The Bancroft Strategy Page 8

She opened her closet. Had Brent left anything here? Not that she could see. Her gaze settled on her own clothes, and she felt something small and wistful well up. Hanging neatly from padded hangers were her business suits, evening dresses, weekend wear, every hue of blue and peach and beige.

  Her wardrobe—not extensive but well-chosen—was always a point of pride with her. She was an aficionado of discount outlets like Filenes Basement, could spot under-priced item of upscale apparel like a heron spotting a fish. And there were often bargains to be had, as she’d counseled friends, if you weren’t a snob about labels. A lot of those bridge-collection brands, like Evan Picone and Bandolino, could bring out something truly handsome, almost indistinguishable from the outfits they were copying. Guess what I paid for this—it was a game she and her girlfriends used to play when they weren’t complaining about work or men, and Andrea was a champ of it. The cream silk blouse that she got for thirty bucks? Suzanne Muldower had yelped; she’d seen something identical at Talbot’s for a hundred and ten. Andrea now fingered the fabrics wistfully, the way she used to page through her high-school yearbook, amused and embarrassed by who she used to be: the pretension, the innocence, the freckles.

  Suzanne Muldower—a friend since the age of eleven, the one who had known her longest—was the first to arrive. The invitation was last-minute, but Muldower didn’t have much to cancel: just a double date with her microwave and DVD player, she admitted. Melissa Pratt—a willowy blonde with what Andrea privately thought of as a downtown attitude, and slowly ebbing hopes for an acting career—arrived a few minutes later, with her boyfriend of the past eight months, Jeremy Lemuelson, a chunky little guy who worked as a civil engineer in Hartford, owned two vintage Stratocasters, and, because he painted in his spare time, considered himself something of an artist.

  Dinner was nothing fancy, as she warned: a pot of fettuccine with some store-bought pesto, a few side dishes she got at the prepared foods counter at the Carlyle Market—and a big bottle of Vouvray.

  “So what’s the four-one-one?” Suzanne asked, after tasting the pasta and making the obligatory noises of admiration. “You said we were celebrating tonight.” She turned to Melissa. “And I told her, ‘Let me be the judge of that.’”

  “Brent bought you a ring, didn’t he?” Melissa put in. She shot Suzanne an I-told-you-so look, premature in victory.

  “Brent? Please.” Andrea clucked, smiling beneath slitted eyes. Melissa and she had shared an apartment when Andrea was in grad school, and even then she took a sisterly interest in Andrea’s romantic successes and failures.

  “You got a promotion?” Suzanne’s turn.

  “A bun in the oven?” Melissa looked concerned.

  “Garlic bread, actually,” Andrea said. “Smells good, doesn’t it?” She trotted out to the kitchen and brought it to the table, a little crisper than ideal.

  “I already know. You won the lottery.” Jeremy’s sardonic contribution. His cheek was swollen with half-chewed food, like a squirrel’s.

  “Close,” Andrea told him.

  “Okay, girlfriend, out with it!” Suzanne reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “Don’t make us suffer.”

  “I’m dying here,” Melissa chimed in. “Now give!”

  “Well, the thing is…” Andrea looked at the three expectant faces around her and suddenly the lines she’d rehearsed in her head seemed awkward and boastful. “The thing is that the Bancroft Foundation has decided to…reach out to me. They want me to be on the board. A trustee.”

  “That’s amazing,” Suzanne shrilled.

  “Any money in it for you?” Jeremy asked, massaging a callus on his right forefinger.

  “Actually, there is,” Andrea said. Twelve million dollars.

  “Yeah?” A gentle prod.

  “It’s really generous. An honorarium just for serving and…” She faltered, berating herself silently: What a phony she was becoming! “Oh, shit, listen to me. They’re giving me…”

  The words would not come out. She could not say them. Nothing would be the same among them once she did. She hadn’t thought this through. And yet not saying it—especially if and when they found out later—would be the corrosive thing. Not for the first time that evening, she found herself choking on the number. “Look, let’s just say it’s crazy money, okay?”

