The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  In less than a minute, a bald, squat man with nails bitten to the quick bustled out of the inner door. His fishbelly-white face wore a breezy, unconcerned smile; only a small facial tic betrayed the tension he was at pains to conceal.

  “I’m Philip Sutton,” the man said. “The senator’s chief of staff. What can we do for you?” He spoke in a low voice.

  “You know who I am?”

  “Todd Beller, was it? Or Bellhorn—was that what you said to Jean?”

  “I’ll save us both some time.” The operative’s voice was calmly disabused, not reproachful. “You just ran a computer check from your office or you wouldn’t be talking to me. I’m betting you pulled up records from the State Department database. What did you find?”

  Another small tic rippled through his cheek. He did not answer immediately. “You’re aware, aren’t you, that the senator is under the protection of the Secret Service?”

  “I’m glad to hear of it.”

  “Owing to the nature of the commission hearings, there have been various threats.” Sutton was no longer smiling.

  “I passed through metal detectors on the way in. You can search me if you like.”

  Confrontation glinted in Sutton’s eyes. “But there’s no record of your having come into the building,” he said fiercely.

  “Would you prefer that there were?”

  Sutton’s gaze met his for a long moment. “I’m not sure.”

  “Will the senator meet me?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “You mean you haven’t decided.”

  “Yes,” the portly aide replied, his pale eyes alert. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “If you’re certain we have nothing to discuss, just say the word. You’ll never see me again. But you’d be making a mistake.”

  Another long moment elapsed. “Look, why don’t you follow me? We’ll talk in my office.” In a louder voice he said, “Fact is, lots of people misunderstand the senator’s views on agricultural price supports. I welcome the opportunity to clarify them.”

  The facial-recognition system had been installed at the Hart Senate Building without hoopla or, indeed, any official notice. The system was still considered experimental, although in tests it had so far proven to be 90 percent accurate. The security cameras were connected to both a local and a remote computer database, and fed into a multiscale algorithm. Each camera would, in low-resolution mode, swiftly identify the appearance of a headlike object, at which point the camera would switch into a high-resolution mode. As long as a face was turned at least 35 degrees toward a viewing lens, the image could be automatically manipulated—rotated and scaled, so that it could be compared to reference images. The transposed video image was then captured in an eighty-four-byte code—a numeric faceprint, based on sixteen facial landmarks—and compared to hundreds of thousands of stored data files. The system was capable of comparing ten million faces every ten seconds, with a numeric value assigned to each comparison. If the value was high enough, a provisional match was triggered and the tracking camera would switch into its highest-resolution mode. If the match was further confirmed, offsite operators would be notified. Only then did human beings peer at the two images, supplanting the mathematics of local-feature analysis with old-fashioned human judgment.

  That was happening now; analysts were replaying the video feed and comparing it to the reference faceprint. There seemed little doubt. The computer could not be fooled by glasses or alterations of facial hair; the facial indices it analyzed were virtually unchangeable: cephalic, nasal, orbital. The angle of the chin, the distance between the eyes—such metrics could not be changed with hair dye or eyewear.

  “It’s a match,” said a slack-bellied operator, who spent much of the day in a darkened room munching on corn chips, with a rhythmic hand-to-mouth motion that sometimes went on, nearly uninterrupted, for hours. He wore an untucked Hawaiian-style shirt and cargo pants.

  “Then you click on that red box, and that’s it.”

  “Then everyone’s notified?”

  “Then whoever needs to be notified is notified. Depends on the guy. Like, sometimes it’s a matter for the lobby guards and the D.C. cops. Sometimes, though, it’s someone the CIA or the FBI just wants to keep tabs on, like a foreign national, and they definitely don’t want to alert the target. They play it how they play it. That’s not our call.”

  “Just click on the red box.” He returned a finger-clutch of Fritos to the bag and stared at the screen.

  “Just click on the red box. Feels good, doesn’t it? Click, and they’ll take care of everything.”

  The man in the Stratus coupe had a last sip of his coffee, then gripped the cup lightly in his fingers. It was an Anthora-style paper cup, the blue ersatz-Greek letters proclaiming IT’S OUR PLEASURE TO SERVE YOU. He crushed it into something wrinkled and shapeless and tucked it between the cushions of the seat beside him. He always left his rental cars as dirty as possible; sometimes he would sprinkle sand and ash from a cigarette receptacle on the seats. That way the rental company would be sure to vacuum it carefully, to wipe it down, and leave less of him.

  He watched the woman leave the motel, relishing the incongruity: an expensive-looking bird leaving a cheap-looking nest. The woman wore no makeup and seemed to have chosen clothing that disguised her figure rather than flattered it, but you could tell she was pretty. Justin Colbert found himself smiling. But that was out of line. One didn’t mix business with pleasure. Not usually.

  The order of business was different with this woman, anyway. A higher degree of difficulty was involved. There could not be another slipup. Not this time.

  That was why they’d called in the best. That’s why they had called in Justin Colbert.

