The Bancroft Strategy

by Robert Ludlum

  A physical impossibility. Yet a prison was not made up of walls and doors alone. There were people, and where there were people, surely, there was the possibility of the unexpected. She recalled the pike-eyed stare of the guard: 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. Her eyes returned to the fluorescent light by the door, its hateful sterile glare calling to mind an interrogator’s lamp.

  A prison that was not a prison. There was a slightly makeshift air about some of the facilities. Though the commode was prison standard, the ancient bathtub was not. The ceiling light fixture near the door was within reach; in a standard prison, it would have been behind a cage. She could probably kill herself if she wanted to—again, not standard prison outfitting. The guard who had brought her “chow”—a man with hairy forearms, a scrubbed bronzed forehead, a dense, close-cropped black beard tight on his jaw—had carried not the washable tray of a large institution but a foil tray from the kind of frozen dinner sold at supermarkets. She had washed it out simply to give herself something to do; they would retrieve it, no doubt, whenever the next scheduled visit was.

  She decided to fill the tub; she inserted the rubber stopper and twisted both taps all the way. The water that poured from the faucet was flecked with rust, evidence of disuse. As the tub filled, she sat on the cot, her fingers starting to tear at the heavy-gauge foil of the dinner tray in idle agitation, and her eyes once more settled on the glaring fluorescent fixture by the door.

  She walked over to it. A circular fluorescent tube, powered by an AC circuit. All that electricity, racing around and going nowhere. It’s trapped here, too. That was Andrea’s first thought.

  Then she looked down at the foil strip in her hand, and she had another.

  Sixty-three goddamn years old, Will Garrison thought, and his field skills had never been sharper. He had parked the Toyota Land Cruiser in the village, behind a liquor store fronted with sun-clouded Plexiglas. He had stopped drinking ten years before—hell, he was probably in better shape now than then. Then he had started the climb.

  On the trip over, he had studied the NSA satellite imagery of Dominica, magnified to the point where you could see the individual fronds of the palm trees, the indicator lights on the AT&T antennae. From this bird’s-eye view, it was easy to see the Privex facility. Thick black-clad cables converged on the small bunker-like structure; round silvery dishes clustered overhead.

  Dammit if Castor didn’t have balls. Garrison had to give the bastard that much credit as he watched him clamber up to the facility’s roof. Castor was going to unlock a Fabergé egg with a goddamn crowbar. Amazing. Now, why didn’t we think of that?

  Garrison concealed himself behind a profusion of Caribbean elephant ears, the giant leaves bejeweled with glimmering drops of evening dew. It was just a matter of waiting. He had taken some Motrin as insurance, but so far his knees weren’t even aching. Belknap was in the building. Before long, he would be leaving it. But he wouldn’t get far. Just when Todd Belknap thought that he had succeeded, he was safe, no one knew he was there, his defenses were relaxed…that was when the Hound would be put down.

  Now he stretched out, with the stock of the Barrett M98 sniper rifle against his cheek. The rifle, dappled with a green-and-black camouflage paint job, had been fitted with an integral silencer and loaded with subsonic ammunition; the combination of the two factors meant that it would be inaudible at distances beyond a hundred meters or so. As a young trainee, Garrison had won prizes in target competitions. But true skill lay in finding a position that required no skill, and he had done so. A ten-year-old could make this shot.

  Once Belknap was taken care of, Garrison might even take an extra day or so to enjoy the island. They said the Boiling Lake was something to see.

  He glanced at his watch, peered through the scope, and settled into a zone of watchful waiting.

  It would not be long now.

  Fighting to suppress his panic response, Belknap expelled the last ounce of breath from his body, curled his fingers around the rim where the grate had been, and pulled himself through. His head and then his torso slid out at a painfully awkward angle, and he collapsed on a hard floor gasping for breath.

  He was in.

  As the infernal beep beep beep continued to grow louder and louder, he forced himself to his feet and looked around in the dim silvery light, the space brightened by hundreds of small illuminated LED displays. Fifteen seconds before autodelete. He raced over to a large metal structure that looked like a giant Sub-Zero refrigerator—the beeping was coming from it—and found a thick power cord behind it. It was as thick as a snake, and required a surprising amount of force to pull it out of the wall plug.

