The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  Now! While the second guard stared at the blood-sprayed face of the slain man, Belknap swung his arm out and snatched this pistol from him. He discharged two rapid volleys, taking out the heavyset man and the remaining blond bodyguard. As Lugner whirled toward him with his handgun, Belknap threw himself behind one of the heavy steel filing cabinets. A round punched through the steel plate and, slowed by the dense paperwork, left a bulge on the opposite side. He noticed his small tape measure on the floor nearby. So you can measure yourself for a coffin.

  Think! The brush-cut man with the veined, ropy arms would be scrambling to retrieve his weapon—would have fallen on the heavyset guard to retrieve it from his jacket. Visualize! Belknap blindly snaked an arm around the cabinet and squeezed the trigger twice, rapidly. The shots seemed unaimed, but they were guided by his memory of the body, of where he anticipated the brush-cut man would be. A stricken cry of agony told him that at least one round had struck its target. The man was panting now like a wounded animal, and a noisy stridor told him that air was filling the pleural cavity through the bullet hole, causing his lungs to collapse.

  Lugner remained. He would be cannier than any of them. Belknap forced clarity into his racing mind. What would I do? He would not risk being overaggressive; instead, he would adopt a defensive posture, perhaps crouching down, making himself a difficult target. His objective would be to get out of the room and lock the door, so that—assuming the talk of explosives proved a hoax—he could dispose of his adversary on his own terms, and at his leisure. He would quietly begin creeping toward the door, would have done so already. He would perhaps seek to distract his adversary from his actual course of action.

  Seconds passed like hours. Belknap heard a sound from his left, felt an impulse to whirl in that direction and shoot. But no, it was not the sound of a man; in all likelihood, Lugner had balled up a piece of paper and tossed it across the room, hoping to distract him while he…

  Belknap stood up abruptly and without looking, let alone aiming, shot toward the doorway—directing his fire low, as if at a fleeing cat. He dived behind the steel cabinets again, replaying what he had seen. He had been right: Lugner had been just where he thought! But had he connected? There was no cry of pain, no gasp.

  After a few seconds of silence, Lugner spoke in a steady, well-controlled voice. “You’re a foolish gambler. Nobody beats the house.”

  It was the voice of someone who was in complete command of the situation. Yet why would he give himself away? Lugner was a liar through and through. A glimmering realization fluttered its wings in Belknap’s breast. Lugner’s voice was too controlled, too masterful. He had been wounded, perhaps mortally. His game was simply to tempt Belknap into exposing himself. He heard Lugner take a step, and then another. The steps were slow, and heavy, the steps of a dying man. A dying man with a carefully aimed pistol.

  He placed his black knit cap on a length of tape from his metal tape measure, pushed it up just above the file cabinet. It was an old trick, the hat or helmet held on a stick, meant to draw out a sniper’s fire.

  Lugner was too smart to fall for it—a fact that Belknap was counting on. He would be aiming the sights of his pistol to the left, expecting a fast roll. Belknap leaped up like a jumping jack, appeared just a foot or two away from the crude decoy. Lugner, as he had anticipated, had trained his pistol low and to the left. As Belknap squeezed the trigger of the Vector SR-1, he saw an expression flicker across Lugner’s sadistic, scowling countenance. The expression conveyed something that the rogue agent had often inspired but seldom experienced: horror.

  “I am the house,” Belknap said.

  “Damn you—”

  The first round struck Lugner in the throat, exploding his larynx and cutting off his final words. The projectile easily punched through flesh, through the steel-reinforced door behind him, while its shock waves destroyed the flesh in the region. A splatter zone of arterial blood outlined his upper body against its white-painted surface. The second round, aimed just slightly higher, struck him in the face, hitting just below the nose, blasting a third nostril through flesh and bone and, invisibly, sending hydraulic pressure waves through the region, liquefying the tissue of the medulla and cerebellum. “Hydrostatic shock” was the technical term, and its effect on the central nervous system was instantaneous and irreversible.

