The Bancroft Strategy

  Christ, no! Her heart started to hammer, fear and outrage vying within her. They wanted to intimidate her, she realized, and the realization made her indignant.

  “Keep driving,” she said in a level voice. She was scared, yes, but she was resolute, too. She would not be intimidated. Her mother deserved more. She deserved more, dammit.

  He complied without a moment’s hesitation. Only after they had returned to the interstate did he give her a questioning look.

  “I thought I saw someone I recognized.”

  “Please don’t tell me you made reservations under your own name,” Belknap said in a rush.

  “No, no—I used my mom’s maiden name instead.” She had a sinking feeling even as she said the words.

  “Like that’s going to throw them a curve. And then you probably gave them your own credit card.”

  “Oh my God. I didn’t even think.”

  “Jesus Christ, woman,” Belknap said. “We’ve been through this. Would you use common sense?”

  Andrea massaged her temples with her forefingers. “I’m in a car with someone who may well be a dangerous enemy of the state, someone the United States government is trying to apprehend. Exactly where does common sense come into this?”

  “Don’t talk.” Belknap’s voice was like the growling of a double bass.

  “And interrupt the patriarchal edict of silence? Never.”

  “You want to pull over and have a consciousness-raising session? Be my guest. I’m sorry you’re stuck with me. I’m sure Simone de Beauvoir would be more your speed, but she doesn’t seem to be available.”

  “Simone de Beauvoir?”

  “She’s—”

  “I know who she is. I’m just surprised you do.”

  “When I’m not rereading the SIG-Sauer owner’s manual, you know…” He shrugged his bulky shoulders.

  “Whatever. Listen, I just—oh, hell, I don’t know.”

  “The one true thing you’ve said for some time.” He reached into his trouser band and pulled out an oblong object; she flinched, and he gave her another look. It was, she realized, a cell phone.

  Todd Belknap dialed the Clear Creek Inn. “I’m calling for Ms. Parry,” he said, in a voice that sounded somehow servile, almost effeminate. “No, I realize she hasn’t checked in yet. She’s asked me to let you know that she’s been delayed, and won’t be arriving until quite late. Around one in the morning. Could you please hold the room? Yes? Thank you.” He clicked off.

  She was going to ask him why, but hazily saw the wisdom in it: If there was someone stationed to look for her, it was better that the person remain in a place where she definitely wasn’t going to be.

  “Listen and learn, okay?”

  Andrea shook her head miserably. “I know I need to get used to this. But I wish to God I didn’t have to.”

  The look Belknap shot her seemed almost pitying. Suddenly, the car slewed across a lane and Belknap took an exit, ending up at a slummy-looking roadside motel. He turned to her, and the halogen light outside the motel cast a harsh, raking light on his square jaw and blocky features, his deep chest and callused hands and a gaze that, most of the time, barely registered her existence except as a convenience, an instrument in his own investigation. “Here’s where you sleep tonight.”

  “If I get fleas…”

  “Fleas you can get rid of. Bullet holes, not so easily.”

  He guided her to the long Formica counter, behind which an Indian man stood on a stool.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked. There was more than a trace of Hindi in his voice.

  “One night,” Belknap said.

  “No problem.”

  “Great,” said Belknap. He spoke in a rush. “The name’s Boldizsar Csikszentmihalyi. B-o-l-d-i-z-s-a-r. C-s-i-k-s-z-e-n-t-m-i-h-a-1-y-i.”

  The clerk stopped writing after a few letters. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite…”

  Belknap gave him a reassuring grin. “Nobody ever does. It’s Hungarian, I’m afraid. Here, let me write it all out for you. Believe me, I’m used to it.”

  Reluctantly the clerk ceded him the guest registry. With a flourish, Belknap wrote out the name. “Room forty-three?” He saw the key hanging on the key rack behind the clerk.

  “That’s fine, but I can—”

  “Not to worry,” Belknap said. “I used to manage a hotel myself.” Making a show of checking his wallet, he pretended to write the number of his driver’s license in the adjoining box. Barely lifting his pen from the paper, he filled out the time of arrival, the number of occupants, a credit card number. Then he returned the clipboard to the Indian man with a cheerful wink. “It’s the same everywhere.”

