The Bancroft Strategy (51 page)

Now he was standing before her, regarding her with a baleful gaze. The pretended fear had abruptly vanished from his countenance. It was replaced by contempt.

“You're a beautiful woman,” he said at last. “Apologies for the unflattering lighting.”

“I suspect that's the least of my worries.”

The smile of a lynx. “You have a point.” He reminded her of a figure from a painting by Pontormo or some such sixteenth-century Florentine. A little stretched, but with a coiled strength. “Then again, we all have our roles to play. And yours is a crucial one.” She felt as if he were drawing her soul from her through the magnetism of his gaze.

“Please, have a seat.” He gestured toward the cot. “And, just to head off any reckless lines of thought, do bear in mind, at all times, that I
am
a professional.” He produced a small metal stylus in his hand, like a conjurer. “If I had a mind to, I could insert this into the back of your neck, between the second and third cervical vertebrae. In a flash. It's a matter of
Fingerspitzgefühl,
as the Germans would
say. Don't be misled by the fact that I don't carry a lot of hardware on my belt. I don't need to.” For a moment his eyes were twin beams of absolute malevolence. Then he blinked and once again his countenance assumed a deceptive civility.

“I have to admit, you really had me there for a while.”

“It was worth a shot. Clearly, Todd has taken you as his helpmate.” He smiled his feline smile, all teeth and no warmth. “He always did have a weakness for clever women. But it's clear you have no actionable intelligence for us. No great surprise there.”

“Is Todd such a threat to you? Am I?”

“On the whole, I'd say we don't respond to threats. We make them. And then we carry them out. More so now than ever. The Ansari network is among the world's largest, and now it's ours. Nikos Stavros himself has been a formidable presence in the transshipment of arms, and Stavros Maritime is in our control as well. As are a dozen other wholesalers in armaments and munitions. I'm aware that you know something about business. In the corporate world, it's called a rollup.”

“A rollup. As in the strategy of acquiring many small firms in the same product category in order to create a market-dominant player. I know about rollups, all right. Coventry Equity backed a few.”

“Nobody imagined it could be done in the parallel economy, the so-called black market. I think we've proven otherwise. Which means, of course, that we're poised to become even more powerful than ever before.”

“Who's ‘we,' kimosabe?”

“I think you know.”

“Theta.”

“You've named the seed crystal.” Another mirthless smile. “Do you understand what we're on the verge of becoming?”

“I understand that you people have been manipulating elections around the world.”

“That's merely a sideline. So few countries have meaningful elections anyway. In most of the world, the gun is ascendant over the
ballot box. It's why we have proceeded as we have. We now effectively control the availability of revolutionary violence. The only way for nonstate forces to gain weaponry is through us. We can ensure the stability of regimes that would otherwise be overturned. We can destabilize regimes that would otherwise have clung to power. Which means we're moving into a whole new phase of operations, you see. We're operating beyond the level of the nation-state. Soon it will be clear what we've built—in effect, our own league of nations.”

Andrea looked in the tall man's clear resolute eyes. “Why? What's your goal?”

“Don't affect ignorance, Andrea. I think you understand perfectly well.”

“I understand that you're Genesis. That much I understand. That's why you wanted to know whether Todd was going to be able to track you down.”

Jared Rinehart's green-gray eyes widened. “You really think I'm Genesis? Hardly. Hardly, Andrea.” He spoke louder, becoming agitated. “Genesis is a purely negative force in the world. Genesis is an agent of destruction.”

Her mind reeled as she strove to absorb his response.
Genesis. Enemy thine.
After a long moment she spoke softly, almost intimately. “You fear him.”

“I fear the allure of chaos and destruction. What rational man doesn't? Genesis has foot soldiers everywhere, has been constantly recruiting mercenaries and confederates—”

“You fear him.”

“I assure you that Genesis is the coward. That's why nobody has been allowed to see Genesis.”

“Then how does he recruit? How can he operate?”

