The Bancroft Strategy (4 page)

And what of the passenger they were guarding? An observer would have known at once that the passenger—tall, corn-fed, attired in an expensive but boxy gray suit—was not Lebanese. His national
origin was unmistakable; the man could just as well have been waving the Stars and Stripes.

As the driver held the door open for him, the American looked around uneasily. Fiftyish and straight-backed, he exuded the bred-in-the-bone privilege of an interloper from the planet's most powerful nation—and, at the same time, the unease of a stranger in a strange city. The hard-sided briefcase he held might have provided a further clue, or merely raised further questions. One of the bodyguards, the smaller of the two, preceded him into the building. The other guard, his eyes darting around him tirelessly, stayed with the tall American. Protection and captivity so often looked the same.

In the lobby, the American was accosted by a Lebanese man with a wincelike smile and black hair that appeared slicked back with unrefined petroleum. “Mr. McKibbin?” he said, extending a hand. “Ross McKibbin?”

The American nodded.

“I'm Muhammad,” the Lebanese man said in a whispery voice.

“In this country,” the American returned, “who isn't?”

His contact smiled uncertainly and led his guest through a cortege of armed guards. These were strapping, hirsute men with small arms in polished hip holsters, men with wary eyes and weathered faces, men who knew how easily civilization could be destroyed, for they had watched it happen, and resolved to side with something of greater durability: commerce.

The American was ushered into a long room on the second floor with white stuccoed walls. It was arranged like a lounge, with upholstered chairs and a low table with urns of coffee and tea, but its ostensible informality did not disguise the fact that it was a place for work, not for play. The guards remained outside, in a sort of antechamber; inside were a handful of local businessmen.

The man they called Ross McKibbin was greeted with anxious grins and quick hand pumps. There was business to be conducted,
and they knew that Americans had little patience for the Arabic traditions of courtesy and indirection.

“We are most grateful that you could meet with us,” said one of the men, who had been introduced as the owner of two cinemas and a chain of grocery stories in the Beirut area.

“You honor us with your presence,” said another chamber-of-commerce type.

“I am just a representative, an emissary,” the American replied airily. “Think of me as a placement officer. There are people who have money, and people who need money. My job is to place one with the other.” His smile snapped shut like a cell phone.

“Foreign investment has been quite hard to come by,” another of the locals ventured. “But we are not the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“I'm not a gift horse,” McKibbin shot back.

In the antechamber, the smaller of the American's bodyguards stepped closer to the room. Now he could see as well as hear.

Few observers, in any case, would have had any trouble discerning the various power inequities within. The American was plainly one of those intermediaries who made a living by contravening international law on behalf of parties who had to operate in secrecy. He represented foreign capital to a group of local businessmen whose need for such funding was far greater than any scruples they could afford about its provenance.

“Mr. Yorum,” McKibbin said briskly, turning to a man who had not yet spoken, “you're a banker, are you not? What would you say are my best opportunities here?”

“I think you will find everyone here to be an eager partner,” replied a man whose squat face and tiny nostrils suggested the countenance of a frog.

“I hope you will consider Mansur Enterprises favorably,” one of the men interjected. “We've had a very robust return on capital.” He
paused, mistaking the disapproving looks around him for skepticism. “Truly. Our books have been carefully audited.”

McKibbin turned a chilly gaze to the man of Mansur Enterprises. “Audited? The parties I represent prefer a less formal system of bookkeeping.” Floating up from outside was the sound of squealing tires. Few paid it any mind.

The other man flushed. “But of course. We are, at the same time, quite versatile, I assure you.”

Nobody uttered the phrase “money laundering” nobody had to. There was no need to spell out the purpose of the meeting. Foreign dealers with unaccountable reserves of cash sought businesses in poorly regulated markets like Lebanon to serve as fronts, as entities through which illicit cash could be sluiced, emerging as legitimate business earnings. Most would be returned to the silent partners; some could be retained. Both greed and apprehension were palpable in the room.

