The Bancroft Strategy (45 page)

“Join the world and see the army.” Andrea stretched. “Do we have an operating hypothesis? Let's go over this one more time. Do we think Paul Bancroft is Genesis?”

“What do you think?”

“Paul Bancroft is a brilliant man, a visionary, an idealist—I truly believe that. But also a dangerous man.” She shook her head slowly. “It's the extremity of his vision that makes it monstrous. But what motivates him isn't vanity. It's not a personal lust for power or money.”

“A man tries to impose his system of morality on the rest of the world, I'd say that—”

“But wouldn't we all do that, if we could? Remember what Winston Smith says in Orwell's
1984
: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.'”

“Two plus two equals four. That works.”

“Does it? Is freedom your freedom to assert what
I
believe to be
true? Is it your freedom to do what
I
believe is right? I mean, just think what might follow from that. There are a lot of people who are just as convinced in their moral codes as they are in the fact that two plus two equals four. What if they're wrong?”

“You can't always doubt yourself. Sometimes, Andrea, you've got to be willing to take your own side of an argument.”

“No, Todd, you can't always doubt yourself. I'll give you that. But if someone else is going to define my freedom. I'd rather it be people who weren't completely sure they were always right. Uncertainty can be a discipline. Not in the sense of being rudderless or indecisive, but in the sense of knowing we're not infallible. Of being open to the possibility that our judgments aren't definitive and beyond revising.”

“You're the niece of a big thinker, and you sound like one, too. Maybe
you're
Genesis.”

She snorted. “Please.”

“Assuming it isn't Jared Rinehart,” he added bleakly.

“You really think it could be him?” Andrea's gaze returned to the road, which spooled before them like an endless gray river.

“Maybe.”

“The way you described him running away from you, the way he looked—reminds me of something Paul Bancroft once told me. He said common sense isn't a matter of seeing what's in front of your eyes. It's a matter of seeing what's in front of the other fellow's eyes.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Genesis. You think maybe it's Jared Rinehart.” She turned to face him. “Maybe Jared Rinehart thinks it's you.”

The Comfort Inn, near Washington's downtown convention center on Thirteenth Street, had the familiar green-and-yellow awning projecting from redbrick walls. Belknap requested a room in the rear of the building. Two beds. The room was small and dim: All the windows looked out on brick walls. It was just what he was after. Once again anonymity would provide security. They ate at a fast-food restaurant, and then Andrea stopped at a copy shop with Internet
access before they turned in for the night. The decision to share a room was not discussed; it just happened. Neither wanted to be separated—not after all they had been through.

Belknap could tell that Andrea had something on her mind, and continued to study her, looking for the subtle fissures of delayed trauma.

“You want to talk about Rosendale?” he said, finally, after they had both brushed their teeth. He wanted her to know that this door was open; he wasn't encouraging her to go through it.

“There's…what happened,” she said haltingly. “And then there's what I learned.”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“I want to tell you about what I learned.”

“I'd like to hear it.”

She nodded quickly. He could see the effort with which she pulled herself together. “You need to understand—in the world of securities research, there's what we call the raw-data stage. That's where I am.”

Even in the yellowish glow of the cheap lamp, she looked beautiful. “Should I want to wait for the glossy cover page and the spiral binding?”

Andrea half-smiled, but her eyes were intent. “I'm seeing patterns of payments. All around the world. Timing suggests the possibility of electoral manipulation.” She was focused now, speaking with growing confidence.

“Swinging elections? Getting favored candidates in office?”

“All circumstantial, but that's part of it, I think. Can't leave the fate of Partido por la Democracia in the hands of ordinary citizens, I guess.”

“Slow down, Andrea. Walk me through this.”

