The Bancroft Strategy (40 page)

Softly, he pronounced the name out loud. It was a name he knew—that of a Greek Cypriot magnate. Nikos Stavros was a reclusive man whose list of holdings worldwide was legendary.

They included, Belknap saw, a 49 percent interest in Estotek.

Was Stavros in fact Genesis? Was “Lanham” his alias? But Andrus Pärt had said he was an American. For that matter, then who owned the other half of the company—and what, precisely, did Estotek control? Belknap peered at an onionskin page headed
PARTNERSHIPS
and struggled to make sense of it. He lurched to his feet and tried the knob to the interior door—which was, blessedly, unlocked. He switched on an overhead light and, as the fluorescents blinked on, he saw further banks of black filing cabinets. Ten minutes later, he was beginning to perceive the complexity of the enterprise, the largely submerged iceberg that was Estotek.

Eleven minutes later, he heard the arrival of guards in the hallway.

He bolted from the annex like a rabbit from its hutch and he noticed—heart-stoppingly—the familiar alarm tab inset in the flange of the interior door. The knob had turned; the annex door had swung open. But what he hadn't realized was that it was armed, that there was a separate alarm system in place. A silent one. There were not enough expletives even in the Estonian language to express Belknap's self-disgust.

And now he found himself face-to-face with four well-armed security guards. They did not look like the pudgy man in the lobby or the feckless night watchman in the brown uniform. These ones were professionals. Each carried a drawn gun.

Instructions were yelled at him in several languages. He understood “Freeze!” He understood the directive about stretching his arms over his head.

He understood that the game was over.

The guard who spoke English came closer to him. He had leathery skin and a hatchet face. His gaze took in the files that spilled from the cabinets.

A triumphant grin stretched across his face. “There was a report of rats,” he said in lightly accented English. “And now we have caught the rat even as he nibbles at our cheese.”

Then he turned and said something to the youngest of his three colleagues, a twentyish man with yellow hair in a buzz cut, and the ropy, veined arms of a weightlifting enthusiast. The words were in a Slavic tongue; Belknap only made out the common Serbian surname Drakulovic—obviously the man's name.

“Corporate history—kind of a hobby of mine,” Belknap said in a hollow voice. He noticed that the English-speaking guard was holding a Gyurza Vector SR-1, a Russian-made pistol designed to punch through body armor. It could, in fact, penetrate sixty layers of Kevlar, and its chambered steel-core bullets would not ricochet, because they would penetrate. They would travel through his body like a pebble through the air.

“See, it's not the way it looks,” Belknap added.

With a sudden movement, the guard belted him across the face with the hand that held his pistol.

The blow landed like a mule's kick. Belknap decided to exaggerate its effect, which took little effort. He wheeled backward, windmilling his arms, and then he caught a glimpse of the guard's contemptuous look. The man was not taken in for a moment. A second, punishing blow landed—on the same cheek, the way a professional would do it. Belknap forced himself to stand erect, although he wobbled on his legs. It was not the time to resist, his instincts told him. The guard was trying to demonstrate his mastery, not to knock him unconscious. They would have questions for him after all.

“No movements,” the man said in a voice like gravel. “Be still like a mannequin.”

Belknap nodded mutely.

One of the other guards spoke to the one with the yellow buzz cut in a snigger. Belknap understood little, save the name Pavel—the young man's first name. The young man approached, patted Belknap down, ensuring that he was disarmed. He fished out a small metal tape measure from Belknap's rear pocket and tossed it aside.

“Now, what are you doing here?” The rugged man, obviously their leader, spoke in the tone of a man hoping for a display of insubordination so as to have an excuse to deal out punishment.

Belknap remained silent. His mind raced.

The hatchet-faced guard stepped closer. Belknap could smell his sour, beefy breath. “Are you deaf?” he demanded. The taunting of a playground bully, prelude to the violence on which he thrived.

Suddenly, impulsive, Belknap whipped his head around and caught the youngest guard's eyes. “Pavel!” he said, his voice imploring and yet berating as well. “Tell them!”

The senior guard narrowed his eyes. Confusion and suspicion played across his face. Pavel looked baffled, stunned. But Belknap did not avert his eyes.

