The Bancroft Strategy (41 page)

The flight from Tallinn to Larnaca International Airport, in Cyprus, was uneventful; the storms preceded it. Calvin Garth had not been pleased when Belknap told him that he needed to make use of the chartered jet—there were flight plans to be filed, logistics to be accounted for—but finally relented. A version of old-school ties. Gennady Chakvetadze, after no little grousing of his own, had taken care of the paperwork. He retained his contacts within the Estonian ministry of transport; the impossible was made possible.

The darker storm clouds accompanied the conversation with Andrea Bancroft.

“I don't want to talk about it right now,” she told him when he asked about her visit to the Rosendale facility. “There's stuff I'm still processing.” There was something in her voice that disturbed him, some sense of a trauma undisclosed.

He debated telling her about Jared, about his fears, but held back. That was his problem; he would not make it hers. He did tell her about Nikos Stavros; here, he knew, her experience with corporate due diligence would be helpful. She rang off and called him back ten minutes later, with a swift précis of the man's holdings and recent activities, at least according to the available business records.

Once more, though, the brittleness of her tone alarmed him. “About the archives in Rosendale,” he began again, “at least tell me this. Does the foundation have any Estonian holdings?”

“Some infant-morality, prenatal-care programs in the early nineties. That's about it.”

“Suspiciously little?”

“Non-suspiciously little. On par with Latvia and Lithuania. Sorry.”

“Anything else raise a flag?”

“I told you, I'm still processing…” This time there was a quaver in her voice, he was certain of it.

“Andrea, what happened?”

“I just…I need to see you.”

“I'll be back before too long.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You said you're flying to Cyprus, right? Larnaca? Kennedy has direct flights there.”

“You don't know what risks you'd be running.”

“I'll be careful. I've
been
careful. I used my credit card to book a flight out of Newark to San Francisco, assuming the account's being monitored. Then I got a friend to book two seats on a flight to Paris, JFK to Orly, using his card, with me as the fellow passenger. My name will show up on the flight manifest but not in the financials. And it gets me into the same international terminal as my flight to Larnaca—a flight that's not going to be fully booked. Forty minutes before the jet to Larnaca departs, I'll just show up at the counter with my passport and cash and buy a ticket. People make last-minute trips all the time—death in the family, urgent business meetings, whatever.” She paused. “I'm just saying, I've thought this through. I can do this. And I'm going to.”

“Dammit, Andrea. It's not
safe.
” If his worries about Jared Rinehart were borne out, he brooded, no place was safe for him. “Larnaca especially. You're barging into a realm where you don't belong.”

“Tell me where I
do
belong. Tell me where it
is
safe. Because I'd like to know.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I am flying to meet you whether you like it or not.”

“Please, Andrea,” he protested, “be reasonable.” The wrong words to use, for her and for him.

“I'll see you tomorrow afternoon,” she told him, and he could hear the finality in her voice.

The prospect of seeing her gladdened him and frightened him. She was an amateur; and Larnaca—
his
Larnaca—could easily turn into a killing field, especially if he was going to be confronting Genesis. The thought of harm coming to her chilled him.
If I didn't know better, Castor, I'd say you were bad luck.

Reclining in his seat, Belknap let the eddies and whirlwinds swirl through the landscape of his mind.

Nikos Stavros. In the rare interviews he had given, he spoke of having enlisted in the Cypriot merchant marines out of high school, and described his father as a hardworking fisherman. He spoke vividly about fishing on a moonless night, shining a five-hundred-watt lamp at the water and attracting a school of mackerels that he would throw a net around. What he tended not to mention was that his father owned the largest fleet of fishing vessels in Cyprus. Nor did he dwell on the fact that his company, Stavros Maritime, made much of its income by ferrying crude for the major oil companies. What distinguished him from competitors with larger fleets was a gift for anticipating the spot market in oil. His tankers could ferry twenty-five million barrels of crude at any time, the value of the cargo varying wildly depending on the fluctuations of the commodities market and the vagaries of OPEC. Stavros was generally credited with a remarkable acuity in predicting those chaotic fluctuations; his fortunes had risen through an acumen usually associated with the canniest Wall Street traders. His own net worth was unknown; he was believed to have extensive holdings, but hidden within a battery of private and unreported partnerships. It was all very suggestive: but of what?