“I started to wonder when I found records of a series of exchange-rate hedges. The details don't matter. What's significant is that the Bancroft Foundation was slipping millions of dollars into foreign banks at various points. Greece, the Philippines, Nepal, even Ghana.
Well, it turns out that the years and places aren't random. Each corresponds to a major change of government. In 1956, millions of dollars are converted into Finnish markkaa, and the next thing you know Finland has a new president. A close-run thing, too. The guy defeats his opponent by just two electoral votes, but he stays in power for the next quarter-century. From the pattern of yen conversions, it looks like Japan's Liberal Democratic Party might have been a big beneficiary of the foundation. There are all sorts of local elections that led to parliamentary-level consolidations, and to go by the timing, the outcomes were guided by Bancroft money. Chile, 1964, the election of Eduardo Frei Montalvo? A major Bancroft presence in the Chilean peso.”

“And you know this how?”

“Basically, there's evidence of a lot of exchange-rate optimizing, probably because they were shifting tens of millions of dollars into the local currency and the foundation wasn't nearly as rich as it would later become. Likewise, in 1969 you see a major conversion into the Ghanaian cedi. I looked at the foundation's official reports, and there were no major initiatives in Ghana dating to that time. But it's the same time that the head of the Progress Party, Kofi A. Busia, is sworn into power as prime minister. I'm sure the guy was irresistible to Paul Bancroft.”

He glanced at Andrea. “What did he do?”

“Start with who he was. This guy had a Ph.D. from Oxford University, had been a professor of sociology at the University of Leiden, in Holland. I bet the Bancroft people were convinced that he was just their kind of guy, a cosmopolitan committed to the common good. Looks like he disappointed his backers, though, because two years later he was ousted. Dead two years after that.”

“And you think the Bancroft Foundation—”

“Maybe because it was West Africa, and nobody was focused on it, they got a little sloppy. I was able to track a series of currency trades from March of that year. Looks to me like Bancroft bought Busia the country of Ghana for twenty million dollars. Now it seems like
they're trying the same thing in Venezuela. The foundation's like an iceberg. Partly visible. Mostly submerged. Turns out they basically control the National Endowment for Democracy. Meanwhile, its official report acknowledges all these grants to various Venezuelan political groups.” She pulled out a piece of paper, showed him.

Belknap looked it over. She must have uploaded the document online before she left and printed it out at the copy shop. “Pin money,” he grunted. “Chump change.”

“These are just the official subventions. They buy you the names of the relevant principals, that's all. Based on currency-conversion data, I'd guess that the real transfers are actually a hundred times greater.”

“Christ. They're buying themselves another government.”

“Because the people aren't smart enough to decide for themselves. That's how they figure it.” She shook her head. “And so much of the stuff is done through computer networks. There's a guy I know, Walter Sachs, who's a real whiz at the tech stuff. Works at the hedge fund I was at. A strange cat in some ways, but brilliant.”

“You're talking about an I.T. guy at a hedge fund?”

“Strange, I know. Graduated near the top of his class at M.I.T. Working at the hedge fund is his way of not working. It's tiddlywinks for him. Means he can spend most of the day vegging out. He's a whiz with an ambition deficit.”

“Andrea, you need to be very careful who you talk to, who you trust,” Belknap said sharply. “For their sake as well as your own.”

“I know.” She sighed. “It's just so goddamn frustrating. All this information, so little knowledge. Theta. Genesis. Paul Bancroft. Jared Rinehart. Rome. Tallinn. Arms dealing. Political manipulation. It's like we're looking at all these tentacles and we're still not sure who the octopus is.”

They thrashed through what they knew for a few minutes longer, but made no real progress. Exhaustion, a bone-deep enervation they both shared, befogged their concentration like dark fumes, and, by mutual assent, they turned in. He chose the bed closest to the window. A shared room with separate beds: There was intimacy, and there was distance. It seemed right.

Sleep should have come easily, but it came with difficulty. He awoke several times in the night, staring at the hateful visage of Richard Lugner. At other moments Jared Rinehart appeared to him, shimmering with an unearthly glow, walking through the corridors and recesses of Belknap's mind.

I'll always be here for you.
Rinehart at the funeral of Belknap's wife.

Know this, my friend. You will always have me.
Rinehart, on the phone just hours after Belknap heard about Louisa's death during an operation in Belfast.