“In the information age, that's child's play. Genesis trawls so-called secure chat rooms on the Internet, identifies soldiers of fortune who communicate via Internet-relay chat systems. Genesis is able to wire payments remotely, even as he hires other informants to file electronic
reports on them. And because nobody knows who is and isn't working for Genesis, a generalized paranoia sets in. It's all been quite craftily done.” There was both resentment and admiration in Rinehart's voice. “Genesis is a spider in the center of a web. Occasionally a filament will catch the rays of the sun and we'll see it. Genesis has kept its own face hidden. Yet Genesis has no positive program for the world. He, she, it, is dedicated only to our destruction.”

“Because Genesis wants to replace you?”

“Perhaps. We'll know more soon. Because we've got the very best on the case.” He allowed himself a small smile. “When it's all over, Genesis will be remembered as nothing more than a bump in the road.”

“What is it that you really want, anyway?”

“As if you don't know. Your cousin said you were an apt pupil. He had even imagined that you might assume an important role in the organization.”

“Paul Bancroft.”

“But of course. It was he who devised the Theta Group in the first place.”

Andrea felt her stomach flip over. “And now you're about to give it an army of its own. Do you know how monstrous that sounds?”

“Monstrous? It astonishes me that you could have learned so little from your own cousin. Everything we do is calculated exquisitely to serve the general welfare of humanity. In a corrupted world, the Theta Group is a force for the truest idealism.”

The line Paul Bancroft had quoted from Manilius returned to her with a shudder:
To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe.

“What I really don't understand,” she said, “is why we're even having this conversation. Why are you still here?”

“Call me a sentimental fool. But I want to get to know you, before…” He looked away. “It's obvious that Todd Belknap adores you. I'm curious to learn what sort of person you were. To talk freely
and candidly with you, so that you'd know that you could talk freely and candidly with me.” He paused. “You won't believe me, but Todd is someone I truly care about, in my fashion. I love him like a brother.”

“You're right,” Andrea said. “I don't believe you.”

“Like a brother. Which, I grant, is a complicated tribute in my case, given the awkward fact that I killed my own brother. My fraternal twin, no less. The really awkward fact is, I can't even remember why. Of course, I was hardly more than a child at the time. But I digress.”

“You're a sick man,” Andrea said in a trembling voice.

“In the pink of health, actually. But I know what you're trying to say. I am…different from most.”

“If Todd had ever known who you really were…”

“He knew
a version
of me. People are complicated, Andrea. My friendship with Belknap was something I worked very, very hard to cultivate and sustain, and if that meant that distractions had to be eliminated, I saw to that.”

Distractions had to be eliminated.

“You kept him isolated,” Andrea said in a low voice. “Off-balance. And when anyone came too close, when he formed a real relationship with someone, you…made it go away. And when he was grieving, you were always there to comfort him, weren't you?” Her voice grew louder, fiercer. “He thought you were his only true friend. And all the while you were the one manipulating him, murdering those he loved, keeping him off-balance. Those times when you rescued him—those were all staged, too, weren't they? This man would have done anything for you. And all you ever did was to betray him.”

“And yet I did care for him, Andrea,” the tall man replied softly. “Certainly I admired him. He had—has—extraordinary skills. There's really nobody he can't track down when he has a mind to.”

“Which is why you latched on to him in the first place, isn't it? He told me about East Berlin all those years ago. What was that—a twofer?”

“You
are
a clever thing. As it happens, I'd recently recruited
Lugner at that point. I knew he was someone we'd be able to make use of, and I was right. At the same time, it was also becoming apparent that this young Mr. Belknap was even better at finding people than Lugner was at disappearing. Lugner's only chance was to get the Hound to think the hunt had been successful. He needed an authoritative post-action report on his death, and after our elaborate stagecraft, that's what he got.”

“But you got something even better. The Hound's loyalty and devotion. Strengths of character that you set out to turn into weaknesses.”

He nodded, with a hint of a smile. “I'm a sensible man. A rare talent like Todd's is one you want to have on your side.”

“And you made sure of that when he was still a junior officer. You recognized right off the bat that he had skills you envied. Skills you wanted to exploit.”

“My dear, you read me like a book.”

“Yeah,
Helter Skelter.
” Repugnance filled her like a scalding fluid. “How can you even live with yourself?”

