The Bancroft Strategy (5 page)

And Belknap
was
in motion, righting himself from a sprawl and now springing off a step as if it were a starting block, bounding down the rest of the staircase, his ankles like tightly coiled springs, and then surging toward the Palladian-style door. Yet the door itself was not his target; it, too, would have been magneto-locked shut.

Abruptly, Belknap veered off to one side of it—to a two-foot-wide ornamental segment of leaded glass, an echoing, though narrower, Palladian shape. The city of Rome forbade any visible change to the villa's facade, and that included the ornamental panel. The blueprints ultimately called for it to be replaced with an identical-looking panel that would be rendered of a bulletproof and unbreakable methacrylate resin, but it would be months before the replica, which required the collaboration of artisans and engineers, would be ready. Now he threw his body at the panel, leading with his hips and averting his face to avoid laceration and—

It gave way, noisily popping out of its frame and shattering upon the stone outside. Elementary physics: The energy of motion was proportional to mass times the square of velocity.

Belknap righted himself swiftly and took off down the stone path in front of the villa. Yet his pursuers were merely seconds behind him. He heard their footfalls—and then their gunfire. He darted erratically, trying to make himself a difficult target, as muzzle flashes
punctuated the darkness outside like starbursts. Belknap could hear bullets ricochet off the statuary that decorated the villa's front grounds. Even as he tried to dodge the handgun fire that was aimed at him, he prayed that no unaimed ricochet found him. Gulping for breath, too frenzied to inventory his injuries, he veered to his left, sprinting to the brick wall that marked the end of the property, and vaulted over it. Razor-edged concertina wire slashed and sliced at his clothing, and he left half his shirt on its barbs. As he dived through the gardens of neighboring consulates and small museums on the via Angelo Masina, he knew that his left ankle would soon start sending shooting pains, that muscles and joints would eventually protest their abuse. For the moment, though, adrenaline had taken his body's pain circuitry offline. He was grateful for that. And grateful for something else, too.

He was alive.

Beirut

The conference room was rank with the foulness of perforated bodies betraying their contents: the old-penny stench of blood, mingled with odors alimentary and fecal. It was the fetor of the slaughterhouse, an olfactory assault. Stuccoed walls, pampered skin, costly fabrics: All were drenched in a syrup of exsanguination.

The smaller of the American's bodyguards felt a searing pain spread across his upper chest—a bullet had hit his shoulder and possibly pierced his lung. But consciousness remained. Through slightly parted eyelids, he took in the carnage in the room, the awful swagger of the keffiyeh-clad assailants. The man who called himself Ross McKibbin alone had not been shot, and, as he stared, evidently paralyzed by horror and disbelief, the gunmen roughly slammed a mud-colored canvas hood over his head. Then they hustled the startled American away, swarming back down the stairs.

The bodyguard, gasping for breath, as his poplin jacket slowly reddened with his blood, heard the low growl of the van's engine. Out the window he was able to catch a final glimpse of the American, his arms now bound together, roughly thrown into the back of the van—a van that now roared off into the dusty night.

The poplin-clad guard withdrew a small cellular phone from a concealed interior pocket. It was an instrument to be used only for emergencies: His controller at Consular Operations had been emphatic about it. His thick fingers slick with arterial blood, the man pressed a sequence of eleven digits.

“Harrison's Dry Cleaning,” a bored-seeming voice prompted on the other end.

The man gulped for air, trying to fill his injured lungs before he spoke. “Pollux has been captured.”

“Come again?” the voice said. American intelligence needed him to repeat the message, perhaps for voiceprint authentication, and the asset in the poplin suit did so. There was no need to specify time and location; the phone itself contained a military-grade GPS device, providing not merely an electronic date-any-time stamp but a geolocation stamp as well, accurate to within nine feet in the horizontal plane. They knew where Pollux had been, therefore.

But where was he being taken?

Washington, D.C.

“Goddammit to hell!” the director of operations roared, his neck muscles bunching visibly.

The message had been received by a special branch of the INR, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and was relayed to the top of the operations org chart within sixty seconds. Consular Operations took pride in its organizational fluidity, a far cry from the sluggish and lumbering pace of the larger spy
agencies. And the top managers at Cons Ops had made it clear that Pollux's work was a high priority.