In a life of inconstancy, Jared Rinehart had proved the one constant thing. His cool intelligence, his steadfast loyalty, his quick, mischievous wit. He was a friend, an ally, even a polestar. Whenever he was needed he would suddenly appear, as if guided by a sixth sense.

What was the truth? If Belknap had been wrong to trust Jared,
what else could he trust? If he had been so wrong about this man, could Belknap trust himself? The questions pierced him like cold steel. He turned and tossed and gathered clammy sheets around him, and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like an hour.

He heard distant traffic sounds, and nearby breathing, Andrea's. At first her breaths were deep, metronomic. Then they began to grow ragged. He heard her cry out in her sleep, muted sounds of distress, and when he turned toward her, her arms were flailing out as if to protect her from unseen assailants.

He came to her, touched her face. “Andrea,” he whispered.

She thrashed again in her sleep, convulsed by nightmares, and he held her flailing arms.

“Andrea,” he repeated.

Her eyes blinked open, staring, terrified. She was breathing hard now, as if she had been running.

“It's okay,” he said. “You were having a nightmare.”

“A nightmare,” she repeated, her voice thick with sleep.

“You're awake now. You're here with me. Everything's okay.” The dim light—street illumination leaking from the edges of the window blinds—modeled her cheekbones, her soft skin, her lips.

Her eyes focused now, registered the comforting lie. “Please,” she said. “Please hold me.” A whispered command.

He pushed the damp hair from her brow, put his arms around her. She was slender and firm in his arms. She was warm and made him feel warm.

“Andrea,” he said. He breathed in deeply, somehow intoxicated by her fragrance, her warmth, her presence. Her face glowed like porcelain.

“It's not over, is it?” she asked. “The nightmare.”

He drew her nearer to him, and she clutched at him, at first with fear, and then with something else, something like tenderness.

His moved his head closer to hers. “Andrea,” he murmured, and
she pressed her lips to his, and clasped him in her own arms, and soon their two bodies felt as if they were one, flexing and shuddering and flushing. It was a way of denying the violence and death they had seen, an affirmation in the face of negation, a way of saying
yes
in a world of
no.

Nobody was more avid for publicity than a senator without seniority. That was why Senator Kenneth Cahill, a freshman from Nebraska, fit the bill perfectly. During the campaign he doubtless received plenty of ink in the local papers; once he was elected, he and his staffers would have been maddened by the ensuing dome of silence. People who run for public office seldom relish silence.

The gambit was childishly easy. When “John Miles” from the Associated Press phoned his office, requesting an interview on the subject of a “key provision” Cahill had supported in an Interior Appropriations bill—half a million dollars for upgrades to the Littleton Wastewater Treatment Plant, and county-wide improvements to the storm-water collection system in Jefferson County—the senator had responded just as Belknap had predicted. Cahill's staffers had practically offered to send a car for him.

Nor did Belknap choose his affiliation randomly. Associated Press reporters, he knew, were generally anonymous, and, as an additional precaution, he had made it clear that he wasn't a Washington reporter, so none of the staffers would have expected to know him. The AP had almost four thousand employees in two hundred fifty bureaus; saying you were from the AP was like saying you were from New York. Even a fellow reporter wouldn't expect to recognize a colleague. Not that anybody at Cahill's office would be scrutinizing his bona fides. To a junior senator, publicity was oxygen, and Cahill, who ranked second to last in seniority in the august body to which he had just ascended, was starved for it. “Miles” made an appointment to visit at three o'clock.

Belknap appeared in the lobby of the Hart Building at five before the hour. He had a yellow lanyard around his neck holding a thick plastic badge with a magnetized strip. The word “press” appeared in bold capital letters above the name John Miles, the assignment verification code, his institutional affiliation and nationality, and a passport-size photograph. It was good work. The guard had small, squashed features, heavy-lidded eyes, and, despite his squinty, suspicious gaze, was about as fierce as an unweaned puppy in Belknap's quick appraisal. He had the visitor write his name on a sign-in list and waved him through. Belknap was wearing a pair of tortoiseshell glasses along with a jacket and tie, and carried a briefcase that was rolled swiftly through a metal detector unopened.

