The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  Belknap himself felt a sense of foreboding as he and Walter Sachs stood on the sidewalk opposite it. Once again, he had a faint sense of being observed. But by whom? His field instincts and his field skills contradicted themselves: If he really were being shadowed, his own maneuvers should have confirmed it. Professional wariness was surely pushing at the boundaries of paranoia.

  “Tell me your friend’s name again,” Belknap said tensely.

  Sachs sighed. “Stuart Purvis.”

  “And remind me how you know him.”

  “We were classmates, and now he’s an assistant professor in the computer science department.”

  “You really trust this guy? He’s fifteen minutes late. You sure he’s not on the phone with the campus police?”

  Sachs blinked. “He stole my girlfriend in freshman year. I stole his when we were sophomores. We called it even. He’s a good guy. His mom was, like, big in the installation-art scene during the sixties. Stuff with girders and beams, but with curves and shell forms. Amazing stuff. Like, imagine if Georgia O’Keeffe were redoing Tilted Arc.”

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

  Sachs hefted the nylon knapsack in his arms. “Dude, bottom line is that we’re dealing with a gargantuan storage tape. An ocean of data, okay? Your pissant little desktop from Dell isn’t gonna help. Stu, on the other hand, helped set up the Beowulf clusters at Yale. That’s, like, two hundred and sixty central processors seamlessly linked in a massively parallel architecture. That’s power. We need to hitch a piggyback ride on it.” He perked up. “Ah, there he is.” He waved. “Yo, Stu!” he shouted to a man in a white guayabera shirt, black pants, and leather sandals.

  The man, in his late thirties, turned and waved back. The thick black frames of his glasses were fashionable or the opposite of fashionable, depending on the degree of irony with which they were worn. He smiled at his old friend, revealing a fleck of green lettuce between two incisors. The opposite of fashionable, then.

  Stuart Purvis led them around the front of Watson Hall to a green enameled custodial entrance at the rear of the building. It led directly to the basement, where the main computer laboratories were situated. Belknap noticed that the junior professor’s neck was spotted with reddish bumps of ingrown hairs, his jaw and upper lip smooth-shaven but shadowed with the greenish-gray of what would have been a heavy beard.

  “So, my man, when you called for a favor, I thought you meant a job recommendation,” the junior academic said. “But I guess you want a ride on Big Bertha here. Totally out of bounds, you know. If the supervisor were to find out—wait, I am the supervisor. We’ve got ourselves an infinite loop here. Or maybe it’s just a self-nested operation, like a distributed autoregression function. Hey, you hear the joke about Bill Gates and the screensaver?”

  Sachs rolled his eyes. “As a matter of fact I did, Stu, and you just gave away the punch line, numb nuts.”

  “Shit,” said Purvis. He walked along the concrete floor with an odd sort of stutter step, and it was only then that Belknap realized he had an artificial leg. “So, Walt the Whiz, how many terabytes you talking about?” He turned to Belknap. “We used to call him Walt the Whiz when we were undergrads.”

  Sachs grinned. “Because I was so good at getting digits from the honeys.”

  Purvis gave him a look. “The honeys? Please. You were lucky if you got Fembots.” He turned to Belknap, sniggering through his nose. “And all he got was their serial numbers.”

  The basement of the Watson building was vast and cavernous, evenly illuminated with diffuse fluorescent lights that had been positioned to minimize screen glare. They could have been in a morgue, Belknap decided, with all those banks of stainless-steel drawers. A thousand small fans cooled powerful chips, creating a wash of white noise.

  Purvis knew exactly where he was going: halfway down a central walkway, then a quick right. “I’m assuming that’s four-millimeter digital linear tape,” he said to Sachs, suddenly businesslike.

  “Well, SDLT.”

  “We can do super digital. Ultrium 960’s what we prefer, but the Quantum SDLT is totally reliable.” Sachs lifted the heavy spools from the nylon bag and Purvis mounted them on an autoloader that looked like an old-fashioned videocassette player. He pressed a button and the tape started spinning with a high-pitched squeal.

  “Step one,” Purvis said, “is reconstruction. We copy the data onto a rapid-access memory format. A hard drive, basically.” He was speaking for Belknap’s benefit. “We use a data-correction algorithm I wrote myself.”

