The Bancroft Strategy (31 page)

Suddenly she shrieked, and Belknap knew that his luck had run out. When he whirled around he saw that two armed men had raced into the room. One of them spun the maid around and shoved her out of the room before standing post at the door.

Belknap forced himself to breathe normally as he sized up the two operatives. Neither was from the lobby; indeed, neither was anybody he had ever seen before. One of them looked vaguely Filipino,
though with the long limbs and well-developed musculature of a corn-fed American. Child of an army base marriage, Belknap figured. The other was denser, and dark-skinned, with a shaven skull that gleamed like ebony. Both held short-barreled automatic weapons, polymer grip, long curved magazines beneath the stock. Thirty rounds of 9mm ammunition each. At full fire, the weapon could probably discharge all thirty rounds in a few seconds.

“Lie flat on the floor.” The black man spoke first. His voice was light and eerily calm. “Clasp your hands behind your head. One ankle over the other. You know the drill.” He could have been a driving instructor telling a student to release the clutch. “Do it now.”

Rinehart was always dismissive when Belknap spoke of good luck.
Has it ever occurred to you that your “good luck” consists of getting you out of fixes that your bad luck got you into?

“I'll repeat the instructions—once,” the man said. Again, he sounded utterly calm.

I'd feel calm, too, if I was aiming a powerhouse machine gun at a man with a pistol stuck in his pocket.

“No need,” Belknap said. “Speaking as a colleague, I gotta say you guys have done a bang-up job so far. If I were writing up a post-action report, though, I might raise a question about the ammunition. Hotel walls are famously thin. I assume you're using standard NATO cartridges. That means one round could punch through half a dozen walls. You got those things set at triple burst? Or single shot?”

The two men traded glances. “Full fire,” the black man said.

“Oh, see, that's not good.” A chink in the armor: The man had responded to him. They had the well-founded confidence of their overwhelming firepower. Belknap's only hope was to find a way to use that confidence to his own advantage. “You didn't work out the backstopping issues.”

“On the ground now, or I
will
fire.” The black man spoke the words with the air of someone who had killed enough men to regard it as little more than an inconvenience. At the same time, pride kept
him from adjusting his weapon's firing rate; he wasn't going to lose face in front of a colleague.

An S.A.P. retrieval team. Belknap knew that his best chance of surviving was to surrender. But S.A.P. retrievals did not end in court hearings or newspaper items. Once “retrieved,” he would probably face incarceration for an indefinite number of years at a clandestine facility in West Virginia or a black-site location in rural Poland. He did not value his own survival highly enough for surrender to be an appealing option.

“First, it's highly irresponsible for you to use full fire in an environment dense with nontarget civilians,” Belknap said, adopting the tone of a training instructor. “When I started in this business, you two were still sucking on pacifiers, so listen to the voice of goddamn experience. Full fire against hotel drywall? The post-action report practically writes itself. Classic tyro's mistake: Job like this, you need a fine camelhair brush, not a goddamn paint roller.” As he spoke, he walked over to the window. “So let me help you out here. What we've got here is a window.”

The man who looked part-Filipino snickered. “Oh, you noticed? No other hotel guests out in the air, now are they?”

“Who the hell trained you?” Belknap demanded. “Please don't tell me it was me. No, I think I'd recognize your ugly mugs. Now, then, before you find yourself trying to explain to Will Garrison why two guys with machine guns were forced to terminate a retrieval and blast away at an unarmed man”—he slipped the lie in with a name they'd recognize—“which we can all agree is a suboptimal mission outcome, let me ask you a question. How far will a nine-millimeter bullet travel through the air?”

“We ain't your goddamn students,” the larger gunman sneered.

“High-velocity plinker like you got there, could be more than two miles. Over ten thousand feet. Even if you reset to triple burst, you need to expect that the third bullet is essentially traveling through thin air, following the opening punched out by the first two. Now,
let's take a closer look at where the natural trajectory is going to lead.” He turned his back to them and slid open the floor-to-ceiling window, which let onto a narrow balcony.

“Hey, Denny,” the corn-fed Asian said to his partner, “I know what I'm gonna write in the post-action report. Target was terminated because he was so goddamn
annoying.
”

Belknap ignored him. “As you may have noticed, we're in a fairly built-up and densely populated region.” He gestured toward a glass-and-steel office building across the nearby highway, but his own attention was focused on the large outdoor pool that the balcony overlooked. A tall privacy hedge of rhododendrons screened the pool from a busy street nearby.