Around him was a scattering of people who were obviously Hart Building regulars: K Street lobbyists, Senate aides and pages, reporters and messengers. He took the elevator to the seventh floor.

As he got off the elevator, he placed a quick call to the Nebraskan's press secretary. He had been delayed—another interview had run long, the story was more complicated than he had realized; he'd be there as soon as he could.

Then he made a left turn down a long, windowed hall and walked into the anteroom to the impressive duplex suite belonging to Senator Kirk, a man who had all the seniority that the Nebraskan lacked and was putting it to startling use. Belknap knew that Kirk would be in his office; he had a committee meeting an hour earlier, had another coming up in forty-five minutes.

“I'm here to see Senator Kirk,” he said to the weathered-looking blonde who sat at the reception desk. Primly dressed in a dark-green jacket and high-necked blouse, she looked less like a praetorian guard than a prep-school headmistress—the hair was colored to a deep-hued honey blond; nothing brassy, nothing frosted—but was no less intimidating for that. “I'm afraid I don't have anything on the senator's schedule. What did you say your name was?”

He paused. Why was this so hard?
Follow the plan
, he exhorted himself.
Roll the dice or you're not in the game.

“My name,” he said, swallowing hard, “is Todd Belknap.”

“Todd Belknap,” she repeated. The name meant nothing to her. “I'm afraid the senator is a very busy man, but if you'd like to try to schedule an appointment at some point, what I'd suggest is that—”

“What I need you to do is convey a message. Tell him my name. Tell him—I'm assuming that this is a privileged conversation—that I'm a senior officer at Consular Operations. And tell him that I've come to talk about Genesis.”

The woman looked confused. Was this man a religious zealot or a source within the intelligence services? “I can certainly deliver the message,” she said uncertainly. She gestured toward a row of worn brown leather chairs on the wall adjoining the door and waited for him to take his seat before she picked up her handset and spoke in a low voice. She was not speaking to the senator, he was certain, but to a senior aide. It was as he expected. Then she glanced behind her, to the closed door that separated the reception area from the rooms where the work of the senator's office was done.

In less than a minute, a bald, squat man with nails bitten to the quick bustled out of the inner door. His fishbelly-white face wore a breezy, unconcerned smile; only a small facial tic betrayed the tension he was at pains to conceal.

“I'm Philip Sutton,” the man said. “The senator's chief of staff. What can we do for you?” He spoke in a low voice.

“You know who I am?”

“Todd Beller, was it? Or Bellhorn—was that what you said to Jean?”

“I'll save us both some time.” The operative's voice was calmly disabused, not reproachful. “You just ran a computer check from your office or you wouldn't be talking to me. I'm betting you pulled up records from the State Department database. What did you find?”

Another small tic rippled through his cheek. He did not answer
immediately. “You're aware, aren't you, that the senator is under the protection of the Secret Service?”

“I'm glad to hear of it.”

“Owing to the nature of the commission hearings, there have been various threats.” Sutton was no longer smiling.

“I passed through metal detectors on the way in. You can search me if you like.”

Confrontation glinted in Sutton's eyes. “But there's no record of your having come into the building,” he said fiercely.

“Would you prefer that there were?”

Sutton's gaze met his for a long moment. “I'm not sure.”

“Will the senator meet me?”

“I couldn't say.”

“You mean you haven't decided.”

“Yes,” the portly aide replied, his pale eyes alert. “That's exactly what I mean.”

“If you're certain we have nothing to discuss, just say the word. You'll never see me again. But you'd be making a mistake.”

Another long moment elapsed. “Look, why don't you follow me? We'll talk in my office.” In a louder voice he said, “Fact is, lots of people misunderstand the senator's views on agricultural price supports. I welcome the opportunity to clarify them.”

