The Bancroft Strategy (19 page)

She downloaded more documents, more digitized filings. The honeycombed intricacy of the foundation's structure presented an intellectual challenge. She tried to be alert both to small irregularities and larger patterns. As she paged through the federal filings over
the past decade, she was taken back to find that the officers of the principal foundation once included her own mother, Laura Parry Bancroft.

It was startling. How was it that her mother, so deeply disaffected with everything to do with the family she married into, had once served as a foundation officer? Andrea peered at the document more closely and noticed something even stranger. Her mother had resigned her position just one day before the car accident that killed her.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

In one corner of the darkened room, a man was seated on an overstuffed blue velvet chair; seated upon the man, in turn, was a lissome young woman. At the sound of the door closing behind Belknap, the man—sixtyish, with a sun-reddened, smooth-shaven head, white-blond hair chest hair, and sagging pectorals—sat upright with a jolt, threw the woman off him, and scrambled to his feet.

“The girl's under new management,” Belknap growled.

“What the hell?” The man spoke with a Swedish accent. His assumption was that he was being set up, that the whore was in cahoots with the intruder. It was the assumption of a worldly man who was experienced with the sex trade and had no illusions about the limits of human knavery. “Get the hell out of my—”

“Why don't you make me?” Belknap replied, cutting him off.

The older man sized up his opponent swiftly; he was a businessman, someone used to assessing the odds and acting accordingly. Making a swift decision, he grabbed his wallet and a couple of items of clothing and bolted from the room. “You're not getting another Euro out of me, you hear?” he hissed to the girl on his way out.

When Belknap turned back to the girl, she was no longer sprawled on the floor, but had put on a silk robe and stood with her arms crossed.

“Lucia Zingaretti?” he asked.

A look of shock passed across her face. She knew it would be pointless to deny it. “Who are you?” she demanded in a throaty Italian accent.

He ignored her question. “Your parents have no idea, do they?”

“What do you know of my parents?”

“I spoke to them yesterday. They were worried about you.”

“You spoke to them.” Her voice was deathly.

“As have you. Except you ply them with lies only. Not exactly the daughter they imagine.”

“What do you know about them, or about me?”

“They're good people. Trusting people. The sort people like you take advantage of.”

“How
dare
you judge me!” the Italian girl spat. “What I do, I do for them!”

“Does that include killing Khalil Ansari?”

The girl blanched. She lowered herself to the blue velvet chair and spoke in a quiet voice. “They promised great sums of money. My parents struggled every working day of their lives, and what can they afford? They said if I did what they asked, I would be able to set them up in luxury for the rest of their lives.”

“They?”

“They,” the girl repeated defiantly.

“And you, too, no doubt. Where did they end up taking you?”

“Not a place like this,” the girl said quietly. “Not like they said. Not like any place fit for human being. Like for animals.”

She seemed bewildered that they had failed to live up to their promises. Yet to Belknap, the greater perplexity was that they had even allowed the girl to live. Why were they so confident she would maintain her silence? “This came as a surprise?” he asked mildly.

She nodded grimly. “When they fly me to Dubai, they say it is for cooling-off period. Just to stay out of the way for a while. To keep me
safe. Then when I come, they say I must work. I must earn my keep. Otherwise I will be on the street or killed. No money. No papers.”

“You were a prisoner.”

“After one day, they take me out of hotel. They take me to this…
magazzino
, this…warehouse. On outskirts of Dubai. They say I must do this thing. Customers must never complain. Otherwise…” She faltered, a victim of sexual servitude who had sought to repress the degradation she had been forced to accept. “But they say that at the end of one year, I can go free. After one year, they say, Lucia write her own ticket. Set up for life. All of us.”

“You and your parents,” Belknap said. “Set up for life, they told you. And you believed them?”

“Why I not believe them?” the Italian girl demanded stormily. “What else can I believe?”

“When they had you poison Ansari, they never told you that you'd end up a high-class whore, did they?”

Her silence was her assent.

“They lied to you once. You really think they're not lying to you now?”

Lucia Zingaretti said nothing, but he could see the contending emotions in her face. Belknap could easily imagine what had happened. It was a phenomenon that plagued nested organizations, each part of which had its own particular needs. In Dubai, the girl's beauty meant that she could be of great value to those who provided sexual services to rich visitors. What's more, she was, after all, a mere servant girl: Many Arabs would be inclined to think that such a girl was likely to be a
sharmuta
anyway. Nor was she in any position to bargain, as she acknowledged: They knew what she had done. The deed did not put them in her debt, as she had supposed; it put her in their power.