  Ten minutes later, Belknap was race-walking down the sidewalk in the Estonian night. He had arrived in Tallinn hoping to reduce the uncertainties, the unknown. Instead, the unknowns, the uncertainties, had only multiplied.

  Nikos Stavros. What role did he play in all this?

  Richard Lugner, alias Lanham. Was he—had he been—Genesis after all? Or just another pawn of his? What really happened on that fateful day in 1987, when Belknap and Rinehart converged on Lugner’s apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee?

  Only one thing was certain: Nothing about that sequence in East Berlin was as it had appeared. Had the stagecraft been managed by Lugner alone?

  Belknap swallowed hard. Had Jared Rinehart been deceived, as he’d been? Or had Jared—the thought scalded him like acid—been part of the deception? It had all seemed so effortless on Jared’s part, the way he suddenly appeared right at the critical moment. To save Belknap’s life? Or to help Lugner escape with a piece of theater that would ensure that the hunt was called off for good?

  The sidewalk seemed to buckle now as another wave of vertigo swept over him.

  His best friend. His most trusted ally.

  Jared Rinehart.

  Belknap tried to tell himself that it was the stinging wind that was making his eyes moist. He wanted to think about anything other than what he needed to think about.

  Had there been other operations in which Jared Rinehart had deceived him? How much fakery had Belknap been subjected to, and why?

  Or had the two of them been jointly victimized?

  Jared Rinehart. Pollux to his Castor. The rock. The one person he could always count on. The one person who had never failed him. He could almost see Jared now, as a wraithlike vision. His reticent warmth, his keen intelligence, his irresistible combination of wry detachment, resolute commitment, unflappable equipoise. A partner through good times and bad. A brother in arms. A protector.

  Images came to Belknap like a flipbook animation. The shootout in the room on the Karl-Marx-Allee, the gun battle in the outskirts of Calí—they were among a dozen such events, in which Jared’s timely intervention proved crucial. Be reasonable, he exhorted himself.

  Rinehart was a hero, a savior, a friend.

  Or he was a liar, a manipulator, a conspirator in some scheme so far reaching and nefarious as to stagger the imagination.

  Which was more likely? Be reasonable.

  Then he remembered what he had counseled Andrea Bancroft. The truth isn’t always reasonable.

  He wanted to collapse to his knees, wanted to retch, wanted to clamp his hands to his ears, wanted to roar at the heavens. Those were luxuries he denied himself. Instead, as he returned to the Georgian’s lakeside house, he forced himself to face the evidence of his senses, to ask the questions that confronted him. It felt like swallowing glass.

  Who was Jared Rinehart really?

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  The flight from Tallinn to Larnaca International Airport, in Cyprus, was uneventful; the storms preceded it. Calvin Garth had not been pleased when Belknap told him that he needed to make use of the chartered jet—there were flight plans to be filed, logistics to be accounted for—but finally relented. A version of old-school ties. Gennady Chakvetadze, after no little grousing of his own, had taken care of the paperwork. He retained his contacts within the Estonian ministry of transport; the impossible was made possible.

  The darker storm clouds accompanied the conversation with Andrea Bancroft.

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she told him when he asked about her visit to the Rosendale facility. “There’s stuff I’m still processing.” There was so
mething in her voice that disturbed him, some sense of a trauma undisclosed.

  He debated telling her about Jared, about his fears, but held back. That was his problem; he would not make it hers. He did tell her about Nikos Stavros; here, he knew, her experience with corporate due diligence would be helpful. She rang off and called him back ten minutes later, with a swift précis of the man’s holdings and recent activities, at least according to the available business records.

  Once more, though, the brittleness of her tone alarmed him. “About the archives in Rosendale,” he began again, “at least tell me this. Does the foundation have any Estonian holdings?”

  “Some infant-morality, prenatal-care programs in the early nineties. That’s about it.”

  “Suspiciously little?”

  “Non-suspiciously little. On par with Latvia and Lithuania. Sorry.”

  “Anything else raise a flag?”

  “I told you, I’m still processing…” This time there was a quaver in her voice, he was certain of it.

