“I’m serious,” Hank Sidgwick was saying over the telephone, and Andrea Bancroft realized, with a sinking feeling, that he was. “I’m telling you, this guy could really use the bucks.”
She could picture him at his desk. Sidgwick, pushing forty, retained his all-American looks: blue eyes, blond hair, the body of a middleweight wrestler, though the sun-reddened furrows of his forehead foretold a less-than-flattering middle age. Somehow he always smelled like fresh laundry. He was a friend and colleague at Coventry Equity Group, but she had first met him years earlier, when he was dating a girlfriend of hers in college.
“You know the most interesting people,” she said carefully. She had always enjoyed Hank’s company and was at first pleased by his call. He had, in turn, been fascinated by her recounting of her first foundation meeting. Now, though, she wondered whether she should have been so forthcoming. Hadn’t she promised, strictly speaking, to treat the foundation’s proceedings as “privileged and confidential”? But what really took her aback was how callow Hank’s response had been when she told him about the test that Paul Bancroft had put her to. Hank’s wife had a friend who was an independent documentary maker. “He could put twenty million to good use,” Hank had told Andrea: his first response. Evidently the filmmaker wanted to complete a documentary about East Village performance artists who engaged in bizarre body-modification practices. Andrea glanced at the door, unconsciously signaling her impatience. She had been talking about saving lives, and all Hank could think of was this trivial endeavor?
“Just something to mull over,” Sidgwick said in a fake offhanded tone as he stood up to go.
“Of course,” she said automatically.
Didn’t anybody get it? Yet she would not let herself express her indignation. She was self-conscious about coming across as a snob. It was important to her, somehow, that everyone saw her as the same old Andrea, unchanged by sudden fortune.
But I’m not, she reflected. That’s the truth. I’m different now.
Yes, it was time to stop pretending, she decided. Everything was different.
Almost as soon as she hung up, the telephone rang again.
“Miss Bancroft?” the caller asked. A voice that sounded slightly hoarse and somehow smoky.
“Yes,” she said, instantly feeling a pang of unease.
“I’m calling from the Bancroft Foundation, the security desk. Just wanted to make sure you were clear about the details of the nondisclosure agreement.”
“Of course.” A silly, paranoid thought came to her: It was as if they knew. As if they’d heard her speaking indiscreetly and were calling her to account.
“And there are other security protocol and compliance issues. We’ll be sending someone to you shortly, if that’s all right.”
“Sure thing,” Andrea said, still spooked, and when she put the phone down, she realized that she was hugging herself for warmth.
Something small and disquieting was beginning to bud in the back of her mind, so she forced herself to think about other things. She once again found herself walking—trudging—in a dreamlike state through her small home. Welcome to your new life, she thought.
But she wasn’t going to live for herself alone. That was the thing. She was going to be part of an incredible project—something truly large, truly important. Merlin’s assurance: On your say-so.
What project would be deserving? So much needed to be done. Water and sanitation was a life-or-death issue for many, and so were diseases like AIDS and malaria, conditions like malnutrition. Then there were issues like global warming. Endangered species. There were so many challenges, so many unknowns, so many partially knowns. How to target the funds for maximal results—the biggest bang for the buck? It was hard, all right, damned hard. Because, really, you had to do the math and think five steps ahead, as Paul Bancroft had explained. Twenty million was too much for some problems, way too little for others. As different scenarios filled her mind, she found that her appreciation for what Paul Bancroft had managed to achieve mounted.
There was a knock at the door, and her thoughts dissipated like smoke rings. At the door was a man she did not recognize, a man whose well-tailored suit failed to conceal how heavily muscled he was: To her, he looked like a cross between a banker and a…bouncer.
“I’m with the Bancroft Foundation,” the man said.
No surprise there.
“You’d asked to have certain case files delivered,” he went on.
She noticed he had a briefcase in one hand, and remembered the request that she’d made the day before. She had been expecting a courier service, or a UPS deliveryman. “Oh, of course,” she said. “Please come in.”
“And there are various security details to review. I hope someone called before to say I was coming.” His steel-gray hair was combed in a knife-sharp part. He had a square face with undistinguished features. He was at some indeterminate point of middle age; she wasn’t even sure which decade.
“Someone called, yeah,” Andrea said.
He stepped inside, his movements like those of a jungle cat; muscles seemed to ripple beneath costly fabric. He opened the briefcase and handed her a clutch of folders. “You have any questions about procedure at the foundation? Protocol’s been laid out?”
“Everything’s been carefully explained.”
“Good to know,” he said. “You have a shredder?”
“Like for cheese?”
