The Bancroft Strategy (58 page)

“Good, Todd. Be Prepared. My Boy Scout.”

Belknap reached behind him, keeping the boy in place and shielded by his body. “You're dying, Jared. You know this. It's over.” He stared into the other man's eyes, trying to reach him on some unspoken level, one mind to another, maintaining the gaze like a grappler's hold.

“They say everyone who sees Genesis's face dies,” Jared said unevenly, his pistol still leveled at Belknap. “So I guess I've been warned. You and me both.”

“You're a dead man, Jared,” said Belknap.

“Yeah? Well, keep 'em guessing, I always say.”

Belknap sensed that Brandon had darted away somewhere, that Rinehart had to decide which target to take out first.

A woman's voice. Andrea's. “Rinehart!” she shouted hoarsely.

She was standing in the doorway, had snatched Belknap's pistol from the table and aimed it at the tall operative. The safety was off; she had only to depress the trigger.

Jared craned his head. “
You
,” he said. The word came out like a groan, the sound of a nail pried from a board.

“What's your blood type, Rinehart?” Andrea's question was punctuated by a loud retort as the gun jerked in her hand. A round struck the tall man high in the chest, where a crimson freshet appeared moments later.

Now Belknap's eyes darted around the room wildly.
Would you just die?
he silently implored Jared Rinehart.
Would you please just die?

He noticed that Brandon had retreated to a corner of the room, where he sat on the floor, his arms around his knees, his face cast down and hidden in the shadows. Only the rocking of his shoulders revealed that he was silently weeping.

Rinehart, incredibly, remained standing. “You shoot like a
girl
.” He sneered, and turned back to Belknap. “She's all wrong for you,” he told him confidingly, breath forced through fluid, half growl, half gurgle. “They all were.”

Andrea squeezed the trigger again, and then again. A spray of blood and viscera spattered onto the computer screen.

Rinehart, his eyes still intently on Belknap's, began to raise his gun yet again, but it slipped from his hand. A rivulet of blood wept from the corner of his mouth. He coughed twice, and gulped at the air, swaying on his feet as he progressively lost control of his muscles. Belknap recognized the look: It was that of a man slowly drowning in his own blood.

“Castor,” Rinehart wheezed. Then, moments before he collapsed, he managed to reach out sightlessly with his hands and take a stumbling step forward, as if to strangle the other man or to embrace him.

It was a year later, and, Andrea had to admit, a great deal had changed. Maybe the world wasn't different, but her world certainly was. She made decisions that surprised her—decisions that surprised them both—but in retrospect they seemed both right and inevitable. Not that she had as much time to ponder these things as she would have preferred. Being the director of the Bancroft Foundation, she found, wasn't something you could do on the side. It was an all-consuming endeavor, at least if you wanted to do it the way it should be done.

The enormities committed by the Theta Group could never be set right. But, as she and her husband had agreed, the foundation proper had played a genuinely valuable role in the world, and, once the malignity had been cut out, it could be of even greater service. Another decision had emerged from a series of meetings that she and Todd had had with Senator Kirk before his death. It was to keep the existence of this terrible aberration a closely guarded secret. The revelations would otherwise have tarred every NGO and philanthropic institution in the world; in geopolitical terms, they would have been destabilizing in thousands of unforeseeable ways. The result could have been years, perhaps decades, of bitterness, enmity, and recrimination. The remaining Theta principals—those who had not managed to disappear—had been turned over to clandestine judicial proceedings organized by the Department of Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, all of which were classified and sealed as a matter of national security.

Her eyes drifted to the photographs on her desk. The two men in
her life. She had last seen them that morning, when she was leaving for work and they were playing basketball. Brandon was growing quickly—all elbows and angles, it seemed, skinny arms and gawky swagger. A fourteen-year-old.

“Now watch, people,” the boy had said in a sports announcer's voice as he galloped toward the basket, his black Pumas looking oversized below his slender calves. “Witness the inimitable moves of Brandon Bancroft! He shoots! He scores!” The ball banged off the rim. “And he speaks too soon!” His T-shirt was lightly spotted with perspiration, Todd's more heavily.

“If I didn't have these shin splints,” Todd said, hobbling slightly as he retrieved the ball. He dribbled twice, leaned back, and sank the ball through the net. The soft swooshing sound of the nylon weave against the pebbled rubber of the ball: Brandon dubbed it “the music of the sphere.”

Andrea, standing by the privet hedge, shook her head. “You're supposed to save your excuses for when you miss, Todd.” She could feel the morning sun on her face, and for a moment she thought it was only the sun that was warming her as she watched the two play.

“Hey, feel free to show your stuff,” said Brandon. “Just for a minute or two, yeah?”

“Only, no Manolos on the court, lady,” said Todd, his expression both tender and playful.

“Step into lace-ups, though, and you might get a nice bidding war started between Team Brandon and Team Todd.” Brandon's voice was deeper, weightier than before. Even his eyebrows were a little darker, a little heavier than they were a year ago. Then he grinned—and that grin, anyway, hadn't changed at all. As far as Andrea was concerned, it was one of the wonders of the natural world.

Don't ever let them take that away from you.
A silent prayer. Watching the two, she thought it had a good chance of coming true.

