The Bancroft Strategy (46 page)

On the seventh floor of the Hart Building, the two men sat at a desk across from each other, and tried to size each other up.

There was no alternative. Senator Kirk's chief of staff wanted to know whether Belknap could be trusted. What he could not know was how hard Belknap had been struggling with the question of whether
Kirk
could be trusted. The operative had scanned Nexis, read the standard profiles and biographical sketches, and tried to form an image in his mind. Without access to Cons Ops files, he was handicapped. The facts only went so far. Kirk had been born in South Bend, into a prosperous farming family. He attended public schools, was president of the student council, played hockey and football, attended Purdue, got a law degree from the University of Chicago, clerked for a Federal circuit judge, and returned to Indiana to take a job at a law school in South Bend. Four years later, he was elected Indiana's secretary of state, and then lieutenant governor, before making a Senate run. For Kirk, the first time was a charm. He served on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committees, the Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance, the Armed Services Committee, and, by the beginning of his most recent term of office, had become the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Was there anything in his earlier career that presaged the explosive course he was now pursuing with the Senate probe? Belknap searched for patterns, but in vain. Like most senators from the Midwest, he championed bills providing incentives for the use of ethanol as a gasoline substitute—the ethanol being derived from corn, and
so a product of the region's vast cornfields. He did nothing contrary to the interests of ConAgra and Cargill. But aside from the customary forms of constituency service and major-donor courtesies, his record was moderate, pragmatic. Perhaps he was a bit of a wheeler-dealer, a little too fast to make concessions in order to get his provisions enacted into law. But in a deliberative body that was increasingly polarized, he had emerged as something of a statesman. Nor was there evidence of untoward, unexplained wealth. Belknap decided to respect what his gut was telling him. The man was no knave, no villain. He was what he appeared to be. To assume as much was to gamble, but it was a gamble he was willing to take. Besides, if there were a violent solution—a backdoor approach to the Kirk Commission—someone would already have exploited it.

That was why Todd Belknap had decided to do the one thing that only he could do: tell the truth. Once again, he would sneak in through the front door.

Now Philip Sutton leaned forward across his cluttered desk. “Everything you've said so far checks out. You said they're trying to shitcan you. The record says you're on administrative leave. Time of recruitment, duration of service—it's all on the money.”

“There's a reason for that,” Belknap said. “It's kind of a manipulation, you could say. I figure if I tell you the truth, the honest, verifiable truth, you'll come to trust me a little.”

A half-grin spread across Sutton's jowly mouth. “Honesty? I'm in politics. That's a filthy lowdown trick that we only rarely resort to.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Belknap said. “Does your record search include any reference to ‘administrative retrieval'?”

Sutton's expression told him the answer to his question.

“You know what it means, don't you?”

“I can guess. This part of your total-candor strategy?”

“You got it. Including fessing up about the strategy.”

Sutton let his professional bonhomie evaporate; his eyes bore in. “Talk to me about Genesis.”

“I'd be glad to, with the senator's permission,” Belknap said slyly.

Sutton got up and padded down the hall, surprisingly light on his feet for someone of his girth. He returned quickly, made a summoning gesture. “The senator will see you now.”

At the end of a short hallway of narrow offices was Bennett Kirk's own office. It was large, filled with dark wooden furniture that had undoubtedly been floating around the Senate since the Gilded Age, and, unlike the rooms occupied by administrative assistants, double-height. Sunlight filtered gently through vast sheer curtains.

Senator Bennett Kirk—tall and loose-limbed, with the unmistakable mane of silver hair—was already standing when Belknap came in, and he took his measure with the speed and acuity of a seasoned pol. Belknap could feel Kirk's gray eyes roam over his face, probing, assessing, searching. There was a glint of something relenting—a glint of approval, even. His handclasp was firm but not showily so.

“Glad you could see me, Senator,” said Belknap. Up close, he thought he saw something almost haggard in the older man's distinguished countenance—not tiredness so much as the effort of concealing tiredness.

“What have you got to tell me, Mr. Belknap? I'm all ears. Well, quite a bit of mouth, too.”

Belknap smiled, charmed by the man's down-to-earth style despite himself, and despite the seriousness of his mission. “Let's not bullshit each other. Genesis was my open sesame. That was the word that got me through the door.”

“I'm afraid I don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about.”

“We don't have time for this,” Belknap snapped. “I'm not here to play gin rummy.”

Kirk's eyes were wary. “Then let's see what cards you got.”

“Fine. I've got reason to believe that someone code-named Genesis is a dangerous force in the world. Genesis—again, whatever it is
that goes by the name—is a direct threat to you. And to others. You need to be careful of being used by this person.”

The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances. There was a hint of
I told you so
in the exchange, but Belknap couldn't have said who told whom what. “Go on,” said the politician, his voice taut. “What do you know about him?”

Belknap sat up very straight and told him the stories that he had heard.

After a few minutes, Senator Kirk cut him off. “Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, doesn't it?”

“If you thought so, you wouldn't have let me in.”

“Truth is, we've heard these stories, too—or some of them, anyway. Sourcing's poor across the board.”

“I grant you that.”

“But you say you've been directly threatened by Genesis. How?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. Belknap exhaled heavily and told him, in abbreviated form, about what had just happened in Cyprus. “I am counting our conversation as privileged,” the operative emphasized.

“That goes without saying.”

“It goes better
with
saying.”

“I understand,” Bennett Kirk said with a genial smile that did not reach his eyes. “Just what do you know about this Genesis?”

“I've done a lot of talking already,” Belknap said carefully. “What do
you
know about him?”

