The Bancroft Strategy (20 page)

A long pause ensued. She did not have the mental fortitude, just then, for an extended standoff. She needed to speak to Paul Bancroft. She had questions. He would have answers. Yet did he himself know everything that was going on in the foundation? It would not be the first time that an idealist was exploited by others with less lofty objectives.

Don't get ahead of yourself, Andrea.

“I was actually just about to have a word with Paul,” she said, using her intimacy with the great man as a weapon. She gave him a tight smile.
And one thing we'll be discussing is whether he really wants to have people like you in his employ.

“He's out of town.”

“I know,” Andrea lied. “I was going to give him a call.” Already she was conscious that she was over-explaining. She didn't owe this man any reasons.

“Out of town,” the man responded, imperturbable, “and unreachable. As they should have explained.”

Andrea tried to meet his steady gaze, but, to her chagrin, was the first to look away. “He'll be back when?”

“In time for the next board meeting.”

“Right,” Andrea said, deflated. “Anyway, I was just leaving,” she said.

“Then let me escort you to your car,” the man said with studied formality.

He did not speak again until they reached the graveled parking lot
where she had left her car. He pointed to some drips of motor oil beneath the undercarriage. “You should have that looked at,” he said. His tone was kindly, yet his eyes were like slits.

“Thank you, I will,” Andrea replied.

“A lot of things can go wrong with a car,” the man persisted. “Things that can get you killed. You of all people should know what can happen.”

Getting into her car, Andrea felt a shivery wave of cold pass over her, as if she'd been licked by an alligator.
A lot of things can go wrong with a car.
It was, on its face, friendly advice.

Why, then, did it feel like a threat?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

“So what did you find?” Todd Belknap demanded. He gripped the cell phone tightly.

“Almost all those names on that list have something in common,” Matt Gomes said. Belknap could tell that he had his lips close to the mouthpiece of his phone and was speaking softly. “They're dead. And all in the past couple of weeks, too.”

“Murdered?”

“Causes of death are all over the map. Some straight-up homicides. Two suicides. Some accidental. Some natural causes.”

“If I'm betting my money? They're all homicides. Some of them better hidden than others. And Gianni?”

“Massive heart attack. Just a few minutes ago.”

“Christ on a raft,” Belknap roared.

“You tell me all the names on that list?”

“Damned straight,” Belknap said, hanging up. All of them except one name: Todd Belknap.

What did it mean? The natural assumption was that they were people whom the Ansari network, or its new masters, regarded as a threat.
But why, exactly? Had there been an internal coup within the network? If so, how did it connect to Jared Rinehart's abduction, if it did at all?

Belknap's scalp tightened with apprehension.
The list.
It bore all the signs of a mop-up. The sort of housecleaning that was typically performed before a make-or-break operation. It could mean that he had even less time than he'd feared to find Pollux.

It could mean it was already too late.

Something else gnawed at Belknap's mind. Given the obvious ruthlessness of those in charge, it was even more perplexing that the Italian girl hadn't been killed immediately, back in Rome. Why had they waited until his arrival forced the issue? Was she of potential value to them in some way that eluded Belknap? It seemed impossible. As confounding as her treatment was, however, it represented a wisp of hope—the hope that Pollux, too, had been allowed to live.

The Italian girl said she had been staying at a place past the Dhow Building Yard, on Marwat Road. He would drive there now in the rented SUV. Perhaps there were others there in whom she had confided. Perhaps the master of the establishment would have the information he needed.

The cell phone he had lifted from the death-squad leader purred. He answered with an ambiguous half-syllable: “Ya.” The voice at the other end, he was surprised to hear, belonged to a woman.

“Hello, is this…?” The woman—an American—trailed off.

Belknap said nothing, and a second later the woman hung up with a murmured apology. The squad's controller? A wrong number? From the caller-log function, he could tell that the call originated from the United States. It was no random misdial; he was sure of it. Once more, he enlisted Gomes's help.

