The Bancroft Strategy (21 page)

He took a carafe from the coffee machine and filled a mug on which was emblazoned the once humorous logo
DOES THIS BODY MAKE ME LOOK FAT?
He poured a heaping spoonful of sugar into it. No Sheila glares to worry about, right? He could have all the sugar he wanted. Like the state motto said: Live free or die!

The Dodge pickup truck started up just fine, but two hours down the turnpike later, the coffee seemed to have turned into piss and stomach acid. A couple of rest stops took care of one problem; a roll
of Tums was contending with the other. His ass was going to sleep, something to do with the springs in the seat, maybe. He should have invested in one of those special seat pads, the kind that hemorrhoidal truck drivers always seemed to have.

 

It took a good four hours before he reached Carlyle, Connecticut, and he was in a foul mood. Four freaking hours of his life. When he could have been doing—what? Still. Four hours. “Just nip over,” Castor had said. Four hours wasn't any kind of a nip.

The job would be a cakewalk, though. By the time he'd made a few reconnoitering runs along Elm Street, he was sure about that. The Carlyle police were a joke. And the lady in question lived in a doll's house of a Cape Cod. No visible security measures whatever. A screen porch. Ordinary glass on the windows. No house-hugging shrubbery that might have concealed security devices by the foundations. He wouldn't be surprised if she didn't even lock her doors.

Still, this trip was strictly business, not pleasure; he was a professional. Castor would not have tasked him for no reason. Which meant it was time for the Navajo Blue show.

He parked his truck across the street and a few hundred yards away from the house. When he finally emerged from the truck—and there was relief in stepping away from his own funk and flatulence—he was wearing a generic-looking handyman uniform: a Dickies-style silver-gray shirt and pants with a small embroidered pocket patch that said S
ERVICE
M
ASTER
, a leather tool belt. Generic service guy: That's how it would read. Nobody you took a second look at, unless you were the guy who had called him. Elm Street was filled with nicely mown rectangular yards with one-from-column-A-one-from-column-B shrubs: red barberries, blue junipers, flat-topped yews, forsythia—all varieties had become indigenous to the suburban sprawl that was the greater Northeast. He craned his head,
looked at the houses on both sides of the street, as far as he could see. Four kinds of plants, four styles of houses. Everybody's special in the US of A, right?

Navajo Blue saw an empty garage, no car in the driveway. Nobody in view from any of the windows. Nobody at home. He went to the door, rang the bell, prepared to pretend he had come to the wrong house if someone answered. As he expected, nobody did. He walked around to the rear of the house, found the place where the telephone and coaxial cables entered the house. Nothing could be easier than to place a listening device on the line. The one he would use—like a lot of retired ops, he kept a trick bag of such devices—was nothing special, but it was road-tested and reliable. He got down on his knees and took out what looked like a cable tester, a small black plastic gizmo the size of a garage opener with an LCD display, and reached under the cable cluster. He felt a small oblong object, a little like a small battery, and a lot like a signal-intercept device.

What the hell?

He squinted at it, visually confirming what he had felt. Someone had got there before he had. There already was a tap on the line, and it was a better model than one that he had. Now he let himself in the back—it took fifteen seconds with a couple of stiff bristles inside the keyhole, not his personal best, but not bad, either—and wandered through the place. Nicely but modestly furnished; a girl's place but not a girly girl's. Nothing too pink or fluffy. On the other hand, nothing that suggested it was a lair of iniquity, either.

There were a number of good places for secreting audio-surveillance instruments, in his professional estimation. An ideal location had to meet two tests. It had to be a place where it wouldn't be detected, but also where it would be capable of getting a high-quality feed. Stick a bug in a pipe and nobody would find it, but you wouldn't pick up a goddamn thing, either. And it had to be someplace that wouldn't get moved or thrown out, the way a floral arrangement would be. He figured he'd have no problem finding
good homes for half a dozen of the devices, starting with the chandelier in the dining room, which was close to ideal. He stepped on a chair and examined the inner brass circle around which was a circle of flame-shaped bulbs. Out of sight, there was a recessed spot where the wiring came through, and that would probably leave room for…Navajo Blue blinked. Once again, someone had beaten him to it. To most people, the thing would look like an extra, capped-off wire. But he knew exactly what it was—starting with the fact that the top of the cap was actually sieve-textured glass.

Over the next fifteen minutes, he identified several other prime locations for surveillance devices. Each time he found that one had already been planted there.

His nerves were now sparking at him, and it wasn't the hangover anymore. The fact was, 42 Elm Street was wired up like a goddamn studio. Something was very wrong.

