The Bancroft Strategy (3 page)

“Here's what
I'd
like to know,” Belknap said, still piecing together his fragmented memories of the past few minutes. “What if I
weren't
a friend?”

“Then there'd be a fourth corpse here for the cleanup crew.” Rinehart put a hand on Belknap's shoulder, gave a squeeze of reassurance. “But you'll learn something about me. I take pride in being a good friend to my good friends.”

“And a dangerous enemy to your dangerous enemies?”

“We understand each other,” his voluble interlocutor replied. “So: Shall we leave this party at the worker's palace? We've met the host, paid our proper respects, had a drink—I think we can go now without giving offense. You never want to be the last to leave.” He glanced at three slack-faced corpses. “If you'll step over to the window, you'll notice a bosun's chair and scaffolding, which is just the thing for an afternoon of window-washing, though I think we'll skip that part.” He led Belknap through the smashed casement and onto the platform, which was secured to cables anchored to the balcony of the apartment above. Given all the maintenance work done on these apartment buildings, it was unlikely to attract notice on the side street, seven floors below, even if there had been anyone around.

Rinehart brushed a remaining fragment of glass from his tan coveralls. “Here's the thing, Mr….”

“Belknap,” he said as he steadied himself onto the platform.

“Here's the thing, Belknap. You're how old? Twenty-five, twenty-six?”

“Twenty-six. And call me Todd.”

Rinehart fiddled with the cable lanyard. With a jerk, the platform started a slow, erratic descent, as if lowered by a series of tugs. “Then you've been with the outfit for just a couple of years, I guess. Me, I'll be thirty next year. Have a few more years of seasoning on me. So let me tell you what you're going to find. You're going to find that most of your colleagues are mediocre. It's just the nature of any organization. So if you come across someone who has genuine gifts, you watch out for that person. Because in the intelligence community, most of the real progress is made by a handful of people. Those are the gemstones. You don't let them get lost, or scratched, or crushed, not if you give a damn about this enterprise of ours. Taking care of business means taking care of your friends.” His gray-green eyes intent, he added, “There's a famous line from the British writer E. M. Forster. Maybe you know it. He said that if he ever had to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he'd have the guts to betray his country.”

“Rings a bell.” Belknap's eyes were glued to the street, which thankfully remained vacant. “Is that your philosophy?” He felt a drop of rain, solitary but heavy, and then another one.

Rinehart shook his head. “On the contrary. The lesson here is that you need to be careful about picking your friends.” Another intent look. “Because you should never have to make that choice.”

Now the two stepped onto the narrow street, leaving the platform behind.

“Take the pail,” Rinehart instructed. Belknap did so, recognizing the wisdom of it at once. Rinehart's coveralls and cap were a formidable disguise in a city of laborers; carrying the pail and spackling kit, Belknap would look like a natural companion.

Another heavy drop of rain splashed on Belknap's forehead. “It's gonna start coming down,” he said, wiping it away.

“It's
all
going to come down,” the lanky operative replied cryptically. “And everyone here, in his heart of hearts, realizes it.”

Rinehart knew the city topography well—he knew which stores connected two streets, which alleys backed onto others that led to yet other streets. “So what did you think of Richard Lugner after your brief encounter?”

The traitor's pitted face of malign impassivity returned to him like a ghostly afterimage. “Evil,” Belknap said shortly, surprising himself. It was a word he seldom used. But no other would do. The twin boreholes of the shotgun were etched in his mind, as were the malevolent eyes of Lugner himself.

“What a concept,” the taller man said with a nod. “Unfashionable these days, but indispensable all the same. We somehow think that we're too sophisticated to talk about evil. Everything is supposed to be analyzed as a product of social or psychological or historical forces. And once you do that, well, evil drops out of the picture, doesn't it?” Rinehart led the younger man into an underground plaza that connected a square that had been split by a motorway. “We like to pretend that we don't speak of evil because we've outgrown the concept. I wonder. I suspect the motivation is itself deeply primitive. Like some tribal fetish worshippers of ancient times, we imagine that by not speaking the name, the thing to which it refers will vanish.”

