The Bancroft Strategy

  “I said, What is your problem?” Belknap repeated the meaningless taunt as he tilted his upper body back, his hips slightly forward, a pantomime of haughty indignation. The other man’s combat pistol—a full-sized Beretta Cougar—now pressed against Belknap’s taut stomach. It had an eight-round magazine, Belknap knew, because it stuck out half an inch from the bottom of the grip. The suited man could shoot him at any time. But Belknap had given him no cause—and the nine-millimeter round, aimed at center mass, would probably hit his red-haired comrade.

  A rapidly closing window of relative safety. Now—Belknap swivel-cocked his hip and slammed his forehead down on the other man’s face, smashing the bridge of his nose. Only a thin, spongy layer of cranial bone separated the brain from the nasal cavities, Belknap knew; the hammer-blow force would have been communicated through the ethmoid bone to the dura mater.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” roared the red-haired man as the suited man sagged to the floor. Belknap heard the snick-click of a round being chambered.

  The next three or four seconds would be as crucial as those preceding them. Belknap saw a clear fluid glistening on the fallen man’s upper lip and realized that it was cerebrospinal fluid. Nobody would assume that Belknap was harmless from this point; it was no longer a weapon to seem weaponless. He dropped forward, sprawling across the man at his feet, as if felled by an invisible blow, and grabbed at the Beretta that hung limply from the man’s fingers. As he rolled over, he released the 8045 Cougar magazine from the grip and hid it in his pocket. When he looked up at the red-haired bodybuilder, it was with a Beretta in his hand.

  An impasse: two men with drawn handguns. Belknap rose smoothly to his feet. “A Mexican standoff,” he said.

  A terrified hush had come over the civilians in the lobby; the last six seconds had made it clear that this was no longer a mere disturbance. Men and women began to cower, or freeze in place, obedient to some obscure animal instinct.

  “Do the math and think again,” the snarling operative said.

  Twelve seconds, thirteen seconds, fourteen seconds.

  Belknap glanced at one of the guardsmen who was in his line of vision. “Arrest this man!” he yelled. The operatives were on hand to identify the target; the guardsmen were expected to apprehend. But whom? So long as they were not completely certain, their automatic weapons were useless.

  “You have a point,” Belknap said to the operative. “You got fast reflexes? Here, catch.” He tossed the Cougar at the musclebound operative—who reacted, reflexively, precisely as Belknap anticipated. He lowered his gun hand in order to reach out with his other hand and grab hold of the Beretta. A second-and-a-half window of opportunity. Like a striking cobra, Belknap grabbed the long barrel of the other man’s pistol and wrenched it from his grasp. The pistol—a Glock .357—was now in Belknap’s hand. In the blink of an eye, he tucked his gun inside his combat vest so that it was aimable but concealed.

  The red-haired man blinked. He leveled the Cougar at Belknap with an unsettled look. Belknap had given him his gun, then grabbed his own: It made no sense. The man was smart enough to worry.

  Belknap spoke to him in a low, confiding voice. “Listen to me very carefully. Follow my instructions precisely and you won’t get hurt.”

  “You need glasses?” the operative demanded, waving his gun hand. “You got a death wish, asshole?”

  “That Cougar feel a little light?” Belknap flashed a quick smile.

  The operative’s florid countenance paled a little.

  “You caught up now, or are you waiting for the Monarch Notes? I squeeze my trigger finger right now and a piece of lead goes whizzing through your torso. You can see the muzzle press against the tunic, you can see where it’s aimed. Now, I figure you’ve spent a real long time working on that body of yours. All it takes is a split-second of disappointment on my side and you’re going to be in physical rehabilitation for two, three years. What did you load this morning? Federal Hydra-Shoks—those nasty expanding hollowpoints? Whatever it was, you need to imagine the slug traveling through your body, crushing organs and chewing up nerves.” He kept his voice soft, almost reassuring in tone. “I’m guessing you’d like to protect that physique of yours. You can, too.” He bore in, asserting mastery through his eyes. “Take me in. As far as anybody can see, you’ve got a gun trained at my head, and they’ll guess that you’ve cuffed my hands beneath the tunic, POW-style. Now you’re going to call out, in a loud voice that everyone can hear, that you’ve got me, that you’re in charge of the prisoner. Then you escort me out of the building, side by side.”