  “Crazy money,” Suzanne repeated acidly. “Would that be bigger than a breadbox?”

  “Is this one of those I-could-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you situations?” Melissa put in. She once had a guest, i.e., nonrecurring, role in a soap opera episode with a plot element like that.

  “You know, I’m hazy on my arithmetic. Is ‘crazy’ greater or less than ‘mad phat’?” Jeremy asked, exasperated.

  “Hey, you’re a private person,” Suzanne said, in a voice that could curdle milk. “We need to respect that.”

  “Twelve,” Andrea said quietly. “Million.”

  The others looked on in stunned silence until Jeremy half-choked on a nastily swallowed mouthful of pasta. He knocked back a glass of the Vouvray. “You’re shitting me,” he said at last.

  “This is a joke, right?” Melissa asked. “Or, like, an improv thing?” Melissa turned to Suzanne. “When I was taking acting classes, at the studio? Andrea used to help me with my improv exercises, and I always thought she was better at them than I was.”

  Andrea shook her head. “I can hardly believe it myself,” she said.

  “And so the caterpillar turns into the butterfly,” Suzanne said, a spot of red appearing on each cheek.

  “Twelve million dollars,” Melissa said softly, almost singing the syllables the way she did when she was trying to memorize a part. “Congratulations! I couldn’t be happier for you! This is un-buh-lievable.” The last word turned into three.

  “A toast!” Jeremy called out, refilling his wineglass.

  The mood was jubilant and joshing, but by the time the meal turned into coffee and cordials, their excitement for her had—or was she imagining it?—somehow edged into envy. Her friends were spending her money for her in their imaginations, coming up with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous scenarios that were both outlandish and banal. Jeremy talked, with a faint air of defiance, about a rich man he knew—he did yardwork for him when was a teenager—who “was just like the guy next door, never put on any airs” and there was a hint of reproach in his story, as if Andrea wasn’t going to measure up to the Pepsi bottling-plant mogul of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

  Finally, after the tenth reference to Donald Trump and eighty-foot yachts, Andrea said, “Can we talk about something else?”

  Suzanne gave her a who-are-you-trying-to-kid look. “What else is there to talk about?” she asked.

  “I’m serious,” Andrea said. “How are you doing?”

  “Don’t patronize me, sweetheart,” Suzanne returned, pretending to be insulted. Except that wasn’t quite it, Andrea realized. Her friend was pretending to be pretending to be insulted.

  So this is what it was going to be like.

  “Anyone for some herbal tea?” Andrea asked, brightly. She could feel a headache coming on.

  Suzanne stared at her, unblinking. “You know how you always said you weren’t one of those Bancrofts?” she asked, not unkindly. “Well, guess what. You just became one.”

  In a darkened room illuminated only by the bluish glow of a flat-panel monitor, agile fingers caressed gently concave keycaps; the LCD screen filled and emptied. Words, numerals. Requests for information. Requests for action. Payments assured. Payments revoked. Reward conferred and reward withheld; sanctions and incentives systematically applied. Information came in. Information went out. It was a computer networked to countless others around the world, receiving and generating a pulse of binary digits, a cascade of ones and zeros, of logic gates in closed or open position, each as insubstantial as the atoms from which mighty edifices are built. Instructions were digitally issued, modified. Data was collected, collated, and assessed. Sizable sums
flashed around the world, digitally transferred from one financial institution to another, and another, ending up in numbered accounts nested within other numbered accounts. More instructions were issued; more agents were enlisted through a multiplex of cutaways.

  Within the room, a face was illuminated only by the moon-glow of the screen. Yet the recipients of the communications were denied even that glimpse. The guiding intelligence remained hidden to them, as vaporous as the morning mist, as distant as the sun that burns it away. A snatch of an old spiritual drifted into the person’s mind. He’s got the whole world in his hands.

  The tapping of the keys was almost lost among the ambient noises, but these were the sounds of knowledge and action, of the resources to translate the first into the second. These were the sounds of power. In the lower left corner of the keyboard were the key caps marked COMMAND and CONTROL. It was not an irony so much as an aptness, and not one lost upon the person seated before the computer. That soft crackling was, indeed, the sound of command and control.

