The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  “You realize it’s going to be a four-hour drive,” said the first man, hoisting the body from beneath its arms.

  “It’s the least we can do,” his companion replied. Together, they arranged the body in the trunk so that it would not slide around in transit. Before the trunk was closed, Navajo Blue’s body was curled around a spare tire as if it were hugging it. “After all, he’s in no condition to drive.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hang on, Pollux, Belknap silently urged. I’m coming to get you.

  But the course would not follow a straight line—for reasons Jared Rinehart understood better than anyone.

  The shortest distance between two points, Jared had once ventured, is frequently a parabola followed by a ellipse followed by a hyperbola. He meant that in the world of espionage, indirection and obliquity were just as likely to provide a shortcut as blunderbuss directness, and he had been cautioning Belknap when he said so. Not that Belknap had any other choice at the moment.

  The dun-colored building could have been a distribution center for industrial components. There was a halfhearted stretch of barbed wire around the property, which seemed mainly for show, a way of discouraging casual visitors. Belknap drove his SUV through the main drive and parked off to one side. Stealth wasn’t possible with a building like this one, and Belknap wasn’t going to attempt it. Such an approach would signal that he had something to hide, that he was in a position of weakness. They were the ones who had something to hide. Belknap would make more progress by being bold and fearless in his approach.

  He stepped outside the SUV, instantly enrobed in kilnlike heat, and he hurried to the nearest door before he began to perspire. Not the garage-style hinged door leading to the tarmac drive, but the white enameled steel door to the left of it. The door pushed open, and, as his eyes adjusted from the dazzling white outside to the gloom within, he had the sense that he had stumbled across a small refugee camp.

  The space was cavernous, poorly lit, with sleeping bags and thin mattresses scattered pell-mell. A row of open shower stalls was at one end of the space; water dripped from leaky faucets. There were food smells: cartons of cheap local stews. And everywhere there were people—girls, boys, many shockingly young. Some were clustered around pillars, some slumped, dozing, off on their own. They were a strikingly international crew. Some seemed to have arrived from Thailand, Burma, or the Philippines. Some were Arab. A few were from sub-Saharan Africa; others might have been village kids from India. A handful might have been from Eastern Europe.

  What he saw did not surprise Belknap, but it nauseated him all the same. Young girls, younger boys, all driven by indigence into sexual slavery. Some must have been sold by their parents; others would have been fortunate even to have living parents.

  Coming toward him slowly was a jowly, swarthy man in a white gauzy shirt and denim cutoffs, with a long, curved knife in one belt holster and a radio communicator in another. The man walked with a slight limp. He was nothing more than a watchman, a caretaker. For that was the ugliest part of it: Those who run such establishments did not need guards to keep these boys and girls in captivity; they required no locks, bars, shackles. And Belknap couldn’t have set them free if he wanted to. For these children, the true shackles were forged of poverty. Even if they were left to wander freely through Dubai, they would only be picked up by another such establishment. Physical beauty was their one saleable asset; the rest reflected the cold inexorable logic of the marketplace.

  Belknap’s nostrils filled with a harsh chemical scent, overwhelming the human fetor; the drains in the concrete floors indicated that the place was hosed down regularly, and doubtless mopped with some industrial-grade disinfectant. Factory-farmed swine were kept in better conditions.

  The man with the knife growled at him ineffectually, saying something in Arabic. When Belknap did not respond, he came closer and said in heavily accented English, “You are in the wrong place. You must go now.” It was clear that he considered the radio communicator on his belt—his ability to summon backup—his real weapon.

  Belknap ignored the fat man and continued to look around. This was a Hades of sorts, an underworld that few of its inhabitants would ever leave, at least not with their souls intact. Of the dozens of people in the building, few were over twenty, he reckoned. A fair number were probably no older than twelve or thirteen. Every one a story of an everyday tragedy.

  Amid the heat, he felt cold. His had been a lifetime of heroics, of derring-do with guns and spycraft, yet what did it amount to in the face of such horrors? In the face of the grinding poverty that drove children into a place like this, and made them feel grateful that they at least were able to fill their bellies? For there was no humiliation like want, no degradation like hunger.

  “I say, you must go!” the jowly man repeated, his breath garlicky and stale.

  There was a noise from a group of somber-looking teenage girls, and the man turned around and scowled at them. He brandished his knife and shouted a string of multilingual curse words. Some rule of local etiquette had been breached. Then he turned back to Belknap, the knife now in his hand.

  “Tell me about the Italian girl,” Belknap demanded.

  The fat man looked blank. The girls were livestock to him; he did not distinguish among them save by the grossest characteristics. “You go!” he bellowed, coming closer to Belknap.

  The man reached for his radio handset and Belknap grabbed it from his chubby hand. Then, with a swift blow, he drove rigid fingers into the man’s soft throat. As the man sank to the ground, helplessly clawing at his rapidly swelling larynx, Belknap kicked him hard in the face with a heavy shoe. The fat man sprawled motionless on the floor, breathing in fast puffs but unconscious.

