The Bancroft Strategy

  Hafez did not deign to respond. “You will answer this man’s questions,” he told the bellhop severely. “I leave you two together.” With a curt bow, he did so.

  Conrad’s smile faded and reappeared with offputting rapidity as Belknap questioned him, his expression shifting from puzzled and solicitous to conspiratorial and lascivious, equally obnoxious from Belknap’s point of view. “So what kind of hoochie are you looking for, my friend?” he finally asked.

  “Italian,” Belknap said. “Young. Dark.”

  “My, my,” said Conrad. “You’re mighty particular. A man who knows what he wants. Gotta respect that.” He was obviously confused by Hafez’s involvement, however.

  “You know anybody who fits the bill?”

  “Well.” Conrad’s eyes were calculating. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got just what the doctor ordered.”

  “When can I see her?”

  Conrad sneaked a peek at his wristwatch. “Soon,” he said.

  “Within the hour?”

  “I could swing that. For a consideration. If you’re having a party, by the way, you might want some party favors. Ecstasy, blow, sensimilla, whatever—just say the word.”

  “She’s in the hotel now?”

  “Now why would you be asking me that?” Conrad said, a clumsy feint. The answer was yes.

  “What room number?”

  “If it’s a threesome you want…”

  Belknap took a step toward the small Irishman and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him a few inches into the air. He pressed his face near Conrad’s. “Tell me the goddamn room number,” he barked. “Or I’ll have you rendered to the goddamned Egyptians for interrogation. You got me?”

  “Bejabbers!” Conrad flushed, beginning to understand that he was in over his head.

  “You want to interfere with an international investigation, I suggest you get yourself lawyered up. And when our Egyptian friends offer you the option of scrotal electrodes, say yes. Because the alternative is even worse.”

  “Fourteen-fifty, sir. Floor fourteen, straight to the left from the main elevators. All I ask is that you leave me the hell out of it.”

  “You gonna call and warn them?”

  “After what you were saying about scrotal electrodes? I don’t think so, mate.” A forced guffaw was meant to convey nonchalance but conveyed the opposite. “Those were the magic words. Quite vivid.”

  Belknap just held out a hand. “Master key,” he demanded.

  Reluctantly, the bellhop handed over his keycard. Then he hovered, in a way peculiar to the serving professions, as if expecting a tip. “Scrotal electrodes”: Belknap mouthed the words as he brushed past him.

  Less than four minutes later, he was outside Room 1450, two-thirds of the way up the hotel’s central tower. He paused at the door, could hear nothing. The Palace was a well-engineered building, constructed of premium materials. He placed the card in the slot, watched the light blink green, and turned the knob. On the other side of the door he would find Lucia Zingaretti: his one thread. Hang on, Jared, he silently urged. I’m on my way.

  Andrea Bancroft had meant to clear out her desk at Coventry Equity Group, but as she sat there she had another thought. The office’s resources would be helpful to her. Her colleagues were sorry to see her go; they would hardly begrudge her the right to spend her last day as she wanted to.

  There was something else, too. She kept thinking about what her nameless visitor had said: You look a lot like your mother. What was the significance of that? Was she becoming undone by suspicion? Perhaps it was the result of some delayed grief reaction from her mother’s death, the jolting abruptness of the Bancroft bequest, perhaps—but no, she wasn’t some hysteric. That wasn’t the kind of person she was. Except that she wasn’t sure she knew what kind of person she was anymore.

  You’re a professional. Do what you’re trained to do. The foundation was ultimately another organization—a nonprofit corporation—and she had expertise in doing due diligence on corporations, in researching companies both public and private, in peering beneath the glossy assurances of their brochures and press releases. She might as well take a closer look at the Bancroft Foundation itself.

  Seated before the networked computer terminal at her desk, she roamed through a series of arcane databases. A nonprofit entity that was chartered in the United States—even a private one like the Bancroft—had to abide by various statutes and regulations; mandated federal filings included the original charter, bylaws, and employee identification numbers for certain senior officers.

