The Bancroft Strategy

  The ambiguous admonition of the nameless man in Katonah returned to her, and the words were like a dark cloud passing over the sun: You of all people should know what can happen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Washington, D.C.

  Will Garrison’s quilted cheeks stretched into a grimace of fury and frustration. “I blame myself,” the senior Cons Ops manager fumed. “I should have had the bastard locked up when we had the chance.”

  A voice of mild demurral came from Mike Oakeshott, the deputy director for analysis. “The Hound—”

  “Needs to be put down!” Garrison roared.

  Both men were in the office of the Director of Operations, Gareth Drucker, whose own gaze kept drifting down to the dispatch on his desk. A veteran Cons Ops analyst struck down on her lunch hour. The news would have rocked him even if he had not been personally fond of Ruth Robbins. As it was, the news came as a double blow. Gareth picked up a pencil, about to scribble a note, and instead snapped the pencil in two.

  “On my goddamn watch!” Drucker’s eyes darted wildly. “It happened on my goddamn watch!”

  “But, forgive me, what exactly happened?” The spindle-shanked senior analyst jumped up from the chair where he had sprawled himself, keyed up with frustration. He tugged at his nimbus of gray hair. Ruth Robbins had been a mainstay of his team; the loss was his, and on some elemental, playground level, it annoyed Oakeshott that Garrison was somehow appropriating his own tragedy.

  Garrison turned to him like a bull lowering its shoulders for a charge. “You know goddamn well—”

  “Who was killed, sure.” He caught Drucker’s eyes. “But how what why…”

  “Don’t make this more complicated than it is,” Garrison growled. “Obviously Belknap has become unhinged.”

  “Deranged by grief, is that it?” Oakeshott hugged himself, spider arms clasping a reed-narrow torso.

  “Jonesing for vengeance, more likely,” Garrison snapped, irritated by the interruption. “And he’s going on some sort of goddamn global killing spree. He’s delusional, but the son of a bitch is killing anyone and everyone he imagines is connected to Rinehart’s disappearance. From that Italian girl to poor Ruthie Robbins. Christ almighty! Who’s safe from this bastard?”

  Oakeshott looked unsettled and unconvinced, but Garrison’s rage had its own persuasive force. “Not you,” the senior analyst said.

  “Let that scumbucket try,” Garrison bellowed.

  Gareth Drucker looked at the two, drumming his fingers. “We’ve got to separate supposition from fact,” he said. A vein pulsed in his forehead. “The exam boys are still studying the video from the CCTV cams at the park’s entrances and exits. Firming this up—it’s going to take time.”

  “Time that we can’t spare,” Garrison protested.

  “Shit,” the Director of Operations said, an expletive of assent. “My call is, we’ve got enough to activate a retrieval team. I want him brought in and interrogated, using all necessary means. But no beyond-salvage orders. We all need to be clear on that. Because everything has to be by the book.”

  “The goddamn Kirk Commission,” Garrison said. “Don’t I know it.”

  Drucker nodded. “We’re following the Queensberry rules. Ever since the probe started, ‘beyond salvage’ has been taken off the table. Proper administrative procedures. Act like anything you do could be read into the Senate record, because for all we know…”

  “Ops isn’t my department, so don’t let me talk out of school,” Oakeshott said. “But you know that a lot of the guys here have beaucoup respect for Castor.”

  “What are you saying?” Drucker demanded. “You’re telling me operatives would disobey an official directive?”

  “Because they don’t know what he’s been up to,” Oakeshott put in.

  Drucker shook his head firmly. “I don’t think so. I’m still running this goddamn show.”

  “I’m just saying you’ll want to proceed with some care,” Oakeshott went on. “He’s got friends. Friends tip off friends. They might give him a heads-up. For a lot of the junior guys, especially, he’s a goddamn folk hero.” He looked at Drucker. “And you’re just the sheriff.” He held up his elongated hands, a gesture of appeasement. “I’m merely saying you need to be aware of unit-discipline issues.”