His instincts might have grown muzzy, but they told him to get out of there fast, and he did so, walking out the back door and rounding to the street. He thought he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye—someone watching from a neighboring yard?—but when he turned for a second look, whatever he saw was gone. Now he strode the half-block to his truck and drove off. Castor said he'd check in within a few hours. Castor was going to get an earful.

The AC was blasting away—he hadn't remembered leaving it on—and he reached over to fiddle with the knobs on the dashboard, which suddenly seemed far away, as if someone had stretched everything out. The afternoon sun seemed to flicker and dim, which meant that a cloud had passed over it, except that the light got dimmer and dimmer and no cloud could turn day into night and it was definitely night, it was midnight-blue, and he had some thought about turning on the headlights and another thought that the headlight thought didn't really make sense, and he just managed to pull the truck over to a halt on the side of the road before the weird noc
turnal vision turned into inky blackness. Then he had no more thoughts at all.

A tinted-glass navy sedan glided to a stop just behind the van. The two men who emerged from it—both of medium height and medium build, medium brown hair at medium length, wholly unexceptionable save for their hatchet-like countenances—were efficient in their movements. Someone who met them might have taken them to be brothers, and they were. One of them lifted the truck's hood and removed a spent flat canister from the air-conditioning system. The other opened the driver's-side door to the truck and, taking care not to inhale, pulled the lifeless body out of it. His companion would drive the truck back to the address they had in New Hampshire, but first he helped carry the dead man into the trunk of the sedan. The body, too, would be returned to the man's home and arranged in some plausible position there.

“You realize it's going to be a four-hour drive,” said the first man, hoisting the body from beneath its arms.

“It's the least we can do,” his companion replied. Together, they arranged the body in the trunk so that it would not slide around in transit. Before the trunk was closed, Navajo Blue's body was curled around a spare tire as if it were hugging it. “After all, he's in no condition to drive.”

Hang on, Pollux
, Belknap silently urged.
I'm coming to get you
.

But the course would not follow a straight line—for reasons Jared Rinehart understood better than anyone.

The shortest distance between two points,
Jared had once ventured,
is frequently a parabola followed by a ellipse followed by a hyperbola.
He meant that in the world of espionage, indirection and obliquity were just as likely to provide a shortcut as blunderbuss directness, and he had been cautioning Belknap when he said so. Not that Belknap had any other choice at the moment.

The dun-colored building could have been a distribution center for industrial components. There was a halfhearted stretch of barbed wire around the property, which seemed mainly for show, a way of discouraging casual visitors. Belknap drove his SUV through the main drive and parked off to one side. Stealth wasn't possible with a building like this one, and Belknap wasn't going to attempt it. Such an approach would signal that he had something to hide, that he was in a position of weakness. They were the ones who had something to hide. Belknap would make more progress by being bold and fearless in his approach.

He stepped outside the SUV, instantly enrobed in kilnlike heat, and he hurried to the nearest door before he began to perspire. Not the garage-style hinged door leading to the tarmac drive, but the white enameled steel door to the left of it. The door pushed open, and, as his eyes adjusted from the dazzling white outside to the gloom within, he had the sense that he had stumbled across a small refugee camp.

The space was cavernous, poorly lit, with sleeping bags and thin mattresses scattered pell-mell. A row of open shower stalls was at one end of the space; water dripped from leaky faucets. There were food smells: cartons of cheap local stews. And everywhere there were people—girls, boys, many shockingly young. Some were clustered around pillars, some slumped, dozing, off on their own. They were a strikingly international crew. Some seemed to have arrived from Thailand, Burma, or the Philippines. Some were Arab. A few were from sub-Saharan Africa; others might have been village kids from India. A handful might have been from Eastern Europe.

What he saw did not surprise Belknap, but it nauseated him all the same. Young girls, younger boys, all driven by indigence into sexual slavery. Some must have been sold by their parents; others would have been fortunate even to have living parents.

Coming toward him slowly was a jowly, swarthy man in a white gauzy shirt and denim cutoffs, with a long, curved knife in one belt holster and a radio communicator in another. The man walked with a slight limp. He was nothing more than a watchman, a caretaker. For that was the ugliest part of it: Those who run such establishments did not need guards to keep these boys and girls in captivity; they required no locks, bars, shackles. And Belknap couldn't have set them free if he wanted to. For these children, the true shackles were forged of poverty. Even if they were left to wander freely through Dubai, they would only be picked up by another such establishment. Physical beauty was their one saleable asset; the rest reflected the cold inexorable logic of the marketplace.