  “I can see that,” said the clerk.

  And we’ll be paying with cash. Eighty-nine plus the tax comes to 96.57, we’ll round to a hundred if you don’t mind.” He immediately leafed five twenty-dollar bills on the counter in front of the clerk. “Now, if you’ll pardon an unseemly rush, my good wife is bursting—she couldn’t bring herself to use the john at the gas station. So if you’ll get us a room key…”

  “Oh, my goodness, right away.” The man handed him the key, and Andrea found herself miming the condition Belknap had described.

  Moments later they were in a room, alone. The highway traffic sounded like a rainstorm, surging and ebbing. She could smell stale cigarette smoke in the room, the hair pomades of strangers, the chemical scent of cleaners.

  “My hat would be off if I wore a hat,” Andrea said to Belknap. “You’re a bullshit artist of the first order.”

  “A LeRoy Neiman rather than a Leonardo. I mean, let’s not exaggerate.”

  “You’re a man of many surprises,” Andrea said, and took a deep breath. Now she could smell him, the liquid soap he had used on his hands and face at their last rest stop, the laundry detergent of his shirt, and somehow it lessened the bleak foreignness of the dimly lighted room.

  “A pretty crappy place for an heiress, huh?”

  “I keep forgetting,” she said dryly. But it was true.

  “Best that you do,” Belknap said soberly. “For the time being. That money is a homing beacon. If the Theta security people have anything on the ball, they’ll know about any withdrawal you make, and they’ll know precisely where you were when you made it. It’s not like you’re using a numbered account in Liechtenstein. So until things are sorted out, consider it radioactive.”

  “Root of all evil. Got it.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Andrea.”

  “I said I got it,” Andrea replied, a little testily. She didn’t meet his eyes. “So what now? Are you going to take a load off your battered feet? Linger a bit before hitting the road?” She knew it was irrational: Her association with him had put her into jeopardy, and yet she somehow felt safer when she was around him.

  Belknap, however, took her invitation as mere sarcasm. “Is that what you’re afraid of?” The strapping operative shook his head. “No worries. I’m out of here.

  That’s not what I meant, she thought. But what had she meant? Did she even know?

  He stepped out of the door, then, before closing it, turned to her, his slate eyes intent. “You find something I need to know, you tell me soon as you can. I’ll do the same for you. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Andrea echoed in a hollow voice. The door clicked shut and, through the window, she watched the man lope back to the car; they agreed that it would be safest for her to call for a taxicab in the morning. She somehow felt at a loss. He was, she realized, a dangerous man who brought trouble in his wake. And yet when she was around him, she had felt safer. Again, she fully appreciated that it made no sense, but that was how she felt.

  The density of all that battered flesh, the scar tissue, the muscle that seemed almost to drop over his upper body like a poncho of hard flesh, the quick, alert eyes, vigilant to every menace. She still found herself choking on fear; he had somehow worked past it, was able to use fear. Or so she imagined. Tomorrow, though, she would be off to the
archives, where the greatest risk was surely tedium. What else could befall her? Death by a thousand paper cuts?

  Better get some sleep, she told herself. You have a long day tomorrow.

  From her motel window, she watched the taillights of his car grow smaller and smaller as he drove off, until they were nothing more than pinpricks, and then nothing more than a memory.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Todd Belknap was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, but his mind kept returning to his last sight of the Bancroft woman at that roadside lodge. There was, he knew, a good chance that they’d never see each other again. It would prove to be another brief encounter in a lifetime of brief encounters, if stormier than most. He had not opened the car windows right away as he drove off from the motel. He could still smell her light, citrusy fragrance in the vehicle, and he did not want the night air to push it away just yet. It somehow kept a damp feeling of despondency at bay. Dimly, he recognized that he was developing inappropriate and unreciprocated feelings toward Andrea Bancroft. They were not feelings he welcomed; too many people he let into his life ended up dead. Violence shadowed him, and, with uncanny sadism, picked off those he held closest to his heart. Yvette’s voice came to him like a distant echo: Where there is beauty, one finds death.

