The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  The Ansari network had fallen into the hands of an Estonian. An Estonian who, if Robbins’s intelligence was accurate, had already seized control of a vast Cold War arsenal. Genesis? Or merely one of Genesis’s powerful confederates?

  I’m coming for you, Belknap thought grimly. The Hound has caught your scent.

  A long time passed before the operative got to sleep again.

  When the plane landed at the Tallinn airport, after nine hours in the air, Cal Garth jogged him awake. “We’re at the gate,” he said. “And it’s going to be a madhouse in there. You’ll see—Estonia’s annual choral festival is practically the Olympics of the vocal arts. Did you know that a majority of Estonians belong to a chorus? It’s in their blood. More than two hundred thousand choristers congregate here, and Tallinn’s population is only about half a million. So it’s, like, this is our town. ‘We’re the Empire State Chorus, and we’re keeping it real.’”

  As Belknap joined the others in a queue in front of a handful of overloaded customs-and-immigrations booths, he saw that Garth was not exaggerating. Around him were hundreds of foreign arrivals, just off full-to-capacity planes, some clutching sheet music, most having that unmistakable chorister’s twinkle. It was already obvious to Belknap that the customs officers weren’t seriously scrutinizing the flocking choristers; Tyler Cooper, ostensibly a member of the Empire State Chorus, was essentially waved through with no more than a cursory glance at his passport.

  “It was something of a miracle,” Calvin Garth was telling him as he gathered his troops at the airport’s ground-transportation deck, “but we did manage to wangle a hotel room for you at the Reval, near the sea docks.”

  “I’m much obliged,” Belknap said.

  On the bus to the hotel, Garth sat next to Belknap. “We were all going to stay at the Mihkli Hotel, but the Latvians stay there and they are killers,” he explained in his loudly voluble manner. “I didn’t want to worry about their ears being pressed against the walls when my people rehearse their numbers. I swear, you have no idea the level of deceit and trickery those Baltic chorus boys get up to. They’ll put salt-peter in your tea if they think it’ll give them a leg up in the competition. You can’t be too careful.”

  Belknap kept gazing out of the window, saw windmill farms give way to the familiar city-outskirt structures: gas stations, vast tanks of oil and natural gas. “Sounds pretty sordid,” he grunted.

  Tallinn Old Town was now coming into view. Clusters of red-roofed baroque buildings; spires and clock towers of churches and an old town hall, cafés with blue or red awnings. A blue streetcar swept past on tracks set into the cobblestone. He caught a glimpse of a furled Union Jack projecting over a bar. A sign below read NIMETA BAAR, with the words “Jack Lives Here” inscribed in cursive on the plate glass. A feeble attempt at appealing to nascent Anglophilia. It was another instance of a phenomenon ubiquitous in developing regions: nostalgia without memory.

  “You have no idea, Tyler,” Garth said in his penetrating nasal voice, gesticulating with his hands. “The seamy underbelly of song. I’ve heard tales that would shock you.”

  The young woman seated behind them got up and joined a friend a few rows away. Belknap wondered whether she found Garth’s voice as headache-inducing as he did, especially after the wearying flight.

  “That so?” Belknap said.

  “Really, it’s better that you remain innocent of what some of these folks get up to. But I have to counsel caution when I’m talking to my people. I hate to act like a den mother, but the stakes, you know, the stakes!”

  Belknap nodded gravely. There was something in his voice that made him wonder whether the chorus master wasn’t pulling his leg. “I’m very grateful to you, as I say, for accommodating me. Very helpful as we rethink our cultural-exchange programs…”

  Garth looked around before he replied. “Tertius asked me to do whatever I could for you,” he said quietly. It was an entirely different voice this time, devoid of the lilting vowels, the exaggerated animation, the hissing sibilants he had previously displayed. His hands were still, his face impassive. The transformation was startling.

  “Appreciate it.”

  Garth leaned closer to him, as if pointing out a feature of the cityscape. “Don’t know what your plans are, don’t want to know.” Again, the voice was low and gruff. “But bear in mind a couple of things. The Estonian intelligence service was set up and organized by the Soviets, like you’d guess. These days it’s basically a wind-up clock without a key. Underfunded, understaffed. It’s the NSP, the National Security Police, that you need to watch for. Better funded and more aggressive because of the organized-crime factor. Do not mess with them.”