  A final, encoded transmission was made. It concluded with one sentence: Time is of the essence.

  Time, the one entity that could be neither commanded nor controlled, would have to be honored and respected.

  Agile fingers, a soft crackling of keys, and the sign-off was typed. GENESIS.

  For hundreds of people around the planet, it was a name to conjure with. For many, it meant opportunity and quickened their sense of avarice. For others, it meant something very different, and made their blood run cold, haunted their nightmares. Genesis. The beginning. But of what?

  Chapter Four

  Belknap slept during the flight to Rome—he had always taken pride in his ability to store up sleep, given the opportunity—but his sleep was troubled, memory-haunted, even tormented. And when he pulled himself from his slumbers, the memories crowded his mind like flies on a carcass. He had lost so much in his life, and he refused to let Rinehart confirm a hateful pattern: the destruction of those he cared most about. Sometimes it felt like a curse, the sort found in Greek tragedy.

  Once, his life was going to be different. Once, Belknap—having been deprived, in his early adulthood, of his own family—was himself going to be a family man. The memories swam into view, darted into darkness, eluded his grasp, then, in a gyre of pain, circled back to bruise him.

  The wedding itself had been a quiet affair. A few friends and colleagues of Yvette’s at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where she worked as a translator; a few colleagues of Belknap’s, whose parents had died long before and who had no close family. Jared, of course, was his best man, and his hovering, friendly presence was a kind of benediction in itself. The first night of their honeymoon at a resort near Punta Gorda, Belize. It had been the end of an enchanted day. They had seen parrots and toucans perched in palm trees, dolphins and manatees sporting in the azure waters, and had been astounded by the call of the howler monkey—it was almost like the roar of the ocean—before they learned the source. Before lunch, they had taken a boat out to the small reef, visible as a line of white surf about half a mile offshore, and there, as they went diving, another magical realm revealed itself to them. There were the vibrant colors of the coral itself, but also of the swarms of iridescent fish, boundlessly various. Yvette knew their names, and in several languages, too—one legacy of having a diplomat father who had been posted at all the major European capitals. She delighted in pointing out the purple vase sponges, the fairy basslet fish, the squirrelfish, the parrot fish—unlikely names for unlikely creatures. When he approached a fish that looked like a Japanese fan, with delicate white and orange stripes, Yvette touched his hand and they surfaced. “That’s a lionfish, my love,” she told him, her brown eyes glittering like the water. “Best admired from a distance.” She explained that its spines could deliver a potent toxin. “It’s like an underwater flower, isn’t it? But as Baudelaire said, ‘Là où il y a la beauté, on trouve la mort.’ Where there is beauty, one finds death.”

  Belize was not paradise; they both knew there was poverty and violence around, none of it very far away. Yet there was beauty here, and that beauty contained a kind of truth. It was a truth, at the least, about themselves: their ability to perceive and be transported by the sublime. At that reef, he experienced something that he wanted to hold on to. He knew that, just as those luminous dazzling, vibrant fish looked dull and gray when brought to the surface, his own inner truth was unlikely to survive his workaday existence. Then know it now, he urged himself.

  That evening, the moonlit beach: The memory was fractured, a heap of lacerating splinters. He could not retrieve them without bleeding. Fragments. Yvette and he had been capering on the sand. Had he ever felt so carefree? Never before, and surely never again. He remembered Yvette, running toward him on the private beach. She was naked, and her hair—somehow golden even in the silvery light of the moon—was flowing over her shoulders, and her blissful expression was itself a source of radiance. He had not noticed, just at that moment, what looked like a small fishing schooner anchored offshore. The two pinpoint pulses of light from the schooner. Had he seen the muzzle flashes, or imagined them later, when trying to make sense of what he did see: the bullet that pierced her throat, her soft, lovely throat; the bullet that pierced her torso? Both projectiles large-caliber, and, in combination, instantly lethal. Except that he hadn’t seen the bullets, either, only their consequences. He remembered that she fell toward him, as if to embrace him, and that it took his stunned mind long seconds to comprehend what had happened. He heard a roar—like the distant guttural clamor of the howling monkey, like the pounding of the surf, but so much louder—and he did not immediately recognize that he was its source.

