The Bancroft Strategy (13 page)

“The kind who understand about unthinking obedience to ultimate authority,” Belknap said. “Where?”

“A ground-floor apartment on via Clarice Marescotti. Khalil Ansari was very particular in who he would permit in his establishments. He had to be.”

“She disappeared the night Ansari was killed?”

Yusef Ali nodded. “We never saw her again.”

“And you—how long were you with Ansari?”

“Nine years.”

“You must have learned a lot about him.”

“A lot and a little. I knew what I needed to know in order to serve. But not more.”

“There was an American. Kidnapped in Beirut. Same night as Ansari was killed.” Belknap studied the Tunisian's expression as he spoke. “Did Ansari arrange this?”

“I do not know.” The response was uninflected, expressionless. Not careful, not crafted. “We were not told about it.”

Again, Belknap studied the Tunisian closely and decided he was telling the truth. There would be no shortcuts here, but then he hardly expected that there would be. For the next twenty minutes, he continued to burrow in, gradually eliciting a vague picture of Ansari's establishment on via Angelo Masina. It was a coarse mosaic pieced together from large tiles. Yusef Ali had received instructions that his master's business concerns were, in effect, under new management. The basic elements of the management team would remain in place. The security breach had been identified and remedied. The security staff was to maintain vigilance until further instructions arrived. As for events in Beirut or the Bekaa, Ali had no direct knowledge. Ansari had dealings there, yes; everyone knew that. But it had never been a posting of Yusef Ali's. One did not ask needless questions, not if you wished to remain in Khalil Ansari's employ.

But Yusef Ali
had
been in charge of security at via Angelo Masina. Which left the servant girl. Belknap's one lead. The Tunisian did not have to be pressed further to provide the exact address where her family lived.

The chamber was growing muggy, close. At last, Belknap glanced at his watch once more. He had, if not what he needed, than all he was likely to get. He noticed that he still held
la pera
in his left hand, had been gripping it throughout the interrogation. Now he set it down and moved toward the door to the soundproofed dungeon. “They'll find you in the morning,” he told Yusef Ali.

“Wait,” the guard said in a hushed, urgent voice. “I have done what you ask of me. You must not leave me here.”

“You'll be found soon.”

“You will not release me?”

“I can't take that risk. Not while I'm making my exit. You know that.”

Yusef Ali's eyes widened. “But you must.”

“But I won't.”

After a few long seconds, the man's eyes clouded over with resignation, even despair. “Then you must do me one service.” The manacled guard jerked his head toward his pistol, still lying on the floor. “Shoot me.”

“I said I was full-service. But not
that
full-service.”

“You must understand. I have been a loyal servant of Khalil Ansari, a good soldier and a true one.” The Tunisian's gaze was downcast. “If they find me here,” he went on, in a strangled voice, “I will be disgraced and…made an example of.”

“Tortured to death, you mean. As you have tortured others to death.”
Where are you now, Jared? What are they doing to you?
The urgency of Belknap's mission seemed to push against his chest cage.

Yusef Ali made no demurral. He must have known precisely how agonizing and humiliating such a death could be, having helped inflict it upon others. A slow and excrutiating death that would strip every atom of dignity and pride from someone who valued dignity and pride above all.

“I do not deserve it,” he declared, his voice harsh and defiant. “I deserve better!”

Belknap turned a vault-style wheel and retracted a series of dead bolts. The door glided open and a coolness drifted inside.

“Please,” the man husked. “Shoot me now. It would be a
kindness.
”

“Yes,” Belknap agreed levelly. “That's why I won't.”

As Andrea Bancroft made her way along the bosky path to Paul Bancroft's house, her mind filled with drifting skeins of half-formed thoughts. The air was fragrant from the mounded borders of lavender, wild thyme, and vetiver grass fringing the gentle berm that subtly screened one property from another. Bancroft's house seemed to be of similar vintage as the foundation's, and in a harmonious style. Like the foundation's headquarters, the facades of aged brick and red sandstone melted into the landscape in a way that made it all the more impressive when at last its outlines could be clearly made out, and one realized how much of it had been in plain sight all along.

