The Bancroft Strategy Read online

  “Andrea Bancroft,” she said into the handset.

  “My name is Horace Linville,” said the man who called, needlessly. That much was on the call slip. “I’m an attorney with the Bancroft Foundation.”

  All at once Andrea felt herself wilting. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Linville?” she said without warmth.

  “Well…” The lawyer paused. “Mostly it’s about what we can do for you.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not interested,” Andrea replied, almost testily.

  “I don’t know if you’re aware that a cousin of yours, Ralph Bancroft, recently passed away,” Linville persisted.

  “I wasn’t,” Andrea replied, her voice softening. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Ralph Bancroft? The name was only vaguely familiar.

  “There’s a bequest,” he said. “Of a sort. Triggered by his death. You’d be the recipient.”

  “He left me money?” The lawyer’s elliptical formulations were beginning to irritate her.

  Linville paused. “The family trusts are quite intricate, as I’m sure you appreciate.” He paused again, and then lurched into an elaboration, as if aware that what he said might have been taken the wrong way. “Ralph Bancroft had been a member of the foundation trustees, and his passing leaves a vacancy. The charter specifies eligibility, and the percentage of members that must belong to the Bancroft family.”

  “I don’t consider myself a Bancroft, really.”

  “You’re a trained historian, no? You’ll want to be fully informed of the antecedent circumstances before you make any final decisions. But I’m afraid we’re on a very tight schedule here. I’d like to drop by and present these details to you formally and in person. Apologies for the short notice, but it’s an unusual situation, as you’ll see. I can come to your house at half-past six.”

  “Fine,” Andrea said, her voice hollow. “That’s fine.”

  Horace Linville turned out to be a wren-drab man with a pear-shaped head, sharp features, and an unfortunate ratio of scalp to hair. A driver had taken him to Andrea Bancroft’s modest Cape Cod–style house in the Connecticut town of Carlyle, and waited outside as he entered. Linville brought with him a metal-sided briefcase with a combination lock. Andrea led him into the living room and noticed that he glanced at the seat of the armchair before sitting on it, as if examining it for cat hairs.

  His presence made her feel oddly self-conscious about her home, a place she had on a twelve-month rental, in a not-so-expensive neighborhood of a generally somewhat pricey town. Carlyle was one or two train stops too far from Manhattan on Metro North to make it a proper bedroom community, but some of its inhabitants did the commute. She had always taken some measure of pride in her Carlyle address. Now she thought about what her place must seem like to someone from the Bancroft Foundation. It must seem…small.

  “Like I said, Mr. Linville, I don’t really consider myself a Bancroft.” She had seated herself on the sofa, at the other side of the coffee table.

  “That’s not quite to the point. By the foundation’s guidelines and charter, a Bancroft is exactly what you are. And with Ralph Bancroft’s passing—with the departure of any member of the board—a series of eventualities are triggered. There’s a…disbursement that accompanies this responsibility. A bequest, if you like. That’s how it’s always been done at the foundation.”

  “Let’s put history aside. I work in finance, as you know. We like things to be clear and specific. What’s the specific nature of the bequest?”

  A slow blink. “Twelve million dollars. Is that specific enough?”

  The words vanished like smoke rings in the wind. What had he said? “I’m not following.”

  “With your authorization, I can wire those twelve million dollars into your account by the end of the banking day tomorrow.” He paused. “Does that make things clearer?” He removed a set of documents from his briefcase, arrayed them on the table.

  Andrea Bancroft was dizzy, almost queasy. “What do I have to do?” she choked out.

  “Serve as a trustee of one of the most admired charitable and philanthropic organizations in the world. The Bancroft Foundation.” Horace Linville let a moment of silence elapse yet again. “Not everyone would find this terribly onerous. Some might even regard it as an honor and a privilege.”

  “I’m stunned,” she said finally. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I hope it’s not inappropriate for me to make a suggestion,” the lawyer replied. “Say yes.”

  Washington, D.C.

