The Bancroft Strategy Read online

  JAFFEIRA:…I’ve engag’d

  With men of souls, fit to reform the ills

  Of all mankind.

  —Thomas Otway, A Plot Discovered (1682)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  East Berlin, 1987

  It was not yet raining, but the leaden skies would open before long. The air itself seemed expectant, apprehensive. The young man crossed from Unter den Linden to Marx-Engels-Forum, where giant bronze statues of socialism’s Teutonic fathers stared toward the city center, sightless eyes fixed and intent. Behind them, stone friezes depicted the joyful life of man under communism. Still not a drop of rain. But soon. Before long, the clouds would burst, the heavens would open. It was a historical inevitability, the man thought, mordantly recalling the socialist jargon. He was a hunter, tracking his prey, and he was closer than he had ever been. It was all the more important, therefore, to conceal the tension that welled inside him.

  He looked like a million others in this self-proclaimed worker’s paradise. His clothes had been acquired at the Centrum Warenhaus, the vast department store at Alexanderplatz, for clothing of such visibly shoddy manufacture was not sold just anywhere. But more than his garb lent him the appearance of an East Berlin menial. It was the way he walked, the stolid, dutiful, draggy gait. Nothing about him suggested that he had arrived from the West just twenty-four hours earlier, and, until a few moments ago, he had been sure that he had attracted no notice.

  A pang of adrenaline tightened his skin. He thought that he recognized the footsteps behind him from his traipse through Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. The pattern seemed familiar.

  All footsteps were the same, yet all were different: there were variations in weight and gait, variations in the composition of soles. Footsteps were the solfège of the city, one of Belknap’s instructors had told him: so commonplace as to pass beyond notice, and yet, to the trained ear, capable of being distinguished like different voices. Had Belknap done so correctly?

  The possibility that he was being followed was one he could not afford. He had to be wrong.

  Or he had to make it right.

  A junior member of the ultra-clandestine branch of the U.S. State Department known as Consular Operations, Todd Belknap had already gained a reputation for finding men who sought not to be found. Like most trackers, he worked best on his own. If the task was to place a man under surveillance, a team—the larger the better—was optimal. But a man who had vanished could not be placed under conventional surveillance. In those cases, the full resources of the organization would be enlisted in the service of the hunt: That was a matter of course. Yet the spymasters at Cons Ops had long since, learned that there could be advantages, too, in letting loose a single, gifted field agent. Allowing him to move about the world solo, unencumbered by an expensive entourage. Free to pursue insubstantial hunches. Free to follow his nose.

  A nose that, if all went well, might lead him to his quarry, a renegade American operative named Richard Lugner. Having chased after dozens of false leads, Belknap was now certain he had the scent.

  But had someone picked up on his scent? Was the tracker being tracked?

  To turn around suddenly would be suspicious. Instead, he stopped and feigned a yawn, looking about as if taking in the giant statues, but ready to make a swift evaluation of whoever was in the immediate vicinity.

  He saw nobody at all. A seated bronze Marx, a standing Engels: massive, glowering over verdigrised beards and mustaches. Two rows of linden trees. An expanse of poorly maintained turf. Across the way, the hulking, long, coppery glass box known as the Palast der Republik. It was a coffin-like building, as if built to entomb the human spirit itself. But the forum seemed vacant.

  There was scant reassurance in that—yet was he really certain of what he had heard? Tension, he knew, made the mind play tricks on itself, see goblins in shadows. He had to quell his anxiety: An agent who was excessively keyed up could make errors of judgment, missing real threats while preoccupied by imagined ones.

  Belknap impulsively walked toward the malignant shimmer of the Palast der Republik, the regime’s flagship building. It housed not only the G.D.R. parliament, but performance spaces, restaurants, and endless bureaucratic offices that processed countless bureaucratic applications. It was the last place anybody would dare follow him, the last place a foreigner would dare show himself—and the first place Belknap thought of to make sure he was as solitary as he had hoped. It was either an inspired decision or a beginner’s error. He would know which soon enough. He willed himself into a state of bored complacency as he made his way past the granite-faced guards at the door, who glanced impassively at his worn-looking identification card. He continued through the balky turnstile, the long wraparound entrance hall smelling of disinfectant, the endless directory of offices and rooms, mounted overhead like the flight times at an airport. You don’t pause, you don’t look around; act as if you know what you’re doing and others will assume that you do. Belknap might have been taken for—what? A low-level office worker back from a late lunch? A citizen in need of documents for a new car? He rounded the corner, and then another corner, until he arrived at the doors on the Alexanderplatz side of the building.

  As he walked away from the Palast, he studied the images reflected on the building’s mirrored glass. A lanky fellow in workman’s shoes and a lunch pail. A big-breasted frau with puffy, hungover eyes. A pair of gray-suited bureaucrats with complexions to match. Nobody he recognized; nobody who triggered any sense of alarm.

