The Bancroft Strategy

  Alone with her at last, Belknap inspected her shrunken pupils. She made noises, soft, slurry noises, somewhere between murmurs and whimpers. More evidence of opiate intoxication. He set off quickly, and got a room at the first motel he saw—an ugly one-story structure of mustard-painted cinderblock, styled like an American roadside lodge. He carried her into it and felt her pulse again. No sign of recovery. No sign that she was emerging from the stupor.

  He stretched her out on the narrow bed and moved his fingers over her knitted cotton shift. His suspicions were confirmed. Beneath her left breast was a Duragesic patch—an adhesive square impregnated with a transdermal fentanyl preparation. It was a powerful synthetic opioid, and the patch—designed for cancer patients and others suffering chronic pain—would steadily release it into her bloodstream, fifty micrograms per hour. Given her level of sedation, there had to have been at least one more patch, stealthily suppressing consciousness. He kept looking, vaguely uncomfortable at the liberties he had to take as his hands roamed her body. He found a second patch attached to her inner thigh and removed it as well. Were there more?

  He could take no chances. He stripped her of all her clothing, including her undergarments, and inspected her nude body.

  At the right side of her thigh, he saw a small dark bruise, an oval of bleeding below the skin. Examining it more closely, he saw a puncture wound, as if she had been messily jabbed by a large-bore needle. Was that how she had first been subdued at the room from which she’d been abducted—jabbed with a fast-acting sedative? If so, she must have struggled; it was not a normal injection site. You didn’t make it easy for them, did you? Belknap thought admiringly.

  He continued his inspection. Two more adhesive transdermal patches had been attached within the crease of her buttocks. The Duragesics, in combination, would steadily keep her sentience submerged while remaining just below lethal dosage.

  Who had done this to her?

  Some of the fentanyl residue would continue to diffuse from her epidermis even after the patches were removed. He ran a bath and helped her into it, vigorously soaping the areas where the patches had been. The activity was both intimate and clinical. The use of such patches to keep a captive subdued for long periods was hardly new. But it alarmed him to contemplate what they might have had in store for her. He remembered the story about the man whom Genesis had kept alive for two years on IV nutrition while he was completely immobilized within a steel box. A Poe-like imagination, Ruth Robbins had called it. Belknap shuddered.

  Over the next hour, Andrea grew less groggy. Her vocalizations gradually became recognizable as English. Speaking in short sentences, she made it clear that she had little memory of what happened to her after she arrived. He was not surprised. The powerful drugs would have induced retrograde amnesia, removing memory of events immediately preceding as well as following the abduction. Just now, she wanted only to sleep. Her body craved it in order to rid itself of the drug.

  The alert among various levels of officialdom would put his adversaries on the defensive, Belknap knew. For the moment, then, she would be safe.

  But Nikos Stavros would not be. Leaving her sleeping peacefully in the narrow bed, he got into the Land Rover and raced back to Stavros’s estate. The winding road was as he remembered it, but when he reached the gate, he was puzzled to find it open.

  Near the grand house, its terra-cotta roof tiles glowing in the setting sun, he saw three police cars. The manservant he had met before, Caius, looked ashen. Conferring with the locals, once more, was the man he recognized from the airport, McGee.

  He pulled up in his black Land Rover, and with a brusque nod at the DEA man, he strode into the house.

  There, in the library, were the bullet-riddled remains of Nikos Stavros. His body looked even smaller than in life, the limbs even spindlier. Blood puddled around him. His eyes were open, holding a lifeless gaze.

  Belknap looked around the room. Bullet holes flecked the ornate woodwork in the library. He picked up a misshapen piece of lead that had penetrated a wood chair, hefted it, got a sense of its weight, its diameter. They were not military-issue; they were U.S. special-ops hollowpoints with partial copper jackets—the very kind Belknap had himself always favored. It was as if someone was intent on implicating him.

  Through an open window near the front hallway he heard the sound of McGee on a cell phone conferring with his higher-ups. Mostly it was an exchange of details, ballistic and location. Then Belknap heard him say in a quiet voice, “He’s here.” A pause. “No, I saw the photo, and I’m telling you that he’s here, now.”