  Will Garrison ran a hand through his steel-gray hair; in repose, his basset eyes and jowly face might have seemed kindly. Belknap knew better. Anyone who had encountered the man did. There was an earth-science logic to it: The hardest rock was born of pressure over time.

  “What the hell happened in Rome, Castor?”

  “You got my report,” Belknap said.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” the older man warned. He stood up and twisted closed the blinds that hung over the interior glass wall of his office. The room had the bolted-down look of a ship captain’s office: no loose articles in sight, everything squared away, secured. A tidal wave could have rocked the office and shifted nothing. “We’ve sunk God knows how much in resources and personnel into three separate Ansari ops. The directive was clear. We get inside, we see how it works, we follow the tentacles where they go.” A display of tea-colored teeth. “Except that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? Instant gratification takes too long, huh?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Belknap replied, wincing involuntarily. It hurt when he breathed: He had cracked a rib when he vaulted over the brick wall outside the villa. His left ankle had been strained and sent up shooting pains when it had to bear any weight. But there had been no time even for a visit to a medic. Hours after his escape from Ansari’s men, he was in the Rome airport, boarding the first commercial flight to Dulles that was available. It would have taken longer to secure transport from one of the U.S. military bases in Livorno or Vicenza. Belknap barely gave himself time to brush his teeth and finger-comb his hair before he raced to Cons Ops headquarters on C Street.

  “You’ve got brass ones, I’ll give you that.” Garrison returned to his chair. “Showing up here like this with that concerned expression on your face.”

  “I’m not here for tea and cookies, okay?” Belknap replied testily. “Start talking sense.” Though he and Garrison had a reasonably functional working relationship, they had never clicked personally.

  Garrison’s chair squeaked as he leaned back. “The regs—they must annoy the hell out of you. You’re like Gulliver and the little people are tying you down with dental floss, right?”

  “Goddammit, Will—”

  “From your perspective, the shop must be getting more tight-assed every year,” the aging intelligence officer went on. “The way you figured it, you were just serving justice, right? Instant, the way you take your coffee.”

  Belknap learned forward. He could smell the Barbasol shaving cream Garrison used, a sharp menthol fragrance. “I hustled my ass over here because I thought I’d get some answers. What happened yesterday wasn’t in anybody’s goddamn playbook that I know of. Suggests another factor’s at work. Maybe you know something I haven’t been privy to.”

  “You’re good,” Garrison said. “We could have you fluttered and see just how good.” Fluttered: subjected to a polygraph examination—to a lie detector.

  “What the hell, Garrison?” Belknap felt his guts beginning to curdle.

  Pretend solicitude barely masked a smirk as Garrison pressed on. “You’ve got to remember who you really are. The rest of us sure do. Times change. It can be a bitch to keep up. Think I don’t know that? These days, James Bond himself would find himself remanded to Alcoholics Anonymous, probably forced to join some program for sexual addiction, too. I’ve been around the block longer than you, so I remember. The spy game used to be the Wild West. Now it’s the Mild West. Used to be a sport fo
r the jungle cats. Now Puss-in-Boots is running the goddamn show, am I right?”

  “What are you talking about?” The turn in the conversation was making Belknap’s skin crawl.

  “I’m just saying I can see where you’re coming from. After what happened, a lot of people would have lost it. Even someone without your history.”

  “My history is just that. History.”

  “Like the man says, there are no second acts in American life. No second acts, and no intermissions, either.” Garrison held a thick file a few feet above his desk and with a dramatic flourish let it drop. It made a smacking sound as it landed. “Do I need to cite chapter and verse? A temper is what they used to call what you’ve got. Now they call it a rage-management issue.”

  “You’re talking about just a few episodes.”

  “Yeah, and John Wilkes Booth only shot a man once. But it was a doozy.” Another tea-colored smile. “Remember a Bulgarian pisser named Drakulic? He still can’t sit right.”

  “Eight girls under the age of twelve suffocated to death in his trailer because their families were a little short on the money he was demanding to smuggle them into the West. I saw those corpses. I saw the bloody scratches on the inside of the trailer from when those girls ran out of air. The fact that Drakulic is still sitting at all is a tribute to some goddamn supreme self-control.”