The man did not smile. “We can supply you with a DoD-grade crosscut shredder. Otherwise we’ll ask you to be sure that the contents of these files, photocopied or otherwise, are returned to the foundation offices.”
“Okay.”
“Just the procedure. You’re new, so I’m supposed to remind you about the terms of the nondisclosure agreement you’re party to.”
“Look, I was in finance, I get the nondisclosure thing.”
His eyes seemed to study her face. “Then you understand that you’re forbidden to discuss any foundation business with outsiders.”
“Right,” Andrea said nervously.
“Easy to forget.” The man spoke the words with a twinkle, but not, it somehow seemed to her, a friendly twinkle. “Important not to.” He began to make his way to the door.
“Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.” Andrea tried not to let it show, but, again, she was spooked. Was it really possible that the foundation had her under surveillance? That it knew about the conversation she’d had just a little earlier? Had her house been bugged?
Nonsense. It was all nonsense, the paranoid imaginings of an unsettled mind, she assured herself. But was there something about the way the man looked at her: a hint of a smile, a certain curious familiarity? No, she was being paranoid again.
Andrea was about to ask him whether they had ever met before when, just before he stepped onto her porch, he offered a terse explanation. “You look a lot like your mother.”
The way he said it chilled her further. She thanked her visitor politely, formally. “I’m sorry—I forgot what you said your name was,” she prompted.
“I didn’t,” he replied blandly. As he turned and walked to an idling Town Car, the phone rang again.
Cindy Lewalski, a realtor with the Cooper Brandt Group, was returning a call Andrea had almost forgotten she had made.
“So I gather you’re interested in looking at apartments in Manhattan,” the woman said. A whiskey voice, businesslike but friendly.
“That’s right,” Andrea said. She had always dreamed of a loft in New York, and, darn it, now she could afford it, with twelve million dollars earning two percent interest in her savings account. She didn’t want to put on airs, but she wasn’t fooling anybody, and she wasn’t going to martyr herself by staying “humble”—that would be the worst affectation of all. She could make an all-cash offer on a place in the big city, get something nice. Something really nice.
Cindy Lewalski took down Andrea’s basic information as she opened a client file on her computer, establishing a price range and the features that Andrea was looking for—size, neighborhood, and so forth. She verified the spelling of Andrea’s name. “You wouldn’t happen to be one of those Bancrofts, by chance?” she asked.
Andrea replied without a flicker of hesitation. “You’ve got my number.”
West End, London
To the world, he was Lukas. The Edinburgh-born rock star had sported the mononym since his early days with the band G7; and the first of the four platinum albums he had recorded since starting a solo career was, as the industry had it, “self-titled.” Someone charted the frequency of babies named Lukas and showed a sharp upturn that began with his hit-making career. Hardcore fans knew he was born Hugh Burney, but the knowledge never stuck. Lukas was the truer identity. He had come to look like Lukas, even to himself.
The sound studio, tucked away in what had once been a girls’ school on Gosfield Street, was gleaming and state-of-the-art, a far cry from the places he had been used to before his career took off. But certain aspects of the enterprise remained the same. For instance, the headphones were getting itchy, as often happened after twenty or so minutes. He pulled them off, put them on again. His producer, Jack Rawls, played another sequence of bass lines.
“Too heavy, man,” Lukas said. “Still too heavy.”
“You don’t want it to fly away,” Rawls protested mildly. “This song, it’s like a picnic blanket in a windstorm. You need to weight it down with a heavy object. A curling stone, like.”
“Yeah, but you’ve given us a boulder. It’s just too much. You feelin’ me?” This wasn’t the glamorous part of the business. The air inside the recording studio was getting stuffy—“fuggy,” as Rawls would say—because mechanical ventilation produced noise. Rawls was seated before an array of synthesizers. These days, the line between producers and instrumentalists was getting blurry, and Rawls, a former keyboard player, combined both roles. Lukas was aiming for an atmospheric soundscape—an ambient electronic groove. When Lukas and Rawls were at the Ipswich Art School together, they experimented with using tape recorders as instruments. The hiss of a blank tape itself could be a powerful sonic element. Lukas was aiming for something like that now.
“How about we try it both ways?” Rawls said, in an agreeable tone of voice that meant he was determined to get his way.
“How about you just dial it back a titch?” Lukas grinned, displaying his famously dazzling smile. Not this time, Jack.
It was his first album in two years, and Lukas was fastidious about every detail. He owed it to people. His fans. Lukas hated the word “fans,” but there it was. What did you call the people who bought not just the albums, but the singles, too? Who traded so-called basement tapes with one another? Who knew his music even better than Lukas himself did?