  As Belknap made his way back to his Land Rover, he saw McGee turn to him and wave, with a wide grin and a friendly look.

  “Hey,” McGee said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.” The voice was cordial, ingratiating.

  Belknap ran to the car and roared off at top speed.

  In his rearview mirror he could see confusion among the officials he had left behind. They would be calling in for orders—should they pursue? But by the time authorization came, it would be too late.

  He flashed on Stavros’s frightened visage during his visit earlier that day. It was as if the magnate had thought that death itself had come to pay a call.

  Had he been right?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Amarillo, Texas

  “That thing still recording?” the large Texan asked with a grin. He had been expansive in defending himself from his critics, and seemed pleased that the reporter—was he from Forbes or Fortune?—didn’t interrupt him in midflow. The wall behind him was filled with photographs of him hunting, fishing, and skiing. A framed cover of a trade magazine proclaimed him the BUCCANEER OF BEEF.

  “No worries,” said the smaller, bearded man in the visitor’s chair drawn up before the Texan’s mahogany desk. “I always bring spare batteries.”

  “Because I can be a big talker when I get worked up.”

  “A man doesn’t get to be the CEO of one of the country’s largest beef producers without knowing how to explain where he’s coming from, I’d guess.” The smaller man’s eyes were bright beneath his thick-framed glasses, and he smiled easily. Not like most journalists, in the Texan’s experience.

  “Well, the truth is eloquent, like my pappy used to say. As for those rumors concerning the misuse of employee pension funds—rumors is all they are. The offer that I’ve proposed is in the best interests of the shareholders. What I’m saying is, Do the math. Aren’t shareholders people, too? Maiden aunts and little old ladies, plenty of ’em. You ever hear those community groups worrying about the shareholders?”

  The man with the tape recorder nodded vigorously. “And our readers will want to hear more about that. But, while there’s still that good light from the outdoors coming in, I’m thinking that our photographer’s going to want to take a few shots of you. That okay?”

  A toothy smile. “Bring it on. The left profile’s best, I’d say.”

  The smaller man left the Texan’s corner office and returned with another man, powerfully built, with a square head and short light-brown hair, not immediately identifiable as a wig. He carried a camera bag and what looked like a tripod in a case.

  The CEO extended a hand. “Avery Haskin,” he said. “But you knew that. I was telling your colleague Jonesy there that my left profile’s probably best.”

  “I’m Smith,” said the photographer. “And I’ll make it as quick as I can. You mind sitting just the way you are, at your desk?”

  “You’re the boss,” Haskin said. “No, wait—I’m the boss.”

  “Funny guy,” Smith said. Standing behind the CEO of Haskell Beef, he opened what looked like a tripod case and removed a captive-bolt pneumatic gun.

  The Texan turned around in his chair and saw what Smith had in his hands. Immediately his smile vanished.

  “What the hell—”

  “Oh, you recognize it. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? It’s what cattlemen use to slaughter cows, isn’t it?”
br />   “Goddammit—”

  “Be a mistake to move,” Smith interrupted in a chilly voice. “Course, it might be a mistake not to.”

  “Listen to me. You fellers animal-rights activists? You gotta know something. Killing me won’t change a goddamn thing.”

  “It’ll save the pensions of fifteen thousand workers,” Jones said airily, fingering his facial hair—wool-crepe fibers affixed with stipple wax. “Fifteen thousand of them, one of you. Do the math, huh?”

  “But I like that you assume we’re animal-rights whackos,” Smith put in. “Natural assumption, when you dispatch the chief of a beef-producing company with the very instrument of professional slaughter. Leastways we thought so. It’ll definitely put the investigators on the wrong track.”

  “Remember the pol we clocked in Kalmikiya last year?” Jones traded glances with Smith. “How the government flew in a toxicologist from Austria? Nobody could figure it out. Decided it was a real bad case of seafood poisoning.”

  “Bet our friend Avery here isn’t much for seafood,” said Smith. “You an organ donor, Avery?”

