Her eyes drifted to the photographs on her desk. The two men in her life. She had last seen them that morning, when she was leaving for work and they were playing basketball. Brandon was growing quickly—all elbows and angles, it seemed, skinny arms and gawky swagger. A fourteen-year-old.
“Now watch, people,” the boy had said in a sports announcer’s voice as he galloped toward the basket, his black Pumas looking oversized below his slender calves. “Witness the inimitable moves of Brandon Bancroft! He shoots! He scores!” The ball banged off the rim. “And he speaks too soon!” His T-shirt was lightly spotted with perspiration, Todd’s more heavily.
“If I didn’t have these shin splints,” Todd said, hobbling slightly as he retrieved the ball. He dribbled twice, leaned back, and sank the ball through the net. The soft swooshing sound of the nylon weave against the pebbled rubber of the ball: Brandon dubbed it “the music of the sphere.”
Andrea, standing by the privet hedge, shook her head. “You’re supposed to save your excuses for when you miss, Todd.” She could feel the morning sun on her face, and for a moment she thought it was only the sun that was warming her as she watched the two play.
“Hey, feel free to show your stuff,” said Brandon. “Just for a minute or two, yeah?”
“Only, no Manolos on the court, lady,” said Todd, his expression both tender and playful.
“Step into lace-ups, though, and you might get a nice bidding war started between Team Brandon and Team Todd.” Brandon’s voice was deeper, weightier than before. Even his eyebrows were a little darker, a little heavier than they were a year ago. Then he grinned—and that grin, anyway, hadn’t changed at all. As far as Andrea was concerned, it was one of the wonders of the natural world.
Don’t ever let them take that away from you. A silent prayer. Watching the two, she thought it had a good chance of coming true.
“It’s always nice to be recruited, but I’ll have to take a raincheck.” She turned away, almost embarrassed by her happiness. “It’s just that I’ve got people waiting in the office. You boys going to be all right?”
Her husband slung a sweaty arm around Brandon’s narrow shoulders. “Hey,” he told her, still slightly out of breath. “Don’t worry about us. You take care of the world.”
Brandon nodded. “We’ll take care of each other.”
Now it was early afternoon, and Andrea had already made it through three executive strategy meetings and two conference calls with regional administrators. At the moment, the senior program director was giving her an update of the foundation’s health campaigns in South America, and, as she sat at her office desk, she nodded encouragingly as he summarized the developments.
Her eyes drifted again to the photographs on her desk, and then caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a chrome frame. She was a different person than she was a year ago; she didn’t have to look in a mirror to recognize that. She could tell it from the way people responded to her. She had the authority and self-assurance of someone who had truly come into her own. And it was genuinely gratifying to be able to use the foundation’s resources to make the world a better place—and do so the right way. The only way, as far as she was concerned. She took pride in the transparency of the foundation’s operations. She hid nothing, because there was nothing to hide.
“The Uruguay project has been a model,” the director of the South American regional program was saying. “We expect many other foundations and NGOs will study what we’ve done and emulate it.” The man—gray-haired, slightly stooped, and with a round, bespectacled face—had the careworn expression of someone who had seen much suffering and misery during his twenty years with the foundation. Yet he had also seen how suffering and misery could be alleviated.
“I hope they do,” Andrea said. “In this line of work, copycats are what you hope for, because that’s how you multiply the benefits. It’s crucial that these regions aren’t written off. They can change. They can change for the better.” As she herself had changed.
Her husband and their adopted son had changed as well. As unlike as Todd and Brandon were, they had forged a relationship that she could not have anticipated. Brandon had, in some sense, lost his childhood, Todd his adulthood, and that made them fellow mourners for a while, and yet there was more to it than that. Nobody could keep up with Brandon intellectually, of course, but his emotional maturity—his basic kindness, his perceptiveness—was also remarkable, and enabled him to recognize something in Todd that was hidden from most people. The boy recognized Todd’s vulnerability and ardor and desire to nurture, and he responded to it with his own vulnerability and ardor and need to be nurtured. A boy had found a father; a man had found a son.