“It's always nice to be recruited, but I'll have to take a raincheck.” She turned away, almost embarrassed by her happiness. “It's just
that I've got people waiting in the office. You boys going to be all right?”

Her husband slung a sweaty arm around Brandon's narrow shoulders. “Hey,” he told her, still slightly out of breath. “Don't worry about us. You take care of the world.”

Brandon nodded. “We'll take care of each other.”

 

Now it was early afternoon, and Andrea had already made it through three executive strategy meetings and two conference calls with regional administrators. At the moment, the senior program director was giving her an update of the foundation's health campaigns in South America, and, as she sat at her office desk, she nodded encouragingly as he summarized the developments.

Her eyes drifted again to the photographs on her desk, and then caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a chrome frame. She was a different person than she was a year ago; she didn't have to look in a mirror to recognize that. She could tell it from the way people responded to her. She had the authority and self-assurance of someone who had truly come into her own. And it was genuinely gratifying to be able to use the foundation's resources to make the world a better place—and do so the right way. The only way, as far as she was concerned. She took pride in the transparency of the foundation's operations. She hid nothing, because there was nothing to hide.

“The Uruguay project has been a model,” the director of the South American regional program was saying. “We expect many other foundations and NGOs will study what we've done and emulate it.” The man—gray-haired, slightly stooped, and with a round, bespectacled face—had the careworn expression of someone who had seen much suffering and misery during his twenty years with the foundation. Yet he had also seen how suffering and misery could be alleviated.

“I hope they do,” Andrea said. “In this line of work, copycats are
what you hope for, because that's how you multiply the benefits. It's crucial that these regions aren't written off. They can change. They can change for the better.” As she herself had changed.

Her husband and their adopted son had changed as well. As unlike as Todd and Brandon were, they had forged a relationship that she could not have anticipated. Brandon had, in some sense, lost his childhood, Todd his adulthood, and that made them fellow mourners for a while, and yet there was more to it than that. Nobody could keep up with Brandon intellectually, of course, but his emotional maturity—his basic kindness, his perceptiveness—was also remarkable, and enabled him to recognize something in Todd that was hidden from most people. The boy recognized Todd's vulnerability and ardor and desire to nurture, and he responded to it with his own vulnerability and ardor and need to be nurtured. A boy had found a father; a man had found a son.

And Andrea had found a family.

“The news from Guyana is not so heartening,” said the program director carefully. He was referring to a major vaccination plan they were trying to implement in its rural regions. It was of particular interest to her. She had made a visit to the Guyanese countryside just last month. The images of the Amerindian villages near the Moruca River were still fresh in her mind, their lives and travails heart-wrenchingly vivid. To see a village being decimated by a preventable epidemic in this day and age—it filled her with sorrow and anger.

“I don't understand,” Andrea said. “Every detail was painstakingly worked out.” It was going to be a textbook example of how to ramp up public health even in regions with poor infrastructure.

“The campaign's potential is extraordinary, Ms. Bancroft,” he told her. “Your leadership during your visit gave everyone hope.”

“What I saw during my visit last month,” she said, “isn't something I'll ever forget.” Her words were heartfelt, fierce.

“Unfortunately, the minister of the interior has just withdrawn permission for us to continue. He says he'll have all the health
workers we've hired deported. He's actually forbidding the inoculations.”

“You can't be serious,” Andrea said. “There's no possible justification—”

“You're right,” the gray-haired man said gravely. “No justification. Only an explanation. You see, the Amerindians whose lives would be saved tend to be supporters of a rival political party.”

“You're sure that's what's going on?” she asked, repulsed.

“We've heard directly from our allies in the administration.” The man's basset-hound eyes were sorrowful. “It's appalling. Thousands will die because of this man's fear of democracy. And he's as corrupt as the day is long. This isn't just rumor. We know people who have obtained actual bank records of payoffs made to his offshore accounts.”

“Really.”

“Might I suggest that we could at least consider the option of, well, getting tough with the bastard? Let him know what we can prove—because that could cause quite a bit of trouble for him politically. Of course, we'd never do that without your permission.” The program director paused. “Ms. Bancroft?”

Andrea was silent. Her mind filled with an image from her trip last month. It was of an Arawak mother—long, lustrous black hair, haunted, luminous eyes—cradling her baby in her arms. The nurse who had accompanied Andrea as she toured the clinic in Santa Rosa told her quietly that the baby had died only minutes earlier of diphtheria; they hadn't had the heart to tell the mother yet.

Andrea's eyes had filled with tears. Then the mother looked up at her and caught her expression, and realized what Andrea had been told. Her baby was no more. A soft wail emerged from the mother's throat, the sound of purest grief.

“Such a shame, too,” the program director went on in a soft, somber voice. “I know what your feelings are about this kind of thing. I share them. But, Christ, the difference it could make to the whole region…”

“No other way?”

“If only,” he said, shaking his head firmly. Something in her face gave him encouragement, though, and his eyes seemed to brighten. “You know how it is. Doing the right thing isn't always easy.” He gave her an expectant look.

“True enough,” she said quietly, struggling with herself. “All right. Go ahead. Just this once, but—let's do it.”