“I'm not your freakin' back office, Castor,” Gomes groused, as Belknap read him the digits. “You feelin' me?”

“Look, help a brother out, okay? I'm in kind of a hurry here. Need you to step up and represent. Just ID the goddamn number, would you?”

Half a minute elapsed before Gomes got back to him. “Okay, man, I got Jane Doe's name, did a quick records search, too.”

“Chances are good she's the goddamn princess of darkness,” Belknap said grimly.

“Yeah, well, her civilian handle is Andrea Bancroft.”

Belknap paused. “A
Bancroft
Bancroft?”

“No duh. She just became a trustee of the Bancroft Foundation.” Cockily, he added, “Who's your daddy now?”

Andrea Bancroft. How was she involved in the killings? How high up was she? Could she know something about—have been complicit in—the disappearance of Jared Rinehart? There were too many questions, too many uncertainties. But Belknap didn't believe in coincidences. This wasn't any wrong number. All indications were that Andrea Bancroft was a dangerous customer, or, at the very least, keeping dangerous company.

Belknap made a call to a retired operative he hadn't spoken to in years. No matter. The man's field name was Navajo Blue, and Navajo Blue owed Belknap one.

A few minutes later, a cinderblock structure came into view. Hidden from the road, near a series of industrial buildings, the building was dun-colored, just shy of derelict, and almost seemed to vibrate in the heat. As the Italian girl had described the setup, it was basically a warehouse for prostitutes. The place had doubtless seen all sorts of people from all walks of life. But it had never seen anyone like Todd Belknap.

 

Andrea Bancroft pulled over again and dialed another one of the most-frequently-called numbers on the phone bill. That one turned out to be a nursery in New Jersey, probably part of the ground-maintenance detail. She crossed it off. She had to be more systematic; she wasn't going to get very far just by calling numbers and seeing who answered. In the case of the international cell-phone number,
the person who answered hardly said anything at all—which was suspicious, to be sure, but hardly informative. She tucked the phone bill away and let her mind drift. Something was nagging at her—some odd detail.

What was it?

It was morbid of her, no doubt, but she could not help going over the painful teenage memory of her mother's death. The policeman at the door…ready to break the news. Except she had already been informed by—who was that caller? It had happened more than a decade before. Yet someone had phoned to tell her that her mother had been killed. And then it came to her: what it was about the man with the hoarse smoky voice—the foundation officer who'd telephoned about security protocols and compliance issues—that made her blood run cold.

It was the same voice as the man who called that night.

At the time, she'd assumed it was someone from the police—yet the policeman at the door seemed puzzled when she mentioned the call. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was imagining things. And yet…something about that night had always bothered her, like a lash under her eyelid. Her mother, she was told, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.1—yet she didn't drink. When Andrea said so, the kindly patrolman had asked a perceptive question: Had she once been an alcoholic? Yes, but her mother had joined AA, hadn't had a drop for years. The policeman nodded; he admitted that he was a recovering alcoholic himself. One day at a time. Still, almost everyone falls off the wagon at one point or another. Andrea's protests had been quietly, gently set aside, the indignation of a protective daughter unwilling to face the truth.

When did it happen?
the seventeen-year-old Andrea had asked.
About twenty minutes ago
, the patrolman explained.
No
, Andrea said,
it must have been
earlier—
they called me at least half an hour ago
.

The patrolman had given her a strange look. She remembered little else, because then everything had been washed away by an ocean of grief.

She had to tell Paul Bancroft. She had to talk to him, she resolved. Yet what if he knew already? What if he knew far more than he was letting on? Her head began to pound.

As Andrea motored along the Old Post Road, she turned on the windshield wipers before she realized that nothing was obscuring the view except the tears that had welled up in her own eyes.

You're losing it, Andrea
, she scolded herself. Yet another voice, darker and deeper, spoke in contradiction:
Maybe you're finding it, Andrea. Maybe you're finding it.

