The Bancroft Strategy (9 page)

Andrea shook her head. “I can hardly believe it myself,” she said.

“And so the caterpillar turns into the butterfly,” Suzanne said, a spot of red appearing on each cheek.

“Twelve million dollars,” Melissa said softly, almost singing the syllables the way she did when she was trying to memorize a part. “Congratulations! I couldn't be happier for you! This is un-buh-lievable.” The last word turned into three.

“A toast!” Jeremy called out, refilling his wineglass.

The mood was jubilant and joshing, but by the time the meal turned into coffee and cordials, their excitement for her had—or was
she imagining it?—somehow edged into envy. Her friends were spending her money for her in their imaginations, coming up with
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
scenarios that were both outlandish and banal. Jeremy talked, with a faint air of defiance, about a rich man he knew—he did yardwork for him when was a teenager—who “was just like the guy next door, never put on any airs” and there was a hint of reproach in his story, as if Andrea wasn't going to measure up to the Pepsi bottling-plant mogul of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Finally, after the tenth reference to Donald Trump and eighty-foot yachts, Andrea said, “Can we talk about something else?”

Suzanne gave her a who-are-you-trying-to-kid look. “What else is there to talk about?” she asked.

“I'm serious,” Andrea said. “How are
you
doing?”

“Don't patronize me, sweetheart,” Suzanne returned, pretending to be insulted. Except that wasn't quite it, Andrea realized. Her friend was pretending to be pretending to be insulted.

So this is what it was going to be like.

“Anyone for some herbal tea?” Andrea asked, brightly. She could feel a headache coming on.

Suzanne stared at her, unblinking. “You know how you always said you weren't one of those Bancrofts?” she asked, not unkindly. “Well, guess what. You just became one.”

 

In a darkened room illuminated only by the bluish glow of a flat-panel monitor, agile fingers caressed gently concave keycaps; the LCD screen filled and emptied. Words, numerals. Requests for information. Requests for action. Payments assured. Payments revoked. Reward conferred and reward withheld; sanctions and incentives systematically applied. Information came in. Information went out. It was a computer networked to countless others around the world, receiving and generating a pulse of binary digits, a cascade of ones and zeros, of logic gates in closed or open position, each as insubstantial as
the atoms from which mighty edifices are built. Instructions were digitally issued, modified. Data was collected, collated, and assessed. Sizable sums flashed around the world, digitally transferred from one financial institution to another, and another, ending up in numbered accounts nested within other numbered accounts. More instructions were issued; more agents were enlisted through a multiplex of cutaways.

Within the room, a face was illuminated only by the moon-glow of the screen. Yet the recipients of the communications were denied even that glimpse. The guiding intelligence remained hidden to them, as vaporous as the morning mist, as distant as the sun that burns it away. A snatch of an old spiritual drifted into the person's mind.
He's got the whole world in his hands.

The tapping of the keys was almost lost among the ambient noises, but these were the sounds of knowledge and action, of the resources to translate the first into the second. These were the sounds of power. In the lower left corner of the keyboard were the key caps marked
COMMAND
and
CONTROL
. It was not an irony so much as an aptness, and not one lost upon the person seated before the computer. That soft crackling was, indeed, the sound of command and control.

A final, encoded transmission was made. It concluded with one sentence:
Time is of the essence.

Time, the one entity that could be neither commanded nor controlled, would have to be honored and respected.

Agile fingers, a soft crackling of keys, and the sign-off was typed.
GENESIS.

For hundreds of people around the planet, it was a name to conjure with. For many, it meant opportunity and quickened their sense of avarice. For others, it meant something very different, and made their blood run cold, haunted their nightmares.
Genesis.
The beginning. But of what?

Belknap slept during the flight to Rome—he had always taken pride in his ability to store up sleep, given the opportunity—but his sleep was troubled, memory-haunted, even tormented. And when he pulled himself from his slumbers, the memories crowded his mind like flies on a carcass. He had lost so much in his life, and he refused to let Rinehart confirm a hateful pattern: the destruction of those he cared most about. Sometimes it felt like a curse, the sort found in Greek tragedy.