“You promised me, Pavel! You promised me there would be none of this!”

The heavyset guard gave the yellow-haired bodybuilder a suspicious side glance. A facial tic twitched the young man's left eye. Evidence of tension. It was inevitable—but, to those so minded, suspicious as well.

Pavel murmured something that, to Belknap, hardly needed translation: some version of “I don't know what he's talking about.”

“Oh,
please
,” Belknap burst out, indignant. He recalled Jared Rinehart's advice:
Suspicion, dear Castor, is like a river; the only way to avoid its flow is to divert it elsewhere.
The memory gave Belknap strength. He jutted his jaw, squared his shoulder, looked less guilty than aggrieved.

The senior guard's voice was menacing—though it was difficult to say toward whom, exactly. “You know this man?” he asked Belknap.

“Drakulovic?” Belknap spat. “I thought I did. Evidently not.” Belknap directed a furious gaze at the young man. “You piece of shit!” he stormed. “What kind of game are you playing? Do you think my boss is going to take this lying down?” Belknap was madly extemporizing at this point, sketching out a scenario that would intrigue but remain mysterious to the guards. He simply needed to buy time.

Belknap rolled his eyes theatrically as Pavel Drakulovic burst into a flurry of denials, protests. The outrage was genuine, but it came off as defensive, possibly spurious. Belknap noticed that the two other guards had subtly positioned themselves a few steps away from him, closer to the leader. Drakulovic was now an uncertain quantity; nobody wanted to be closely associated with him, at least not until the matter was resolved and clarity restored.

He continued to protest until their leader directed some brief, harsh word of remonstration at him, and shut him up. Again, Belknap could guess at the message: “Not another word out of you. We'll sort this out later.”

Now Belknap lifted his chin. Time to drop another name, to sow more confusion. “I'm just telling you that Lanham isn't going to be happy with you guys. Last time I do
him
a favor.”

The black-eyed guard suddenly looked wary. “Who did you say?”

Belknap took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his mind working furiously.

R. S. Lanham.
An American, according to Andrus Pärt. The “R” could stand for Ronald, Richard, Rory, Ralph. But Robert was the likeliest; it was among the most common first names in the United States. A Robert could go by Rob, or Bert, or eschew a diminutive altogether, but if one had to stake a wager on the outcome, Bob was safest.

“Trust me,” Belknap said, “If you knew Bob Lanham as well as I do, you'd know he's the last person you want to piss off.”

The black-eyed guard gave him a curious look. Then he flicked on a small communicator, spoke into it briefly. Then he turned to Belknap. “The boss comes soon.”

The boss. Not Nikos Stavros. The other owner, then. The principal owner. The man who used the name Lanham.

Andrus Pärt:
This isn't someone I've ever met face-to-face. Nor do I care to.

The leader now spoke in a low, reassuring voice to his young companion. A quick side glance at Belknap. They did not trust him. But the black-eyed man took and pocketed Drakulovic's sidearm all the same. He was on probation for the time being. It was the only prudent thing to do. Drakulovic sat down on a small stool in a corner of the room, winded, wanting to protest further but resigned to the sidelines.

Belknap looked around him, at the remaining guards, saw their pistols held steady, nothing in their gaze but indifferent professionalism. His mind raced, his eyes darted.
You must get out of here.
There must be something he could do.

The sounds of arrival.
The boss.
Rapid Estonian but spoken, unless Belknap were mistaken, with an American accent.

Then the outer door swung open again and, accompanied by two young blond gunmen, the man who ran Estotek walked in.

His hair was black, dyed, gleaming in the overhead lights. The face was deeply pockmarked, each facial indentation a dimple of shadow. Jet-black eyes sparkled like jewels of malevolence. The mouth was as thin and as cruel as a well-healed knife wound.

Belknap found himself fixated on the two-inch-long scar that curved across his forehead like a second left eyebrow, and the ground beneath him seemed to swell and buckle like a sudden wave. Vertigo swept through him. He had to be hallucinating.

Belknap squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.
It couldn't be.

Yet it was. The shadowy Estonia-based mogul, the man who had taken over the quondam Ansari network, was no stranger to him. They had met, years before, in an apartment on East Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee.

