The Bancroft Strategy (8 page)

Belknap found himself speechless, paralyzed, encased in ice. He had to remind himself to breathe.

“Except, as I recall, only Pollux was immortal,” the burly manager went on. “Best you keep that in mind.” Now he tilted his head back. “And here's something else to keep in mind. We don't know that Jared's abduction had anything to do with Ansari. Could have been any one of a dozen militant orgs operating in the Bekaa Valley region. Any of them could have mistaken him for the man he was playing. But rage doesn't reflect, does it? You acted on impulse, and as a result you've put thousands of operational man-hours into jeopardy.”

Belknap struggled to contain himself. “Jared was closing in on the financiers of terror. He was working the buy-side.”

“And you were working the sell-side. Until you trashed the operation.” The veteran's quilted cheeks formed a sneer.

“Are you deaf as well as dumb?” Belknap snapped. “I'm saying he was closing in when they did the smash-and-grab. That means something. You're telling me you believe in coincidences? I never knew a spy who did.” He broke off. “Forget about me. We need to talk about Jared. About how to get him back. You can run all the inquests and assessments you want. All I'm saying is, hold off for another week.”

“So we can find out what else you can wreck? You don't get it. You're exactly what this organization can't afford anymore. It needs to be about the work, not about you, but you're always making it about your own dramas, aren't you?”

A surge of disgust. “
Listen
to yourself, for Chrissakes—”

“No, you listen to me. Like I say, it's a whole new era. We got the goddamn Kirk Commission shoving a gloved finger up our ass. The cost-benefit equation doesn't run in your favor any longer. I can't even begin to tot up the damage you did with your half-cocked Roman revenge drama. So here's the deal. You're on immediate administrative suspension. We're going to start an inquest, following all the rules and regs. I suggest you give the internal assessors your complete cooperation. You play nice and we work out a severance. Mess with us and I'll see you get what's coming to you. That could mean charges, penalties, even jail. Everything's going to be by the book.”

“What book? Kafka's
The Trial
?”

“You're out, Geronimo. For good, this time. Improvisation, instinct, that legendary nose of yours, all that good shit—you made a career of it. But the world has changed and you forgot to change with it. We're looking for a silver bullet, not a goddamn wrecking ball. Nobody here can trust your judgment. Which means we can't trust
you
.”

“You've got to let me do what I do. Send me out, goddammit. I'm needed here.”

“Like fur on flounder, pal.”

“Right now you need to flood the zone. Send out anybody who's not nailed down. You ferret things out quicker when you've got more ferrets.” He stopped. “You said Bekaa Valley. You think it was one of Faraad's paramilitary groups?”

“Possibly,” the officer-in-charge said, almost sullenly. “Nothing's been ruled out.”

A shiver ran down Belknap's spine. The members of the Faraad al-Hasani group had a reputation for extraordinary viciousness. He recalled the photographs of the last American they kidnapped, an executive from an international hotel chain. The images were etched in acid.

“You remember what happened to Waldo Ellison?” Belknap prompted in a low voice. “You saw the pictures, same as me. There were soldering-iron burns over fifty percent of his body. His testicles were found in his stomach, partly digested—they forced him to swallow them. They'd even whittled off most of his nose with a box cutter. They took their time, Will. Slow and steady. That's what it was like for Waldo Ellison. That's what it's going to be like for Jared Rinehart. There's no time to waste. Don't you realize that? Don't you realize what's in store for him?”

Garrison paled, but his resolve was unshaken. “Of course I do.” A long moment passed before he added, freezingly, “I'm just sorry it wasn't you instead.”

“Listen, damn you, you've got a problem.”

“I know. I'm looking at it.” Garrison shook his head slowly. “Put your shit in boxes or I'll put
you
in a box. Cartons or curtains—your choice. But you're out of here.”

“
Focus
, Will! What we need to be talking about is how we're going to exfiltrate Jared. The odds are good that a ransom demand is going to arrive, maybe sometime today.”

“I'm sorry, but we're not playing it that way,” the manager said tonelessly. “Decision is, we stand pat.”

Belknap leaned in close. He could smell Garrison's shaving cream again. “You've got to be joking.”

Garrison jutted his jaw like a weapon. “Listen up, you asshole. Jared spent the better part of a year creating the character of Ross McKibbin. Some of his best handiwork went into this. And thousands of man-hours went into supporting the op. Reality check: It would be totally out of character for Ross McKibbin's employers to take any of the measures you've suggested. Drug merchants don't pay ransom. That's for starters. And they don't mobilize a hundred operatives to sweep Bekaa Valley for a misplaced emissary. We do anything like that, we've just announced that Ross McKibbin is a U.S. cat's-paw. Which not only endangers Jared Rinehart, but all the assets we had to use in order to backstop the legend. Drucker and I looked at the same facts, came to the same conclusion. If Ross McKibbin is burned, dozens of other assets and operatives are going to be jeopardized. Not to mention an operational budget upwards of three million dollars. A wise man once said, ‘Don't just do something, stand there.' You need to size up the situation before you blunder in. That's something you've never really understood. In this case, the right thing to do isn't whatever guns-blazing bullshit you're imagining.”

