The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

“So what did you find?” Todd Belknap demanded. He gripped the cell phone tightly.

  “Almost all those names on that list have something in common,” Matt Gomes said. Belknap could tell that he had his lips close to the mouthpiece of his phone and was speaking softly. “They’re dead. And all in the past couple of weeks, too.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Causes of death are all over the map. Some straight-up homicides. Two suicides. Some accidental. Some natural causes.”

  “If I’m betting my money? They’re all homicides. Some of them better hidden than others. And Gianni?”

  “Massive heart attack. Just a few minutes ago.”

  “Christ on a raft,” Belknap roared.

  “You tell me all the names on that list?”

  “Damned straight,” Belknap said, hanging up. All of them except one name: Todd Belknap.

  What did it mean? The natural assumption was that they were people whom the Ansari network, or its new masters, regarded as a threat. But why, exactly? Had there been an internal coup within the network? If so, how did it connect to Jared Rinehart’s abduction, if it did at all?

  Belknap’s scalp tightened with apprehension. The list. It bore all the signs of a mop-up. The sort of housecleaning that was typically performed before a make-or-break operation. It could mean that he had even less time than he’d feared to find Pollux.

  It could mean it was already too late.

  Something else gnawed at Belknap’s mind. Given the obvious ruthlessness of those in charge, it was even more perplexing that the Italian girl hadn’t been killed immediately, back in Rome. Why had they waited until his arrival forced the issue? Was she of potential value to them in some way that eluded Belknap? It seemed impossible. As confounding as her treatment was, however, it represented a wisp of hope—the hope that Pollux, too, had been allowed to live.

  The Italian girl said she had been staying at a place past the Dhow Building Yard, on Marwat Road. He would drive there now in the rented SUV. Perhaps there were others there in whom she had confided. Perhaps the master of the establishment would have the information he needed.

  The cell phone he had lifted from the death-squad leader purred. He answered with an ambiguous half-syllable: “Ya.” The voice at the other end, he was surprised to hear, belonged to a woman.

  “Hello, is this…?” The woman—an American—trailed off.

  Belknap said nothing, and a second later the woman hung up with a murmured apology. The squad’s controller? A wrong number? From the caller-log function, he could tell that the call originated from the United States. It was no random misdial; he was sure of it. Once more, he enlisted Gomes’s help.

  “I’m not your freakin’ back office, Castor,” Gomes groused, as Belknap read him the digits. “You feelin’ me?”

  “Look, help a brother out, okay? I’m in kind of a hurry here. Need you to step up and represent. Just ID the goddamn number, would you?”

  Half a minute elapsed before Gomes got back to him. “Okay, man, I got Jane Doe’s name, did a quick records search, too.”

  “Chances are good she’s the goddamn princess of darkness,” Belknap said grimly.

  “Yeah, well, her civilian handle is Andrea Bancroft.”

  Belknap paused. “A Bancroft Bancroft?”

  “No duh. She just became a trustee of the Bancroft Foundation.” Cockily, he added, “Who’s your daddy now?”

  Andrea Bancroft. How was she involved in the killings? How high up was she? Could she know something about—have been complicit in—the disappearance of Jared Rinehart? There were too many questions, too many uncertainties. But Belknap didn’t believe in coincidences. This wasn’t any wrong number. All indications were that Andrea Bancroft was a dangerous customer, or, at the very least, keeping dangerous company.

  Belknap made a call to a retired operative he hadn’t spoken to in years. No matter. The man’s field name was Navajo Blue, and Navajo Blue owed Belknap one.

  A few minutes later, a cinderblock structure came into view. Hidden from the road, near a series of industrial buildings, the building was dun-colored, just shy of derelict, and almost seemed to vibrate in the heat. As the Italian girl had described the setup, it was basically a warehouse for prostitutes. The place had doubtless seen all sorts of people from all walks of life. But it had never seen anyone like Todd Belknap.