  There were dozens of eyes on Belknap when he turned around, neither approving nor condemning, but simply interested to see what he would do next. There was something sheeplike about them, and he felt a surge of contempt.

  He turned toward a girl who looked to be around Lucia Zingaretti’s age. “You know an Italian girl? A girl named Lucia?”

  The girl dazedly shook her head. She neither moved away from him nor met his gaze. She just wanted to get through the day. For someone like her, mere survival was an achievement.

  He tried again with another girl, and again; the responses were the same. These were people who had been taught that whatever they did would be futile; the lesson of helplessness was not easily unlearned.

  Then Belknap made his way across the main floor until he noticed, through a slatlike window, a small cinderblock storage facility at the rear of the property. He barged through a back door and made his way across yards of sand and scrub until he reached the small cinderblock shelter. He noticed that the main door was designed to take a heavy security padlock, and that such a padlock had been used recently. The paint was scratched in spots, exposing glinting steel. No evidence of corrosion yet, which meant that the scratches were recent.

  He pushed through the steel door and, pulling a penlight from his pocket, he investigated the gloom. The space was basically a shack, the sort of structure that was normally made of sheet metal, not heavy cement blocks. There was dust on the concrete floor, but there were also areas where the dust had been wiped away—further evidence of recent activity.

  It took him nearly five minutes before he saw it.

  A small inscription, easy to miss, about a foot above the floor on the rear wall. He knelt down and peered, holding his penlight very close to it.

  Two words, in small painted letters: POLLUX ADERAT.

  It was Latin for “Pollux was here.” Belknap could hardly breathe. He recognized the neat, almost crabbed handwriting—unmistakably Jared’s—and he recognized something else as well.

  The words had been written in blood.

  Jared Rinehart had been there—but when? And, most crucially, where was he now? Belknap raced back into the main building and started demanding of everyone he came across whether they had seen a man in the past f
ew days, a tall American. All he aroused was mute indifference.

  As he made his way back to his SUV, hair now sweat-pasted on his forehead, he heard a boy’s voice. “Mister, mister,” the child was calling out.

  He turned around to see a kohl-eyed Arab, who was maybe in his early teens, maybe not yet. The urchin’s voice had not yet broken. A specialty taste.

  Belknap gazed at him, mute, expectant.

  “You ask about your friend?” the boy asked.

  “Yes?”

  The boy was silent for a moment, staring up at the American as if to scrutinize his character, his soul, the possible danger he presented and the possible help he could offer. “A trade?”

  “Go on.”

  “You take me back to my home village in Oman.”

  “And?”

  “I know where they took your friend.”

  That was the boy’s trade, then: information for transport. Yet could he be trusted? If he were desperate to be returned to his Omani village, a crafty boy could concoct a story on the spur of the moment.

  “Where?”

  The boy shook his head, his fine black hair gleaming in the sun. The makeup they had applied around his eyes was doubtless a regional specialty. But his delicate face was resolute, his large eyes were solemn. The terms of the exchange had to be honored first.

  “Talk to me,” Belknap said. “Give me a reason to believe you.”

  The boy—perhaps four foot six in height—tapped on the hood of the SUV. “You have air conditioning?”

  Belknap gave him a hard stare. Then he got into the driver’s seat and opened the door opposite; the Arab boy climbed in. He started up the engine, and within moments cool air bathed them both.

  The boy smiled, a dazzling white smile, as he pressed his face to the nearest AC vent. “Habib Almani—do you know this princeling?”

  “Princeling?”

  “He calls himself ‘princeling.’ An Omani gentleman. Very rich. Big man.” The boy gestured with his hands to describe someone of considerable girth. “Owns much property in Dubai. Owns stores. Owns trucking firm. Owns dhow business.” He pointed toward the dun-colored building. “Owns this, too. Nobody knows.”

  “But you know.”

  “My father owe him money. Almani is also a Beit, a clan chieftain.”

  “So your father gave you to him.”

  The boy shook his head vehemently. “My father never do that! He refused! So Habib Almani’s men take his two children. Zip, zip, in the darkness, he steals us away. What can my father do? He does not know where we are.”

  “And my American friend?”

  “I see him brought here blindfolded, in Habib Almani van. They use his trucking service. They use his building for the rent boys and girls. Habib Almani does all this for them. Then they take the tall American away. The princeling knows, because he is the one in charge!”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “My name is Baz. Baz means falcon. Falcons see much.” He gave Belknap an intent look. “You are an American, so this is hard for you to understand. But poor is not the same as stupid.”

  “Point taken.”

  The drive that the boy described would involve traveling through the desert, and on some poorly trafficked terrain. If Baz were lying to him…but the boy seemed to understand the risks as well as the rewards. Too, there were details in his story that made a sickening kind of sense.

  “Take me with you,” the boy implored, “and I’ll take you to him.”

