had expanded over time a hundredfold, and making lucrative investments with advice from certain wealthy friends in industry and politics. His first newspaper, Seoul’s Truth in Action, had been launched in 1970, spreading globally over the next twelve years as Shin founded affiliated papers on six continents, in nineteen languages.
His great conversion to religion, never indicated in his public statements previously, came a week after Shin’s fortieth birthday. On July 4, 1998, he was prepared to share the word. He put his money where his mouth was at the start, and was rewarded over time by one more profit-making branch of his empire. How many other bootstrap billionaires were ranked among the richest men on Earth and heralded by followers as an enlightened mouthpiece of Almighty God?
Thus far, there’d been no hint of Shin or his hand-picked lieutenants preaching violence, although the Congregation’s doctrine did maintain that the reunion of fractured Korea might require apocalyptic sacrifice. In Seoul, such rhetoric was not unusual: leaders of South Korea had been talking war since 1948 and—unknown to most Americans—illegal border crossings by the troops of first president Rhee Syng-man had motivated North Korea’s Kim Il-sung to order an invasion of the South in 1950, starting the Korean War and ultimately drawing Red China into the fight. Outside Korea, Congregation speakers kept it on the down-low, pressing would-be members to donate whatever they or their extended families could spare to help the cause.
File “C” picked up with Lee Jay-hyun, Shin’s front man in America. At thirty-two, he’d climbed the Congregation’s ladder rapidly, from raw recruit to office aide in Seoul, promoted once again after he’d saved Shin’s life from a demented gunman in October 2002 outside the cult’s Heavenly Palace in central Seoul’s Jongno-gu district. Elevated to the august rank of second soul, Lee soon turned up in San Francisco with a work visa identifying him as a religious missionary. One year later that had been converted to a green card naming him as a permanent resident of the US.
Lee’s church and headquarters in San Francisco was located in Ashbury Heights, on a hill south of the once-notorious Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Bolan had pegged it as one of his first stops when he reached the coast.
File “D” was sparse but interesting, focused on Park Hae-sung, reputed businessman from Seoul, suspected—as Brognola had explained—of being an illegal agent of North Korea’s State Security Department. Since North Korea had no consulates in the United States, the FBI and CIA had no hard proof of any links between Park and the SSD, but agents of the National Security Agency claimed he was in contact with Pyongyang via covert telephones and radio broadcasts, pending decryption that would give an indication of their contents.
Evidence that would have bolstered an indictment: zero.
It was one more thing for Bolan to determine when he got to San Francisco, and he hoped he wouldn’t leave his heart—or body—there when he was done.
San Francisco International Airport
Bolan’s nonstop flight from Reagan National to Frisco by the Bay consumed five hours’ airtime, plus thirty minutes for takeoff and landing. He’d covered 2,439 miles and four time zones, touching down officially two hours after takeoff from Virginia. Add another hour to get off the plane, collect his rented Volkswagen Passat and find his way out of the airport, and he still felt as if he’d lost time.
Unknown to Bolan’s airport rental agent, the Passat she gave him had been arranged through Stony Man with a contract associate in San Francisco. The four-door sedan came fully loaded from the factory, but in its trunk were certain items not anticipated by the manufacturer or rental company. Bolan discovered them after he pulled into the deserted corner of a shopping center parking lot in San Bruno and opened the trunk.
The trunk contained two standard duffel bags. In one, he found an M-4 carbine with a telescoping stock, an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, an AN/PEQ-2 Target Pointer/Illuminator/Aiming Light and twenty spare 30-round magazines filled with 5.56 mm NATO rounds.
The second bag held Bolan’s sidearms and the holsters to support them: a DE44CA—Desert Eagle .44 Magnum California—the Israeli pistol’s only model certified for sale inside the Golden State, and a Beretta 93-R selective-fire handgun. While deemed obsolete by military purists, last manufactured in 1993, the 93-R had served Bolan well in the past. Included in the second bag were two dozen 20-round Beretta magazines and an equal number of 8-round mags for the big Desert Eagle.
By the time he left San Bruno, westbound into San Francisco proper, Bolan was dressed to kill with the Beretta in fast-draw armpit leather, gun beneath his left arm, two spare magazines beneath his right. The other weapons rode behind him on the Passat’s floorboards, within arm’s reach of the driver’s seat. If he was stopped by the police—unlikely, but an outside possibility—his driver’s license from Virginia, made out to “Matthew Cooper,” would withstand a visual inspection and a check for warrants through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. If the probe went any further, his employment record as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical concern in Arlington was also verifiable by phone, routed to Stony Man.
The point, of course, was not to be discovered, stopped or questioned by authorities.
Right now, though, Bolan’s problem was a church of sorts, allegedly connected to the massacres committed by three of its members in Los Angeles, 347 miles southeast of San Francisco. That, and the alleged link between Lee Jay-hyun’s Omega Congregation and a rumored spy for North Korea.
Bolan personally had no quarrel with any doctrine, sect or cult until they crossed the line belief into criminal action. No churchgoer himself, he had a broad view of morality as such and privately disagreed with many statutes punishing crimes the law labeled malum prohibitum—“wrong” simply because they were prohibited—rather than malum in se—“evil in itself.” He did not disapprove of gambling, prostitution and the like for their own sake, but cracked down hard wherever victimless crimes were employed by evil men to fatten felonious coffers and promote more sinister activities: extortion, murder, human trafficking, enslavement of the innocent with drugs or terrorism.
And when Bolan drew a line, it was a dead line in the classic Old West sense.
His enemies who crossed it generally wound up dead.
Ashbury Heights, San Francisco
AMERICAN HEADQUARTERS FOR the Omega Congregation stood on Delmar Street, west of Buena Vista Park. Stately homes in the neighborhood listed with Realtors for a median price of $2.6 million and normally sold for an average $1.2 million after various negotiations, light-years away from nearby Haight-Ashbury with its 1967 Summer of Love reputation and its swift decline thereafter into hard drugs, occupation by the outlaw biker gangs and frequent raids by the police and Feds. The 1970s brought renovations and an unexpected renaissance of standup comedy, but “Hashbury” still lagged far behind its gentrified southern neighbor in terms of outward style and dependable property values.
Ashbury Heights, in short, had been the perfect place for Lee Jay-hyun to plant the seeds of the Omega Congregation and watch them bloom.
Not that his neighbors were receptive to a new Eastern religion springing up among them, with the automatic stigma that attached to gurus, chanting, incense and the like. They had already watched the Hare Krishna movement from a cautious distance, noting its devolution from a peaceful group of peaceful supplicants in saffron robes into public charges of blackmail and extortion, embezzlement, even gunrunning and murder. And those were Hindus,
