The Bancroft Strategy (12 page)

“And with disease?”

“Sometimes you have treatments that, by addressing the symptoms of an infectious disease, end up by increasing the transmission rate.”

“You don't want to be the doc who gives Typhoid Mary an aspirin so she can go back to work in the kitchen,” Andrea said.

“My God, Andrea, you were
born
to this.” The laugh lines around his eyes gathered into a smile.

Once more she found herself blushing. A reclaimed birthright—was that what it was? “Oh, come on,” she said quickly.

“I just mean you have a knack for thinking about these things. Perverse consequences come in all shapes and sizes. That's why the Bancroft Foundation always has to think five steps ahead. Because every action has an effect, yes—but those effects, too, have effects. Which have yet further effects.” She felt the force of a powerful intellect directed toward a deep problem, and determined not to be defeated by it.

“It must be enough to induce paralysis. You start thinking about these knock-on effects, and you wonder about doing anything at all.”

“Except”—there was an intellectual fluidity and grace to the way
Paul Bancroft spoke now, gliding in and out of her sentences—“that there's no exit from the conundrum.”

“Because there are consequences to
in
action, too,” Andrea put in. “Doing nothing has knock-on effects as well.”

“Which means you can never decide not to decide.”

It wasn't sparring; it was more like dancing, the back and forth, the to and fro. She was exhilarated. She was talking with one of the great minds of the postwar era about the greatest issues of the day and she was holding her own. Or was she flattering herself? A tabby dancing with a lion?

They moved along a gentle incline, a knoll flecked with bluebells and buttercups, and did not speak for a bit. She found herself in a sort of fugue. Had she ever met anyone so extraordinary? Paul Bancroft had all the money in the world; he didn't care about money. He only cared about what money could do, if targeted with extraordinary care. In college and in grad school, Andrea had spent time with academics who were desperate to get their papers published in the right journal, to get included on the right academic panels at the right conferences—needily, hungrily pursuing the most withered laurel. Yet here was Paul Bancroft, who had published enduring work before he was old enough to purchase alcohol, who, in his mid-twenties, received an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, once the lair of Einstein, Gödel, and von Neumann, and the country's most illustrious research center—and who, a few years later, gave it up in order to devote his energies to the foundation and its expansion. The man was hardheaded and big-hearted: a truly rare combination, and a thrilling one.

Being in his presence made all her past ambitions seem so
shrunken
.

“So the first task of doing good is to avoid doing bad,” she said, finally, musingly. They were walking downhill now. She heard a soft fluttering and looked up to see a brace of wood ducks lift up into the air before her eyes, in a cloud of vibrant plumage. Tucked behind the
knoll, it turned out, was a small, clear pond, perhaps half an acre in size. Water lilies clustered around its banks. The ducks had obviously decided to wait among the trees until the human visitors had moved on.

“God, they're lovely,” Andrea said.

“That they are. And there are men of a certain stripe who can't see them without itching for a shotgun.” Paul Bancroft approached the pond, picked up a pebble from near its edge, and with boyish skill skipped it across the water's surface. The stone bounced twice, landing on the opposite bank. “I'll tell you a story.” He turned to face her. “Have you ever heard of Inver Brass?”

“Inver Brass? Sounds like a lake in Scotland.”

“And so it is, though you won't find it on any map. But it's also the name of a group of men—and originally it
was
all men—who came from around the world and met up there back in 1929. The organizer was a Scotsman of great means and ambition, and the people he gathered together were men of the same stamp. It was a small group, too. Six people: all influential, all rich, all idealistic, all determined to make the world a better place.”

“Oh,
that
's all.”

“Does it seem so very modest?” he asked jestingly. “But yes, that was why Inver Brass was founded. And, from time to time, they would send vast sums of money to distressed regions, the idea being to diminish the suffering and, in particular, the violence that arose from deprivation.”

“A long time ago. A different world.” There was a distant chittering of a squirrel somewhere in the canopied woods across the glen.