Belknap fought to dampen the rage that began to roil within him. “So your plan of action is…no plan of action?”

Garrison met his gaze. “Maybe you've been on active deployment too long. Tell you one thing. I lived through the old Church Committee hearings from the early seventies. Word on the street is, this new Kirk investigation is going to make those hearings look like a tongue bath. Everybody in the intel community is walking on eggshells right now.”

“I can't believe you're talking about Washington bullshit at a time like this.”

“Field agents never get it. The office is just another field. Capitol Hill is just another field. Battles are won and lost here, too. If a budget requisition gets crossed out, an operation gets crossed out. The last thing we need is news of any operational irregularities to make the rounds. The last thing we need is you.”

Belknap listened to the parade of rationalizations with a visceral sense of revulsion. Operational man-hours, budgetary allocations—that was what was behind the “prudence” that the O.I.C. was urging. The vaunted concern with security and safety was a smokescreen, nothing more. Garrison had been a manager so long that he could no longer distinguish between lives and budget lines. “You make me ashamed to be in the same profession as you,” Belknap said, numbly.

“There's nothing we can do that wouldn't make things worse, goddammit!” Garrison's eyes sparked and glinted. “Can you get past yourself for a single goddamn moment? You think Drucker likes the idea of standing back? You think
I
want to be sitting here with my thumb up my ass? None of the folks here do. Not an easy decision to make, for any of us. All the same, there's unity of command on this one.” He let his gaze drift off to the middle distance. “I don't expect you to see the bigger picture, but we can't afford to act. Not just now.”

A fury whipped through Todd Belknap's very being like a cyclone scouring across a blighted plain.
You mess with Pollux, you'll have Castor on your ass.

With a sudden movement of his arm, Belknap swept the lamp and telephone console off Garrison's desk. “Do you even
believe
your goddamn excuses? Because Jared deserves better from us. And he's going to get it.”

“It's over,” Garrison said quietly.

Rage gave Belknap strength, the way it always did, and he would need all the strength he could get. Jared Rinehart was the finest man he had ever known, a man who had saved his life more than once. The time had come to return the favor. Belknap knew that Jared was
probably being tortured even now, that his odds of survival were dwindling with every passing day, every passing hour. His very musculature stiffened, a resistance of the soul that had become a resistance of the body, as he stormed out of the federal building. A swirl of emotion filled the empty core of his being—fury, determination, and something uncomfortably close to bloodlust.
It's over,
Garrison had declared.
It's over,
Drucker had declared. Belknap knew how wrong his superior officers were.

It had only just begun.

Rome

There were procedures to be followed, and Yusef Ali—still charged with the security of the establishment on via Angelo Masina—followed them, reporting in regularly to the cramped communications room situated at a rear corner of the villa's second floor. A series of messages were relayed to him, in various idioms, and with various degrees of urgency. Yet the gist was plain: The late master himself had masters, masters until now unseen. The establishment was now theirs. The security breach had to be repaired, the weak links replaced. Failure—and there
had
been failure—was to be punished.

The administration of it would be Yusef Ali's task. Their expectations of him were high; he would need to take care that he did not disappoint them. He assured them that he would not. His life had not been that of someone averse to risk, but neither was he one for taking foolish chances.

Yusef Ali had been reared in a Tunisian village that was only a hundred miles from the coastline of Sicily. Fishing vessels could make the passage across the Cap Bon from Tunisia to Agrigento or Trapani in a morning, depending on the currents. Italian lire were as common as dinars in the coastal settlements near Tunis. From an early age, Yusef spoke Italian as well as Arabic, negotiating prices for his father's catch with the Sicilian fishmongers. He was in his mid-teens when he learned that there were even more lucrative forms of import and export for someone whose discretion could be counted upon. Italy had a small-arms industry, was one of the largest exporters of pistols, rifles, and ammunition in the world; in Tunisia, there were eager and adept middlemen who transshipped such
weaponry to areas where the demand was surging—perhaps Sierra Leone one year, Congo or Mauritania another. The smuggling obviated end-use certificates and the other feckless bureaucratic attempts to limit the arms trade. The movement of arms could no more be halted by such regulations than the ocean's currents could be arrested by drawing lines on a map. It was a matter of linking supply and demand—and North African merchants had for centuries taken advantage of Tunisia's ports to make a specialty of it, whether the valuable in question was salt, silk, or gunpowder.

