The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  “Or hers, or its.” She wriggled in her seat, shifting to face him again. “Is that why we’re driving to Washington?”

  “Glad you’re alert enough to read the traffic signs.”

  “I’m getting a Daniel-in-the-lion’s-den vibe. Are you sure this is the safest course of action?”

  “On the contrary. I’m sure it isn’t. You want me to do the safest thing?”

  “Hell, no,” she answered without hesitation. “I want to make things right. I’m not built for living in fear, okay? I’m not built that way. Cowering in a cave somewhere isn’t my style.”

  “Mine neither. You know, you could have made a kick-ass government agent. The salaries aren’t much, but you can’t beat the parking spaces.” Belknap’s eyes darted once again to the rearview mirror as he spoke. Still no sign that they had been followed. I-95 was the busiest corridor in the whole Northeast. There was protection in the sheer profusion of humanity.

  “Join the world and see the army.” Andrea stretched. “Do we have an operating hypothesis? Let’s go over this one more time. Do we think Paul Bancroft is Genesis?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Paul Bancroft is a brilliant man, a visionary, an idealist—I truly believe that. But also a dangerous man.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s the extremity of his vision that makes it monstrous. But what motivates him isn’t vanity. It’s not a personal lust for power or money.”

  “A man tries to impose his system of morality on the rest of the world, I’d say that—”

  “But wouldn’t we all do that, if we could? Remember what Winston Smith says in Orwell’s 1984: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.’”

  “Two plus two equals four. That works.”

  “Does it? Is freedom your freedom to assert what I believe to be true? Is it your freedom to do what I believe is right? I mean, just think what might follow from that. There are a lot of people who are just as convinced in their moral codes as they are in the fact that two plus two equals four. What if they’re wrong?”

  “You can’t always doubt yourself. Sometimes, Andrea, you’ve got to be willing to take your own side of an argument.”

  “No, Todd, you can’t always doubt yourself. I’ll give you that. But if someone else is going to define my freedom. I’d rather it be people who weren’t completely sure they were always right. Uncertainty can be a discipline. Not in the sense of being rudderless or indecisive, but in the sense of knowing we’re not infallible. Of being open to the possibility that our judgments aren’t definitive and beyond revising.”

  “You’re the niece of a big thinker, and you sound like one, too. Maybe you’re Genesis.”

  She snorted. “Please.”

  “Assuming it isn’t Jared Rinehart,” he added bleakly.

  “You really think it could be him?” Andrea’s gaze returned to the road, which spooled before them like an endless gray river.

  “Maybe.”

  “The way you described him running away from you, the way he looked—reminds me of something Paul Bancroft once told me. He said common sense isn’t a matter of seeing what’s in front of your eyes. It’s a matter of seeing what’s in front of the other fellow’s eyes.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Genesis. You think maybe it’s Jared Rinehart.” She turned to face him. “Maybe Jared Rinehart thinks it’s you.”

  The Comfort Inn, near Washington’s downtown convention center on Thirteenth Street, had the familiar green-and-yellow awning projecting from redbrick walls. Belknap requested a room in the rear of the building. Two beds. The room was small and dim: All the windows looked out on brick walls. It was just what he was after. Once again anonymity would provide security. They ate at a fast-food restaurant, and then Andrea stopped at a copy shop with Internet access before they turned in for the night. The decision to share a room was not discussed; it just happened. Neither wanted to be separated—not after all they had been through.

  Belknap could tell that Andrea had something on her mind, and continued to study her, looking for the subtle fissures of delayed trauma.

  “You want to talk about Rosendale?” he said, finally, after they had both brushed their teeth. He wanted her to know that this door was open; he wasn’t encouraging her to go through it.

  “There’s…what happened,” she said haltingly. “And then there’s what I learned.”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  “I want to tell you about what I learned.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  She nodded quickly. He could see the effort with which she pulled herself together. “You need to understand—in the world of securities research, there’s what we call the raw-data stage. That’s where I am.”