  “You lost it. You were supposed to be collecting information on the trafficking techniques, not playing avenging angel. Remember a Colombian gentleman named Juan Calderone? We do.”

  “He had tortured five of our informants to death, Garrison. Melted their faces with a goddamn acetylene torch. Did it personally.”

  “We could have put pressure on him. He might have made a deal. He could have had usable intelligence.”

  “Trust me.” A quick, wintry grin. “He didn’t.”

  “That wasn’t your call to make.”

  The field agent shrugged stonily. “You don’t actually know what happened to Calderone. All you have is your conjecture.”

  “We could have done an inquest. Conducted an investigation. It was my decision to let sleeping dogs…die.”

  Another shrug. “I made my decision. You made yours. What’s there to talk about?”

  “What I’m saying is that there’s a pattern. I’ve let you off the hook several times. We all have. We’ve let things slide because you’ve got gifts we value. Like your buddy Jared always said, you’re the Hound. But now I’m thinking that we’ve made a mistake letting you out of the kennel. What happened in Rome might have felt right to you, but it was wrong. Very wrong.”

  Belknap just stared at the seamed face of his superior officer. In the harsh light of the halogen desk lamp, Garrison’s cheeks looked quilted. “Start making sense, Will. What the hell are you trying to say?”

  “You colored outside the lines for the last time,” said the aging manager, rumbling like a distant thunderstorm, “when you killed Khalil Ansari.”

  Horace Linville watched Andrea closely as she read through the documents; whenever she lifted her eyes from the page they seemed to catch his. Paragraphs were given over to the definition of terms, the detailing of contingencies. But the upshot was that the foundation’s charter mandated that a specified percentage of the board had to be members of the family, and so the sudden vacancy was to be filled by Andrea. The bequest was contingent upon her acceptance. An additional honorarium would come with her service as a trustee of the family-run foundation, a sum that would escalate with each year she served.

  “The foundation has an extremely impressive record,” Linville said after a while. “As a trustee you’ll share a responsibility to make sure it continues to in the future. If you think you’re prepared for it.”

  “How does anybody prepare for something like this?”

  “Being a Bancroft is a good start.” Linville looked at her over half-moon glasses and gave her a lipless smile.

  “A Bancroft,” she echoed.

  He held out the pen. He had not just come to explain; he had come for her signature. In triplicate. Say yes.

  After he left, the signed document neatly tucked into his briefcase, Andrea found herself pacing, giddy yet apprehensive. She had gained an unimaginable prize, and yet felt weirdly bereft. There was logic to the illogic: Her life—the life that she had known, had struggled to shape—would change beyond recognition, and there was loss in that.

  Her eyes darted around the living room again. She had gussied up the Ikea lounger by putting a nice Berber weave on it. It looked posh, even though she had picked it up for a song at a flea market. The coffee table from Pier 1 looked like it cost at least twice what she paid for it. The wicker furniture—well, you could find that sort of thing in expensive houses in Nantucket, no?

  Never mind how Horace Linville saw it. How did she now see it? She’d told herself she was going for shabby chic. But, regarded without sentiment, maybe it really looked just shabby. Twelve million dollars. This morning, she had three thousand dollars in her savings account. From the perspective of a financial professional—as a trade executed by a fund, as the valuation of a proposed deal, as a tranche of convertible debentures—twelve million wasn’t much. But as an actual chunk of cash in her actual bank account? It almost didn’t compute. She couldn’t even say the amount out loud. When she tried, speaking to Horace Linville, Esq., she started giggling, and had to choke it off with a pretend attack of coughing. Twelve million dollars. The sum now ran through her mind, like one of those catchy jingles one couldn’t drive from one’s head.

  A few hours ago, it was a source of satisfaction that she earned a salary of eighty thousand dollars—and had hopes to hit six figures before long. And now? She couldn’t fathom the sum. Not in the small private world of Andrea Bancroft. A stray fact drifted into her mind: The entire population of Scotland was about five million. She could—one of the silly thoughts that flitted through her consciousness like flies—give a couple of boxes of raisins to every single inhabitant of Scotland.