With an easy grin, the black man lowered himself into a crouch, keeping the gun aimed at center-body mass, but at an upward angle. “Easy enough to change the trajectory, now isn't it? That's some bullshit you're talking.”

“You should have taken a closer look,” Belknap said, undeterred. “Should have done what I'm doing.” He stepped onto the balcony, gauged the horizontal distance between it and the pool.

“Sucker thinks he can run out the clock,” the second gunman said with a nasty laugh.

“I'm just trying to teach you kids a thing or two,” Belknap went on. “Because if you're firing from that rice-paddy crouch of yours, Denny, you'd ideally want your target in a more elevated position.” As if to demonstrate, Belknap turned his back to the operatives again and stepped onto the four-foot steel trellis, its exact measurement doubtless in compliance with some child-safety law.
What about the safety of fleeing adults?
Balancing himself precariously, he sprang forward with all the coiled strength of his legs, forward and into thin air.

He heard a spurt of gunfire, like a chainsaw exploding into life: full fire depleting their magazines at eight hundred rounds per minute, or a little over two seconds for a thirty-round clip.
If you can hear it,
it didn't hit you.
They had failed to anticipate his move, and their surprise must have delayed their reaction by a critical instant.

Belknap was hurtling downward—yet, in freefall, he felt as if he were motionless, and that the ground was hurtling toward him, growing bigger and bigger and closer and closer. He had perhaps three seconds to right himself, to stretch his body into a blade, knife though the surface tension. At these heights, one did not dive headfirst. He could not waste time peering downward: If he had miscalculated and was going to hit cement, then nothing he did mattered. He had to assume that he was going to fall where he had aimed himself, at the deep end of the pool. To a body falling from a height of twenty yards, water was not a soft and yielding substance: It was stiff and resistant, and the more surface area exposed to it—the broader the area of impact—the harder the water would hit him. In training, he had learned the basic equation: shape factor multiplied by water density multiplied by the square of velocity. It was like someone taking a two-by-four to your bare feet, he recalled a professional cliff diver reporting. He would be traveling at almost forty miles per hour when he reached the water.
The problem isn't the falling,
the cliff diver had said.
It's the stopping.

Belknap could not affect his velocity; he could not change the fact that water was more than eight hundred times denser than air. All he could do was reduce his shape factor—to place his feet together, angled
en pointe,
raise his arms above his head, straight, palm to palm. He glimpsed cars on the adjacent roadway and, though they had to have been traveling at least forty miles an hour, they looked to him as if they were inching along, scarcely moving at all. At the last moment before hitting the water, Belknap inhaled deeply, filled his lungs, and prepared for what could not be prepared for.

The jolt ran through his body, an impact that rippled through his very skeleton, his spinal cord, his every joint and sinew.

He'd thought it would never come, and yet, paradoxically, it had come sooner than he had expected. He had done all he could, and yet
felt utterly unready. After the concussing shock of impact, he grew conscious of other sensations, like a sense of coolness all over his body, and the way the water, having struck the first blow, now cushioned him, as if to make amends, gentling his course to the bottom. Coolness became warmth, uncomfortable warmth, and then the sensation of temperature was swamped by a mounting breathlessness. A warning chimed in his head:
Don't inhale.
He could feel solid ground beneath him—the bottom of the pool. He sank down further, bending his knees all the way, and then he shot upward, toward the surface, fourteen feet above him. Only when he could wave a hand freely in front of his face, proving that he was no longer underwater, did he allow himself to take a breath of air.
No time!
He clambered over the side of the pool and rolled himself onto the stone coping.

He did not bother to look up at the window from which he had jumped. The gunmen there were equipped for close-quarters combat. Neither was a marksman, nor equipped with a distance-accurate rifle, and there were too many civilians in the pool area for a burst of automatic fire to be a permissible action.

With great effort he struggled to his feet. His entire lower body felt like a giant bruise. His muscles jellied, and no sooner was he upright than he sprawled to the ground.
No!
He would not give in. Adrenaline surged through his viscera, tightening every muscle fiber as if someone were twisting the pegs of a violin. He lurched into a run—he was not sure he could walk, but he could
run
—and found a small opening in the rhododendron hedge. His sodden clothing added at least ten pounds to the weight he had to carry, and—as he realized only when he nearly stepped into the path of a whizzing and, to him, noiseless car—he was deafened: Pool water had evidently filled both ear canals. His legs were now pincushions; he could not feel the asphalt underneath his feet: In place of physical sensation, tactile awareness, there was only a needling pain, and then pulses of searing heat.