  “Which means it probably has more bugs than features,” Walt gibed.

  “Walt, you still don’t get it. Those bugs are features.” An allusion to a years-old argument, obviously. “Whoa, Nelly!” he exclaimed abruptly. “What are we dealing with here, the entire U.S. Census databank? I guess now I see why they had to use SDLT.”

  “Contents may have settled during shipping,” Sachs said wryly. “In other words, expect some data expansion because of encryption.”

  “Never gets any easier, does it, Walt?” Purvis pulled out a keyboard from a rolling drawer at midriff level and started typing. The screen filled with numbers, and then the numbers gave way to what looked like the jagged graphics of an oscilloscope. “Jeepers creepers! See, we run basically a statistical probe, which classifies the code according to certain frequencies that are characteristic of different cryptosystems.” He shot Belknap a look. “It’s just a statistical analysis. It can’t read it, but it can tell you what language you’re looking at.” Under his breath he murmured, “Come to papa. Okay. I’m feeling you now.” Now he turned to Sachs. “The tape starts with the sixty-four-bit key. The actual data is there underneath block encryption. It’s just a parameterized algorithm. Put your right foot in and your left foot out, you do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. Or, more precisely, you do a little bitwise XOR and variable rotation. And Bob’s your uncle. Well, more like your second cousin’s wife’s uncle on his mother’s side twice removed. But that’s where the Beowulf cluster comes in. I gotta say, I’m impressed by what I’m seeing. It’s great security, actually. Phenomenal. So long as somebody doesn’t, like, steal your backup tape.”

  “Can I key in the search parameters?” Walt asked.

  “We script in Prolog. But we can switch to Python if you like. You still a Python partisan?”

  “You know it.”

  Purvis shrugged, stood up. “Knock yourself out.”

  Walt sat at the keyboard and began to type.

  “See, it’s kinda like ice fishing,” Purvis explained to Belknap with the air of an inveterate teacher. “You don’t exactly see what you’re doing, no more than you can see into the water. But you carve out a hole, and you drop in your bait, and then, in a manner of speaking, the fish come to you.”

  “Nobody’s interested in your cockamamie analogies, Stu,” Walt grumbled. “We just want answers.”

  “That’s life, isn’t it? We all arrive on Earth wanting answers. And we have to content ourselves with inane analogies.” He peered over Sachs’s shoulder. “And…we’ve got a bite! Or a few thousand bites, if you’re thinking of actual binary digits.”

  “Any way to speed this up?” Belknap asked.

  “Are you kidding? This system’s like a cheetah on Dexedrine. Feel the G-forces, man.”

  “Can we print out the file?” Sachs asked.

  Purvis snorted. “Like, on paper? You are so old school, Walt. Haven’t you heard of the paperless office?”

  “I think I crumpled up that memo before I read it.”

  “Fine, Mr. Eaton Twenty Pound. I’m sure we’ve got some monks in the scriptorium.”

  “You probably wipe your ass with virtual paper,” Sachs growled.

  “Okay, okay. We’ll laser it out, you Gutenberg geek.” Purvis rubbed his irritated neck, then moved to another console, tapping out some instructions. At the adjacent alcove, a large office-sized copier hummed and ejected a single page.


  “That’s it?” Belknap asked.

  It was identical to the page given to him by Senator Kirk’s chief of staff, except for a longer header.

  “Looks like it’s hashed out,” Purvis said.

  “Gonna run a traceroute on this,” Walt said urgently. “Then print that out, too.”

  “That’s kind of like a digital ping,” Purvis told Belknap. “You know, like in the old submarine movies. Or, like, sending a carrier pigeon down a long tunnel. It flies out to the end, and it comes back, and it tells you what it saw along the way, because, really, it’s not so much a carrier pigeon as a parrot!”

  “Stu,” Sachs balked, “my friend here isn’t going to be submitting a teacher-evaluation form. We just need the numbers.”

  Soon three more pages slid from the laser printer.