Kirk turned away. “What do you think, Phil? Think it's time to open our kimonos?” The words were bantering, but his tone was edged with apprehension.

Sutton shrugged.

“Would you like his name, address, and Social Security number?” the senator asked.

Belknap stared. “Yes.”

“So would we.” Another long glance was exchanged between the
regal-looking senator and his pudgy, disheveled chief of staff. “Belknap, my gut tells me you're a straight shooter. But your record talks about administrative retrieval. Meaning, formally, that your clearances have all been revoked.”

“You knew this since before we started to talk.”

“You said it yourself: Our conversation is privileged. But you can appeal to me in my role as the head of the Senate Committee on Intelligence. I've got to appeal to you as a man, and as an American. Can I do that?” He broke off.

“Privilege goes both ways. Frankly, Senator, I have so many of this nation's secrets in my head that talk of clearance is a bureaucratic absurdity. Not to put too fine a point on it, I
am
one of those secrets. I've spent my career in and out of special-access programs.”

Sutton gave the senator a sidelong glance. “You make a good point,” he said to Belknap.

“Fact of the matter is,” Kirk said, “all our communications from Genesis have been via e-mail. Strictly untraceable, or so they assure me. There's the sign-off; there's information that's often fragmentary and sometimes less so. But he's never been more than a byline to me. You ask whether I'm being used. How can I answer that? Functionally, the role he's performing is that of a confidential informant—only with an extraordinary knowledge of an extraordinary range of activities. There's always the threat of disinformation, but we take nothing at face value. Either the info checks out or it doesn't. Other possibilities? Score-settling? Sure. Every investigation is propelled by people leaking dirt on their enemies for self-interested purposes. So what's new? That doesn't make the revelations any less valuable as far as the public interest is concerned.” The logic was dry, hard, and difficult to dispute.

“It doesn't bother you that you have no idea who your chief informant is?”

“Of course it does,” Sutton growled. “That's not the point. You can't order what's not on the menu.”

“So you don't care that you're dealing with the devil.”

“The devil you don't know?” Sutton raised an eyebrow. “You're being dramatic. Try being specific.”

“Fine,” Belknap said, tight-lipped. “Has it occurred to you that Genesis might be an alias for Paul Bancroft?”

The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances again. “If that's what you think,” Kirk said, “you're dead wrong.”

“You've mixed up the cat and the mouse,” Sutton added. “Genesis is Bancroft's mortal enemy.”

Belknap paused. “You've been informed about the Theta Group?” He was groping, disoriented.

“So you know about that, too,” said the senator after a pause. “The picture we've got is still preliminary. But Genesis is collecting information. Within a few days, we should have enough to proceed with.”

“You don't mess with something as powerful and august as the Bancroft Foundation,” Sutton explained, “unless you've got bandoliers draped over both shoulders.”

“I understand.”

“Glad one of us does,” said Senator Kirk.

Another moment of silence fell. Each sought to reveal as little as possible while learning as much as possible: It was a delicate balance.

“You say these e-mails are untraceable,” Belknap began.

Sutton stepped in: “Untraceable is right. And please don't talk about a trap-and-trace—believe me, we've already looked into the situation. The thing goes through an anonymizer—one of those special routing services that strip off all the identifying codes, all the ISP digits and so on. Impossible to track back any further. That's a high-level assurance.”

“Show me,” Belknap said simply.

“Show you what? An e-mail from Genesis?” Sutton shrugged. “Whatever your security clearance used to be, the proceedings of the commission are closely guarded. Air-gapped. I'll print you out a sample, sure. But you won't learn a goddamn thing.” He stood, went
over to a terminal on the senator's desk, keyed in a series of passcodes; a minute later, a single sheet of paper purred its way through a nearby laser printer. He handed it to the operative.

Belknap looked at the nearly blank paper.

“Not a real chatty fellow,” Belknap grunted.

“You know about SMTP?” Sutton asked. “I didn't, either, before this thing came up. But I've picked up a thing or two.”

“It's all Greek to me,” the senator said, with a smile. He walked over to the window as Sutton cleared his throat.

“It's like the e-mail postal service,” the pasty-faced aide explained. “Or the software equivalent. Usually it gives you the return address. But here, it's like it's been remailed, by some anonymizer in the Caribbean, and that's the end of the story. As to how it got to this anonymous remailer? Anybody's guess. You can put all these number under a goddamn electron microscope. Doesn't matter. This is the most uninformative piece of paper you'll ever come across.”

Belknap folded the sheet of paper and inserted it in his pocket. “In that case, you won't mind if I take it with me.”

“It's a gesture of good faith,” Sutton said. “We're moved by your candor. Your desperation. Call it that.” That wasn't quite it; Belknap knew that Sutton was as almost as eager to identify their informant as he was.

Belknap turned to Senator Kirk. “Can I ask you something? How
did you get started, anyway? I mean, the whole Kirk Commission thing—the whole ball of wax. It's a shitload of work, for one thing. What do you get out of it?”

“It's not the usual valedictory endeavor of an aging politician, is that what you're saying?” A smile played across his age-etched face. “Yep, I'm a regular South Bend Cincinnatus, aren't I? Politicians always talk about serving their country. That's the rhetoric: public service. But we're not all lying, at least not all of the time. Most people in Congress are highly competitive people. They're here because they like to win, and they like to win in public, and they're out of high school and you've got to figure out another way to get this aside from being student-body president or making a long pass on the gridiron. They're temperamentally impatient, disinclined to put their head down for ten or fifteen years, which is what it takes to really make it to the top in banking or law. So they end up here. But the place changes you, Belknap. It does, or it can.”