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 Lipizzaner 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.
“My God,” Andrea said a few minutes later. What looked, from a distance, like a hillock, a swelling of the earth, stood revealed as a vast, curving structure of shingle and stone, something old but unusual. It had nothing of the usual English-country-house kind of grandeur—there was no Gothic masonry; there were no leaded windows, no wings or courtyards. Instead, it was composed of simple shapes—cones, columns, rectangles—and built of wood and locally quarried sandstone. Its palette of earth tones—rich hues of rusty red, sepia, umber—was why it so readily blended into its surroundings. Which made it all the more startling when Andrea came close enough to take it in—its size, the elegance of every detail: the wide oval porches, the sawtooth shingled walls, the gently asymmetric forms. It was immense, and yet it was so lacking in ostentation that its immensity seemed on the scale of nature, not artifice.
Andrea felt breathless.
“It’s a beaut,” the driver agreed. “Not that Dr. Bancroft has a lot of use for it. Up to him, he’d have sold it off and moved into a bed-and-breakfast. But they say the charter won’t have it.”
“Good thing.”
“I guess it’s part yours now.” The car pulled up to a graveled parking area to one side of the vast building. Andrea felt weak-kneed as she made her way up a low porch and into a light-flooded foyer. Smells of old wood and furniture polish were just detectable. A starched woman greeted her at once, with a wide smile and a thick three-ring binder.
“The agenda,” the woman—stiff coppery hair, upturned nose—explained to Andrea. “We’re delighted to have you on board.”
“This place is amazing,” Andrea said, gesturing around her.
The woman’s lacquered hair barely moved as she nodded vigorously. “It was built in 1915, from a design of H. H. Richardson’s, we’re told—a design he’d never been able to get built during his lifetime. Thirty years after his death, the world was at war, and this country was preparing to jump into the fight. A dark time. But not for the Bancrofts.”
That was right, Andrea mused—wasn’t there some story about a Bancroft who had made a fortune in munitions during the First World War? Her historical interest had never extended to her father’s family, but she had picked up the basic lineaments.
The trustees’ room was on the second floor, multipaned windows facing onto a terraced garden, which was profusion of vibrant colors. Andrea was escorted to a seat on one side of a long table, a sort of Georgian banquet table, where at least a dozen others, some combination of trustees and foundation staff members, were already gathered. An elegant tea-and-coffee service had been set up in one corner of the room. The men and women around the table were bantering quietly, and as Andrea made a show of paging through the binder, she heard countless references that were just above her head: clubs she hadn’t quite heard of, brand names that might have been a kind of yacht but might have been a kind of cigar, admission directors of grand-sounding boarding schools she had never heard of. From a door at the opposite end of the room, a couple of suited men emerged, accompanied by a much younger assistant. The conversational murmur began to die down.
“Those are program officers from the foundation,” the man seated to Andrea’s right explained. “Means it’s show-and-tell time.” Andrea turned to her neighbor: slightly pudgy, salt-and-pepper hair, an overgenerous application of gel preserving visible comb tracks. His tanned face did not match his white and hairless hands, and the fringes of hair around his forehead had acquired a faint orange tint.
“I’m Andrea,” she said.
“Simon Bancroft,” he said, something wet and buzzy in his voice. His eyes were gunmetal gray, and inexpressive. His forehead was oddly immobile, she decided; his eyebrows scarcely moved as he spoke. “You’re Reynolds’s girl, right?”
“He was my father,” she responded, insisting on a shade of meaning doubtless lost on him. She wasn’t Reynolds’s girl; she was, if anything, Laura’s girl.
Scion of the outcast.
She felt a surge of hostility toward the man beside her, like the molecular call of some ancient blood feud, and then, oddly, it passed. What really disturbed her, she realized, wasn’t a sense of being out of place; it was her sense of belonging. An outsider, an insider: Which was she now?
What if it were up to her to decide?
Loose the hound, Todd Belknap thought mordantly. Loose the hound of hell.
Every manhole cover in Rome was emblazoned with the initials “SPQR.” Senatus Populusque Romanus: The Senate and the People of Rome. Once a grand political gesture, he reflected; now, like so many grand political gestures, little more than a logo. With a small crowbar, the operative prized up the cover and descended a scuttle ladder until he found himself on a rickety-seeming wooden catwalk in a fetid space about twenty feet high and five feet wide. He flicked his flashlight to its medium setting, moving the beam around to inspect his surroundings. The sides of the concrete cavern shimmered with water bugs. Cables, most the thickness of a cigarillo, lined the sides like swagged drapery—black, orange, red, yellow, blue. Fifty-year-old telephone cables hung alongside coaxial from the seventies and eighties, and modern fiber-optic cable freshly installed by municipal utilities like Enel and ACEA. The sheathing colors would have meant something to most people who drove an Enel van and wore an Enel uniform, Belknap supposed. He’d just have to be an exception.
Beads of water formed at the ceiling, gathered strength, and dripped down at irregular intervals. Belknap consulted a small luminescent compass. The villa was an eighth of a mile ahead, and he easily traversed most of the distance, the main utilities tunnel running parallel to the street.