  “Andrea, what happened?”

  “I just…I need to see you.”

  “I’ll be back before too long.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You said you’re flying to Cyprus, right? Larnaca? Kennedy has direct flights there.”

  “You don’t know what risks you’d be running.”

  “I’ll be careful. I’ve been careful. I used my credit card to book a flight out of Newark to San Francisco, assuming the account’s being monitored. Then I got a friend to book two seats on a flight to Paris, JFK to Orly, using his card, with me as the fellow passenger. My name will show up on the flight manifest but not in the financials. And it gets me into the same international terminal as my flight to Larnaca—a flight that’s not going to be fully booked. Forty minutes before the jet to Larnaca departs, I’ll just show up at the counter with my passport and cash and buy a ticket. People make last-minute trips all the time—death in the family, urgent business meetings, whatever.” She paused. “I’m just saying, I’ve thought this through. I can do this. And I’m going to.”

  “Dammit, Andrea. It’s not safe.” If his worries about Jared Rinehart were borne out, he brooded, no place was safe for him. “Larnaca especially. You’re barging into a realm where you don’t belong.”

  “Tell me where I do belong. Tell me where it is safe. Because I’d like to know.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I am flying to meet you whether you like it or not.”

  “Please, Andrea,” he protested, “be reasonable.” The wrong words to use, for her and for him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” she told him, and he could hear the finality in her voice.

  The prospect of seeing her gladdened him and frightened him. She was an amateur; and Larnaca—his Larnaca—could easily turn into a killing field, especially if he was going to be confronting Genesis. The thought of harm coming to her chilled him. If I didn’t know better, Castor, I’d say you were bad luck.

  Reclining in his seat, Belknap let the eddies and whirlwinds swirl through the landscape of his mind.

  Nikos Stavros. In the rare interviews he had given, he spoke of having enlisted in the Cypriot merchant marines out of high school, and described his father as a hardworking fisherman. He spoke vividly about fishing on a moonless night, shining a five-hundred-watt lamp at the water and attracting a school of mackerels that he would throw a net around. What he tended not to mention was that his father owned the largest fleet of fishing vessels in Cyprus. Nor did he dwell on the fact that his company, Stavros Maritime, made much of its income by ferrying crude for the major oil companies. What distinguished him from competitors with larger fleets was a gift for anticipating the spot market in oil. His tankers could ferry twenty-five million barrels of crude at any time, the value of the cargo varying wildly depending on the fluctuations of the commodities market and the vagaries of OPEC. Stavros was generally credited with a remarkable acuity in predicting those chaotic fluctuations; his fortunes had risen through an acumen usually associated with the canniest Wall Street traders. His own net worth was unknown; he was believed to have extensive holdings, but hidden within a battery of private and unreported partnerships. It was all very suggestive: but of what?

  If you were wrong about Jared Rinehart, what else were you wrong about? The question seared him. Maybe his life’s journey had been no journey at all, but a manipulated march through a labyrinth of deception. His sense of resolve, his sense of himself, had been compromised beyond retrieval, so it seemed to him. Rage at what had befallen Jared had been his soul’s own sustenance: He had put himself in harm’s way for Jared; would, indeed, have given his life for his.

  And now?

  For all he knew, Jared Rinehart was himself Genesis. Hadn’t he been in all the right places? The guile, the stealth, the mastery of machination—all these traits equipped him for the role. He had declined promotions that would have taken him out of the field, reduced his mobility, compromised his ability to travel freely. And all the while he was constructing a shadowy realm of terror.

  A shadowland that encompasses the globe. Yet its creator would remain anonymous, never glimpsed, never sighted, never recognized. Like the dark side of the moon.

  Was Rinehart capable of such enormities? Belknap’s very soul rebelled at the possibility. Yet he could not rule it out.

  As Belknap reclined in a fuguelike state, images and information and uncertainties swirled through his mind in a dust storm of data, until he heard the hydraulic whine of the plane’s landing gear. He had arrived.

