The Bancroft Strategy (22 page)

But over the years, most of the other fellows from the old days peeled off to do their own thing. Some started their own companies; others spent their days with costly toys—speedy yachts and jets. Culp stayed the course. He replaced the garage boys with MBA types, and, apart from a nasty and narrowly dodged antitrust trial, SoftSystems had gone from strength to strength ever since.

“So what do you say we acquire Prismatic?” Donnelly asked.

“You think we can make it profitable?”

Donnelly ran a hand through his short reddish hair, as thick as boar bristles, and shook his head. “Strictly as a B&B.” A B&B was
their shorthand for “buy and bury.” When SoftSystems analysts stumbled on a company with a technology that might pose a competitive threat, it would sometimes acquire the company, and thus its patents, simply to take them off the market. Retooling SoftSystems programs with the superior algorithm could be a costly proposition. “Good enough” was, often, all that the market really required.

“You work up the financials?” Culp took another sip of the rich brew. He looked like an aging schoolboy, with wire-rim glasses that had scarcely changed since college, a thatch of sandy brown hair that still hadn't receded a millimeter. Close up, you could see the lines around his eyes, the way it took a while for his forehead to uncrinkle when he had raised his eyebrows. The truth was that he had never really been boyish when he was a boy. There had been something middle-aged about him even when he was an adolescent, so it was maybe only fitting that there was something adolescent about him now that he was middle-aged. It amused him sometimes when people pretending to be his intimates referred to him as “Bill” the people who really knew him knew that he had always been “William.” Not Bill, not Will, not Billy, not Willy. William. Two syllables separated by a hint of a third.

“Got 'em here,” said Donnelly. He had boiled them down to a single page. Culp liked his executive summaries to be truly summary.

“I like what I'm seeing,” Culp said. “An equity swap—think they'll go for that?”

“We can do it either way. We'll make a richer offer in equity, but if they want cash, no problemo. And I know their angel investors—Billy Hoffman, Lou Parini, guys like that. They'll insist on a quick payday. Force the managers' hand if they have to.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Millie Lodge, one of Culp's personal assistants. “Urgent call.”

“I'll take it here,” Culp said absently.

Millie silently shook her head—a small gesture, but one that caused Culp's stomach to clutch.

He took his coffee with him to his office, and picked up the phone: “Culp here,” he said, suddenly hoarse.

The voice that greeted him was sickeningly familiar. A creepy, electronically altered sound. It was whispery and raspy and harsh and heartless and eerily insistent. The way it would sound if an insect could speak, he sometimes thought.

“Time to tithe,” the voice said.

Culp broke out in a cold sweat. From experience, he knew that the call would have been placed via Web-based telephony and was impossible to trace. It could have emanated from the floor below him or from some hovel in Siberia; there was simply no way to know.

“More money for those goddamn savages?” Culp asked between gritted teeth.

“We're looking at a document composed on October seventeen, another series of e-mail exchanges from that afternoon, another internal document from October twenty-one, and a confidential communication sent to Rexell Computing, Ltd. Shall we forward copies to the S.E.C.? In addition, we have documentation relating to the formation of an offshore business entity called WLD Enterprises, and—”

“Stop,” Culp croaked. “You had me at hello.” Any hint of rebellion or defiance had been crushed. Each one of those documents by itself could spur the S.E.C. and the Justice Department into a fresh investigation of antitrust activities, and a legal morass that could cost billions to deal with and dent the company's market capitalization for a long time. There was even the looming danger that the company would be broken up, spun off into parts—which would be the greatest disaster, because the parts were decidedly less valuable than the whole. Nobody needed to belabor the consequences. They were crystal-clear.

That was why he had already been forced to give away vast sums, through the William and Jennifer Culp Charitable Trust, toward the
treatment of tropical diseases. If the whole goddamn continent of Africa just sank beneath the waves one day, Culp wouldn't give a good goddamn. But he was running an empire here: He had responsibilities to it. And his enemies were formidable and intelligent and unsympathetic. Culp had spent a shitload of cash trying to track them down, and with nothing to show for it save a few denial-of-service attacks on the corporate Web sites.