Yusef Ali himself was something of an exported valuable. He had first distinguished himself when he repelled a half-dozen brigands who had sought to hijack a shipment of Beretta handguns he was helping shepherd to an inland depot near Béja. Yusef was part of a team of four young men entrusted with the cargo, and he swiftly realized that at least two of his fellows were complicit in the attack—had provided information to the brigands, doubtless for cash, and were only pantomiming resistance when they arrived with guns drawn. Yusef, for his part, pantomimed acquiescence, opening the trailer for the brigands, opening a crate as if to demonstrate that the goods were what they had come for, before abruptly turning his own automatic pistol on them. They fell like those small brown birds, the pipits and shrikes, on which Yusef had practiced his marksmanship during long afternoons in the dusty countryside.

After Yusef gunned down the brigands, he leveled his pistol at the turncoats, and could read their treachery on their panicked faces. Then he gunned each of them down as well.

The delivery was made without further incident. And Yusef Ali found that he had made a name for himself. When he was in his early twenties, he found himself with new employers: Like so many small-scale arms merchants around the world, they were incorporated into a larger and well-organized network. To join the network was to prosper; to resist it was to be destroyed. Pragmatists to the core, these merchants found the choice was not a difficult one to make.
Their higher-ups would exert their privileged status by commandeering from them persons whose particular talents they required. Yusef Ali came from a tribal community in which such feudal devotion was commonplace; he accepted the training he received with gratitude; he accepted the greater responsibilities with which he was entrusted with grave sobriety. Besides, his employer's sense of discipline came ridged with an outsized degree of cruelty. Having taken a position in Ansari's own household, Yusef had seen what punishments had befallen others who stumbled in the course of their responsibilities. At times he had helped carry them out.

Indeed, he was doing so again. The young guard who had been drugged and stowed in a cupboard—his own demonstrable lack of vigilance could be described as nothing other than failure. Yusef had asked him to recount precisely how he had been overpowered, again and again. The guard, though humbled, had denied that he had done wrong. He had to be made an example of.

Now Yusef watched as the young man dangled with his feet just a few feet from the ground, the hawser around his neck securely attached to a beam in the interrogation chamber, his hands corded tightly together.
Better you than me,
the Tunisian thought mordantly. The young guard was strangling very slowly, his face a deep scarlet, a faint burble coming from his mouth, a feeble flow of air forced through compressed flesh and accumulating drool. With distaste, Yusef noticed the dark patch of wetness at the man's groin. Though the man's neck was broken, death would not come soon. He had at least another two hours of conscious life remaining to him. Time to contemplate his deeds and misdeeds. Time to contemplate his dereliction of duty.

Others would come for the body in the morning, Yusef knew. And they would see. They would see that Yusef did not countenance failure. They would see that Yusef would maintain the highest standards. Examples would be made. Weak links would be replaced.

Yusef Ali would make sure of it.

Andrea poured herself a glass of wine and went upstairs to change. She just wanted to feel normal. But “normal” was proving elusive. She felt…like Alice in Wonderland, having swallowed a potion and grown enormous, because the Cape Cod now seemed like a dollhouse, the rooms shrinking around her. In the hall outside her bedroom she stumbled on a sneaker, one of a pair of unlaced men's running shoes.
Goddamn Brent Farley
, she thought, seething for a few seconds.
Well, good goddamn riddance.
The thought would have been more satisfying if she had been the one to call it quits, but that was not how the relationship played out.

Brent was a few years older than she was, another finance guy out of Greenwich, a vice president for sales development at a specialty reinsurance firm. He was silver-tongued, deep-voiced, ambitious—a man who dressed well, played squash as if his life depended on the outcome, checked his personal portfolios several times a day, and would browse his BlackBerry during what was meant to be a romantic date. They had a blow-out fight about that about a week before. “I think I'd have a better chance of getting your attention if I were texting you right now,” she'd complained at a restaurant. All she wanted was an apology. She never got it. Instead, the argument escalated, with Brent making references to her “small-time” mentality; she was, he said, a “downer.” Methodically, he gathered up his things from her house, loaded them into his black Audi sports car, and drove off. No door slamming, nothing flung, no squealing tires in the driveway. He wasn't even angry, not really—that was the hardest thing to take. He was dismissive and contemptuous, yes, but he wasn't really angry. She wasn't worthy of anger, it seemed. Too
small-time
, obviously.

She opened her closet. Had Brent left anything here? Not that she could see. Her gaze settled on her own clothes, and she felt something small and wistful well up. Hanging neatly from padded hangers were
her business suits, evening dresses, weekend wear, every hue of blue and peach and beige.