  “Yowza,” said Purvis, looking at the top sheet. “So we’ve got thirty-eight-byte packages, each making thirty hops. Oh, the places you’ll go.” He circled several of the strings of numbers. “We’ve been to the Perth Academic Regional Network, at AS7571. We’ve swung around Canberra RNO and Queensland, stopped off at the Rede Rio de Computadores at Brazil, Multicom in Bulgaria, EntreNet in Canada, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Chile, Ropácek and SilesNet in the Czech Republic, Azero in Denmark, Transpac in France, SHE Informationstechnologie AG in Germany, Snerpa ISP in Iceland—brother, I am dizzy! Somebody’s playing catch-me-if-you-can.”

  “The more hops, the more middlemen, the harder to follow,” Sachs said.

  “Don’t recognize this one.” Purvis keyed in another number. “Ah, so! MugotogoNet in Japan! ElCat in Kyrgyzstan! It’s a wonder this lil’ packet didn’t pick up traveler’s diarrhea.”

  Sachs turned to the last page of the traceroute printout, his eyes bright. To Belknap, it just looked like another list of cryptic alphanumeric strings:

  > hurroute (8.20.4.7) 2 ms * *

  > mersey (8.20.62.10) 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms

  > efw (184.196.110.1) 11 ms 4 ms 4 ms

  > ign-gw (15.212.14.225) 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms

  > port1br1-8-5-1.pt.uk.ibm.net (152.158.23.250) 34 ms 62 ms

  > port1br3-80-1-0.pt.uk.ibm.net (152.158.23.27) 267 ms 171

  > nyor1sr2-10-8-0.ny.us.ibm.net (165.87.28.117) 144 ms 117

  > nyor1ar1-8-7.ny.us.ibm.net (165.87.140.6) 146 ms 124 ms

  > nyc-uunet.ny.us.ibm.net (165.87.220.13) 161 ms 134 ms 143

  > 10 105.ATM2-0.XR2.NYC1.ALTER.NET (126.188.177.158) 164 ms

  “So what does this tell us, Walt?” Belknap said. His voice was hard with impatience. “Where in the world is this Genesis?”

  Sachs blinked several times. “Point of origin should be here, but…I mean, I can tell you it’s New York State,” he said. “Stu? Check the terminal ISP code.”

  “They say it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” Purvis said. “You remember that ex-girlfriend of mine who used to read the last pages of a novel first, so she knew how it ended? She found that comforting somehow.”

  “Stu, goddammit!”

  “Ah,” said Purvis as the UNIX machine flashed a response. “Just a few hours away. Bedford County.”

  “That’s where Katonah is,” Belknap said softly. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Yet even as he spoke he remembered something he had been told at Senator Kirk’s office, something about Genesis burrowing into the Bancroft Foundation. Had Genesis burrowed in so far that it was actually inside it?

  “Does not compute?” Purvis snorted. “Well, shit, we’ve got a BIOS serial number, too. Basically the license plate of the machine. Can’t do any better than that.”

  “He’s right, Todd,” said Sachs. “That’s degree-zero as far as the trace goes.”

  “Can I put the Beowulf back online, now?” Purvis yawned. They’re gonna be pissed off at Yale–New Haven Medical Center. They’re trying to get it to read MRI scans, you know.”

  “Katonah,” Belknap said to Sachs. He felt suffused with a bewildering mixture of hope, desperation, urgency. “Anything more we can do with that license plate? I need the physical location of that unit.”

  “Listen,” Sachs said. “I’ll stay here and try to scan the commercial databases, see if I can get a lead on that. Meanwhile, maybe you’d better make your way over there.” He turned to Purvis. “Give him a wireless laptop, omega-compatible.”

  “This isn’t the goddamn Salvation Army, Walt.”

  “Just do it. You’ll get it back.”

  Purvis sighed resignedly and unplugged one from a nearby workstation. “Don’t do Internet porn on it,” he told Belknap with a sullen glare. “We’ll know if you do.”

  “Hope I’ll see you again one day,” Sachs told Belknap. “I’ll call you as soon as I have anything useful to report.”

  “You’re a good man, Walter Sachs,” the operative said with genuine warmth. Then he winced at his own carelessness. “Dammit. Almost forgot. My cell phone was destroyed in Dominica.”

