Belknap heard the other man slam a new magazine into his pistol—the one he had wounded, the one he had forgotten about. Dammit! A mistake he could not afford.
With lightning rapidity, he swept his gun arm around and squeezed the trigger, knowing that success or failure would be determined in the next two-tenths of a second. He watched as his one remaining round punched through his assailant’s neck, and the man slumped to the ground. Had Belknap been two-tenths of a second slower, the round would have been fired by his victim, and Belknap, not him, would have been the last man down.
Unsteadily, Belknap rose to his feet and looked at the dizzying carnage around him. Here, in a well-appointed hotel bedroom, were four bodies of powerful young men—nourished and exercised for well over two decades, trained at considerable expense. Dead. So was a beautiful girl, scarcely out of adolescence, doted on by hardworking parents to whom the world had never given a break, not one. Dead. Human lives transformed into jointed meat. If they were outdoors, not protected by the air-conditioned sanctuary of this glass-skinned whale, botflies would have already started to hover and alight. Belknap had just taken on four well-armed gunmen and survived. Close-quarters combat was a rare art, and he was more experienced at it than his opponents. Yet he felt no sense of conquest, no sense of triumph. He felt only a bone-deep sense of waste.
If we do not treat death with respect, Jared used to say, it will reciprocate in kind.
He spent the next three minutes searching the combat vests of the slain men. There were wallets stuffed with faked identity cards—generic in nature, identities designed to be swiftly adopted and swiftly discarded. Finally, in an interior pocket in the combat vest of the skilled marksman, he found a torn scrap of paper. The kind that came on narrow rolls, like a cash-register receipt. In a simple sans-serif font was a typed list of names.
Belknap rinsed the blood from his face in the bathroom and hastened from the hotel. Only after he had rented a rugged SUV from a nearby Hertz office and motored off did he scrutinize the list.
He recognized a few of the names. A recently slain investigative reporter for La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper. A Paris-based magistrate whose murder had also made the papers recently. Marked for death? Most of the other names were a bewildering jumble of personages who were unknown to him. One name, however, was Lucia Zingaretti.
Another was his own.
Chapter Seven
Driving to the Bancroft Foundation headquarters in Katonah on her own was an entirely different experience from being driven there. Andrea Bancroft was glad she had paid close attention to the sequence of turns when she was riding there in the backseat. Even so, she made a few wrong turns, and the trip took longer than it should have.
At the main door, she was greeted cordially by the woman with the stiff copper hair, who seemed slightly puzzled at her appearance.
“Just here to do research,” Andrea said. “Preparing for the next board meeting, you know. I remember you had that very impressive library on the second floor.” She was a trustee, after all. Her real purpose was to research possible projects for the twenty-million-dollar challenge that Paul Bancroft had set to her, but she judged that it would be better not to discuss with others the special grant he had allocated. It might be seen as favoritism of some sort. Reticence, at this point, seemed the wisest course. “Also, I’m returning the files you guys delivered to me yesterday.”
“You’re so very conscientious,” the woman told her with a set smile. “That’s wonderful. I’ll get you some tea.”
One by one the foundation officers appeared from their offices, greeted her, offered to assist with whatever questions she might have. They were nothing if not solicitous.
A little too solicitous, perhaps? A little too eager to help her in her researches, as if intent on monitoring her? For the first couple of hours, Andrea did some strenuous data-foraging, getting numbers about sanitation projects in the less-developed world. The range of information resources available there were, she had to admit, impressive, and impressively displayed. In the research rooms, books and binders were shelved in elegant walnut cases sturdily erected above the dark wood flooring. At one point, she walked through the “reading corner” of the library and saw a boy with curly blond hair and apple cheeks. Brandon. On his lap was a stack of books: some sort of tome on natural history, what looked like a Russian treatise on number theory, and a copy of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Not your average thirteen-year-old! His eyes lighted up when he saw her. He looked tired; there were smudges beneath his eyes.
“Hey, you.” He grinned.
“Hey, you,” she returned. “A little light reading?”
“Actually, yeah. You know anything about the lancet liver fluke? Way cool. It’s this tiny wormy creature, and its life cycle is pretty awesome.”
“Let me guess. It commutes every weekday to an office in New York until retirement, and then moves to Miami to run out the clock.”
“Wrong species, lady. Naw, it gets snails to excrete it so that ants, which love snail poop, will eat it, and then when it’s inside, it goes to the ant’s brain and basically lobotomizes it. So now it programs the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass and then paralyzes the mandibles, so the ant just stays there all day, so that it can make sure it gets eaten by sheep.”
“Hmm.” Andrea made a face. “It programs the ant to get itself eaten by sheep. Interesting. I guess everybody has his own idea of a good time.”
“It’s really about survival. See, the sheep’s intestines is where the lancet fluke reproduces. So when the sheep takes a dump, you get millions of them out in the world. All ready to sneak inside more ants and program them for destruction. Lancet liver flukes rule.”
“And I have a hard enough time wrapping my mind around the birds and bees,” Andrea said to him, shaking her head.