  Andrea had asked him whether he felt fear; right then, he was feeling fear for her.

  The sleep that finally overtook him offered little respite. Images crowded his unconscious, as vaporous as wraiths, and then as solid as real-time experience. He was back in Calí, reliving something that had happened half a decade earlier as if it were happening now. The sounds, the smells, the sights. The fear.

  The mission was to intercept a truckload of weaponry en route to a cartel of Colombian narcoterrorists. But the targets had been tipped off. One of their informants, it appeared, had been playing both sides. Men with bandoliers of .308-caliber full-jacketed rounds suddenly appeared from the back of a flatbed, spraying bullets at the positions where the Americans had been lying in wait. None of them was prepared for this. Belknap had been laying low in an ordinary sedan, unarmored—and now the car was being perforated with explosive bursts of the high-velocity rounds.

  Then—from someplace behind him—Belknap made out the distinctive round of a long rifle. There were cracks, spaced perhaps two seconds apart, and the torrential buzzing of the machine guns ceased. A glance at his cracked rearview mirror told the story: Each of the Colombian gunmen had fallen. Four gunmen, their torsos still draped with bandoliers. Four head shots.

  Silence had never been so welcome.

  Belknap craned his head to the roadside area where the rifle shots had been fired. Saw, outlined against the darkening sky, a lean, almost elongated figure holding a scoped rifle. A pair of binoculars hung from a strap around his neck.

  Pollux.

  He approached with his long stride, swiftly assessed the situation, and then turned to his friend.

  “I have to say, my heart’s in my throat,” Rinehart told him.

  “Imagine how I’m feeling,” Belknap said, unembarrassed by his gratitude.

  “You saw it, too, did you? Amazing, isn’t it! A flame-rumped tanager. I’m positive—the black head, the short beak, the incredible red oval on the wing. I even got a glimpse of the yellow breast.” He extended a hand, helped Belknap out of the car. “You look skeptical, my friend. Well, I’d show you, if only our Colombian friends hadn’t made such a racket. I swear, they’ve flushed every finch in earshot. What were they thinking?”

  Belknap couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “What are you even doing here, Jared?”

  Later, Belknap figured out what had happened: The operation’s B team had taken a wrong turn, reported their delay to the Calí station; Rinehart, monitoring the situation from the local consulate, had feared the worst, that the key informant wasn’t just incompetent, but treacherous. Yet that wasn’t the explanation Rinehart had given at the time.

  Instead, he simply shrugged and said, “Where else can you hope to find a flame-rumped tanager?”

  Now Belknap opened his eyes, peered through the fog of slumber, felt the stream of air from the nozzle overhead, fingered his lap belt, and remembered where he was. He was on a chartered jet that was taking the Empire State Chorus to an international music festival in Tallinn, Estonia. Todd Belknap—no, he was Tyler Cooper now—was tagging along as an official with the State Department’s cultural-exchange program. Belknap’s old ally and former colleague—“Turtle” Lydgate—knew the chorus master somehow and had arranged it. Lydgate had pointed out that chartered flights were less carefully monitored than those of the international carriers—and that, it being the week of Estonia’s annual choral festival, a goodly number of such chartered planes would be arriving at Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. Among the chorus members, there were vague intimations that the cultural-programs officers at State might provide funding for the chorus as an item in a new “civil society and the arts” initiative. They were to treat him as an honorary member of the chorus. In the event, they were both courteous and intimidated in his presence, which suited Belknap fine.

  He was following new rules: The near miss in Raleigh had jolted him into proper caution. No government-authorized documents any longer. He would have to dig into his cache of truly off-the-book identity papers. All deep-cover agents he knew had them—not because they had plans to live off the grid, or to defect, but simply because paranoia came with the job. “Tyler Cooper” was one of Belknap’s best-hidden and best-crafted legends, and tonight that was who Belknap was.

  He tried to return to sleep, but over the sound of the engines, he heard—oh, God, more of their infernal singing.