An assistant, wildly pantomiming outside the glass: telephone.
Lukas made a blow-off gesture in return. He’d told them that he wasn’t taking phone calls. He was working. The Pan-African tour was going to start in just two weeks, so he didn’t have a lot of time at the recording studio. He had to make the most of the sessions he had scheduled.
Now the assistant reappeared holding the phone, pointing to it. “You’ll want to take this,” she mouthed.
Lukas took off his headphones, stood up, and retreated to the jury-rigged office he had made for himself across the hall.
“They said yes!” His agent, Ari Sanders, crowing.
“What are you talking about?”
“Eighty percent of the house. Madison Square Garden. You’re wondering: How did Ari Sanders swing this one? Yes, you are. Well, forget about it. A magician never reveals his secrets!”
“I’m a slow Scotsman, Ari. You need to break it down for me nice and easy. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, okay, I can refuse you nothing. We got word that the Garden had to cancel the hip-hop gala because of insurance problems. Can you believe? Suddenly, they’ve got a humungous hole in their schedule. A Friday night and they’re dark, can you believe it? So that’s when your faithful knight commits armed robbery. A daylight hijacking. I tell the manager, There’s one guy who can sell out the house in four days, and that’s my guy. Am I right? You put an ad on the radio saying Surprise Lukas Concert! So the goniff’s practically wetting himself. He wants it. This is headline news, right?”
“News to me,” Lukas said warningly.
“Oh, but I had to play it this way. I got his balls in my hand. Then I squeezed, hard. I say, Lukas hasn’t performed a live concert in the United States for a long, long time. But if you want him to break his goddamn self-denying ordinance, you have to do right by him. Eighty percent of the house. That’s what I said. The bastard starts bellyaching, about how they’ve never given more than fifty percent, on and on. I said, ‘Fine. This conversation is over.’ He says, ‘Hold on a sec.’ I’m counting to myself: one Mississippi, two Mississippi…And he caved. Can you believe it! He caved! New York, make some noise for…Lukas!”
“Listen, Ari,” Lukas said. An eel of unease squirmed through his innards. “I just don’t know whether—”
Ari Sanders steamrollered on with his customary manic energy. “You’re a saint! A goddamn Scottish saint! All those benefit concerts you’ve been doing for the past three years—I mean, it chokes me up to think about it. All those orphans and widows you’ve helped. It humbles me. It humbles me. Your Children’s Crusade? Truly an inspiring thing. Like Time magazine says, nobody has done more to draw the world’s attention to the worst off among us. A rock star with a social conscience—I mean, who would have figured? But Lukas?”
“Yeah?”
“Enough’s enough. Oh, sure, widows and orphans—you gotta love ’em. But the secret to life is balance. You gotta show love to the hordes of Lukas fans out there. And you gotta show love to little Ari Sanders, who’s been busting his heinie for you out on the front lines every day.”
“A twenty percent cut’s not enough, all of a sudden?”
“Do this,” Ari said. “I made history today. I made history for you. Eighty percent of box office receipts—the Pope doesn’t get that.” He paused to take a breath. “Then again, how many Grammy Awards has he won?”
“I’ll think about it, okay,” Lukas said weakly. “But I’ve got these benefit concerts all lined up, and—”
“So they’ll be heartbroken in Ouagadougou for a day. Change your plans. You cannot say no to this.”
“I’ll—I’ll get back to you.”
“Jesus, Lukas, you sound like someone’s got a gun to your head.”
Lukas clicked off. He noticed that he was sweating.
Moments later, his personal cell phone chimed its Jimi Hendrix ringtone. “Lukas here,” he said.
It was an all-too-familiar voice: electronically altered, eerily devoid of humanity, of affect. “Stick to the plan,” the voice said. If a lizard could speak, Lukas thought, this is what it would sound like.
He swallowed hard. It felt as if there was a stone lodged in his throat. “Look, I’ve done everything you told me to—”
“We still have the videotape,” the voice said.
The videotape. The goddamn videotape. The girl had sworn she was seventeen. How could he have known that she was exaggerating by three crucial years? Which made it statutory rape. A criminal offense. Deadly to his endorsement deals, his career, his reputation, his marriage. Lukas needed reminding of none of this. There were some musicians who could weather a revelation like that, especially the ones who deliberately cultivated a bad-boy image. That wasn’t Lukas’s way, though. If anything, a few had even accused him of sententiousness, of a holier-than-thou streak: They would pounce on the slightest weakness. And if he were prosecuted? He could readily imagine the headlines: LUKAS TO FACE THE MUSIC. ROCK STAR JAILED ON CHILD MOLESTING RAP. CHILDREN’S CRUSADER ARRAIGNED ON KIDDIE SEX CHARGES.