Her wardrobe—not extensive but well-chosen—was always a point of pride with her. She was an aficionado of discount outlets like Filenes Basement, could spot under-priced item of upscale apparel like a heron spotting a fish. And there were often bargains to be had, as she'd counseled friends, if you weren't a snob about labels. A lot of those bridge-collection brands, like Evan Picone and Bandolino, could bring out something truly handsome, almost indistinguishable from the outfits they were copying.
Guess what I paid for this
—it was a game she and her girlfriends used to play when they weren't complaining about work or men, and Andrea was a champ of it. The cream silk blouse that she got for thirty bucks? Suzanne Muldower had yelped; she'd seen something identical at Talbot's for a hundred and ten. Andrea now fingered the fabrics wistfully, the way she used to page through her high-school yearbook, amused and embarrassed by who she used to be: the pretension, the innocence, the freckles.

Suzanne Muldower—a friend since the age of eleven, the one who had known her longest—was the first to arrive. The invitation was last-minute, but Muldower didn't have much to cancel: just a double date with her microwave and DVD player, she admitted. Melissa Pratt—a willowy blonde with what Andrea privately thought of as a downtown attitude, and slowly ebbing hopes for an acting career—arrived a few minutes later, with her boyfriend of the past eight months, Jeremy Lemuelson, a chunky little guy who worked as a civil engineer in Hartford, owned two vintage Stratocasters, and, because he painted in his spare time, considered himself something of an artist.

Dinner was nothing fancy, as she warned: a pot of fettuccine with some store-bought pesto, a few side dishes she got at the prepared foods counter at the Carlyle Market—and a big bottle of Vouvray.

“So what's the four-one-one?” Suzanne asked, after tasting the
pasta and making the obligatory noises of admiration. “You said we were celebrating tonight.” She turned to Melissa. “And I told her, ‘Let me be the judge of that.'”

“Brent bought you a ring, didn't he?” Melissa put in. She shot Suzanne an I-told-you-so look, premature in victory.

“Brent?
Please
.” Andrea clucked, smiling beneath slitted eyes. Melissa and she had shared an apartment when Andrea was in grad school, and even then she took a sisterly interest in Andrea's romantic successes and failures.

“You got a promotion?” Suzanne's turn.

“A bun in the oven?” Melissa looked concerned.

“Garlic bread, actually,” Andrea said. “Smells good, doesn't it?” She trotted out to the kitchen and brought it to the table, a little crisper than ideal.

“I already know. You won the lottery.” Jeremy's sardonic contribution. His cheek was swollen with half-chewed food, like a squirrel's.

“Close,” Andrea told him.

“Okay, girlfriend, out with it!” Suzanne reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “Don't make us suffer.”

“I'm dying here,” Melissa chimed in. “Now
give
!”

“Well, the thing is…” Andrea looked at the three expectant faces around her and suddenly the lines she'd rehearsed in her head seemed awkward and boastful. “The thing is that the Bancroft Foundation has decided to…reach out to me. They want me to be on the board. A trustee.”

“That's amazing,” Suzanne shrilled.

“Any money in it for you?” Jeremy asked, massaging a callus on his right forefinger.

“Actually, there is,” Andrea said.
Twelve million dollars.

“Yeah?” A gentle prod.

“It's really generous. An honorarium just for serving and…” She faltered, berating herself silently: What a phony she was becoming! “Oh, shit, listen to me. They're giving me…”

The words would not come out.
She could not say them.
Nothing would be the same among them once she did. She hadn't thought this through. And yet
not
saying it—especially if and when they found out later—would be the corrosive thing. Not for the first time that evening, she found herself choking on the number. “Look, let's just say it's
crazy
money, okay?”

“Crazy money,” Suzanne repeated acidly. “Would that be bigger than a breadbox?”

“Is this one of those I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you situations?” Melissa put in. She once had a guest, i.e., nonrecurring, role in a soap opera episode with a plot element like that.

“You know, I'm hazy on my arithmetic. Is ‘crazy' greater or less than ‘mad phat'?” Jeremy asked, exasperated.

“Hey, you're a
private person
,” Suzanne said, in a voice that could curdle milk. “We need to respect that.”

“Twelve,” Andrea said quietly. “Million.”

The others looked on in stunned silence until Jeremy half-choked on a nastily swallowed mouthful of pasta. He knocked back a glass of the Vouvray. “You're shitting me,” he said at last.

“This is a joke, right?” Melissa asked. “Or, like, an improv thing?” Melissa turned to Suzanne. “When I was taking acting classes, at the studio? Andrea used to help me with my improv exercises, and I always thought she was better at them than I was.”