The door banged open and Pak strode to the room, his anger tightly marshaled behind the impassive round mask of his face. The bedroom was cluttered with torn posters on the walls, empty beer and soda cans on the floor, and piles of laundry, cast-off clothing, and dirty sheets.
O’Malley lay naked in the bed with two naked women, the dark-haired one astride his hips, the other one at his side. As Pak stormed in, closely followed by Chun Hyon Hee and Gunther Weiss, both women screamed and rolled off the Provo man, clutching at the scattered sheets.
“What the bloody hell?” O’Malley shouted, heaving himself up from the pillow on his elbows.
Pak drew his weapon, a North-Korean-manufactured Type 68 automatic pistol equipped with a long, blunt sound suppressor.
“Kim!” O’Malley shouted, trying to scramble over the legs of one of the screaming women and onto the floor. None of the people here knew Pak’s real name, of course. “Kim, you son of a bitch, have you gone completely nuts?”
“Take them aside,” Pak told Chun, gesturing at the two women with the pistol. “By the wall. Keep them quiet. You!” He swung the pistol to aim it squarely at O’Malley’s head. “Out of the bed. Over there. Face to that wall and hands up!”
O’Malley complied, but his face was flushed dark red with a barely contained fury. “Kim, what the hell is this?”
“Who are they?” Pak demanded. The women’s screams had died down to broken sobs and whimpers now. Chun had them on their knees, hands behind their heads, and was standing before them with her own pistol out. Weiss stood guard impassively in the doorway with an unsilenced 9mm Browning Hi-Power.
“Huh?” O’Malley blinked. “Who?”
“The women, you fool! Who are they? Where did they come from?”
“Aw, fer the love of—”
Pak jammed the muzzle of his pistol hard into O’Malley’s left kidney. The man gasped and flinched. “Christ! Y’can’t just come in here and—”
“You would be surprised at what I can do,” Pak said coldly. “Now, for the last time. Who are these women and where did they come from?”
“Th’ brunette’s, uh, Sharon, and the blonde’s… what is it, honey? Patty?”
“P-Patricia Summers,” the woman said from the other side of the room.
Chun rapped her sharply in the side of her head with her pistol, and both women screamed again. “Silence!” Chun said. “He was not talking to you!”
“Where did you find them, O’Malley?”
“At a fuckin’ pub! God damn it, Kim, I jus’ brought ’em home fer a little—”
“You knew the rules. No contact with anyone outside the group until the operation was well under way!”
“But the operation is under way! C’mon, Kim! Lighten up, man!”
“Turn around. Keep your hands above your head.”
Slowly, O’Malley did as he was told. The man was scared, but Pak could easily read the anger still in his face. He needed to be broken, and quickly. “Weiss!”
“Yes, sir,” the German said.
“Come here.”
The man walked across from the open door. “Sir?”
“Place your gun to O’Malley’s head. If he makes any move, any move at all which I do not first tell him to make, shoot him.”
“My pleasure.”
“Spread your legs,” Pak said, addressing O’Malley again.
“Huh?”
“Spread your legs apart! Do not make me repeat myself!”
The anger was nearly all gone now, drained away with the color in the Provo terrorist’s face. His eyes were very wide now, and sweat was beading on his forehead and along his upper lip. Slowly, bit by bit, he inched his legs to either side, his spine pressed against the wall at his back, until his bare feet were about three feet apart.
Slowly, Pak lowered his pistol down the centerline of the man’s torso. The man’s eyes squeezed shut and his breath came in short, hard gasps. With great deliberation, Pak pressed the muzzle of the sound suppressor sharply against O’Malley’s penis, which was still ludicrously encased within the glistening wet sheath of a condom.
“O, Christ, oh, God, please, no, no, no…”
“I should simply shoot you,” Pak said quietly. “You appear unable to accept simple discipline, and your actions have endangered our entire operation.”
“It was a mistake, oh, God-Jesus-Mary please, don’t, it was a mistake—”
“On the other hand, I could simply hurt you in such a way that you would not break our rules in this manner again. Which punishment would you prefer?”
“Please, Jesus God, you don’t have to do this, please… ” The man was crying openly now, and his knees were threatening to give way.
“Stop babbling. Now, tell me what I want to know, or I will castrate you here and now. Who are these women? Where did you meet them?”
“I swear to God, Kim, they’re just a couple of whores! They don’t mean nothin’! I picked them up at the King’s Bull in town! I swear! I swear!”
“Prostitutes? How much did you pay them?”
“I ain’t paid ’em yet! But, but they said we could have a great party if I gave ’em a twenty each.”
“Forty pounds?”
“Yeah! Yeah, that’s right!”
Pak sighed. “No wonder you people can’t win your war with the English. You are so easily distracted. Did you approach them? Or did they approach you?”
“Huh? Hell, I don’t know. They were at the bar and I come up to ’em and started talkin’ ’em up, y’know? So yeah, I guess I approached them.”
“Did they suggest you bring them back here?”
“Uh, I, uh—”
He jabbed the muzzle of the gun forward, hard. “Tell me!”
“They wanted to go to a fuckin’ hotel, okay? But I said I had a place here! I thought it would be okay! That’s God’s truth, Kim! I swear it! I didn’t think it would be any harm, I swear to God I didn’t!”
Pak lifted the gun away from O’Malley’s genitals and took a step back. As he did so, the condom fell away with a wet plop, followed by a dribble of urine. Then the terrorist lost control of his bowels, and Pak wrinkled his nose in disgust. These filthy oegugin had no self-discipline at all.
“I believe you,” he said, and he squeezed the trigger. Pak’s gun jerked with a loud but muffled thud, as a neat red hole appeared just above O’Malley’s left eye, and a splatter of blood and brains exploded across the wall behind his head.
Behind him, the two women kneeling in front of Chun screamed again. Weiss gave Pak a leering grin. “So what are we going to do about these two lovelies, eh?”
Pak ignored him. “Kot hasipsiyo, ” he told Chun. “Do it now.”
Chun shot the brown-haired one, the sound-suppressed shot hitting her in the face, knocking her sprawling back against the wall with a scarlet splash of blood. With a flash of scissoring bare legs, the yellow-haired woman leaped up from the floor and bowled Chun aside, racing for the bedroom door.
“Stop her! ” Pak screamed. Spinning, he raised his pistol and fired twice, both shots missing the woman and punching neat side-by-side holes through the open wooden door. Beside him Weiss raised the Browning and snapped off another shot, this one explosively loud in the confines of the room. Chun was already racing after the fleeing prisoner. “Ai ch’am!” Damn it! Everything was coming apart, the situation completely out of control. “Don’t let her get away!”
Patty Summers sprinted for her life. Out the door as gunfire crashed behind her, down the stairs and to the right… down the stairs again. As she rounded the bottom of the flight, she heard again that horrible, chirping thud of a silenced gunshot, and the banister a few inches to her right shattered in whirling chips of varnished wood.