Can’t keep a good man down, he mused. Or a bad one.
Will Garrison’s threats and protests had passed through Belknap like a bad plate of clams. Had he sometimes gone too far in the past? No doubt. Belknap wasn’t one to wait for a WALK sign before crossing at an intersection. He wasn’t good with paperwork. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice, a prophet had said, and Belknap hoped that was true. If it took too long, though, Belknap was happy to do the bending himself.
He was not an introspective sort, but he had no illusions about himself, either. He could be irascible, hotheaded, even brutal, no doubt. There were moments—rare ones—when fury overrode his conscious will, and in those moments he knew what it must be like to be possessed. He valued, above all, loyalty: It was a motive force in his life. He could think of nothing more despicable than disloyalty—except it wasn’t a matter of thinking. The conviction was visceral, part of the fiber of his very being.
There was a three-foot gap in the catwalk where the tunnel, following the street above, made a bend. Belknap noticed it just in time and jumped across it. His tools—the crowbar, the grapnel launcher—banged uncomfortably against his thigh. Though the grapnel launcher was a compact model, its housing made of a lightweight polymer, it was still bulky, and the three-pronged grappling hook kept slipping out of the Velcro straps.
Despite Garrison’s squid-ink cloud of rationalizations, Belknap’s every instinct told him that there was a connection between Ansari’s murder and Jared Rinehart’s disappearance. Yet there was more than instinct to consider. Belknap’s friends at Consular Operations—his real friends—weren’t going to cut him off because of Garrison’s shit storm, and when he pressed one of them, he learned about a few highly suggestive intel reports. These were sourced to so-called “unspecified channels”—highly confidential assets—and, as his analyst friend warned, the picture was still murky. But the early indications were that Rinehart’s kidnappers had been either enlisted or co-opted by another, far more formidable organization. The puppet masters had puppet masters. The murder of Khalil Ansari was consistent with this pattern—a stealthy takeover of one network by another, more powerful one.
He had to be close to the villa now. Yet the pathway he had been walking along would not lead him to the villa itself; the cable entered the house through hardened PVC pipes only a few inches in diameter. The conduits for water and sewage were less than a foot across. Having cross-checked the architectural blueprints with a geological survey, however, Belknap realized that there was another way in. The two hundred and sixty miles of the Roman aqueduct systems—all but thirty miles of which were subterranean—had required a legion of laborers to maintain, working under the direction of the Curator Aquarum, the keeper of the waters. And the Curator Aquarum had always insisted that the waterways be constructed with an eye toward their upkeep and repair: The ancient equivalent of access panels—sheathed openings—were installed at regular intervals so that blockages could be swiftly cleared. In the honeycombed earth beneath the streets of Rome, modern utilities tunnels regularly intersected with the chutes and dropshafts of the ancient aqueducts, including the aqueducts of Trajan. Belknap again checked his compass, along with a pedometer-like device that measured horizontal displacement. Between the two instruments, he would be able to gauge his position. Now he stopped in front of a hinged metal gate and made his way into an adjoining tunnel, where the gas and water mains ran. The air was as stagnant as ditchwater, thick with mold and mildew and centuries of slow fungal growth. Whereas the utilities tunnel ran approximately parallel with the street above, the cavernous space he had entered soon began to slope downward, every step taking him deeper and deeper into the earth. The air, too, seemed to grow denser and more sulfurous as he descended.
The tunnel—only it was truly more like a cavern at this point, after so many centuries, with a crumbling roof and a debris-cluttered floor, closer to a natural geological formation than a man-made conduit—alternately narrowed and flared, and reaching his destination required much doubling back, many circuitous turns in the subterranean maze. Some of the passageways had probably not been traversed by a human being in centuries.
The unwelcome thought came to him that if he should drop either his flashlight or his compass he could easily be lost forever, a moldering skeleton to be encountered by the next foolhardy explorer however many years in the future.
Beneath his hardhat, his hair was soaked in sweat; he had to stop and tie a handkerchief around his forehead, bandana-style, to keep it from dripping into his eyes. At last, he was, by his calculations, almost directly beneath the villa—but fifty feet beneath it, the depth of a prairie well.
The basement storm grate indicated on the architectural schematics was what had first given him the idea. These were not an uncommon feature among villas built over the ancient and now-empty waterways, it seemed. It was, indeed, the easiest way to alleviate basement flooding during heavy rains. To prevent clogging, a shaft would be dug straight down until it met with one of the disused Roman tunnels.
Now he pushed the slide on his flashlight all the way forward, shifting its beam to its brightest mode. A few minutes of searching revealed a lichen-covered mound of earth on the rocky tunnel floor, and above it, far above it—he held a small pair of digital binoculars to his eyes and peered—was a grate. He folded down the prongs of the pneumatic grapnel gun, aimed it vertically, and squeezed on the triggering device. With a soft popping noise, the nozzle discharged the folded hook and an attached pair of linked polypropylene lines. A clank told him that the grappling hook had caught. He gave the trailing line a tug, and it held firm. With another tug, the polypropylene skein unfolded into a sort of ladder. It seemed flimsy, insubstantial, but appearances were deceptive. The braided microfilament structure would hold many times his body weight.