  Even in the yellowish glow of the cheap lamp, she looked beautiful. “Should I want to wait for the glossy cover page and the spiral binding?”

  Andrea half-smiled, but her eyes were intent. “I’m seeing patterns of payments. All around the world. Timing suggests the possibility of electoral manipulation.” She was focused now, speaking with growing confidence.

  “Swinging elections? Getting favored candidates in office?”

  “All circumstantial, but that’s part of it, I think. Can’t leave the fate of Partido por la Democracia in the hands of ordinary citizens, I guess.”

  “Slow down, Andrea. Walk me through this.”

  “I started to wonder when I found records of a series of exchange-rate hedges. The details don’t matter. What’s significant is that the Bancroft Foundation was slipping millions of dollars into foreign banks at various points. Greece, the Philippines, Nepal, even Ghana. Well, it turns out that the years and places aren’t random. Each corresponds to a major change of government. In 1956, millions of dollars are converted into Finnish markkaa, and the next thing you know Finland has a new president. A close-run thing, too. The guy defeats his opponent by just two electoral votes, but he stays in power for the next quarter-century. From the pattern of yen conversions, it looks like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party might have been a big beneficiary of the foundation. There are all sorts of local elections that led to parliamentary-level consolidations, and to go by the timing, the outcomes were guided by Bancroft money. Chile, 1964, the election of Eduardo Frei Montalvo? A major Bancroft presence in the Chilean peso.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Basically, there’s evidence of a lot of exchange-rate optimizing, probably because they were shifting tens of millions of dollars into the local currency and the foundation wasn’t nearly as rich as it would later become. Likewise, in 1969 you see a major conversion into the Ghanaian cedi. I looked at the foundation’s official reports, and there were no major initiatives in Ghana dating to that time. But it’s the same time that the head of the Progress Party, Kofi A. Busia, is sworn into power as prime minister. I’m sure the guy was irresistible to Paul Bancroft.”

  He glanced at Andrea. “What did he do?”

  “Start with who he was. This guy had a Ph.D. from Oxford University, had been a professor of sociology at the University of Leiden, in Holland. I bet the Bancroft people were convinced that he was just their kind of guy, a cosmopolitan committed to the common good. Looks like he disappointed his backers, though, because two years later he was ousted. Dead two years after that.”

  “And you think the Bancroft Foundation—”

  “Maybe because it was West Africa, and nobody was focused on it, they got a little sloppy. I was able to track a series of currency trades from March of that year. Looks to me like Bancroft bought Busia the country of Ghana for twenty million dollars. Now it seems like they’re trying the same thing in Venezuela. The foundation’s like an iceberg. Partly visible. Mostly submerged. Turns out they basically control the National Endowment for Democracy. Meanwhile, its official report acknowledges all these grants to various Venezuelan political groups.” She pulled out a piece of paper, sho
wed him.

  Fundación Momento de la Gente

  $64,000

  Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad-Venezuela

  $44,500

  Grupo Social Centro al Servicio de la Acción Popular

  $65,000

  Acción Campesina

  $58,000

  Asociación Civil Consorcio Justicia

  $14,412

  Asociación Civil Justicia Alternativa

  $14,107

  Belknap looked it over. She must have uploaded the document online before she left and printed it out at the copy shop. “Pin money,” he grunted. “Chump change.”

  “These are just the official subventions. They buy you the names of the relevant principals, that’s all. Based on currency-conversion data, I’d guess that the real transfers are actually a hundred times greater.”

  “Christ. They’re buying themselves another government.”

  “Because the people aren’t smart enough to decide for themselves. That’s how they figure it.” She shook her head. “And so much of the stuff is done through computer networks. There’s a guy I know, Walter Sachs, who’s a real whiz at the tech stuff. Works at the hedge fund I was at. A strange cat in some ways, but brilliant.”