Belknap's nostrils filled with a harsh chemical scent, overwhelming the human fetor; the drains in the concrete floors indicated that the place was hosed down regularly, and doubtless mopped with some industrial-grade disinfectant. Factory-farmed swine were kept in better conditions.

The man with the knife growled at him ineffectually, saying something in Arabic. When Belknap did not respond, he came closer and
said in heavily accented English, “You are in the wrong place. You must go now.” It was clear that he considered the radio communicator on his belt—his ability to summon backup—his real weapon.

Belknap ignored the fat man and continued to look around. This was a Hades of sorts, an underworld that few of its inhabitants would ever leave, at least not with their souls intact. Of the dozens of people in the building, few were over twenty, he reckoned. A fair number were probably no older than twelve or thirteen. Every one a story of an everyday tragedy.

Amid the heat, he felt cold. His had been a lifetime of heroics, of derring-do with guns and spycraft, yet what did it amount to in the face of such horrors? In the face of the grinding poverty that drove children into a place like this, and made them feel grateful that they at least were able to fill their bellies? For there was no humiliation like want, no degradation like hunger.

“I say, you must go!” the jowly man repeated, his breath garlicky and stale.

There was a noise from a group of somber-looking teenage girls, and the man turned around and scowled at them. He brandished his knife and shouted a string of multilingual curse words. Some rule of local etiquette had been breached. Then he turned back to Belknap, the knife now in his hand.

“Tell me about the Italian girl,” Belknap demanded.

The fat man looked blank. The girls were livestock to him; he did not distinguish among them save by the grossest characteristics. “You go!” he bellowed, coming closer to Belknap.

The man reached for his radio handset and Belknap grabbed it from his chubby hand. Then, with a swift blow, he drove rigid fingers into the man's soft throat. As the man sank to the ground, helplessly clawing at his rapidly swelling larynx, Belknap kicked him hard in the face with a heavy shoe. The fat man sprawled motionless on the floor, breathing in fast puffs but unconscious.

There were dozens of eyes on Belknap when he turned around,
neither approving nor condemning, but simply interested to see what he would do next. There was something sheeplike about them, and he felt a surge of contempt.

He turned toward a girl who looked to be around Lucia Zingaretti's age. “You know an Italian girl? A girl named Lucia?”

The girl dazedly shook her head. She neither moved away from him nor met his gaze. She just wanted to get through the day. For someone like her, mere survival was an achievement.

He tried again with another girl, and again; the responses were the same. These were people who had been taught that whatever they did would be futile; the lesson of helplessness was not easily unlearned.

Then Belknap made his way across the main floor until he noticed, through a slatlike window, a small cinderblock storage facility at the rear of the property. He barged through a back door and made his way across yards of sand and scrub until he reached the small cinderblock shelter. He noticed that the main door was designed to take a heavy security padlock, and that such a padlock had been used recently. The paint was scratched in spots, exposing glinting steel. No evidence of corrosion yet, which meant that the scratches were recent.

He pushed through the steel door and, pulling a penlight from his pocket, he investigated the gloom. The space was basically a shack, the sort of structure that was normally made of sheet metal, not heavy cement blocks. There was dust on the concrete floor, but there were also areas where the dust had been wiped away—further evidence of recent activity.

It took him nearly five minutes before he saw it.

A small inscription, easy to miss, about a foot above the floor on the rear wall. He knelt down and peered, holding his penlight very close to it.

Two words, in small painted letters:
POLLUX ADERAT
.

It was Latin for “Pollux was here.” Belknap could hardly breathe.
He recognized the neat, almost crabbed handwriting—unmistakably Jared's—and he recognized something else as well.

The words had been written in blood.

Jared Rinehart had been there—but when? And, most crucially, where was he now? Belknap raced back into the main building and started demanding of everyone he came across whether they had seen a man in the past few days, a tall American. All he aroused was mute indifference.

As he made his way back to his SUV, hair now sweat-pasted on his forehead, he heard a boy's voice. “Mister, mister,” the child was calling out.

He turned around to see a kohl-eyed Arab, who was maybe in his early teens, maybe not yet. The urchin's voice had not yet broken. A specialty taste.

Belknap gazed at him, mute, expectant.

“You ask about your friend?” the boy asked.

“Yes?”

The boy was silent for a moment, staring up at the American as if to scrutinize his character, his soul, the possible danger he presented and the possible help he could offer. “A trade?”

“Go on.”

“You take me back to my home village in Oman.”

“And?”

“I know where they took your friend.”

That was the boy's trade, then: information for transport. Yet could he be trusted? If he were desperate to be returned to his Omani village, a crafty boy could concoct a story on the spur of the moment.

