The Bancroft Strategy (54 page)

The beeping stopped.

Blessed silence. Belknap's legs were wobbly for a moment as he made his way to the door. He retracted the four-point dead-bolt system that secured the steel-clad door to the cinderblock framing, opened it, and whistled softly.

Sachs darted inside the door. “Mother of God,” he said. “They've got enough power to run the entire U.S. defense network. God, I'd love to take this for a spin.”

“We're not joyriding, Walt. We're searching for a goddamn electronic pin in an electronic haystack. So get your magnifying glass out. I need a digital fingerprint. I'll take a partial. But I'm not going home empty-handed.”

Walt wandered around, poking among tall racks of servers and routers, boxes that looked like DVD players but that sprouted hundreds of tiny, brightly colored wires.

Finally, he stood stock-still, contemplating what looked like a large black cooler. “Change of plans,” said the computer maven.

“Speak.” Belknap shot him a questioning glance.

“How much room you got in that duffel bag of yours?”

“Are you improvising, Walt?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” Belknap said. “It's the one damn sign of hope so far.”

Sachs ran a hand along his close-cropped temple. “I'm staring at a five-terabyte storage system. Give me a minute and I'll give you a backup tape of the whole goddamn thing.”

“Walt, you're a genius,” Belknap said.

“Tell me something I don't know,” Sachs replied.

 

Will Garrison idly swatted at a mosquito. He had dry-swallowed a Malarone on the way down, but couldn't remember how long it took
before the antimalarial became effective. He stared through the low-light scope of his rifle, adjusted it on its bipod until the red-dot reticle was precisely centered on the doorway where Todd Belknap would soon be appearing.

If you want a job done right,
he thought to himself again,
you've got to do it yourself.
Wasn't it the truth.

Sweet dreams, “Henry Giles.” Farewell, Castor. Bye-bye, Belknap.
From behind him he thought he heard the noise of a broken twig or branch, as if from a footfall. But that made no sense, did it?

It couldn't be Belknap—he was still inside, and so was the amateur he'd dragged in with him. Who else knew he was here? Belknap had no backup, no team or support personnel.

He stole a quick glance behind him. Nothing. There was nothing at all.

He was moving his finger back behind the trigger guard when he heard another sound and craned his head again.

Suddenly he felt the most god-awful terrific pressure around his neck—a searing band biting into his flesh, and then a sense that his head was going to explode from too much blood.

Finally he caught a glimpse of his assailant. “You!” he gasped, but the word died in his mouth. And then the darkness of the night was replaced with a deeper, truer blackness, which was the extinction of consciousness itself.

 

“Silly rabbit,” Jared Rinehart murmured to himself as he rewrapped the catgut cord of his garrote around one of its wooden handles. An old-fashioned device, and one of the few that had not been improved upon by modern technology.

The cord was not even wet with blood. Amateurs often went for steel wire of an excessively thin gauge: A properly constructed garrote did not cut into the flesh; it compressed the carotid arteries and the internal and external jugular veins, preventing blood from entering
and leaving the brain. Done properly, it should be wetwork without wetness. As here: The only fluid released was the urine that now spotted the aging spymaster's trousers.

Rinehart dragged the body downhill, the sound inaudible above the noise of the million buzzing midges and stone flies and the piping of little tree frogs, until he reached a trail of reddish volcanic soil. He removed and folded Garrison's clothes, placed them in a plastic trash bag, and stowed the bag in his rucksack. He could simply dispose of the corpse in the underbrush, but there were better options.

Soon a sulfurous miasma become pungently evident, and the vegetation thinned, gradually giving way to slippery mats of lichens, moss, and grasses. Scattered vents and mud pots released wisps of steam that shone silver in the filtered moonlight.

Ten minutes later, walking by the intermittent light of a half-moon in a partly cloudy sky, Rinehart looked past a boulder and saw a milky-looking circle of water mostly obscured by steam. It was the lake. He heaved the body—even in the available light it was obviously an unpleasant specimen, with its withered dugs, varicosities, and dorsal pelt of coarse graying hair—over a ridge of crumbling pumice. It bounced down the steep declivity and plunged into the churning, bubbling waters,

After a few hours of simmering amid the harsh sulfur fumes, its flesh would peel away from the skeleton. Teeth and bones would drift to the bottom of a two-hundred-foot-deep lake. One could not send divers into water of its temperature, even if the authorities had reason to do so, and Rinehart very much doubted that they would. He was pleased with himself. It was quite a creative way to keep the Cons Ops boys guessing.

He flipped open his cell phone and phoned a number in the continental United States. Reception was crystal-clear.

“Everything's on schedule,” he said. He paused, listening, before he spoke again. “Will Garrison? No worries. Let's just say he found himself in hot water.”

A puddle of water had formed outside the prisoner's cell, the guard noticed angrily, and he hastened to open the door, inserting the key, pushing down on the lever handle, and stepping inside the cell.

