The Bancroft Strategy (47 page)

“For the worse, in a lot of cases.”

“In a lot of cases, sure.” The senator shifted in his seat, and Belknap thought he saw a fleeting grimace. “But what we do, and ultimately who we are, is determined less by character than by circumstances. I didn't always think that. But it's what I think now. Winston Churchill was a great man. He would always have been an immensely talented one, whatever the course of history. But he was great because circumstances called him to be, and because they called upon something he richly possessed. He got Germany right. But he got India wrong, never got that Britain's colonial subjects wanted to be citizens, and of their own country. The same sort of single-mindedness that protected him from appeasement and temporizing in one case stopped him from rightful and just compromise and concession in another. But forgive me. I'm speechifying, aren't I?”

“You're good at it.”

“An occupational hazard, is what it is. Look, you can argue whether intelligence reform is my Germany or my India—and I'm
not pretending to be even a bush-league Winston. But you can't dispute that there's a problem here. Some people who do intelligence oversight, they hunker down and they go native, they stop seeing the problems. That didn't happen with me. The more I learned, the more worried I got. Because beneath the lumber, there's termite holes and a lot of rot. And we can paint and repaint this house, but unless we're willing to lift up the floorboards and peer behind the drywall and check it out from pillar to post, we're just part of the problem.”

“Still, why you?” Belknap persisted.

Sutton himself looked at the senator expectantly, seemingly wondering how he would answer.

Bennett Kirk was smiling; his eyes were not. “If not me, who?”

 

Belknap had left the senator's suite and was halfway down the hallway toward the elevators when he realized that something was amiss. How? Belknap could not have said: The awareness was beneath the level of conscious knowledge.

The Hart Building was constructed around a central atrium, a sort of internal courtyard, with elevator banks to either side; and when he walked out of the duplex suite, he caught a quick glimpse of the Calder mobile. But that was not what caught his attention. Fingertips will pick up the slightest irregularity in an otherwise smooth surface, and the focus of a trained and field-seasoned operative had precisely that kind of sensitivity. The presence of four uniformed National Guardsmen in the lobby where there had been two. The men who were stationed on several floors at the railing that faced the atrium—civilians only at first glance; plainclothes operatives at a second. The slightly oversized jacket, the too-vigilant gaze, the casual act—a passerby admiring the vast Calder mobile—prolonged beyond the casual.

A cold fear washed over Belknap. He saw a pair of men, also dressed as civilians, push through the revolving door of the main
entrance. They did not have the gait of civilians: They fell into step with each other. Neither checked in with the guard at the station; neither moved to the elevator banks. They were not visiting; they were taking up an agreed-on position.

A dragnet, then. One that was still in formation.

Had Senator Kirk or his chief of staff sounded the alert, after all? That wasn't credible to him. Neither had betrayed the slightest vibration of excitement or apprehension; nobody in the suite of connected offices had. There had to be another explanation. The operating assumption had to be that a visual identification had taken place; yet his specific destination was plainly not known to those who would apprehend him. Therefore he had been detected while in the lobby. They knew he was in the building. They did not know exactly where. If he had any chance of escaping the dragnet, he would have to take that into account and make use of it.

And soon—the odds were already against him, and they got worse with every passing minute. He visualized his position as if in an aerial photograph. The seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. A vast parking lot across the street, to the north on C Street. A wedge-like block carved out by Maryland Avenue to the south. To the west, the landscape was one of parks and hulking capital buildings; to the east, buildings and blocks grew smaller and less grand, becoming interspersed with apartments and stores.
Now, if you could just strap on a rocket pack and fly…

He reviewed other options: Could he prompt an evacuation of the building by pulling a fire alarm, phoning in a bomb threat, or starting a trash-can fire, and then try to vanish into the panicked crowds? But that was exactly the sort of countermaneuver they would be prepared for. The fire exits would be guarded from outside; a high-level security protocol would circumvent efforts to activate a building-wide alarm. Security officers would do their own investigation first before any evacuation proceeded.