Yet he had not been captured. Not yet. He had not been “retrieved.” His adversaries had failed—so far.

Belknap darted across the busy road, testing the limits of a two- or three-second interval between vehicles—if he stumbled, took just a second longer than he hoped, he would have met the bumper of an oncoming van—and then through another intersection.

A block later, he reached a row of small houses with separate garages; most looked dark, shuttered, waiting for their owners to get home from work. Belknap scooted into a garage through an unlocked side door and stretched out behind a pile of tires. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out a silhouetted statuary of gas-powered gardening gizmos—a leaf-blower, a weed-whacker, a tiller with its tines plugged by ancient sod. Evidence of a fitful enthusiasm. The toys were no doubt purchased after a great deal of care and comparison shopping, used a couple of times, and left to gather dust. He inhaled the familiar smells of decaying tire rubber, motor oil, and tried to make himself comfortable. He would stay here until his clothes dried.

There were too many places he could have gone to make it rational for the retrieval team to stay in place, especially after the burst of gunfire and the unwanted attention it would attract. The team would disperse until the next sighting. Belknap simply had to stay still for the next six hours, with no companion but the pain, which assaulted him like a violent, whole-body toothache. Still, nothing was broken, nothing torn. Time would heal the bruising, and, as Belknap reviewed what had happened, he knew that the physical agony would be overtaken by the one thing that had always proved its equal: rage.

Los Angeles

“I'm sorry, sir,” said the burly black-clad man standing at the velvet ropes in front of the ultra-hip nightclub on Sunset Boulevard near Larrabee Street. He combined the functions of doorman and bouncer. “There's a private party tonight.”

The Cobra Room was the most exclusive club in L.A., and it was his job to ensure that it stayed so. Its main habitués were celebrities and the very rich. The presence of gawkers, hangers-on, and wannabes could quickly make the environment uncomfortable for the clientele. The hulking doorman spent most of the evening repeating, with firm politeness, variations on the standard formula: a private function, no admittance. Only people who won the approval of his discerning gaze would be allowed in, whisked past the crowds of failed supplicants, and they were very much the exception.

“I'm sorry, miss,” the man said. “Private function tonight. Can't let you in.” And: “I'm sorry, sir. Private party. No admissions.”

“But I'm meeting a friend,” the would-be entrants pleaded, as if this ploy wasn't trotted out dozens of times each evening.

A brisk headshake. “I'm sorry. No exceptions.”

A bleached blonde with a low-cut dress and knockoff Jimmy Choos dug through a tiny black purse, trying to get in with a tip. “Thank you, no, ma'am,” the doorman preempted her. The hair was obviously a do-it-yourself job; a good salon would have produced more natural-looking results. “You need to move along.”

The man who called himself Mr. Jones observed the activities at the Cobra Room door for half an hour, from the tinted glass of a town car parked on the other side of the street and further down the
block. Mr. Smith, his companion, had already prepared the ground for him. He glanced at his watch. He was wearing black thin-wale corduroys, a ribbed cotton sweater from Helmut Lang, a silk zippered jacket, vintage black sneakers. The costume—typical of the dressed-down yet lavishly expensive garb of L.A.'s glitterati—would not do the trick by itself, but it would not count against him. He had the driver drive around the block and pull up just in front of the Cobra Room. Then he donned a pair of Oakleys and walked casually toward the door.

The doorman's wide-spaced eyes missed little, but this was clearly a tough call. Suddenly, the blonde darted over to Mr. Jones.

“Omigod, you're Trevor Avery!” she squeaked. “I've got to tell my girlfriends. We just
love
you.” She started to grip the man in the Helmut Lang sweater, clasping his arms in squealing excitement. “Stay here for a sec! Please, oh, please!”

“Ma'am,” the doorman said in a warning tone.

“Don't you watch
Venice Beach
?” she asked the doorman, referring to a television show popular among teenagers.

“No, I don't,” the doorman said sternly.

“
Please
, couldn't you take a picture of us together with my cell-phone cam? That would be
soooo
awesome!”

Mr. Jones turned to the doorman. “Hate when this happens,” he muttered.

“Step right in, sir,” the burly man said, unhooking the velvet rope from a brass stanchion and smiling at his new guest. The decision had become easy. “
You
, ma'am”—a stare that would freeze meat—“need to move along. Now. Like I said, it's a private function.”

