The Bancroft Strategy (30 page)

“How did you know that Javier would go to the garage, not anybody else?”

“What, and let another person drive his brand-new sedan? A man like that? You obviously don't know these parts very well.” He pressed the button of an augmented radio-frequency transmitter; two hundred yards away, a garage door rolled up.

Replacing the air in the garage with a pure nitrogen from the tank of liquid gas had taken nearly half an hour. Now the atmosphere would equilibrate in less than a minute.

Mr. Jones looked through the binoculars, adjusting the focus until he saw the stricken man on the concrete, an area of urine darkening his crotch, a fog of flies darkening his face. “There's never any real dignity in death,” he observed. “But he does look peaceful, don't you think?”

The second man, Mr. Smith, took the binoculars and peered
carefully. “Does he look peaceful? It's hard to tell. He certainly looks dead.”

Raleigh, North Carolina

The images kept cycling through his head as Belknap returned to the hotel. Ruth's sightless, staring eyes, the rivulet of blood glistening from the corner of her slack mouth. One moment she was talking, breathing, reasoning; the next moment she had simply ceased to exist, leaving behind only insentient tissue. No, she had left behind more than that. There were her two young boys, now orphaned, and there were the memories that others had of the woman's unique and precious existence. An existence that blinked out when someone had squeezed off a carefully aimed bullet.

A sniper's bullet, obviously from a considerable distance, given its soundless arrival, and therefore demonstrating considerable marksmanship. Belknap himself might have been next, had he not dived into the brush as soon as he realized what had happened. Why was the sniper dispatched? Who had done so? How had they been shadowed? Belknap tried to be analytical, but he felt the rage grow within him, wrapping tendrils around his stony heart. How many of his friends had he seen die? And then there was his beloved Yvette: a memory he had tried to bury as deep as he could, like nuclear waste canistered and interred in a desert salt mine. Part of him—a dream of the man he might have been—had been struck down along with his bride. Where there is beauty, one finds death.

He appeared punctually at the lobby of the Raleigh Marriott at precisely four, and there was Andrea Bancroft, equally punctual, drinking from a white china cup at one of the chair-and-low-table clusters to the right side of the lobby. He hoped that she had followed his instructions and stayed at the hotel. After what had happened at
Rock Creek, he had to worry about her own safety as well as his own.

By reflex, he let his gaze wash over the rest of the lobby, a second-long glance that slid like a windshield washer over slick glass. His neck prickled.
Something was wrong.
To try to warn Andrea was to endanger her; it would plant a target on her within sight of his enemies. She wasn't their objective, or she wouldn't be there.

He had to act before he could analyze, act in a manner that was swift, erratic, and difficult to anticipate.
Don't turn back: They'll have thought of that. Go in!
Todd did not break stride as he made his way through the lobby.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Andrea leap up. She assumed he didn't see her, was coming after him.

Exactly the wrong thing to do.

He whipped his head around, tried frantically to signal her with his eyes, by looking at and yet past her:
Do not acknowledge me, as I am not acknowledging you. Pretend we are strangers.

He kept race-walking across the lobby, and—rather than stopping at the front desk or waiting by the elevator bank—immediately pushed through the unmarked swing door behind the concierge desk. Now he was in a luggage-storage area. The fleur-de-lis carpet immediately gave way to hard Congoleum flooring, chandelier lights gave way to fluorescent tubes; racks of suitcase lined either side of the long alcove.