He began to climb. The transverse lines were spaced two feet apart between the two main filament braids, and by the time he was a third of the way up, a slip of the foot would be fatal. All would be for naught, of course, if someone was already in the basement, had seen the grappling hook. But the odds were very much against it. A security guard would make a pro forma inspection—indeed, he was counting on the fact—but only once or twice a night.
The grate, when he finally reached it, was heavy—perhaps two hundred pounds of steel, secured in place by its own massive weight—and the filament ladder would not provide him sufficient purchase to lift it. Belknap’s stomach clenched. To have come so far…to be inches away…
Desperately, he looked around at the lining of the shaft where it met the basement storm drain. A collar of steel, like the mouth of a funnel, had been installed there—it looked like seven-gauge sheet metal—and, with his small crowbar, he bent the material in two places so that it flared out and provided a makeshift ledge. Positioning his feet on opposite sides of the shaft, he pushed up at the grate. It was an unnatural angle of exertion; his elbows were higher than his shoulders as he started to push. The massive grate did not budge.
Belknap’s heart began to hammer, not from the exertion so much as from frustration, a sense of frustration he would not permit to edge into despair. He thought of Jared Rinehart, held somewhere by hirelings of the Ansari network and utterly subject to their will. You choose a friend with care, Jared had once said. And then you never let him down. Jared had kept his word. Would Belknap?
Belknap knew so many who had lost their lives for no good reason, whether at home or in the field. Mac “the Mountain” Marin had survived dozens of high-risk ops only to succumb at home to a burst aneurysm in some tiny vessel in the brain. Mickey Dummett—a man whose torso was stippled with four bullet entry-wound scars—gave up the ghost at a country intersection where a station-wagon driver failed to notice a stop sign. Alice Zahavi was shot dead in the course of an operation, but an operation so badly conceived from the get-go that it would have had no tactical or intelligence justification even if everything had gone right. These were good men and women to whom the fates assigned senseless, contemptible deaths. Just the hands they were dealt. Belknap took a deep breath. To give up his life in order to save a man like Jared Rinehart—there would be nobility in that. In an age where heroism was an endangered attribute, he could imagine worse deaths than this, and few better.
Now Belknap surged upward with every fiber of his body, possessed of a strength that somehow came to him as much as from him.
The grate moved.
Up, and over. He slid the massive disk off to one side, just enough to squeeze a hand through, and then used his other hand to push it further away. Hard metal on smooth concrete: quieter than he might have supposed.
And so, forty minutes after parking the utilities van, he made his way into the very place he had sought so desperately to avoid: one that had been designed to the exquisite—and profoundly twisted—specifications of the late Khalil Ansari.
Now came what Belknap always found the hardest part of all.
Waiting.
Katonah, New York
As the program officers launched into their overviews, Andrea concentrated, at first, on appearing composed and self-assured. Before long, however, she found herself riveted by the presentations. They should, by all rights, have been tedious. Yet she couldn’t get over how extensive the foundation’s activities were. Clean-water and vaccination projects in the Third World, literacy programs in Appalachia, programs to eradicate polio in Africa and Asia, programs to provide micronutrient supplementation throughout the world’s less-developed regions. Each foundation officer talked about the projects he or she oversaw in precise terms: costs, prospects, plans for the future, assessments of efficacy. The language was flat, pedestrian, uninflected. Yet what they were talking about was quite remarkable—one project after another that would transform the lives of thousands. In one instance, it involved the construction of waterways in impoverished regions, allowing irrigation and proper agriculture where only a subsistence living had been possible. A few photographs, displayed on a wall-mounted monitor, made the results vividly clear: The desert truly was being coaxed into bloom.
Like the Rockefeller Foundation, Bancroft had branch offices all over the planet, but it was careful to keep its overhead costs under strict control. Again and again, the presenters conveyed a businesslike ethic of “value for money,” a refreshing clarity of vision for a nonprofit charitable organization, she thought—especially because “value,” in this context, referred to lives saved, suffering averted.
Perhaps that should not have been surprising, she reflected, given the man behind the foundation.
Paul Bancroft. It was a name that elicited trepidation and awe. Dr. Bancroft had always maintained a low profile: not for him the black-tie galas, the bold-type mentions in the society pages. What could never be kept entirely quiet was his multifaceted genius. Andrea recalled when, taking a junior-level seminar in the foundations of economics, she was obliged to master a set of multivariate functions known as Bancroft’s Theorem—and, delving into it, discovered that its inventor was actually a cousin of hers. Dr. Bancroft had been still in his twenties when he made major contributions to game theory and its applications to moral philosophy. But it was a more practical kind of wisdom that had created the foundation: a series of brilliant investments and speculations that had turned a handsome family fortune into an immense endowment, and transformed what had been a small-to-midsized foundation into one that encircled the globe.