The images returned to Belknap, sickeningly. The Turkish flatweave
on the floor. The ebony-framed mirror, the large Biedermeier desk. The twin boreholes of the man's shotgun, his eyes.

Richard Lugner.

The man had been killed that day. Belknap had seen him die with his own eyes. Yet here he was before him.

“It's impossible!” Belknap blurted the words, his thoughts given speech.

The slight widening of the man's vulpine stare only confirmed the identification. “Would you stake your life on that?” he asked in a horribly familiar nasal rasp. In his left hand he held a large pistol.

“But I saw you die!”

“You saw me die, did you?” Lugner's lizard-like tongue flickered across his lips, as if searching for a fly. “Then it's only fair that I get to see
you
die. Only, there will be no stagecraft this time. You see, I've become quite an aficionado of reality as I've grown older. Older but wiser. As opposed to you, Mr. Belknap. When last we met, you were a stripling lad. Too old to be fuckable, but not too old to be fucked with.” He laughed dryly, horribly.

Belknap forced air into his lungs. He recognized the pistol that Lugner was holding. Matte-black, with a grooved, slablike unit containing the bolt and barrel: a nine-millimeter Steyr SPP. Effectively a foot-long assault rifle.

“All these years later,” Lugner went on, “I'm afraid you've lost your dewy deliquescent youth and only grown coarser. Thicker and coarser.” He took a step closer. “The pores on your face, the veining under your skin, the shape of your features—it all grows steadily coarser. Every year, you've grown less like spirit and more like meat. Less soul and more body.”

“I don't…I don't understand.”

“Not much to show for four billion years of evolution, are you?” Richard Lugner glanced at his armed guards. “Gentlemen, behold the resignation in his eyes.” He turned to Belknap. “You're like an animal in a trap. At first, the animal—mink or fox, weasel or stoat—struggles wildly. It claws at the steel cage, lashes out this way and that, twists and howls and thrashes. A day passes, and the hunter who has set the trap does not appear. The animal thrashes, then sulks. Thrashes, then sulks. Another day passes, and another. The animal grows weak from
lack of water. It slinks to the bottom of the cage. It waits only for death. The hunter arrives. But the animal has given up hope. It opens its eyes. And it does not thrash. Because it has accepted death. Even if the hunter sets it free, the animal has sentenced itself to death. It has accepted defeat. There is no reversing course.”

“Have you come to set me free?”

A sadistic grin twisted Lugner's face. “I've come to set your
spirit
free. Death is man's destiny. I am the one who will help you achieve that destiny on an accelerated schedule. There's nobody who can help you. Your own employers, I happen to know, have effectively disowned you. Your former colleagues know you're damaged goods. Who do you think you can turn to—some grandstanding Midwestern senator? Some vaporous bugbear nobody's ever seen? God, perhaps? Satan, more likely.” A harsh laugh. “It's time to put away childish things and face your extinction with dignity.” He turned to the English-speaking guard. “This gentleman will be allowed to leave this building.”

The guard raised his eyebrows.

“In a body bag.” Lugner's slitlike mouth stretched wide.

“Actually, you might want to bring more than one.” Belknap kept his voice level.

“We'd be happy to double-bag you, if you like.”

Belknap forced himself to laugh, a loud, carefree laugh.

“I'm pleased my wit isn't lost on you.”

“If you think you're a wit, you're half right,” Belknap snorted. “Naw, the joke's on all of us. I wouldn't have chosen you all as companions for my final voyage. But I guess it's not the sort of thing you usually get to choose. I won't be leaving this place alive. That's true. But, one small detail I forgot to mention: Nobody here leaves the building alive. Yes, triacetone triperoxide is a wonderful thing. A real mindblower.” A grin so wide that Calvin Garth's choristers would have been envious.

“How boring, these lies of yours,” Lugner said, a moue settling on his slashlike mouth. “How uninventive.”

“You'll see. I've wired up the place with triacetone explosives. On a timer. I'd hoped that I'd be long gone by now. But of course I've been detained. And now destiny is about to play its final card.” He lowered a hand, glanced at his watch. “So there's some comfort in that. I know I'll be killed. But so will you. Which means that I can die with a certain satisfaction. A life that claims yours hasn't been lived in vain.”

