Belknap crossed the street, withdrew a small flat pair of field glasses, and squinted, trying to make out the security guard on duty in the lobby. He saw nothing. He saw…a curling wisp of smoke drifted from an interior pillar. There was a guard in that lobby all right. He was smoking. And he looked tired.
Briskly, the American checked himself in a reflective window. His dark suit fitted the part he was playing; the black leather Gladstone bag—it and its contents came courtesy of Gennady—was somewhat bulkier than the usual corporate briefcase but otherwise nothing very noticeable. Now he took a deep breath, approached the entrance, flashed his ID, and prepared to sign himself in.
The guard gazed at him sleepily, pressed a buzzer that released the front door. He had the widening girth that most Estonian men had acquired by their early middle age, the product of a diet of pork, fat, pancakes, and potatoes. He took a last drag on his cigarette and resumed his place behind a granite counter.
“CeMines,” Belknap said. “CeMines Estonia. Floor eleven.”
The guard nodded stolidly, and Belknap could guess what he was thinking. A foreigner, but then Tallinn was overrun with them. It was doubtless unusual for CeMines, a medical-science company, to have visitors at this hour, but Gennady had placed a call to the guard bank, letting him know, in his Russian-inflected Estonian, that a visitor was en route. Some sort of system failure requiring the attentions of some sort of technician.
“You come to make fix?” asked the guard in halting English.
“Sensors indicate a refrigeration-coil malfunction in the biostorage unit. No rest for the wicked, right?” Belknap spoke with a confident smile.
The guard had the perplexed look of someone whose English had been overtasked. But the import of his thoughts was plain enough: Making trouble for a rich foreigner might be more than his job was worth. After a long moment, he had the visitor sign in, jerked a thumb toward the elevator bank, and lighted up another cigarette.
Belknap, for his part, felt his apprehension level rise with the elevator. The hard part was ahead of him.
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Gina Tracy fingered a curl of black hair next to her ear as she spoke to the others. “There’s been a screwup. Really regrettable. Apparently the guys we sent to South America removed the wrong Javier Solanas. Can you believe it?” South America seemed so far away from the lacquered slate floors and frosted glass of the Theta facility, and yet this was where the critical decisions originated. Sometimes Tracy felt as if she was at an aerospace mission-control center, guiding probes on other planets. “They were supposed to take out the Ecuadorian trade representative.” She glanced at the instant message that had flashed on her computer screen. “Instead they got some harmless rancher with the same name. I mean, shit.”
There was a moment of hushed silence; only the white-noise purr of the climate-control system was audible.
“Oy, gevalt,” said Herman Liebman, the loose folds of his neck quivering with frustration.
“And these are supposed to be our top guys,” Tracy went on. “Total A-listers. Maybe we should’ve used people in-country. Something to be said for local talent, you know?”
“These things happen,” fluted George Collingwood, spreading his fingers across his beard, his short curly hairs neatly trimmed. Someone had once remarked that his beard looked almost vaginal, and Gina sometimes smiled when she looked at him, thinking about it. She did so now.
He tilted his head. “You think it’s funny?”
“In a dark and bitter and blackly comic sort of way,” Gina assured him.
John Burgess’s watery, pale eyes caught hers. “You have a recommendation?” Filtered daylight picked out comb tracks in his white-blond hair.
“We need to think hard about how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again,” she said. “I really hate when this happens.”
“We all do,” Collingwood said.
“I’ve got to learn to be philosophical about it,” Tracy said. Some might consider them bloodless technocrats, she knew, but the truth was, they really cared about their work, and it was a struggle not to take it personally when things went wrong. “George is right. We’re going to slip up from time to time. Get too caught up in it and you lose the bigger vision. That’s what Paul would say.” She turned to the savant. “Isn’t it?”
“I regret this,” Paul Bancroft said. “Very much. We’ve made errors in the past, and there will, inevitably, be errors in the future. Still, there’s solace in knowing that our error rate continues to be well within the parameters that we’ve established as acceptable—and our error rates have been improving over time. That’s a heartening trend-line.”