  After a brief pause, the beeping resumed.

  Oh, Christ—a battery backup, no doubt, with enough power to run the autodelete program.

  How many seconds remained? Six? Five?

  He followed the other end of the power cord to a flat box, the size of a steel ingot, by the base of the mammoth network server. As the beeping grew deafening, he grabbed it, yanked it hard, and another plug came loose—the plug connecting the battery to the system.

  The beeping stopped.

  Blessed silence. Belknap’s legs were wobbly for a moment as he made his way to the door. He retracted the four-point dead-bolt system that secured the steel-clad door to the cinderblock framing, opened it, and whistled softly.

  Sachs darted inside the door. “Mother of God,” he said. “They’ve got enough power to run the entire U.S. defense network. God, I’d love to take this for a spin.”

  “We’re not joyriding, Walt. We’re searching for a goddamn electronic pin in an electronic haystack. So get your magnifying glass out. I need a digital fingerprint. I’ll take a partial. But I’m not going home empty-handed.”

  Walt wandered around, poking among tall racks of servers and routers, boxes that looked like DVD players but that sprouted hundreds of tiny, brightly colored wires.

  Finally, he stood stock-still, contemplating what looked like a large black cooler. “Change of plans,” said the computer maven.

  “Speak.” Belknap shot him a questioning glance.

  “How much room you got in that duffel bag of yours?”

  “Are you improvising, Walt?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” Belknap said. “It’s the one damn sign of hope so far.”

  Sachs ran a hand along his close-cropped temple. “I’m staring at a five-terabyte storage system. Give me a minute and I’ll give you a backup tape of the whole goddamn thing.”

  “Walt, you’re a genius,” Belknap said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Sachs replied.

  Will Garrison idly swatted at a mosquito. He had dry-swallowed a Malarone on the way down, but couldn’t remember how long it took before the antimalarial became effective. He stared through the low-light scope of his rifle, adjusted it on its bipod until the red-dot reticle was precisely centered on the doorway where Todd Belknap would soon be appearing.

  If you want a job done right, he thought to himself again, you’ve got to do it yourself. Wasn’t it the truth.

  Sweet dreams, “Henry Giles.” Farewell, Castor. Bye-bye, Belknap. From behind him he thought he heard the noise of a broken twig or branch, as if from a footfall. But that made no sense, did it?

  It couldn’t be Belknap—he was still inside, and so was the amateur he’d dragged in with him. Who else knew he was here? Belknap had no backup, no team or support personnel.

  He stole a quick glance behind him. Nothing. There was nothing at all.

  He was moving his finger back behind the trigger guard when he heard another sound and craned his head again.

  Suddenly he felt the most god-awful terrific pressure around his neck—a searing band biting into his flesh, and then a sense that his head was going to explode from too much blood.

  Finally he caught a glimpse of his assa
ilant. “You!” he gasped, but the word died in his mouth. And then the darkness of the night was replaced with a deeper, truer blackness, which was the extinction of consciousness itself.

  “Silly rabbit,” Jared Rinehart murmured to himself as he rewrapped the catgut cord of his garrote around one of its wooden handles. An old-fashioned device, and one of the few that had not been improved upon by modern technology.

  The cord was not even wet with blood. Amateurs often went for steel wire of an excessively thin gauge: A properly constructed garrote did not cut into the flesh; it compressed the carotid arteries and the internal and external jugular veins, preventing blood from entering and leaving the brain. Done properly, it should be wetwork without wetness. As here: The only fluid released was the urine that now spotted the aging spymaster’s trousers.

  Rinehart dragged the body downhill, the sound inaudible above the noise of the million buzzing midges and stone flies and the piping of little tree frogs, until he reached a trail of reddish volcanic soil. He removed and folded Garrison’s clothes, placed them in a plastic trash bag, and stowed the bag in his rucksack. He could simply dispose of the corpse in the underbrush, but there were better options.