The blonde sullenly retreated, opening her little purse and no doubt fingering the hundred-dollar bill that Mr. Smith had slipped her.

Mr. Jones was in. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting inside, he saw the L.A. developer Eli Little at one of the black vinyl booths. His white hair gleamed under the blood-red track lights. With him was a young film director who had just won a Sundance
prize, an old-school studio exec, a big-time music mogul, and an actress who had her own HBO series. The rumors that connected the developer to organized crime made him only more alluring to Hollywood folk, who were fascinated by anything that savored of the dark side.

Mr. Jones looked genial as he crossed the small lounge space to get a better look at his target. The developer, who was usually protected by a veritable cordon of security, was expansive in his gestures, relaxed, and very comfortable, like a fish in its own aquarium.

He had no idea that a shark had just entered the tank.

Lower Manhattan, New York

Andrea Bancroft sat at the diner sipping at the third cup of the dishwater-weak coffee that was grudgingly sloshed from the Pyrex carafe. She kept her eyes peeled on the sidewalk. Aside from the diner's signage—the swooping Greengrove Diner logo; an open plastic-laminated menu taped to one side of the door—it was easy to see through the plate glass. This wasn't a place she would have selected for privacy, but Belknap had his own ways.

She was rattled; there was no way to hide it. She was entering another world. A world of ruses and snares, a world where guns were casually drawn and casually fired. A world where life was cheap and truths were costly. She noticed that she was clutching her coffee cup with a white-knuckled grip.
Keep it together
, she urged herself.
Keep it together.
It was Belknap's world, and he knew how to function there. But it was not her world.

Or was it?

Uncertainty and fear battered at her like ocean waves against a pier. Could she trust Belknap? Could she afford not to? She remembered the way he had inserted himself between her and the gunman, rescuing her with his actions and his words. Yet he was the one they
were after—and why was that? His answers had been maddeningly vague, but amounted to the claim that he had been set up. Which was what suspects always maintained. She had no reason to believe him. But for some reason, she did.

And what about Paul Bancroft? Could the foundation really be involved with the kidnapping that Belknap was obsessed with? Paul had assured her that the Theta Group's sole purpose was to do good. And for some reason she believed him, too.

“I'm surprised you showed up.” Belknap's voice.

She turned around, and saw that he had slipped into the banquette next to her. “You mean, after all the fun times we had together?” Her words were sarcastic, but her heart wasn't in it.

“Something like that.” He shrugged. “How long have you been nursing that cuppa joe?”

“Nursing? I'd say the coffee was definitely beyond resuscitation.” She took another sip. “I didn't see you come in.”

Belknap head-pointed toward the back, the employees-only door. “I'm hoping nobody else did, either.” His tone was impassive, almost smug, and yet Andrea could tell that he was keyed up; his eyes darted around the place, swept across the sidewalk outside, roamed across the other table and banquettes inside.
God sees the little sparrow fall
: The words of the old spiritual came to her. She had an idea that he would see the little sparrow fall, too.

“What happened at the hotel—I'm sorry, I can't even wrap my mind around it.” She wanted to add,
Thank God you're all right,
but held back. She did not know why.

“The hotel reservations were under a certified field name,” Belknap said in his low, gruff voice. He was wearing a knit polo shirt, olive-green, and she could see the outlines of his heavy muscles beneath the fabric. “A field legend. Protects you from your enemies who come from the outside world. It doesn't protect you from your enemies
inside
the agency. This was an official Consular Operations retrieval team.”

Another sip of the hot, flavorless fluid. “That guy in the back of the hotel. I really thought he'd shoot me. People like that…” She shook her head.

“A special-access-program operative. S.A.P. is way beyond the usual security classifications. S.A.P. means nothing leaks beyond the immediate players. With some S.A.P.s, there could be five or six people in the entire government who know about it.”

“This includes the president?”

“Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.”

“So those are the kinds of trigger-happy brutes you're up against. I guess I'm starting to have some sympathy for you.”

Belknap shook his head. “Maybe you shouldn't. You saw some S.A.P. brutes in action, and you were appalled.”

“Damn right,” she put in sharply.

“Whereas the fact is I'm one of them myself. Just not right now.”

“But—”

“It's best that you know exactly what I am. I've done what they were doing. I could have been any one of them.”

“Which raises an obvious question. If your own colleagues don't trust you, why the hell should I?”

