The Bancroft Strategy

  “It’s the destination point on the traceroute, sure.”

  “First, I want Senator Kirk to send a message from his private e-mail address.”

  “You mean, you want me to send a message as Senator Kirk.”

  “That’s it. Say you’ll be using a masking system to preserve confidentiality on your end.”

  “I can use an opaquing VPM system.”

  “Fine. Say it’s urgent that they set up a chatroom in ninety minutes. Ask why someone named Todd Belknap came to ask questions about Genesis.”

  “I get it,” Walt said over the phone. “You’re trying to keep Genesis online, so to speak. You want him at the actual machine, right? In meat space.”

  “Meat space, did you say?”

  “Yeah,” Sachs grunted. “It’s what they used to call the real world.” He paused. “You think this will actually work?”

  “I don’t know if it will work. All I know is that it has to work.”

  “You know what they say, buddy. Hope is not a plan.”

  “That’s true,” Belknap returned in a hollow voice. “But it’s the only plan we’ve got.”

  Midtown Manhattan

  Mr. Smith was puzzled and, though he prided himself on keeping an even keel, even a little irritated. The instructions had arrived on his PDA in unusually bare-bones form. Normally he got a complete profile of the target. This time, the directive contained merely a location and a handful of visual specs.

  Did they no longer trust him to use his best judgment on assignments? Had his controller changed, the result of some personnel shakeup he hadn’t heard about yet? Was there to be a permanent change in procedures?

  No matter. He sat at the outdoor café in Bryant Park and took another sip of his cappuccino. He would complete the assignment first and voice his misgivings later. He was a professional, after all.

  Sit at the table closest to the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, he had been instructed. The target would appear at the low stone ridge that ran across the park, separating the concession area from the back lot of the New York Public Library. He was to use the pen.

  The man appeared at the appointed time, six feet tall, lean, sandy-haired—just as described.

  Mr. Smith decided to get a closer look at his target, and he ambled toward the stone ridge with a genially distracted air. The target looked up at him.

  Mr. Smith blinked. The man was no stranger.

  On the contrary.

  “Why, Mr. Jones,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “My dear Mr. Smith,” said his sandy-haired colleague. “Does this mean we’ve been given overlapping assignments?”

  Mr. Smith hesitated for a moment. “It’s the damnedest thing. The truth is, you’re my assignment.”

  “I am?” Mr. Jones seemed surprised. But not very surprised.

  “I must assume so. I wasn’t given a name. But yes, you match all the assignment indices.” His target, he knew, was someone whose identity had been revealed to the Kirk Commission. How the slipup had happened was unclear. Some error on Mr. Jones’s part? In any event, security dictated the elimination of an asset who had been “burned,” exposed.

  “You know what’s just as strange,” said Mr. Jones. “You match all my assignment indices. Simply a matter of a compromised identity, I’m told, but you know the security protocol.”

  “It’s quite possibly a mix-up, don’t you think?” Mr. Smith shook his head amiably.

  “Some desk jockey accidentally types the name of the operative in the blank meant for the name of the target,” said the man with sandy hair. “And there you go. Quite possibly nothing more than a simple clerical error.”

  Mr. Smith had to agree, it was a possibility. But given the high level of operational security and oversight, surely not a probability. And he was a professional.

  “Well, my friend,” said Mr. Smith. “We’ll get to the bottom of this together. Let me show you the message I got on my Treo.” He placed a hand in his breast pocket, but what he pulled out was an object that resembled a steel-barreled pen. He clicked on one end and a tiny dart shot out.

  Mr. Jones looked down. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said, pulling out the spent dart from his chest and handing it to Mr. Smith. “That’s chironex venom, I assume.”

  “Afraid so,” said Mr. Smith. “I am sorry. You shouldn’t experience any symptoms for another few minutes, I’d say. But as you know, it’s irreversible. Nothing to be done once it’s in your bloodstream.”

  “Darn,” Mr. Jones said in the tone of mild annoyance usually provoked by hangnails.

  “You’re being awfully dignified about this,” said Mr. Smith. He was feeling almost sentimental. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Please believe me.”

  “I do believe you,” said Mr. Jones. “Because I’m sorry, too.”

  “You’re…sorry.” Mr. Smith was suddenly aware that he had been sweating profusely for a few minutes, and he was not given to perspiration. The outdoor light was beginning to hurt his eyes, as if his pupils were dilated. And then there was a growing sense of vertigo. All were symptoms of an anticholinergic reaction, characteristic of many poisons. “The cappuccino?” He choked out the words.

  Mr. Jones nodded. “Do you think me a rule stickler? I am sorry.”

  “I don’t suppose…”

  “No antidote, either. It’s a methylated derivative of ciguatera toxin.”

  “The one we used in Kalmikiya last year?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Believe me, if they somehow kept you alive, you’d wish they hadn’t. It ravages the nervous system permanently. You’d be a twitching, spasmodic imbecile on a ventilator. No kind of life, really.”

  “Well, then.” Mr. Smith was experiencing flashes of hot and cold, as if alternately blasted with fire and encased in ice. As for Mr. Jones, he noticed that his face was turning gray, the first sign of a diffused accelerated necrosis.