  “Understood.” Belknap found himself marveling. A globetrotting chorus master: the perfect cover—though for what? Lydgate had given him no hints, but Belknap could guess. He knew of retired spooks who had offered their services to a corporate clientele, helping firms clear the way for branch offices and subsidiaries in regions of the world where the rule of law wasn’t exactly ascendant. Regions of the world where the kind of local knowledge possessed by an experienced spy could prove its worth. Such post-service careers were condoned by the official spymasters as long as certain boundaries were observed. “Understood,” Belknap repeated.

  “Then understand this, too.” Garth’s voice was a quiet rumble, and his eyes grew hard. “If you get burned, don’t come to me. Because I don’t want to know you.”

  Belknap nodded gravely, then turned and gazed out the window again. The sky was a piercing blue; residents of a sun-starved nation were out, soaking up as much of it as they could, as if it could be banked and metered out during the long dark months. There was beauty here, and spirit, and history. Yet those long dark months made it a perfect incubator for those merchants of death, men who thrived on darkness and who profited through the convergence of two ineradicable features of human nature: violence and greed.

  A darkened room, no illumination save what emanated from the screen. The soft crackle of a keyboard, caressed into service by agile fingertips. Strings of alphanumeric characters rippled from the keyboard to the screen and disappeared into cryptographic algorithms of extraordinary complexity before reconstituting themselves in far-off lands, to faraway recipients. Messages were sent and received. Directives were discharged and verified.

  Digital instructions decanted money from one numbered account to another, pulled strings that would pull other strings that would pull yet other strings.

  Once more, Genesis reflected on the simple key-cap labels: CONTROL. COMMAND.

  But also OPTION. And, of course, SHIFT.

  To shift the course of history would require more than a keystroke. But a string of keystrokes—the right ones, at the right times—might very well do it.

  To know for sure would take time. A very long time. A very, very long time, really.

  Perhaps as long as seventy-two hours.

  Tallinn was more than 40 percent Russian—the residuum of empire. Russians were not just among the privileged classes; they were among the worst-off as well. Ethnic Russians were Mohawk-haired punk youths with safety pins in their cheeks; they were waiters in restaurants and redcaps in train stations; they were bureaucrats and businessmen. More than a handful were former apparatchiks who regarded the place as a picturesque province of a rightful Russian empire, and some—like the man Belknap set out to meet—were KGB men who had been stationed in Tallinn and, when they retired, found it a more restful prospect than the available alternatives.

  Gennady Chakvetadze was a retired KGB man who was of Georgian ancestry but who grew up mainly in Moscow and had spent twenty years at the Tallinn station. He had started out a flaps-and-seals man, humble stuff, as befitted someone with a two-year degree from a provincial technical school and few connections with the nomenklatura. He had rubbery, peasant features: a bulbous nose, cheekbones invisible beneath pudgy, wide-spaced eyes, slightly recessed jaw. But only fools underestimated him because of
his manners and appearance. He did not stay in flaps-and-seals for long.

  When Belknap first made his acquaintance, they were on opposite sides of the great geopolitical divide known as the Cold War. Yet even then, the great states had common enemies: terrorism and insurgencies led by those who were hostile to the existing world order. Belknap had been looking for POSHLUST, the code name for a Soviet weapons scientist who had—on the “informal” market—been selling information to the Libyans and other unlicensed customers. The Americans had no name, just the coded legend, but Belknap had the idea of following a Libyan delegation to a scientific conference at the resort town of Paldiski, thirty miles west of Tallinn. There Belknap recorded a rendezvous between a man whom he knew, from his facebook, to be a member of Mukhabarat, the Libyan state-security services, and a Russian physicist named Dmitri Barashenkov. During a panel discussion at which Bareshenkov was present, Belknap let himself into the physicist’s room—the participants were put up at a slightly decrepit spa—and conducted a swift search. He found enough to confirm the identification. When he left the room, however, and made his way down the hallway, amber-and-white tiles set in discolored grout, he found himself accosted by a KGB man with peasant features and a look of exhaustion: Gennady. Later, Belknap realized that Gennady could have come with a full entourage but chose to appear alone in order to be less threatening. To the Soviets, POSHLUST was nothing less than an embarrassment—one of their own who had wandered off the reservation and was making side deals irrespective of state policies and official diplomacy. Their failure to have identified him over the past twenty-four months had been galling—as was the way they finally had done so.