 

Nimble fingers roamed across the computer keyboard. Fingers that knew their destination, that executed a complex series of directives with precision and celerity. In a flurry of quiet clicks, an e-mail message was composed. A few more keystrokes and the message was encrypted, then dispatched to an offshore anonymizer service, where it would be stripped of all identifying codes, decrypted, and rerouted to its ultimate recipient, one with a senate.gov suffix. In less than a minute, a computer in the office of a United States senator would ping. The message would have arrived, and with it its signoff.

G
ENESIS
.

In the next few minutes, other messages were sent, other instructions dispatched. Strings of digits shifted money from one numbered account to another, moving levers that would move still other levers, pulling strings that would pull still other strings.

G
ENESIS
. For some, it was indeed the beginning. For others, it meant the beginning of the end.

 

Tom Mitchell ached all over. It was the way he felt after a bout of unaccustomed exercise or after an alcoholic binge. He had not taken any exercise. Process of elimination, right? Blinking hard, he peered into the garbage pail by the sink. It was heaped with beer
cans—“tinnies,” as his Australians friends called them. How many six-packs had he gone through? His head hurt when he thought about it. His head hurt when he didn't.

The screen door banged noisily in the breeze, like a concussion bomb, he thought. A wasp buzzed in the doorway, and to him it sounded as if a Second World War fighter plane was overhead. And when the phone had rung a little earlier in the day, it had sounded like an air-raid siren.

Maybe it
was
an air-raid siren, of sorts. Castor had called, and it wasn't to borrow a cup of sugar, either. Didn't matter. He wasn't someone you said no to, and Tom Mitchell—Navajo Blue had been his field name, when he had been in active deployment—figured he ought to be grateful for a chance to repay a debt. You didn't want to get on the Hound's bad side, that was for sure. Because the Hound had teeth, and his bite was worse than his bark.

The serenity of Tom's New Hampshire idyll was killing him, anyway. He wasn't cut out for the quiet life, that was the long and short of it, and it was asking too much from the booze to supply all the excitement that was missing from his daily routine.

Sheila had found the place. Post-and-beam construction, whatever the hell that meant. Wide plank floors under the particleboard—she crowed at the discovery as if she'd unearthed King Tut's tomb. Just a little down the road of them to either side were ratty A-frames and piece-of-shit bungalows and car-killed raccoons, each with their own blowfly cloud. But there was enough land in back that he could take out his Ruger snubby for a spin once in a while and blast a few squirrels out of the trees, squirrels being the Vietcong of the rodent family, as far as he was concerned. The bird feeders were strictly designated for creatures of feather: A tree rat messed with their supply lines at its peril.

But that wasn't the hardy-har-har part of the whole Simple Life thing. Thirty years of gallivanting all over the godforsaken planet in the service of the US of A—including month-long sojourns out of
radio contact—and Sheila loyally sticks it out. Thirty years—thirty-one and a half, more precisely. His wife through thick and thin. Always overjoyed when he came back, but careful not to lay a big guilt trip on him when he had to set off again. So now, the payoff for all those years of patience: She gets her husband full-time, the way it ought to be, right? They get the rural hideaway they've always talked about. A few green acres, mostly paid for. Paradise at last, if you didn't mind the blackflies in the summer.

Sheila lasted for just over a year of it. That was all she could take. Probably saw more of him during that time than she had in the previous three decades. Which evidently was the trouble.

She tried to explain. She said she never got used to sharing her bed, somehow. She said a lot of things. Eight acres of New Hampshire wilderness and she complained that she Needed Her Space. Neither were great talkers, but they had talked a fair amount the day before Sheila headed off to Chapel Hill, where her sister lived and had found her a condo. She said:
I'm bored
. He said:
We could get cable
.

Tom would never forget the look she gave him then. Pitying, mostly. Not angry, but disappointed, the way you'd look at an incontinent old dog when it made a mess. Sheila called him once a week, and there was something nurselike about her conversations. She was acting like the responsible adult, checking to make sure he was okay, was keeping himself out of trouble. The truth was, he felt like a car rusting away on cinderblocks. A common sight in these parts.