The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  “Another one?” Tracy asked, crestfallen.

  The man from the communications center handed a sheet to Paul Bancroft. To the others, he said, “The guys downstairs take this seriously.”

  Bancroft looked at the sheet briefly, his eyes widening. Wordlessly, he passed the sheet to Collingwood.

  “I don’t like this,” Collingwood said softly, his anxiety undisguised. “What do you think, Paul?”

  The philosopher had a look of intense focus. A stranger would take him to be reflective rather than fearful; the others knew that was his way in the face of crisis.

  “Well, my friends, it would appear that we have larger worries to contend with,” Bancroft said at last. “Genesis is escalating the threat level.”

  “We’ll follow the relocation protocol,” said Collingwood, studying the communication. “Suspend the operation here for the moment, shift over to one of the other facilities. Maybe the one near Butler, Pennsylvania. We can do it seamlessly, overnight.”

  “I hate the idea that we’re running scared, though,” said Liebman.

  “We’re in this for the long haul, Herm,” said Bancroft. “Short-term inconveniences for the sake of long-term security are of no great moment.”

  “Yet why is this happening now?” Liebman asked.

  “With the Ansari network under our belts,” Burgess told the elderly analyst, “there will be absolutely no stopping us. We’re just at a time of transition. Which means a time of vulnerability. We ride this out, and we’ll be unconquerable.”

  “The world will be our terrarium,” Collingwood put in.

  Liebman still sounded fretful. “But to let Genesis…”

  “Inver Brass perished the first time because of overreaching.” Bancroft’s voice was mesmerizing in its intensity. He had regained his air of mastery and command. “Genesis will do it again. We just need to make it through the next few days. Genesis will be destroyed.”

  Liebman looked less sanguine. “Or we will be.”

  “Have you become a doubter, like Thomas in the Garden of Gethsemane? Have I lost your confidence?” Bancroft’s face was unreadable.

  “You’ve never been wrong about the big things,” said Liebman, stung.

  “You’re kind to say so,” Bancroft replied icily.

  Though Liebman hesitated to speak again, his decades of loyalty and friendship compelled him to address the great man with candor. He cleared his throat. “But, Paul,” he said, “there’s always a first time.”

  When the elevator pinged at the eleventh floor, Belknap stepped out, maintaining the slightly blasé look of the overtired air traveler for whatever cameras might have been installed in the car. Estotek was on the floor below; the eleventh was given over to CeMine. As Gennady had explained, CeMine was a pharmaceutical startup specializing in “bio-marker” research; the aim was to develop bioassays—simple blood tests—that could replace surgical biopsies for certain kinds of cancers. The company boasted that it was based on “strategic cooperation among industry, academia, and government.” Many partners, many pockets.

  It was one of three small offices on the floor; Belknap chose it because its work was least sensitive, from the point of view of confidentiality, and therefore would have the lowest level of security. All that stood between him and the CeMine offices was a steel-clad door with a narrow slate of steel-mesh reinforced glass.

  After making sure that there was no security camera in the hallway, Belknap moved a narrow tension wrench into the keyway of the latch knob, pushing from the far end in order to maximize sensitivity. Then he thrust the rake pick into the keyway and worked back, dragging the pick so that it pushed against all the tumblers. No go. As he feared, it was a double-sided lock. After he raked the top tumblers, he reversed the pick and raked those on the bottom. Only after another several minutes of intense, agonizing concentration did the latch retract and the door swing open.

  No alarms. As he anticipated, the offices, which housed the company’s finance and legal department, relied upon the building’s security. Break-ins were rare in such settings. Ordinary precautions would suffice.