  “You’re crazy,” the operative snarled. Yet, tellingly, he did not raise his voice.

  “My advice? If this Glock contains full-jacketed roundpoints, take the hit. You’ll get a nice pension, and with any luck it won’t hit the spinal column or any of the major nerve branches. But if you’ve loaded the pistol with expanding slugs, the kind with high stopping power?” Belknap knew that the man had. “Then you’re going to spend the rest of your life asking yourself why you didn’t do the sensible thing. Decide now. Or I decide for you.”

  The red-haired operative inhaled deeply, shakily. “I’ve got him!” he bellowed to the guardsmen. “The prisoner’s in my custody. Make way!” Another deep breath. From any distance, the fear and nausea on the man’s face would read as impatience. “Goddammit, I said make way!”

  Belknap’s role, in turn, required him to look surrendered and dispirited. It came surprisingly easily.

  The gantlet in front of the building was a blur of shouted commands. Belknap kept his eyes mainly downcast, occasionally glancing around to see the rope strung from sawhorses, the tight-faced guardsmen with rifles raised and aimed at him.

  The red-haired man performed his part well, because all he had to do was to be the professional that he was. The fact that it was over in such a short period of time was what Belknap mainly had going for him. Less than sixty seconds in all. By the time the red-haired operative—Diller was the name someone had called him—had marched him down to the car, the hard part was over.

  Following Belknap’s barked command from the backseat, he simply gunned the motor and drove off before the other armed men could join them. Near Maryland Avenue, as the vehicle stopped at a light, Belknap reached around the driver’s seat and smashed the flat side of the pistol into the other man’s temple, rendering him unconscious. Then he scrambled out at the Metro stop a hundred feet away. Soon others would arrive in pursuit, but the head start he had would suffice. He knew how to disappear. Once he had boarded the Metro, he stepped into the area between cars. Jolted by the movement of the train, taking care to keep his footing, he discarded his tunic, tossing it to the side of the track. Then, using a sharp pocket knife, he sliced off his camouflage trousers as well, taking care to avoid the fabric beneath them and to retain the contains of his pockets.

  The man who had stepped onto the Metro looked like a member of the National Guard, a common sight in mass-transit venues. The man who stepped into the next car was wearing a green T-shirt and nylon track pants, like a jogger—an even commoner sight.

  As the train hurtled down its subterranean tracks, Belknap felt the folded sheet of paper he’d secreted in his right pocket.

  Genesis. You can run, he thought. Let’s see if you can hide.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Answer the phone, Belknap silently implored, not for the first time. Please answer the phone. The cord between them was a delicate one. She had his cell number; he had hers. But he was most of the way to Philadelphia already. They would have to choose a safe place for a rendezvous. Consular Operations would not rest until he was apprehended.

  Answer the phone!

  He had so much to tell her. As he drove north on Route 95, his mind kept returning to his harrowing escape from the Hart Senate Office Building. He was not surprised to hear a report on the local radio news that the government had conducted “security exercises” at some federal buildings and was currentl
y analyzing vulnerabilities. “Some tourists and visitors to the Senate offices were taken aback when they were caught up in a surprise rehearsal conducted by a joint unit of the Army National Guard and the Secret Service,” the newscaster noted sunnily, adding, with a chuckle, “You might say they were ‘caught off-guard.’” Just one of thousands of official lies, Belknap mused, cheerfully accepted and regurgitated by an increasingly supine Fourth Estate.