People thought he was the master of his domain. Nonsense. He was a goddamn
victim
. What did he really control, after all? He glanced through the glass at his COO. Donnelly had a whitehead on the side of his nose, a small pustule, and Culp felt a sudden urge to pop it, or poke it with a needle. A twisted grin appeared on his face.
Imagine what would happen if I did that.
He caught Millie Lodge's eyes; Millie Lodge who knew so many of his secrets and was every inch a loyalist, he had no doubt. But that goddamn reeking perfume she always wore. He'd meant to say something to her about it, but somehow it never seemed appropriate—he could never figure out a sufficiently offhand way to bring it up, without devastating her, and now, all these years later, it would be just too goddamn awkward to broach the subject. So there! William Culp, a prisoner of her Jean Tatou cologne or whatever the hell it was.

But maybe—maybe Millie herself was somehow behind the shakedown! He looked at her again, tried to size her up as a potential conspirator. It didn't make sense, somehow; she just wasn't that crafty. He continued to steam, silently.
Here I sit, William Culp, No. 3 on the Forbes Four Hundred, and these bastards have my goddamn sack in their fist! Where's the justice in that?

“The European Commission would look askance at your proposed acquisition of Logiciel Lilles,” the voice from hell prompted, “if it was made aware of your draft marketing scheme for—”

“Just tell me what you want from me, for the love of God,” Culp said with bitter resignation. It was the snarling of a defeated animal.
“Just tell me!” He took another sip of his cooling brew and made a face. The flavor was actively unpleasant. Who was he kidding, anyway? It tasted like shit.

Oman

The horizon line was serrated with crags and swales and the occasional stunted acacia tree. Half-shrouded in the distance, to the north, was the irregular crest of the distant Hajar Mountains. The one-lane road was often powdered over with the reddish sand, so that it blended into the surrounding desert. Finally, the road lurched through a rocky pass and into a green arroyo. There were date palms along the ravine, desert oleander, and scrubby grasses.

For intervals, he allowed himself to be dazed by the beauty of the landscape, his mind emptying out into the barren majesty of his surroundings. Then thoughts of Jared Rinehart began to intrude.

He was failing a man—he could not shake the feeling—who had never failed him. A man who had not only saved his life on more than one occasion, but who had stepped in on occasion to keep him from harm's way. He remembered the time when Jared had warned him that a woman he had been getting close to—a Bulgarian émigrée who worked at Walter Reed—was a suspected mole, the subject of a clandestine FBI probe. The dossier Rinehart showed him had been devastating to Belknap. Yet how much more devastating would it have been if Belknap hadn't learned the truth? The FBI generally guarded its domestic investigations from the other agencies; Belknap's own career could have been destroyed, and perhaps, given his carelessness, it should have been. But Rinehart would not hear of it. Through every kind of travail, he always kept an eye out for Belknap, as much a guardian angel as a friend, Belknap sometimes thought. When a close friend of Belknap's—a friend from childhood—died in a car accident, Rinehart had traveled all the way to Vermont to
attend the funeral, simply to keep Belknap company, and make it clear he was not alone, that when he grieved Rinehart grieved as well. When a girlfriend of Belknap's was killed during an operation in Belfast, Rinehart had insisted that he be the one to break the terrible news to him. He remembered how he struggled not to fall apart, how he struggled not to weep, until he looked up and saw that Rinehart's own eyes were moist.

Thank God I still have you
, Belknap had told him.
Because you're all I've got.

And now? What did Belknap have?

He was failing the one true friend he had. Failing, yes, the one man who had never failed him.

The SUV juddered as he drove over a crested ridge of fissured road, and his gaze drifted away from the crenulated mountains in the distance, the shades of ochre and yellow in the earth and stones. He had filled the tank two hours earlier, and now he gave the gas gauge an occasional glance. Up ahead, a cluster of mud-brick houses was sheltered by a cliff. A few birds circled overhead.

“Falcons!” Baz said, pointing.