“It's that face,” Belknap grunted.

“A face only Helen Keller could love.” Rinehart mimed the motion of Braille-reading fingertips.

“The way he looks at you, I mean.”

“
Looked,
anyway,” Rinehart replied, stressing the past tense. “I've had my own encounters with the man. He was pretty formidable. And as you say—evil. Yet not all evil has a face. The Ministry of State Security in this country feeds off people like Lugner. That's a form of evil, too. Monumental and faceless.” Rinehart maintained a level tone, but he did not hide the passion in his voice. The man was cool—maybe the coolest Belknap had ever known—but he was not a cynic. After a while, Belknap realized something else, too: The other man's
conversational flow wasn't simply a matter of self-expression; it was an attempt to distract and calm a young operative whose nerves had just been severely jarred. His very chatter was a kindness.

Twenty minutes later, the two of them—workmen from all appearances—were approaching the embassy building, a Schinkel-style marble building now sooted by pollution. Large raindrops were falling intermittently. A familiar loamy smell arose from the pavement. Belknap envied Rinehart his cap. Three G.D.R. policemen eyed the embassy from their post across the street, adjusting their nylon parkas, trying to keep their cigarettes dry.

As the two Americans approached the embassy, Rinehart pulled up a Velcro tab on his coveralls and revealed a small blue coded nameplate to one of the American guards standing at a side entrance. A quick nod, and the two found themselves on the inner side of the consulate fence. Belknap felt a few more drops of rain, landing heavily, darkening the tarmac with black splotches. The heavy steel gate clanged shut. A short while before, death had seemed certain. Now safety was assured. “I just realized that I never answered the first question you asked me,” he said to his lanky companion.

“Whether you were friend or foe?”

Belknap nodded. “Well, let's agree we're friends,” he said in a sudden rush of gratitude and warmth. “Because I could use more friends like you.”

The tall operative gave him a look that was both affectionate and appraising. “One might be enough,” he replied, smiling.

Later—years later—Belknap would have reason to reflect on how a brief encounter could set the course of a man's life. A watershed moment splits life into a before and an after. Yet it was impossible, except in retrospect, to recognize the moment for what it was. At the time, Belknap's mind was filled with the ardent yet banal thought
Someone saved my life today
—as if the act had merely restored normality, as if there could now be a going back, a return to the way things were. He did not know—he could not know—that his life had
changed irreversibly. Its trajectory, in ways both imperceptible and dramatic, had shifted.

By the time the two men stepped under the olive-drab awning that extended from the side of the consulate, its plasticized fabric was thrumming with rain, water sliding off it in sheets. The downpour had begun.

Rome

Tradition holds that Rome was built on seven hills. The Janiculum, higher than any of them, is the eighth. In ancient times, it was given over to the cult of Janus—the god of exits and entrances; the god of two faces. Todd Belknap would need them both. On the third floor of the villa on the via Angelo Masina, a looming neoclassical structure with facades of yellow ochre stucco and white pilasters, the operative checked his watch for the fifth time in ten minutes.

This is what you do,
he silently assured himself.

But this was not the way he had planned it. It was not the way anybody had planned it. He moved quietly through the hallway—a surface, blessedly, of solidly mortared tile: no squeaking floorboards. The renovation had removed the rotting woodwork of a previous renovation…and how many such renovations had there been since the original construction in the eighteenth century? The villa, built upon an aqueduct of Trajan, had an illustrious past. In 1848, in the great days of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi used it as his headquarters; the basement, supposedly, had been enlarged to serve as a backup armory. These days, the villa once again had a military purpose, if more nefarious in nature. It belonged to Khalil Ansari, a Yemeni arms dealer. Not just any arms dealer, either. As shadowy as his operations were, Cons Ops analysts had established that he was a significant supplier not only in South Asia but also in Africa. What set him apart was how elusive he was: how carefully he had concealed his movements, his location, his identity. Until now.