  Now he powered down the driver’s-side window and fluttered a road map. “Ma’am,” he called to her. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m trying to get back onto Route 495, and…” A helpless shrug.

  The woman looked around warily, but she was unable to resist Justin’s helpless look. She walked over to the car.

  “You just get onto 66,” she said. “A couple blocks north.”

  “And which way is north?” Justin asked. The timing was right: They were unobserved. His wrist brushed against her forearm.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “My watchband—sorry about that.”

  The woman gave him a strange look: a small flare of puzzlement, giving way to suspicion, giving way finally to stupor and incomprehension and the loss of consciousness.

  It’s my pleasure to serve you, he thought, chuckling to himself.

  Colbert was already out of the car when she started to collapse; he caught her by her elbows. Four seconds later he had positioned her in the trunk of his coupe and closed it gently. The plastic tarp would keep any messy body fluids from wetting the carpet-lined trunk. Five minutes later he was on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. He would check on her in an hour or so, but there would be enough oxygen to sustain life during the trip.

  Andrea Bancroft was more valuable alive than dead. At least for the time being.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  On the seventh floor of the Hart Building, the two men sat at a desk across from each other, and tried to size each other up.

  There was no alternative. Senator Kirk’s chief of staff wanted to know whether Belknap could be trusted. What he could not know was how hard Belknap had been struggling with the question of whether Kirk could be trusted. The operative had scanned Nexis, read the standard profiles and biographical sketches, and tried to form an image in his mind. Without access to Cons Ops files, he was handicapped. The facts only went so far. Kirk had been born in South Bend, into a prosperous farming family. He attended public schools, was president of the student council, played hockey and football, attended Purdue, got a law degree from the University of Chicago, clerked for a Federal circuit judge, and returned to Indiana to take a job at a law school in South Bend. Four years later, he was elected Indiana’s s
ecretary of state, and then lieutenant governor, before making a Senate run. For Kirk, the first time was a charm. He served on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committees, the Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance, the Armed Services Committee, and, by the beginning of his most recent term of office, had become the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

  Was there anything in his earlier career that presaged the explosive course he was now pursuing with the Senate probe? Belknap searched for patterns, but in vain. Like most senators from the Midwest, he championed bills providing incentives for the use of ethanol as a gasoline substitute—the ethanol being derived from corn, and so a product of the region’s vast cornfields. He did nothing contrary to the interests of ConAgra and Cargill. But aside from the customary forms of constituency service and major-donor courtesies, his record was moderate, pragmatic. Perhaps he was a bit of a wheeler-dealer, a little too fast to make concessions in order to get his provisions enacted into law. But in a deliberative body that was increasingly polarized, he had emerged as something of a statesman. Nor was there evidence of untoward, unexplained wealth. Belknap decided to respect what his gut was telling him. The man was no knave, no villain. He was what he appeared to be. To assume as much was to gamble, but it was a gamble he was willing to take. Besides, if there were a violent solution—a backdoor approach to the Kirk Commission—someone would already have exploited it.

  That was why Todd Belknap had decided to do the one thing that only he could do: tell the truth. Once again, he would sneak in through the front door.

  Now Philip Sutton leaned forward across his cluttered desk. “Everything you’ve said so far checks out. You said they’re trying to shitcan you. The record says you’re on administrative leave. Time of recruitment, duration of service—it’s all on the money.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” Belknap said. “It’s kind of a manipulation, you could say. I figure if I tell you the truth, the honest, verifiable truth, you’ll come to trust me a little.”

  A half-grin spread across Sutton’s jowly mouth. “Honesty? I’m in politics. That’s a filthy lowdown trick that we only rarely resort to.”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures,” Belknap said. “Does your record search include any reference to ‘administrative retrieval’?”

  Sutton’s expression told him the answer to his question.

  “You know what it means, don’t you?”

  “I can guess. This part of your total-candor strategy?”

  “You got it. Including fessing up about the strategy.”

  Sutton let his professional bonhomie evaporate; his eyes bore in. “Talk to me about Genesis.”

  “I’d be glad to, with the senator’s permission,” Belknap said slyly.

  Sutton got up and padded down the hall, surprisingly light on his feet for someone of his girth. He returned quickly, made a summoning gesture. “The senator will see you now.”

  At the end of a short hallway of narrow offices was Bennett Kirk’s own office. It was large, filled with dark wooden furniture that had undoubtedly been floating around the Senate since the Gilded Age, and, unlike the rooms occupied by administrative assistants, double-height. Sunlight filtered gently through vast sheer curtains.

  Senator Bennett Kirk—tall and loose-limbed, with the unmistakable mane of silver hair—was already standing when Belknap came in, and he took his measure with the speed and acuity of a seasoned pol. Belknap could feel Kirk’s gray eyes roam over his face, probing, assessing, searching. There was a glint of something relenting—a glint of approval, even. His handclasp was firm but not showily so.

  “Glad you could see me, Senator,” said Belknap. Up close, he thought he saw something almost haggard in the older man’s distinguished countenance—not tiredness so much as the effort of concealing tiredness.