At the door Andrea was met by a uniformed woman of around fifty; her hair was a mixture of red and gray, and her broad cheeks were freckled. “You'll be Miss Bancroft?” she asked, with the faint brogue of an Irishwoman who had spent most of her adult life in America. Nuala, wasn't it? “The gentleman will be down presently.” She gave Andrea a look that segued swiftly from appraisal to approval. “Now, what can I get you to drink? A taste of something nourishing?”

“I'm fine, I think,” Andrea replied hesitantly.

“You're telling me. How about a light sherry, then? The gentleman likes it quite dry, if that agrees with you. Not like the sticky stuff I grew up on, I can tell you that.”

“Sounds perfect,” Andrea said. The servants of a billionaire were bound to be stiff and starched to the nth degree, weren't they? But the Irishwoman was practically loosey-goosey, and that had to be a tribute to her employer. Paul Bancroft was obviously not a stickler
for ceremony. This wasn't someone who wanted members of his staff to walk on eggshells, terrified of a trespass.

“One fino coming up,” the Irishwoman said. “I'm Nuala, by the way.”

Andrea shook her hand and smiled, already beginning to feel welcomed.

Nursing her glass of fino sherry, Andrea began to take in the prints and paintings that hung in the dark wood-paneled foyer and adjoining parlor. She recognized some of the images, some of the artists; others, no less captivating, were unknown to her. She found herself drawn to a black-and-white drawing of a gargantuan fish on a shore somewhere, a fish so vast that it dwarfed the fishermen who surrounded it with ladders and knives. A dozen or more smaller fish spilled from its mouth. Where a fisherman had sliced open the leviathan's belly, another bevy of smaller fish had tumbled out.

“Arresting, isn't it?” Paul Bancroft's voice. Andrea had been studying the picture so intently that she had not heard him arrive.

“Who's it by?” Andrea asked, turning around.

“It's an ink drawing by Pieter Bruegel the elder, from 1556. He called it
Big Fish Eat Little Fish
. He wasn't one for decorous indirection. It used to hang in the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna. But, like you, I found myself drawn to it.”

“And you swallowed it whole.”

Paul Bancroft laughed again, heartily, with his whole body. “I hope you don't mind dining on the early side,” he said, “The boy's still at the age where he has a bedtime.”

Andrea sensed that her host was eager to have her meet his son but anxious as well. She was reminded of a friend who had a child with Down Syndrome—a gentle, sunny, smiling child, whom the mother loved and felt pride in and, on some dark unacknowledged plane, some tincture of shame about, too…a shame that itself inspired shame.

“Brandon, was it?”

“Brandon, yes. Apple of his father's eye. He's…well, special, I
guess you might say. A little unusual. In a
good
way, I like to think. Probably upstairs on the computer, IM-ing someone unsuitable.”

Paul Bancroft, too, had a small glass of sherry in his hands, and had taken off his jacket, though the houndstooth sweater vest made him look as professorial as ever. “Welcome,” he said, raising his glass in a toast, and the two settled down in tufted leather chairs in front of an unlighted hearth. The walnut paneling, the old, worn Persian carpets, the simple hardwood floors, darkened with age: It all seemed ageless, tranquil, a kind of luxury that scorned luxury.

“Andrea Bancroft,” he said, as if savoring the syllables. “I have learned a thing or two about you. Graduate study in economic history, am I right?”

“For two years, at Yale. Two and half. Never finished the dissertation.” The fino was pale straw in color. She took a sip of it and the flavors blossomed in her mouth, her nose. It had a light toffee-like scent, tasted deliciously of nuts and melon.

“No wonder, given your independence of mind. It isn't an attribute that's valued there. Too much independence breeds discomfort, especially among would-be gurus who don't quite believe what they're saying.”

