The Bancroft Strategy

  Five minutes later the door swung open, revealing an airless space of about fifteen feet square, dominated by a bank of filing cabinets. There was another door frame on one of the inner walls, suggesting a room within a room. But perhaps it only led to a stairwell.

  Belknap looked at his watch. So far, the after-hours infiltration had come off almost without a hitch, but the thought made him feel edgier, not more relaxed. Overconfidence could prove fatal; and no real operation ever went entirely smoothly. When things went smoothly, he wondered when the anvil was going to fall.

  The cam locks on the steel cabinets connected to a hook-and-latch mechanism and succumbed to Belknap’s focused attentions before long. He pulled open the drawers, removed a thatch of papers, began reading through them. Before long, frustration welled up: He was no expert, didn’t know what to look for. He wished that Andrea were there to help him decipher the material. Yanking open one drawer after another, he finally found a file labeled R. S. LANHAM.

  The file was empty. A meaningless name, an empty file—it seemed a parable of futility, mocking his very hopes. The hound was chasing its tail.

  After twenty minutes in the files, Belknap found himself fighting off waves of tedium. Yes, Andrea Bancroft should have been there: corporate documents—just her speed. But he forced himself to stay at it, speed-reading through business boilerplate. Only when he reached a tranche of papers stamped COPY did he begin to find what he was looking for. These were offshore documents of incorporation, and his eyes raced across them so swiftly that at first he did not recognize the name as a name. As a name of a recognizable person, rather than an arbitrarily named business entity. But there it was: Nikos Stavros.

  Softly, he pronounced the name out loud. It was a name he knew—that of a Greek Cypriot magnate. Nikos Stavros was a reclusive man whose list of holdings worldwide was legendary.

  They included, Belknap saw, a 49 percent interest in Estotek.

  Was Stavros in fact Genesis? Was “Lanham” his alias? But Andrus Pärt had said he was an American. For that matter, then who owned the other half of the company—and what, precisely, did Estotek control? Belknap peered at an onionskin page headed PARTNERSHIPS and struggled to make sense of it. He lurched to his feet and tried the knob to the interior door—which was, blessedly, unlocked. He switched on an overhead light and, as the fluorescents blinked on, he saw further banks of black filing cabinets. Ten minutes later, he was beginning to perceive the complexity of the enterprise, the largely submerged iceberg that was Estotek.

  Eleven minutes later, he heard the arrival of guards in the hallway.

  He bolted from the annex like a rabbit from its hutch and he noticed—heart-stoppingly—the familiar alarm tab inset in the flange of the interior door. The knob had turned; the annex door had swung open. But what he hadn’t realized was that it was armed, that there was a separate alarm system in place. A silent one. There were not enough expletives even in the Estonian language to express Belknap’s self-disgust.

  And now he found himself face-to-face with four well-armed security guards. They did not look like the pudgy man in the lobby or the feckless night watchman in the brown uniform. These ones were professionals. Each carried a drawn gun.

  Instructions were yelled at him in several languages. He understood “Freeze!” He understood the directive about stretching his arms over his head.

  He understood that the game was over.

  The guard who spoke English came closer to him. He had leathery skin and a hatchet face. His gaze took in the files that spilled from the cabinets.

  A triumphant grin stretched across his face. “There was a report of rats,” he said in lightly accented English. “And now we have caught the rat even as he nibbles at our cheese.”

  Then he turned and said something to the youngest of his three colleagues, a twentyish man with yellow hair in a buzz cut, and the ropy, veined arms of a weightlifting enthusiast. The words were in a Slavic tongue; Belknap only made out the common Serbian surname Drakulovic—obviously the man’s name.

  “Corporate history—kind of a hobby of mine,” Belknap said in a hollow voice. He noticed that the English-speaking guard was holding a Gyurza Vector SR-1, a Russian-made pistol designed to punch through body armor. It could, in fact, penetrate sixty layers of Kevlar, and its chambered steel-core bullets would not ricochet, because they would penetrate. They would travel through his body like a pebble through the air.

  “See, it’s not the way it looks,” Belknap added.

