At night it was swankly glamorous and sure to catch the eye of the unwary tourists who couldn't spot a clip-joint until confronted with the bill. The China Gardens was more than a clip-joint, though. It was a bag-drop and a crossroads of many diverging trails in San Francisco's underworld, a favored meeting place and watering hole of the area's most secretive citizens. During the three long nights of patient stakeout, Bolan had identified several California mob captains — including a Peninsula gambling czar and the narcotics boss of Berkeley. He had also recognized a miscellany of muscle men and runners, plus a couple of black bagmen who were probably from the city's Fillmore District, the black neighborhood.

So, yeah, it seemed the perfect place to start a war.

The timing was about right. They'd closed the door an hour ago. All of the legitimate customers and employees were long gone — and everyone left in the joint now would be a valid target. There were plenty of those left.

Johnny Liano was in there. He'd made it big in Berkeley when the kids began turning on with drugs instead of politics. Pete Trazini was also present, the shylocker and numbers king of depressed Richmond who'd lately been boasting that he was getting bigger than Bank of America.

About a dozen lesser Mafiosi were inside, too, some of them with Liano and Trazini — hardmen; personal bodyguards who probably followed their bosses even to the bathroom.

The parking lot was deserted except for a cluster of vehicles parked near the rear entrance. The neon marquee out front was extinguished and both wings of the building were darkened; only the pagoda was showing lights, and these were all on the upper level. Wisps of fog drifted sullenly past the lone lamp which now tried to illuminate the parking area, a dull yellow blob of light which would have been worthless even without the dense atmosphere.