The Bancroft Strategy (38 page)

“Our geopolitical analysts are quite clear about this. In situations of non-eliminationist civil war,” Bancroft said, “a swift and decisive victory by one side is nearly always preferable, from a humanitarian point of view, to protracted conflict.”

“It hardly matters which side. Getting bogged down in the supposed grievances and aggressions—the you-started-it crap—is a huge mistake. Now we'll be able to run the numbers, pick a winner, and guarantee the optimal outcome. Think how crazy it is that the Ansari network was able to prop up these mountain tribes in Burma. Small arms, second-rate artillery, paid for by drug money. For years, it kept them at war with the Myanmar government. Like they ever really had a chance. That's wrong. Wrong for the tribe. Wrong for the country. Nobody likes a repressive authoritarian regime, but longstanding conflict is even worse. Then, once the military has stabilized the social order, we can get to work on engineering the regime so that it's less repressive and takes better care of its citizenry.”

“You're saying that the rebels' Ansari contacts are going to switch sides?” Liebman asked.

“Who knows more about the weaponry caches of the Wa people or the Karenni than their former suppliers? Who knows more about how
the guerilla militias are organized? We're giving the Myanmar generals a trove of intelligence—and a shipment of NATO-grade weaponry. Overwhelming force is key. And before you know it, you get peace through pacification. From a global perspective, the age of rebellion is about to be over.”

“Unless it's a rebellion
we
sanction,” Liebman prodded.

“Toppling a regime by open warfare is always going to be a last resort,” Collingwood said, nodding vigorously. “But if it comes to it, sure. It's an option. And our roll-up of the major networks isn't by any means finished. Of course, the Ansari acquisition gives Theta more
direct
benefits as well. At the end of the day, do-gooders also have to do what it takes to protect themselves.” He turned to Bancroft. “You'd agree with that, wouldn't you?”

“The quills of the porcupine,” Bancroft said.

“When threats to our own security arise, abroad or at home, we deal with them.”

“As best we can,” the aging savant agreed.

Collingwood traded glances with Burgess and then Tracy. He took a deep breath. “Then, Paul, we need to talk about Andrea.”

“I see.”

“Paul, you're too close to the situation. Forgive me for speaking bluntly. But there are decisions to be made here. You need to leave them to the professionals on the ground. She's become a problem. When she went to Rosendale, she crossed a line. You thought she'd listen to reason. Now we know that you overestimated her.”

“Or, from another point of view, underestimated her.” There was something veiled in Bancroft's tone.

“Your judgment was colored.”

“You always like to think the best of people,” Tracy said. “Which is a great starting assumption. But you've also taught us that we shouldn't resist changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence.”

Through the filtered light, Bancroft suddenly looked years older
than he usually did. “You want me to delegate a case involving my own cousin?”

“Precisely because she
is
your own cousin,” Tracy said.

Bancroft stared into the middle distance. “I don't know what to say.” Had she imagined it, or was there a tremble in the philosopher's voice? When he turned back to face the others, he looked ashen.

“Then don't say anything,” Burgess said, in a gingerly tone of both respect and solicitude. “You've trained us well. Allow us to shoulder some of the responsibility here. Leave this case in our hands.”

“Like you always say,” Collingwood put in, “doing the right thing isn't always easy.”

“Weathering the goddamn Kirk Commission isn't going to be a cakewalk, either,” Tracy put in.

“You're too young to remember the Church Committee hearings,” an older man at the table, Herman Liebman, told her. “Paul and I do. These things run in cycles.”

“So do monsoons,” Collingwood said heavily. “A historical perspective's not much use if you're in the path of the storm.”

“A fair point,” Bancroft agreed. His eyes narrowed. “Knowledge is power. Goodness knows we've turned over enough rocks from the senator's past. What squirmy things have we found?”

Collingwood turned to John Burgess and gave him a you-tell-him look.