  Soon a sulfurous miasma become pungently evident, and the vegetation thinned, gradually giving way to slippery mats of lichens, moss, and grasses. Scattered vents and mud pots released wisps of steam that shone silver in the filtered moonlight.

  Ten minutes later, walking by the intermittent light of a half-moon in a partly cloudy sky, Rinehart looked past a boulder and saw a milky-looking circle of water mostly obscured by steam. It was the lake. He heaved the body—even in the available light it was obviously an unpleasant specimen, with its withered dugs, varicosities, and dorsal pelt of coarse graying hair—over a ridge of crumbling pumice. It bounced down the steep declivity and plunged into the churning, bubbling waters,

  After a few hours of simmering amid the harsh sulfur fumes, its flesh would peel away from the skeleton. Teeth and bones would drift to the bottom of a two-hundred-foot-deep lake. One could not send divers into water of its temperature, even if the authorities had reason to do so, and Rinehart very much doubted that they would. He was pleased with himself. It was quite a creative way to keep the Cons Ops boys guessing.

  He flipped open his cell phone and phoned a number in the continental United States. Reception was crystal-clear.

  “Everything’s on schedule,” he said. He paused, listening, before he spoke again. “Will Garrison? No worries. Let’s just say he found himself in hot water.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A puddle of water had formed outside the prisoner’s cell, the guard noticed angrily, and he hastened to open the door, inserting the key, pushing down on the lever handle, and stepping inside the cell.

  The bitch had let the bathtub overflow. That was not the guard’s last thought, but it was among his last thoughts. He also had time for puzzlement at the way his hand was no longer just grasping the lever handle but was spastically clamped onto it. He wondered at what looked like a strip of twisted foil attached to the inside lever knob, connected to something high up, something he could not see. He knew that the puddle of water at his feet had indeed come from the bathtub faucet, and he even noticed the little blue logo on a paper packet of salt floating on the puddle he had stepped into. The perceptions arrived in a cluster, a panicked mob swarming a gateway; he could not have said what came first and which came after.

  There were also many thoughts he did not have. He did not reflect on the fact that a tenth of an amp of current could cause a beating heart to defibrillate. He did not notice the fact that the doorway was darker than before, because the lighting fixture overhead had been smashed open. The searing, vibratory pain that swept through him, through his arm, his chest, his legs, swiftly cleansed him of consciousness. He could not see, therefore, that his limp body now kept the door from shutting, could not sense the woman leap over his body, could not hear her light footfalls as she raced down the monastery hall.

  Andrea’s feet ghosted along the tiled flooring in great soft strides. The element of surprise was in her favor now; soon it would not be. She scarcely allowed herself to register the oddity of her surroundings, the round columns and the archways overhead like those of an old chapel. Stone, heavy beams, tiles. A faded gilt engraving on a wall, what looked like Cyrillic lettering beneath a bearded icon. It was an Eastern Orthodox monastery, then, but the guards were American, so what did that really tell her?

  A man in drab khaki at the end of the long hallway: He had looked up, taken stock of the situation, was reaching for something on his combat belt, a weapon of some kind. Andrea darted into one of the side niches, some sort of sacristy. A dead end.

  Or was it? She closed the door behind her, but the room did not darken much. There was a jumble of heavy wooden chairs, and she climbed on top of a stacked set of them until she could see a crawl space that led onto another tiled expanse. She sprang forward, her feet toppling the stack of heavy chairs even as her hands made contact with the stone ledge. Now she pulled herself up and clambered through the narrow space and onto a sort of breezeway.

  Overhead, perhaps twenty feet above her, was a spandreled ceiling; to her right was a tall bricked half-wall—too tall to climb over—and yet she could feel the air move against her face, could hear the call of birds in the distance, the sound of rustling leaves. She darted toward where the outdoor light was most visible, and, as she rounded a corner, her lungs filled with air, her body seemingly weightless, fueled by adrenaline and hope, a lunging body, appearing from nowhere, crashed into her. She was slammed onto the hard floor.

  The man was winded as he stood over her. “Like mother like daughter,” the man said, breathing heavily.