“I guess I could claim I wanted to be more grounded in the real world. Except the humiliating truth is, I dropped out of grad school because I wanted to make more money.” She stopped, appalled that she had actually said it out loud.
Great going, Andrea. Be sure to tell him about the factory outlet sale you drove two hours to get to last weekend.

“Ah, but our means contour our preferences,” her cousin replied lightly. “You're not just clear-eyed, you're honest, too. Two things that don't always come in one package.” He looked off. “I suppose it would be disloyal of me to express ferocious disapproval of my late cousin Reynolds, but then, as the utilitarian William Godwin wrote near the end of the eighteenth century, ‘What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?' The circumstances in which your mother was left are something else
I recently learned about, to my dismay. But…” He shook his head. “A subject for another occasion.”

“Thank you,” Andrea said, suddenly embarrassed and eager to change the subject. She couldn't help but think back to her closets filled with knockoffs of costly designs, her aspirations, the pride with which she paid off her charge-card balances in full every month. It seemed so absurd now. Would she have left the sheltering groves of academe if she hadn't been concerned about money? Her academic advisers had been encouraging; they'd assumed that she would soon be wheeling along on the tenure track, making the sort of decisions and compromises that they had made. Meanwhile, her student loans grew more onerous; she felt suffocated by the bills she couldn't quite pay, the credit-card debt she serviced with the minimum payment due as she watched it grow from one month to the next. Perhaps, too, on some scarcely conscious level, she yearned for a life where she wouldn't have to study the numbers on the right-hand column of the menu—for the life that had almost been hers.

She felt a strange moment of upheaval as she reflected back on all those “practical” choices and worldly accommodations she had made—and for what? Her salary as a securities analyst was considerably more than what she could have expected as a junior faculty member; but it was, she now saw, a trivial sum. With her grubby fixation on discounts, she had discounted herself.

When she looked up, she realized that Paul Bancroft had been speaking.

“So I know what it's like to lose someone. My wife's death was shattering both for me and my son. A difficult time.”

“It must have been,” Andrea murmured.

“Alice was twenty years younger than me, for one thing. She was supposed to have been the one to carry on. To wear black at my funeral. But somehow she got a short straw in some infernal genetic lottery. It makes you realize how fragile life is. Unbelievably resilient. Unbelievably fragile.”

“‘Work for the night cometh,' right?”

“Sooner than we know,” he said softly. “And the work is never done, is it?” He took another sip of the pale-straw fino. “You'll have to forgive me for dragging down the mood. It's the fifth anniversary of her death this week. There's the consolation that what she left behind is as precious to me as anything.”

The scrambling sound of coltish footsteps—someone taking the stairs two at a time, then jumping down to the landing.

“Speaking of whom…” Paul Bancroft said. He turned to the new arrival, who was standing in the arched doorway to the parlor. “Brandon, I'd like you to meet Andrea Bancroft.”

The mop of curly blond hair was what she noticed first, and then the boy's apple cheeks. His eyes were an unclouded blue, and he had his father's fine symmetrical features. He was, she decided, an exceptionally handsome boy, even beautiful.

Then he turned to her and his face broke in a smile. “Brandon,” he said, extending a hand. “Nice to meet you.” His voice had not yet acquired the husk of adolescence, but it was deeper than a child's. A beardless youth, as the ancients would have said, but with a perceptible darkening of the down on his upper lip. Not yet a man, no longer a child.

His handshake was firm and dry; he was a little shy but not awkward. He sprawled on a nearby chair and maintained eye contact with her. There was none of that “command performance” resentment that children his age have around guests. He seemed genuinely curious.

She was curious herself. Brandon wore a blue plaid shirt, untucked, and gray trousers with lots of zippers and pockets, pretty much standard garb for his cohort.

“Your father guessed that you were instant-messaging unsuitable people,” Andrea said lightly.

“Solomon Agronski was whuppin' my behind,” Brandon said merrily. “We were doing DAGs, and I was way off-base. Got my ass handed to me.”

“This some kind of game?”

