The Bancroft Strategy

  As the man made his way out, Andrea asked, “What time do you have?”

  “You really want to know how much time you have, isn’t that right?” the man replied. “Not a whole hell of a lot.”

  Belknap had struggled to keep his tone light when he telephoned Andrea’s friend Walter Sachs at the hedge fund for which she used to work. It was crucial not to scare him off. Andrea had trusted him. Belknap would have to as well.

  Belknap had agreed to meet him in the place he suggested, which turned out to be some sort of natural-foods eatery in Greenwich, Connecticut. To judge from the sparse number of customers, its offerings left something to be desired. Taking a seat toward the back, Belknap kept an eye out for a man in a green linen jacket.

  Finally he saw a tall man with a long, rectangular face arrive. His brown-and-gray hair was buzzed short on the sides, almost whitewall-style. He had a cleft chin and a torso that seemed a little undersized for the rest of his body. Belknap gave him a little wave, and he sat down at the chair opposite him. His eyes were slightly reddened and glassy, as if he had been smoking pot, though he didn’t smell that way.

  “I’m Walt,” the man said.

  “Todd,” said Belknap.

  “So,” said Walt Sachs. He wriggled his fingers in the air. “Lot of cloak-and-dagger shit. Sudden meetings with strangers. What’s up with Andrea, anyway?”

  “She’s fine. We’re talking because I know she confided in you a certain amount.” A waitress appeared and set down a plate.

  “Complimentary,” the waitress said. “Specialty of the house. Carob cookies.”

  “What exactly is carob?” Walt asked Belknap. Maybe he was trying to break the ice.

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Belknap said, suppressing his impatience.

  Walt looked up at the waitress. “You know, there’s something I’ve always wondered. What exactly is carob?”

  The waitress, dressed in a T-shirt of unbleached cotton and coarse linen balloon trousers, smiled brightly. “Carob comes from the pod of the carob tree. It’s fat-free, fiber-rich, nonallergenic, high in protein, and oxalic-acid free. And it tastes just like chocolate.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Walt gave her look of piercing incredulity.

  “Similar. Many people prefer it to chocolate.”

  “Name one.”

  “They say it’s nature’s healthiest confection.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “They just do, okay?” The waitress’s smile remained fixed.

  Sachs tapped on one of the slogans printed in fake cursive on the menu. “Says here, ‘To question is to grow.’”

  “Give him a cup of the calming Kava Kava,” Belknap said. His own sense of desperation and panic was welling up, but he could not afford to frighten or alienate the man. He had to appear calm and in control.

  “Actually, I’ll have the Tisane of Tranquility.” Sachs fidgeted an earlobe that had once had a stud and now merely a small puncture scar.

  “Me too,” Belknap told the waitress.

  “So where’s Andrea?” Walt asked again. “I’m guessing I’m not here because your hard disk crashed.”

  “Did you tell anyone where you were going—that you were seeing me?” Belknap asked.

  “The instructions were real clear on that, Todd-man.”

  “That’s a no?”

  “That’s a no. Logic gate: open.”

  Belknap removed the page he’d received from Senator Kirk from his breast pocket, handed it to Sachs without a word.

  The computer tech unfolded the page, waving it in the air. “Clammy!” he said. “Smuggle this out in your ass, did you?”

  Belknap’s murderous gaze bounced off him. “We’re wasting time,” he snapped. “I’m sorry,” he added. “It’s just that there’s…some pressure to this.”

  The computer guy unfolded the page, glanced at it, and said solemnly, “Have a carob cookie.”

  “The source code on the e-mail. Does this tell you anything?”

  “I have a theory that nobody likes carob cookies,” Sachs went on. “Though maybe I’m being a little rash. There are generations yet unborn.”

  “Walt, please focus. Is this a dead end or not?”

  The technicians snorted. “How can I put it? It’s like a blind alley along a dead end in a cul de sac just off another dead end.” He took out a mechanical pencil and circled a string of digits. “Ends don’t come any deader. You know what an anonymous remailer is?”