“Where?”

The boy shook his head, his fine black hair gleaming in the sun. The makeup they had applied around his eyes was doubtless a regional specialty. But his delicate face was resolute, his large eyes were solemn. The terms of the exchange had to be honored first.

“Talk to me,” Belknap said. “Give me a reason to believe you.”

The boy—perhaps four foot six in height—tapped on the hood of the SUV. “You have air conditioning?”

Belknap gave him a hard stare. Then he got into the driver's seat and opened the door opposite; the Arab boy climbed in. He started up the engine, and within moments cool air bathed them both.

The boy smiled, a dazzling white smile, as he pressed his face to the nearest AC vent. “Habib Almani—do you know this princeling?”

“Princeling?”

“He calls himself ‘princeling.' An Omani gentleman. Very rich. Big man.” The boy gestured with his hands to describe someone of considerable girth. “Owns much property in Dubai. Owns stores. Owns trucking firm. Owns dhow business.” He pointed toward the dun-colored building. “Owns this, too. Nobody knows.”

“But you know.”

“My father owe him money. Almani is also a
Beit
, a clan chieftain.”

“So your father gave you to him.”

The boy shook his head vehemently. “My father never do that! He refused! So Habib Almani's men take his two children. Zip, zip, in the darkness, he steals us away. What can my father do? He does not know where we are.”

“And my American friend?”

“I see him brought here blindfolded, in Habib Almani van. They use his trucking service. They use his building for the rent boys and girls. Habib Almani does all this for them. Then they take the tall American away. The princeling knows, because he is the one in charge!”

“How do you figure that?”

“My name is Baz. Baz means falcon. Falcons see much.” He gave Belknap an intent look. “You are an American, so this is hard for you to understand. But poor is not the same as stupid.”

“Point taken.”

The drive that the boy described would involve traveling through
the desert, and on some poorly trafficked terrain. If Baz were lying to him…but the boy seemed to understand the risks as well as the rewards. Too, there were details in his story that made a sickening kind of sense.

“Take me with you,” the boy implored, “and I'll take you to him.”

 

At the Portland headquarters of the SoftSystems Corporation—a sprawling campus of redbrick and energy-efficient glass that the
New York Times
architecture critic had called “Portland postmodern”—there was never any cause to complain about the coffee. William Culp, its founder and CEO, liked to crack that a programmer was a machine for turning coffee into code. In the great Silicon Valley tradition, sophisticated coffee machines were available throughout the offices, and the brew was an upscale blend of specialty beans. Still, William Culp's own brew was, well, first among equals. Kona or Tanzanian Peaberry was all very well, but he'd developed a fondness for Kopi Luwak beans. They cost six hundred dollars a pound, and only five hundred pounds were harvested every year, all from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Most of it was snapped up by Japanese gourmets. But Culp made sure he had a regular supply.

What was special about Kopi Luwak? Culp relished the explanation. The beans had actually been eaten by a tree-dwelling marsupial that always went for the ripest coffee cherries, and then excreted them whole, still layered in their mucilage but subtly altered by the animal's digestive enzymes. The locals gathered the marsupial's droppings and carefully washed them to retrieve the beans, as if panning for gold. The result was the most complex java in the world—heavy-bodied, rich, musty, with caramel flavors and a hint of something he could only describe as “jungly.”

He was enjoying a freshly brewed cup right now.

Bob Donnelly, his chief operating officer, a man with the broad
shoulders of the college fullback he had once been, regarded him with amusement. He wore an open-collared pale blue shirt with the shirtsleeves rolled up. SoftSystems generally adhered to a dress-down ethic—if you saw anyone wearing a tie, it was invariably a visitor—and preserved the conventions of Silicon Valley informality. “Another cup of your crappuccino?” he asked wryly. They were sitting together in a small conference room adjacent to Culp's private office.

“You'll never know what you're missing.” Culp smiled. “Which is fine with me.”

Donnelly wasn't one of the “OGs,” as they liked to call themselves—he wasn't one of the six boys from Marin County who, decades back, had monkeyed around with old Atari consoles in their garages and had come up with the prototype of the computer mouse. What was patentable wasn't the mouse itself—the “hardware peripheral”—but the software that made it work, that integrated it with a visual interface. In the years that followed, nearly every software package on the shelf licensed intellectual property that Culp and company had patented. SoftSystems got big. Culp had given his parents a chunk of stock, and they sold it for a hefty sum once the price broke a hundred. Culp privately scorned their fearful attitude toward financial risk. The stock would triple in just another five years, making Culp a billionaire before his thirty-fifth birthday.