  “It’s weirdly intimate, isn’t it?” Mr. Jones said, reaching over to the railing in order to steady himself.

  “Being each other’s murderers?”

  “Well, yes. Not the word I would have chosen, of course.”

  “We need a thesaurus,” said Mr. Smith. “Or…what’s another word for ‘thesaurus’?”

  “Perhaps we’re both the victims of a practical joke,” said Mr. Jones. “Though I don’t quite see the humor in it. Truth is…I don’t feel so good.” Mr. Jones slid to the ground. His eyelids started to flutter and twitch uncontrollably. His extremities were beginning to jump and jerk in cascades of convulsions.

  Mr. Smith joined him on the paving stone. “That makes two of us,” he wheezed. The light no longer bothered him, and for a moment he wondered whether he was starting to recover. But that wasn’t it. The light wasn’t bothering him because he was shrouded in darkness. He could smell nothing, could feel nothing, could hear nothing. Nothing at all.

  There was only a sense of absence. And then there was no sense of anything at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Katonah, New York

  Belknap pulled over at a distance from the drive to the Bancroft Foundation, climbed over a stone wall, and made his way toward the headquarters in the dim light of early evening. It was like encountering a camouflaged jumbo jet in the forest: At first he saw nothing, and then he saw something so large he wondered how he could ever have missed it. It was after hours on a Sunday. Officially the place was no doubt uninhabited. But he couldn’t assume that. And where was Andrea? Was she somehow being held captive on these very grounds?

  On the side of the drive, by an ancient linden tree about thirty yards from the office building, he crouched down, checked his watch, and then opened the wireless notebook-sized PC that the computer scientist had given him. Following Sachs’s instructions, he keyed his way into the chatroom, a virtual space for real-time communication. Sachs had done what he’d asked him to do; and Genesis, prodded
by what appeared to be a senatorial request, had agreed to communicate in the chatroom, albeit via an opaquing system. Now it was the appointed time. The wireless computer seemed sluggish, but it did its job.

  “Questions have arisen about your relation with Bancroft,” Belknap typed.

  A quiet ping, and a string of words appeared in a box underneath.

  Your job, Senator, is to “identify the rot and remove it,” in your words. I can only point you in the right direction.

  Belknap typed “I must know whether your information is tainted by the method by which you acquired it.”

  A rejoinder appeared seconds later.

  The “fruit of the poisoned tree” is a legal doctrine. The evidence I have supplied you is for you to use to guide your investigations. You must prepare your own evidentiary exhibitions.

  “But what is your interest in this?” Belknap typed, and then scrambled further down the drive.

  My interest is in bringing a monstrous conspiracy to an end. Only you have the ability to stop it.

  Another sprint, and then he typed: “Yet your name inspires terror across the world.”

  My name, yes. But then my renown resides in the fact that I do not exist.

  Belknap’s heart began to thud as he approached the main door of the foundation’s headquarters, still carrying the wireless notebook. He peered through the door’s leaded glass. It was unlocked, and as he entered the darkened, empty entrance hall he smelled lemon oil and old wood. He also grew aware of music, playing softly. String instruments, an organ, voices—something baroque. He typed and transmitted another question, and then crept silently in the direction of the music. The perfectly mitered floorboards did not squeak or groan beneath the Persian runners. The door was ajar to the small office from where the music was emanating. He saw the back of a high chair, silhouetted by the glow of a larger computer screen.

  Belknap could almost imagine that his pounding heart was audible throughout the mansion.

  A soft tap-tap-tap of keys, and, on Belknap’s own computer a few seconds later, another line of script appeared.

  The commonweal can only be served one at a time. For each is as precious as all.

  The hairs on Belknap’s nape stood up. He was in this room with Genesis.

  The mastermind—the puppet master—was seated just twenty feet away from him.

  From a CD player on a bookshelf, recorders piped, then a rich mezzo sang sad liturgical music. Bach, Belknap decided. One of the masses? Dimly he associated it with an Easter service he had attended, and the name came to him. “St. Matthew’s Passion.” He put the computer aside and pulled a handgun soundlessly from his jacket.

  Finally Belknap spoke. “They say that everyone who sees you dies.” He trained a gun at the back of the tall office chair. “I’d like to test that hypothesis.”

  “That’s kids’ stuff,” replied Genesis. The voice was—not that of a man. “Fairy tales. You’re too old for that.” The person in the chair slowly revolved to face him.

  It was a boy. Straw-colored hair that formed a heap of curls, apple cheeks. He was slender in his T-shirt and shorts, his legs and arms almost hairless.

  A boy. Twelve, thirteen?

  “You’re Genesis?” Belknap’s voice was hushed in astonishment.

  The boy smiled. “Don’t tell my dad. I mean it.”

  “You’re Genesis.” A statement this time. The room seemed to spin slowly, like a platform at an amusement park.

  “Genesis is my avatar, yeah.” His voice was not a child’s soprano, but it wasn’t an adult’s baritone, either. “I’m guessing you’re Todd Belknap.”

  Belknap nodded, speechless. He grew aware of his slack jaw, struggled to remember to breathe.

