The Bancroft Strategy (36 page)

“It fills us with pride,” Pärt replied automatically.

“I'm devoted to other Estonian traditions as well,” Belknap said quickly. “I'm afraid I'm not here strictly due to my amateur interests. You understand. It is the nature of Grinnell's operations. Unpredictable, sudden demands. They arrive with little notice and the company's directors, like myself, must scurry to cope with them.”

“I only wish I could be of service.”

Belknap's smile was almost tender. “Perhaps you can be.”

 

After two hours of perusing small type, Andrea's eyes were becoming hot and scratchy, and her head was starting to throb. Battling midafternoon fatigue, she had jotted down several columns of digit and dates on a small piece of paper. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe it
meant something. She had to go on instinct at this point, do more research when she returned to planet Earth. She checked the time, and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to track down the archives from the April when her mother died.
The cruelest month
. Well,
her
cruelest month, anyway.

The archived corporate records contained nothing that made reference to it. She leaned against the shelves, scanning the black plastic clad boxes of the bank opposite, lost in thought. There was a movement in her peripheral vision, and she turned to see an electric cart driving toward her at top speed.
Aren't they supposed to beep?
she wondered fleetingly, as adrenaline pulsed through her and she stepped out of its path.

Yet the cart now veered, tracking her movement. It was—
impossible!
—as if the driver
wanted
to hit her. She let out a shriek as she realized that the man on the cart was wearing a motorcycle helmet with a full tinted visor and face-shield. She could see only a reflection of herself when she looked at her, and somehow the image of her own terror just compounded it. At the last moment, she leaped up, sprang as high as she could with all the strength she had, and then, gripping a high shelf, pulled herself up and out of harm's way.
Oh, dear Lord!

The cart skidded to halt, and the man on it swiftly dismounted. Now Andrea raced down the end of the bank of shelves, turned left, and plunged down another long corridor. The maze of shelving would conceal her, wouldn't it? She ran down another corridor and made a series of erratic turns that took her deeper into the vast, dimly lighted space. She ran, her knees pumping high into the air, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking against the concrete flooring only occasionally. Finally, winded, she slid to the floor behind a support pillar at row K, rank L, and—
dammit
—suddenly a bank of halogens sparked on, flooding the section with light. She might as well have put a homing beacon on her head. The badge—the security badge—was designed to turn on the lights wherever she went. Listening carefully, she
could hear the soft whine of the electric cart: The man in the helmet had to have been motoring after her.

She heard footfalls, perhaps twenty feet away. Someone else, then. She craned her head, caught a glimpse of another figure, dressed in paramilitary garb, obviously armed. Not here to help her. It was a difficult Gestalt shift; for her entire life, men with guns—policemen, usually—had been on
her
side. They worked for her. She realized this was not everyone's experience of the world, but it was hers. Now they were working against her, and the realization clashed with so many of her settled assumptions. The badge. She gripped it, tugged on its lanyard. The badge was betraying her. She had to leave it behind. Or was there a way to enlist it?

With a sudden burst of speed, she darted down the end of the row and zigzagged across a few sections. She was now somewhere in P rank. She hid her badge inside a document-storage box and, just as the halogens blazed, she climbed up to the very top shelf, scuttled over a long row of metal canisters, the kind that held film or magnetic tape, and kept moving until she was at the other end of the row, where the reading lights remained dark. Had she been quiet enough? She stretched herself out on the top shelf, invisible, or so she hoped. Then she pulled out one of the heavy canisters so that she would have an angle of vision on what was happening on the floor, twelve feet beneath her.

The man in the paramilitary garb arrived first. Not seeing her, he darted to the aisles to either side. With a look of frustration, he returned to the lighted section, scanning the shelves, looking either for her or for her badge. Then he spoke into a handy-talkie.

“Bitch ditched the badge,” he said in a voice like gravel. “A goddamned risky strategy. We have kill clearance yet from Theta?”

As he spoke, he walked further down the P-rank aisle, closer to Andrea. Timing was everything. Now she held the heavy steel canister in both hands, waiting for the shadowy figure to get to the spot she was visualizing on the floor beneath her, and—
now!
—she let it drop.

She heard the man's strangled yelp, then peered down to see him sprawled on the ground, the steel canister lying awkwardly on his skull.

Oh, Christ what have you done, Andrea? Oh, Christ!

A surge of nausea and revulsion rippled through her. This wasn't her world. This was not what she did, not who she was.

But if her assailants thought she would not resist with every fiber of her being, they had underestimated her.
We have kill clearance yet?
The words returned like an arctic wind.

A fist of rage hammered in her chest.
No, asshole, but
I
have.

She swung down, like a child on a jungle gym, and fell on the slain man. There was a gun holstered on his belt. The sides were flat, not curved, so it was probably a pistol. She grabbed it and, by the light of the distant halogens, examined it.

She had never held a handgun before. How hard could it be, though? She knew which was the business end, and that was a start, wasn't it? She knew that rap artists in music videos liked to hold their guns sideways, though she couldn't imagine how that made any difference to a bullet's trajectory. She had seen too many movies where a gun didn't go off because someone didn't know about the safety. Did the gun have a safety? Was it even loaded?

Dammit. It didn't come with handy instructions printed on the handle, and she didn't have time to read anyway. The truth is, she had no idea what would happen if she squeezed the trigger. Maybe nothing. Maybe it needed to be cocked or something. But maybe the guy had left it in point-and-shoot mode.