“And still you protect them, the very people who have forced you into a life of degradation.”

“It is not for you to say what is
degradazione.
” Lucia Zingaretti pouted and rose to her feet. “Not for you.”

“Tell me who they are,” Belknap said steadily.

“It is not for you to interfere.”

“Tell me who they are,” he repeated, more urgently.

“So that I should be in your clutches rather than theirs? I think I take my chances. Yes, I think I take my chances, thank you very much.”

“Goddammit, Lucia…”

“What must I do to make you go away?” the girl asked. Her voice was breathy, sultry. “What can I offer you?”

With a shrug of her shoulders she let her robe fall to the floor. Now she stood naked before him. He could feel the heat of her body, could smell the scent of her honeyed skin. Her breasts were smallish but perfectly shaped.

“There's nothing you can offer me,” Belknap replied contemptuously. “That body can pay for a lot. But not in any currency I accept.”

“Please,” she said, purring, taking a step toward him, caressing her breasts with one hand. Her gestures were sensual, but motivated by sheer survival. Her eyes narrowed to slits, vampishly—and then, suddenly, they blinked open.

Belknap saw a red dot blossom in the center of her forehead a split-second before he heard a quiet popping noise from behind him. Time became viscous as Belknap dived to the floor and rolled behind the large, skirted bed.

A silenced shot had been fired.

Silencing Lucia Zingaretti forever.

He flashed back to what he had glimpsed of the assailants, forced himself to piece together visual fragments into a whole. There had been…two men at the door, each armed with a long-barreled, sighted handgun. Both had short dark hair. One, wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket, had the dead eyes of a hammerhead shark—obviously a combat-seasoned veteran, and a marksman of considerable skill. A precise head shot from a handgun across a
room lay beyond the competence even of most professionals. On the base of a shiny brass floor lamp, Belknap caught the reflection of the two men. They were moving their handguns in sweeping arcs, but had stepped only a few feet into the room. They were cautious, more cautious than Belknap would have been in their situation. At least one of them should have seized the opportunity of surprise and pushed clear across the bedroom.

Yet their movements made one thing plain. They were hunting him. Their mission would not be complete until there was a slug in Belknap's brain as well.

Belknap snake-bellied himself under the bed until he was within arm's length of one of the gunmen. Now he lashed out with an arm curved like a grappling hook, striking with all his might.

A risky move: He had just given away his position.

The man fell heavily to the ground. Belknap grabbed his weapon, firing it at him a second later. Close-quarters combat was like speed chess. You stop to think, you lose. Swiftness of response was paramount. He could feel his face wetted with a spray of warm blood. No matter. Where was the second assailant, the one who had moved to get an angle on the rest of the room?

Belknap seized the torso of the slain man and hoisted his body into the air. The sudden movement drew gunfire, as he had expected, a quick reflexive
rat-a-tat
that must have emptied the gun—and that identified the other man's exact firing position. Belknap set his newly acquired pistol to single-shot action and squeezed off a returning round. Accuracy of gunfire counted more than volume. Better to have to squeeze a few times than to be caught with an empty chamber.

The man's cry told him that the bullet had connected—but not with a vital organ.

Then he heard the sound of glass shattering, and another pair of men stepped into the room from the balcony outside. Belknap rolled the corpse over himself, drawing the limp body over him like a saddlebag. He was conscious of the slain man's body heat, the acrid smell
of his sweat. The members of his unit could not be certain that he was dead—at least not at first—and would not fire freely toward him.

It would buy Belknap only seconds, but seconds were all he needed.

One of the late arrivals—tall, husky, muscled—was wearing a combat vest and holding a Heckler & Koch MP5, a compact automatic weapon known as a “room broom.” He directed a spray of bullets into the mattress. Nobody hiding beneath it could have survived. It was a sensible precaution, Belknap thought as he squeezed a carefully aimed shot into the sternum of each balcony boy. Two rounds spaced by a second-long interval. Conveniently, they were almost exactly the same height; the adjustment between shots was slight.

Belknap heard the other man slam a new magazine into his pistol—the one he had wounded, the one he had forgotten about.
Dammit! A mistake he could not afford.

With lightning rapidity, he swept his gun arm around and squeezed the trigger, knowing that success or failure would be determined in the next two-tenths of a second. He watched as his one remaining round punched through his assailant's neck, and the man slumped to the ground. Had Belknap been two-tenths of a second slower, the round would have been fired by his victim, and Belknap, not him, would have been the last man down.