  “Call me Brandon.”

  Brandon Bancroft. Not the father. The son.

  “Want some Sprite?” the boy asked. “No? I was gonna have some.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Where do you want to touch down?” Andrea heard the man’s voice in her headphones; the chopper noise made it hard to communicate otherwise. “You got several helipads to pick from. House? Office?”

  “House,” Andrea said. She was going to confront her cousin face-to-face, and confront him where he lived.

  The wash of the helicopter’s downdraft flattened the grass below and puffed at the leafy trees that encircled the landing site. As soon as she felt the bump of the steel skids against the earth, she clambered out of the craft and, as the nameless man flew off, broke into a trot, bounding down a bosky path, treating a stone wall like a vaulting horse, hurtling through a grove of trees, and then racing up to Paul Bancroft’s house. The smell of old wood and old rugs was as she remembered it. The door was open, and she raced up the stairs. A room that was obviously his study was empty. In his bedroom she saw an unmade bed. As if he had turned in for the evening and then been summoned. All she knew was that he wasn’t home.

  “Where’s Andrea?” Force returned to Belknap’s voice as he fought to regain his focus.

  “I thought you were going to be Andrea. She should be here in a moment. She’s great, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Belknap said. Once more, the room seemed to spin slowly.

  “You look kinda pale. Sure you don’t want that Sprite?”

  “I’m good.”

  Brandon nodded. “That’s what I hear.” He looked down shyly. “They were gonna do bad stuff to Andrea. But one of my guys on the inside figured out where she was. Got her on a copter. She wanted to come here.”

  Andrea—safe? Yet could he trust the message or, indeed, the messenger? Apprehension and elation cycled through him.

  “You like Bach?” the boy asked.

  “I like this,” Belknap said.

  “I like a lot of music. But this one always gets me.” The boy turned back to the keyboard, started typing a series of instructions. Belknap could see the boy’s shoulder blades moving against the thin cotton of his shirt. “Chapters twenty-six and twenty-seven of the Book of Matthew.” He touched a button on a remote controller, and the music was muted. The boy recited, “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  Belknap gave him an uncertain look.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not like I’ve got a messiah complex,” Brandon said. “When Jesus grew up, he learned that his father was God. I learned that my father plays God. There’s a difference, huh?”

  “God or the devil. Hard to say.”

  “Is it?” Brandon met his gaze. “They say the most diabolical thing the devil ever did was to persuade people that he doesn’t exist,” he said. “If you’re facing off with the devil, you gotta turn that principle upside-down.”

  “Persuade people that a fictional creation is real,” Belknap said, clarity starting to arrive. “And those stories—they were just a way to magnify your authority as Genesis, weren’t they?”

  “Well, sure. Have you ever played multiuser computer games? You can create an avatar, a fictional alter ego, give him a path through the world. You know something about it now, don’t you? I mean, that was you spoofing Senator K., right? Thought so.”

  So Genesis was an electronic legend, nothing more, nothing less. With comprehension came awe. A legend dressed up with stories, rumors, tales that spread over the Internet and then from person to person. “But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?” Belknap prodded, thinking aloud. “As Genesis, you could transfer money from one account to another. You could hire people who never saw you, could send instructions, monitor, reward. You could do a great deal. But to what end?”

  Brandon was quiet for a few moments. “I love my dad. I mean, he’s my dad, right?”

  “But he’s not only your dad.”

  Branded nodded miserably. “He created something that’s bigger than just him. Something…evil.” He whispered the last word.

  “You father believes that the greatest good for the greatest number
justifies any act at all,” Belknap said.

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you believe?”

  “That every life is sacred. Not like I’m some pacifist or whatever. It’s one thing to kill in self-defense. But you don’t take lives on spec. You don’t justify murder with a calculator.”

  “So you spent months orchestrating events through underlings who had never seen your face, transferring funds, sending orders, monitoring the results—all remotely, digitally, untraceably. All in order to dismantle the Theta Group?”

  “A multibillion-dollar operation.”

  “Inver Brass squared,” Belknap said. “‘Genesis’ was a name you knew would inspire fear in your old man. And the Kirk Commission was your opportunity. It was going to help you enlist the authority of the United States government to uproot Theta. You’ve been collecting data files on its operations and parceling them out to the Senate investigators.”

  “I couldn’t think of any other way,” the boy said. He had, Belknap thought, a curious combination of self-assurance and fragility. “Oh, don’t take this personally, but could you ditch the gun? I have a thing about having those doodads pointed at me. Kooky, huh?”

  Belknap had forgotten the gun was in his hand. “Sorry,” he said. “Bad manners.” He set the weapon down on the semicircular table by the door and took a few steps further into the room. “Does your father know how you feel about Theta?”

  “He doesn’t like me reading Kant, let alone the Bible. He knows we disagree, but, like, he isn’t moved by arguments. It’s tough to explain. I told you, I love my dad, Mr. Belknap. But…” Brandon faltered.

  “You felt you had to stop him.” Belknap’s voice softened. “Nobody else was in a position to. So it’s as if you’ve been playing online chess with your father.”

  “It’s not chess when the pawns are human lives.”