Even as he ran, an inward eye reviewed his threat assessment. What had he seen in the lobby, exactly? A man—an ordinary-looking man, maybe forty, in an ordinary gray suit—reading a newspaper in one of the hotel wing chairs. Diagonally across an unmarked centerline, a man and a woman, both in their late twenties or early thirties, sitting together at a small table. A white porcelain tea server, two white cups. Nothing that would be noticed by a nonprofessional. What alerted Belknap was that neither the man nor the woman at the table near the door looked up when he walked in. A typical couple would have responded to the arrival of a stranger with
a flicker of the eye at least. But this couple did not need to; they had already registered his arrival through the glass adjoining the extra-wide revolving door. Instead, the woman glanced, fleetingly, at the older man, who was holding the newspaper just a little lower than he would if he had actually been reading it. Then there was the matter of footwear. The older man was sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles, such that the soles of his shoes were visible, and visibly discordant with his expensive leather shows: textured black rubber, not leather. The woman was dressed fancily—a pale blouse, a dark skirt—and yet her shoes, too, had thick rubber soles. Her makeup was careful, her hair pinned up above her neck, her attire elegant: The rubber-soled shoes she wore were an incongruous element. Belknap had picked up on these things at a glance, instinctively; spelling them out, naming them, took longer. He knew these people: not personally, but professionally, generically. He knew how they were trained; he knew who had trained them. People like him.

They were enemies, but worse still, they were
colleagues
. Members of a Consular Operations retrieval team. They had to be. Highly trained professionals, carrying out orders. They were not used to failure; they had no reason to be. Belknap had been on just such a detail more than once in his own career. Never had the operation ended in anything less than swift success. How did they know where he was going to show up? he wondered—yet there was no time for such questions.

There was another swing door with a small glass window toward the end of the space; Belknap pushed through it and into an industrial-looking kitchen. A row of small brown men with straight black hair were cleaning or doing prep work, but nobody heard him over the faucet noises, the clattering of aluminum pots on the range grates. Cans of vegetables the size of small oil drums were stacked on wheeled steel carts. There was a rear entrance—but it would be watched. Instead, he found a small elevator, no doubt used for room service.

From behind him, he heard the clattering of unmuffled footsteps: Andrea had gone chasing after him.

Exactly the wrong thing to do.
She was no professional, had understood nothing of what he had tried to signal.

Another sound: the
snick-click
of a pistol being readied. A small, wiry man stepped out of a recessed area next to the service elevator, an M9 pistol trained at Belknap.

Dammit!
She was not the only one to miscalculate. The team was well deployed; an operative was stationed by the service elevator as well.

Andrea was tugging on Belknap's arm. “What the hell is going on?”

The small, wiry man—iron eyes in a broad, weathered face—stepped closer to them, moving his pistol from one to the other. “So who's your friend?” he barked.

Andrea gasped. “Oh, Jesus. This isn't happening. This isn't happening.”

Three in the lobby.
Not five or seven. Three. That meant that they were staffing the operation with S.A.P. operatives only—veterans of special-access programs, with the very highest level of security clearance. Three in the lobby meant that the man with the dull black pistol in his hand was on his own. He would call in the others momentarily—but had not done so yet.
He wants to get credit for the capture,
Belknap thought.
He'll want it to be absolutely clear that he'd already taken charge of the target when the others arrive.

“I said, who's your friend?” the gunman snarled.

Belknap snorted. “My
friend
? For three hundred dollars an hour, the bitch better be my friend. She'll be your friend, too.”

Belknap saw something on Andrea's face. A glint of comprehension.

“Screw you,” she yelled at Belknap, suddenly vehement. “And give me my goddamn money!” She punched Belknap hard in the shoulder. “You think you can get away with not paying, you asshole?” Then she turned to the gunman. “What the hell are you looking at?
You gonna help me or not? Help me get his wallet. I'll split it with you.”

“You're out of your tree,” the gunman said, startled and unsettled. Belknap saw him reaching for his communicator.

“Didn't Burke send you?” Andrea asked him. “Get on the goddamn stick.”

“You move again, bitch, you'll get a breast implant of bullets,” the gunman snarled at her. “Both of you—you better freeze. I ain't saying it again.”

One gunman. One gun. Belknap stepped in front of Andrea, keeping his body between her and the gun. If his orders were to shoot, he would have done so already. Therefore shooting was to be resorted to only in the event of likely mission failure. He took a long step toward the gunman, plunging both his hands inside his own trouser pockets. “You want my wallet? That what this is about?”