  He pulled the car over to a rest stop and speed-dialed her phone again. Finally, the rhythmic electronic purring ceased; there was a click, and he detected the sound of an open line. “Andrea!” he said, the words rushing from him. “I’ve been so worried!”

  “No need to worry.” A strange voice—a man’s—was on the other end.

  Belknap felt as if he had swallowed ice. “Who is this?”

  “We’re Andrea’s caretakers.” The accent was strangely indeterminate; not American or English, but not identifiably foreign, either.

  “What have you done to her, goddammit?”

  “Nothing. Yet.”

  Not again! His nerve endings were shrieking at him.

  How had they found her? Nobody had followed them: He was certain of it. Nobody had even tried…

  Because they didn’t need to.

  He flashed back to the puzzling bruise on Andrea’s thigh, the hard red hematoma, the puncture wound, and he cursed his failure to think it through. Her captors would have been too skillful to have injected her there, however much she struggled; nor would they have needed a large-bore needle to inject a liquid.

  The explanation should have been obvious. They had implanted something inside the deep fascia of the thigh. A transponder, probably capsule-sized. In effect, a miniaturized homing device.

  “Talk to me!” Belknap implored. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’ve been careless. Genesis has decided that it was time to assume custody. You’ve been in the way, you see. As she has been.”

  “Tell me she’s alive!”

  “She is alive. She’ll soon wish she weren’t. We’ll need a few days to be sure we’ve learned everything we need from her.”

  Another voice in the background. “Todd! Todd!” A woman’s voice, high-pitched with terror.

  Andrea’s.

  Suddenly the screams were cut off.

  “If you lay a hand on her, so help me God,” Belknap rumbled, “I will—”

  “Enough with your empty threats. You’ll never find Genesis. So you’ll never find her. I suggest you go to some quiet place and meditate upon your own arrogance. A gravesite on the banks of the Anacostia River, perhaps. No doubt you’re feeling unlucky in love. But remember, Mr. Belknap, a man creates his own luck.”

  “Who are you people?” Belknap felt as if a balloon had been inflated in his chest. He struggled for breath. “What do you want?”

  A dry, toneless laugh. “To teach the Hound to heel.”

  “What?”

  “We may be in touch with further instructions.”

  “Listen to me,” Belknap said, breathing heavily. “I will find you. I will hunt you down. You will be accountable for everything you do. Know this.”

  “More empty threats from a three-legged mutt. You still don’t understand. It’s Genesis’s world. You just live in it.” A beat. “For the moment, anyway.”

  With that, Andrea’s captor clicked off.

  Andrea opened her eyes and stared out at whiteness. Her head pounded. Her mouth was dry. Her eyes were sticky.

  Where was she?

  Whiteness was all she could see. After a few long moments, the whiteness came to seem less ethereal and cloudlike, more like the surfaces of something real and hard and unyielding. Where was she?

  She had been in Washington, had been walking down the block to a local newspaper-and-coffee place when…and now? She tried to inventory her surroundings.

  A ceiling of white, with recessed fluorescent lights that shed a uniform penumbra of a cold-white glow. The floor: four feet beneath the bed—a hospital-style cot, it seemed—where she had slept a drugged sleep. She wanted to get out of bed, but how? Laboriously, she mentally rehearsed and then performed the complex series of movements that the maneuver required: the shifting, the rotating, the extension of the legs. An act performed every day without thinking now felt like a delicate and demanding operation. She remembered getting riding lessons as a little girl, learning how to dismount a horse, the easy fluid motion starting out as half a dozen commands. Brain damage? More likely evidence that the sedation had not fully dissipated. She felt exhausted. She wanted to give up.

  She would not give up.