  She remembered freezing up when Linville placed the fountain pen in her hand. The long moments that elapsed before she inked her name to the documents. Why had it been so hard?

  She continued to pace, numb, exhilarated, and strangely agitated. Why had she found it so hard to say yes? Linville’s words returned to her: A Bancroft…

  Precisely what she had spent her life trying not to be. Which wasn’t to say the renunciation required great effort. When her mother severed ties with Reynolds Bancroft after seven years of marriage, she found herself not only a single mother of a young girl but a sudden outsider. She had been warned, hadn’t she? The prenuptial agreement—something the family attorneys had insisted upon and drafted—meant that, as the instigator of divorce proceedings, she would be left with nothing at all. The agreement would be enforced as a matter of principle and, perhaps, her mother once darkly surmised, as a warning to others. The welfare of mother and daughter received not a moment’s consideration from the clan. Yet the divorcée had no regrets.

  The marriage to Reynolds Bancroft wasn’t just unhappy, it was something worse: It was embittering. Laura Parry was a small-town girl with big-town looks, but those looks never brought the happiness they promised. The young swell who had romanced her soured after their marriage, feeling obscurely trapped, even gulled, as if her pregnancy had been some sort of snare. He became petulant, cold, and then emotionally abusive. Their infant daughter he regarded as little more than a noisy inconvenience. He drank heavily, and Laura began to drink, too, at first in a futile effort to join with him, and then in an equally futile attempt to defend herself. Some fruit ripens on the vine, honey, she used to tell Andrea. Some fruit just shrivels up.

  As a rule, though, she simply preferred not to discuss the subject. Before long, Andrea’s memories of her father became shrouded in fog. Reynolds, a first cousin of the family patriarch, might have been a bad seed, but when his kin closed ranks, Laura came to loathe the Bancroft clan as a whole.

>   It had always been a matter of loyalty to her mother to be a Bancroft who was not a Bancroft. Once in a while, in the public high school outside Hartford she attended, and, with greater frequency, in college, somebody would raise an eyebrow at Andrea’s surname and ask her whether she was “one of those Bancrofts.” She would always deny it. “Different,” she would say. “Completely different.” It felt like the truth, anyway, and it felt like betrayal to embrace the wealth that her mother had spurned. “Precious bane” was what her mother always called it, meaning the birthright of the Bancrofts. Meaning, well, the money. When she walked away from Reynolds, she walked away from a whole way life, from a world of luxury and indulgence. What would she think of Andrea’s decision? Those triplicate signatures? That yes?

  Andrea shook her head, scolding herself. It wasn’t the same decision. Her mother had to escape a bad marriage, or lose her soul.

  Maybe the fates were somehow making it up to her, giving back to one generation what was taken from another. Maybe it would help her find her soul.

  Besides, though Reynolds Bancroft might have been a son of a bitch, the Bancroft Foundation itself was undoubtedly a very, very good thing. And what of the paterfamilias behind it, its strategist and chief: Wasn’t he a Bancroft, too? However much he fought the limelight, the facts were the facts. Paul Bancroft wasn’t just a great philanthropist; he was one of the great minds of postwar America—a onetime academic prodigy, a major moral theorist, a man who had truly turned principles into practices. A clan that had a Paul Bancroft among its number had ample reason for pride. If that was a way to be a Bancroft, well, she could only aspire to be worthy of it.

  Andrea’s mind, and mood, cycled up and down. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and her mind suddenly filled with the image of her mother’s wan, drawn face. Andrea’s last glimpse of her before the car accident.

  Maybe this wasn’t a good time to be alone. She still felt raw from her recent breakup with Brent Farley. She ought to be celebrating, not dwelling on painful memories. Friends for dinner—that’s what the occasion required. She and her friends always talked about doing things spontaneously; for once, why not try it? She made a couple of phone calls, made a quick shopping trip, set the table for four. Très intime. The ghosts would be dispelled soon enough. It was only natural that she was having a hard time adjusting to the news. But—Christ—if this wasn’t a cause for celebration, what was?