Belknap's timing could not have been better—or worse. In the two decades he had spent as a field agent, he had come to dread the
stroke of luck that arrives almost too late. It had happened near the beginning of his career, in East Berlin. It had happened seven years ago, in Bogotá. It was happening again here in Rome. Good things come in threes, as his good friend Jared Rinehart wryly insisted.

Ansari, it was known, was on the verge of a major arms deal, one that would involve a series of simultaneous exchanges among several parties. It was, from all indications, a deal of enormous complexity and enormous magnitude—something that perhaps only Khalil Ansari would be capable of orchestrating. According to humint sources, the final settlement would be arranged this very evening, via an intercontinental conference call of some sort. Yet the use of sterile lines and sophisticated encryption ruled out the standard sigint solutions. Belknap's discovery had changed all that. If Belknap was able to plant a bug in the right place, Consular Operations would gain invaluable information about how the Ansari network functioned. With any luck, the rogue network could be exposed—and a multibillion-dollar merchant of death brought to justice.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Belknap had identified Ansari only hours before. No time for a coordinated operation. No time for backup, for HQ-approved plans. He had no other choice but to go in alone. The opportunity could not be allowed to pass.

The photo ID clipped to his knitted cotton shirt read “Sam Norton,” and identified him as one of the site architects involved in the latest round of renovations, an employee of the British architectural firm in charge of the project. It got him in the house, but it could not explain what he was doing on the third floor. In particular, it could not justify his presence in Ansari's personal study. If he were found here, it was over. Likewise if anyone were to discover the guard he had knocked out with a tiny Carfentanil dart and stowed in a cleaning closet down the hall. The operation would be terminated.
He
would be terminated.

Belknap recognized these facts dully, dispassionately, like the rules
of the road. Inspecting the arms dealer's study, he felt a kind of operational numbness; he saw himself from the perspective of a disembodied observer far above him. The ceramic element of the contact microphone could be hidden—where? A vase on the desk, containing an orchid. The vase would serve as a natural amplifier. It would also be routinely inspected by the Yemeni's debugging team, but that would not be until the morning. A keystroke logger—he had a recent model—would record messages typed on Ansari's desktop computer. A faint chirp sounded in Belknap's earpiece, a response to radio pulse emitted by a tiny motion detector that Belknap had secreted in the hallway outside.

Was someone about to enter the room? Not good. Not good at all. It was an appalling irony. He had spent the better part of a year trying to locate Khalil Ansari. Now the danger was that Khalil Ansari would locate him.

Dammit!
Ansari was not supposed to be back so soon. Belknap looked helplessly around the Moroccan-tiled room. There were few places for concealment, aside from a closet with a slatted door, at the corner near the desk. Far from ideal. Belknap stepped quickly inside and hunched down, squatting on the floor. The closet was unpleasantly warm, filled with racks of humming computer routers. He counted the seconds. The miniaturized motion detector he had placed in the hall outside could have been set off by a roach or rodent. Surely it was a false alarm.

It was not. Someone was entering the room. Belknap peered through the slats until he could make out the figure. Khalil Ansari: a man tending everywhere toward roundness. A body made of ovals, like an art-class exercise. Even his close-trimmed beard was a thing of round edges. His lips, his ears, his chin, his cheeks, were full, soft, round, cushioned. He wore a white silk caftan, Belknap saw, which draped loosely around his bulk as the man padded toward his desk with a distracted air. Only the Yemeni's eyes were sharp, scanning the room like a samurai's rotating sword. Had Belknap been seen? He
had counted on the darkness of the closet to provide concealment. He had counted on many things. Another miscalculation, and he would be counted
out.