The three o’clock presentation was given by a program officer named Randall Heywood: a red, leathery face that suggested too many years under a tropical sun, a bullet head with a close-cropped fringe of dark hair. His field was tropical medicine, and he was in charge of a program that directed funds toward research and development of malaria treatments. Ninety million dollars would be given as seed money to a group at the Howell Medical Institute, another ninety to a group at Johns Hopkins. Heywood spoke briefly about “molecular targets,” about vaccine protocols, about the special challenges presented by the pathogen, about the inadequacy of vaccines currently in development. About the million lives that were claimed each year by the most aggressive malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.
A million lives. A statistic? An abstraction? Or a tragedy.
Heywood spoke in a low rumble. There was something overcast about him. A storm cloud at dawn, Andrea thought. “The results so far, well, we’re not seeing any breakthroughs on the horizon. Nobody wants to over-promise. The whole field has been a series of high hopes and dashed hopes. But there we are.” His eyes roamed around the long table, inviting questions.
Andrea set down her teacup with an audible clink—Spode on Spode, politer than clearing her throat, she thought. “Forgive me—I’m new to all this—but we’d been told earlier that the foundation looks for areas that are underserved by the marketplace.” She paused meaningfully.
“And vaccines are a good example,” Heywood said, nodding sagely. “The value of an inoculation is greater than its value to any one individual, because if I’m inoculated, it helps you, too. I can’t spread a pathogen to other people, and, of course, society doesn’t have to pay the cost of my sick days, absences from school, hospitalization. Any health economist would say that its value to the community could be twenty times greater than what an individual would pay for it. That’s why governments have always directly invested in vaccination. It’s ultimately a public good, same as public sanitation, clean water, or what have you. In this case, though, the disease is worst in the most impoverished places in the world, where there simply aren’t the resources necessary. Places like Uganda, Botswana, or Zambia have an annual health-care budget that comes to maybe fifteen dollars per capita. Here, it’s closer to five thousand dollars.”
Andrea’s eyes focused on Heywood as he spoke. His ruddy complexion made the paleness of his eyes all the more striking. He was powerfully built, had large hands, nails bitten to the quick. A type, then, with whom she had some experience: a man’s man…with a nervous stomach. A bruiser with a glass jaw.
“That puts things into perspective,” Andrea said.
“It’s a dollars-and-cents calculation. Drug companies are terrific at drug development when there’s a real market for it. But they don’t have a financial incentive to spend huge sums to develop treatments for people who can’t afford to pay for them.”
“Which is where the Bancroft Foundation comes in.”
“Which is where we come in,” Heywood said, nodding somberly. The neophyte was up to speed. “Basically, what we’re trying to do is prime the pump.”
He started to shuffle his papers, but Andrea was not finished yet. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve been in commercial finance, so maybe I’m looking at this cockeyed. But instead of trying to pick the winning team ahead of time, why not provide an incentive for any research team that licks the problem?”
“I’m sorry?” Heywood massaged the bridge of his nose.
“Put a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” A quiet titter went around the table, and Andrea could feel herself blushing. She regretted having spoken up. But I’m right, she thought fiercely. Aren’t I? “It’s hard to direct innovation. But I’m guessing there are hundreds of laboratories and research groups—in universities, in nonprofit research institutes, at biotech firms, too—that could hit on something real if they tried to. You make it worthwhile for all of them to compete, and you can harness all that creativity. You said the drug companies and biotech firms are great at drug development. Why not give them an incentive to get there first, too? Promise to buy a million or so doses of an effective vaccine at a fair price. Which means giving every potential investor that incentive as well—effectively magnifying the sums you put in.”
The program officer’s ruddy face bore a look of suppressed exasperation. “What we’re trying to do,” he explained, “is get people off the starting block.”
“And you’re choosing the candidates you think have the best chance of winning.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re placing a bet.”
The program officer fell silent for a moment.
From across the table, a distinguished-looking man with a full head of wavy gray hair caught Andrea’s eye. “And your model is—what?” he asked her. “A sort of Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes for medical researchers? ‘You may already be a winner’—that sort of thing?” His voice was smooth, almost honeyed. The challenge was in his words, not his tone.
Andrea Bancroft’s face went hot. But the objection was off-base. Something she’d read in one of her history books came to her. She met her challenger’s gaze. “Is the idea so new? In the eighteenth century, the British government offered a prize for anyone who could figure out how to measure longitude at sea. If you look into it, I think you’ll find that the problem was solved and the prize money collected,” She forced herself to take another sip of tea, hoped nobody noticed the tremble in her hand.
The gray-haired man gave her a long, appraising look. His features were sharp and symmetrical, given warmth by his brown eyes; his attire—a charcoal tweed jacket, a buttoned sweater-vest with a houndstooth pattern—distinctly professorial. One of the program consultants?
Now she lowered her gaze to the tea in her cup, suddenly abashed. Way to go, Andrea, she thought. Making enemies on your first day here.
But her larger sense was one of excitement: These were people who didn’t just talk about changing the world, the stuff of a million freshman dorm conversations—these were people who were actually doing it. And they were smart about it. Very smart. If she ever had a chance to meet Dr. Bancroft herself, she would have to stop herself from gushing.
The program officer gathered his papers. “We’ll certainly take your remarks under consideration,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. It was neither dismissal nor acquiescence.