  Belknap closed the door behind him. The office suite was dimly lit from fluorescent strips inset along the inner walls, the emergency lighting that building codes around the world required. He let his eyes adjust and walked through the space carefully, flashing a penlight around. The workplaces were mainly open-plan, save for a few enclosed offices at the windows. The carpeting was gray with a large diamond pattern. After a few minutes of inspection, he chose an area where a computer and telephone console was plugged into the floor. As with most office buildings constructed in the past decade or so, the subflooring held a weave of optical and coaxial cables. What were called carpet tiles, usually about two feet by two, were now commonplace, and he was not surprised to find them here; the floor panels could be lifted up for easy access to the wiring below. He lay on the floor and lifted up the carpet tile adjacent to the plug cluster. Flanging the tiles from below was a steel grid, and beneath the steel grid was the wiring. But how many feet of space was there between floors? Removing a crowbar from his Gladstone bag, he began prying up tiles, swiftly, quietly.

  Then he pushed down a small fiber-optic camera. On the other end, it plugged into a digital camera, and displayed a flickering image on the flat-screen viewfinder. The snake camera, which produced a standard RCA output, was a mere quarter-inch in diameter and had a sixty-degree field of vision. It was four yards of black-clad cable attached to a small black case of electronics, where a small endocoupler converted the light from thousands of tiny fibers into a unified image. A small xenon light in the terminal cuff provided illumination as the snake cam made its way beneath the “floating” floor. He pushed the wire further and further, snaking around obstacles, until it ran into a white irregular surface. The acoustic tiles of the ceiling below.

  Now he pressed a trigger on the side of the terminal knob; a hollow trocar of hardened steel extended out from the same cuff that bore the miniature fiber-optic viewer and began to spin. It was like drilling with a pin. Eventually he maneuvered the head of the remote camera until it protruded through the just-bored hole.

  At first, an irritating moiré pattern obscured the image; Belknap adjusted the controls until the Estotek floor came into sharper focus. The image was of a generic-looking office: rectangular desks, black chairs with oval seats and backs, the usual collection of printers, desktop computers, telephone consoles, in/out boxes. He adjusted the snake cam again, moving the head one way and then another until he brought into focus what he was looking for.

  Recessed contact switches, unobtrusive and visible only to a trained eye, mounted in the top of the main door frames. Infrared motion detectors: small plastic boxes placed in high-traffic areas—walkways between cubicle clusters, along a long row of windows. The motion detectors would have been activated once the office closed for the evening, and they presented his most immediate challenge.

  Belknap recognized the model. They were passive devices, designed to detect changes in temperature. When an infrared-emitting body entered the protected space, the devices would sense it and a flow of electricity within the device would be interrupted, activating the alarm.

  He peered again at them. Again, they looked almost like light switches; nothing that would detain a casual glance. A fresnel lens focused infrared radiation through a special filter. The sensor had had two reception elements, which enabled it to correct for signals caused by sunlight, vibration, or ambient temperature changes. Those conditions would affect the two pyroelectric elements simultaneously; a moving body would activate one sensor and then the other in rapid succession.

  There was virtually no way that Belknap could descend without triggering the alarm. He would not attempt to.

  Belknap busied himself removing the sixteen screws holding together the steel flanges that formed a section of the sturdy floor-supporting grid. Finally, he was able to lift up a two-meter L of steel, exposing a reticulat
ed lay of fine wiring, like a beaded curtain. The requirements of versatility also made for porosity. Soon a jumble of carpet tiles, flanged bars, and steel pedestal assemblies formed a small heap.

  With a few crude nips of a wirecutter, Belknap made a space, then lowered his Gladstone bag down it until it caught a few feet below the floor. Next, Belknap himself wriggled through the wiring, then scuttled around the airflow ductwork and the rigid piping that fed the sprinkler system. In the crawlspace beneath the subflooring he groped around, with just his small penlight to light the way, until he was inches above the ceiling tiles of the floor below, holding on to electrical cables to support his weight. Gently, he lowered himself onto the reverse side of the ceiling panels, spreading his body out on the thin metal frames—an array of T-beams, cross-tees, and suspension wires—in order to diffuse the downward pressure. The ceiling was designed to support a man’s weight, since repairmen occasionally had to do work here. By contrast, the drop-in panels were of mineral fiber designed to absorb sound, not force. If he tried to stand up, he would fall through.