  “Would I be speaking to Mr. Ralph Cogan, science administrator from the Rensselaer Institute of Technology?” Chakvetadze had asked him.

  Belknap had given him an uncomprehending look.

  “G. I. Chakvetadze,” replied the Russian. “But you can call me Gennady.” He smiled. “At least if I can call you Todd. I think we are, in fact, colleagues. If you are an employee of RPI, I am with the Kiev Gas Company.” He put an arm around Belknap, who tensed. “May I say thank you? On behalf of the Soviet people?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Belknap replied.

  “Come, we shall have tea in the lobby,” the slovenly KGB man replied, the buttons on his cheap navy jacket straining at his belly, his too-short tie askew. “Tell me, have you ever gone hunting for wild boar? Great sport in the republic of Georgia. You must use dogs. Two kinds, at least. Track dogs, which have the gift of scenting out and tracking down the wild hog. But once the boar has been located, then what? You bay them up. Then what? That’s when you need catch dogs. The catch dogs sink their teeth in its nose and hang on. A lesser skill? No doubt. But an indispensable one.”

  The two were walking down the stairs together. There was no point in putting up further resistance. “We look for POSHLUST, but never find. Then we learn that the fabled Mr. Belknap is coming to a seaside resort here in Estonia. How? From you, Todd, I have no secrets, save the secrets that I have. Not your fault. One of your legend clerks gets sloppy. They accidentally doubled up on ‘Ralph Cogan’ documents. There’s a Ralph Cogan in Bratislava as we speak. The Estonian processor is puzzled, and the photo ID is kicked upstairs, and the determination is made. This is none other than Todd Belknap, the one they call sobak, the Hound. Who is he looking for? Could it be the one we look for? We wait and see.”

  Once they had reached the ground floor, Belknap decided he would indeed have tea with the KGB man, take his measure as the other did the same.

  “So we are grateful to you. But you now have reason to thank us. After all, what were you going to do with this swine once you had bayed him up at the corner of a tree? You Americans are too dainty to be comfortable with mokry dela, with ‘wetwork.’ Yet you must eliminate him. The problem is solved. At the conclusion of the panel, the errant physicist will be whisked off into the world of Soviet criminal justice. Your job is done, your track-dog paws are clean. You leave the unpleasant work of the catch dog to us, yes? You did confirm that Dmitri Barashenkov is POSHLUST, yes? If you tell me yes, I have him apprehended. So, your conclusion is—what?”

  Belknap took a long time before he answered.

  The two had stayed in touch at irregular intervals over the succeeding two decades; each time was memorable. Belknap knew that the KGB agent wrote reports of their meetings; he also suspected that those reports were not complete. And when the Soviet empire shriveled up and the KGB was scaled down, Belknap assumed that the Georgian had retained his position, though he had so many guises that Belknap could not be certain. Sometimes, a legend was converted into reality: There were cases in which someone set up by the KGB to play a businessman would detach himself from his superiors and simply pursue his cover career in earnest. Belknap did know that Chakvetadze was retired now; the man was in his mid-seventies, after all, and the years of hard drinking had told. He also knew that Chakvetadze would have held on to a kit bag from his old trade; the ex–KGB officers all did, the way Second World War infantrymen often held on to souvenir sidearms.

  Chakvetadze’s lakeside cottage, by Lake Ülemiste, was just a couple of miles south of Tallinn Old Town. It was not exactly a picture of arcadia; the airport was not far, and the sound of jets was as omnipresent as birdsong. It was a spare, bungalow-like house, a one-story structure of semicircular shingles, a redbrick fireplace sprouting from the center like a handle.

  Perhaps as a point of pride, Chakvetadze did not admit to surprise at hearing from his old friend. “Yes, come, come,” he had said with a Slavic garrulity that had never been chastened by Estonian reserve.