Unsteadily, Belknap rose to his feet and looked at the dizzying carnage around him. Here, in a well-appointed hotel bedroom, were four bodies of powerful young men—nourished and exercised for well over two decades, trained at considerable expense. Dead. So was a beautiful girl, scarcely out of adolescence, doted on by hardworking parents to whom the world had never given a break, not one. Dead. Human lives transformed into jointed meat. If they were outdoors, not protected by the air-conditioned sanctuary of this glass-skinned whale, botflies would have already started to hover and alight. Belknap had just taken on four well-armed gunmen and survived. Close-quarters combat was a rare art, and he was
more experienced at it than his opponents. Yet he felt no sense of conquest, no sense of triumph. He felt only a bone-deep sense of waste.

If we do not treat death with respect
, Jared used to say,
it will reciprocate in kind.

He spent the next three minutes searching the combat vests of the slain men. There were wallets stuffed with faked identity cards—generic in nature, identities designed to be swiftly adopted and swiftly discarded. Finally, in an interior pocket in the combat vest of the skilled marksman, he found a torn scrap of paper. The kind that came on narrow rolls, like a cash-register receipt. In a simple sans-serif font was a typed list of names.

Belknap rinsed the blood from his face in the bathroom and hastened from the hotel. Only after he had rented a rugged SUV from a nearby Hertz office and motored off did he scrutinize the list.

He recognized a few of the names. A recently slain investigative reporter for
La Repubblica
, the Italian newspaper. A Paris-based magistrate whose murder had also made the papers recently. Marked for death? Most of the other names were a bewildering jumble of personages who were unknown to him. One name, however, was Lucia Zingaretti.

Another was his own.

Driving to the Bancroft Foundation headquarters in Katonah on her own was an entirely different experience from being driven there. Andrea Bancroft was glad she had paid close attention to the sequence of turns when she was riding there in the backseat. Even so, she made a few wrong turns, and the trip took longer than it should have.

At the main door, she was greeted cordially by the woman with the stiff copper hair, who seemed slightly puzzled at her appearance.

“Just here to do research,” Andrea said. “Preparing for the next board meeting, you know. I remember you had that very impressive library on the second floor.” She
was
a trustee, after all. Her real purpose was to research possible projects for the twenty-million-dollar challenge that Paul Bancroft had set to her, but she judged that it would be better not to discuss with others the special grant he had allocated. It might be seen as favoritism of some sort. Reticence, at this point, seemed the wisest course. “Also, I'm returning the files you guys delivered to me yesterday.”

“You're so very conscientious,” the woman told her with a set smile. “That's wonderful. I'll get you some tea.”

One by one the foundation officers appeared from their offices, greeted her, offered to assist with whatever questions she might have. They were nothing if not solicitous.

A little too solicitous, perhaps? A little too eager to help her in her researches, as if intent on monitoring her? For the first couple of hours, Andrea did some strenuous data-foraging, getting numbers about sanitation projects in the less-developed world. The range of
information resources available there were, she had to admit, impressive, and impressively displayed. In the research rooms, books and binders were shelved in elegant walnut cases sturdily erected above the dark wood flooring. At one point, she walked through the “reading corner” of the library and saw a boy with curly blond hair and apple cheeks. Brandon. On his lap was a stack of books: some sort of tome on natural history, what looked like a Russian treatise on number theory, and a copy of Kant's
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Not your average thirteen-year-old! His eyes lighted up when he saw her. He looked tired; there were smudges beneath his eyes.

“Hey, you.” He grinned.

“Hey, you,” she returned. “A little light reading?”

“Actually, yeah. You know anything about the lancet liver fluke? Way cool. It's this tiny wormy creature, and its life cycle is pretty awesome.”

“Let me guess. It commutes every weekday to an office in New York until retirement, and then moves to Miami to run out the clock.”

“Wrong species, lady. Naw, it gets snails to excrete it so that ants, which love snail poop, will eat it, and then when it's inside, it goes to the ant's brain and basically lobotomizes it. So now it programs the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass and then paralyzes the mandibles, so the ant just stays there all day, so that it can make sure it gets eaten by sheep.”

“Hmm.” Andrea made a face. “It programs the ant to get itself eaten by sheep. Interesting. I guess everybody has his own idea of a good time.”