A little later, she was reshelving a box of CD-ROMs filled with morbidity and mortality data from the World Health Organization when a white-haired clerk gave her a lingering look.
Andrea nodded pleasantly. The woman looked to be in her sixties, her white hair offsetting a pink, slightly puffy face. Not someone she had seen before. On a desk in front of her was a sheet of library-style adhesive labels that she had been affixing to various disk boxes.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the clerk said diffidently, “but you remind me of someone.” She hesitated. “Laura Bancroft.”
“My mother,” Andrea said, feeling her face prickle. “You knew her?”
“Oh, certainly. She was a good person. A breath of fresh air, I always felt. I liked her a lot.” The woman sounded as if she might have come from Maryland or Virginia—her voice had a hint of Southern, but little more. “She was the kind of person who notices people, you know what I mean? She noticed people like us. With some people—her ex-husband, for one—clerks and secretaries are like pieces of furniture. Like, you’d be sorry if they weren’t around, but you don’t really focus on them. Your mother was different.”
Andrea recalled the words of the gray-suited man who had visited her: You look a lot like your mother. “I guess I hadn’t really realized how active she was in the foundation,” she said after a pause.
“Laura never minded upsetting the apple cart. Like I say, she was a noticing kind of gal. And I think she truly cared about the work. So much so that she refused to take any money for it.”
“Really.”
“Besides, since Reynolds had cycled off the board, it wasn’t like they’d be running into each other.”
Andrea sat down beside the white-haired clerk. There was something grandmotherly about her, some quality of undemanding sympathy. “So they asked her to serve as a foundation officer. Even though she was just a Bancroft by marriage, she fulfilled the family quota, was that it?”
“You know that the charter has all these rules about that. So yeah, that was pretty much the shape of it. I’m guessing she hadn’t mentioned it to you.”
“No, ma’am
,” Andrea said.
“Doesn’t surprise me much.” The woman glanced down at her adhesive labels. “Wouldn’t want you to think we’re all gossips here, but we’d heard a thing or two about that marriage. It’s no wonder she wanted to keep you protected from the mess—she figured Reynolds would just find a way to make you feel bad about yourself, same as he did to her.” She stopped. “Sorry—I know they say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But if we don’t, who’s gonna? You don’t need me to tell you that Reynolds was a piece of work.”
“I’m not sure I understand, though. About my mother’s concern.”
The woman looked at her with cornflower-blue eyes. “Sometimes, when you’ve got a kid to take care of, you try to make a clean break seem a little cleaner than it really is. Too much to explain otherwise. Too many questions. Expectations get raised and crushed. I’m a divorced mother of four, all grown now. So I got my own perspective on it. What I think is, your mom aimed to protect you.”
Andrea swallowed hard. “Is that why she finally resigned?”
The woman looked away. “I guess I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” she said after a while. There was a slight cooling of her tone, as if Andrea had overstepped a boundary. “So, anything I can help you with?” Her face was professional, now, and somehow closed, as expressionless as polished slate.
Andrea thanked her quickly and returned to her carrel, but she felt a prickling again, and something else, some deep, glowing disquiet. It was as if embers that had smoldered for years were suddenly fanned.
Laura never minded upsetting the apple cart. A tribute to her character, surely, nothing more. She was a noticing kind of gal. But what did that really mean, other than she wasn’t any kind of snob? Andrea berated herself for her paranoia, her inability to manage her own emotions. Passion must be within reason, Paul Bancroft had said: She ought to be able to subordinate what she felt to hard demands of rationality. But, hard as she tried, she could not eradicate the suspicions that now swarmed around her. They were like yellow jackets at a picnic, small yet persistent, and no matter how she swatted at them, they would not be banished.
She tried to direct her attentions to a page from a W.H.O. almanac, but it was no use. Her mind kept returning to the Bancroft Foundation itself. It undoubtedly kept archives of its activities at hand, and they would be at a level of detail far in excess of the federally required reports. If there were answers to be found, they might well be in the basement archives, where older documents relating to the foundation’s operations were stored.
As she made her way out of the library wing, she saw Brandon again, and something lifted in her as he caught her eye.
“You know, they don’t have a hoop at this place or I’d challenge you to a little one-on-one,” he said, giggling sweetly.
“Next time,” Andrea said. “I’ve got some archive-trawling to do right now, I’m afraid. The boring basement kind.”
Brandon nodded. “The good stuff’s shut in cages. All locked up like dirty magazines.”
“And what would you know about such things?” she asked, mock-censorious.
The boy’s face split open into another one of his joyful grins. He was nothing less than a genius; but he was also just a boy.
Cages: They would indeed be standard in unsupervised low-use archives. She needed to get to those caged archives, and this time she would actively solicit help. But not from a senior officer. Rather, she would enlist a younger, low-level employee. She wandered through one of the smaller offices outside the library wing, past a water cooler and a coffee machine, and introduced herself to a twenty-something man who was sorting through a pile of mail. The man—moon-pale, with short mousy hair and nicotine-stained fingernails—recognized her name, had heard that she was a new trustee, and seemed delighted that she would take the time to make his acquaintance.