“Even so,” Liebman persisted grumpily.
“What’s important is to situate these lapses in the larger context of success,” Bancroft went on, “and to look forward, not backward. As you say, Gina, we need to learn from our mistakes and determine what additional safeguards can protect against such errors in the future. The calculus of risk produces an asymptotic curve. Which means that there’s always room for improvement.”
“Think we should send our boys back to get the right one?” Burgess asked.
“Forget about it,” Collingwood said. “That would be too much of a coincidence. I mean, in the unlikely event that someone were keeping track of the deaths of people named Javier Solanas. But still. A risk-assessment analysis will tell you it’s not worth pursuing. Any developments elsewhere?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard the news story about a woman in northern Nigeria who’s about to be stoned to death,” said Tracy. “Apparently a village court found her guilty of adultery. I mean, how medieval is that?”
Paul Bancroft furrowed his brow. “I hope you’re not forgetting the larger view here,” he said. “We can have the boffins confirm this, but I’d project that this intensely publicized event has a highly beneficial effect on HIV transmission rates. It’s the baby-in-the-well syndrome all over again. The world media focuses on one woman with mournful eyes and an infant in her arms. The plangent iconography of the madonna and child. Yet the medieval law of these unlettered mullahs is probably going to prevent thousands of AIDS cases. Which is to say, thousands of painful, lingering, ravaging, costly deaths.”
Collingwood blinked. “It’s a no-brainer,” he chimed in, turning to Tracy. “Why do you think HIV seropositivity rates are so low in Muslim countries? When you penalize and stigmatize sexual promiscuity, transmission rates plunge. Look at the map. Senegal has one of the lowest rates of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s ninety-two percent Muslim. Now look at its neighbor, Guinea-Bissau, which has half the percentage of Muslims that Senegal has—and an HIV rate that’s five times higher. Stone away, I say.”
“Anything else in that continental sector?” Bancroft asked.
Burgess scanned his console for an electronic list of items. “Well, what about the minister of mines and energy in Niger? Isn’t he blocking important aid projects?”
“That got nixed, remember?” Gina Tracy looked annoyed. “Too many knock-on effects. We already went over this.”
“Remind me of the play here,” said Collingwood. “I’ve been meeting with the systems people all morning.”
“Executive summary? I’ll break it down into broad strokes.” Burgess paused, collecting his thoughts. “First, Minister Okwendo is too high-profile. Second, he’s likely to be replaced by Mahamadou, the finance minister. Which is fine, but then the question is, Who’s in place to succeed Mahamadou? If he’s replaced by Sannu, that’s fine. But it’s even money that he’ll be replaced by Seyni. And ultimately that could make things even worse. Instead of removing the minister of mines and energy, it would be better to remove Diori, the assistant minister involved. Diori’s number two is a relatively benign character, all our intelligence suggests: His father was a kleptocrat, but the result is that the son has enough money that he’s not in government to make more.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Bancrof
t said pensively. “Diori would appear to be the strategically sound choice. But let’s be sure to take it to the second-team boffins to see whether their calculations accord. An independent assessment is always valuable, as we’ve learned the hard way.” The look he gave Liebman spoke of their shared history.
“Running a fresh set of models could take a few days,” Burgess warned.
“A country like Niger, with a relatively tiny ruling elite, is extremely susceptible to wide output variances given minuscule input variances. We’ll want to be safe, not sorry.”
“No argument here,” said Liebman, tenting his liver-spotted hands beneath his chin.
“All right, then.” Bancroft gave Burgess a grave look.
“Meanwhile, how’s the absorption of the Ansari network coming along?” Liebman asked. “After all the effort we spent in taking it over, I certainly hope it proves its worth.”