  “You’re talking about an I.T. guy at a hedge fund?”

  “Strange, I know. Graduated near the top of his class at M.I.T. Working at the hedge fund is his way of not working. It’s tiddlywinks for him. Means he can spend most of the day vegging out. He’s a whiz with an ambition deficit.”

  “Andrea, you need to be very careful who you talk to, who you trust,” Belknap said sharply. “For their sake as well as your own.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “It’s just so goddamn frustrating. All this information, so little knowledge. Theta. Genesis. Paul Bancroft. Jared Rinehart. Rome. Tallinn. Arms dealing. Political manipulation. It’s like we’re looking at all these tentacles and we’re still not sure who the octopus is.”

  They thrashed through what they knew for a few minutes longer, but made no real progress. Exhaustion, a bone-deep enervation they both shared, befogged their concentration like dark fumes, and, by mutual assent, they turned in. He chose the bed closest to the window. A shared room with separate beds: There was intimacy, and there was distance. It seemed right.

  Sleep should have come easily, but it came with difficulty. He awoke several times in the night, staring at the hateful visage of Richard Lugner. At other moments Jared Rinehart appeared to him, shimmering with an unearthly glow, walking through the corridors and recesses of Belknap’s mind.

  I’ll always be here for you. Rinehart at the funeral of Belknap’s wife.

  Know this, my friend. You will always have me. Rinehart, on the phone just hours after Belknap heard about Louisa’s death during an operation in Belfast.

  In a life of inconstancy, Jared Rinehart had proved the one constant thing. His cool intelligence, his steadfast loyalty, his quick, mischievous wit. He was a friend, an ally, even a polestar. Whenever he was needed he would suddenly appear, as if guided by a sixth sense.

  What was the truth? If Belknap had been wrong to trust Jared, what else could he trust? If he had been so wrong about this man, could Belknap trust himself? The questions pierced him like cold steel. He turned and tossed and gathered clammy sheets around him, and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like an hour.

  He heard distant traffic sounds, and nearby breathing, Andrea’s. At first her breaths were deep, metronomic. Then they began to grow ragged. He heard her cry out in her sleep, muted sounds of distress, and when he turned toward her, her arms were flailing out as if to protect her from unseen assailants.

  He came to her, touched her face. “Andrea,” he whispered.

  She thrashed again in her sleep, convulsed by nightmares, and he held her flailing arms.

  “Andrea,” he repeated.

  Her eyes blinked open, staring, terrified. She was breathing hard now, as if she had been running.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You were having a nightmare.”

  “A nightmare,” she repeated, her voice thick with sleep.

  “You’re awake now. You’re here with me. Everything’s okay.” The dim light—street illumination leaking from the edges of the window blinds—modeled her cheekbones, her soft skin, her lips.

  Her eyes focused now, registered the comforting lie. “Please,” she said. “Please hold me.” A whispered command.

  He pushed the damp hair from her brow, put his arms around her. She was slender and firm in his arms. She was warm and made him feel warm.

  “Andrea,” he said. He breathed in deeply, somehow intoxicated by her fragrance, her warmth, her presence. Her face glowed like porcelain.

  “It’s not over, is it?” she asked. “The nightmare.”

  He drew her nearer to him, and she clutched at him, at first with fear, and then with something else, something like tenderness.

  His moved his head closer to hers. “Andrea,” he murmured, and she pressed her lips to his, and clasped him in her own arms, and soon their two bodies felt as if they were one, flexing and shuddering and flushing. It was a way of denying the violence and death they had seen, an affirmation in the face of negation, a way of saying yes in a world of no.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Nobody was more avid for publicity than a senator without seniority. That was why Senator Kenneth Cahill, a freshman from Nebraska, fit the bill perfectly. During the campaign he doubtless received plenty of ink in the local papers; once he was elected, he and his staffers would have been maddened by the ensuing dome of silence. People who run for public office seldom relish silence.