Standing at the threshold of the D.O.'s office, a junior operations officer—café-au-lait skin; black, wavy hair that grew tight, dense, and low—flinched as if he himself had been berated.

“Shit!” the director of operations shouted, slamming his desk with a fist. Then he slid back his chair and stood up. A vein in his temple pulsed. His name was Gareth Drucker, and although he was staring at the junior ops man in the doorway, he was not actually seeing him. Not yet. Finally, his eyes did focus on the swarthy young staffer. “What are the parameters here?” he asked, like an EMT verifying pulse-rate and blood-pressure stats.

“We just got the call in now.”

“‘Now' meaning—?”

“Maybe a minute and a half ago. By a recruit of ours who's in pretty bad shape himself. We thought you'd want to know ASAP.”

Drucker pressed an intercom button. “Get Garrison,” he ordered an unseen assistant. Drucker was a lean five foot eight, and had been likened by one colleague to a sailboat: Through slight of build, he bulged when he got the wind in him. He had the wind in him now, and he was bulging—his chest, his neck, even his eyes, which seemed to loom behind his rectangular rimless glasses. His lips were pursed, growing short and thick like a prodded earthworm.

The junior ops officer stood aside as a burly man in his sixties strode into Drucker's office. Light from the early afternoon sun filtered through Venetian blinds, bathing the cheap government-issue furniture—a composite-topped desk, a badly veneered credenza, battered enameled-steel file cabinets, the faded velvet-covered chairs that had once been green and were still not quite any other hue. The nylon industrial carpeting, always having been the approximate color and texture of dirt, was a triumph of camouflage if not of style. A decade of foot traffic could scarcely detract from its appearance.

The burly man craned his neck around and squinted at the junior operations officer. “Gomez, right?”

“Gomes,” the junior officer corrected. “One syllable.”

“That'll fool 'em,” the older man said heavily, as if indulging a lapse of taste. He was Will Garrison, the Beirut operation's officer-in-charge.

The junior man's swarthy cheeks reddened slightly. “I'll let you two talk.”

Garrison sought and obtained a glance of approval from Drucker. “Stay here. We're both going to have questions.”

Gomes stepped into the office with a chastened, summoned-to-the-principal's expression. It took another impatient gesture from Drucker before he sat down on one of the green—somewhat green,
had
been green, more green than anything else—chairs.

“What's our move here?” Drucker asked Garrison.

“You get kicked in the balls, you double over. That's the move.”

“So we're screwed.” Drucker, the winds of outrage having gusted out, now looked as worn and battered as everything else in his office, and he was by far the newest thing in it, having held the position of D.O. for just four years.

“Royally screwed.” Will Garrison was perfectly cordial around Drucker, but he could not be called deferential. He had more years on him than any other senior Cons Ops manager, with an accumulated store of experience and connections that, just often enough, proved invaluable. The years had not mellowed him, Gomes knew. Garrison had always been a hard-ass by reputation, and if anything, he was only more so now. Around the shop, people liked to say that if there were a Mohs scale of hard-assedness, he'd pretty much top it out. He had a long memory, a short temper, a jut-jaw that jutted more when he was irate, and a temperament that started out at the setting “Vaguely Pissed” and got worse from there.

When Gomes was in college, at Richmond, he once bought a used car that had a broken radio: The frequency dial was stuck on a
heavy-metal station and the volume dial was stuck at the halfway point, so that it could only be turned louder. Aside from the heavy-metal part, Garrison reminded him of that car radio.

It was just as well that Drucker had little interest in any org-chart rituals of subservience. The bureaucratic nightmare, Gomes's colleagues all agreed, was the classic “kiss-up, kick-down” kind of guy. Garrison might kick down, but he didn't kiss up, and Drucker might kiss up, but he didn't kick down. Somehow it worked.

“They took his shoes off, too,” Drucker said. “Dumped on the side of the road. So long, GPS transponder. They're no fools.”

“Mother of Christ,” Garrison rumbled, and then, shooting a glance at Gomes, he charged, “Who?”

“We don't know. Our man at the scene said—”

“What?” Garrison jumped.