The Yemeni eased his avoirdupois upon the leather chair at his desk, cracked his knuckles, and typed in a rapid sequence—a password, no doubt. As Belknap continued to squat uncomfortably in the recessed bay, his knees started to protest. Now in his mid-forties, he had lost the limberness of his youth. But he could not afford to move; the sound of a cracking joint would instantly betray his presence. If only he had arrived a few minutes earlier, or Ansari a few minutes later: Then he would have had the keystroke logger in place, electronically capturing the pulses emitted by the keyboard. His first priority was just to stay alive, to endure the debacle. There would be time for postmortems and after-action reports later.

The arms dealer shifted in his seat and intently keyed in another sequence of instructions. Messages were being e-mailed. Ansari drummed his fingers and pressed a button inset in a rosewood-veneered box. Perhaps he was setting up the conference call via Internet telephony. Perhaps the entire conference would be conducted in encrypted text, chatroom style. There was so much that could have been learned, if only…It was too late for regrets, but they churned through Belknap all the same.

He remembered his exhilaration, not long before, when he had at last tracked his quarry to earth. It was Jared Rinehart who had first dubbed him “the Hound,” and the well-earned honorific had stuck. Though Belknap did have a peculiar gift for finding people who wished to stay lost, much of his success—he could never persuade people of it, but he knew it to be true—was a matter of sheer perseverance.

Certainly that was how he had finally tracked down Khalil Ansari after entire task forces had returned empty-handed. The bureaucrats would dig, their shovels would bang against bedrock, and they
would give it up as futile. That was not Belknap's way. Each search was different; each involved a mixture of logic and caprice, because human beings were a mixture of logic and caprice. Neither ever sufficed by itself. The computers at headquarters were capable of scanning vast databases, inspecting records from border control authorities, Interpol, and other such agencies, but they needed to be told what to look for. Machines could be programmed with pattern-recognition software—but first they had to be told what pattern to recognize. And they could never get into the mind of the target. A hound could scent out a fox, in part, because it could think like a fox.

A knock at the door, and a young woman—dark hair, olive skin, but Italian rather than Levantine, Belknap judged—let herself in. The severity of her black-and-white uniform did not disguise the young woman's beauty: the budding sensuality of someone who had only recently come into her full physical endowments. She was carrying a silver tray with a pot and a small cup. Mint tea, Belknap knew at once from the aroma. The merchant of death had sent for it. Yemenis seldom did business without a carafe of mint tea, or
shay,
as they called it, and Khalil, on the verge of a concluding a vast chain of trades, proved true to form. Belknap almost smiled.

It was always details like those that helped Belknap track down his most elusive subjects. A recent one was Garson Williams, the rogue scientist at Los Alamos who sold nuclear secrets to the North Koreans and then disappeared. The FBI spent four years searching for him. Belknap, when he was finally assigned to the task, found him in two months. Williams, he learned from a domestic inventory, had a pronounced weakness for Marmite, the salty, yeast-based spread popular among Britons of a certain age as well as former subjects of the British Empire. Williams had developed a taste for it during a graduate fellowship at Oxford. In a list of the contents of the physicist's house, Belknap noticed that he had three jars of it in the pantry.
The FBI demonstrated its thoroughness by X-raying all the objects in the household and determining that no microfiche had been hidden anywhere. But its agents didn't think the way Belknap did. The physicist would have retreated to a less-developed part of the world, where record-keeping was slipshod: It was the logical thing to do, since the North Koreans would have lacked the resources to provide him with identity papers of a quality that would pass in the information-age West. So Belknap scrutinized the places where the man went on vacation, looking for a pattern, a semi-submerged preference. His own tripwires were of a peculiar sort, triggered by the conjuncture of certain locations and certain distinctive consumer preferences. A shipment of a specialty foodstuff was made to an out-of-the-way hotel; a phone call—ostensibly from a chatty “customer satisfaction” representative—revealed that the request had originated not with a guest but with a local. The evidence, if one could even call it that, was absurdly weak; Belknap's hunch was not. When Belknap finally caught up with him, at a seaside fishing town in eastern Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka, he came alone. He was taking a flyer—he couldn't justify dispatching a team based on the fact that an American had special-ordered Marmite from a small hotel in the neighborhood. It was too insubstantial for official action. But it was substantial enough for him. When he finally confronted Williams, the physicist seemed almost grateful to have been found. His dearly bought tropical paradise had turned out the way they usually did: a fugue of tedium, of stultifying ennui.