And Andrea had found a family.
“The news from Guyana is not so heartening,” said the program director carefully. He was referring to a major vaccination plan they were trying to implement in its rural regions. It was of particular interest to her. She had made a visit to the Guyanese countryside just last month. The images of the Amerindian villages near the Moruca River were still fresh in her mind, their lives and travails heart-wrenchingly vivid. To see a village being decimated by a preventable epidemic in this day and age—it filled her with sorrow and anger.
“I don’t understand,” Andrea said. “Every detail was painstakingly worked out.” It was going to be a textbook example of how to ramp up public health even in regions with poor infrastructure.
“The campaign’s potential is extraordinary, Ms. Bancroft,” he told her. “Your leadership during your visit gave everyone hope.”
“What I saw during my visit last month,” she said, “isn’t something I’ll ever forget.” Her words were heartfelt, fierce.
“Unfortunately, the minister of the interior has just withdrawn permission for us to continue. He says he’ll have all the health workers we’ve hired deported. He’s actually forbidding the inoculations.”
“You can’t be serious,” Andrea said. “There’s no possible justification—”
“You’re right,” the gray-haired man said gravely. “No justification. Only an explanation. You see, the Amerindians whose lives would be saved tend to be supporters of a rival political party.”
“You’re sure that’s what’s going on?” she asked, repulsed.
“We’ve heard directly from our allies in the administration.” The man’s basset-hound eyes were sorrowful. “It’s appalling. Thousands will die because of this man’s fear of democracy. And he’s as corrupt as the day is long. This isn’t just rumor. We know people who have obtained actual bank records of payoffs made to his offshore accounts.”
“Really.”
“Might I suggest that we could at least consider the option of, well, getting tough with the bastard? Let him know what we can prove—because that could cause quite a bit of trouble for him politically. Of course, we’d never do that without your permission.” The program director paused. “Ms. Bancroft?”
Andrea was silent. Her mind filled with an image from her trip last month. It was of an Arawak mother—long, lustrous black hair, haunted, luminous eyes—cradling her baby in her arms. The nurse who had accompanied Andrea as she toured the clinic in Santa Rosa told her quietly that the baby had died only minutes earlier of diphtheria; they hadn’t had the heart to tell the mother yet.
Andrea’s eyes had filled with tears. Then the mother looked up at her and caught her expression, and realized what Andrea had been told. Her baby was no more. A soft wail emerged from the mother’s throat, the sound of purest grief.
“Such a shame, too,” the program director went on in a soft, somber voice. “I know what your feelings are about this kind of thing. I share them. But, Christ, the difference it could make to the whole region…”
“No other way?”
“If only,” he said, shaking his head firmly. Something in her face gave him encouragement, though, and his eyes seemed to brighten. “You know how it is. Doing the right thing isn’t always easy.” He gave her an e
xpectant look.
“True enough,” she said quietly, struggling with herself. “All right. Go ahead. Just this once, but—let’s do it.”
Also by Robert Ludlum
The Tristan Betrayal
The Janson Directive
The Sigma Protocol
The Prometheus Deception
The Matarese Countdown
The Apocalypse Watch
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Icarus Agenda
The Bourne Supremacy
The Aquitaine Progression
The Parsifal Mosaic
The Bourne Identity
The Matarese Circle
The Gemini Contenders
The Holcroft Covenant
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Road to Gandolfo
The Rhinemann Exchange
The Cry of the Halidon
Trevayne
The Matlock Paper
The Osterman Weekend
The Scarlatti Inheritance
The Ambler Warning
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Since his death, the Estate of Robert Ludlum has worked with a carefully selected author and editor to prepare and edit this work for publication.
THE BANCROFT STRATEGY. Copyright © 2006 by Myn Pyn LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ludlum, Robert.
The Bancroft strategy / Robert Ludlum.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-31673-0
1. Kidnapping—Fiction. 2. Terrorists—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Family foundations—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.U26B36 2006
813'.54—dc22
2006043578
The Bancroft Strategy Page 54