  Where there is beauty, one finds death.

  What he remembered about the funeral, back in Washington, was mostly that it rained. A pastor spoke, but it was as if the sound was turned off in Belknap’s head: A dark-clad stranger with a professionally somber expression, a stranger whose mouth was moving, no doubt reciting prayers and uttering ritual solace—what had this man to do with Yvette? He was seized by the unreality of all before him. Again and again he plunged into the depths of his mind, trying to bring back that incandescent truth he had experienced at the coral reef that day. Nothing remained. He had the memory of a memory; but the memory that mattered had vanished, or else secreted itself within a hard shell, rendering itself forever inaccessible.

  There was no Belize, no beach, no Yvette, no beauty, no timeless truth; there was only the cemetery, a swath of some thirty aggressively green acres overlooking the Anacostia River. If it had not been for Jared Rinehart’s steadfast presence, he doubted that he could have held it together.

  Rinehart was a rock. The one stable point in his life. He had grieved for Yvette alongside Belknap, but he had grieved for his friend even more. Belknap would not countenance being pitied, however, and Rinehart had sensed this as well, tempering his compassion with mordancy. “If I didn’t know better, Castor,” Rinehart said at one point, putting an arm around his friend’s shoulder and gripping him with a warmth that belied his words, “I’d say you were bad luck.”

  For all the raging anguish Belknap felt, he managed to smile, and, briefly, to laugh.

  Then Rinehart met his eyes. “You know I’ll always be here for you,” his friend said quietly. He spoke simply, directly; a blood oath made by one warrior to another.

  “I know,” Belknap replied, the words half-trapped in his throat. “I know.” And he did.

  An inviolate bond of loyalty and honor: This was a deep truth as well. In Rome, it was the truth that would have to sustain him. Those who harmed Pollux would never be safe from Castor. They had surrendered their right to safety.

  They had surrendered their right to live.

  The Town Car that arrived at Andrea’s house was absurdly incongruous: a Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL—long, sleek, black. On her modest street of small houses with small yards it was as out of place as a L
ipizzaner stallion. But the board meeting was set for this afternoon, and, Horace Linville had explained, getting to the foundation headquarters involved a number of unmarked turns in Westchester County. So the car had been sent for her. It wouldn’t do for her to get lost.

  Toward the end of the two-hour trip, the driver went from one narrow road to another one, evidently old cow paths that had only recently been paved. Few of the lanes had signs. She tried to remember the sequence of turns, but wasn’t sure she would be able to repeat the trip on her own.

  Katonah, forty miles north of Manhattan, was a peculiar combination of rusticity and wealth. The actual village, part of Bedford Township, was a veritable stage set of Victorian charm, but the real action was found in its sylvan outskirts. That was where the Rockefeller family maintained a sizable compound, as did the international financier George Soros and scores of billionaires who had no public profile at all. For some reason, people who lived lives of wealth beyond all imagining often imagined themselves living in Katonah. The hamlet was named after the Indian chief from whom it was purchased in the nineteenth century, and, for all its rural appeal, its spirit of commerce—the buying and selling of property, knowledge, souls—had scarcely diminished in the years since.

  The bumpy road began to test even the cushioned suspension of the Mercedes SEL. “Sorry it’s a little rocky,” said the blandly equable driver. The area they were driving through was lightly timbered, disused farmland that had been reclaimed by the woods sometime in the past several decades. Finally, a handsome brick house came into view—a Georgian redbrick quoined and corniced with Portland limestone. Three stories with a slate mansard roof, it was imposing without being pretentious.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Andrea said softly.

  “That?” The driver coughed, trying to conceal a chuckle. “That’s the gatehouse. The foundation’s about a half-mile down the drive.” At the car’s approach, a section of the black sword-topped wrought-iron fence swung open, and they made their way down an allée of lindens.