The bitch had let the bathtub overflow.
That was not the guard's last thought, but it was among his last thoughts. He also had time for puzzlement at the way his hand was no longer just grasping the lever handle but was spastically clamped onto it. He wondered at what looked like a strip of twisted foil attached to the inside lever knob, connected to something high up, something he could not see. He knew that the puddle of water at his feet had indeed come from the bathtub faucet, and he even noticed the little blue logo on a paper packet of salt floating on the puddle he had stepped into. The perceptions arrived in a cluster, a panicked mob swarming a gateway; he could not have said what came first and which came after.

There were also many thoughts he did not have. He did not reflect on the fact that a tenth of an amp of current could cause a beating heart to defibrillate. He did not notice the fact that the doorway was darker than before, because the lighting fixture overhead had been smashed open. The searing, vibratory pain that swept through him, through his arm, his chest, his legs, swiftly cleansed him of consciousness. He could not see, therefore, that his limp body now kept the door from shutting, could not sense the woman leap over his body, could not hear her light footfalls as she raced down the monastery hall.

Andrea's feet ghosted along the tiled flooring in great soft strides. The element of surprise was in her favor now; soon it would not be. She scarcely allowed herself to register the oddity of her surroundings, the round columns and the archways overhead like those of an old chapel. Stone, heavy beams, tiles. A faded gilt engraving on a wall, what looked like Cyrillic lettering beneath a bearded icon. It was an Eastern Orthodox monastery, then, but the guards were American, so what did that really tell her?

A man in drab khaki at the end of the long hallway: He had looked up, taken stock of the situation, was reaching for something on his combat belt, a weapon of some kind. Andrea darted into one of the side niches, some sort of sacristy. A dead end.

Or was it? She closed the door behind her, but the room did not darken much. There was a jumble of heavy wooden chairs, and she climbed on top of a stacked set of them until she could see a crawl space that led onto another tiled expanse. She sprang forward, her feet toppling the stack of heavy chairs even as her hands made contact with the stone ledge. Now she pulled herself up and clambered through the narrow space and onto a sort of breezeway.

Overhead, perhaps twenty feet above her, was a spandreled ceiling; to her right was a tall bricked half-wall—too tall to climb over—and yet she could feel the air move against her face, could hear the call of birds in the distance, the sound of rustling leaves. She darted toward where the outdoor light was most visible, and, as she rounded a corner, her lungs filled with air, her body seemingly weightless, fueled by adrenaline and hope, a lunging body, appearing from nowhere, crashed into her. She was slammed onto the hard floor.

The man was winded as he stood over her. “Like mother like daughter,” the man said, breathing heavily.

She recognized him at once: The motorist with the map in Washington. The man who had abducted her. The Brillo-like curls of
graying hair, the eyes that glittered like the plastic bead eyes of a stuffed toy, the oddly small mouth and weak, dimpled chin.

“Don't touch me,” Andrea said, coughing.

“See, your mom was never with the program, either. She didn't want to die, didn't care that it was for a good cause. In the end, we had to inject the ethanol straight into the inguinal artery. A tiny puncture mark.”

“You killed my mother.”

“You say it like it's a bad thing,” the man snorted.

Without warning, Andrea lashed her left leg out, trying to spring off the tiled flooring. The man reacted swiftly, and she caught his left foot in her abdomen. She collapsed again, winded, as he hammer-locked her neck from behind, his left knee jammed into the small of her back, his right leg wrapped around her ankles, clamping them. “One jerk and the spine snaps. A painful way to go.”

The veins in her neck felt distended to the point of bursting. “Please,” she gasped. “I'm sorry. Whatever you say.”

He lifted her to her feet and spun her around. He had a gun in his hand. Andrea took a fast look. The gun was black. The muzzle was blacker.

“Navasky,” the man barked into a miniature walkie-talkie. “On deck.” With contained brutality, he frogmarched Andrea along the breezeway. The guard with the waxy skin and pale pike's eye—Navasky, it must have been—appeared at the other end of the tiled breezeway.

“Son of a bitch,” he drawled, and grabbed at his stun gun.

“Daughter of, to be precise,” said the first man.

“J-man ain't gonna want to hear about this.”

“Maybe J-man won't need to. We can jump the schedule, put her in a permanent coma now. She ain't likely to run her mouth any.”

Each man grabbed one of her elbows. She thrashed mightily but their iron grip was unshaken.

“She got spirit,” said the Southerner. “So tell me, Justin, you being the expert and all, can she still get wet if she's a vegetable?” His breath was dank.

“Sex is pretty much a hindbrain thing,” the other man said. “Don't need a functioning cerebral cortex for that. So the answer's yes, if we do the job right.”

Andrea thrashed again with all her strength. Nothing. It did nothing.

“What are
you
doing here?” the man at her left, the man named Justin, called out to another man who had now appeared at the end of the walkway. “Thought you were a foundation boy.”

“Got your distress signal,” the man called back. He held up a miniature walkie-talkie like theirs, returned it to his trouser pocket. “New protocol.”

“Good timing,” said the Southerner, sounding relieved.