  “One more thing I can’t afford with that goddamn Senate probe hovering overhead.” The director of operations stared miserably into space. “You think one of his allies could spill to the commission?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Oakeshott began. “I’m just saying be careful.”

  Drucker frowned. “Then we’ll cabin it as a special-access program. Use S.A.P. staff down the line. That way, nobody else here needs to know about it.”

  “Belknap’s done plenty of S.A.P. work himself,” Oakeshott cautioned.

  “Which is why we’ll use muscle from nonoverlapping S.A.P. operations only. That goes for support staff, too. Different programs, different firewalls. Ergo, no cross talk.”

  Oakeshott tilted his head. “Doesn’t give you a huge pool to choose from. Manpower-wise.”

  “We’ll keep it lean and mean. Probably better that way. We need this op to go like clockwork. Because Kirk’s loaded for bear, the son of a bitch. That’s one thing I learned at the interagency lunch today.” He crooked a smile. “Another is that it’s been a long downhill slide since Edgar Hoover. If you’re thinking the FBI’s gonna come up with some dossier and make the revered Senator Bennett Kirk stand down, then dream on.”

  “Those Feds are a bunch of pansies nowadays,” Garrison growled. “Couldn’t find their butts with two hands and a periscope.”

  “Nobody’s saying Kirk’s the driven snow,” Drucker continued. “He’s just not particularly dirty. Besides, there are too many moving parts to this thing now.”

  “Double your pleasure, double your fun,” Garrison said heavily. He did not need to elaborate on the fact that Kirk was coordinating the efforts of both an independent counsel and a Senate investigative team. Kirk’s speeches about how he intended to root out abuses within the U.S. intelligence community, as well as the businesses and NGOs they had been dealing with, had galvanized the media. He had too much momentum to be turned back. In the spy agencies, long-term survival was the priority. Intelligence officers were all on their best behavior these days…or busily trying to erase evidence of their bad behavior.

  “There’s no way I’m going to ink my name on any piece of paper I don’t want Kirk to get his hands on,” Drucker murmured. “Just so we’re clear.” He peered again at Ruth Robbins’s personnel file and then his gaze settled upon the mottled, livid countenance of Will Garrison. A long moment passed. “I’m authorizing a retrieval. S.A.P. designation. Nothing more.”

  “If the retrieval team fails, I’ll take him out myself,” Garrison vowed grimly. It was a matter of professional pride at this point. He raised his chin slightly, eliciting tacit assent from Drucker’s silence. “Your hands will be clean, Gareth. It was my bad. If need be, I’ll make good on it.”

  Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

  “Listen, Paul, can we have a moment?” asked the man with the well-trimmed black beard.

  Paul Bancroft stopped and joined him at the U-shaped conference table.

  “Certainly. What is it?”

  “Ms. Bancroft is—”

  “Being escorted back to her hotel.”

  “I hope you’re right about her,” the bearded man, George Collingwood, said.

  The maven was usually tolerant of forthright comment and criticism. But this was a family matter. One stepped carefully when it came to family—even with Paul Bancroft.

  “We’ll know for sure soon enough,” the gray-haired philosopher replied. “We can’t rush the…acclimation process. It’s got to be one step at a time. As it was with you.”

  “You make it sound like brainwashing.”

  “Into the cult of reason. Whose brain couldn’t stand a little cleansing?”
r />   “This whole Nancy Drew bent of hers doesn’t worry you?”

  “On the contrary. She’s had suspicions, and she’s had the opportunity to air them. Now she’s in a position to move on. To put these matters behind her. That’s a good first step toward becoming an initiate.”

  “An initiate in the cult of reason.” Collingwood seemed to savor the phrase. “Well, you know her best. It’s just that the Kirk Commission looks to me like a hovering storm cloud, and just one seed crystal could loose a hailstorm on our heads.” He glanced at a dossier on the senator from Indiana that a colleague of his was studying.

  “I understand,” Paul Bancroft replied, imperturbably, “and I grant that I could be wrong about her. But I’m hopeful.”