“Not enough,” Burgess, the former Kroll Associates investigator, said with a twitch of a smile. “For our purposes, we'd need something big, and we're not coming up with it. Frankly, what we have wouldn't make the front page of the
South Bend Tribune.
Favors for major donors? Sure. But it's pretty much what politicians call constituency service. Illegal donations? Not really—he's stood for office four times, against some decently funded opponents. One made that accusation more than a dozen years ago, but the details were so complicated that the legal experts couldn't agree whether it was outside the lines or not.
Separate donations from companies where CALPERS, the California public employees retirement fund, held a plurality of shares. If the two companies are really units of a single company, then the donation is in excess of the legal limit.” A wan smile. “A reporter asked Bennett Kirk about the charge at a press conference. Kirk said, ‘Sorry, could you explain it to me one more time?' and everybody cracked up. That was the end of that scandal. Otherwise? He may have had a sexual encounter with a waitress in Reno twenty years ago, but the woman in question has denied it up and down, and even if she didn't, I don't know that it would get media pickup. The journalists have put a halo on this guy. At this point, you'd have to prove that he molested every last kid in the Harlem Boys' Choir to get any traction.”

“Can't be brought, either,” Collingwood said in his fluting voice. “I mean, you already know about the medical condition. He's kept it secret, but if it got out, it would only bring a wave of public sympathy. Meanwhile, he's got his eyes on posterity. He knows he's not going to be alive to run again, but he'll be around and functioning long enough to make a heap of trouble for us.”

“It's like the Samson effect,” Burgess added. “The illness doesn't help us. He's in good enough shape that he just might collapse the pillars and bring down the goddamn temple.”

“You say knowledge is power.” Collingwood gave Bancroft a meaningful look. “The trouble, of course, is what the Kirk Commission knows. Somehow the senator has gained information that he just shouldn't have. That's what makes him a real threat to our entire enterprise.”

“And we still have no clue how?” Bancroft's gaze was attentive but not anxious.

Collingwood shrugged.

Gina Tracy looked impatient. “I still don't get why we can't just remove Senator Kirk. Accelerate the inevitable. Take the thorn out of our paw.”

Bancroft shook his head gravely. “You plainly haven't thought it through.”

“Can you imagine the storm of controversy and attention?” Collingwood shot her a reproving look. “Might prove more dangerous than the committee itself.”

“But we're the goddamn Theta Group,” the black-haired woman persisted. “Theta as in
thanatos.
” She glanced at Burgess. “Greek for death, right?”

“I'm aware of this, Gina,” said Burgess. “But the same risk-assessment procedures that apply elsewhere in the world apply here, too.”

Tracy gave Bancroft a petitioning look. “There's got to be
something
we can do.”

“Rest assured that I shall not have the work of the Theta Group derailed by a cornhusking pol from Indiana,” Bancroft told her. “You can be certain of this. The Theta Group must continue to be the arrowhead of benevolence.”

“Extreme philanthropy,” Burgess half-chuckled. “Like extreme sports.”

“Please don't make a joke of my life's work.” Bancroft spoke softly, but with a chastening look.

A long moment of silence was broken by the sound of apprehensive voices from the communications center on the level below. Then a pasty-faced man mounted the spiral staircase and greeted the senior managers with a grim expression. “There's been another message from Genesis.”

“Another one?” Tracy asked, crestfallen.

The man from the communications center handed a sheet to Paul Bancroft. To the others, he said, “The guys downstairs take this seriously.”

Bancroft looked at the sheet briefly, his eyes widening. Wordlessly, he passed the sheet to Collingwood.

“I don't like this,” Collingwood said softly, his anxiety undisguised. “What do you think, Paul?”

The philosopher had a look of intense focus. A stranger would take him to be reflective rather than fearful; the others knew that was his way in the face of crisis.

“Well, my friends, it would appear that we have larger worries to contend with,” Bancroft said at last. “Genesis is escalating the threat level.”

“We'll follow the relocation protocol,” said Collingwood, studying the communication. “Suspend the operation here for the moment, shift over to one of the other facilities. Maybe the one near Butler, Pennsylvania. We can do it seamlessly, overnight.”

“I hate the idea that we're running scared, though,” said Liebman.

“We're in this for the long haul, Herm,” said Bancroft. “Short-term inconveniences for the sake of long-term security are of no great moment.”