“I do wonder whether I'm wasting my time here,” McKibbin went on in a bored tone. “We're talking about an arrangement that depends on trust. And there can be no trust without candor.”

The banker ventured an amphibious half-smile, blinking slowly.

The fraught silence was broken by the sound of a group of men rushing up the wide terrazzo stairs: late arrivals to a meeting elsewhere? Or—something else?

The harsh, concussive noise of automatic gunfire stilled idle speculation. At first, it sounded like a burst of firecrackers, but the burst went on too long, and was too fast, for that. There were shrieks—men forcing air through constricted throats, emitting a keening chorus of terror. And then the terror spilled into the meeting room, like a rampaging fury. Men clad in keffiyehs charged in, aiming their Kalashnikovs at the Lebanese businessmen.

Within moments, the room had turned into a tableau of carnage. It looked as if a disgruntled painter had splashed a can of crimson
paint against the stuccoed walls; men sprawled everywhere like red-drenched mannequins.

The meeting was over.

Rome

Todd Belknap raced to the study door and, clipboard in hand, made his way down the long hallway. He would have to brazen it out. His planned means of escape—descending to the inner courtyard and exiting through a delivery chute—was no longer possible: It would require time he could no longer afford. He had no choice but to take a more direct route.

When he reached the end of the hallway, he paused; at the landing below, he could see a pair of sentries making their rounds. Flattening himself in the crook of an open guest-room door, he waited several minutes for the guards to move on. Fading footsteps, the jingle of keys on a chain, the closing of a door: the ebbing sounds of movement in retreat.

Now he stepped lightly down the stairs and, casting his mind back to the blueprints he had studied, he opened a narrow door just to the right of the landing. It would take him to a back staircase that would avoid the main floor of the villa and lessen the risk of exposure. Even as he stepped through the threshold, though, he could sense that something was not right. A small twinge of anxiety arrived before he was conscious of the explanation for it: raised voices and the sound of rubber soles slapping against hard flooring. Men running, not walking. The disruption of routine. Meaning: Khalil Ansari's death had been discovered. Meaning: Security at the compound was now at high alert.

Meaning: Belknap's chances of survival were dwindling with every minute he remained inside.

Or was it too late already? As he raced down a flight of stairs, he
heard a buzzing sound, and the swinging grate at the bottom of the landing clanged shut electronically. Someone had activated a high-security state for all points of egress and ingress, overriding the ordinary fire-safety presets. Was he trapped on this flight of stairs? Belknap raced back up and tried the lever knob to the floor above. The door opened and he pushed through it.

Straight into an ambush.

He felt an iron grip around his left upper arm, a gun pressed painfully against his spine. A heat-and-movement sensor must have revealed his position. He whipped his head around and his eyes met the granite stare of the man gripping his arm. It was another, unseen guard, then, who had the gun to Belknap's back. It was the less challenging position, and therefore occupied by someone who was surely junior to the man to his side.

Belknap took another look at him. Swarthy, black-haired, clean-shaven, he was in his early forties, at a stage of life where the seasoning of experience conferred an advantage that was not yet offset by any loss of physical vigor. A young man with muscles but limited experience could be overcome, as could the superannuated veteran. But everything about the way this man moved told Belknap that he knew precisely what he was doing. His face betrayed neither overconfidence nor fear. Such an opponent was formidable indeed: steel that had been hardened by duress but not yet fatigued.

The man was powerfully built, yet moved with agility. He had a face of planes and angles, a nose with a thickened bridge that had obviously been broken in his youth, and a heavy brow that jutted out slightly over reptilian eyes—those of a predator examining his fallen prey.

“Hey, listen, I don't know what's going on,” Belknap began, trying to sound like a bewildered factotum. “I'm just one of the site architects. I'm checking on our contractors. That's my job, okay? Look, just call the office, get this thing straightened out.”