  She recognized him at once: The motorist with the map in Washington. The man who had abducted her. The Brillo-like curls of graying hair, the eyes that glittered like the plastic bead eyes of a stuffed toy, the oddly small mouth and weak, dimpled chin.

  “Don’t touch me,” Andrea said, coughing.

  “See, your mom was never with the program, either. She didn’t want to die, didn’t care that it was for a good cause. In the end, we had to inject the ethanol straight into the inguinal artery. A tiny puncture mark.”

  “You killed my mother.”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing,” the man snorted.

  Without warning, Andrea lashed her left leg out, trying to spring off the tiled flooring. The man reacted swiftly, and she caught his left foot in her abdomen. She collapsed again, winded, as he hammer-locked her neck from behind, his left knee jammed into the small of her back, his right leg wrapped around her ankles, clamping them. “One jerk and the spine snaps. A painful way to go.”

  The veins in her neck felt distended to the point of bursting. “Please,” she gasped. “I’m sorry. Whatever you say.”

  He lifted her to her feet and spun her around. He had a gun in his hand. Andrea took a fast look. The gun was black. The muzzle was blacker.

  “Navasky,” the man barked into a miniature walkie-talkie. “On deck.” With contained brutality, he frogmarched Andrea along the breezeway. The guard with the waxy skin and pale pike’s eye—Navasky, it must have been—appeared at the other end of the tiled breezeway.

  “Son of a bitch,” he drawled, and grabbed at his stun gun.

  “Daughter of, to be precise,” said the first man.

  “J-man ain’t gonna want to hear about this.”

  “Maybe J-man won’t need to. We can jump the schedule, put her in a permanent coma now. She ain’t likely to run her mouth any.”

  Each man grabbed one of her elbows. She thrashed mightily but their iron grip was unshaken.

  “She got spirit,” said the Southerner. “So tell me, Justin, you being the expert and all, can she still get wet if she’s a vegetable?” His breath was dank.

  “Sex is pretty much a hindbrain thing,” the other man said. “Don’t need a functioning cerebral
cortex for that. So the answer’s yes, if we do the job right.”

  Andrea thrashed again with all her strength. Nothing. It did nothing.

  “What are you doing here?” the man at her left, the man named Justin, called out to another man who had now appeared at the end of the walkway. “Thought you were a foundation boy.”

  “Got your distress signal,” the man called back. He held up a miniature walkie-talkie like theirs, returned it to his trouser pocket. “New protocol.”

  “Good timing,” said the Southerner, sounding relieved.

  Andrea stared, her sense of horror escalating. Twenty yards away was a powerfully built man in a well-tailored gray suit. The nameless man who had visited her in Carlyle, and who had seemingly dogged her steps since then. The thug who had warned her to keep silent with his blandly cryptic threats.

  She felt the grip of the two others relax slightly in the presence of another armed man, and—a sudden erratic impulse—she once again lunged forward, this time twisting from their grip, and raced forward, because she could move in no other direction. As if in slow motion, she saw the gray-suited man pull out a heavy revolver from beneath his jacket and hold it perfectly level. Better a quick death, she thought.

  She stared at its borehole, now just fifteen feet away, stared like a prey animal mesmerized by a cobra, and saw the tongue of blue-white fire pulse from it as the man squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession.

  At the same instant, she saw, in his eyes, the serene confidence of a marksman who seldom missed.

  Yale University, the third oldest university in the United States, had been founded in 1701, but most of its physical structure—including the collegiate Gothic buildings that it was invariably associated with in the mind of the public—was less than a century old. The newer buildings typically housed science departments and research laboratories, and tended to be further from the oldest parts of the so-called “Old Campus,” like the ring pattern of a classic European city. So it was a point of pride among the university’s computer scientists there that they were housed in a building that dated back to the nineteenth century, however extensive the interior renovations may have been. The Arthur K. Watson Building was a redbrick structure with arched facades that honored Victorian ambition and a Victorian sense of grandeur. It stood opposite the Grove Street Cemetery, and there were some who claimed to find the Arthur K. Watson Building itself somewhat sepulchral.