“My, my,” said the bronzed man to Andrea’s left. Simon Bancroft, she remembered. He gave her a quick smile: mock congratulations, perhaps, though ambiguous enough to be represented, later, as the real thing.
A half-hour recess was called. The other trustees drifted off in clusters, some to a room downstairs where coffee and pastries were served; others walked around the gallery or sat outside, settling on parasol-sheltered chairs, straining to read the little displays of their BlackBerrys and wireless PDAs. Andrea herself wandered aimlessly, feeling suddenly alone: the transfer student freshly arrived at school. Wouldn’t want to sit down with the wrong crowd at the cafeteria, she thought sardonically. She was pulled out of her reveries by a smooth baritone.
“Miss Bancroft?”
She looked up. The professor guy in the tweed and vest. Something unclouded about his gaze. He had to be around seventy, but his face, in repose, was scarcely lined, and the way he moved conveyed a certain vitality. “Would you join me for a stroll?”
They ended up walking together down a slate path behind the house, descending down several terraced gardens and across a small wooden bridge over a stream, and then through a maze of privet hedges.
“It’s like another world here,” Andrea said. “Plunked down in the middle of another one. Like a restaurant on the moon.”
“Oh, that place. Great food, but no atmosphere.”
Andrea giggled. “So how long have you been with the Bancroft Foundation?”
“Long time,” the man said. He stepped lightly over small branches. Corduroy trousers and sturdy brogues, Andrea noticed. Professorial but elegant.
“You must like it.”
“Keeps me out of trouble,” the man said.
He seemed in no hurry to bring up their disagreement, but she still felt awkward about it. “So,” she said after a pause, “did I make a fool of myself?”
“I’d say you made a fool of Randall Heywood.”
“But I thought—”
“You thought what? You were absolutely right, Miss Bancroft. Pull, not push—that’s going to be the most efficient use of foundation resources when it comes to medical research. Your analysis was completely on the money. So to speak.”
Andrea smiled. “I wish you’d tell the big guy that.”
A questioning look from the older man.
“I mean, when do I get to meet Dr. Bancroft anyway?” As she spoke the words, she had an inkling that she had already made a misstep. “Okay, let me back up for a sec—who did you say you were?”
“I’m Paul.”
“Paul Bancroft.” Comprehension arrived like heartburn.
“Afraid so. Bound to be a disappointment, I know. Apologies, Miss Bancroft.” A smile played around his mouth.
“Andrea,” she corrected. “I feel like such a idiot, is all.”
“If you’re an idiot, Andrea, we need more idiots. I found your remarks to be exceptionally astute. You immediately set yourself apart from the fine ruminants around you, distinguished cud-chewers all. I daresay some were impressed. You even held your ground against me.”
“You were playing devil’s advocate, then.”
“Wouldn’t put it that way.” He arched an eyebrow. “The devil doesn’t need an advocate. Not in this world, Miss Bancroft.”
The senior guard Yusef Ali rounded the corner of the darkened hallway, the powerful beam of his flashlight sweeping through every corner of the villa on via Angelo Masina. There could be no lapse of thoroughness, even now. Especially now. There had been so much uncertainty since the demise of their master. But the new master, he knew, was no less demanding. The physical security of any facility was no greater than the vigilance with which it was inspected.
Now, in a small room in the rear of the ground floor, the Tunisian checked a screen that displayed the status of the perimeter sensors. The electronic sensors reported themselves to be in a “normal” state, but Yusef Ali knew that human observation could only be supplemented, never supplanted, by the methods of electronic detection. His evening walk-through was not complete.
It was in the basement that he finally noticed something distinctly awry. The door to the stanza per gli interrogatori was ajar. Light spilled out of it, piercing the gloom.
It was not supposed to have been left like that. A pistol in one hand, Yusef Ali strode over to the chamber, opened the heavy door—it glided slowly on powerful, soundless hinges—and stepped inside.
At once, the lights went out. A powerful blow knocked the weapon from his right hand, while another blow swept his legs from under him. How many assailants were there? Disoriented by the sudden darkness, he could not tell, and when he tried to lash out, he found that his hands had been manacled. Another forceful blow, at the square of his back, sent the guard staggering to the floor.
Then the door to the interrogation chamber sucked shut behind him.
“Okay, now I’m really confused,” said Andrea Bancroft.
An elegant shrug. “I was merely curious to see whether you’d hold your ground when you were in the right.” The man’s gray hair turned silver in the midafternoon sun.
“I can’t believe it—I can’t believe I’m here, walking along a path with the Paul Bancroft. The guy who invented Bayesian networks. The Bancroft’s Theorem Bancroft. The guy who—oh, God, I’m having flashbacks to graduate school. Forgive me. I’m embarrassing myself again. I’m a bobbysoxer meeting Elvis.” She could feel herself blushing.
“Elvis has left the building, I’m afraid.” Paul Bancroft laughed, a low musical laugh, and they turned right on the flagstone path.