  The chorus master, Calvin Garth, had a helmet of orangey Grecian Formulated hair, an oddly full mouth, plump and delicate hands, and a little whinnying laugh. Worse, he was hell-bent on using the flying time for further rehearsals.

  When some of the choristers groused, he whipped himself into a lather of indignation that would have done Patton proud and made Bear Bryant envious. “Do you people realize what the stakes are?” he demanded, pacing down the aisle. “You may think you’re veterans of the touring circuit. Paris, Montreal, Frankfurt, Cairo, Rio, and so on—those concerts weren’t the big time, kids. For the choral arts, places like those are strictly minor-league. All that was warmup, nothing more. No, this is the big time. This is the make-or-break. In just twenty-four hours, your audience will be—the whole entire world! Years from now, you’ll realize this is probably the most important thing you ever did. This was the moment you stood up to sound the chords of freedom, and you will be heard.” His plump hands wriggled in the air, expressing the ineffable. “Take it from me. You know I’ll travel anywhere to keep up with what’s happening in the vocal realm. Well, when it comes to the choral arts, the Estonians don’t just play. What ice hockey is to Canadians, what soccer is to Brazilians—that’s what the chorus is to Estonia. They are a deeply choral people. So folks, you ‘gotta represent.’ Jamal here knows what I’m talking about.” He gave a tender glance at a tenor with cornrows and a gold hoop earring. “Tallinn is hosting choirs and choruses from fifty countries around the world. They’re going to be singing from here”—he clutched his diaphragm—“and from here”—he pounded his heart—“and they’re going to be giving their all. But guess what. I’ve heard what you ladies and gentlemen are capable of. Some may think I’m too much of a perfectionist. Well, listen up. I’m a bear because I care. We’re arriving at the choral Olympics. And together”—an ethereal smile crept over his face—“together we will make sweet music.” He plucked a piece of lint from his tan jacket.

  When Belknap surfaced again, three hours later, the chorus master was still at it, cuing the altos and basses; the young men and women in the chorus were seated according to their section. “Ar-ticu-late, ladies and gentlemen!” Garth implored. “Now, again! This is the Empire State Chorus anthem, so it’s got to be perfect!”

  The passengers watched h
is downbeat carefully, and then began as cued:

  We’ve traveled round the planet giving freedom a voice

  So the chorus of nations knows it’s time to rejoice!

  Because freedom is part

  Of every human heart—

  The fussy man in the tan jacket cut them off. “Not good enough! Eighty soloists put together do not a chorus make. Adam, Melissa, you’re ruining the attack. This passage must be allargando. We’re slowing, we’re broadening—watch my right hand. Amanda, turn that frown upside down! Eduardo, you’re pressing against the beat as if it were marked affrettando. I mean, really—is there someplace you need to be? Next week, Eduardo, you go back to work managing the perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue and then you can coast. But this week you represent the United States of America, am I right? This week you represent the Empire State Chorus. I meant what I said. You’re all going to make yourselves proud. Eduardo, you’re going to make your adopted country proud, too. I know it.”

  “Adopted?” A voice of confusion from several rows back. “I was born in Queens.”

  “And what an amazing journey it’s been, hasn’t it?” Garth replied implacably. “You inspire us all. And if you can just learn to come in on the downbeat with everybody else, you’ll soon be singing in the world capital of the choral arts. Speaking of which, we need to do one more run-through of the Estonian national anthem. ‘My Native Land.’ That’s part of the program, too, remember.” He hummed a snatch of melody. His voice was reedy, nasal, and unpleasant. Those who can’t sing, Belknap decided, lead choruses. The sopranos started in:

  Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm,

  Kui kaunis oled sa!

  My native land, my joy, delight,

  How fair thou art and bright!

  Belknap suddenly sat up, his heart pummeling in his chest. It was the draggy, marchlike tune that the corpulent Omani princeling had sung in his drunken way. He struggled to remember the context. Something about how Ansari had begun to lose control of his arms network, something about new management. The drunken Omani had pretended to be a conductor. New maestro—that was something he had said, too.