  “What have you got to tell me, Mr. Belknap? I’m all ears. Well, quite a bit of mouth, too.”

  Belknap smiled, charmed by the man’s down-to-earth style despite himself, and despite the seriousness of his mission. “Let’s not bullshit each other. Genesis was my open sesame. That was the word that got me through the door.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Belknap snapped. “I’m not here to play gin rummy.”

  Kirk’s eyes were wary. “Then let’s see what cards you got.”

  “Fine. I’ve got reason to believe that someone code-named Genesis is a dangerous force in the world. Genesis—again, whatever it is that goes by the name—is a direct threat to you. And to others. You need to be careful of being used by this person.”

  The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances. There was a hint of I told you so in the exchange, but Belknap couldn’t have said who told whom what. “Go on,” said the politician, his voice taut. “What do you know about him?”

  Belknap sat up very straight and told him the stories that he had heard.

  After a few minutes, Senator Kirk cut him off. “Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, doesn’t it?”

  “If you thought so, you wouldn’t have let me in.”

  “Truth is, we’ve heard these stories, too—or some of them, anyway. Sourcing’s poor across the board.”

  “I grant you that.”

  “But you say you’ve been directly threatened by Genesis. How?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. Belknap exhaled heavily and told him, in abbreviated form, about what had just happened in Cyprus. “I am counting our conversation as privileged,” the operative emphasized.

  “That goes without saying.”

  “It goes better with saying.”

  “I understand,” Bennett Kirk said with a genial smile that did not reach his eyes. “Just what do you know about this Genesis?”

  “I’ve done a lot of talking already,” Belknap said carefully. “What do you know about him?”

  Kirk turned away. “What do you think, Phil? Think it’s time to open our kimonos?” The words were bantering, but his tone was edged with apprehension.

  Sutton shrugged.

  “Would you like his name, address, and Social Security number?” the senator asked.

  Belknap stared. “Yes.”

  “So would we.” Another long glance was exchanged between the regal-looking senator and his pudgy, disheveled chief of staff. “Belknap, my gut tells me you’re a straight shooter. But your record talks about administrative retrieval. Meaning, formally, that your clearances have all been revoked.”

  “You knew this since before we started to talk.”

  “You said it yourself: Our conversation is privileged. But you can appeal to me in my role as the head of the Senate Committee on Intelligence. I’ve got to appeal to you as a man, and as an American. Can I do that?” He broke off.

  “Privilege goes both ways. Frankly, Senator, I have so many of this nation’s secrets in my head that talk of clearance is a bureaucratic absurdity. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am one of those secrets. I’ve spent my career in and out of special-access programs.”

  Sutton gave the senator a sidelong glance. “You make a good point,” he said to Belknap.

  “Fact of the matter is,” Kirk said, “all our communications from Genesis have been via e-mail. Strictly untraceable, or so they assure me. There’s the sign-off; there’s information that’s often fragmentary and sometimes less so. But he’s never been more than a byline to me. You ask whether I’m being used. How can I answer that? Functionally, the role he’s performing is that of a confidential informant—only with an extraordinary knowledge of an extraordinary range of activities. There’s always the threat of disinformation, but we take nothing at face value. Either the info checks out or it doesn’t. Other possibilities? Score-settling? Sure. Every investigation is propelled by people leaking dirt on their enemies for self-interested purposes. So what’s new? That doesn’t make the revelations any less valuable as far as the public i
nterest is concerned.” The logic was dry, hard, and difficult to dispute.

  “It doesn’t bother you that you have no idea who your chief informant is?”

  “Of course it does,” Sutton growled. “That’s not the point. You can’t order what’s not on the menu.”

  “So you don’t care that you’re dealing with the devil.”

  “The devil you don’t know?” Sutton raised an eyebrow. “You’re being dramatic. Try being specific.”

  “Fine,” Belknap said, tight-lipped. “Has it occurred to you that Genesis might be an alias for Paul Bancroft?”

  The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances again. “If that’s what you think,” Kirk said, “you’re dead wrong.”

  “You’ve mixed up the cat and the mouse,” Sutton added. “Genesis is Bancroft’s mortal enemy.”

  Belknap paused. “You’ve been informed about the Theta Group?” He was groping, disoriented.

  “So you know about that, too,” said the senator after a pause. “The picture we’ve got is still preliminary. But Genesis is collecting information. Within a few days, we should have enough to proceed with.”

  “You don’t mess with something as powerful and august as the Bancroft Foundation,” Sutton explained, “unless you’ve got bandoliers draped over both shoulders.”

  “I understand.”

  “Glad one of us does,” said Senator Kirk.

  Another moment of silence fell. Each sought to reveal as little as possible while learning as much as possible: It was a delicate balance.

  “You say these e-mails are untraceable,” Belknap began.

  Sutton stepped in: “Untraceable is right. And please don’t talk about a trap-and-trace—believe me, we’ve already looked into the situation. The thing goes through an anonymizer—one of those special routing services that strip off all the identifying codes, all the ISP digits and so on. Impossible to track back any further. That’s a high-level assurance.”