“So,” Andrea said, after the initial pleasantries, “I’m wondering if you can help me. If I’m being a bother, you let me know. All right?”
“No bother at all,” replied the man, whose name was Robby.
“It’s just that I’ve been asked to sort through various documents, you know, trusteeship stuff, and I’ve locked myself out of the basement archives,” she said, with a low cunning she hadn’t known was in her. “So embarrassing.”
“Not a bit!” the man replied heartily, grateful for a reprieve from the letter opener. “Not a bit! I could…I bet I could help you.” He looked around the office. “I’m sure one of these good people will have a key.” He rummaged through desk drawers until he found one.
“You’re such a blessing,” Andrea said. “I’ll get this back to you in two shakes.”
“I’ll come with you,” the man said. “Easier that way.” No doubt he was hoping for a quick smoke outside while he was at it.
“I hate to make myself a bother,” Andrea cooed.
But she was glad that he showed her the way, because instead of the exposed main staircase, he took her down a narrower rear staircase that descended to the basement in a few steep zigzags. The basement wasn’t very basement-like; it was elegantly appointed, steeped in the fragrance of lemon furniture polish, of old paper, even, faintly, of ancient pipe tobacco. The walls were wainscoted; the floors carpeted with a Wiltshire broadloom of evident distinction. The archives were divided into two sections, one of which was secluded behind a metal grate, just as Brandon had told her. The man let Andrea in and then took the stairs up, not entirely hiding the eagerness of someone craving a nicotine fix.
Andrea was left alone with the foundation’s archives. Black laminated boxes with coded alphanumeric labels stretched before her in long rows. There were hundreds of them, and Andrea did not know where to begin. She pulled the box nearest to her, riffled through the pages. Photostats of bills—physical-plant repairs, groundskeeping expenses from fifteen years earlier. She reshelved the box and started on another shelf. It was like taking soil samples. When she came to the bills that corresponded to the month in which her mother was killed, she took her time, scrutinizing every detail, hoping that something would pop up, announce itself as unusual. Yet nothing did.
The fifth box she looked through contained itemized telephone bills made from the Katonah headquarters, as did the one beside it. She located the box at the end of that shelf and kept going until she found another box that contained bills from the period when her mother died. Again, she saw nothing that, on the face of it, seemed worth a second glance. Finally, she opened a carton that contained telephone bills from the past half-year. Without having anything particular in mind, she took the list of telephone calls from the last month and slipped it into her handbag.
She turned to another section, opened another box, then another. Intriguingly, she encountered a couple of references to a facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Now she scanned the other shelves swiftly, stopping when she found a series of document boxes with labels prefixed by the letters RTP.
What was this facility? She crouched down and sampled documents from the RTP boxes on the lowest shelves. A few budget lines for seemingly minor items suggested that it was lavishly funded. Lavishly funded—yet never mentioned during the board meeting. What could it be for?
She looked up, still musing, and was startled to see the powerfully built man who had visited her at her house in Carlyle.
He was standing with arms akimbo. He must have just arrived—but how had he known to do so? Andrea resolved to maintain an icy composure even as her heart hammered in her chest. She rose slowly to her feet and extended a hand.
“I’m Andrea Bancroft,” she said with great deliberateness. “As I’m sure you remember. And you are…?” Her way of taking the offensive.
“Just here to help,” the man replied blandly. She could feel him looking right through her. He was obviously there to keep an eye on her.
“You’re too kind,” Andrea returned freezingly.
The man seemed distantly amused by her ploys. “Just kind enough,”
he assured her.
A long pause ensued. She did not have the mental fortitude, just then, for an extended standoff. She needed to speak to Paul Bancroft. She had questions. He would have answers. Yet did he himself know everything that was going on in the foundation? It would not be the first time that an idealist was exploited by others with less lofty objectives.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Andrea.
“I was actually just about to have a word with Paul,” she said, using her intimacy with the great man as a weapon. She gave him a tight smile. And one thing we’ll be discussing is whether he really wants to have people like you in his employ.
“He’s out of town.”
“I know,” Andrea lied. “I was going to give him a call.” Already she was conscious that she was over-explaining. She didn’t owe this man any reasons.
“Out of town,” the man responded, imperturbable, “and unreachable. As they should have explained.”
Andrea tried to meet his steady gaze, but, to her chagrin, was the first to look away. “He’ll be back when?”
“In time for the next board meeting.”
“Right,” Andrea said, deflated. “Anyway, I was just leaving,” she said.
“Then let me escort you to your car,” the man said with studied formality.
He did not speak again until they reached the graveled parking lot where she had left her car. He pointed to some drips of motor oil beneath the undercarriage. “You should have that looked at,” he said. His tone was kindly, yet his eyes were like slits.
“Thank you, I will,” Andrea replied.
“A lot of things can go wrong with a car,” the man persisted. “Things that can get you killed. You of all people should know what can happen.”
Getting into her car, Andrea felt a shivery wave of cold pass over her, as if she’d been licked by an alligator. A lot of things can go wrong with a car. It was, on its face, friendly advice.
Why, then, did it feel like a threat?
Dubai, United Arab Emirates