The sylvan grounds gave way to meadow—ryegrass and yarrow and nameless wildflowers of all varieties, yet no thistles or burrs, no poison oak or ragweed. A meadow without noxious weeds: Like so much at the Katonah estate, it looked natural, effortless, and yet it had to be the result of a great deal of unseen attention. Nature perfected.
“Those things you mentioned—I feel like someone who penned a few catchy pop songs in the early sixties,” Paul Bancroft said after a while. “As an older man, I find that the real challenge is to put precepts into practice. Enlist the mind to serve the heart—get those theories into the harness.”
“They’ve taken you a long way. Starting with the basic notion of utilitarian ethics. Let’s see if I’ve got it right: Act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.”
A low chuckle. “That’s how Jeremy Bentham put it in the eighteenth century. The phrase, I believe, originated in the writings of the scientist Joseph Priestley, and of the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Everyone forgets that modern economics is, technically speaking, concerned precisely with the maximization of utility, which is to say happiness. Applying the welfare functions of Marshall and Pigou to the axioms of neoutilitarianism should have been an obvious exercise.”
Andrea fought to dredge up the classroom memories—knowledge and skills quickly mastered for exams and papers, just as quickly forgotten. “The urban legend, as I remember, was that you formulated the Bancroft Theorem as a homework assignment in an undergraduate course. A term paper for a sophomore seminar, something like that. Is that really true?”
“Well, yes,” the hearty gray-haired man replied, his unlined face now lightly gleaming with perspiration. “As a stripling lad, I was clever enough to have worked it out, not clever enough to have realized that it hadn’t been worked out a thousand times before. The problems were easier back then. They had solutions.”
“And now?”
“They seem only to lead to more problems. Like Russian nesting dolls. I’m seventy, and looking back I find it hard to value that sort of technical cleverness as much as others do.”
“That’s quite a recantation, coming from you. Didn’t you get a Fields Medal?” The Fields Medal was the most prestigious award in mathematics, the discipline’s equivalent of the Nobel. “For some early work in number theory, if I’m remembering right. Back when you were at the Institute for Advanced Study.”
“Now you’ve really got me feeling my age,” her companion said with a grin. “I’ve still got the actual medal in a shoebox somewhere. It bears a quote from the Roman poet Manilius: ‘To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe.’ Haunting.”
“And humbling,” she added.
A wind rustled the tall meadow grasses and Andrea shivered briefly. They were walking toward a stone wall. It was ancient-looking, like the sort of pastureland divisions that crisscrossed the English Cotswolds.
“But now you’re able to put all that greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number stuff into practice,” she went on. “Having a foundation at your disposal must make it easy.”
“Do you really think so?” A hint of a smile. Another test.
Andrea paused, and gave a serious answer. “Not easy, no. Because there’s the issue of opportunity costs—of what else you could have done with any grant. And there’s the question of downstream consequences.”
“I knew I saw something in you, Andrea. A quality of mind. A genuine measure of independence. An ability to think through problems by yourself. But as for what you were saying—you know, you put your finger on it exactly. Downstream consequences. Perverse effects. It’s the snare of all ambitious attempts at philanthropy. Our greatest battle, really.”
Andrea nodded vigorously. “Nobody wants to be the pediatrician who saved the life of little Adolf Hitler.”
“Precisely,” Paul Bancroft answered. “And sometimes an effort to ameliorate poverty results only in more poverty. You dump free grain on an area—and put the farmers out of business. Next year, the Western aid agency isn’t around, and neither are the local farmers, who were forced to eat their seed grain. We’ve seen this sort of thing happen again and again over the past decades.” Bancroft’s gaze was alert and focused on her.
“And with disease?”
“Sometimes you have treatments that, by addressing the symptoms of an infectious disease, end up by increasing the transmission rate.”
“You don’t want to be the doc who gives Typhoid Mary an aspirin so she can go back to work in the kitchen,” Andrea said.
“My God, Andrea, you were born to this.” The laugh lines around his eyes gathered into a smile.
Once more she found herself blushing. A reclaimed birthright—was that what it was? “Oh, come on,” she said quickly.
“I just mean you have a knack for thinking about these things. Perverse consequences come in all shapes and sizes. That’s why the Bancroft Foundation always has to think five steps ahead. Because every action has an effect, yes—but those effects, too, have effects. Which have yet further effects.” She felt the force of a powerful intellect directed toward a deep problem, and determined not to be defeated by it.
“It must be enough to induce paralysis. You start thinking about these knock-on effects, and you wonder about doing anything at all.”
“Except”—there was an intellectual fluidity and grace to the way Paul Bancroft spoke now, gliding in and out of her sentences—“that there’s no exit from the conundrum.”
“Because there are consequences to inaction, too,” Andrea put in. “Doing nothing has knock-on effects as well.”
“Which means you can never decide not to decide.”
It wasn’t sparring; it was more like dancing, the back and forth, the to and fro. She was exhilarated. She was talking with one of the great minds of the postwar era about the greatest issues of the day and she was holding her own. Or was she flattering herself? A tabby dancing with a lion?