  “With reason, let’s trust.” Collingwood flashed a quick, bleak smile.

  A husky woman with spiky black hair pressed several buttons on a nearby console and, with a low hum, a narrow metal platform rose up from the level below and slotted into an adjacent cabinet. Her name was Gina Tracy, and she was the most junior member of the team. She rested her hand on a recessed glass panel until its bio-identification scanner had approved her handprint. Then the side panel swung open and she retrieved a set of dossiers. The documents were printed on paper that would blacken immediately in the presence of small quantities of ultraviolet light, even the quantities emitted by regular incandescent and fluorescent fixtures. The illumination within the Theta facility was carefully filtered, eliminating all wavelengths shorter than indigo. If stolen, the facility’s internal documents would be immediately rendered useless, like a film negative exposed to light.

  “We’ve already got a squad en route to La Paz,” she said, handing out the dossier on the land-reclamation project based there. “There’s a fake community activist who’s been holding strikes, gumming up the works. Turns out he’s on retainer from the local representative of a French conglomerate.”

  “No surprise there,” Paul Bancroft said, nodding.

  “We’re going to burn him—circulate copies of his financial records, show the exact amounts disbursed into his bank account. It was done incredibly crudely. His name’s on everything. He’ll be instantly discredited.” She smiled. “GGGN, asshole.” GGGN—it was Theta shorthand for the prime objective: the greatest good for the greatest number.

  “Excellent,” Bancroft said with a savoring air.

  “The African loan-forgiveness question has been trickier, because the bureaucracy for the European Union is so messy. We’ve zeroed in on an obscure Belgian policymaker, though. He’s low down on the totem pole, but apparently he has an inordinate influence on the higher-ups. He’s smart and opinionated and hardworking, and he’s won their trust. And he’s vehemently opposed to any form of Third World debt forgiveness. A real ideologue. Burgess has the personal stats.” She turned to an associate—a sharp-featured man whose blond hair was so pale it appeared nearly white.

  His name was John Burgess, and he had spent ten years at Kroll Associates as a manager of investigations before joining the Theta Group. “He’s not just an ideologue. He’s also a bachelor,” he said. “No kids. One surviving parent with Alzheimer’s. We’ve run the models. Verdict is, we put him out of his misery—or anyway, other people’s misery.”

  “No disagreement here?” Bancroft asked.

  “Both teams ran the numbers separately,” said Collingwood, “and both teams came to the same conclusion. He doesn’t wake tomorrow, and the world’s a better place. GGGN, right?”

  “Very well,” Bancroft said somberly.

  “As for the banking official in Indonesia?” Collingwood went on. “We’ve had a win there. He got a phone call last night, and he’s just submitted his resignation.”

  “Tidy,” Bancroft commended.

  In the next half-hour, more dossiers were reviewed. A recalcitrant mining director in South Africa, a religious activist in Gujarat, India, a communications mogul in Thailand: Each was the source of significant, avoidable suffering. Some would be forced to resign or shift their behaviors; where blackmail was not an option, however, an elite execution team would do its work, typically making the deaths appear to be the result of accidental or natural causes.

  On infrequent occasions, to be sure, members of the Theta Group had resorted to spectacle, as when they had arranged the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—a tragic necessity, all agreed—in order the bolster the civil rights movement. Or as when they had arranged a couple of NASA shuttle disasters in order to promote the defunding of the wasteful, pointless program. The loss of a handful of lives meant thousands of lives saved, billions of dollars for worthier programs.

  But they had to be careful. Though the models were ever more sophisticated, they all knew that such models could never be infallible, however potent the computer power harnessed.