  Now he reached down and partially unseated a meter-square panel from its frame—one of Estotek’s ceiling panels—and opened his leather case. The next phase of the infiltration would be performed by rodents. He withdrew a squirming canvas bag from his leather case, high-pitched squeaks and grunts growing audible as he opened the drawstring top. Now he tipped the bag over. Its contents—four white rats—slipped through the opening left by the unseated drop panel and fell to the floor nine feet below. Then he reseated the panel and maintained a vigil through the tiny snake cam.

  On the small camera screen, he watched the vermin racing around the floor, bewildered and disoriented. Then he directed the camera lens toward the nearest motion detector. The soft green light beneath the square fresnel lens had turned red.

  The alarm had been triggered.

  Belknap’s eyes darted between his watch dial and the small digital viewfinder. Forty-five seconds elapsed before anything happened. Then a man in a brown Estotek uniform appeared with a small pistol in one hand, a large flashlight in the other. He peered around, and a long moment passed before a squeak and a flash of fur caught his attention. Cause and effect. First, the motion detector goes off; then a rat appears—and now a second rat flashing into view. The guard issued what was obviously a curse, though not in a language Belknap could understand. He recalled having heard that Estonian was unusually well supplied with expletives. The rats had been fed nothing in the past few hours save chocolate-coated coffee beans: They were caffeinated, even more energetic than usual. As lab specimens, they lacked the skills and instinct at concealment that their feral cousins would have mastered.

  Another rat skittered into view; fecklessly, the guard leaped toward it with his thick-soled boots, trying to stomp on it. Belknap was reminded of children who tried to kick the pigeons on a city sidewalk: so close and yet so elusive.

  The next part would require exquisite timing. Withdrawing the remaining rat from the tightly cinched canvas sack, Belknap lifted a corner of a ceiling panel and stuck its head through. Obligingly, it squeaked madly. Snipping off a piece of fiber-optic filament, Belknap knotted a length of it to one of the rat’s hind legs. He then pushed a few inches of the squirming creature through the small crevice. It clawed the air wildly. Belknap pinched its tail hard to make it squeak.

  Now the guard whirled around, saw the creature’s small darting head protruding from a loose ceiling tile. A false dawn of comprehension showed on the Estonian’s gray, fleshy face: Vermin—perhaps specimens being held by the medical science company on the floor above—had escaped through the ceiling.

  “Kurat! Ema keppija! Kuradi munn!” A flurry of unintelligible imprecations: What couldn’t be missed was the frustration and annoyance in the guard’s voice. But not, however, alarm or anxiety. It was a pest-control problem, not a security breach, the Estonian had decided. He disappeared for a couple of minutes and then returned. Belknap knew the standard security protocols well, and if they were being followed, the guard had gone to cancel any central notification. It was a customary two-stage arrangement when live guards were deployed in combination with electronic sensors. The alarm first notified just the guard, who had perhaps four minutes to investigate its cause. If he deemed it an unwarranted alarm—and 90 percent of all such alarms were unwarranted—he would stop the notification from advancing any further. If he failed to do so, the alarm would then be relayed to a remote location. The guard had responded as a well-trained professional should have. He had identified the cause of the false alarm, had temporarily disabled the sensors in the sector, would maintain his own vigil. The appearance of vermin did not constitute a security concern. Exterminators could be called in the morning.

  Belknap also knew, now, that only one guard had been stationed there. Had there been a second, the man would assuredly have summoned him, if only to gawk at the spectacle, a reprieve from the tedium of the posting.

  The guard was now directly beneath him. He looked like another victim of the Estonian national cuisine. Yet he moved with surprising agility. For a few seconds he stared at the wildly scrabbling rodent. He started leaping up at it, batting at it—inches away from Belknap, who now pushed up the ceiling panel and, clenching a heavy wrench in his right hand, prepared himself for a sudden strike. It happened as if in slow motion. There was a long second in which the guard, having propelled himself into the air, saw the entire panel above his head lift up, saw a man in the shadows. There was a split-second of eye contact between the two men: The guard’s face flashed dismay and astonishment and then a fearful sense of the inevitable as the heavy steel in Belknap’s hand struck his forehead, concussing him with a dull thunk. The guard, knocked senseless, fell limply to the carpeted floor.