  At the Portland headquarters of the SoftSystems Corporation—a sprawling campus of redbrick and energy-efficient glass that the New York Times architecture critic had called “Portland postmodern”—there was never any cause to complain about the coffee. William Culp, its founder and CEO, liked to crack that a programmer was a machine for turning coffee into code. In the great Silicon Valley tradition, sophisticated coffee machines were available throughout the offices, and the brew was an upscale blend of specialty beans. Still, William Culp’s own brew was, well, first among equals. Kona or Tanzanian Peaberry was all very well, but he’d developed a fondness for Kopi Luwak beans. They cost six hundred dollars a pound, and only five hundred pounds were harvested every year, all from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Most of it was snapped up by Japanese gourmets. But Culp made sure he had a regular supply.

  What was special about Kopi Luwak? Culp relished the explanation. The beans had actually been eaten by a tree-dwelling marsupial that always went for the ripest coffee cherries, and then excreted them whole, still layered in their mucilage but subtly altered by the animal’s digestive enzymes. The locals gathered the marsupial’s droppings and carefully washed them to retrieve the beans, as if panning for gold. The result was the most complex java in the world—heavy-bodied, rich, musty, with caramel flavors and a hint of something he could only describe as “jungly.”

  He was enjoying a freshly brewed cup right now.

  Bob Donnelly, his chief operating officer, a man with the broad shoulders of the college fullback he had once been, regarded him with amusement. He wore an open-collared pale blue shirt with the shirtsleeves rolled up. SoftSystems generally adhered to a dress-down ethic—if you saw anyone wearing a tie, it was invariably a visitor—and preserved the conventions of Silicon Valley informality. “Another cup of your crappuccino?” he asked wryly. They were sitting together in a small conference room adjacent to Culp’s private office.

  “You’ll never know what you’re missing.” Culp smiled. “Which is fine with me.”

  Donnelly wasn’t one of the “OGs,” as they liked to call themselves—he wasn’t one of the six boys from Marin County who, decades back, had monkeyed around with old Atari consoles in their garages and had come up with the prototype of the computer mouse. What was patentable wasn’t the mouse itself—the “hardware peripheral”—but the software that made it work, that integrated it with a visual interface. In the years that followed, nearly every software package on the shelf licensed intellectual property that Culp and company had patented. SoftSystems got big. Culp had given his parents a chunk of stock, and they sold it for a hefty sum once the price broke a hundred. Culp privately scorned their fearful attitude toward financial risk. The stock would triple in just another five years, making Culp a billionaire before his thirty-fifth birthday.

  But over the years, most of the other fellows from the old days peeled off to do their own thing. Some started their own companies; others spent their days with costly toys—speedy yachts and jets. Culp stayed the course. He replaced the garage boys with MBA types, and, apart from a nasty and narrowly dodged antitrust trial, SoftSystems had gone from strength to strength ever since.

  “So what do you say we acquire Prismatic?” Donnelly asked.

  “You think we can make it profitable?”

  Donnelly ran a hand through his short reddish hair, as thick as boar bristles, and shook his head. “Strictly as a B&B.” A B&B was their shorthand for “buy and bury.” When SoftSystems analysts stumbled on a company with a technology that might pose a competitive threat, it would sometimes acquire the company, and thus its patents, simply to take them off the market. Retooling SoftSystems programs with the superior algorithm could be a costly proposition. “Good enough” was, often, all that the market really required.

  “You work up the financials?” Culp took another sip of the rich brew. He looked like an aging schoolboy, with wire-rim glasses that had scarcely changed since college, a thatch of sandy brown hair that still hadn’t receded a millimeter. Close up, you could see the lines around his eyes, the way it took a while for his forehead to uncrinkle when he had raised his eyebrows. The truth was that he had never really been boyish when he was a boy. There had been something middle-aged about him even when he was an adolescent, so it was maybe only fitting that there was something adolescent about him now that he was middle-aged. It amused him sometimes when people pretending to be his intimates referred to him as “Bill” the people who really knew him knew
that he had always been “William.” Not Bill, not Will, not Billy, not Willy. William. Two syllables separated by a hint of a third.

  “Got ’em here,” said Donnelly. He had boiled them down to a single page. Culp liked his executive summaries to be truly summary.

  “I like what I’m seeing,” Culp said. “An equity swap—think they’ll go for that?”

  “We can do it either way. We’ll make a richer offer in equity, but if they want cash, no problemo. And I know their angel investors—Billy Hoffman, Lou Parini, guys like that. They’ll insist on a quick payday. Force the managers’ hand if they have to.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Millie Lodge, one of Culp’s personal assistants. “Urgent call.”

  “I’ll take it here,” Culp said absently.

  Millie silently shook her head—a small gesture, but one that caused Culp’s stomach to clutch.

  He took his coffee with him to his office, and picked up the phone: “Culp here,” he said, suddenly hoarse.

  The voice that greeted him was sickeningly familiar. A creepy, electronically altered sound. It was whispery and raspy and harsh and heartless and eerily insistent. The way it would sound if an insect could speak, he sometimes thought.

  “Time to tithe,” the voice said.

  Culp broke out in a cold sweat. From experience, he knew that the call would have been placed via Web-based telephony and was impossible to trace. It could have emanated from the floor below him or from some hovel in Siberia; there was simply no way to know.