If you were wrong about Jared Rinehart, what else were you wrong about?
The question seared him. Maybe his life's journey had been no journey at all, but a manipulated march through a labyrinth of deception. His sense of resolve, his sense of himself, had been compromised beyond retrieval, so it seemed to him. Rage at what had befallen Jared had been his soul's own sustenance: He had put
himself in harm's way for Jared; would, indeed, have given his life for his.

And now?

For all he knew, Jared Rinehart was himself Genesis. Hadn't he been in all the right places? The guile, the stealth, the mastery of machination—all these traits equipped him for the role. He had declined promotions that would have taken him out of the field, reduced his mobility, compromised his ability to travel freely. And all the while he was constructing a shadowy realm of terror.

A shadowland that encompasses the globe.
Yet its creator would remain anonymous, never glimpsed, never sighted, never recognized.
Like the dark side of the moon.

Was Rinehart capable of such enormities? Belknap's very soul rebelled at the possibility. Yet he could not rule it out.

As Belknap reclined in a fuguelike state, images and information and uncertainties swirled through his mind in a dust storm of data, until he heard the hydraulic whine of the plane's landing gear. He had arrived.

The Republic of Cyprus, a third the size of Massachusetts, held an outsized fascination for the contending powers that had divided the island back in 1974. Cyprus was much nearer to Beirut than to Athens, and in more than geographical terms. While the breakaway Turkish polity of Northern Cyprus languished, the Cypriots of the south had created a haven of relative prosperity, nourished by tourism, financial services, and shipping. The Republic of Cyprus, a Greek client state, had six excellent ports and a merchant marine with almost a thousand large container ships, not to mention another thousand that sailed under the flags of foreign nations. Given that the island had twenty airports as well, it was inevitably a transshipment point for heroin between Turkey and Europe, a region where the associated activity of money laundering took place all too freely. It was frequented by American tourists, and, with equal diligence, American DEA agents.

Larnaca was named for a Greek word meaning “sarcophagus”—named after death. It was among the most charmless cities in all of Cyprus. Its streets were laid out in a maze that only a longtime resident could make sense of—and even they could not keep track of the frequent name changes—while Lebanese immigrants huddled in urban squalor in the north of the city. The surrounding land was parched, barren, the local restaurants crowded out by franchises of international chains: KFC, McDonald's, Pizza Hut. It had all the charm of a Bridgeport strip mall set down in a desert. Sand flies made the beaches unappealing for sunbathers. But, past the scrubby salt pines and the long, pencil-like wharfs, its marinas were crowded with yachts and with freighters, and not a few of each were the property of the legendary shipping mogul Nikos Stavros.

After a long delay, aluminum stairs were motored over to the plane, the door opened, and he stepped out into blue-skied morning. Passport control was cursory. He did not dare reuse the Tyler Cooper papers; he had to trust that the papers that Gennady had furnished him were, as the retired spy had assured him, truly uncompromised. So far as he could tell, they were. The taxi ride into town took fifteen minutes. It would take him longer to content himself that he had picked up no unsought companions.

Belknap found himself struggling not to wilt under the strong Cyprus sun, which made everything seem preternaturally bright, and almost disguised the seediness of the city and much of its surrounds. He had seven hours before Andrea's flight would arrive. Much of this time would be spent scouting out Stavros's residence.

Was he being followed? Almost certainly not, he decided. But he would spare no precautions. He spent a full hour darting in and out of the shops and stalls in the old Turkish quarter, changing his wardrobe twice—he put on a couple of cheap kaftans before changing back to a Western tourist's ensemble of guayabera shirt and khaki trousers.