Once, his life was going to be different. Once, Belknap—having been deprived, in his early adulthood, of his own family—was himself going to be a family man. The memories swam into view, darted into darkness, eluded his grasp, then, in a gyre of pain, circled back to bruise him.

The wedding itself had been a quiet affair. A few friends and colleagues of Yvette's at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where she worked as a translator; a few colleagues of Belknap's, whose parents had died long before and who had no close family. Jared, of course, was his best man, and his hovering, friendly presence was a kind of benediction in itself. The first night of their honeymoon at a resort near Punta Gorda, Belize. It had been the end of an enchanted day. They had seen parrots and toucans perched in palm trees, dolphins and manatees sporting in the azure waters, and had been astounded by the call of the howler monkey—it was almost like the roar of the ocean—before they learned the source. Before lunch, they had taken a boat out to the small reef, visible as a line of white surf about half a mile offshore, and there, as they went
diving, another magical realm revealed itself to them. There were the vibrant colors of the coral itself, but also of the swarms of iridescent fish, boundlessly various. Yvette knew their names, and in several languages, too—one legacy of having a diplomat father who had been posted at all the major European capitals. She delighted in pointing out the purple vase sponges, the fairy basslet fish, the squirrelfish, the parrot fish—unlikely names for unlikely creatures. When he approached a fish that looked like a Japanese fan, with delicate white and orange stripes, Yvette touched his hand and they surfaced. “That's a lionfish, my love,” she told him, her brown eyes glittering like the water. “Best admired from a distance.” She explained that its spines could deliver a potent toxin. “It's like an underwater flower, isn't it? But as Baudelaire said,
‘Là où il y a la beauté, on trouve la mort.'
Where there is beauty, one finds death.”

Belize was not paradise; they both knew there was poverty and violence around, none of it very far away. Yet there
was
beauty here, and that beauty contained a kind of truth. It was a truth, at the least, about themselves: their ability to perceive and be transported by the sublime. At that reef, he experienced something that he wanted to hold on to. He knew that, just as those luminous dazzling, vibrant fish looked dull and gray when brought to the surface, his own inner truth was unlikely to survive his workaday existence.
Then know it now,
he urged himself.

That evening, the moonlit beach: The memory was fractured, a heap of lacerating splinters. He could not retrieve them without bleeding. Fragments. Yvette and he had been capering on the sand. Had he ever felt so carefree? Never before, and surely never again. He remembered Yvette, running toward him on the private beach. She was naked, and her hair—somehow golden even in the silvery light of the moon—was flowing over her shoulders, and her blissful expression was itself a source of radiance. He had not noticed, just at that moment, what looked like a small fishing schooner anchored offshore. The two pinpoint pulses of light from the schooner. Had he
seen the muzzle flashes, or imagined them later, when trying to make sense of what he did see: the bullet that pierced her throat, her soft, lovely throat; the bullet that pierced her torso? Both projectiles large-caliber, and, in combination, instantly lethal. Except that he hadn't seen the bullets, either, only their consequences. He remembered that she fell toward him, as if to embrace him, and that it took his stunned mind long seconds to comprehend what had happened. He heard a roar—like the distant guttural clamor of the howling monkey, like the pounding of the surf, but so much louder—and he did not immediately recognize that he was its source.

Where there is beauty, one finds death.

What he remembered about the funeral, back in Washington, was mostly that it rained. A pastor spoke, but it was as if the sound was turned off in Belknap's head: A dark-clad stranger with a professionally somber expression, a stranger whose mouth was moving, no doubt reciting prayers and uttering ritual solace—what had this man to do with Yvette? He was seized by the unreality of all before him. Again and again he plunged into the depths of his mind, trying to bring back that incandescent truth he had experienced at the coral reef that day. Nothing remained. He had the memory of a memory; but the memory that mattered had vanished, or else secreted itself within a hard shell, rendering itself forever inaccessible.