  Belknap proceeded to the grand promenade of Stalinist neoclassicism known as Karl-Marx-Allee. The extra-wide streets were fronted with eight-story buildings—an endless stretch of cream-colored ceramic tiles, tall casements, rows of Roman-style balusters above the shop level. At intervals, decorative tiles showed contented laborers, such as the ones who had built the promenade three and a half decades earlier. If Belknap recalled his history correctly, it had been those very laborers who led a rebellion against the socialist order in June 1953—an uprising ruthlessly crushed by Soviet tanks. Stalin’s favored “confectioner’s” style of architecture was bitter indeed to those who were compelled to bake it. The promenade was a beautiful lie.

  Richard Lugner, however, was an ugly one. Lugner had sold out his country, but he hadn’t sold cheap. The fading tyrants of Eastern Europe, Lugner had grasped, had never been more desperate than they were now, and their desperation matched his avarice. The American secrets he had been purveying, including the names of deep-cover American assets in their own Soviet-style security bureaus, could not be passed up; his treachery presented a rare opportunity. He made separate
deals with each member of the Eastern bloc. Once the “goods” had been sampled and proven authentic—the identity of perhaps one American asset, who would be carefully monitored before being arrested, tortured, and executed—Lugner was able to name his price.

  Not every merchant stays on good terms with his customers, but Lugner had obviously taken precautions: He must have led his clients to suspect that he had kept a few cards to himself, that his stores of American secrets were not wholly depleted. As long as that possibility remained, such a man would have to be protected. It was appropriate that he should have found quarters among the Stasi officials and GDR nomenklatura who had settled in what had once been proclaimed “workers’ housing,” even as the true workers found themselves forced into featureless boxes made of concrete slabs. To be sure, Lugner was not a man to stay in one place for long. A month and a half before, in Bucharest, Belknap had missed him by a matter of hours. He could take no chances of that happening again.

  Belknap waited for a few battered-looking Skoda cars to pass, and crossed the boulevard just before the intersection, where a decrepit-looking hardware store advertised its wares. Would anybody follow him in? Had he only imagined that tail in the first place? A cheap door of Plexiglas and enameled aluminum banged behind him as he entered—a screen door that had no screens—and a dour gray-haired woman with a slight mustache peered at him bleakly from behind a counter, making him feel as if he had interrupted something, committed an act of trespass. The cramped space was suffused with the smell of machine oil; the shelves were filled with items that—it was clear at a glance—nobody had much use for. The dour woman, the shop’s Eigentümer, continued to scowl as he found items that suggested someone doing maintenance in the apartment blocks: a pail, a container of ready-mixed plaster, a tube of grout, a wide-bladed spackling knife. Within a city in constant need of repair, the tools would immediately explain his presence almost anywhere he appeared. The counter woman gave him another grudging, the-customer-is-always-wrong glare, but sulkily took his money, as if accepting compensation for an injury.

  Gaining entrance to the apartment block turned out to be child’s play—an ironic advantage of life within a high-security state. Belknap waited as a couple of pungently perfumed hausfraus with canvas bags of groceries entered the doorway marked HAUS 435, and followed them in, his tools earning him not merely instant legitimacy but unspoken approval. He got off at 7 Stock, the floor above theirs. If he was right—if his scrawny, greasy-haired informant was playing it on the level—he was only yards away from his quarry.

  His heart started to thud, a tom-tom of anticipation that he could not dampen. This was no ordinary quarry. Richard Lugner had eluded every conceivable snare, having designed more than a few when he was still in the service of the United States. American intelligence officers had accumulated a vast compendium of reported sightings in the past eighteen months, and gave credence to few. Belknap himself had drilled dozens of dry holes during the past three months, and at this point, his superiors were only interested in a bona fide DPS, a “direct and positive sighting” of his quarry. This time, though, he wasn’t merely staking out a bar or café or airport lounge; this time he had an address. A real one? There were no guarantees. Yet his instincts—his nose—told him that his luck had turned. He had taken a stab in the dark and had struck something.

  The next moments would be crucial. Lugner’s quarters—evidently a substantial suite, with windows facing both the main street and the narrow side street, Koppenstrasse—were down one long hallway, and then a short one. Belknap approached the door to the suite and set down his pail; from a distance, he would look like a workman repairing one of the missing floor tiles in the corridor. Then, checking that the hallways were clear, Belknap knelt down before the lever handle—round doorknobs were almost never seen in this country—and inserted a small optical scope through the keyhole. If he could establish a DPS, he could effectively keep a watch while a proper ex-filtration team was mobilized.