  Belknap threw down the Gladstone bag and clambered down from the ceiling, swinging from a cross-tee to a desk a couple of horizontal yards away, and then onto the floor. Now he scrutinized the model number of the nearest motion detector. If he remembered its default settings correctly, it would have phased into a five-minute suspension cycle. Two of those minutes had already elapsed.

  With almost automatic movements, he pulled on the sensor’s white plastic casing, which popped off easily. If it were an old-style system, he would have been able simply to block the lens while it was off—perhaps with a piece of cardboard—and thereby prevent its activation when it was powered up. But the newer models came with blockage detectors and went into alarm mode if they sensed a visual obstruction of that sort. So Belknap set to work with a very small screwdriver. He removed the tiny corner screws that held in place the amplifier and comparator units. Just beneath them he saw four wires running into the device. Two were the alarm-circuit wires, the code 12VDC appearing in tiny print on the coated wire—voltage direct current. The two other wires were the ones he needed to manipulate. He stripped back the insulation and twisted them together. Then he reassembled the sensor. He proceeded to the other two sensors in the area and went through the same procedure. When the master control resumed, it would sense normal power, but the sensors would no longer be functional.

  The files! Gennady had told him roughly what he should be looking for. But first he had to find them. Assuming they were here in the first place.

  The small power diode pulsed on; the system would indicate that the office was alarmed once more. Nervously, he moved an arm in front of the wall-mounted sensor. The green light remained steady. Deactivation had been successful.

  The files he was looking for were probably locked in the large windowless space placed at the building core. He approached the door carefully, scrutinizing it carefully. If he had any doubts about it, they were dispelled by the battery of discreet alarm systems that protected it, beginning with a rubber mat, like a double-length welcome mat, in front of the door. At first he took it as a something to protect the carpet when heavy wheeled carts came in. A closer inspection revealed that it was a pressure mat. A series of metal strips w
ere embedded between two layers of plastic, separated only by an intermittently applied spongy material. Step on the mat and the metal strips would touch, activating an alarm. Belknap pried up the carpet tile next to where the mat ended, and with the help of his penlight identified the pair of wires that led to it. He snipped one of them, rendering the pressure mat useless.

  Trickier would be the recessed contact switch, similar to the one on the door leading to the outer corridor. A magnet in the top of the door held a switch in the adjacent frame in closed position. Once the magnet was moved away, the switch opened and the protection loop was broken. Belknap pulled up a chair and stood on it. He ran his fingertips along the smooth painted surface of the metal door frame until he felt a slight change in texture. Tapping with his nails, he confirmed that the hollow metal had given way to a thicker, more solid-sounding steel plate. He retrieved a bottle of acetone from his kit bag and wetted the area with the solvent, scraping away at the paint with a screwdriver until he uncovered the flat screw-heads that kept the door-frame unit in place. The unit had been masterfully concealed beneath putty, sealant, and paint. It was concealed no more.

  Now he carefully removed the steel plate that protected the alarm unit and revealed the tiny reed switch, two spring metal strips that were encapsulated in a glass tube, which was kept closed by the presence of the door magnet. With a pair of pliers he swiftly crunched the glass vial and clamped together the two metal reeds physically. Now he wrapped a piece of tape around the tiny metal strips, binding them together. He was just about to start working on the door lock when he had a sudden thought. He had stopped at the first contact switch he found. But might there be others? Now he continued to feel along the steel frame, tapping with his fingernail. There was indeed a second one.

  Dammit! He cursed the gods and himself, grateful only for the reprieve granted by his second thought. How could he have been so careless? With movements that were more practiced and less tentative on the second go-round, he disabled the second contact switch, and then did a final inspection of the complete door frame before he set to work on the keyway with the tension wrench and rake pick.