They moved along a gentle incline, a knoll flecked with bluebells and buttercups, and did not speak for a bit. She found herself in a sort of fugue. Had she ever met anyone so extraordinary? Paul Bancroft had all the money in the world; he didn’t care about money. He only cared about what money could do, if targeted with extraordinary care. In college and in grad school, Andrea had spent time with academics who were desperate to get their papers published in the right journal, to get included on the right academic panels at the right conferences—needily, hungrily pursuing the most withered laurel. Yet here was Paul Bancroft, who had published enduring work before he was old enough to purchase alcohol, who, in his mid-twenties, received an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, once the lair of Einstein, Gödel, and von Neumann, and the country’s most illustrious research center—and who, a few years later, gave it up in order to devote his energies to the foundation and its expansion. The man was hardheaded and big-hearted: a truly rare combination, and a thrilling one.
Being in his presence made all her past ambitions seem so shrunken.
“So the first task of doing good is to avoid doing bad,” she said, finally, musingly. They were walking downhill now. She heard a soft fluttering and looked up to see a brace of wood ducks lift up into the air before her eyes, in a cloud of vibrant plumage. Tucked behind the knoll, it turned out, was a small, clear pond, perhaps half an acre in size. Water lilies clustered around its banks. The ducks had obviously decided to wait among the trees until the human visitors had moved on.
“God, they’re lovely,” Andrea said.
“That they are. And there are men of a certain stripe who can’t see them without itching for a shotgun.” Paul Bancroft approached the pond, picked up a pebble from near its edge, and with boyish skill skipped it across the water’s surface. The stone bounced twice, landing on the opposite bank. “I’ll tell you a story.” He turned to face her. “Have you ever heard of Inver Brass?”
“Inver Brass? Sounds like a lake in Scotland.”
“And so it is, though you won’t find it on any map. But it’s also the name of a group of men—and originally it was all men—who came from around the world and met up there back in 1929. The organizer was a Scotsman of great means and ambition, and the people he gathered together were men of the same stamp. It was a small group, too. Six people: all influential, all rich, all idealistic, all determined to make the world a better place.”
“Oh, that’s all.”
“Does it seem so very modest?” he asked jestingly. “But yes, that was why Inver Brass was founded. And, from time to time, they would send vast sums of money to distressed regions, the idea being to diminish the suffering and, in particular, the violence that arose from deprivation.”
“A long time ago. A different world.” There was a distant chittering of a squirrel somewhere in the canopied woods across the glen.
“As it happens, though, the founder of Inver Brass had ambitions beyond his own life. The group was regularly reconstituted in ensuing decades. One thing remained the same: The leader, whomever it might be, was always code-named ‘Genesis.’ As the founder had been.”
“An interesting role model,” Andrea ventured. She found another small pebble, made an effort to skip it along the water, but the angle was wrong. It plunked down and disappeared.
“Maybe more of a cautionary tale,” Bancroft countered. “They weren’t infallible. Far from it. The fact is, one of their feats of economic engineering inadvertently led to the rise of Nazi Germany.”
Andrea faced him. “You can’t be serious,” she said in a quiet voice.
“Which pretty much canceled out all the good they did. They thought about causes and effects—and forgot that effects, too, are causes.”
Through scudding clouds, the sun dimmed and brightened. Andrea fell silent.
“You look…”
“Stunned,” Andrea said. And so she was: a trained historian, stunned by the history of Inver Brass, stunned by the casualness with which Dr. Bancroft had related it. “The notion that a cabal like that could have shifted the course of human history…” She trailed off.
“There’s a great deal that never appears in the history books, Andrea.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Inver Brass. From a lake in Scotland to the ascent of the Third Reich. This takes a little getting used to.”
“I’ve never met a faster study,” the aging savant murmured in an almost intimate tone. “You see it before most people do: Doing the right thing isn’t always easy.” He looked off to the acreage on the other side of the long, low stone wall, a stretch of artfully piled shale.
“You must be haunted by the story of Inver Brass.”
“And humbled,” he put in with a significant glance. “As I say, the imperative is always to think forward. I’d like to believe that the Bancroft Foundation has some grasp of the elementals of historical causation. We’ve learned that the straight shot is often less effective than the carom shot.” He skipped another pebble across the pond. This one touched down three times. “It’s all in the wrist,” he told her with a wink. He was seventy, and he was seven. He had taken the heaviest burdens in the world upon his shoulders, and yet there was something about him that was lighter than air. “You remember Voltaire’s rallying cry: Ecrasez l’infame!—Crush the horror! It’s mine, too. But the hard question has always been: How? As I say, doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”
Andrea took a deep breath. Clouds were beginning to gather overhead, not just to scud. “It’s a lot to take in,” she said at last.
“That’s why I want you to dine at my place tonight—en famille.” He gestured toward a house a few hundred yards on the other side of the stone wall, mostly concealed by foliage. So Bancroft resided in an adjoining parcel of land, his house a mere twenty-minute walk from the foundation.
“Seems you live over the shop,” Andrea said, with a careless giggle. “Or next to it.”
“Beats commuting,” he said. “And if I’m in a hurry, there’s always a bridle path. Is that a yes?”
“A long-winded one. Thank you. I’d love to.”