“It's really about survival. See, the sheep's intestines is where the lancet fluke reproduces. So when the sheep takes a dump, you get millions of them out in the world. All ready to sneak inside more ants and program them for destruction. Lancet liver flukes
rule.
”

“And I have a hard enough time wrapping my mind around the birds and bees,” Andrea said to him, shaking her head.

A little later, she was reshelving a box of CD-ROMs filled with morbidity and mortality data from the World Health Organization when a white-haired clerk gave her a lingering look.

Andrea nodded pleasantly. The woman looked to be in her sixties, her white hair offsetting a pink, slightly puffy face. Not someone she had seen before. On a desk in front of her was a sheet of library-style adhesive labels that she had been affixing to various disk boxes.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” the clerk said diffidently, “but you remind me of someone.” She hesitated. “Laura Bancroft.”

“My mother,” Andrea said, feeling her face prickle. “You knew her?”

“Oh, certainly. She was a good person. A breath of fresh air, I always felt. I liked her a lot.” The woman sounded as if she might have come from Maryland or Virginia—her voice had a hint of Southern, but little more. “She was the kind of person who
notices
people, you know what I mean? She noticed people like us. With some people—her ex-husband, for one—clerks and secretaries are like pieces of furniture. Like, you'd be sorry if they weren't around, but you don't really focus on them. Your mother was different.”

Andrea recalled the words of the gray-suited man who had visited her:
You look a lot like your mother.
“I guess I hadn't really realized how active she was in the foundation,” she said after a pause.

“Laura never minded upsetting the apple cart. Like I say, she was a noticing kind of gal. And I think she truly cared about the work. So much so that she refused to take any money for it.”

“Really.”

“Besides, since Reynolds had cycled off the board, it wasn't like they'd be running into each other.”

Andrea sat down beside the white-haired clerk. There was something grandmotherly about her, some quality of undemanding sympathy. “So they asked her to serve as a foundation officer. Even though she was just a Bancroft by marriage, she fulfilled the family quota, was that it?”

“You know that the charter has all these rules about that. So yeah, that was pretty much the shape of it. I'm guessing she hadn't mentioned it to you.”

“No, ma'am,” Andrea said.

“Doesn't surprise me much.” The woman glanced down at her adhesive labels. “Wouldn't want you to think we're all gossips here, but we'd heard a thing or two about that marriage. It's no wonder she wanted to keep you protected from the mess—she figured Reynolds would just find a way to make you feel bad about yourself, same as he did to her.” She stopped. “Sorry—I know they say you shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But if we don't, who's gonna? You don't need me to tell you that Reynolds was a piece of work.”

“I'm not sure I understand, though. About my mother's concern.”

The woman looked at her with cornflower-blue eyes. “Sometimes, when you've got a kid to take care of, you try to make a clean break seem a little cleaner than it really is. Too much to explain otherwise. Too many questions. Expectations get raised and crushed. I'm a divorced mother of four, all grown now. So I got my own perspective on it. What I think is, your mom aimed to protect you.”

Andrea swallowed hard. “Is that why she finally resigned?”

The woman looked away. “I guess I'm not sure what you're talking about,” she said after a while. There was a slight cooling of her tone, as if Andrea had overstepped a boundary. “So, anything I can help you with?” Her face was professional, now, and somehow closed, as expressionless as polished slate.

Andrea thanked her quickly and returned to her carrel, but she felt a prickling again, and something else, some deep, glowing disquiet. It was as if embers that had smoldered for years were suddenly fanned.

Laura never minded upsetting the apple cart.
A tribute to her character, surely, nothing more.
She was a noticing kind of gal.
But what did that really mean, other than she wasn't any kind of snob? Andrea berated herself for her paranoia, her inability to manage her own
emotions.
Passion must be within reason,
Paul Bancroft had said: She ought to be able to subordinate what she felt to hard demands of rationality. But, hard as she tried, she could not eradicate the suspicions that now swarmed around her. They were like yellow jackets at a picnic, small yet persistent, and no matter how she swatted at them, they would not be banished.

She tried to direct her attentions to a page from a W.H.O. almanac, but it was no use. Her mind kept returning to the Bancroft Foundation itself. It undoubtedly kept archives of its activities at hand, and they would be at a level of detail far in excess of the federally required reports. If there were answers to be found, they might well be in the basement archives, where older documents relating to the foundation's operations were stored.

As she made her way out of the library wing, she saw Brandon again, and something lifted in her as he caught her eye.