“What offends me isn't that you're lying, but that you're lying so badly. Put some effort into it, man.”

“You'd like to think I'm lying because it wounds your pride to acknowledge that you walked into a trap.” Belknap's voice was exultant, almost madly so. “Ha! Do you imagine for one moment that I didn't know exactly which alarm I was triggering? What kind of an amateur do you take me for, you pockmarked piece of shit?”

“You're fooling nobody,” Lugner repeated stolidly.

“What you don't seem to understand is this:
I don't care.
” Belknap spoke with the gaiety of the scaffold. “I'm not trying to persuade you of anything. Just letting you know. For old times' sakes. So you understand the deal. When you die, I want you to know why.”

“And if I left now? Just to play out this absurd scenario.”

Belknap spoke slowly, crisply, enunciating his consonants with care. “The elevator would have returned to the lobby by now. Sixty seconds to get out there, another thirty seconds at least for the elevator to appear—sorry. It doesn't give you enough time, especially with your limp. The guards here—well, they're extra. Deal-sweeteners. Because, really, this is just between you and me. But I don't think their English is very good. So you don't need to worry about them fending for themselves. And if they're truly loyal, they'll
want
to be vaporized with their boss. Like Hindu brides throwing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Estonian
sati.
Only this time we're talking about triacetone triperoxide: nectar for the god of thunder. Can you smell it? A little like nail-polish remover. But then you knew that. You
can
smell it, can't you?” He took a few steps closer to Lugner. “Shall we count out our remaining seconds out loud?”

Lugner's gaze grew only more piercing as Belknap spoke, yet he noticed that the blond guard to his left had grown pale. Belknap made a small bye-bye hand gesture at him, and, suddenly, the man bolted. The second began to follow, spooked. In a lightning-fast movement, Lugner shot him in the face. The Steyr's report was loud yet strangely echoless in the enclosed office space. The others looked at Lugner, stunned.

Now!
While the second guard stared at the blood-sprayed face of the slain man, Belknap swung his arm out and snatched this pistol from him. He discharged two rapid volleys, taking out the heavyset man and the remaining blond bodyguard. As Lugner whirled toward him with his handgun, Belknap threw himself behind one of the heavy steel filing cabinets. A round punched through the steel plate and, slowed by the dense paperwork, left a bulge on the opposite side. He noticed his small tape measure on the floor nearby.
So you can measure yourself for a coffin.

Think!
The brush-cut man with the veined, ropy arms would be scrambling to retrieve his weapon—would have fallen on the heavyset guard to retrieve it from his jacket.
Visualize!
Belknap blindly snaked an arm around the cabinet and squeezed the trigger twice, rapidly. The shots seemed unaimed, but they were guided by his memory of the body, of where he anticipated the brush-cut man would be. A stricken cry of agony told him that at least one round had struck its target. The man was panting now like a wounded animal, and a noisy stridor told him that air was filling the pleural cavity through the bullet hole, causing his lungs to collapse.

Lugner remained. He would be cannier than any of them. Belknap forced clarity into his racing mind.
What would
I
do?
He would not risk being overaggressive; instead, he would adopt a defensive posture, perhaps crouching down, making himself a difficult target. His objective would be to get out of the room and lock the door, so that—assuming the talk of explosives proved a hoax—he could dispose of his adversary on his own terms, and at his leisure. He would quietly begin creeping toward the door, would have done so already.
He would perhaps seek to distract his adversary from his actual course of action.

Seconds passed like hours. Belknap heard a sound from his left, felt an impulse to whirl in that direction and shoot. But no, it was not the sound of a man; in all likelihood, Lugner had balled up a piece of paper and tossed it across the room, hoping to distract him while he…

Belknap stood up abruptly and without looking, let alone aiming, shot toward the doorway—directing his fire low, as if at a fleeing cat. He dived behind the steel cabinets again, replaying what he had seen. He had been right: Lugner had been just where he thought! But had he connected? There was no cry of pain, no gasp.

After a few seconds of silence, Lugner spoke in a steady, well-controlled voice. “You're a foolish gambler. Nobody beats the house.”