“As it happens, though, the founder of Inver Brass had ambitions beyond his own life. The group was regularly reconstituted in ensuing decades. One thing remained the same: The leader, whomever it might be, was always code-named ‘Genesis.' As the founder had been.”

“An interesting role model,” Andrea ventured. She found another
small pebble, made an effort to skip it along the water, but the angle was wrong. It plunked down and disappeared.

“Maybe more of a cautionary tale,” Bancroft countered. “They weren't infallible. Far from it. The fact is, one of their feats of economic engineering inadvertently led to the rise of Nazi Germany.”

Andrea faced him. “You can't be serious,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Which pretty much canceled out all the good they did. They thought about causes and effects—and forgot that effects, too, are causes.”

Through scudding clouds, the sun dimmed and brightened. Andrea fell silent.

“You look…”

“Stunned,” Andrea said. And so she was: a trained historian, stunned by the history of Inver Brass, stunned by the casualness with which Dr. Bancroft had related it. “The notion that a cabal like that could have shifted the course of human history…” She trailed off.

“There's a great deal that never appears in the history books, Andrea.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Inver Brass. From a lake in Scotland to the ascent of the Third Reich. This takes a little getting used to.”

“I've never met a faster study,” the aging savant murmured in an almost intimate tone. “You see it before most people do: Doing the right thing isn't always easy.” He looked off to the acreage on the other side of the long, low stone wall, a stretch of artfully piled shale.

“You must be haunted by the story of Inver Brass.”

“And humbled,” he put in with a significant glance. “As I say, the imperative is always to think forward. I'd like to believe that the Bancroft Foundation has some grasp of the elementals of historical causation. We've learned that the straight shot is often less effective than the carom shot.” He skipped another pebble across the pond. This one touched down three times. “It's all in the wrist,” he told her with a wink. He was seventy, and he was seven. He had taken the heaviest
burdens in the world upon his shoulders, and yet there was something about him that was lighter than air. “You remember Voltaire's rallying cry:
Ecrasez l'infame!
—Crush the horror! It's mine, too. But the hard question has always been: How? As I say, doing the right thing isn't always easy.”

Andrea took a deep breath. Clouds were beginning to gather overhead, not just to scud. “It's a lot to take in,” she said at last.

“That's why I want you to dine at my place tonight—
en famille
.” He gestured toward a house a few hundred yards on the other side of the stone wall, mostly concealed by foliage. So Bancroft resided in an adjoining parcel of land, his house a mere twenty-minute walk from the foundation.

“Seems you live over the shop,” Andrea said, with a careless giggle. “Or next to it.”

“Beats commuting,” he said. “And if I'm in a hurry, there's always a bridle path. Is that a yes?”

“A long-winded one. Thank you. I'd love to.”

“I have an idea my son would enjoy meeting you. Brandon's his name. He's thirteen. A wretched age, everyone says, but he wears it rather well. Anyway, I'll let Nuala know you'll be coming. She's—well, she looks after us. Among other things, I'd guess you'd call her the governess. But that sounds so Victorian.”

“And you're more of an Age of Enlightenment guy.”

Laughter rippled through him.

Having made the great man laugh, Andrea suddenly felt buoyed by a wave of unreasonable happiness. She was over her head, out of place—and somehow she had never felt more at home.

You were
born
to this
, her cousin had said, and, thinking of her mother, Andrea felt a moment of coldness. Yet what if he was right?

 

Todd Belknap manacled the guard's wrists and ankles, stripped him naked with a few strokes of a knife, and then chained the manacles
to the heavy cast-iron chair. Only then did he switch the lights back on. To overpower such a man required speed and stealth, and those advantages were temporary. The steel fetters were needed to make it permanent.

Now, in the harsh fluorescent light, the seated man's olive complexion appeared sallow. Belknap stepped in front of him and watched his eyes widen and then narrow with recognition and realization. The one who had called himself Yusef was both startled and dismayed. The very intruder he had meant to torture had taken over the torture chamber.