“Are you kidding? It’s turning out to be another one of Paul’s masterstrokes,” said Collingwood. “Proper integration will take a while, the same as with a corporate acquisition. But there’s every reason to expect that it’s going to enable us to gather really valuable intelligence on its clients. And knowledge is—”
“The power to do good,” Bancroft put it. “Everything we learn goes to support the larger cause.”
“Absolutely,” Collingwood said, nodding vigorously. “The world is awash in munitions. Right now, they flow toward the highest bidder. Even worse is when the bidding is split, and you’ve got both sides of a civil war armed to the hilt. There were thirty years of that in Angola. Totally irrational. Now we’re going to be able to guide the firepower to the states and factions that ought to get it. We’ll be able to pacify provinces that had been making themselves miserable for decades, because they’ve been given just enough arms to wage war and not enough to win. That’s always the worst state of affairs.”
“Our geopolitical analysts are quite clear about this. In situations of non-eliminationist civil war,” Bancroft said, “a swift and decisive victory by one side is nearly always preferable, from a humanitarian point of view, to protracted conflict.”
“It hardly matters which side. Getting bogged down in the supposed grievances and aggressions—the you-started-it crap—is a huge mistake. Now we’ll be able to run the numbers, pick a winner, and guarantee the optimal outcome. Think how crazy it is that the Ansari network was able to prop up these mountain tribes in Burma. Small arms, second-rate artillery, paid for by drug money. For years, it kept them at war with the Myanmar government. Like they ever really had a chance. That’s wrong. Wrong for the tribe. Wrong for the country. Nobody likes a repressive authoritarian regime, but longstanding conflict is even worse. Then, once the military has stabilized the social order, we can get to work on engineering the regime so that it’s less repressive and takes better care of its citizenry.”
“You’re saying that the rebels’ Ansari contacts are going to switch sides?” Liebman asked.
“Who knows more about the weaponry caches of the Wa people or the Karenni than their former suppliers? Who knows more about how the guerilla militias are organized? We’re giving the Myanmar generals a trove of intelligence—and a shipment of NATO-grade weaponry. Overwhelming force is key. And before you know it, you get peace through pacification. From a global perspective, the age of rebellion is about to be over.”
“Unless it’s a rebellion we sanction,” Liebman prodded.
“Toppling a regime by open warfare is always going to be a last resort,” Collingwood said, nodding vigorously. “But if it comes to it, sure. It’s an option. And our roll-up of the major networks isn’t by any means finished. Of course, the Ansari acquisition gives Theta more direct benefits as well. At the end of the day, do-gooders also have to do what it takes to protect themselves.” He turned to Bancroft. “You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?”
“The quills of the porcupine,” Bancroft said.
“When threats to our own security arise, abroad or at home, we deal with them.”
“As best we can,” the aging savant agreed.
Collingwood traded glances with Burgess and then Tracy. He took a deep breath. “Then, Paul, we need to talk about Andrea.”
“I see.”
“Paul, you’re too close to the situation. Forgive me for speaking bluntly. But there are decisions to be made here. You need to leave them to the professionals on the ground. She’s become a problem. When she went to Rosendale, she crossed a line. You thought she’d listen to reason. Now we know that you overestimated her.”
“Or, from another point of view, underestimated her.” There was something veiled in Bancroft’s tone.
“Your judgment was colored.”
“You always like to think the best of people,” Tracy said. “Which is a great starting assumption. But you’ve also taught us that we shouldn’t resist changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence.”
Through the filtered light, Bancroft suddenly looked years older than he usually did. “You want me to delegate a case involving my own cousin?”
“Precisely because she is your own cousin,” Tracy said.
Bancroft stared into the middle distance. “I don’t know what to say.” Had she imagined it, or was there a tremble in the philosopher’s voice? When he turned back to face the others, he looked ashen.
“Then don’t say anything,” Burgess said, in a gingerly tone of both respect and solicitude. “You’ve trained us well. Allow us to shoulder some of the responsibility here. Leave this case in our hands.”
“Like you always say,” Collingwood put in, “doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”
“Weathering the goddamn Kirk Commission isn’t going to be a cakewalk, either,” Tracy put in.