  After peering through digitized documents for two hours, Andrea worked out that the foundation was—at least formally—a complex of separately incorporated entities. There was the Bancroft Estates, the Bancroft Philanthropic Trust, the Bancroft Family Trust, and on and on. Funds seemed to slosh through them as through the pipes and valves of a manifold.

  All around her she saw her colleagues—former colleagues, she corrected herself—working busily at their stations. They seemed drone-like, in a way that she’d never noticed before; seated at desks, fingering keyboards, speaking on telephones—performing hundreds of tasks through about three or four basic motions that were repeated all day long.

  What makes me any different? she thought. I’m doing the same thing. It felt different from inside, that was all. It felt different when you knew that what you did truly mattered.

  Her phone purred, intruding on her thoughts.

  “Hey, girl!” Brent Farley’s smooth baritone was dialed up to its most ingratiating pitch. “It’s me.”

  Her voice was tundra-dry. “How can I help you?”

  “How much time you got?” he breezily replied. “Look, it’s just that I hated the way we left things. We need to talk, okay?”

  “And what would this be in regard to?” Maintaining the secretarial permafrost took surprisingly little effort.

  “Hey, don’t be that way, Andrea. Look, I got us a couple of tickets to—”

  “I’m just curious,” she cut in. “Why is it that you’re calling me out of the blue? Why now?”

  He stammered. “Why—why am I calling? No special reason,” he lied. At that moment, she knew for sure: The word had reached him. “I just, like I said, I just thought we needed to talk. Maybe start over again. But, however it goes, we really need to talk.”

  Because suddenly the “small-time” girl is worth more than you’ll ever make?

  “We did need to talk,” she replied calmly. “And, thank goodness, we just have. Good-bye, Brent. Please don’t call again.”

  She hung up, feeling vindicated, excited, and, oddly, tired.

  She walked over to the coffee machine, waved at Walter Sachs, the firm’s tech guru, who seemed to be in the middle of a riff with an assistant on the subject of granola bars. He was a brilliant guy, really, and a classic underachiever. Sachs, oddly, took satisfaction in being absolutely indifferent to what he did for a living; he did it well, but found it entirely undemanding, which was to his liking.

  “Hey, Walt,” she said. “Working hard or hardly working?”

  He turned his long, rectangular head toward her and blinked hard, as if there was something stuck in his contact lenses. “Running the systems here is something I can do in my sleep and with my left hand or, come to think of it, with my left hand asleep. The ‘or’ is inclusive, not exclusive: My claim, in its strongest form, is that the tingling left hand of a sleeping Walt Sachs would suffice. Sorry, Andrea, I’m feeling very Boolean today. I blame granola-bar intoxication. Did you realize that granola bars are essentially conduits for com syrup? Do you know how many products on the supermarket shelves are essentially conduits for corn syrup?” He blinked again, a hard, windshield-wiper-style clench. “Consider, of all things, ketchup.”

  “See you, Walt,” she said, and returned to her desk with a Stryro-foam cup of coffee.

  She downloaded more documents, more digitized filings. The honeycombed intricacy of the foundation’s structure presented
an intellectual challenge. She tried to be alert both to small irregularities and larger patterns. As she paged through the federal filings over the past decade, she was taken back to find that the officers of the principal foundation once included her own mother, Laura Parry Bancroft.

  It was startling. How was it that her mother, so deeply disaffected with everything to do with the family she married into, had once served as a foundation officer? Andrea peered at the document more closely and noticed something even stranger. Her mother had resigned her position just one day before the car accident that killed her.

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  In one corner of the darkened room, a man was seated on an overstuffed blue velvet chair; seated upon the man, in turn, was a lissome young woman. At the sound of the door closing behind Belknap, the man—sixtyish, with a sun-reddened, smooth-shaven head, white-blond hair chest hair, and sagging pectorals—sat upright with a jolt, threw the woman off him, and scrambled to his feet.