  The gambit was childishly easy. When “John Miles” from the Associated Press phoned his office, requesting an interview on the subject of a “key provision” Cahill had supported in an Interior Appropriations bill—half a million dollars for upgrades to the Littleton Wastewater Treatment Plant, and county-wide improvements to the storm-water collection system in Jefferson County—the senator had responded just as Belknap had predicted. Cahill’s staffers had practically offered to send a car for him.

  Nor did Belknap choose his affiliation randomly. Associated Press reporters, he knew, were generally anonymous, and, as an additional precaution, he had made it clear that he wasn’t a Washington reporter, so none of the staffers would have expected to know him. The AP had almost four thousand employees in two hundred fifty bureaus; saying you were from the AP was like saying you were from New York. Even a fellow reporter wouldn’t expect to recognize a colleague. Not that anybody at Cahill’s office would be scrutinizing his bona fides. To a junior senator, publicity was oxygen, and Cahill, who ranked second to last in seniority in the august body to which he had just ascended, was starved for it. “Miles” made an appointment to visit at three o’clock.

  Belknap appeared in the lobby of the Hart Building at five before the hour. He had a yellow lanyard around his neck holding a thick plastic badge with a magnetized strip. The word “press” appeared in bold capital letters above the name John Miles, the assignment verification code, his institutional affiliation and nationality, and a passport-size photograph. It was good work. The guard had small, squashed features, heavy-lidded eyes, and, despite his squinty, suspicious gaze, was about as fierce as an unweaned puppy in Belknap’s quick appraisal. He had the visitor write his name on a sign-in list and waved him through. Belknap was wearing a pair of tortoiseshell glasses along with a jacket and tie, and carried a briefcase that was rolled swiftly through a metal detector unopened.

  Around him was a scattering of people who were obviously Hart Building regulars: K Street lobbyists, Senate aides and pages, reporters and messengers. He took the elevator to the seventh floor.

  As he got off the elevator, he placed a quick call to the Nebraskan’s press secretary. He had been delayed—another interview had run long, the story was more complicated than he had realized; he’d be there as soon as he could.

  Then he made a left
turn down a long, windowed hall and walked into the anteroom to the impressive duplex suite belonging to Senator Kirk, a man who had all the seniority that the Nebraskan lacked and was putting it to startling use. Belknap knew that Kirk would be in his office; he had a committee meeting an hour earlier, had another coming up in forty-five minutes.

  “I’m here to see Senator Kirk,” he said to the weathered-looking blonde who sat at the reception desk. Primly dressed in a dark-green jacket and high-necked blouse, she looked less like a praetorian guard than a prep-school headmistress—the hair was colored to a deep-hued honey blond; nothing brassy, nothing frosted—but was no less intimidating for that. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything on the senator’s schedule. What did you say your name was?”

  He paused. Why was this so hard? Follow the plan, he exhorted himself. Roll the dice or you’re not in the game.

  “My name,” he said, swallowing hard, “is Todd Belknap.”

  “Todd Belknap,” she repeated. The name meant nothing to her. “I’m afraid the senator is a very busy man, but if you’d like to try to schedule an appointment at some point, what I’d suggest is that—”

  “What I need you to do is convey a message. Tell him my name. Tell him—I’m assuming that this is a privileged conversation—that I’m a senior officer at Consular Operations. And tell him that I’ve come to talk about Genesis.”

  The woman looked confused. Was this man a religious zealot or a source within the intelligence services? “I can certainly deliver the message,” she said uncertainly. She gestured toward a row of worn brown leather chairs on the wall adjoining the door and waited for him to take his seat before she picked up her handset and spoke in a low voice. She was not speaking to the senator, he was certain, but to a senior aide. It was as he expected. Then she glanced behind her, to the closed door that separated the reception area from the rooms where the work of the senator’s office was done.