  “What?” Sweat beaded on the Texan’s forehead. “What did you say?”

  “He is now,” Jones reminded his colleague. “I filled out the forms in his name more than a week ago.”

  “So here we go,” Smith said, adjusting the lead-length of the captive-bolt stunner. “A veritable bolt from the blue, huh? A pretty funny way to go for a cattleman.”

  “You think it’s funny? Oh, Jesus, please, sweet Jesus…”

  “Fact is, one day we’ll look back on this and laugh,” said the man with the captive-bolt gun. He caught Jones’s eyes.

  “And laugh? You’re off your rocker!” Avery Haskin’s voice rose in incredulity and rage.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you,” said Smith, as he sent the bolt deep into Haskin’s brain. Unconsciousness was instant, irrevocable, but the pons and the medulla at the base of the brain—responsible for respiration and heartbeat—would remain intact. At the hospital, an EKG would confirm that the CEO was brain-dead. Then the organ harvesting would begin.

  Prime meat, Smith reflected. A fine destiny for the buccaneer of beef.

  New York

  All great cities, in Belknap’s experience, were surrounded by an industrial wasteland, and New York was no exception. As he drove, he could see, to either side of him, vast tanks of liquid natural gas and redbrick factories, dominating but disused, like the mastodon skeletons of a bygone industrial era. Factories gave way to warehouses in various states of disrepair, and then the looming blocks of abandoned housing projects. Evidence of human habitation gradually became visible: culverts littered with fast-food detritus, pavement sparkling with fragments of green and brown glass, the shrapnel of alcoholism. If you were homeless, you’d be home by now, Belknap thought sourly. He changed lanes abruptly, swung the steering wheel too hard, keeping himself awake by the juddering and slewing of the rented car.

  Andrea Bancroft, who had been half-slumbering beside him, yawned and blinked.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. She did not respond at first. He placed a hand on hers, gently. “You doing okay?”

  “Still a little deafened from the trip over,” she said. They had traveled directly from Larnaca to Kennedy International Airport, but not in an aircraft made for passengers. Instead, they took a DHL jet, a windowless cargo hauler whose pilot Belknap had known for years. They had been, in effect, stowaways. The chartered DC-8 had returned to Tallinn, and he didn’t know what names might have been added to the international watch lists that the commercial airlines were obliged to track. The freighter solved a number of immediate problems. Still, a cargo jet was not designed for passenger comfort. Outside the cockpit, hinged benches were attached to the bulkhead, for backup crews, but the soundproofing, like the heating, was fairly perfunctory.

  “Sorry about the ride,” Belknap said. “It seemed better than the alternatives, though.”

  “I’m not complaining. At least I’m finished vomiting.”

  “Your body was trying to get the fentanyl out of your system.”

  “I’m just sorry you had to see it. Not very romantic.”

  “The bastards could have killed you, or worse.”

  “Right. I must remember to send you a thank-you note. Anyway, now you’ve heard all my secrets. I was running my mouth for a while, wasn’t I?”

  “It passed the time.” His eyes were smiling.

  “I still feel kind of wiped.”

  “Four Duragesic patches. That’s going to pack a punch.”

  “Four, huh.”

  “I told you. Two on your ass, one on your shoulder, one on your inner thigh. All infusing a powerful narcotic into your bloodstream. Plus there’s a nasty bruise on your thigh you should keep an eye on.”

  “Say, how did you get all those patches off me anyway?” She was blushing.

  “How do you think? No nurse matron at hand.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Respiratory depression isn’t a real healthy condition, okay? What was I supposed to do?”

  “I’m not complaining. Christ. I’m grateful.”

  “You’re embarrassed. Which is crazy.”

  “I know it is. I know it is. It’s just a little…further than I usually go on a first date. The stripped-naked part.”

  Belknap kept his eyes trained on the traffic ahead of him and said nothing. After a while he asked, “Still no memory of your abduction?”

  “I remember arriving at Larnaca, I remember checking into the place on Nikolaou Rossou. Then it’s like a black fog. The drugs, I guess. There’s a long period where I can’t remember much at all. Just flashes and glimpses. Maybe I hallucinated this, but I had a memory of you holding me. For hours.”