  “The girl’s under new management,” Belknap growled.

  “What the hell?” The man spoke with a Swedish accent. His assumption was that he was being set up, that the whore was in cahoots with the intruder. It was the assumption of a worldly man who was experienced with the sex trade and had no illusions about the limits of human knavery. “Get the hell out of my—”

  “Why don’t you make me?” Belknap replied, cutting him off.

  The older man sized up his opponent swiftly; he was a businessman, someone used to assessing the odds and acting accordingly. Making a swift decision, he grabbed his wallet and a couple of items of clothing and bolted from the room. “You’re not getting another Euro out of me, you hear?” he hissed to the girl on his way out.

  When Belknap turned back to the girl, she was no longer sprawled on the floor, but had put on a silk robe and stood with her arms crossed.

  “Lucia Zingaretti?” he asked.

  A look of shock passed across her face. She knew it would be pointless to deny it. “Who are you?” she demanded in a throaty Italian accent.

  He ignored her question. “Your parents have no idea, do they?”

  “What do you know of my parents?”

  “I spoke to them yesterday. They were worried about you.”

  “You spoke to them.” Her voice was deathly.

  “As have you. Except you ply them with lies only. Not exactly the daughter they imagine.”

  “What do you know about them, or about me?”

  “They’re good people. Trusting people. The sort people like you take advantage of.”

  “How dare you judge me!” the Italian girl spat. “What I do, I do for them!”

  “Does that include killing Khalil Ansari?”

  The girl blanched. She lowered herself to the blue velvet chair and spoke in a quiet voice. “They promised great sums of money. My parents struggled every working day of their lives, and what can they afford? They said if I did what they asked, I would be able to set them up in luxury for the rest of their lives.”

  “They?”

  “They,” the girl repeated defiantly.

  “And you, too, no doubt. Where did they end up taking you?”

  “Not a place like this,” the girl said quietly. “Not like they said. Not like any place fit for human being. Like for animals.”

  She seemed bewildered that they had failed to live up to their promises. Yet to Belknap, the greater perplexity was that they had even allowed the girl to live. Why were they so confident she would maintain her silence? “This came as a surprise?” he asked mildly.

  She nodded grimly. “When they fly me to Dubai, they say it is for cooling-off period. Just to stay out of the way for a while. To keep me safe. Then when I come, they say I must work. I must earn my keep. Otherwise I will be on the street or killed. No money. No papers.”

  “You were a prisoner.”

  “After one day, they take me out of hotel. They take me to this…magazzino, this…warehouse. On outskirts of Dubai. They say I must do this thing. Customers must never complain. Otherwise…” She faltered, a victim of sexual servitude who had sought to repress the degradation she had been forced to accept. “But they say that at the end of one year, I can go free. After one year, they say, Lucia write her own ticket. Set up for life. All of us.”

  “You and your parents,” Belknap said. “Set up for life, they told you. And you believed them?”

  “Why I not believe them?” the Italian girl demanded stormily. “What else can I believe?”

  “When they had you poison Ansari, they never told you that you’d end up a high-class whore, did they?”

  Her silence was her assent.

  “They lied to you once. You really think they’re not lying to you now?”

  Lucia Zingaretti said nothing, but he could see the contending emotions in her face. Belknap could easily imagine what had happened. It was a phenomenon that plagued nested organizations, each part of which had its own particular needs. In Dubai, the girl’s beauty meant that she could be of great value to those who provided sexual services to rich visitors. What’s more, she was, after all, a mere servant girl: Many Arabs would be inclined to think that such a girl was likely to be a sharmuta anyway. Nor was she in any position to bargain, as she acknowledged: They knew what she had done. The deed did not put them in her debt, as she had supposed; it put her in their power.

  “And still you protect them, the very people who have forced you into a life of degradation.”

  “It is not for you to say what is degradazione.” Lucia Zingaretti pouted and rose to her feet. “Not for you.”