“Don't judge me, Andrea.” Rinehart was silent for a long moment. “It's odd—I'm having the conversation with you that I always wished I could one day have with Belknap. I don't imagine he'd be able to understand me any better that you have. But try, Andrea Try. Not every difference is a disability. Years ago, I sought out the services of a shrink. A very well respected one. I essentially booked an afternoon with him.”

“You don't seem the type.”

“I was a young man then. Still, as they say, finding myself. So there I was, in a cozy office on West End Avenue, Manhattan, spilling my guts out. Talked about absolutely everything. There was an aspect to my nature that troubled me—or, rather, what troubled me was precisely that it didn't trouble me, and I knew it ought to. I guess the way to put it, Andrea, is this: I was born without a moral compass. Even as child I was aware of this. Not at first, of course. I found out about this deficit the way you find out that you're color-blind. You find that others see a distinction that you can't quite make out.”

“You're a monster.”

Rinehart ignored her. “I remember when our pet Labrador had puppies, more than it could take care of, it seemed to me, and I borrowed one of those puppies to experiment on. I was fascinated by what was revealed when one slit open its abdomen with an X-Acto knife, and I remember fetching my brother to show him what I'd found, the way the small intestines looked like earthworms, the way the liver looked just like chicken livers did. I got no sadistic thrill from this—it was just a matter of disinterested curiosity. Yet when my brother saw what I'd done, he looked at me as if I were horribly disfigured, a monster. Such fear and disgust. I simply didn't understand.” Rinehart's voice was haunted. “I came to understand, as I grew older. But never to
feel.
Other people had a set of moral intuitions that guided them unthinkingly. I never had that. I had to learn the rules, as one learns the rules of etiquette, and to conceal those instances when I violated those rules. As with my brother's death in a presumed hit-and-run accident. I suppose it was because I learned to conceal this aspect of myself that I ended up in the covert ops business: Concealment, subterfuge became second nature to me.”

Andrea was roiled with nausea. “And you told everything to a shrink?”

Rinehart nodded. “He was quite insightful. Finally he said, ‘Well, I'm afraid our time is up.' Whereupon, simply as a precautionary measure, I strangled him at his desk with my necktie. Now, I ask myself, did I know that I was going to kill him when we started the session? I think that I did, on some level, because I was careful to leave no fingerprints in his office. Made the appointment under an alias, and so forth. And knowing this, even on an unconscious level, is surely what enabled me to speak so freely to him.”

“As with me.” Andrea breathed the words.

“I think we understand each other.” Rinehart's tone was not unkind.

“And yet you tell me that you're a force for good. That the Theta
Group is a force for good. Do you really expect anyone to take the judgment of a sociopath seriously?”

“Is it such a paradox?” Rinehart was leaning against the wall opposite her cot. His expression was both attentive and remote. “You see, this is how Dr. Bancroft changed my life. Because, intellectually, I very much wanted to devote my life to the good. I wanted to do the right thing. Yet I had a hard time
seeing
it, and ordinary people seemed to operate by such a complicated clutter of different considerations that I found it was sometimes impossible to anticipate these very strongly held judgments they had. I desperately needed some clear guide to right action. And that's when I encountered the work of Dr. Paul Bancroft.”

Andrea just stared.

“Here was a man with a brilliantly simple algorithm—a clear, clean yardstick, an objective metric,” Rinehart went on. “He showed that morality wasn't some subjective faculty of perception after all. That it was a straightforward matter of maximizing utility. And that people's intuitions were quite likely to lead them astray.” Rinehart's voice grew animated, his gaze intent. “I can't tell you how captivated I was—even more so after I met the man himself. I'll always remember something he said to me once. He said, ‘Compare yourself to the man who refrains from flaying alive random strangers because the very thought of doing so is repugnant to him. His is merely the morality of disgust. If you refrain from doing so, by contrast, it's because you've reflected upon the axioms and principles involved. Ethically speaking, whose is the greater achievement?' It was a gift, his saying that. But the greatest gift was the rigorous system of morality he set forth. The calculus of felicity.”