  With a sudden movement, the guard belted him across the face with the hand that held his pistol.

  The blow landed like a mule’s kick. Belknap decided to exaggerate its effect, which took little effort. He wheeled backward, windmilling his arms, and then he caught a glimpse of the guard’s contemptuous look. The man was not taken in for a moment. A second, punishing blow landed—on the same cheek, the way a professional would do it. Belknap forced himself to stand erect, although he wobbled on his legs. It was not the time to resist, his instincts told him. The guard was trying to demonstrate his mastery, not to knock him unconscious. They would have questions for him after all.

  “No movements,” the man said in a voice like gravel. “Be still like a mannequin.”

  Belknap nodded mutely.

  One of the other guards spoke to the one with the yellow buzz cut in a snigger. Belknap understood little, save the name Pavel—the young man’s first name. The young man approached, patted Belknap down, ensuring that he was disarmed. He fished out a small metal tape measure from Belknap’s rear pocket and tossed it aside.

  “Now, what are you doing here?” The rugged man, obviously their leader, spoke in the tone of a man hoping for a display of insubordination so as to have an excuse to deal out punishment.

  Belknap remained silent. His mind raced.

  The hatchet-faced guard stepped closer. Belknap could smell his sour, beefy breath. “Are you deaf?” he demanded. The taunting of a playground bully, prelude to the violence on which he thrived.

  Suddenly, impulsive, Belknap whipped his head around and caught the youngest guard’s eyes. “Pavel!” he said, his voice imploring and yet berating as well. “Tell them!”

  The senior guard narrowed his eyes. Confusion and suspicion played across his face. Pavel looked baffled, stunned. But Belknap did not avert his eyes.

  “You promised me, Pavel! You promised me there would be none of this!”

  The heavyset guard gave the yellow-haired bodybuilder a suspicious side glance. A facial tic twitched the young man’s left eye. Evidence of tension. It was inevitable—but, to those so minded, suspicious as well.

  Pavel murmured something that, to Belknap, hardly needed translation: some version of “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Oh, please,” Belknap burst out, indignant. He recalled Jared Rinehart’s advice: Suspicion, dear Castor, is like a river; the only way to avoid its flow is to divert it elsewhere. The memory gave Belknap strength. He jutted his jaw, squared his shoulder, looked less guilty than aggrieved.

  The senior guard’s voice was menacing—though it was difficult to say toward whom, exactly. “You know this man?” he asked Belknap.

  “Drakulovic?” Belknap spat. “I thought I did. Evidently not.” Belknap directed a furious gaze at the young man. “You piece of shit!” he stormed. “What kind of game are you playing? Do you think my boss is going to take this lying down?” Belknap was madly extemporizing at this point, sketching out a scenario that would intrigue but remain mysterious to the guards. He simply needed to buy time.

  Belknap rolled his eyes theatrically as Pavel Drakulovic burst into a flurry of denials, protests. The outrage was genuine, but it came off as defensive, possibly spurious. Belknap noticed that the two other guards had subtly positioned themselves a few steps away from him, closer to the leader. Drakulovic was now an uncertain quantity; nobody wanted to be closely associated with him, at least not until the matter was resolved and clarity res
tored.

  He continued to protest until their leader directed some brief, harsh word of remonstration at him, and shut him up. Again, Belknap could guess at the message: “Not another word out of you. We’ll sort this out later.”

  Now Belknap lifted his chin. Time to drop another name, to sow more confusion. “I’m just telling you that Lanham isn’t going to be happy with you guys. Last time I do him a favor.”

  The black-eyed guard suddenly looked wary. “Who did you say?”

  Belknap took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his mind working furiously.

  R. S. Lanham. An American, according to Andrus Pärt. The “R” could stand for Ronald, Richard, Rory, Ralph. But Robert was the likeliest; it was among the most common first names in the United States. A Robert could go by Rob, or Bert, or eschew a diminutive altogether, but if one had to stake a wager on the outcome, Bob was safest.

  “Trust me,” Belknap said, “If you knew Bob Lanham as well as I do, you’d know he’s the last person you want to piss off.”