  Andrea Bancroft pulled over again and dialed another one of the most-frequently-called numbers on the phone bill. That one turned out to be a nursery in New Jersey, probably part of the ground-maintenance detail. She crossed it off. She had to be more systematic; she wasn’t going to get very far just by calling numbers and seeing who answered. In the case of the international cell-phone number, the person who answered hardly said anything at all—which was suspicious, to be sure, but hardly informative. She tucked the phone bill away and let her mind drift. Something was nagging at her—some odd detail.

  What was it?

  It was morbid of her, no doubt, but she could not help going over the painful teenage memory of her mother’s death. The policeman at the door…ready to break the news. Except she had already been informed by—who was that caller? It had happened more than a decade before. Yet someone had phoned to tell her that her mother had been killed. And then it came to her: what it was about the man with the hoarse smoky voice—the foundation officer who’d telephoned about security protocols and compliance issues—that made her blood run cold.

  It was the same voice as the man who called that night.

  At the time, she’d assumed it was someone from the police—yet the policeman at the door seemed puzzled when she mentioned the call. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was imagining things. And yet…something about that night had always bothered her, like a lash under her eyelid. Her mother, she was told, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.1—yet she didn’t drink. When Andrea said so, the kindly patrolman had asked a perceptive question: Had she once been an alcoholic? Yes, but her mother had joined AA, hadn’t had a drop for years. The policeman nodded; he admitted that he was a recovering alcoholic himself. One day at a time. Still, almost everyone falls off the wagon at one point or another. Andrea’s protests had been quietly, gently set aside, the indignation of a protective daughter unwilling to face the truth.

  When did it happen? the seventeen-year-old Andrea had asked. About twenty minutes ago, the patrolman explained. No, Andrea said, it must have been earlier—they called me at least half an hour ago.

  The patrolman had given her a strange look. She remembered little else, because then everything had been washed away by an ocean of grief.

  She had to tell Paul Bancroft. She had to talk to him, she resolved. Yet what if he knew already? What if he knew far more than he was letting on? Her head began to pound.

  As Andrea motored along the Old Post Road, she turned on the windshield wipers before she realized that nothing was obscuring the view except the tears that had welled up in her own eyes.

  You’re losing it, Andrea, she scolded herself. Yet another voice, darker and deeper, spoke in contradiction: Maybe you’re finding it, Andrea. Maybe you’re finding it.

  Nimble fingers roamed across the computer keyboard. Fingers that knew their destination, that executed a complex series of directives with precision and celerity. In a flurry of quiet clicks, an e-mail message was composed. A few more keystrokes and the message was encrypted, then dispatched to an offshore anonymizer service, where it would be stripped of all identifying codes, decrypted, and rerouted to its ultimate recipient, one with a senate.gov suffix. In less than a minute, a computer in the office of a United States senator would ping. The message would have arrived, and with it its signoff.

  GENESIS.

  In the next few minutes, other messages were sent, other instructions dispatched. Strings of digits shifted money from one numbered account to another, moving levers that would move still other levers, pulling strings that would pull still other strings.

  GENESIS. For some, it was
indeed the beginning. For others, it meant the beginning of the end.

  Tom Mitchell ached all over. It was the way he felt after a bout of unaccustomed exercise or after an alcoholic binge. He had not taken any exercise. Process of elimination, right? Blinking hard, he peered into the garbage pail by the sink. It was heaped with beer cans—“tinnies,” as his Australians friends called them. How many six-packs had he gone through? His head hurt when he thought about it. His head hurt when he didn’t.

  The screen door banged noisily in the breeze, like a concussion bomb, he thought. A wasp buzzed in the doorway, and to him it sounded as if a Second World War fighter plane was overhead. And when the phone had rung a little earlier in the day, it had sounded like an air-raid siren.

  Maybe it was an air-raid siren, of sorts. Castor had called, and it wasn’t to borrow a cup of sugar, either. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t someone you said no to, and Tom Mitchell—Navajo Blue had been his field name, when he had been in active deployment—figured he ought to be grateful for a chance to repay a debt. You didn’t want to get on the Hound’s bad side, that was for sure. Because the Hound had teeth, and his bite was worse than his bark.

  The serenity of Tom’s New Hampshire idyll was killing him, anyway. He wasn’t cut out for the quiet life, that was the long and short of it, and it was asking too much from the booze to supply all the excitement that was missing from his daily routine.