More clicking from the Yemeni's keyboard. Ansari picked up a cellular telephone—undoubtedly a model with chip-enabled auto-encryption—and spoke in Arabic. His voice was at once unhurried and unmistakably urgent. A long pause, and then Ansari switched into German.

Now Ansari looked up briefly as the servant girl set down his cup of tea and she smiled, displaying perfectly even white teeth. As Ansari turned back to his work, her smile disappeared like a pebble
dropped into a pond. She made her exit noiselessly, the perfectly unobtrusive servitor.

How much longer?

Ansari raised the small teacup to his mouth and took a savoring sip. He spoke again into the phone, this time in French.
Yes, yes, all was on schedule.
Words of reassurance, but lacking all specificity. They knew what they were talking about; they did not have to spell it out. The black marketeer clicked off the telephone and typed another message. He took another sip of the tea, placed the cup down, and—it happened suddenly, like a small seizure—he shivered briefly. Moments later, he sprawled forward, his head falling on his keyboard, motionless, evidently insensate. Dead?

It couldn't be.

It was.

The door to the study opened again; the servant girl. Would she panic, raise the alarm, when she made the shocking discovery?

In fact, she showed no surprise of any sort. She moved briskly, furtively, stepping over to the man and placing her fingers at his throat, feeling for a pulse, obviously detecting none. Then she pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and repositioned him in his chair so that he seemed to be leaning back, at rest. Next she moved to the keyboard, typed a hurried message of her own. Finally, she removed the teacup and carafe, placing them on her tray, and left the study. Removing, thus, the instruments of his death.

Khalil Ansari, one of the most powerful arms dealers in the world, had just been murdered—in front of his eyes. Poisoned, in fact. By…a young Italian servant girl.

With no little discomfort, Belknap rose from his squatting position, his mind buzzing like a radio tuned midway between two stations. It wasn't supposed to go down this way.

Then he heard a quiet electronic hooting sound. It came from an intercom on Ansari's desk.

And when Ansari did not respond?

Dammit to hell!
Soon the alarm really would be raised. Once that happened, there would be no way out.

Beirut, Lebanon

“The Paris of the Middle East,” the city had once been called, as Saigon was once heralded as the Paris of Indochina and conflict-roiled Abidjan the Paris of Africa: the designation more of a curse than an honor. Those who remained there had proven themselves survivors of one sort or another.

The bulletproof Daimler limousine smoothly negotiated the mid-evening traffic on rue Maarad in the troubled city's downtown, known as Beirut Central District. Streetlights cast a hard glow on the dusty streets, as if laying down a glaze. The Daimler navigated through the Place de l'Etoile—once hopefully modeled on the Parisian center, now merely a traffic-snarled roundabout—and glided along streets where restored buildings from the Ottoman and French Mandate eras stood alongside modern office blocks. The building before which the limousine finally stopped was perfectly unremarkable: a dun-colored seven-story structure, like half a dozen in the neighborhood. To an experienced eye, the wide external frames around the limousine's windows gave away the fact that it was armored, but there was nothing remarkable about that, either. This was, after all, Beirut. Nor was there anything unusual about the sight of the two heavyset bodyguards—both wearing taupe poplin suits, in the loose fit preferred by those whose usual getup required a holster as well as a tie—who piled out of the car as soon as it came to a stop. Again, this was Beirut.