  Sachs nodded. “Take mine,” he said, handing him a small Nokia. “And take care.” A half-smile. “You don’t get bonus lives in the game you people play.”

  “Maybe that’s because it’s not a game,” Belknap said grimly.

  Andrea stared at the blue-white flame that pulsed from the gun muzzle, and screamed in terror. The shots were loud, deafening, as they echoed in the stone breezeway. Impassively, the man reholstered his revolver; despite its bulk, it disappeared beneath his perfectly tailored jacket, leaving no visible bulge.

  Andrea Bancroft was bewildered. She was still alive. Unharmed. It made no sense. She whirled around, saw the limp, lifeless bodies of the two men who had taken her captive. A small dark hole, like a third eye, appeared on the forehead of each.

  “I don’t understand,” she breathed.

  “That’s not my problem,” said the man, his expression formal, almost studious. “My instructions are to take you away from here.”

  “Where?”

  Powerful shoulders moved upward in a shrug. “Anywhere you want to go.” He had already turned and was walking away. She followed him to a low swinging gate, and then a series of wide brick steps leading to a large, closely mown field. A few hundred yards away, she saw what could have been a playing field, but was, she realized, a helipad. Four rotorcraft—aging military models by the look of them—were stationed there. Andrea struggled to keep up with the nameless man.

  “Where are we?”

  “About ten miles north of Richfield Springs. Maybe five miles south of Mohawk.”

  “Where?”

  “Upstate New York. Town’s called Jericho. Theta bought it from the Eastern Orthodox Church about a decade ago. Too few brothers for the space. The usual story.” He helped her onto a small helicopter, belted her in, and handed her a set of ear protectors. Stenciled on the helicopter, white on royal-blue, was the logo ROBINSON and the model number, R44: trivial details that caught in her mind like burrs.

  “Listen,” Andrea started. “I’m kind of at a loss here…” Her whole body stated to quake. “My mother—”

  “Was a very special person.” The man reached over to her, put his hand on her forearm, gripping it firmly. “I once promised your mother I’d look out for you. The two of you. Only, I let her down. I wasn’t there when she needed me.” There was a faint catch in his voice. “I can’t let that happen twice.”

  Andrea blinked hard, trying to take in the meaning of his words. “You said you had instructions,” she said abruptly. “Whose? Who gave you these instructions.”

  He met her eyes. “Genesis,” he said. “Who else?”

  “But at the Bancroft Foundation—”

  “Let’s just say I got a better offer.”

  “I don’t understand,” she repeated.

  “Hold on to that thought,” he grunted as he started the engine and the rotors began their whomp whomp whomp. “Now,” he yelled, “where to?”

  There were only two options. She could try to hide from Paul Bancroft or she could try to confro
nt him. She could go to Katonah or as far away from Katonah as was possible. She did not know which was more prudent. She did know that she was tired of running, tired of being chased. In an instant, she made up her mind.

  “You got enough gas to reach Bedford County?” she asked.

  “And back,” he assured her.

  “I’m not coming back,” Andrea said.

  A small smile broke into his solemn expression, a crack in the ice. “Hold on to that thought, too.”

  Another rented car. Another paved roadway. Framed by the windshield, the highway was an endless current of concrete, ornamented only by small tar-daubed fissures and battered, rusting guardrails. To either side, blast-carved shale sloping upward like the banks of a river. The road before him was taking him where he needed to go. The road before him was the distance he still had to traverse. It was foe and it was friend. Like Genesis?

  He had passed the exits to Norwalk, Connecticut, before his cell phone rang. It was Sachs with an update.

  “I did what you said,” Sachs told him, his voice tight with excitement. “I just got off the phone with Hewlett-Packard customer service. Pretended to be a computer-repair guy. Called in the BIOS number, they ran it through the sales records. Purchaser was the Bancroft Foundation. But that’s not a surprise, is it?”

  Acid splashed at the back of Belknap’s throat. “I guess not,” he said. Yet what did it mean? That Paul Bancroft was Genesis after all? Or simply that Genesis had infiltrated the foundation? “Good work, Walt. Look, you’ve got Senator Kirk’s private e-mail address, right?”