The man who had shoved a gun in his back now walked alongside
him to his right: mid-twenties, lithe, brown hair cut
en brosse,
sunken cheeks. He exchanged glances with the senior guard. Neither dignified Belknap's chatter with a response.

“Maybe you don't speak English,” Belknap said. “I guess that's the problem.
Dovrei parlare in italiano
…”

“Your problem isn't that I don't understand,” said the senior guard in lightly accented English, tightening his iron grip. “Your problem is that I do understand.”

His captor was a Tunisian, Belknap guessed from his accent. “But then—”

“You wish to speak? Excellent. I wish to listen. But not here.” The guard stopped walking for a moment, jerking his captive to an abrupt stop. “In our lovely
stanza per gli interrogatori.
The interview chamber. In the basement. We go there now.”

Belknap's blood ran cold. He knew all about the room in question—had studied it on the blueprints, had researched its construction and equipment even before he had confirmed that Ansari was the villa's true owner. It was, in plain English, a torture chamber, and of truly cutting-edge design.
“Totalmente insonorizzato,”
the architectural specifications had stipulated: completely soundproof. The soundproofing materials had, in fact, been special-ordered from a company in the Netherlands. Acoustic isolation was achieved by density and disconnection: The chamber was floated and lined with a dense polymer made of sand and PVC; sturdy rubber seals lined the door frame. A man could scream at the top of his lungs and be entirely inaudible to someone standing outside, just a few feet away. The elaborate soundproofing guaranteed that.

The equipment contained in the basement chamber would guarantee the screams.

Evildoers always sought to sequester the sight and sound of their deeds; Belknap had known this since East Berlin, a couple of decades earlier. Among connoisseurs of cruelty,
privacy
was the invariable watchword; it sheltered barbarism in the very midst of
society. Belknap knew something else, as well. If he were taken to the
stanza per gli interrogatori
it was all over. All over for the operation; all over for him. There was no possible escape from it. Any form of resistance, no matter how hazardous, would be preferable to allowing himself to be taken there. Belknap had only one advantage: the fact that he
knew
this, and that the others did not know he knew this. To be more desperate than your captors realized—a slender reed. But Belknap would work with what he had.

He allowed a dull look of gratitude to settle on his face. “Good,” he said. “Fine. I understand this is a high-sec facility. Do what you need to do. I'm happy to talk, wherever you like. But—Sorry, what's your name?”

“Call me Yusef,” the senior guard said. There was something implacable even in the pleasantry.

“But, Yusef, you're making a mistake. You got no beef with me.” He slackened his body slightly, rounding his shoulders, subtly making himself physically less intimidating. They did not believe his protestations, of course. His awareness of that fact was all he needed to keep from them.

Opportunity came when they decided to save time by frog-marching him down the main staircase—a grand, curving structure of travertine adorned with a Persian runner—instead of the concrete rear stairs. When he saw a glimpse of the streetlights through the frosted window bays to either side of the massive front door, he made a quick, silent decision. One step, a second step, a third step—he jerked his arm from the guard's grip in a feeble gesture of wounded dignity, and the guard did not bother to respond. It was the hopeless fluttering of a caged bird.

He turned to face the guards, as if trying to make conversation again, seemingly careless of his footing. The runner was well cushioned with an underlay that snaked along the treads and risers; that would be helpful. A fourth step, fifth step, sixth step: Belknap stumbled, as convincingly as he could, pretending he had missed his
footing. Now he pitched forward, gently, falling on his slack left shoulder, while secretly breaking his fall with his right hand. “Shit!” Belknap yelped, feigning dismay as he rolled down another couple of steps.

“
Vigilanza fuori!
” the seasoned guard, the man who called himself Yusef, muttered to his partner. The guards would have only seconds to decide how to respond: A captive had value—the value of the information he could provide. Killing him at an inopportune moment could, in the fullness of time, lead to recriminations. Yet a nonlethal shot had to be aimed with great care, all the more so when the target was in motion.