The Bancroft Strategy (53 page)

“There's a lot of heat in that place, a lot of sensitive equipment. Ergo, there's got to be a powerful cooling system, too.” Belknap pointed toward some aluminum ductwork on the roof, a wide hood with a vertical grill. “The place is practically windowless. Take a look. There's a condenser unit just outside the rear door, and a fan, so cool air is forced in.” He pointed. “That's the other end of the ventilation system—it's where the warm air is pushed out. Wide ductwork to minimize resistance. So we get on the roof, we unscrew the grill, and we wriggle down.”

“And then the alarm goes off.”

“You got it.”

“Which, if standard security protocols are followed,” warned Sachs, “will kick the machinery into autodelete mode in about fifteen seconds. All files totally erased. A place like Privex would rather risk losing data than leak it.”

“Which means we need to work fast. Unplug the brain before it can activate the erase procedure. That's the key. The guys who run this place live in town. It'll take them half an hour to get up here. It's the machines we need to outsmart.”

“Now what? Because I'm not up for any derring-do, okay?”

“All you need to do is wait for me to open the back door, and then scoot right on in.”

“And how you're going to do that?”

“Watch and learn,” Belknap grunted.

Belknap removed a rope ladder from his backpack and a two-foot piece of metal tubing. He extended the tubing—it telescoped to several times its original length—and twisted it several times until two hooks protruded from it. He scanned the facility's roofline until he found a place where a white pipe extended along the top of the building's nearly flat roof, and he flung the hooked tube toward it. It caught with a
clank
; the nylon ladder now dangled from it like a long black shawl. He tested its grip with a few tugs, then scaled it rapidly.

Now, on the roof, he knelt before the ventilation grate and, with a wide screwdriver from his kit, removed the flat heads from all four corners. Belknap laid the grate gently on the roof. A stale smell emanated from the wide aluminum duct. The flow rate was high enough to produce a very faint breeze.

Headfirst, he clambered in, pulling himself over the bend, using his hand and legs like a lizard. A few yards into the duct, he became aware of the dead silence, the complete absence of light. All he could hear was his own breathing, eerily magnified by the metal tube. He kept moving down the pitch-black tunnel, wriggling and pulling himself forward with his hands, foot by foot, and, painfully, around a bend. The sounds of his own breathing were eerily amplified. Then
he found himself upside-down, the blood pooling in his head as abruptly he slid a few yards deeper into the duct.

Which narrowed unexpectedly. His hands reached forward, seeking purchase, but slid back on what had become a slippery, almost greasy surface. Too late, he realized that the jointed section had connected ducting of two different standards, two different widths. He breathed in, and found that the dimensions of the duct prevented his chest from expanding fully. Only shallow breaths were possible. A primal sense of claustrophobia began to creep up on him. He moved a few feet further, straight down now. He had thought he would have to strain to control his rate of descent. Instead, he found the walls of the duct pressing against his chest. He had to struggle simply to move. His cell phone, in a breast pocket of his tunic, now gouged painfully into his ribs. He worked it free, and then it slipped from his grip, falling and smashing on some hard unseen surface below him.

Would it trigger the motion detector? Evidently not; it was too small. His own problem was that he was too big. He was effectively trapped.

Trapped.

Panic was the one thing he could not afford. Yet now trivial thoughts were starting to loom large in his mind—such as the sense that he could not know whether his eyes were closed or not in the pitch darkness. He reminded himself that he couldn't be any more than twelve feet from the end. Then his mind began to race. Sachs was a civilian, had no expertise relevant to the physical world. If Belknap were stuck here, Sachs would have no idea how to get him out. He would remain here all night. And who knew what fate would befall him if he was found by whatever security goons Privex employed?

It was his own damn fault—the operation had been foolhardy, desperation ascendant over prudence. He had improvised a plan of
action without taking his usual precautions. He'd settled on a plan without a backup plan. Christ on a raft!

His fear had triggered sweating, and the sweating, he dimly sensed, would help smooth his passage. A cheap irony. He exhaled fully, reducing the diameter of his chest, and wriggled further, like a snake or worm, propelled by small movements from all his limbs, even his fingers. He gulped for air—and once more felt the sheet metal pressing against his rib cage. If he got stuck, could he back up somehow? He felt entombed, buried alive.

A hundred alternate entrance routes filled his head amid clouds of regret. He was wheezing now, his breath reduced to a whistling stridor, his very alveoli constricted by stress hormones. When he was a young child he had experienced episodes of asthma, and he never forgot what it was like. It was as if you had been sprinting and then were forced to breathe through a straw. There was air, but not enough, and somehow the insufficiency seemed worse than none at all. He had not felt like that for decades, but it was how he felt now.

Goddammit!

He wriggled another yard, slick with perspiration, blood pounding in his ears, pressure mounting in his chest.
Snug as a bug in a rug.
And then his stretched-out hand touched something irregular. A grate. At the other end. He pressed at it and felt it yield slightly. Just slightly, yet enough to give him heart. Now he banged at it with the heel of his hand—and he heard it fall clanging onto the floor.

A second later, he heard a loud, piercing beeping noise.

Oh, Jesus
—the motion detector had already been triggered while he was still trapped in this infernal metal tube, his hips bruised further with every snaking move. The alarm noise, rhythmic, mindless, ceaseless, grew subtly louder with each beep. Soon, no doubt, the beeping would give way to a steady whine, and the security system would be activated. A million or so e-mails erased. The journey here had been in vain. Their last lead was about to be destroyed.

He would have screamed if he had only been able to get enough air into his lungs.