  Sheila had found the place. Post-and-beam construction, whatever the hell that meant. Wide plank floors under the particleboard—she crowed at the discovery as if she’d unearthed King Tut’s tomb. Just a little down the road of them to either side were ratty A-frames and piece-of-shit bungalows and car-killed raccoons, each with their own blowfly cloud. But there was enough land in back that he could take out his Ruger snubby for a spin once in a while and blast a few squirrels out of the trees, squirrels being the Vietcong of the rodent family, as far as he was concerned. The bird feeders were strictly designated for creatures of feather: A tree rat messed with their supply lines at its peril.

  But that wasn’t the hardy-har-har part of the whole Simple Life thing. Thirty years of gallivanting all over the godforsaken planet in the service of the US of A—including month-long sojourns out of radio contact—and Sheila loyally sticks it out. Thirty years—thirty-one and a half, more precisely. His wife through thick and thin. Always overjoyed when he came back, but careful not to lay a big guilt trip on him when he had to set off again. So now, the payoff for all those years of patience: She gets her husband full-time, the way it ought to be, right? They get the rural hideaway they’ve always talked about. A few green acres, mostly paid for. Paradise at last, if you didn’t mind the blackflies in the summer.

  Sheila lasted for just over a year of it. That was all she could take. Probably saw more of him during that time than she had in the previous three decades. Which evidently was the trouble.

  She tried to explain. She said she never got used to sharing her bed, somehow. She said a lot of things. Eight acres of New Hampshire wilderness and she complained that she Needed Her Space. Neither were great talkers, but they had talked a fair amount the day before Sheila headed off to Chapel Hill, where her sister lived and had found her a condo. She said: I’m bored. He said: We could get cable.

  Tom would never forget the look she gave him then. Pitying, mostly. Not angry, but disappointed, the way you’d look at an incontinent old dog when it made a mess. Sheila called him once a week, and there was something nurselike about her conversations. She was acting like the responsible adult, checking to make sure he was okay, was keeping himself out of trouble. The truth was, he felt like a car rusting away on cinderblocks. A common sight in these parts.

  He took a carafe from the coffee machine and filled a mug on which was emblazoned the once humorous logo DOES THIS BODY MAKE ME LOOK FAT? He poured a heaping spoonful of sugar into it. No Sheila glares to worry about, right? He could have all the sugar he wanted. Like the state motto said: Live free or die!

  The Dodge pickup truck started up just fine, but two hours down the turnpike later, the coffee seemed to have turned into piss and stomach acid. A couple of rest stops took care of one problem; a roll of Tums was contending with the other. His ass was going to sleep, something to do with the springs in the seat, maybe. He should have invested in one of those special seat pads, the kind that hemorrhoidal truck drivers always seemed to have.

  It took a good four hours before he reached Carlyle, Connecticut, and he was in a foul mood. Four freaking hours of his life. When he could have been doing—what? Still. Four hours. “Just nip over,” Castor had said. Four hours wasn’t any kind of a nip.

  The job would be a cakewalk, though. By the time he’d made a few reconnoitering runs along Elm Street, he was sure about that. The Carlyle police were a joke. And the lady in question lived in a doll’s house of a Cape Cod. No visible security measures whatever. A screen porch. Ordinary glass on the windows. No house-hugging shrubbery that might have concealed security devices by the foundations. He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t even lock her doors.

  Still, this trip was strictly business, not pleasure; he was a professional. Castor would not have tasked him for no reason. Which meant it was time for the Navajo Blue show.

  He parked his truck across the street and a few hundred yards away from the house. When he finally emerged from the truck—and there was relief in stepping away from his own funk and flatulence—he was wearing a generic-looking handyman uniform: a Dickies-style silver-gray shirt and pants with a small embroidered pocket patch that said SERVICE MASTER, a leather tool belt. Generic service guy: That’s how it would read. Nobody you took a second look at, unless you were the guy who had called him. Elm Street was filled with nicely mown rectangular yards with one-from-column-A-one-from-column-B shrubs: red barberries, blue junipers, flat-topped yews, forsythia—all varieties had become indigenous to the suburban sprawl that was the greater Northeast. He craned his head, looked at the houses on both sides of the street, as far as he could see. Four kinds of plants, four styles of houses. Everybody’s special in the US of A, right?