Andrea stared, her sense of horror escalating. Twenty yards away was a powerfully built man in a well-tailored gray suit. The nameless man who had visited her in Carlyle, and who had seemingly dogged her steps since then. The thug who had warned her to keep silent with his blandly cryptic threats.

She felt the grip of the two others relax slightly in the presence of another armed man, and—a sudden erratic impulse—she once again lunged forward, this time twisting from their grip, and raced forward, because she could move in no other direction. As if in slow motion, she saw the gray-suited man pull out a heavy revolver from beneath his jacket and hold it perfectly level.
Better a quick death
, she thought.

She stared at its borehole, now just fifteen feet away, stared like a prey animal mesmerized by a cobra, and saw the tongue of blue-white fire pulse from it as the man squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession.

At the same instant, she saw, in his eyes, the serene confidence of a marksman who seldom missed.

Yale University, the third oldest university in the United States, had been founded in 1701, but most of its physical structure—including the collegiate Gothic buildings that it was invariably associated with in the mind of the public—was less than a century old. The newer buildings typically housed science departments and research laboratories, and tended to be further from the oldest parts of the so-called “Old Campus,” like the ring pattern of a classic European city. So it was a point of pride among the university's computer scientists there that they were housed in a building that dated back to the nineteenth century, however extensive the interior renovations may have been. The Arthur K. Watson Building was a redbrick structure with arched facades that honored Victorian ambition and a Victorian sense of grandeur. It stood opposite the Grove Street Cemetery, and there were some who claimed to find the Arthur K. Watson Building itself somewhat sepulchral.

Belknap himself felt a sense of foreboding as he and Walter Sachs stood on the sidewalk opposite it. Once again, he had a faint sense of being observed. But by whom? His field instincts and his field skills contradicted themselves: If he really were being shadowed, his own maneuvers should have confirmed it. Professional wariness was surely pushing at the boundaries of paranoia.

“Tell me your friend's name again,” Belknap said tensely.

Sachs sighed. “Stuart Purvis.”

“And remind me how you know him.”

“We were classmates, and now he's an assistant professor in the computer science department.”

“You really trust this guy? He's fifteen minutes late. You sure he's not on the phone with the campus police?”

Sachs blinked. “He stole my girlfriend in freshman year. I stole his when we were sophomores. We called it even. He's a good guy. His mom was, like, big in the installation-art scene during the sixties.
Stuff with girders and beams, but with curves and shell forms. Amazing stuff. Like, imagine if Georgia O'Keeffe were redoing
Tilted Arc
.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Sachs hefted the nylon knapsack in his arms. “Dude, bottom line is that we're dealing with a gargantuan storage tape. An ocean of data, okay? Your pissant little desktop from Dell isn't gonna help. Stu, on the other hand, helped set up the Beowulf clusters at Yale. That's, like, two hundred and sixty central processors seamlessly linked in a massively parallel architecture. That's power. We need to hitch a piggyback ride on it.” He perked up. “Ah, there he is.” He waved. “Yo, Stu!” he shouted to a man in a white guayabera shirt, black pants, and leather sandals.

The man, in his late thirties, turned and waved back. The thick black frames of his glasses were fashionable or the opposite of fashionable, depending on the degree of irony with which they were worn. He smiled at his old friend, revealing a fleck of green lettuce between two incisors. The opposite of fashionable, then.

Stuart Purvis led them around the front of Watson Hall to a green enameled custodial entrance at the rear of the building. It led directly to the basement, where the main computer laboratories were situated. Belknap noticed that the junior professor's neck was spotted with reddish bumps of ingrown hairs, his jaw and upper lip smooth-shaven but shadowed with the greenish-gray of what would have been a heavy beard.

“So, my man, when you called for a favor, I thought you meant a job recommendation,” the junior academic said. “But I guess you want a ride on Big Bertha here. Totally out of bounds, you know. If the supervisor were to find out—wait, I
am
the supervisor. We've got ourselves an infinite loop here. Or maybe it's just a self-nested operation, like a distributed autoregression function. Hey, you hear the joke about Bill Gates and the screensaver?”

Sachs rolled his eyes. “As a matter of fact I did, Stu, and you just gave away the punch line, numb nuts.”

“Shit,” said Purvis. He walked along the concrete floor with an odd sort of stutter step, and it was only then that Belknap realized he had an artificial leg. “So, Walt the Whiz, how many terabytes you talking about?” He turned to Belknap. “We used to call him Walt the Whiz when we were undergrads.”

Sachs grinned. “Because I was so good at getting digits from the honeys.”

Purvis gave him a look. “The honeys?
Please.
You were lucky if you got Fembots.” He turned to Belknap, sniggering through his nose. “And all he got was their serial numbers.”

The basement of the Watson building was vast and cavernous, evenly illuminated with diffuse fluorescent lights that had been positioned to minimize screen glare. They could have been in a morgue, Belknap decided, with all those banks of stainless-steel drawers. A thousand small fans cooled powerful chips, creating a wash of white noise.

Purvis knew exactly where he was going: halfway down a central walkway, then a quick right. “I'm assuming that's four-millimeter digital linear tape,” he said to Sachs, suddenly businesslike.