The address he had, 500 Lefkara Avenue, was at once accurate and
curiously uninformative. He finally determined that Nikos Stavros essentially owned a hillside and adjoining beach on the very outskirts of Larnaca. The residence overlooked the sea, and was little less than a citadel. The walls were vast, unscalable, and wire-topped, with security cameras mounted every ten yards; even from the sea, a series of buoys hinted at precautions like flat-nets and perimeter cable. A bomb dropped from the air could shake the place. Other than that, however, it would be difficult indeed to penetrate.

From the nearest hillside, a sandy, scrubby elevation, he could make out the dazzling emerald turf, obviously the product of intensive irrigation. The house was a vast three-story Levantine mansion of white stucco with elaborate balconies and gables, the whole structure extending outward into several points, like a vast starfish or a work of sharply folded origami, whose symmetries took a while to detect. Surrounding it was perhaps forty acres of land. Close to the house, he made out elaborate flower gardens, sculpted bushes, a sheltering topiary of cypresses. Through binoculars, Belknap took in the various outbuildings: stables, swimming pool, tennis court. He saw several low hutlike structures, positioned over a berm line, that would have been invisible from the main house: kennels for guard dogs, without a doubt. They would help patrol the place at night, their powerful jaws as deadly as any bullet. Uniformed figures patrolled the perimeter; focusing on them closely, he could see that they carried assault rifles.

He lowered his binoculars, feeling overwhelmed. He recalled what Gennady had said about trail dogs and catch dogs. Was he playing out of position? Had he exceeded the limits of his competence? Even if the technology of surveillance was surmounted, the shipping magnate was protected by an armed brigade. Exhaustion coursed through him.

The situation is hopeless but not serious:
something Jared Rinehart liked to say. Remembering Jared's voice caused something close to physical pain, like regurgitating lye. It could not be true. It had to be
true. It could not be true. It had to be true. A spinning solenoid of doubt and conviction—an alternating current of recognition and denial—was consuming his ebbing powers of concentration.

Why was he even here? For the past nine days he had been consumed with the mission of rescuing Jared Rinehart—or avenging him. He had been propelled by a certainty that had perished the previous evening. Now the Hound was chasing after something else, something hard, inviolable, essential. He was chasing after the truth.

Andrea's voice:
Tell me where it
is
safe.

A shadowland that encompasses the globe.

Nowhere was safe. Nowhere would be safe. Not until Belknap had made it so. Or was killed in the attempt.

The sun was brilliant—noon in the Mediterranean, the sky that inimitable Mediterranean azure—and yet it could all have been inky blackness. Belknap prided himself on seeing through deceptions, yet he had spent much of his life as a victim of one. His belly clutched and cramped. Maybe it was time to admit the futility of his efforts.
And let Genesis have his way?

Out of the pain came a renewed sense of determination. Stavros's estate was ultra-secure. But it surely had at least one weakness. Swirling mists gave way to crystalline clarity, and another line of Jared's:
When there's no way in, try the front door.

Half an hour later, Belknap drove up to the estate in a rented Land Rover; to a pebbly-faced man at the outermost gate he passed on a message that was relayed to another, and another. He and his vehicle were searched, and then waved on through. He parked as directed, on a shaded graveled lot, as tidy and carefully raked as a Japanese sand garden. At the front door, he repeated his message to a manservant in formal attire. It was simple, and it was powerful: “Tell Mr. Stavros that Genesis sent me.”

Once again it proved its efficacy. The manservant, a gaunt man in his sixties with a slightly jaundiced complexion and hollows beneath his brown eyes, did not offer Belknap a drink or issue any other
pleasantries. He spoke English with a vaguely Levantine accent, but his movements were stiff and proper, almost prissy—another residue, perhaps, of the island's colonial past. The foyer had elaborate coffered ceilings of mahogany; intricate wainscoting adorned the coral-hued walls.

“He will see you in the library,” the manservant told him. As the man turned, Belknap caught a fleeting glimpse of a small blued-steel Luger inside his black jacket. He knew he had been meant to see it.