“Yet why is this happening now?” Liebman asked.

“With the Ansari network under our belts,” Burgess told the elderly analyst, “there will be absolutely no stopping us. We're just at a time of transition. Which means a time of vulnerability. We ride this out, and we'll be unconquerable.”

“The world will be our terrarium,” Collingwood put in.

Liebman still sounded fretful. “But to let Genesis…”

“Inver Brass perished the first time because of overreaching.” Bancroft's voice was mesmerizing in its intensity. He had regained his air of mastery and command. “Genesis will do it again. We just need to make it through the next few days. Genesis
will
be destroyed.”

Liebman looked less sanguine. “Or we will be.”

“Have you become a doubter, like Thomas in the Garden of Gethsemane? Have I lost your confidence?” Bancroft's face was unreadable.

“You've never been wrong about the big things,” said Liebman, stung.

“You're kind to say so,” Bancroft replied icily.

Though Liebman hesitated to speak again, his decades of loyalty and friendship compelled him to address the great man with candor. He cleared his throat. “But, Paul,” he said, “there's always a first time.”

 

When the elevator pinged at the eleventh floor, Belknap stepped out, maintaining the slightly blasé look of the overtired air traveler for whatever cameras might have been installed in the car. Estotek was on the floor below; the eleventh was given over to CeMine. As Gennady had explained, CeMine was a pharmaceutical startup specializing in “bio-marker” research; the aim was to develop bioassays—simple blood tests—that could replace surgical biopsies for certain kinds of cancers. The company boasted that it was based on “strategic cooperation among industry, academia, and government.” Many partners, many pockets.

It was one of three small offices on the floor; Belknap chose it because its work was least sensitive, from the point of view of confidentiality, and therefore would have the lowest level of security. All that stood between him and the CeMine offices was a steel-clad door with a narrow slate of steel-mesh reinforced glass.

After making sure that there was no security camera in the hallway, Belknap moved a narrow tension wrench into the keyway of the latch knob, pushing from the far end in order to maximize sensitivity. Then he thrust the rake pick into the keyway and worked back, dragging the pick so that it pushed against all the tumblers. No go. As he feared, it was a double-sided lock. After he raked the top tumblers, he reversed the pick and raked those on the bottom. Only after another several minutes of intense, agonizing concentration did the latch retract and the door swing open.

No alarms. As he anticipated, the offices, which housed the company's finance and legal department, relied upon the building's security. Break-ins were rare in such settings. Ordinary precautions would suffice.

Belknap closed the door behind him. The office suite was dimly lit from fluorescent strips inset along the inner walls, the emergency lighting that building codes around the world required. He let his eyes adjust and walked through the space carefully, flashing a penlight around. The workplaces were mainly open-plan, save for a few enclosed offices at the windows. The carpeting was gray with a large diamond pattern. After a few minutes of inspection, he chose an area where a computer and telephone console was plugged into the floor. As with most office buildings constructed in the past decade or so, the subflooring held a weave of optical and coaxial cables. What were called carpet tiles, usually about two feet by two, were now commonplace, and he was not surprised to find them here; the floor panels could be lifted up for easy access to the wiring below. He lay on the floor and lifted up the carpet tile adjacent to the plug cluster. Flanging the tiles from below was a steel grid, and beneath the steel grid was the wiring. But how many feet of space was there between floors? Removing a crowbar from his Gladstone bag, he began prying up tiles, swiftly, quietly.

Then he pushed down a small fiber-optic camera. On the other end, it plugged into a digital camera, and displayed a flickering image on the flat-screen viewfinder. The snake camera, which produced a standard RCA output, was a mere quarter-inch in diameter and had a sixty-degree field of vision. It was four yards of black-clad cable attached to a small black case of electronics, where a small endocoupler converted the light from thousands of tiny fibers into a unified image. A small xenon light in the terminal cuff provided illumination as the snake cam made its way beneath the “floating” floor. He pushed the wire further and further, snaking around obstacles, until it ran into a white irregular surface. The acoustic tiles of the ceiling below.