He was not completely unprepared, though. He turned and
headed back to where he had seen a sign for men's and women's restrooms, the genders pictographed, in the usual way, with isosceles triangles. He locked himself in a stall, opened his briefcase, and swiftly changed into the neatly folded uniform he had brought with him. The glasses and shoes went back in the briefcase. When he emerged, he was attired in the standard-issue camouflage uniform of the Army National Guard, which was a familiar presence in all such federal buildings. The tunic and trousers rippled with green-gray-tan fractals were authentic; one would have to look closely to realize that his high black lace-ups were not government-issue combat boots but cheaper, lighter knockoffs. His hair was just a little long for the role, but, again, it was an irregularity few would notice.

Which left the briefcase itself to be disposed of. When he was in business drag, the briefcase complemented his disguise. Now it was utterly incongruous. He emerged from the stall quickly, keeping his face turned away from the row of mirrors in front of the washbasins, and reached a wide circular trash receptacle near the door to the hallway. Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he dropped the case inside and then covered it with a wadding of brown paper towels. It would not be found anytime soon.

Now he strode down the hallway, taking care to put on a bit of a strut: the stride of a man on duty, on display, not someone in a rush. He took the staircase at the far west, the wall adjoining the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The staircase had none of the modernist grandeur of the semicircular stairs that rose from the atrium, but they were wide, as required by the fire code. At the landing of the fourth floor he saw another guardsman, standing post. A light-skinned black man with a smooth-shaven head that did not conceal an advanced case of male pattern baldness. The man had a bulky combat pistol holstered to his belt; attached to a shoulder sling, he held a semiautomatic rifle, an M16A2 with a plastic buttstock. Belknap noticed that he had activated the burst-control device: three rounds per trigger pull. At close quarters, three rounds would be plenty.

Belknap gave the man a brusque nod, taking care to meet his eyes forthrightly without inviting conversation, which could be disastrous. On impulse, he took out a radio communicator in hardened plastic, which resembled the standard military model, and started speaking into dead air.

“Did a quick walk-through of six, no sign of our guy,” Belknap said, his voice bored but professional. He noted the other man's unit number, then spoke into the handset again. “Are we coordinated with the 171-Bs? I feel like we're slathering on too many units here. It's a goddamn crush.”

Make of that what you will
, Belknap thought as he made his way down the next flight of stairs. The last flight of stairs, the one that led to the ground stairs, was easily accessible behind a broad steel push-bar-equipped door.

A fire door, in fact. Unlocked. But armed. A rectangular red-and-white sign warned
FIRE DOOR. KEEP CLOSED. DO NOT BLOCK
. A second sign further warned:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND
.

Dammit!
Frustration hammered his chest from within. He turned back and made his way to the adjoining public hallway. As he strode down the hall, he counted three and perhaps four plain-clothed operatives. None gave him a second look; he was seen but not noticed; the camouflage uniform indeed conferred a kind of camouflage, albeit that of a spurious familiarity rather than invisibility.

A handful of people were stepping into one of the elevators, on their way to the ground floor. It was an opportunity: Again, acting on impulse, Belknap stepped into it seconds before the door closed.

A young woman standing next to him was talking quietly to another young woman: “And so I go, ‘If that's how you feel, like, why are we having this conversation?'”

“You didn't!” her friend replied.

An older man talked to a younger associate, both of them lawyers by all appearances, about some line item that needed to be “stopped before reconciliation.”

Belknap felt the gaze of some of the civilians on him. He also sensed that at least one person in the elevator was no civilian at all. He was a large man with arms that dangled away from his sides, suggesting the bulked-up musculature of a bodybuilder. He had short red hair and an almost matching reddish complexion, so that from a distance he had appeared bald. It seemed that he seldom wore the shirt he had on: The collar did not fit his thick neck, and despite the tie, he had to keep it unbuttoned at the top. The man—a fellow operative, it seemed clear—stared steadily, stonily, ahead of him. His jaws moved in a slow rhythm; he was chewing gum. Belknap saw the man's face blurrily reflected on the stainless steel of the elevator door. Belknap was behind him. He did not look up; he knew that the elevators were connected to the building's video surveillance system, that each had a wide-angle lens embedded in the center of its ceiling. It was important not to turn his face toward it.