  He shrugged. “I guess I was scared.”

  “For me?”

  “Which is why you’re bad news, sister. A good agent should be unattached.” He spoke gruffly, but couldn’t avoid a catch-in-the-throat moment of recollection. “Jared always said that.”

  “You think Stavros knew what he was in for?”

  “Hard to say. Stavros was pulling strings, but he was in the grips of his own puppet masters, who were pulling his strings. Rashly, this time.”

  “They feel threatened.”

  “We’ve been trampling on a tripwire,” Belknap said. “The piano was supposed to drop on our heads.”

  “And I’ve been rummaging through the records of the piano factory.”

  He eyes darted to the rearview mirror, keeping tabs on the vehicles around him. Instinct would tell him whether they were being followed. He glanced at a bent-over woman on the roadside with a shopping cart filled with bottles: a plant? No, the real thing, he concluded, with the kind of matted hair that required weeks of neglect. “You told me about what happened at Rosendale. You can’t let it prey on your mind.”

  “Doing what I did—does it change a person?” Her voice was small.

  “It does if you let it.”

  She shuttered her eyes. “When it happened, I felt like I was going to hell. Like I’d crossed a line, gone to a place I could never return from. And somehow, after what happened to me in Larnaca, I don’t exactly feel that way anymore. Because there’s a kind of evil here that doesn’t play by any rules I know about.” She opened her eyes, and there was a glint of defiance in them. “Now I feel I’m going to hell only if they drag me there. And I’ll go kicking and screaming.”

  He looked at her gravely. You killed two people, he thought. Two people who wanted to kill you. Welcome to the club. “You did what you had to do. Nothing more, nothing less,” he said. “They thought you were weak. They were wrong. And thank God for that.”

  They were wounded, he knew, both of them, in ways both deep and invisible. Yet he also knew that to take the time to tend to an injury would slow them down, maybe with fatal consequences. There would be a time for healing, but that time was not now.

  “So what now?” Andrea said
tonelessly. “What are we looking at?”

  “A goddamn spiderweb.” At a concrete cloverleaf, Belknap off-ramped onto I-95 South. “And you know what you find when you come across a great big spiderweb? Somewhere in the vicinity, a big fat spider.” He turned and looked at her closely. There were hollows beneath her eyes, like yellowish bruises. She was exhausted. But he did not see the staring look of fear that some people acquired after a traumatic episode. She had undergone a shattering experience, but had not been shattered by it.

  “You still mad at me for going to Cyprus?” Her hazel eyes glinted in the morning light.

  “Mad and glad. I was there, driving around Stavros’s place, and it was the middle of the day there, and the sun was blazing. And you weren’t there. And, to me, even though it was the middle of the day, it felt like night. There was a kind of darkness to it all.”

  “Darkness at noon,” Andrea mused. Another look of wan amusement. “That could make a good title for a novel, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Never mind. A lame joke. So what’s the plan?”

  “Go back to something you just said. About them being threatened. Because we’re not the real threat. Something else frightens them more. Something or someone. Stavros was scared—but not of me. He was scared of what he thought I represented: Genesis. But also of Senator Bennett Kirk, the Kirk Commission. They were linked in his mind.”

  “Could Genesis be working through the Kirk Commission?” she asked. “I’m just trying to connect the dots.” She shook her head. “Christ. A United States senator in the pocket of a crazed maniac? Now there’s a thought.”

  “I don’t know that Kirk’s in anyone’s pocket, exactly. Like you say, maybe the idea was that Genesis was using him. Working through him. Feeding him stuff, maybe.”

  “Meaning the senator’s a cat’s-paw? But that’s insanity!”

  Belknap shifted lanes and increased speed, simply to see whether any other vehicle followed suit. “Meaning the senator’s a critical player in this. Probably without even realizing it. Because I’ve been thinking of something that Lugner said, too. Something about a grandstanding Midwestern senator. Made me wonder whether Genesis was using the Kirk Commission, that he—or she or it—had somehow enlisted it for his own purposes.”