 

Andrea Bancroft shuddered as she remembered Jared Rinehart's lynxlike gaze, the abrupt way he slipped from persona to persona, multiple personalities that were each under his tight control. His gifts for deception were frightening. Yet the glimpse she'd had into his true self was even more frightening. To him, Belknap was an instrument, but something more as well; he had an unwholesome fixation on the man he had so cunningly manipulated. At the same time, it was clear, he feared Genesis as much as she and Todd did.

What was the real reason for that? Why was she here?

Andrea Bancroft found herself pacing, a caged animal, struggling to keep hope flickering in her breast.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
—it was the mantra of a Spanish literature teacher she'd once had, an old campaigner who revered the prewar communists and Republicans. She recalled a bit of verse from the Spanish poet Rafael Garcia Adeva, whose works she had been required to translate:

The lines came to her, but they carried no solace. At least a real prisoner knew where his or her prison was located. She had no idea
where she was. Was it indeed in upstate New York? Quite possibly. She did know that it was not an actual prison; Rinehart had called the place a “monastery,” and she suspected the reference was not merely a joke. An abandoned monastery would have plenty of cells like this one, which could easily be retrofitted to make escape a physical impossibility. Maybe not for Todd. But she wasn't Todd. For her it was impossible.

A physical impossibility.
Yet a prison was not made up of walls and doors alone. There were people, and where there were people, surely, there was the possibility of the unexpected. She recalled the pike-eyed stare of the guard:
It's only the sheerest professionalism that stops me from raping you within an inch of your life and maybe an inch or so beyond.
Her eyes returned to the fluorescent light by the door, its hateful sterile glare calling to mind an interrogator's lamp.

A prison that was not a prison. There
was
a slightly makeshift air about some of the facilities. Though the commode was prison standard, the ancient bathtub was not. The ceiling light fixture near the door was within reach; in a standard prison, it would have been behind a cage. She could probably kill herself if she wanted to—again, not standard prison outfitting. The guard who had brought her “chow”—a man with hairy forearms, a scrubbed bronzed forehead, a dense, close-cropped black beard tight on his jaw—had carried not the washable tray of a large institution but a foil tray from the kind of frozen dinner sold at supermarkets. She had washed it out simply to give herself something to do; they would retrieve it, no doubt, whenever the next scheduled visit was.

She decided to fill the tub; she inserted the rubber stopper and twisted both taps all the way. The water that poured from the faucet was flecked with rust, evidence of disuse. As the tub filled, she sat on the cot, her fingers starting to tear at the heavy-gauge foil of the dinner tray in idle agitation, and her eyes once more settled on the glaring fluorescent fixture by the door.

She walked over to it. A circular fluorescent tube, powered by an
AC circuit. All that electricity, racing around and going nowhere.
It's trapped here, too.
That was Andrea's first thought.

Then she looked down at the foil strip in her hand, and she had another.

 

Sixty-three goddamn years old, Will Garrison thought, and his field skills had never been sharper. He had parked the Toyota Land Cruiser in the village, behind a liquor store fronted with sun-clouded Plexiglas. He had stopped drinking ten years before—hell, he was probably in better shape now than then. Then he had started the climb.

On the trip over, he had studied the NSA satellite imagery of Dominica, magnified to the point where you could see the individual fronds of the palm trees, the indicator lights on the AT&T antennae. From this bird's-eye view, it was easy to see the Privex facility. Thick black-clad cables converged on the small bunker-like structure; round silvery dishes clustered overhead.

Dammit if Castor didn't have balls. Garrison had to give the bastard that much credit as he watched him clamber up to the facility's roof. Castor was going to unlock a Fabergé egg with a goddamn crowbar. Amazing.
Now, why didn't we think of that?

Garrison concealed himself behind a profusion of Caribbean elephant ears, the giant leaves bejeweled with glimmering drops of evening dew. It was just a matter of waiting. He had taken some Motrin as insurance, but so far his knees weren't even aching. Belknap was in the building. Before long, he would be leaving it. But he wouldn't get far. Just when Todd Belknap thought that he had succeeded, he was safe, no one knew he was there, his defenses were relaxed…
that
was when the Hound would be put down.

Now he stretched out, with the stock of the Barrett M98 sniper rifle against his cheek. The rifle, dappled with a green-and-black camouflage paint job, had been fitted with an integral silencer and loaded with subsonic ammunition; the combination of the two factors
meant that it would be inaudible at distances beyond a hundred meters or so. As a young trainee, Garrison had won prizes in target competitions. But true skill lay in finding a position that required no skill, and he had done so. A ten-year-old could make this shot.

Once Belknap was taken care of, Garrison might even take an extra day or so to enjoy the island. They said the Boiling Lake was something to see.

He glanced at his watch, peered through the scope, and settled into a zone of watchful waiting.

It would not be long now.

 

Fighting to suppress his panic response, Belknap expelled the last ounce of breath from his body, curled his fingers around the rim where the grate had been, and pulled himself through. His head and then his torso slid out at a painfully awkward angle, and he collapsed on a hard floor gasping for breath.

He was in.

As the infernal
beep beep beep
continued to grow louder and louder, he forced himself to his feet and looked around in the dim silvery light, the space brightened by hundreds of small illuminated LED displays.
Fifteen seconds before autodelete.
He raced over to a large metal structure that looked like a giant Sub-Zero refrigerator—the beeping was coming from it—and found a thick power cord behind it. It was as thick as a snake, and required a surprising amount of force to pull it out of the wall plug.

After a brief pause, the beeping resumed.

Oh, Christ
—a battery backup, no doubt, with enough power to run the autodelete program.

How many seconds remained? Six? Five?

He followed the other end of the power cord to a flat box, the size of a steel ingot, by the base of the mammoth network server. As the beeping grew deafening, he grabbed it, yanked it hard, and
another plug came loose—the plug connecting the battery to the system.