  The Republic of Cyprus, a third the size of Massachusetts, held an outsized fascination for the contending powers that had divided the island back in 1974. Cyprus was much nearer to Beirut than to Athens, and in more than geographical terms. While the breakaway Turkish polity of Northern Cyprus languished, the Cypriots of the south had created a haven of relative prosperity, nourished by tourism, financial services, and shipping. The Republic of Cyprus, a Greek client state, had six excellent ports and a merchant marine with almost a thousand large container ships, not to mention another thousand that sailed under the flags of foreign nations. Given that the island had twenty airports as well, it was inevitably a transshipment point for heroin between Turkey and Europe, a region where the associated activity of money laundering took place all too freely. It was frequented by American tourists, and, with equal diligence, American DEA agents.

  Larnaca was named for a Greek word meaning “sarcophagus”—named after death. It was among the most charmless cities in all of Cyprus. Its streets were laid out in a maze that only a longtime resident could make sense of—and even they could not keep track of the frequent name changes—while Lebanese immigrants huddled in urban squalor in the north of the city. The surrounding land was parched, barren, the local restaurants crowded out by franchises of international chains: KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut. It had all the charm of a Bridgeport strip mall set down in a desert. Sand flies made the beaches unappealing for sunbathers. But, past the scrubby salt pines and the long, pencil-like wharfs, its marinas were crowded with yachts and with freighters, and not a few of each were the property of the legendary shipping mogul Nikos Stavros.

  After a long delay, aluminum stairs were motored over to the plane, the door opened, and he stepped out into blue-skied morning. Passport control was cursory. He did not dare reuse the Tyler Cooper papers; he had to trust that the papers that Gennady had furnished him were, as the retired spy had assured him, truly uncompromised. So far as he could tell, they were. The taxi ride into town took fifteen minutes. It would take him longer to content himself that he had picked up no unsought companions.

  Belknap found himself struggling not to wilt under the strong Cyprus sun, which made everything seem preternaturally bright, and almost disguised the seediness of the city and much of its surrounds. He had seven hours before Andrea’s flight would arrive. Much of this time would be spent scouting out Stavros’s residence.

  Was he be
ing followed? Almost certainly not, he decided. But he would spare no precautions. He spent a full hour darting in and out of the shops and stalls in the old Turkish quarter, changing his wardrobe twice—he put on a couple of cheap kaftans before changing back to a Western tourist’s ensemble of guayabera shirt and khaki trousers.

  The address he had, 500 Lefkara Avenue, was at once accurate and curiously uninformative. He finally determined that Nikos Stavros essentially owned a hillside and adjoining beach on the very outskirts of Larnaca. The residence overlooked the sea, and was little less than a citadel. The walls were vast, unscalable, and wire-topped, with security cameras mounted every ten yards; even from the sea, a series of buoys hinted at precautions like flat-nets and perimeter cable. A bomb dropped from the air could shake the place. Other than that, however, it would be difficult indeed to penetrate.

  From the nearest hillside, a sandy, scrubby elevation, he could make out the dazzling emerald turf, obviously the product of intensive irrigation. The house was a vast three-story Levantine mansion of white stucco with elaborate balconies and gables, the whole structure extending outward into several points, like a vast starfish or a work of sharply folded origami, whose symmetries took a while to detect. Surrounding it was perhaps forty acres of land. Close to the house, he made out elaborate flower gardens, sculpted bushes, a sheltering topiary of cypresses. Through binoculars, Belknap took in the various outbuildings: stables, swimming pool, tennis court. He saw several low hutlike structures, positioned over a berm line, that would have been invisible from the main house: kennels for guard dogs, without a doubt. They would help patrol the place at night, their powerful jaws as deadly as any bullet. Uniformed figures patrolled the perimeter; focusing on them closely, he could see that they carried assault rifles.

  He lowered his binoculars, feeling overwhelmed. He recalled what Gennady had said about trail dogs and catch dogs. Was he playing out of position? Had he exceeded the limits of his competence? Even if the technology of surveillance was surmounted, the shipping magnate was protected by an armed brigade. Exhaustion coursed through him.