  “I’ve got the general idea. Broad strokes. Maybe you should tell me more.”

  Walt stared at him for a moment. “E-mail’s a lot like regular mail. You go from one post office to another, maybe stop at a vast mail-sorting complex, then you’re off to your local post office. A typical e-mail probably has about fifteen to twenty rest stops along the way. Everywhere it goes, it leaves a piece of itself, like a crumb, and it picks up a code, like a visa stamp, that says where it’s been. Say you’re in Copenhagen and you’re using your AT&T account to send a message to Stockholm. That e-mail’s going to hop here and hop there, and at some point it’s probably going to pass through Schaumburg, Illinois, before hopping through a bunch of other networks and arriving at your friend’s computer in Sweden. Which could take a few seconds.”

  “Sounds complicated,” said Belknap.

  “But I’m way simplifying. Because that one e-mail isn’t sent as one e-mail. The system tears it into pieces—a bunch of little packets, because to keep things zipping around, everything needs to be the right size for the pipes, the system of routers. Remember, the system has to carry billions of e-mails every day. All of the little packets are assigned a special identification number so they can be sewn back together at the other end. Now, most people aren’t interested in seeing all that header info, so e-mail programs typically don’t display them. But they arrive with the e-mail. You go into source-code view to see them. Then you can run a simple program like traceroute, and it’s like having an itinerary for that message.”

  “How secure is the system?”

  “Using a standard Internet service provider? Hackers like to say that ISP stands for ‘Internet surveillance project.’ This is the least secure form of communication ever: Without encryption, every e-mail is a postcard. You feeling me?” As he spoke, he started to crumble one of the carob cookies into pieces, then crumbled the pieces into smaller pieces. “Then there’s the fact that every computer has a unique digital signature, a unique BIOS identification number, same as every automobile has a one-of-a-kind VIN, a vehicle identification number. So IP address tracing is just the start. There are lots of sniffer programs that automatically scan traffic for certain strings. A lot of trap-and-trace technology that the government doesn’t even make public, and private-sector versions that are even stronger. I mean, say you’re a hotshot coder. Who you gonna work for—the National Security Agency, for a salary in the high five digits? Pu-leeze. Not when recruiters from Cisco or Oracle or Microsoft come around in their Porsches, dangling big bucks, stock options, and free cappuccino.”

  “But what you were saying about system security—”

  “Sniffers, yeah. See, under the hood, e-mail systems all work the same way. SMTP is the messaging algorithm, and POP—post office protocol—is what runs the servers. But with the best anonymous remailers, well, it’s like an invisibility shield.”

  “An invisibility shield,” Belknap repeated. “But all you’re really talking about is a firm that automatically strips out the header data from messages and resends them, right?”

  “Naw, that’s only part of it.” A decisive shake of the head. “A simple dip-and-strip isn’t going to take care of the problem. Because then Big Brother could just monitor your incoming traffic. If it’s just an encryption game, well, that’s the one thing the NSA’s halfway decent at, see? So an effective remailer has to have a whole network in place. If you’re a user, you send with a local program like Mixmaster, something that will scramble your message so that it arrives w
ith a series of time delays. It’s as if you were sending all your vowels seven seconds after you send your consonants, so they arrived as separate clusters. Then another message has the reassembly instructions. That way, you can’t rap-and-trace the incoming. Second thing is, how do you allow for a ‘reply’ function? Anybody can rip the header off a message, like blacking out the return address. Figuring out a return route while keeping it untraceable—that’s the art.”

  “And remailers can do that?”

  “This one can,” Sachs said. Professional admiration had crept into his voice. He tapped on the last string of digits. “This was remailed by Privex, which is one of the very best in the business. A Russian computer scientist set it up a few years back in Dominica. That’s in the eastern Caribbean.”

  “I know where Dominica is,” Belknap said tightly. “It’s a big tax haven.”

  “And served by a big fat fiber-optic undersea cable. The place is wired. Not like here, but you’ll almost never find a remailer based in the United States. Nobody wants to hassle with U.S. crypto regs.”