Belknap, for his part, surveyed the gear crowding the dungeon's walls. Some of the devices were unfathomable; his imagination wasn't sick enough to conceive how they could be put to use. Others he recognized from a visit he had made once to the Museum of the Pusterla, in Milan, a horrifying collection of medieval torture implements.

“Your master was quite a collector,” Belknap said.

In the chair, the Tunisian drew his angular face into a scowl of defiance. Belknap would have to be very clear about how far he was prepared to go. The captive's nakedness, he knew, would help bring home the vulnerability of the flesh, all flesh.

“I see you've got an actual iron maiden here,” the operative went on. “Impressive.” He walked over to the tomblike container, which was lined with metal talons. Its victim, when forced inside, would be slowly pinioned, his own shrieks magnified by the enclosure. “The Inquisition lives. Thing is, it wasn't just a fascination with antiques that led your late master to go medieval. Think about it. The Inquisition went on for centuries. Torture, too. That means decade after decade after decade of trial and error. Learning from experience. Learning how to play a man's pain fibers like a goddamn fiddle. The expertise they accumulated was incredible. Nothing we could hope to rival. Some of the art was lost, I'm sure. But not all.”

The seated man just spat at him. “I tell you nothing,” he said in his lightly accented English.

“But you don't even know what I'm going to ask,” Belknap returned. “I'm just going to ask you to make a decision, that's all. A choice. Do I ask too much?”

The guard glowered but was silent.

Now Belknap opened the drawer of a mahogany cabinet and removed an implement he recognized as a
turcas
, designed to rip out fingernails. He placed it on a large, leather-lined tray in sight of the prisoner. Next to it he placed a steel pincer, a thumbscrew—a vice with protruding studs designed to compress and then crush the joints of a person's fingers and toes—and a metal wedge designed to dig out, very slowly, someone's fingernails by the root. During the Inquisition, a common method of torture involved extracting the nails from fingers and toes as slowly as possible.

He presented the gleaming array of implements to his prisoner and spoke a single word. “Choose.”

A bead of perspiration slowly ran down the man's forehead.

“Then I'll choose for you. I think we should start small.” He spoke in a coaxing voice as he glanced around the shelves again. “Yes, I know just the thing—how about the pear?” Belknap asked, his eye falling upon a smooth ovoid object with a long screw projecting from the end, like a stem. He brandished it in front of his captive, who remained silent.
La pera,
one of the most notorious implements of medieval torture, was designed to be inserted into the rectum or vagina. Once inside, the projecting screw would be rotated and the iron pear would expand while spikes began to protrude from small holes, mutilating the victim's internal cavity in a slow and excruciating manner.

“Feel like a bite of pear? I think this one would like a bite of you.” Belknap pressed a lever recessed in the frame of the heavy iron chair and a hinged panel swung down from the center of the seat. “You'll see.
I'm full-service. Not a clock-watcher. Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, that's what I'll do. And when they find you in the morning—”

“No!” the guard yelped, his sweat-slick flesh beginning to emit the acrid stench of fear. Belknap's calculation appeared to have been correct; his captive was evidently shaken as much by the humiliation of the prospect—the forcible penetration itself—as the bloody agony that would ensue.

“Don't worry about embarrassing yourself,” Belknap went on, relentlessly. “The wonderful thing about this chamber is that you can scream as loud as you like, as long as you like. Nobody will be able to hear a thing. And, like I say, when you're found in the morning—”

“I tell you what you want to know,” the guard blurted, a whimper in his voice. “I tell you.”

“The servant girl,” Belknap barked. “Who is she? Where is she?”

The guard blinked. “But she vanished. We thought—we thought
you
had killed her.”

Belknap lifted an eyebrow. “When was she hired? Who is she?”

“Maybe eight months ago. She was checked out thoroughly. I made sure of it. Eighteen years old. Lucia Zingaretti. Lives with her family in the Trastevere. An old family. Modest. But respectable. Devout, in fact.”