  The black-eyed guard gave him a curious look. Then he flicked on a small communicator, spoke into it briefly. Then he turned to Belknap. “The boss comes soon.”

  The boss. Not Nikos Stavros. The other owner, then. The principal owner. The man who used the name Lanham.

  Andrus Pärt: This isn’t someone I’ve ever met face-to-face. Nor do I care to.

  The leader now spoke in a low, reassuring voice to his young companion. A quick side glance at Belknap. They did not trust him. But the black-eyed man took and pocketed Drakulovic’s sidearm all the same. He was on probation for the time being. It was the only prudent thing to do. Drakulovic sat down on a small stool in a corner of the room, winded, wanting to protest further but resigned to the sidelines.

  Belknap looked around him, at the remaining guards, saw their pistols held steady, nothing in their gaze but indifferent professionalism. His mind raced, his eyes darted. You must get out of here. There must be something he could do.

  The sounds of arrival. The boss. Rapid Estonian but spoken, unless Belknap were mistaken, with an American accent.

  Then the outer door swung open again and, accompanied by two young blond gunmen, the man who ran Estotek walked in.

  His hair was black, dyed, gleaming in the overhead lights. The face was deeply pockmarked, each facial indentation a dimple of shadow. Jet-black eyes sparkled like jewels of malevolence. The mouth was as thin and as cruel as a well-healed knife wound.

  Belknap found himself fixated on the two-inch-long scar that curved across his forehead like a second left eyebrow, and the ground beneath him seemed to swell and buckle like a sudden wave. Vertigo swept through him. He had to be hallucinating.

  Belknap squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. It couldn’t be.

  Yet it was. The shadowy Estonia-based mogul, the man who had taken over the quondam Ansari network, was no stranger to him. They had met, years before, in an apartment on East Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee.

  The images returned to Belknap, sickeningly. The Turkish flatweave on the floor. The ebony-framed mirror, the large Biedermeier desk. The twin boreholes of the man’s shotgun, his eyes.

  Richard Lugner.

  The man had been killed that day. Belknap had seen him die with his own eyes. Yet here he was before him.

  “It’s impossible!” Belknap blurted the words, his thoughts given speech.

  The slight widening of the man’s vulpine stare only confirmed the identification. “Would you stake your life on that?” he asked in a horribly familiar nasal rasp. In his left hand he held a large pistol.

  “But I saw you die!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You saw me die, did you?” Lugner’s lizard-like tongue flickered across his lips, as if searching for a fly. “Then it’s only fair that I get to see you die. Only, there will be no stagecraft this time. You see, I’ve become quite an aficionado of reality as I’ve grown older. Older but wiser. As opposed to you, Mr. Belknap. When last we met, you were a stripling lad. Too old to be fuckable, but not too old to be fucked with.” He laughed dryly, horribly.

  Belknap forced air into his lungs. He recognized the pistol that Lugner was holding. Matte-black, with a grooved, slablike unit containing the bolt and barrel: a nine-millimeter Steyr SPP. Effectively a foot-long assault rifle.

  “All these years later,” Lugner went on, “I’m afraid you’ve lost your dewy deliquescent youth and only grown coarser. Thicker and coarser.” He took a step closer. “The pores on your face, the veining under your skin, the shape of your features—it all grows steadily coarser. Every year, you’ve grown less like spirit and more like meat. Less soul and more body.”

  “I don’t…I don’t understand.”

  “Not much to show for four billion years of evolution, are you?” Richard Lugner glanced at his armed guards. “Gentlemen, behold the resignation in his eyes.” He turned to Belknap. “You’re like an animal in a trap. At first, the animal—mink or fox, weasel or stoat—struggles wildly. It claws at the steel cage, lashes out this way and that, twists and howls and thrashes. A day passes, and the hunter who has set the trap does not appear. The animal thrashes, then sulks. Thrashes, then sulks. Another day passes, and another. The animal grows weak from lack of water. It slinks to the bottom of the cage. It waits only for death. The hunter arrives. But the animal has given up hope. It opens its eyes. And it does not thrash. Because it has accepted death. Even if the hunter sets it free, the animal has sentenced itself to death. It has accepted defeat. There is no reversing course.”