“I have an idea my son would enjoy meeting you. Brandon’s his name. He’s thirteen. A wretched age, everyone says, but he wears it rather well. Anyway, I’ll let Nuala know you’ll be coming. She’s—well, she looks after us. Among other things, I’d guess you’d call her the governess. But that sounds so Victorian.”
“And you’re more of an Age of Enlightenment guy.”
Laughter rippled through him.
Having made the great man laugh, Andrea suddenly felt buoyed by a wave of unreasonable happiness. She was over her head, out of place—and somehow she had never felt more at home.
You were born to this, her cousin had said, and, thinking of her mother, Andrea felt a moment of coldness. Yet what if he was right?
Todd Belknap manacled the guard’s wrists and ankles, stripped him naked with a few strokes of a knife, and then chained the manacles to the heavy cast-iron chair. Only then did he switch the lights back on. To overpower such a man required speed and stealth, and those advantages were temporary. The steel fetters were needed to make it permanent.
Now, in the harsh fluorescent light, the seated man’s olive complexion appeared sallow. Belknap stepped in front of him and watched his eyes widen and then narrow with recognition and realization. The one who had called himself Yusef was both startled and dismayed. The very intruder he had meant to torture had taken over the torture chamber.
Belknap, for his part, surveyed the gear crowding the dungeon’s walls. Some of the devices were unfathomable; his imagination wasn’t sick enough to conceive how they could be put to use. Others he recognized from a visit he had made once to the Museum of the Pusterla, in Milan, a horrifying collection of medieval torture implements.
“Your master was quite a collector,” Belknap said.
In the chair, the Tunisian drew his angular face into a scowl of defiance. Belknap would have to be very clear about how far he was prepared to go. The captive’s nakedness, he knew, would help bring home the vulnerability of the flesh, all flesh.
“I see you’ve got an actual iron maiden here,” the operative went on. “Impressive.” He walked over to the tomblike container, which was lined with metal talons. Its victim, when forced inside, would be slowly pinioned, his own shrieks magnified by the enclosure. “The Inquisition lives. Thing is, it wasn’t just a fascination with antiques that led your late master to go medieval. Think about it. The Inquisition went on for centuries. Torture, too. That means decade after decade after decade of trial and error. Learning from experience. Learning how to play a man’s pain fibers like a goddamn fiddle. The expertise they accumulated was incredible. Nothing we could hope to rival. Some of the art was lost, I’m sure. But not all.”
The seated man just spat at him. “I tell you nothing,” he said in his lightly accented English.
“But you don’t even know what I’m going to ask,” Belknap returned. “I’m just going to ask you to make a decision, that’s all. A choice. Do I ask too much?”
The guard glowered but was silent.
Now Belknap opened the drawer of a mahogany cabinet and removed an implement he recognized as a turcas, designed to rip out fingernails. He placed it on a large, leather-lined tray in sight of the prisoner. Next to it he placed a steel pincer, a thumbscrew—a vice with protruding studs designed to compress and then crush the joints of a person’s fingers and toes—and a metal wedge designed to dig out, very slowly, someone’s fingernails by the root. During the Inquisition, a common method of torture involved extracting the nails from fingers and toes as slowly as possible.
He presented the gleaming array of implements to his prisoner and spoke a single word. “Choose.”
A bead of perspiration slowly ran down the man’s forehead.
“Then I’ll choose for you. I think we should start small.” He spoke in a coaxing voice as he glanced around the shelves again. “Yes, I know just the thing—how about the pear?” Belknap asked, his eye falling upon a smooth ovoid object with a long screw projecting from the end, like a stem. He brandished it in front of his captive, who remained silent. La pera, one of the most notorious implements of medieval torture, was designed to be inserted into the rectum or vagina. Once inside, the projecting screw would be rotated and the iron pear would expand while spikes began to protrude from small holes, mutilating the victim’s internal cavity in a slow and excruciating manner.
“Feel like a bite of pear? I think this one would like a bite of you.” Belknap pressed a lever recessed in the frame of the heavy iron chair and a hinged panel swung down from the center of the seat. “You’ll see. I’m full-service. Not a clock-watcher. Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, that’s what I’ll do. And when they find you in the morning—”
“No!” the guard yelped, his sweat-slick flesh beginning to emit the acrid stench of fear. Belknap’s calculation appeared to have been correct; his captive was evidently shaken as much by the humiliation of the prospect—the forcible penetration itself—as the bloody agony that would ensue.
“Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself,” Belknap went on, relentlessly. “The wonderful thing about this chamber is that you can scream as loud as you like, as long as you like. Nobody will be able to hear a thing. And, like I say, when you’re found in the morning—”
“I tell you what you want to know,” the guard blurted, a whimper in his voice. “I tell you.”
“The servant girl,” Belknap barked. “Who is she? Where is she?”
The guard blinked. “But she vanished. We thought—we thought you had killed her.”
Belknap lifted an eyebrow. “When was she hired? Who is she?”
“Maybe eight months ago. She was checked out thoroughly. I made sure of it. Eighteen years old. Lucia Zingaretti. Lives with her family in the Trastevere. An old family. Modest. But respectable. Devout, in fact.”
“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.”