  A big if—yet this time the trail was short enough that Belknap felt hopeful. It had begun with a late-night visit to the pissoir of the Friedrichstrasse train station, where he had eventually accosted one of the so-called Bahnhof Boys, the male prostitutes who frequented such sites. They shared information with far greater reluctance than they did their bodies, as soon became clear, and for a much steeper price. The very predilections that had led Lugner to cross over, he had always been convinced, would betray the betrayer. An appetite for underaged flesh: Lugner’s indulgences would have caught up with him had he stayed in Washington, and it was not an appetite easily or long slaked. As a privileged guest of the Eastern bloc countries, Lugner could count on the fact that his appetites would be overlooked, if not abetted. Then, too, operating in a police state, the Bahnhof Boys were, of necessity, a close-knit group. If any of their number had been “entertained” by a generous American with a pitted face and a taste for thirteen-year-olds, Belknap figured it wasn’t improbable that the news had spread among his brethren.

  It had taken a good deal of cajoling and reassurances, not to mention a sheaf of Marks, but the hustler finally went off to ask around, returning two hours later with a scrap of paper and a triumphant look on his lightly pimpled face. Belknap remembered his informant’s sour-milk breath, his clammy hands. But that scrap of paper! Belknap dared to take it as vindication.

  Belknap twisted the fiber-optic scope, moving it slowly into position. His were not the most practiced fingers. And he could afford no slips.

  He heard a noise behind him, the scrape of boots on tile, and whirled around to see the business end of a short-barreled SKS carbine. Then the man holding it: He wore a dark blue-gray uniform with steel buttons, and a beige plastic communicator strapped beneath his right shoulder.

  Stasi. The East German secret police.

  He was an official sentry, no doubt, assigned to guard the eminent Herr Lugner. He must have been seated within a dimly lit, recessed corner, hidden from view.

  Belknap rose slowly to his feet, his hands raised, affecting bewilderment while calculating his counterstrike.

  The Stasi sentry barked into his beige walkie-talkie with the distinctively hard consonants of a true Berliner, his other hand loosely gripping a handgun. The distraction of the communicator meant that the sentry would be ill-prepared for a suddenly aggressive move. Belknap’s own gun was holstered at his ankle. He would pretend to be showing the sentry the contents of his spackling kit while retrieving a tool far more lethal.

  Suddenly he heard the door to the apartment open behind, felt the warm air inside—and felt a forceful blow to the side of his neck. Powerful arms wrestled him to the ground, hurled him facedown onto the wooden parquet of the foyer. Immediately someone had a boot on the back of his head. Unseen hands patted him down, extracted the small handgun secreted in its ankle holster. Then he was hustled into an adjoining room. A door closed behind him with a heavy thunk. The room was darkened, the main blinds closed; the only light came from a narrow bay window that faced the side street, and the gloom outside hardly penetrated the gloom within. It took him a few moments before his eyes adjusted.

  Goddammit! Had they been on to him all along?

  Now he made out his surroundings clearly. He was in something like a home office, with a costly-looking Turkish flatweave on the floor, an ebony-framed mirror on the wall, and a large Biedermeier-style desk.

  Behind it stood Richard Lugner.

  A man he had never met, but a face he would know anywhere. The slitlike mouth, the deeply pitted cheeks, the two-inch-long scar that curved across his forehead like a second left eyebrow: The photographs did him full justice. Belknap took in the man’s small, malevolent, anthracite eyes. And, in Lugner’s hands, a powerful shotgun, its twin boreholes bearing down on him like a second pair of eyes.

  Two other gunmen—well-trained professionals, it was obvious from their bearing, their firing stance, their watchful gaze—stood to either side of Lugner’s desk, their weapons
trained on Belknap. Members of his private guard, Belknap immediately guessed—men whose loyalty and competence he could trust, men on his own payroll, men whose fortune depended upon his. For a man in Lugner’s position, the investment in such a retinue would have been well worth it. The two gunmen now crossed over to Belknap, holding their weapons level as they flanked him.

  “Persistent little bugger, aren’t you?” Lugner said at last. His voice was a nasal rasp. “You’re like a human tick.”

  Belknap said nothing. The configuration of gunfire was all too clear, and professionally arranged; there was no sudden move he could make that would change the geometry of death.

  “My mother used to remove ticks from us kids with a hot match head. Hurt like hell. Hurt the critter more.”

  One of his private bodyguards emitted a soft, throaty laugh.

  “Oh, don’t act like such an innocent,” the traitor went on. “My procurer in Bucharest told me about your conversation with him. It left his arm in a sling. He didn’t sound happy about it. You’ve been bad.” A moue of ironic disapproval. “Fighting never solves anything—weren’t you paying attention in seventh grade?” A grotesque wink. “Pity I didn’t know you when you were in seventh grade. I could have taught you a few things.”

  “Screw you.” The words flared from Belknap in a low growl.

  “Temper, temper. You have to master your emotions, or your emotions will master you. So tell me, greenhorn, how’d you find me?” Lugner’s gaze hardened. “Am I going to have to garrote little Ingo?” He shrugged. “Well, the child did claim he liked it rough. I told him I’d take him to a place he’d never been before. Next time we’ll just take it to the next level. The final level. I don’t guess anybody will mind all that much.”