“You’re too young to remember the Church Committee hearings,” an older man at the table, Herman Liebman, told her. “Paul and I do. These things run in cycles.”
“So do monsoons,” Collingwood said heavily. “A historical perspective’s not much use if you’re in the path of the storm.”
“A fair point,” Bancroft agreed. His eyes narrowed. “Knowledge is power. Goodness knows we’ve turned over enough rocks from the senator’s past. What squirmy things have we found?”
Collingwood turned to John Burgess and gave him a you-tell-him look.
“Not enough,” Burgess, the former Kroll Associates investigator, said with a twitch of a smile. “For our purposes, we’d need something big, and we’re not coming up with it. Frankly, what we have wouldn’t make the front page of the South Bend Tribune. Favors for major donors? Sure. But it’s pretty much what politicians call constituency service. Illegal donations? Not really—he’s stood for office four times, against some decently funded opponents. One made that accusation more than a dozen years ago, but the details were so complicated that the legal experts couldn’t agree whether it was outside the lines or not. Separate donations from companies where CALPERS, the California public employees retirement fund, held a plurality of shares. If the two companies are really units of a single company, then the donation is in excess of the legal limit.” A wan smile. “A reporter asked Bennett Kirk about the charge at a press conference. Kirk said, ‘Sorry, could you explain it to me one more time?’ and everybody cracked up. That was the end of that scandal. Otherwise? He may have had a sexual encounter with a waitress in Reno twenty years ago, but the woman in question has denied it up and down, and even if she didn’t, I don’t know that it would get media pickup. The journalists have put a halo on this guy. At this point, you’d have to prove that he molested every last kid in the Harlem Boys’ Choir to get any traction.”
“Can’t be brought, either,” Collingwood said in his fluting voice. “I mean, you already know about the medical condition. He’s kept it secret, but if it got out, it would only bring a wave of public sympathy. Meanwhile, he’s got his eyes on posterity. He knows he’s not going to be alive to run again, but he’ll be around and functioning long enough to ma
ke a heap of trouble for us.”
“It’s like the Samson effect,” Burgess added. “The illness doesn’t help us. He’s in good enough shape that he just might collapse the pillars and bring down the goddamn temple.”
“You say knowledge is power.” Collingwood gave Bancroft a meaningful look. “The trouble, of course, is what the Kirk Commission knows. Somehow the senator has gained information that he just shouldn’t have. That’s what makes him a real threat to our entire enterprise.”
“And we still have no clue how?” Bancroft’s gaze was attentive but not anxious.
Collingwood shrugged.
Gina Tracy looked impatient. “I still don’t get why we can’t just remove Senator Kirk. Accelerate the inevitable. Take the thorn out of our paw.”
Bancroft shook his head gravely. “You plainly haven’t thought it through.”
“Can you imagine the storm of controversy and attention?” Collingwood shot her a reproving look. “Might prove more dangerous than the committee itself.”
“But we’re the goddamn Theta Group,” the black-haired woman persisted. “Theta as in thanatos.” She glanced at Burgess. “Greek for death, right?”
“I’m aware of this, Gina,” said Burgess. “But the same risk-assessment procedures that apply elsewhere in the world apply here, too.”
Tracy gave Bancroft a petitioning look. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“Rest assured that I shall not have the work of the Theta Group derailed by a cornhusking pol from Indiana,” Bancroft told her. “You can be certain of this. The Theta Group must continue to be the arrowhead of benevolence.”
“Extreme philanthropy,” Burgess half-chuckled. “Like extreme sports.”
“Please don’t make a joke of my life’s work.” Bancroft spoke softly, but with a chastening look.
A long moment of silence was broken by the sound of apprehensive voices from the communications center on the level below. Then a pasty-faced man mounted the spiral staircase and greeted the senior managers with a grim expression. “There’s been another message from Genesis.”
The Bancroft Strategy Page 35