  Finally, Bancroft and the members of his executive team came to the final operational dossier, and the thorniest one. It involved a complex political carom shot that would require the deaths of an entire national soccer team. A regional governor had arranged to have the soccer team—the subject of delirious adulation since their World Cup victory three days earlier—come as guests to his private estate, and to a celebration party he was having. At his insistence, they were to be flown over on his private airplane, a prized and lovingly polished vintage specimen that dated to the Second World War and was meant to recall the wartime heroism of the governor’s father. A midair explosion that took the lives of the celebrated young men would cast a pall over the nation in the short run. But it would also doom the governor’s chances in the national election to be held the following day, for the common folk would blame him for the tragedy. It was the one way to avert a disastrous administration and ensure the success of a reformist candidate. A soccer team would be destroyed; a handful of lives would be wasted. It was not a decision to be undertaken lightly. But the country would prosper. Thousands of lives would be saved as foreign investment surged and the country’s economic development was accelerated.

  Bancroft paused for a long time. It was not something to authorize lightly. His eyes sought out those of the oldest analyst at the table, Herman Liebman. “What do you think, Herm?” the philosopher asked quietly.

  Liebman ran his hand through his thinning gray hair. “You’ve always looked to me as the guy who remembers when things didn’t work as planned,” he said mordantly. “There’s no question that the governor’s a kleptocrat. Definitely bad news. Then again, I can’t help but remember Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr.”

  “Who?” Tracy asked.

  “A real hard-on. A truculent Iraqi leader who governed together with another Sunni secularist in the seventies. Before your time, Gina. But Paul remembers. We tussled with the problem, and all the analysts were convinced that al-Bakr was the worse of the two. So we sent a team of operatives to Iraq. This was in 1976. Technically, it was a beautiful job. They chemically induced a myocardiac infarction. Complete control was promptly assumed by his partner. Saddam Hussein.”

  “Not one of our finest moments,” Paul agreed.

  “Not one of mine,” Liebman persisted. “Because—and Paul’s too polite to point it out—I was the one who had been lobbying the hardest to get rid of al-Bakr. All the models seemed to back me up.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Bancroft said gently. “We’ve fine-tuned the Theta algorithms since then. Not to mention the fact that we’re employing today’s vastly greater computational power. We’re not perfect, never have been. But in the long run, we’ve made this planet a better place. Men and women are now alive and living good, productive lives who would have died in infancy if it weren’t for Theta. What we’re doing is surgery, Herm—you know this as well as anyone. A scalpel to the body: That’s a kind of violence. You don’t make a deep cut without having reason to. But sometimes survival depends upon surgery. Cutting out malignancies, clearing blockages, and sometimes just finding out what’s really going on. People die from surgery all the time. But a lot more pe
ople die from the lack of it.” He turned to Burgess. “It’s funny—I watched that final World Cup match. An incredibly spirited group of players. And when Rodriguez scored, the look on his face…” He smiled at the memory. “But we’ve done the math. The opportunity to affect national governance in a country where bad policies have been laying waste to entire communities, entire generations—we can’t pass that up. It may be among the most important decision we make all year.”

  “Just for the sake of argument, let’s spare another thought for the twelve men who will be on that plane.” Liebman wasn’t challenging him; he knew that Bancroft counted on him to spell out the immediate consequences as well as the distant ones they hoped for. “Young men.” He tapped a finger on the second page of the dossier. “Three of whom have wives. Including Rodriguez—his wife has already borne him two girls, and she’s pregnant again. They’re hoping for a boy. And the men have parents, grandparents in most cases. The pain will be terrible and lingering for these people. Indeed, the whole nation will experience an intense bout of grief.”

  “And all these factors have been carefully accounted for in the computer models,” Bancroft said softly. “We wouldn’t be contemplating it if the upside weren’t greater still. The people of that beleaguered nation—the children of that nation—are owed our best judgment. They won’t know what really happened, and they certainly won’t know why, so they’ll never thank us. But in four or five years, they will have cause to give thanks.”

  “GGGN,” Burgess murmured in a soft undertone, like a prayer.

  “Oh, here’s something that will brighten your day,” Collingwood fluted, holding a copy of a press release that had just been issued from the Culp Foundation. “William Culp is funding a new round of AIDS vaccine trials in Kenya.”