He saw the uncertainty in the other man's eyes. An operative's most important weapon was his hands; no professional would encumber his hands the way Belknap had by sticking them in his pockets. Had Belknap approached him with his hands raised to shoulder level, the wiry operative would instantly have recognized the gambit; he would have been trained to employ it himself. Even with hands raised high in the air, Belknap would be identified as a threat. An opponent becomes more dangerous when he's within an arm's length of you.

“You tell Burke that if he wants a john to pay up, he better make sure his honeys are putting out.” Belknap's voice was confiding, as if he were trying to appeal to the other, man to man.

“Don't take another goddamn step!” The man's command was taut, yet his uncertainty was visibly growing. Was this, in fact, the correct target?

Belknap ignored him. “Put yourself in my situation,” Belknap went on, and came closer still. He was close enough to smell cigarettes and sweat on the man. “Because I'm going to tell you a secret about your boss I don't want this bitch to hear.”

With a sudden movement, Belknap scissored his torso and smashed his forehead into the other man's face, then wrested the pistol from his grasp before he crumpled to the ground.

“Andrea, listen to me,” he told her urgently. “There were three operatives in the lobby, and they would have made you. Chances are at least one of them will be here in maybe fifteen seconds. The others won't recognize you. You need to do precisely what I tell you.”

He knelt down, rummaged through the fallen man's pockets until he found a pack of Camels, half-empty, and a disposable lighter.

Andrea was breathing hard now. She had momentarily staved off her terror, lost it in the mad intensity of her performance. Soon, he knew, it would return.

“Keep it together, okay?” He handed her the cigarettes and lighter.

She nodded mutely.

Belknap looked into her eyes as he spoke, as if to verify that she was absorbing his words. “You leave the back way, like you're a manager taking a cigarette break. Five paces away from the door, stop. Turn and face the hotel. Open your purse. Take out a cigarette. Light it. That cigarette is like oxygen to you. Then you start to wander off the lot and toward the street, like you need to buy more cigarettes. You keep going. There's a hotel a block south with a taxi line. Get a taxi there, get yourself to downtown Durham, stay in public places like shopping areas.”

“Please,” she whispered. “Come with me.”

He shook his head. “I can't go out that way. They're waiting for me.”

“Then what's going to happen to you? That man, he was going to—”

Belknap heard footfalls from the corridor where the luggage was stored. “You're craving a cigarette,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “The smoke is like oxygen to you. Now
go
!”

Her shoulders stiffened slightly, and he saw that she grasped the situation. She put the cigarette pack into her purse, and, without
another word, let herself out the rear entrance. If she were given a role, he knew, she could play it. He had given her one. She would be safe.

He had no such confidence about himself.

Now he jabbed the button to the service elevator. He could hear the sound of luggage being tossed around. One person, plainly, had been detached from the lobby unit to search the internal spaces of the floor. A sound move: The agents watching the other exits must have reported in that the target had made no appearance so far.

He jabbed the elevator call button again. It would take just seconds before the operative satisfied himself that Belknap was not hiding with the luggage, and pushed toward the rear of the hotel.

The elevator cabin opened and Belknap stepped in. He pressed the button, almost randomly, for the fourth floor. The doors closed jerkily and the cabin started to move.

He closed his eyes, calmed his pulse, reviewed his options. He had to consider the strong possibility that he had been glimpsed stepping onto the elevator—in which case others may well be in pursuit, taking other elevators to the fourth floor, or simply bounding up the stairs. He raced down the hallways, looking for a maid's towel-laden cart, an open door. His head start, if he had one, could be measurable in seconds.

An open door.
He found one: a room being turned down, the bolster pillows removed from the headboard, the spread and blanket folded back. The maid, moving stiffly in her pale blue uniform, greeted him with a Spanish accented “Good afternoon, sir,” as he entered, taking him to be the guest. “Just finishing up,” she added.