“I never said they didn't trust me.” His slate eyes appeared almost guileless. “Their job was to hogtie me and put me into a cage. That doesn't mean they've decided I'm untrustworthy. For all they know, maybe it's because I'm
too
trustworthy. They're not the ones who make the decisions. They're the ones who carry out the decisions. I've got no hard feelings toward them. Like I say, I've
been
them. Only difference is, I'd probably have done the tracking solo. Possibly the capture, too. And I've have done it right.”

“Tracking?”

“It's what I do, Andrea. I find people. Usually people who don't want to be found.”

“You good at it?”

“Probably the best,” he said. There was nothing boastful about the
way he said it. He could have been reporting his height or date of birth.

“Your colleagues share that assessment.”

He nodded. “They call me the Hound. Like I say, it's what I do.”

A wave of cheap drugstore fragrance announced the arrival of the waitress. Strawberry-haired and slender, except for her pointing, melon-heavy breasts; the shirt of her uniform was open to the third button. “What would you like?” she asked him.

“Benny in the back?”

“Yup.”

“Ask him to make the thing he does with the French toast stuffed with mascarpone,” Belknap said.

“Oh, that's
fantastic
,” the waitress shrilled. “I've had that. I'll ask him, okay?”

“You do that,” Belknap told her, winking. “We'll have two.” Then he spoke to her in a low voice. Andrea couldn't make it all out—something about a guy he was trying to avoid, about how she could do him a solid.

“I'll keep an eye out,” she returned in a low voice, and winked. Her tongue was coral-pink in the corner of her mouth, like a sugar rosebud on a cupcake.

“You have a gift for making friends,” Andrea said, surprised that she sounded slightly nettled when she spoke. She couldn't have been jealous, could she?

“We don't have a lot of time,” Belknap said. His eyes seemed to linger on the waitress, but when he turned to her, he was all business. For some reason, Andrea felt disappointed. Quietly she relayed her experiences of the previous day. The muscled operative listened without expression. Only when she told him about the phone call to Dubai did he lift an eyebrow.

“So what's your explanation?” Andrea asked. “What's to say you're not full of shit?”

“A trunk-line redirect. If they've got access to the ISDN comput
ers, it would take all of thirty seconds. How much time elapsed between when you gave them the number and when you placed the call?”

“Longer than that,” Andrea allowed. “Christ, I don't know what to think. It isn't as if I have any better reasons for believing your story.”

“It happens to be true.”

“So you say.” She looked down, peering into her coffee cup as if it contained secrets. “And what he told me about my mother—it's perfectly possible. More plausible than the alternatives, rationally speaking. What haunts me is, what if he's right, and all I'm doing is shadowboxing with figments of my own imagination? I don't even know what I'm doing here with you.”

Belknap nodded. “You shouldn't be. Rationally speaking.”

“Then you agree.”

“You've been given good, solid, well-crafted explanations. Why not take them at face value? Believe everything they told you and live a long, happy life. Buy that loft in Tribeca you told me about. You ought to be talking to an interior designer right now, talking about swatches and samples. Instead you're talking to me.” He leaned forward. “Why do you think that is?”

Andrea felt a prickling on her face. Her mouth was dry.

“Because,” Belknap pressed, “you didn't
believe
him.”

She took a sip from her glass of ice water, and the sip turned into a long gulp. The glass was empty when she put it down.

“There's something we've got in common. A second sense for when things only
seem
to add up. They gave you a sound, orderly explanation. But somehow it didn't wash with you. You're not sure what's wrong with it. You're just sure that something is.”

“Please don't pretend you know me.”

“I'm just saying. A lot of true things are unreasonable. You know this. Someone tried to give you a logical explanation of what had been preying on your mind. And the fact is that, on some intuitive
level, you're still not convinced. Because otherwise you wouldn't be here, drinking the worst coffee in lower Manhattan.”

“Maybe,” she replied shakily. “Or maybe I was feeling grateful.”

“You know better than that. If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't have needed rescuing in the first place.”

Andrea studied Belknap's face, tried to imagine how he would look to her if they were meeting for the first time. She would see someone who was ruggedly handsome, strapping, and, yes, intimidating. His dense, heavy muscles weren't the kind produced by a health-club membership; they weren't toned, they were knotted, muscles for work, not for display. And there was something else about him, too: the willed control of someone who could, if he chose, go out of control. A brute? Yes, in some sense. But more than a brute. There was something forceful about his very personality.