It was the voice of someone who was in complete command of the situation. Yet why would he give himself away? Lugner was a liar through and through. A glimmering realization fluttered its wings in Belknap's breast. Lugner's voice was
too
controlled, too masterful. He had been wounded, perhaps mortally. His game was simply to tempt Belknap into exposing himself. He heard Lugner take a step, and then another. The steps were slow, and heavy, the steps of a dying man. A dying man with a carefully aimed pistol.

He placed his black knit cap on a length of tape from his metal tape measure, pushed it up just above the file cabinet. It was an old trick, the hat or helmet held on a stick, meant to draw out a sniper's fire.

Lugner was too smart to fall for it—a fact that Belknap was counting on. He would be aiming the sights of his pistol to the left, expecting a fast roll. Belknap leaped up like a jumping jack, appeared just a foot or two away from the crude decoy. Lugner, as he had anticipated, had trained his pistol low and to the left. As Belknap squeezed the trigger of the Vector SR-1, he saw an expression flicker across Lugner's sadistic, scowling countenance. The expression conveyed
something that the rogue agent had often inspired but seldom experienced: horror.

“I
am
the house,” Belknap said.

“Damn you—”

The first round struck Lugner in the throat, exploding his larynx and cutting off his final words. The projectile easily punched through flesh, through the steel-reinforced door behind him, while its shock waves destroyed the flesh in the region. A splatter zone of arterial blood outlined his upper body against its white-painted surface. The second round, aimed just slightly higher, struck him in the face, hitting just below the nose, blasting a third nostril through flesh and bone and, invisibly, sending hydraulic pressure waves through the region, liquefying the tissue of the medulla and cerebellum. “Hydrostatic shock” was the technical term, and its effect on the central nervous system was instantaneous and irreversible.

 

Ten minutes later, Belknap was race-walking down the sidewalk in the Estonian night. He had arrived in Tallinn hoping to reduce the uncertainties, the unknown. Instead, the unknowns, the uncertainties, had only multiplied.

Nikos Stavros. What role did he play in all this?

Richard Lugner, alias Lanham. Was he—had he been—Genesis after all? Or just another pawn of his? What really happened on that fateful day in 1987, when Belknap and Rinehart converged on Lugner's apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee?

Only one thing was certain: Nothing about that sequence in East Berlin was as it had appeared. Had the stagecraft been managed by Lugner alone?

Belknap swallowed hard. Had Jared Rinehart been deceived, as he'd been? Or had Jared—the thought scalded him like acid—been part of the deception? It had all seemed so effortless on Jared's part,
the way he suddenly appeared right at the critical moment. To save Belknap's life? Or to help Lugner escape with a piece of theater that would ensure that the hunt was called off for good?

The sidewalk seemed to buckle now as another wave of vertigo swept over him.

His best friend. His most trusted ally.

Jared Rinehart.

Belknap tried to tell himself that it was the stinging wind that was making his eyes moist. He wanted to think about anything other than what he needed to think about.

Had there been other operations in which Jared Rinehart had deceived him? How much fakery had Belknap been subjected to, and
why
?

Or had the two of them been jointly victimized?

Jared Rinehart. Pollux to his Castor. The rock. The one person he could always count on. The one person who had never failed him. He could almost see Jared now, as a wraithlike vision. His reticent warmth, his keen intelligence, his irresistible combination of wry detachment, resolute commitment, unflappable equipoise. A partner through good times and bad. A brother in arms. A protector.

Images came to Belknap like a flipbook animation. The shootout in the room on the Karl-Marx-Allee, the gun battle in the outskirts of Calí—they were among a dozen such events, in which Jared's timely intervention proved crucial.
Be reasonable,
he exhorted himself.

Rinehart was a hero, a savior, a friend.

Or he was a liar, a manipulator, a conspirator in some scheme so far reaching and nefarious as to stagger the imagination.

Which was more likely?
Be reasonable.

Then he remembered what he had counseled Andrea Bancroft.
The truth isn't always reasonable.

He wanted to collapse to his knees, wanted to retch, wanted to clamp his hands to his ears, wanted to roar at the heavens. Those
were luxuries he denied himself. Instead, as he returned to the Georgian's lakeside house, he forced himself to face the evidence of his senses, to ask the questions that confronted him. It felt like swallowing glass.

Who was Jared Rinehart really?