  “So how do we trace it?” Belknap asked.

  “I just explained,” Sachs said, slightly peeved. “You don’t. You can’t. There’s a giant roadblock called Privex. Privex masks your IP address with its IP address. Beyond that, it’s impossible to see. Strictly no entry.”

  “Oh, come on, Andrea’s told me about the things you can do,” he said in a coaxing voice. “I’m sure you could make headway.”

  “You never told me where she is.” A note of unease entered Sachs’s voice.

  Belknap leaned forward. “You were about to explain to me how you’re going to beat the Privex system.”

  “You want me to say that the tooth fairy is real and Santa Claus wriggles down your fireplace on Christmas Eve? I’d be happy to. It just might be true. I mean, I very much doubt it, but I’m not absolutely and totally and galactically positive. There aren’t a lot of things I’m absolutely and totally and galactically sure about. This, however, is one. Privex has handled millions and millions of communications. And nobody has ever breached its security. Never. Not once. We’d know if they had. And people have tried. They’ve run sophisticated statistical techniques to do traffic monitoring, real fancy algorithmic shit. Forget about it. Privex makes sure that your message is spliced and blended so it’s statistically indistinguishable from all the others. It’s got programmed IP rotation, tunneling services, and major-league dedicated servers. I mean, governments make use of its services, for Chrissakes. They don’t play around.”

  Belknap was silent for a long moment. He wasn’t able to follow the details of Sachs’s explanation. And yet somewhere in his mind was the glimmer of an idea, like a tiny luminescent fish in an underwater cave. “You said Privex was based in Dominica.”

  “The servers are, yeah.”

  “Can’t be hacked.”

  “Nope.”

  “Fine,” Belknap said, after another long pause. “So we break in.”

  “You don’t listen. I just explained to you that there’s no hacking, no cracking, no end runs here. Nobody’s ever hacked a Privex traceroute. It’s a virtual fortress.”

  “Which is why we need to sneak in.”

  “Like I said—”

  “I’m talking about the physical plant. The actual facility.”

  “The physical…” Sachs trailed off, bemused. “I’m not following.”

  Belknap was hardly surprised. The two men inhabited radically different worlds. Belknap lived in a world of real things, real people, real objects; Sachs dwelled in a vortex of flowing electronics, of cascading zeros and ones: It was a world of virtual agents, virtual objects. To find Andrea Bancroft, they would have to join forces. “Privex might be a virtual fortress,” the operative said. “And carob is virtual chocolate. But somewhere in Dominica, there’s a bunker with a lot of whirling magnetized disks, right?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “All right, then.”

  “But it’s not like they’re going to leave the door unlocked, you know, and let you waltz right in.”

  “You never heard of breaking and entering?”

  “Well, sure. That’s what hackers do. They bust through firewalls and pick the virtual locks and siphon off pass codes and install digital-surveillance systems. Happens at every cybercafé.”

  “Don’t play dumb.” It was all Belknap could do not to slap the wobbly little laminate-topped table.

  “Given that I graduated summa cum laude from M.I.T. and I’m still working as a goddamn techie at a Coventry hedge fund, a lot of people would say I’m not just playing,” Sachs snorted.

  “Suppose someone beamed you over to this rugged island nation and into the Privex building itself. Would there be a copy of this e-mail, unstripped, somewhere on the servers or storage facilities?”

  “Depends when it was sent,” Sachs said. “Files older than seventy-two hours would be automatically deleted. That’s the ‘reply’ window. For that set interval, it has to retain a copy of the original in order to process responses. Probably has a multiterabyte storage system.”

  Belknap leaned back in his chair. “You know something, Walt? You’re looking a little pale. You could use a little sun. Maybe you’re spending too much time playing video games. The kind where you get extra lives for every enemy you shoot.”

  “You can’t get any good if you don’t practice,” Walt admitted.

  “The sunny Caribbean is calling to you,” Belknap said.