In his mind he scrolled back to the lobby, trying to visualize its geometry. How far was the main entrance from the elevator? Thirty paces, give or take. He might just make it.

Belknap's attention flitted among the few quiet conversations taking place as he counted the remaining seconds and willed himself to feel calm. An electronic
bing.
A small LED by the floor indicator changed from the red that signaled descent to the green that signaled ascent.

The doors rolled back, and everyone stepped onto the polished slate of the Hart Building lobby. The ride had taken perhaps fifteen seconds; he had known days that went faster.

Belknap held back for a lingering moment. It would be better not to have the muscled operative's gaze settle on him again. All it would take was a passing thought, a moment of doubt—the hair, the shoes, the subtle irregularities of the uniform, his very presence on this elevator—and the game would be over. But the red-haired man was taking up a position by a phone booth across the hall; there was no alternative but to push past him.

Belknap continued walking, his heavy-soled boots quietly thunking against the polished floor, looking straight ahead, as if he meant to cross to the opposite wing of the building. All those leaving the building would be scrutinized. He would not betray his intentions until the very last moment.

He took fifteen paces. Eighteen paces. He had walked past another layer of plainclothesmen, shielded by the effrontery of his uniform, when a man in a brown suit suddenly gave a shout.

“That's him!”

He pointed at Belknap, his eyes narrowed with certainty.

“Where?” Belknap heard another man call out.

“Which one?” a guardsman shouted, cradling his rifle in his arms.

Belknap joined the chorus: “Where?” he called out, craning his head behind him, as if the suited man had pointed not at him but at someone further away.

“Where?” Belknap repeated.

It was an uncomplicated, unsubtle ruse that would buy him only seconds. But if seconds were all he could get, seconds were what he would take. The lobby guard's station was only a few yards away. Agency arrogance made it almost certain that the guard would not have been informed of the operation. Belknap could exploit that. Now he approached the man with the squashed features and heavy-lidded eyes, still seated by his clipboard, his lists, and the small video-display panels.

“We've got an emergency situation,” Belknap said. He whirled around and pointed out the brown-suited man. “How did that man get in here?” he demanded.

The lobby guard looked stern, pretending to be in control of the situation. Seven seconds had elapsed since Belknap had been burned. He had no weapon—he could not get one through the metal detector—and so his only option was to sow as much confusion as he could. The techniques for doing so came under the rubric of “social engineering” in the training manuals. The difficulty was that
many of his adversaries had undergone the same training. The man in the brown suit was fast and agile; Belknap's dodges had not wrong-footed him in the slightest. When Belknap stole a glance, he saw that the man had drawn a handgun, doubtless one that had been strapped under his jacket. A delicate game of intentions: If Belknap acknowledged the man's weapon and refused his orders, the man would effectively be authorized to shoot. But not if Belknap were unaware of the weapon. Belknap turned his head around, maintaining eye contact with the lobby guard at his booth even as he walked toward the man in the brown suit—toward a man who had a gun trained on him. Right now, Belknap's chief weapon was precisely that he had no weapon: an unjustified use of force in front of one or more witnesses would create career complications, even for someone in the “special” services.

Now Belknap turned to face the suited operative. “What is your problem, man?” he protested.

“Hands where I can see them,” the man said. He gestured toward another man, someone behind Belknap. When Belknap craned around, he saw the red-haired man from the elevator. He was closing in, race-walking with a fast stride. By now, three uniformed guardsmen had their rifles out, though their faces betrayed confusion. It was all taking place so fast, and with so much misdirection, that they were less than confident about their target. To raise his hands would straighten that out in an instant; Belknap decided against doing so.