 

The facial-recognition system had been installed at the Hart Senate Building without hoopla or, indeed, any official notice. The system was still considered experimental, although in tests it had so far proven to be 90 percent accurate. The security cameras were connected to both a local and a remote computer database, and fed into a multiscale algorithm. Each camera would, in low-resolution mode, swiftly identify the appearance of a headlike object, at which point the camera would switch into a high-resolution mode. As long as a face was turned at least 35 degrees toward a viewing lens, the image
could be automatically manipulated—rotated and scaled, so that it could be compared to reference images. The transposed video image was then captured in an eighty-four-byte code—a numeric faceprint, based on sixteen facial landmarks—and compared to hundreds of thousands of stored data files. The system was capable of comparing ten million faces every ten seconds, with a numeric value assigned to each comparison. If the value was high enough, a provisional match was triggered and the tracking camera would switch into its highest-resolution mode. If the match was further confirmed, offsite operators would be notified. Only then did human beings peer at the two images, supplanting the mathematics of local-feature analysis with old-fashioned human judgment.

That was happening now; analysts were replaying the video feed and comparing it to the reference faceprint. There seemed little doubt. The computer could not be fooled by glasses or alterations of facial hair; the facial indices it analyzed were virtually unchangeable: cephalic, nasal, orbital. The angle of the chin, the distance between the eyes—such metrics could not be changed with hair dye or eyewear.

“It's a match,” said a slack-bellied operator, who spent much of the day in a darkened room munching on corn chips, with a rhythmic hand-to-mouth motion that sometimes went on, nearly uninterrupted, for hours. He wore an untucked Hawaiian-style shirt and cargo pants.

“Then you click on that red box, and that's it.”

“Then everyone's notified?”

“Then whoever needs to be notified is notified. Depends on the guy. Like, sometimes it's a matter for the lobby guards and the D.C. cops. Sometimes, though, it's someone the CIA or the FBI just wants to keep tabs on, like a foreign national, and they definitely don't want to alert the target. They play it how they play it. That's not our call.”

“Just click on the red box.” He returned a finger-clutch of Fritos to the bag and stared at the screen.

“Just click on the red box. Feels good, doesn't it? Click, and they'll take care of everything.”

 

The man in the Stratus coupe had a last sip of his coffee, then gripped the cup lightly in his fingers. It was an Anthora-style paper cup, the blue ersatz-Greek letters proclaiming
IT'S OUR PLEASURE TO SERVE YOU
. He crushed it into something wrinkled and shapeless and tucked it between the cushions of the seat beside him. He always left his rental cars as dirty as possible; sometimes he would sprinkle sand and ash from a cigarette receptacle on the seats. That way the rental company would be sure to vacuum it carefully, to wipe it down, and leave less of
him.

He watched the woman leave the motel, relishing the incongruity: an expensive-looking bird leaving a cheap-looking nest. The woman wore no makeup and seemed to have chosen clothing that disguised her figure rather than flattered it, but you could tell she was pretty. Justin Colbert found himself smiling. But that was out of line. One didn't mix business with pleasure. Not usually.

The order of business was different with this woman, anyway. A higher degree of difficulty was involved. There could not be another slipup. Not this time.

That was why they'd called in the best. That's why they had called in Justin Colbert.

Now he powered down the driver's-side window and fluttered a road map. “Ma'am,” he called to her. “I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to get back onto Route 495, and…” A helpless shrug.

The woman looked around warily, but she was unable to resist Justin's helpless look. She walked over to the car.

“You just get onto 66,” she said. “A couple blocks north.”

“And which way is north?” Justin asked. The timing was right: They were unobserved. His wrist brushed against her forearm.

“Ouch,” she said.

“My watchband—sorry about that.”

The woman gave him a strange look: a small flare of puzzlement, giving way to suspicion, giving way finally to stupor and incomprehension and the loss of consciousness.

It's my pleasure to serve you
, he thought, chuckling to himself.

Colbert was already out of the car when she started to collapse; he caught her by her elbows. Four seconds later he had positioned her in the trunk of his coupe and closed it gently. The plastic tarp would keep any messy body fluids from wetting the carpet-lined trunk. Five minutes later he was on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. He would check on her in an hour or so, but there would be enough oxygen to sustain life during the trip.

Andrea Bancroft was more valuable alive than dead. At least for the time being.