“I wish,” Brandon said. “DAGs—it's, like, a directed acyclic graph. I know—snooze city, right?”

“And this Solomon Agronski…” Andrea prompted, still at a loss.

“Handed me my ass,” Brandon repeated.

Paul Bancroft crossed his legs, looking amused. “He's one of the country's foremost mathematical logicians. Runs the Center for Logic and Computation at Stanford. They've developed quite a correspondence, if that's the word for it.”

Andrea tried to hide her astonishment. This was a far cry from Down Syndrome.

The boy sniffed her glass of sherry and made a face. “Yuck,” he said. “Wouldn't you like some Sprite instead? I'm gonna have some.”

“Actually, I'm okay,” Andrea said, laughing.

“Suit yourself.” Then he snapped his fingers. “I know what we could do. Let's shoot some hoops.”

Paul Bancroft traded glances with Andrea. “I'm afraid he thinks you're here as a playmate for him.”

“Naw, seriously,” Brandon persisted. “Want to show me your moves? While it's still light?”

Paul cocked a brow. “Brandon,” he told his son, “she's just arrived and she's not exactly dressed for the playground, is she?”

“If I had the right shoes,” Andrea said, apologetically.

The boy was all business. “Size?”

“Seven and a half.”

“Which is seven in a man's size. Each size represents an increment of a third of an inch, starting at three and eleven-twelfths inches. Did you know that?”

“Brandon's filled with fun facts,” his father jested. But there was no mistaking his doting gaze.

“Some of them are even correct,” the boy chirruped. “Brainstorm!” he announced, leaping up from the chair. “Nuala's an eight! Close enough, right?” He scampered down the hallway, and from a distance
they could hear him call out: “Nuala, can Andrea borrow a pair of your sneakers? Pretty please? Pretty pretty pretty please.”

Paul Bancroft crooked a smile at her. “Resourceful, no?”

“He's…remarkable,” Andrea said, risking polite understatement.

“He's already certified as an international chess master. When I achieved the rank, I was twenty-two. People said I was precocious, but there's no comparison.”

“An international chess master? Most kids his age spend their time doing Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations.”

“Guess what. Brandon does, too. He's always playing Sim City. The thing to remember is, he's just a kid. He's got the intellectual firepower to make significant contributions to a dozen fields, but—well, you'll see. He's also a kid. Loves video games and hates to clean his room. He's an American thirteen-year-old. Thank goodness.”

“You ever have to tell him where babies come from?”

“No, but he's asked some pretty pointed questions about the molecular basis of embryology.” A contented look settled on the savant's face. “He's what they call a sport of nature.”

“Sounds like a good sport, anyway.”

“With a good nature.”

Brandon galumphed back into the parlor triumphantly holding a pair of canvas sneakers in one hand, green track pants in another.

His father rolled his eyes. “You can say no, you realize,” he told her.

Andrea changed in a bathroom off the foyer. “You've got five minutes,” she told Brandon when she emerged. “Time enough to show me your stuff.”

“Fine. You want to see my moves?”

“
Bring
it, on kid,” she deadpanned, spoof streetwise. “You gotta represent.”

The court—basic concrete with chalked lines—was tucked behind a tall privet hedge to one side of the house.

“You gonna show me your old-school moves?” He tossed the basketball from behind the three-point line. It glanced off the rim but
didn't go through. Andrea stepped in and scooped up the ball, doing a fast dunk. She'd played varsity basketball in high school, still remembered the basic plays.

“Just keepin' it real,” Andrea returned. Brandon drove to the hoop and picked up the rebound; he was unpracticed and inexperienced, but surprisingly coordinated for a boy of his age. He seemed to study her stance when she put the ball through the net, and copied her moves. Each time he shot, he came a little closer. By the time they returned to the house—she insisting on keeping to the five minutes they had agreed on—they both had color in their cheeks. She changed out of the athletic shoes and track pants in a small powder room off a side parlor—how many did this house have, anyway?—and returned to the sitting room with the leather furniture.