with not thinking was that you could set yourself on fire, instead of whatever it was you planned to burn.

      With gasoline and most other accelerants, it was the fumes that burn and not the raw liquid. Light up a sloppy Molotov cocktail too soon and it was fifty-fifty that the contents of the bottle, under mounting pressure, would ignite before you made your pitch, exploding in the thrower’s hand or near enough to douse him with an unexpected wave of searing flame. The burns might not be fatal but they almost certainly would be debilitating, leaving the potential arsonist to be arrested at the scene and carted off to some burn ward where he or she would writhe in agony while cops and fire inspectors questioned him in relays, lining up a trip to prison for the clumsy firebug.

      Bolan’s plan eliminated chance, assuming he found the proper vantage point from which to hurl his fiery wakeup call.

      And he already had a spot in mind.

      Behind the house on Delmar Street there was a spacious fenced-in yard with trees, a swimming pool and hot tub for the faithful who had paid their rent, plus something that resembled a sauna. The fence was redwood, nothing tricky about scaling it, and Bolan was inside with cocktails clanking lightly in a shopping bag before anyone saw him from the house.

      The good news: there were no lookouts or dogs patrolling the grounds. He was alone inside the yard, with access to the back door of the cult house free and clear.

      Crouching behind a stately oak tree, Bolan struck one of his leftover matches and lit those attached to his first Molotov. He’d left a clear place for his gloved hand to grip the wine bottle and pitched it overhand, lofting it high atop Lee’s roof, where it exploded with a whoosh and set the shingles blazing over a dark dormer window. Runnels of liquid fire streaked down the shingles to the gutter, where they ran along the length of the third floor.

      He primed the second cocktail, let it fly off to the right of his first pitch, then clutched his M-4 carbine close and jogged toward the back door.

      * * *

      AFTER INVESTING JUST over a million dollars of the Congregation’s money—meaning Shin Bon-jae’s—to buy his home and headquarters in San Francisco, Lee Jay-hyun had lobbied for an extra outlay on security. Aside from sensitive alarms on doors and windows, with the pass codes changed erratically, he’d modernized the building’s smoke alarms and sprinkler system to protect the house from random accidents as well as home invasions.

      Thus it was that his first warning of attack came from the attic, where alarms began to beep and blare above his study, driving spikes of pain into his ears. Lee could not smell the smoke yet, but they’d never had a false alarm since moving in, so he jabbed a finger at the intercom that occupied a corner of his huge desk, barking out, “Security! The attic! Smoke alarm! Right now!”

      He got a “Roger that” in return and pictured two of his disciples sprinting for the attic stairs with fire extinguishers in hand, prepared to save the day if there were any flames to douse. And if the situation was beyond them, God forbid, they would alert him to immediately summon help.

      Not that Lee cared for the prospect of dialing 9-1-1 just now.

      He and the Congregation were trapped in a law-enforcement spotlight since the gassings in Los Angeles, and while the various authorities had come up empty-handed in their first search of the cult’s headquarters, why should he invite them back with sledgehammers and axes to defile the place?

      Lee awaited word from his men in the attic when, downstairs, he heard a different alarm start chiming from the ground floor. Glancing at a monitor beside his desktop intercom, he saw the floor plan of the building with the patio’s sliding-glass door blinking red.

      Lee jabbed the intercom again, shouting, “Security! The TV room is open! Go at once! Report on how and why!”

      His mind’s eye saw more men racing to carry out his order. All members of the cult’s in-house security detachment had been duly trained and licensed to meet California standards for a team of private officers carrying licensed guns. They were as legal as the rent-a-cops employed at shopping malls, concerts and any other public venue that could be named, schooled over several weekends in the Justice Department at City College of San Francisco.

      And, if required, they’d shoot to kill without an instant’s hesitation.

      Lee supposed some resident of headquarters had heard the smoke alarms and rushed in from the yard, forgetting in his or her haste to cancel the back-door alarm. Thus, he was startled by the sound of gunfire from below—not the pop of pistols his guards habitually carried, but short, ripping bursts of automatic fire.

      One