There was no Belize, no beach, no Yvette, no beauty, no timeless truth; there was only the cemetery, a swath of some thirty aggressively green acres overlooking the Anacostia River. If it had not been for Jared Rinehart's steadfast presence, he doubted that he could have held it together.

Rinehart was a rock. The one stable point in his life. He had grieved for Yvette alongside Belknap, but he had grieved for his friend even more. Belknap would not countenance being pitied, however, and Rinehart had sensed this as well, tempering his compassion with mordancy. “If I didn't know better, Castor,” Rinehart said at one point, putting an arm around his friend's shoulder and
gripping him with a warmth that belied his words, “I'd say you were bad luck.”

For all the raging anguish Belknap felt, he managed to smile, and, briefly, to laugh.

Then Rinehart met his eyes. “You know I'll always be here for you,” his friend said quietly. He spoke simply, directly; a blood oath made by one warrior to another.

“I know,” Belknap replied, the words half-trapped in his throat. “I know.” And he did.

An inviolate bond of loyalty and honor: This was a deep truth as well. In Rome, it was the truth that would have to sustain him. Those who harmed Pollux would never be safe from Castor. They had surrendered their right to safety.

They had surrendered their right to
live.

 

The Town Car that arrived at Andrea's house was absurdly incongruous: a Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL—long, sleek, black. On her modest street of small houses with small yards it was as out of place as a Lipizzaner stallion. But the board meeting was set for this afternoon, and, Horace Linville had explained, getting to the foundation headquarters involved a number of unmarked turns in Westchester County. So the car had been sent for her. It wouldn't do for her to get lost.

Toward the end of the two-hour trip, the driver went from one narrow road to another one, evidently old cow paths that had only recently been paved. Few of the lanes had signs. She tried to remember the sequence of turns, but wasn't sure she would be able to repeat the trip on her own.

Katonah, forty miles north of Manhattan, was a peculiar combination of rusticity and wealth. The actual village, part of Bedford Township, was a veritable stage set of Victorian charm, but the real action was found in its sylvan outskirts. That was where the Rockefeller family maintained a sizable compound, as did the international
financier George Soros and scores of billionaires who had no public profile at all. For some reason, people who lived lives of wealth beyond all imagining often imagined themselves living in Katonah. The hamlet was named after the Indian chief from whom it was purchased in the nineteenth century, and, for all its rural appeal, its spirit of commerce—the buying and selling of property, knowledge, souls—had scarcely diminished in the years since.

The bumpy road began to test even the cushioned suspension of the Mercedes SEL. “Sorry it's a little rocky,” said the blandly equable driver. The area they were driving through was lightly timbered, disused farmland that had been reclaimed by the woods sometime in the past several decades. Finally, a handsome brick house came into view—a Georgian redbrick quoined and corniced with Portland limestone. Three stories with a slate mansard roof, it was imposing without being pretentious.

“It's gorgeous,” Andrea said softly.

“That?” The driver coughed, trying to conceal a chuckle. “That's the gatehouse. The foundation's about a half-mile down the drive.” At the car's approach, a section of the black sword-topped wrought-iron fence swung open, and they made their way down an allée of lindens.

“My God,” Andrea said a few minutes later. What looked, from a distance, like a hillock, a swelling of the earth, stood revealed as a vast, curving structure of shingle and stone, something old but unusual. It had nothing of the usual English-country-house kind of grandeur—there was no Gothic masonry; there were no leaded windows, no wings or courtyards. Instead, it was composed of simple shapes—cones, columns, rectangles—and built of wood and locally quarried sandstone. Its palette of earth tones—rich hues of rusty red, sepia, umber—was why it so readily blended into its surroundings. Which made it all the more startling when Andrea came close enough to take it in—its size, the elegance of every detail: the wide oval porches, the sawtooth shingled walls, the gently asymmetric
forms. It was immense, and yet it was so lacking in ostentation that its immensity seemed on the scale of nature, not artifice.

Andrea felt breathless.