  “Have you come to set me free?”

  A sadistic grin twisted Lugner’s face. “I’ve come to set your spirit free. Death is man’s destiny. I am the one who will help you achieve that destiny on an accelerated schedule. There’s nobody who can help you. Your own employers, I happen to know, have effectively disowned you. Your former colleagues know you’re damaged goods. Who do you think you can turn to—some grandstanding Midwestern senator? Some vaporous bugbear nobody’s ever seen? God, perhaps? Satan, more likely.” A harsh laugh. “It’s time to put away childish things and face your extinction with dignity.” He turned to the English-speaking guard. “This gentleman will be allowed to leave this building.”

  The guard raised his eyebrows.

  “In a body bag.” Lugner’s slitlike mouth stretched wide.

  “Actually, you might want to bring more than one.” Belknap kept his voice level.

  “We’d be happy to double-bag you, if you like.”

  Belknap forced himself to laugh, a loud, carefree laugh.

  “I’m pleased my wit isn’t lost on you.”

  “If you think you’re a wit, you’re half right,” Belknap snorted. “Naw, the joke’s on all of us. I wouldn’t have chosen you all as companions for my final voyage. But I guess it’s not the sort of thing you usually get to choose. I won’t be leaving this place alive. That’s true. But, one small detail I forgot to mention: Nobody here leaves the building alive. Yes, triacetone triperoxide is a wonderful thing. A real mindblower.” A grin so wide that Calvin Garth’s choristers would have been envious.

  “How boring, these lies of yours,” Lugner said, a moue settling on his slashlike mouth. “How uninventive.”

  “You’ll see. I’ve wired up the place with triacetone explosives. On a timer. I’d hoped that I’d be long gone by now. But of course I’ve been detained. And now destiny is about to play its final card.” He lowered a hand, glanced at his watch. “So there’s some comfort in that. I know I’ll be killed. But so will you. Which means that I can die with a certain satisfaction. A life that claims yours hasn’t been lived in vain.”

  “What offends me isn’t that you’re lying, but that you’re lying so badly. Put some effort into it, man.”

  “You’d like to think I’m lying because it wounds your pride to acknowledge that you walked into a trap.” Belknap’s voice was exultant, almost madly so. “Ha! Do you imagine for one moment that I didn’t
know exactly which alarm I was triggering? What kind of an amateur do you take me for, you pockmarked piece of shit?”

  “You’re fooling nobody,” Lugner repeated stolidly.

  “What you don’t seem to understand is this: I don’t care.” Belknap spoke with the gaiety of the scaffold. “I’m not trying to persuade you of anything. Just letting you know. For old times’ sakes. So you understand the deal. When you die, I want you to know why.”

  “And if I left now? Just to play out this absurd scenario.”

  Belknap spoke slowly, crisply, enunciating his consonants with care. “The elevator would have returned to the lobby by now. Sixty seconds to get out there, another thirty seconds at least for the elevator to appear—sorry. It doesn’t give you enough time, especially with your limp. The guards here—well, they’re extra. Deal-sweeteners. Because, really, this is just between you and me. But I don’t think their English is very good. So you don’t need to worry about them fending for themselves. And if they’re truly loyal, they’ll want to be vaporized with their boss. Like Hindu brides throwing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Estonian sati. Only this time we’re talking about triacetone triperoxide: nectar for the god of thunder. Can you smell it? A little like nail-polish remover. But then you knew that. You can smell it, can’t you?” He took a few steps closer to Lugner. “Shall we count out our remaining seconds out loud?”

  Lugner’s gaze grew only more piercing as Belknap spoke, yet he noticed that the blond guard to his left had grown pale. Belknap made a small bye-bye hand gesture at him, and, suddenly, the man bolted. The second began to follow, spooked. In a lightning-fast movement, Lugner shot him in the face. The Steyr’s report was loud yet strangely echoless in the enclosed office space. The others looked at Lugner, stunned.