  Navajo Blue saw an empty garage, no car in the driveway. Nobody in view from any of the windows. Nobody at home. He went to the door, rang the bell, prepared to pretend he had come to the wrong house if someone answered. As he expected, nobody did. He walked around to the rear of the house, found the place where the telephone and coaxial cables entered the house. Nothing could be easier than to place a listening device on the line. The one he would use—like a lot of retired ops, he kept a trick bag of such devices—was nothing special, but it was road-tested and reliable. He got down on his knees and took out what looked like a cable tester, a small black plastic gizmo the size of a garage opener with an LCD display, and reached under the cable cluster. He felt a small oblong object, a little like a small battery, and a lot like a signal-intercept device.

  What the hell?

  He squinted at it, visually confirming what he had felt. Someone had got there before he had. There already was a tap on the line, and it was a better model than one that he had. Now he let himself in the back—it took fifteen seconds with a couple of stiff bristles inside the keyhole, not his personal best, but not bad, either—and wandered through the place. Nicely but modestly furnished; a girl’s place but not a girly girl’s. Nothing too pink or fluffy. On the other hand, nothing that suggested it was a lair of iniquity, either.

  There were a number of good places for secreting audio-surveillance instruments, in his professional estimation. An ideal location had to meet two tests. It had to be a place where it wouldn’t be detected, but also where it would be capable of getting a high-quality feed. Stick a bug in a pipe and nobody would find it, but you wouldn’t pick up a goddamn thing, either. And it had to be someplace that wouldn’t get moved or thrown out, the way a floral arrangement would be. He figured he’d have no problem finding good homes for half a dozen of the devices, starting with the chandelier in the
dining room, which was close to ideal. He stepped on a chair and examined the inner brass circle around which was a circle of flame-shaped bulbs. Out of sight, there was a recessed spot where the wiring came through, and that would probably leave room for…Navajo Blue blinked. Once again, someone had beaten him to it. To most people, the thing would look like an extra, capped-off wire. But he knew exactly what it was—starting with the fact that the top of the cap was actually sieve-textured glass.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, he identified several other prime locations for surveillance devices. Each time he found that one had already been planted there.

  His nerves were now sparking at him, and it wasn’t the hangover anymore. The fact was, 42 Elm Street was wired up like a goddamn studio. Something was very wrong.

  His instincts might have grown muzzy, but they told him to get out of there fast, and he did so, walking out the back door and rounding to the street. He thought he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye—someone watching from a neighboring yard?—but when he turned for a second look, whatever he saw was gone. Now he strode the half-block to his truck and drove off. Castor said he’d check in within a few hours. Castor was going to get an earful.

  The AC was blasting away—he hadn’t remembered leaving it on—and he reached over to fiddle with the knobs on the dashboard, which suddenly seemed far away, as if someone had stretched everything out. The afternoon sun seemed to flicker and dim, which meant that a cloud had passed over it, except that the light got dimmer and dimmer and no cloud could turn day into night and it was definitely night, it was midnight-blue, and he had some thought about turning on the headlights and another thought that the headlight thought didn’t really make sense, and he just managed to pull the truck over to a halt on the side of the road before the weird nocturnal vision turned into inky blackness. Then he had no more thoughts at all.

  A tinted-glass navy sedan glided to a stop just behind the van. The two men who emerged from it—both of medium height and medium build, medium brown hair at medium length, wholly unexceptionable save for their hatchet-like countenances—were efficient in their movements. Someone who met them might have taken them to be brothers, and they were. One of them lifted the truck’s hood and removed a spent flat canister from the air-conditioning system. The other opened the driver’s-side door to the truck and, taking care not to inhale, pulled the lifeless body out of it. His companion would drive the truck back to the address they had in New Hampshire, but first he helped carry the dead man into the trunk of the sedan. The body, too, would be returned to the man’s home and arranged in some plausible position there.