  Once she had gotten out of bed, she knelt down and inspected the floor. She was wearing a hospital johnny, was barefoot, could feel the floorboards beneath her toes. The floor was constructed of wooden planks, but immensely thick, like a ship’s hull, and layered with a hard white coating. She banged the floor with her heel and made almost no sound: Concrete probably lay beneath the lumber. The walls, when she examined them, seemed constructed of similar material and were covered with a similar white substance. It resembled the sort of epoxy paint that was used for ships and factory floors, and formed a dense, unchippable surface. She would have had a hard time gouging it with a screwdriver. All she had were her fingernails.

  Get ahold of yourself, Andrea. There was a locked door, hinged on the outside, with a small shuttered window at the top. Near it was another ceiling-mounted lighting fixture—a simple fluorescent circle, ensuring that the entire room was drenched in light. A security measure, or a method of psychological intimidation as well?

  Where had they taken her?

  The room was about twenty feet by twenty, with a small adjoining alcove that contained an old-style bathtub of enameled cast iron and a stainless-steel commode of a kind she had seen in movies set in prisons. She scrutinized the cot. A simple frame, fashioned of tubular steel. Braked casters. Several holes designed, it was clear, for IV poles. It was hospital-issue, then.

  Then she heard a noise at the door: the sliding of its narrow window hatch. A man’s eyes at the slatlike opening. She watched as the door opened, saw how the guard held the key turned in the keyhole as he pushed up on the stainless-steel lever knob, saw the simple redbrick wall of the hallway outside her cell. Every little detail could be valuable, she told herself.

  Once he had stepped inside and released them, the level knob returned to the horizontal position with a spring-loaded thunk. She didn’t know much about locks, but she could tell it was a high-security device: Even if a prisoner had somehow smuggled a lock-pick inside, the door would not open without simultaneous pressure on the lever knob. Both had to be pushed away from their default positions with active pressure against the vector of the springs.

  The guard had pale skin, a pug nose, a weak, dimpled, chin, and wide-spaced pale-green eyes that seemed never to blink and made Andrea think of a pike. He was dressed in olive-drab khaki with a thick military-style belt.

  “Stand at the rear wall,” he commanded, with a hand on a black plastic device—some sort of stun gun, it seemed. He sounded like a Southerner who had spent much of his life in the North.

  Andrea did as she was instructed, standing at the wall opposite the door. The guard quickly glanced beneath the cot, then entered the bathroom and gave it a thorough inspection.

  “All right,” he said, finally. “There’s not a chance in hell you can break out of here, so do us both a favor and don’t trash the place.”

  “Where am I? And who are you?” Andrea spoke for the first time. Her voice was stronger, steadier, than she had thought it would be.

  The guard just shook his head, scorn and amusement in his eyes.

  “Do I get a change of clothing?”

  “That’s probably okay,” he said. He was not in command, then; there were others whose orders he was following. “Though, really, what’s the point?”

  “Because you’re going to let me go in a day or so?” She tried to catch
a glimpse of his wristwatch.

  “Sure. One way or the other.” The guard looked amused. “I suggest you make peace with your God all the same, ma’am.”

  “Please,” she said, “tell me your name.” If she could establish some human contact with the guard, she might be able to learn more from him, to get him to see her as more than just a parcel.

  “Ma’am, this ain’t no church social,” the man said, his pike eyes staring. “I’ll give you that for nothing.”

  Andrea now sat on the bed, clenching the blanket with one hand.

  “Sorry about the quality of the bedding,” the guard volunteered. “Ballistic nylon, heavy canvas on the outer seams—it’s called a suicide blanket. All we had around.”

  “Where you from? Originally, I mean?” Another foray. She could not let herself be discouraged.

  A slow smile appeared on the guard’s face. “I know what you’re trying to do. I may be a Southerner, but it don’t mean I’m stupid. One of us will be back with chow in a couple of hours.”

  “Please—”

  “Shut your pie hole.” A slow polite smile as he removed his cap. “Ma’am, it’s only the sheerest professionalism that stops me from raping you within an inch of your life and maybe an inch or so beyond.” He put his cap back on. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”