“You know, they don't have a hoop at this place or I'd challenge you to a little one-on-one,” he said, giggling sweetly.

“Next time,” Andrea said. “I've got some archive-trawling to do right now, I'm afraid. The boring basement kind.”

Brandon nodded. “The good stuff's shut in cages. All locked up like dirty magazines.”

“And what would you know about such things?” she asked, mock-censorious.

The boy's face split open into another one of his joyful grins. He was nothing less than a genius; but he was also just a boy.

Cages: They would indeed be standard in unsupervised low-use archives. She needed to get to those caged archives, and this time she would actively solicit help. But not from a senior officer. Rather, she would enlist a younger, low-level employee. She wandered through one of the smaller offices outside the library wing, past a water cooler and a coffee machine, and introduced herself to a twenty-something man who was sorting through a pile of mail. The man—moon-pale, with short mousy hair and nicotine-stained fingernails—recognized
her name, had heard that she was a new trustee, and seemed delighted that she would take the time to make his acquaintance.

“So,” Andrea said, after the initial pleasantries, “I'm wondering if you can help me. If I'm being a bother, you let me know. All right?”

“No bother at all,” replied the man, whose name was Robby.

“It's just that I've been asked to sort through various documents, you know, trusteeship stuff, and I've locked myself out of the basement archives,” she said, with a low cunning she hadn't known was in her. “So embarrassing.”

“Not a bit!” the man replied heartily, grateful for a reprieve from the letter opener. “Not a bit! I could…I bet I could help you.” He looked around the office. “I'm sure one of these good people will have a key.” He rummaged through desk drawers until he found one.

“You're such a blessing,” Andrea said. “I'll get this back to you in two shakes.”

“I'll come with you,” the man said. “Easier that way.” No doubt he was hoping for a quick smoke outside while he was at it.

“I hate to make myself a bother,” Andrea cooed.

But she was glad that he showed her the way, because instead of the exposed main staircase, he took her down a narrower rear staircase that descended to the basement in a few steep zigzags. The basement wasn't very basement-like; it was elegantly appointed, steeped in the fragrance of lemon furniture polish, of old paper, even, faintly, of ancient pipe tobacco. The walls were wainscoted; the floors carpeted with a Wiltshire broadloom of evident distinction. The archives were divided into two sections, one of which was secluded behind a metal grate, just as Brandon had told her. The man let Andrea in and then took the stairs up, not entirely hiding the eagerness of someone craving a nicotine fix.

Andrea was left alone with the foundation's archives. Black laminated boxes with coded alphanumeric labels stretched before her in long rows. There were hundreds of them, and Andrea did not know where to begin. She pulled the box nearest to her, riffled through the
pages. Photostats of bills—physical-plant repairs, groundskeeping expenses from fifteen years earlier. She reshelved the box and started on another shelf. It was like taking soil samples. When she came to the bills that corresponded to the month in which her mother was killed, she took her time, scrutinizing every detail, hoping that something would pop up, announce itself as unusual. Yet nothing did.

The fifth box she looked through contained itemized telephone bills made from the Katonah headquarters, as did the one beside it. She located the box at the end of that shelf and kept going until she found another box that contained bills from the period when her mother died. Again, she saw nothing that, on the face of it, seemed worth a second glance. Finally, she opened a carton that contained telephone bills from the past half-year. Without having anything particular in mind, she took the list of telephone calls from the last month and slipped it into her handbag.

She turned to another section, opened another box, then another. Intriguingly, she encountered a couple of references to a facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Now she scanned the other shelves swiftly, stopping when she found a series of document boxes with labels prefixed by the letters
RTP
.

What was this facility? She crouched down and sampled documents from the
RTP
boxes on the lowest shelves. A few budget lines for seemingly minor items suggested that it was lavishly funded. Lavishly funded—yet never mentioned during the board meeting. What could it be for?

She looked up, still musing, and was startled to see the powerfully built man who had visited her at her house in Carlyle.

He was standing with arms akimbo. He must have just arrived—but how had he known to do so? Andrea resolved to maintain an icy composure even as her heart hammered in her chest. She rose slowly to her feet and extended a hand.

“I'm Andrea Bancroft,” she said with great deliberateness. “As I'm
sure you remember. And you are…?” Her way of taking the offensive.

“Just here to help,” the man replied blandly. She could feel him looking right through her. He was obviously there to keep an eye on her.

“You're too kind,” Andrea returned freezingly.

The man seemed distantly amused by her ploys. “Just kind enough,” he assured her.