“Like you, Baz,” Belknap said, to show that he understood. The boy had been chatty at the onset of the journey, and then subdued, and Belknap wanted to be sure that he would hold together if there were troubles ahead. As soon as they were out of Dubai, he had peered at himself in the mirror on the reverse side of the sunshade, and started rubbing at the kohl around his eyelids. Belknap gave him his handkerchief for the job. Now that it was almost gone, it was easier to see who the boy had been before being dragooned into the services of Habib Almani. Baz told him that his father wanted him to be an imam, that his grandfather had taught him to memorize scripture from a young age. The grandfather, once a trader from the coast, was also the one who had taught him English. Baz was fascinated by the radio in the dashboard, and during the first half hour of the trip he had avidly, marvelingly, switched between stations.

At the base of an escarpment, across from the wasp-nest village of mud houses on a wadi, was a large tentlike structure. The fabric—a cream-colored silk, it seemed—rustled in the faint breeze.

“This the place?”

“Yes,” Baz confirmed. There was tension in his voice.

The Omani princeling would be inside, holding court. Outside was a loose line of six or seven men in turbans and dishdashas, some sun-wizened, all lean, nearly to the point of emaciation. Baz had said that Almani would be on one of his regular visits to his region of tribal origin, and plainly he was—doling out gifts to the local chiefs and village elders. That was how the essentially feudal social order worked in places like Oman.

Belknap pushed his way into the tent and found himself walking on silk carpets. An attendant looked dismayed and heckled him in Arabic, gesturing excitedly. Belknap realized that the man was upset because he had not removed his shoes.
The least of your problems
, he thought.

Baz told him that the princeling was a man of considerable girth, but that was an understatement. He was corpulent. He was perhaps five-eight and must have weighed three hundred pounds. All of which made it easy to recognize him. He sat on a woven-cane seat, as if it were a throne. On a rug beside him was a heap of gaudy trinkets, obviously for bestowing upon the visiting elders. One of them, clad in dusty muslin, was walking away on bare feet as he clutched some bauble of gold foil.

“You're Habib Almani,” Belknap said.

“My dear sir,” the man replied with an elegant sweep of a hand, his eyes widening. On his fingers were jewel-encrusted rings that glinted and flashed. A diamond-studded
khandjar,
a small L-shaped ceremonial scabbard, drooped from a sash around his waist. He spoke in the plummiest of British accents; Belknap could have been at the Athenaeum Club. “We come across so few Americans here. You must excuse the humble and temporary nature of my establishment. This
is not exactly Muscat! And to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?” His small hard eyes belied his elaborate courtesies.

“I'm here for information.”

“You come to this humble Omani princeling for information? Driving directions, perhaps? How to get to the nearest…discotheque?” He started to guffaw, the very image of debauchery, and stole a leering side glance at a girl, perhaps thirteen, who silently huddled in the corner. “You'd enjoy a night at a discotheque, wouldn't you, my little rosebud,” he cooed to her. Then he turned to Belknap again. “I'm sure you know about Arab hospitality. Everywhere we are renowned for it. I must ply you with goodies, and take pleasure in doing so. But, well, you see, I am curious.”

“I'm with the U.S. Department of State. A researcher, shall we say.”

A small twitch was visible on the man's porridgy face. “A spy. Lovely. The Great Game. Just like in the old days of the Ottomans.” The self-described princeling took another sip from a silver teacup. Belknap was close enough to smell liquor—Scotch, in fact. Probably the expensive stuff. The princeling was plainly the worse for drink. He did not slur his words; he enunciated them with the emphatic precision of someone determined not to, which was no less of a giveaway.

“An Italian girl came into your possession recently,” Belknap said.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about.”

“She was employed by an escort service you own.”

“By the beard of the Prophet, you shock me to the core, you cut me to the quick, you rock me to the foundations, you shiver my timbers and—”

“Don't try my patience,” Belknap said in a low, menacing voice.

“Oh, hell, if you're looking for an Italian
putta
, you've really gone out of your way. I can offer you other satisfactions. I can and I will. What's your speed? Name your poison? You want—yes, my little rosebud?” He gestured toward the cowering girl. “You can have her.
Not
for keeps. But you can take her for a test drive, shall we say—a test drive to paradise!”