  “You’re crazy,” Walt said, “if you think for one minute that I’d allow myself to get caught up in something like this. How many national and international laws would you be violating, do you think? Can you count that high, G.I. Joe?”

  “Don’t you want something special to tell the grandkids?” Belknap shot him a sly look. He knew men like Walt Sachs, knew that his protests were partly directed at himself. “I bet there are spreadsheets with corrupted sectors to be attended to back at the office. Keep your head down, Walt, and soon you’ll qualify for the company’s dental policy. Why help save the world when you can get dental?”

  “I bet there aren’t even any direct flights to Dominica.” Walt broke off. “Why am I even talking about this? This is crazy. This I do not need in my life.” He stared at the one surviving gray-brown cookie, neglected on the earthenware plate, dipped a finger in the sandy remains of the other. “Would this be…dangerous?”

  “Be honest with me, Walt,” said the operative. “Are you hoping I say no or are you hoping I say yes?”

  “Doesn’t matter what you say,” the technician sulked, “because I’m not doing it. I’m not even thinking about doing it.”

  “I wish you would. Because I need to find the person who sent that e-mail.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “A lot of reasons.” Belknap stared at the technician hard, and made a decision. “Here’s one,” he went on, struggling to keep his voice level. “I lied when I said Andrea was okay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s not okay. She’s been kidnapped. And this is probably the only way we’ll ever get her back.” The information would either scare the technician off for good or ensure his cooperation. Roll the dice or you’re not in the game.

  “Oh, Christ.” Genuine concern fought with fear and the instinct for self-protection. His already reddened eyes grew redder. “So this is, like, for real.”

  “Walt,” he said. “You have a choice to make. All I can say is that she needs you.”

  “So what’s the story here? You figure this out, you get Andrea back, everything ends up fine?” He picked up the carob cookie with trembling fingers and then returned it to the plate.

  “It all depends,” Belknap said. “Are you in or are you out?”

  Roland McGruder’s fifth-floor walkup on West Forty-fourth Street in New York—a neighborhood that used to be called “Hell’s Kitchen” before the realtors decided that “Clinton” had certain advantages when it came t
o sales—was crowded and untidy, as if in homage to the cramped rooms offstage where he plied his theatrical craft. As he often apologized to friends, it wasn’t as if he were a set designer.

  Given pride of place was his mounted Tony award medallion, Best Makeup for a Theatrical Production. Near it, on a desktop stand, was the signed photograph of Nora “Knock ’Em Dead” Norwood, the finest belter—in his opinion—since Ethel Merman. To my darling Roland, she had penned in her loopy, round handwriting, who makes me look the way I feel. Eternal gratitude! Another was from Elaine Stritch, with an equally effusive message. It was one of the dicta that the old-timers held with: Make friends with the makeup artist, and they’ll always make you look good. A lot of the younger divas, though, could be impossible: imperious, cold, even rude, treating Roland like some guy with a broom. That kind of attitude was why he stopped doing film work.

  There’s no people like show people, as the old song had it. But Roland had worked with other people who were not show people at all. They didn’t leave signed photographs. In fact, they made him sign all sorts of scary-sounding nondisclosure agreements. But they had other ways to indicate their gratitude, not least with payments that were quite lucrative for the little time they asked of him. It had started, years back, when he was asked to give training sessions to a few government spooks, explaining the basic techniques of disguise. Though Roland was discreet, his name had obviously spread in the intelligence community by word of mouth. Every once in a while he’d have an unexpected visitor with peculiar requests and an envelope fat with cash. A few of them were even semiregulars.

  Like the fellow he was helping now. Six feet, regular features, gray eyes. Basically a blank slate as far as Roland was concerned.

  “I can use wax and make a dental appliance that will wrap around the upper gums,” Roland explained. “Good-looking guy like you, it’s such a shame. But it’ll change the contours of the face pretty dramatically. How about blue eyes?”

  The man showed him the passport: HENRY GILES was the name, and it stipulated that the passport bearer had brown eyes. “Stick to that script,” he said.