One or the other. Probably the gun would do her more harm than good. The guy in the polarized-glass helmet would hear her squeeze the trigger, and nothing would happen, and he'd take her out. She scampered to the end of the bank of shelves and watched as the helmeted man raced over in the electric cart.

Then the man surprised her, getting out of the cart, stepping behind a pillar and—
where was he
?

Half a minute passed; still no sign of the man. She curled up on the lower shelf, concealing herself as best she could, and simply listened.

Then she heard him, and slowly craned her head. Her stomach dropped: The man had found her. He was walking toward her slowly. She remained stock-still, feeling like a frog that did not know it had been spotted.

“Come to papa,” the man said, walking slowly toward her. He held a black plastic device; electricity arced from one end of it menacingly. Some sort of stun gun, or Taser. He tossed a pair of plastic handcuffs at her. “Here, you can put the cuffs on yourself. Make things easy for you.”

Andrea still didn't move.

“I can see you, you know,” the visored man said almost playfully. “There's nobody else here. Just you and me. And I'm not in any great rush.” The electric wand arced and sparked as he strode closer to her. With his other hand, he loosened his leather belt, began massaging his crotch. “Hey, baby. Boss says it's all about the greatest pleasure.” He took a few steps closer to her. “Yo bitch, why don't you maximize
my
pleasure today?”

She squeezed the trigger without thinking, was shocked at the loudness of the report. The man in the visor stopped walking, but he did not fall to the ground or make a noise. Had she missed?

She squeezed the trigger again, and again. The third round shattered the man's face-shield, and he finally fell backward in a heap.

Andrea clambered down to the floor, standing on wobbling legs. She walked over to the man she had shot. She recognized him, recognized the bat-wing eyebrows, the blotchy skin. He was one of the men who had taken her from her car at the Research Triangle Park.
We have kill clearance yet?
A shudder ran through her entire body. Then she saw the lifeless eyes of the man at her feet, and she suddenly doubled over and retched, the hot acid contents of her stomach streaming from her mouth, splashing on the man's face, and, when she saw what had happened, she retched again.

A beefy arm reached around the Estonian minister's shoulders. “Andrus!” boomed an overly hearty voice. A heavyset, boisterous man with an unshaveable beard shadow. His breath had the anise smell of a popular Estonian schnapps. “Come meet Stephanie Berger. She's from Polygram. Very interested in the prospects of setting up a studio in Tallinn. Perhaps a distribution center, even.” He addressed the deputy minister in English out of deference to his English-speaking interloper.

Andrus Pärt turned to Belknap with an apologetic look. “This is unfortunate. You should have told me you were visiting Estonia.”

“My colleagues, on the contrary, think it's very fortunate. That I happened to be in Tallinn when the crisis arose. Fortunate for us, that is.” He lowered his voice. “Perhaps fortunate for you?”

The deputy minister gave him a curious, unsettled look. “I will be right back, Roger…”

“Delamain,” Belknap said.

He drifted toward a long table draped in white lace, where servants busily took and fulfilled beverage requests, but he kept Andrus Pärt in the corner of his eye. The deputy minister listened to the woman with head nods and flashes of porcelain teeth. He clasped the upper arm of the boisterous man—a businessman, no doubt, and probably one of the underwriters of the affair—and made we'll-continue-this-conversation-soon gestures. But he did not circle back immediately, Belknap observed. Instead, reaching for a cell phone, he disappeared into an adjoining room. When he returned, a few minutes later, he was decidedly more upbeat than before.

“Roger Delamain,” he said, giving the name a French pronunciation. “Thank you for your patience.”

So he had made brief inquiries, had at least asked an aide to verify the name and its connection to the global security firm Grinnell International. “Either pronunciation is fine with me,” Belknap replied.
“Among Anglophones, I pronounce it one way, and I knew you spoke English. Among French speakers, the French way. I'm highly adaptable, just like my company. Our clients have their own demands. If you're protecting an oil refinery, one set of skills is required. If it's a presidential palace, quite another face must be displayed. Alas, in a world with so much instability, we find our services in ever greater demand.”

“They say that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

“That's almost exactly what we told the Cuprex Mining Company when they woke up and found that their African copper mines were being threatened by a murderous insurrection led by the Lord's Resistance Army. Eternal vigilance, and twelve million dollars plus direct expenses:
That's
the price of freedom, on an annualized basis.”

“And a bargain, I'm sure.” The deputy minister grabbed a small canapé from a silver tray that seemed to float through the crowd.

“It's why I wished to speak to you, to be candid. I speak to you informally, this is understood, yes? I do not come as a registered agent of any company.”

“We are standing together at a reception, eating small triangles of cured meat on toast. What could be more informal?”

“I knew we should get along,” Belknap said conspiratorially. “What we seek to fulfill is a
substantial
order for small arms.”

“Surely Grinnell has its regular supplier.” Pärt was scrutinizing the bait.

“Regular suppliers do not always suffice for irregular demands. There are some who say I am given to understatement. I like to think I am only precise. When I say ‘substantial,' I mean…enough to equip five thousand men, and fully.”

The deputy minister blinked. “Our entire army consists of fifteen thousand men.”

“Then you see the problem.”

“And this is to protect, what—installations, mines?” Black brows knitted in frank disbelief.

Belknap returned his curious, penetrative gaze with a bland one. “Minister Pärt, if you ever entrust me with a secret, you should feel confident that I will never divulge it. I speak institutionally as well as personally. One cannot prosper in the security business without earning a reputation for trustworthiness and discretion. I understand that you have questions. I hope you will not think ill of me if I decline to answer them.”