“It's a beaut,” the driver agreed. “Not that Dr. Bancroft has a lot of use for it. Up to him, he'd have sold it off and moved into a bed-and-breakfast. But they say the charter won't have it.”

“Good thing.”

“I guess it's part yours now.” The car pulled up to a graveled parking area to one side of the vast building. Andrea felt weak-kneed as she made her way up a low porch and into a light-flooded foyer. Smells of old wood and furniture polish were just detectable. A starched woman greeted her at once, with a wide smile and a thick three-ring binder.

“The agenda,” the woman—stiff coppery hair, upturned nose—explained to Andrea. “We're
delighted
to have you on board.”

“This place is amazing,” Andrea said, gesturing around her.

The woman's lacquered hair barely moved as she nodded vigorously. “It was built in 1915, from a design of H. H. Richardson's, we're told—a design he'd never been able to get built during his lifetime. Thirty years after his death, the world was at war, and this country was preparing to jump into the fight. A dark time. But not for the Bancrofts.”

That was right, Andrea mused—wasn't there some story about a Bancroft who had made a fortune in munitions during the First World War? Her historical interest had never extended to her father's family, but she had picked up the basic lineaments.

The trustees' room was on the second floor, multipaned windows facing onto a terraced garden, which was profusion of vibrant colors. Andrea was escorted to a seat on one side of a long table, a sort of Georgian banquet table, where at least a dozen others, some combination of trustees and foundation staff members, were already gathered. An elegant tea-and-coffee service had been set up in one corner of the room. The men and women around the table were bantering
quietly, and as Andrea made a show of paging through the binder, she heard countless references that were just above her head: clubs she hadn't quite heard of, brand names that might have been a kind of yacht but might have been a kind of cigar, admission directors of grand-sounding boarding schools she had never heard of. From a door at the opposite end of the room, a couple of suited men emerged, accompanied by a much younger assistant. The conversational murmur began to die down.

“Those are program officers from the foundation,” the man seated to Andrea's right explained. “Means it's show-and-tell time.” Andrea turned to her neighbor: slightly pudgy, salt-and-pepper hair, an overgenerous application of gel preserving visible comb tracks. His tanned face did not match his white and hairless hands, and the fringes of hair around his forehead had acquired a faint orange tint.

“I'm Andrea,” she said.

“Simon Bancroft,” he said, something wet and buzzy in his voice. His eyes were gunmetal gray, and inexpressive. His forehead was oddly immobile, she decided; his eyebrows scarcely moved as he spoke. “You're Reynolds's girl, right?”

“He was my father,” she responded, insisting on a shade of meaning doubtless lost on him. She wasn't Reynolds's girl; she was, if anything, Laura's girl.

Scion of the outcast.

She felt a surge of hostility toward the man beside her, like the molecular call of some ancient blood feud, and then, oddly, it passed. What really disturbed her, she realized, wasn't a sense of being out of place; it was her sense of
belonging.
An outsider, an insider: Which was she now?

What if it were up to her to decide?

 

Loose the hound,
Todd Belknap thought mordantly.
Loose the hound of hell.

Every manhole cover in Rome was emblazoned with the initials “SPQR.”
Senatus Populusque Romanus
: The Senate and the People of Rome. Once a grand political gesture, he reflected; now, like so many grand political gestures, little more than a logo. With a small crowbar, the operative prized up the cover and descended a scuttle ladder until he found himself on a rickety-seeming wooden catwalk in a fetid space about twenty feet high and five feet wide. He flicked his flashlight to its medium setting, moving the beam around to inspect his surroundings. The sides of the concrete cavern shimmered with water bugs. Cables, most the thickness of a cigarillo, lined the sides like swagged drapery—black, orange, red, yellow, blue. Fifty-year-old telephone cables hung alongside coaxial from the seventies and eighties, and modern fiber-optic cable freshly installed by municipal utilities like Enel and
ACEA
. The sheathing colors would have meant something to most people who drove an Enel van and wore an Enel uniform, Belknap supposed. He'd just have to be an exception.