  Immediately upon Belknap’s arrival, the Russian ushered him through the house to a concrete patio, where there were a couple of worse-for-wear canvas-backed chairs and a table of silvered wood. Then he returned with a bottle of vodka and two glasses, and began pouring with little ceremony.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” Belknap said.

  “It will be longer if you don’t have some of this lighting fluid in your belly,” the Georgian said. “I’m sorry you didn’t come earlier. I could have introduced you to my wife.”

  “She out of town?”

  “I meant a few years earlier, durak, not a few hours. Raisa’s been dead for two years.” He settled down, took a generous swallow, and gestured toward the lake, from which wisps of fog arose like steam from soup. “You see that great boulder in the middle of the lake there? It’s called Lindakivi. According to Estonian folklore, the great king Kalev married a woman born of a hen’s egg, named Linda. When he died, Linda was supposed to carry great boulders to his grave, but one fell off her apron. So she sat on it and cried. Hence Lake Ülemiste. The tears, you know.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “All national epics are truthful,” Gennady replied stoutly. “In their way, It is also said that Ülemiste the Elder lives in this lake. If you meet him, he asks, ‘Is Tallinn ready yet?’ and you must always answer, ‘No, much remains to be done.’”

  “What if you answered yes?”

  “Then he would flood the city.” The Georgian chortled merrily. “So you see, disinformatzia is a very old Estonian occupation.” He closed his eyes, turned to face the lake breeze. There was a sound like the whine of a distant gnat as an airplane came in for a landing.

  “It is a powerful tool, disinformation,” Belknap allowed. “I am in search of others.”

  Gennady opened one eye, and then the other. “I can deny you nothing, old friend, save what I must deny you.”

  Belknap looked at his watch. It was a good start. “I thank you, moy droog.”

  “So.” The Russian’s eyes were watchful, but his smile was unforced. “What outrageous requests have you come to make?”

  The depository on Binnewater Road, Rosendale, just north of New Paltz, was an old mine that had been converted into a high-security storage center. As her cab pulled up to
the address, little was visible from outside, other than a vast black plastic mat—a moisture barrier—that was stretched over a sandy knoll. She showed her ID to a guard in a booth, and a steel gate was raised, enabling the cab to pull into the large parking lot—a parking lot without a building, so it seemed, for the storage facility was underground. The terrain, she’d learned, had once been rich with veins of limestone, especially sought after because it was low in magnesium, making it desirable for the manufacture of cement and concrete. Indeed, much of the physical structure of modern Manhattan had been extracted from the county. It was in the remains of one of these “cement mines” that the Archival Storage facility had been built. Despite its colloquial designation as an “iron mountain,” it was, in fact, a steel-lined mine.

  At an entrance area her photo ID was carefully scrutinized. Her friend at the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance had called ahead and authorized her visit; ostensibly she was an independent auditor contracted by the state for special research. Seated at a wood-veneer counter by the entrance was a pear-shaped man with deep-set eyes, broad sloping shoulders, and receding glossy black hair. He looked to be in his late thirties. Despite his bulky torso, his face was oddly fatless; his cheeks were grooved, almost gaunt, skin taut over a death’s head. Finally, almost reluctantly, the man gave her a special badge with a magnetic strip.

  “The badge activates all doors and elevators,” he said, in the tone of someone who had regularly issued the official cautions. “It’s good for eight hours from stamp date, by the clock. You must return before that interval has elapsed. On any future visit, you must fill out the same form and get your badge reissued or recharged. The badge must be with you at all times.” He tapped it with a long fingernail. “That bad boy there turns on the lights automatically for the segment where you’re working. Be sure to keep an eye out for staffers on the electric carts. They beep, just like the trolleys at the airport. You hear beeping, step aside, because those carts can zoom by pretty fast. On the other hand, if you need vehicular transport, you use one of the internal phones and call in the request. Number, letter, all that good shit. Righty-ho? If you’ve visited an iron-mountain type facility before, you’re probably familiar with the system. If not, it’s better to get your questions answered now.” When he stood up, Andrea saw that he was shorter than she had thought.