  “Tell me who they are,” Belknap said steadily.

  “It is not for you to interfere.”

  “Tell me who they are,” he repeated, more urgently.

  “So that I should be in your clutches rather than theirs? I think I take my chances. Yes, I think I take my chances, thank you very much.”

  “Goddammit, Lucia…”

  “What must I do to make you go away?” the girl asked. Her voice was breathy, sultry. “What can I offer you?”

  With a shrug of her shoulders she let her robe fall to the floor. Now she stood naked before him. He could feel the heat of her body, could smell the scent of her honeyed skin. Her breasts were smallish but perfectly shaped.

  “There’s nothing you can offer me,” Belknap replied contemptuously. “That body can pay for a lot. But not in any currency I accept.”

  “Please,” she said, purring, taking a step toward him, caressing her breasts with one hand. Her gestures were sensual, but motivated by sheer survival. Her eyes narrowed to slits, vampishly—and then, suddenly, they blinked open.

  Belknap saw a red dot blossom in the center of her forehead a split-second before he heard a quiet popping noise from behind him. Time became viscous as Belknap dived to the floor and rolled behind the large, skirted bed.

  A silenced shot had been fired.

  Silencing Lucia Zingaretti forever.

  He flashed back to what he had glimpsed of the assailants, forced himself to piece together visual fragments into a whole. There had been…two men at the door, each armed with a long-barreled, sighted handgun. Both had short dark hair. One, wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket, had the dead eyes of a hammerhead shark—obviously a combat-seasoned veteran, and a marksman of considerable skill. A precise head shot from a handgun across a room lay beyond the competence even of most professionals. On the base of a shiny brass floor lamp, Belknap caught the reflection of the two men. They were moving their handguns in sweeping arcs, but had stepped only a few feet into the room. They were cautious, more cautious than Belknap would have been in their situation. At least one of them should have seized the opportunity of surprise and pushed clear across the bedroom.

  Yet their movements made one thing plain. They were hunting him. Their mission would not be complete until there was a slug in Belknap’s brain as well.

  Belknap snake-bellied himself under the bed until he w
as within arm’s length of one of the gunmen. Now he lashed out with an arm curved like a grappling hook, striking with all his might.

  A risky move: He had just given away his position.

  The man fell heavily to the ground. Belknap grabbed his weapon, firing it at him a second later. Close-quarters combat was like speed chess. You stop to think, you lose. Swiftness of response was paramount. He could feel his face wetted with a spray of warm blood. No matter. Where was the second assailant, the one who had moved to get an angle on the rest of the room?

  Belknap seized the torso of the slain man and hoisted his body into the air. The sudden movement drew gunfire, as he had expected, a quick reflexive rat-a-tat that must have emptied the gun—and that identified the other man’s exact firing position. Belknap set his newly acquired pistol to single-shot action and squeezed off a returning round. Accuracy of gunfire counted more than volume. Better to have to squeeze a few times than to be caught with an empty chamber.

  The man’s cry told him that the bullet had connected—but not with a vital organ.

  Then he heard the sound of glass shattering, and another pair of men stepped into the room from the balcony outside. Belknap rolled the corpse over himself, drawing the limp body over him like a saddlebag. He was conscious of the slain man’s body heat, the acrid smell of his sweat. The members of his unit could not be certain that he was dead—at least not at first—and would not fire freely toward him.

  It would buy Belknap only seconds, but seconds were all he needed.

  One of the late arrivals—tall, husky, muscled—was wearing a combat vest and holding a Heckler & Koch MP5, a compact automatic weapon known as a “room broom.” He directed a spray of bullets into the mattress. Nobody hiding beneath it could have survived. It was a sensible precaution, Belknap thought as he squeezed a carefully aimed shot into the sternum of each balcony boy. Two rounds spaced by a second-long interval. Conveniently, they were almost exactly the same height; the adjustment between shots was slight.