Gomes felt like a suspect under interrogation. “The asset said the captors barged in on a meeting that had been set up between—”

“I know all about the goddamn meeting,” Garrison snapped.

“Anyway, it was a hood-and-hustle job. The bad guys threw him into a van and disappeared.”

“The bad guys,” Garrison repeated, dyspeptic.

“We don't have much on the captors,” said Gomes. “They were fast and they were brutal. Shot up everybody else in sight. Headdresses, automatic weapons.” Gomes shrugged. “Arab militants. That's my opinion.”

Garrison stared at the young man the way a butterfly collector with a long needle stares at a specimen. “Your opinion, huh?”

Drucker turned to the OIC. “Let's get Oakeshott in here.” He barked the order over the intercom.

“I'm just saying,” Gomes continued, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

Garrison folded his arms on his chest. “Our boy got snatched in Beirut. You venture Arab militants were involved.” He spoke with exaggerated precision. “I bet you were Phi Beta Kappa in college.”

“I didn't do the Greeks,” Gomes muttered.

Garrison made a sibilant
pfut
. “Goddamned greenhorn. Somebody gets snatched in Beijing, you'd announce you think a Chinaman did it. Some things go without saying. If I ask you what kind of van, don't tell me ‘the kind with wheels.'
Com
-fucking-
prende
?”

“Dark green, dusty. Curtained windows. A Ford, our guy thought.”

A tall, reedy man with a thin face and a nimbus of graying hair stepped into the office. A herringbone tweed blazer draped loosely around his narrow torso. “So whose operation was this?” asked Mike Oakeshott, the deputy director for analysis. He dropped himself on another of the more-green-than-not chairs, folding up his long, attenuated arms and spindle shanks like a Swiss Army knife.

“You know damn well whose,” Garrison growled. “Mine.”

“You're the officer-in-charge,” Oakeshott said, with a knowing stare. “Who designed it?”

The burly man shrugged. “Me.”

The senior analyst just looked at him.

“Me and Pollux,” Garrison amended, with a concessive shrug. “Pollux, mainly.”

“Another Tour de France of backpedaling, Will,” said Oakeshott. “Pollux is a brilliant guy when it comes to operations. Not a guy for needless risk. So factor that in.” A glance at Drucker. “What was the game plan?”

“He was undercover for four months,” Drucker said.

“Five months,” Garrison corrected. “Legend was ‘Ross McKibbin.' An American businessman who walked on the shady side of the street. Supposedly a go-between, scouting out laundering opportunities for narco-moohla.”

“That's the right kind of bait if you're after minnows. He wasn't.”

“Damn right,” Drucker said. “Pollux had a slow-infiltration strategy. He wasn't after the fish. He was looking for the other fisherman. The bait just got him a place on the wharf.”

“I get the picture,” Oakeshott said. “It's George Habash revisited.”

The senior analyst did not need to elaborate. In the early 1970s, the Palestinian resistance leader George Habash, known as the Doctor, hosted a secret summit in Lebanon for terror organizations around the world, including ETA in Spain, the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Iranian Liberation Front. In the years that followed, Habash's organization, and Lebanon generally, became a place where terrorists from all over came in search of armaments. The Czech-model Skorpion machine gun that was used to murder Aldo Moro had been acquired in the Lebanon arms mart. When the leader of Autonomia, the Italian revolutionary group, was arrested with two Strela missiles, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine actually claimed the missiles as their property and requested their return. By the fall of the Berlin Wall, though, the Lebanon arms markets, the relay systems through which extremist organizations from around the world could buy and sell the tools of their deadly campaigns, had settled into a long decline.

No longer. As Jared Rinehart and his team had confirmed, the nexus was being revived: The circuits were buzzing again. The world had changed—only to change back. A ballyhooed new world order had grown old fast. The intel analysts recognized something else as well. Armed insurrection did not come cheap; the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research estimated that the Red Brigade spent the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year maintaining its five hundred members. Extremist groups today had extreme needs: plane travel, special weaponry, marine vessels for transport of munitions, the bribery of officialdom. It added up. Plenty of legitimate businessmen were desperate for a quick cash infusion. So were a small but significant number of organizations devoted to organized mayhem and destruction. Jared Rinehart—Pollux—had devised a strategy to get into the buy-side of the equation.