Maybe there were some who could survive that. Lukas wasn’t among them.
“All right,” Lukas said. “I get it.” What sickened him the most was the rapidity with which the call had followed Ari’s. His every call was evidently monitored, and must have been for the past three years. Indeed, he could only guess at how much of his life was under surveillance by these faceless manipulators. There seemed no limit to what they knew about him—whoever “they” really were.
“Stick to the plan,” the voice repeated. “Do the right thing.”
“Like I have a choice,” Lukas replied shakily. “Like I have a friggin’ choice.”
Dubai, the United Arab Emirates
It was a skyline out of Jules Verne: the Arabian sands sprouting vast structures of glass and steel, contours undulating like spacecraft. Ancient souks huddled in the shadow of vast new shopping malls; dhows and abras nestled besides vast freighters and cruise ships; low, crowded street markets displayed DVD players and karaoke machines alongside rugs, leather goods, and trinkets. Dubai was a place that had everything—except mailing addresses. A building was on Sheikh Zayed Road, and on some official map that building had a number. But mail was delivered according to P.O. boxes, not street numbers. At Dubai International Airport, an area larger than the city center, Belknap took a tan-colored metered taxi, paying for the three empty seats at the driver’s voluble insistence.
The man, evidently a Pakistani, wore a local-style keffiyeh of white-and-red checked fabric, like the tablecloth of an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, and rattled off one sales pitch after another. But he had to repeat his chief mid-trip suggestion three times before Belknap was able to understand him: “You want to go Wild Wadi Waterpark?” It was evidently a tourist attraction, twelve acres of water rides, and the driver probably got a finder’s fee for bringing visitors over.
Between the blast-furnace heat and the bleaching dazzle from the sun overhead, Belknap felt he had arrived at a planet that did not naturally support life, and had to move from one oxygenated pod to another. Certainly most of Dubai’s superstructure was devoted to creating a wholly artificial environment: an oasis of freon and steel and polarized glass. It was a place of portals, and yet curiously guarded, if your interest was not in shopping or the luxuries of a resort existence: Depending on the nature of one’s pursuits, one would find it to be a place of a thousand welcome mats or a thousand locked gates. In Rome, Gianni Mattucci had supplied the address that corresponded to the number from which the Italian girl had telephoned. In Dubai, Belknap learned that the address led him to no residence or hotel, but rather a commercial post office that handled mail for several of the swank hotels along the beach.
If it weren’t for the gentle azure of the Gulf, he could have been in Las Vegas in summer: There was the same garish display of affluence, the sleek pop-modernism of the construction, the boundlessness of human greed emblematized in architecture. And yet in the real wadis and escarpments nearby were Koranic holy men who sought to establish a global ummah, and to unhorse what they regarded as the American imperium. Dubai existed for the delectation of foreigners in an arid country that dreamed fervently of their humiliation. The serenity that obtained was as perishable as a rainbow.
“No Wild Wadi Waterpark,” Belknap grumbled warningly when the driver had brightened with the thought of another tourist snare. “No Dubai Dinner Cruise. No Dubai Desert Class Golf. No.”
“But Sahib—”
“And don’t ‘Sahib’ me. I’m not some colonel out of Kipling.”
The taxi driver reluctantly let him off at the small mail-sorting facility. Belknap stepped out of the car, was struck by a riptide of sheer heat, and ducked back inside. “You wait here,” he instructed the driver, handing him another sheaf of pink and blue dirhams, the currency of the Emirates.
“I take dollars,” the driver said hopefully.
“Of course you do. Isn’t that what Dubai exists for?”
A sly look crept over the man’s face. Belknap was reminded of an Arab proverb: Never seek to know what the camel thinks of the camel driver. “I wait,” the man said.
The facility was a white-painted, low-slung concrete box, windowless except for the grated front. It was infrastructure, not superstructure: one of those buildings designed not for public display but for serving those that were. It received mail addressed to many separately designated post boxes, and made deliveries up and down the small rear lane that serviced the gargantuan pleasure palaces on the beach roads.
Belknap would rely upon an air of officialdom, his unwrinkled blue tropical-weight suit and white shirt. He knew immediately upon entering that the establishment was not set up for visitors. There was no receptionist, nobody minding a counter. Instead, an expanse of grip-textured laminated flooring—the kind one found in sweatshops that did not use heavy machinery—opened onto a space where workers sorted mail into wire-mesh bins. They looked, at a glance, to be Filipinos; it took Belknap just a few moments to determine who the manager was. It was a fat man, a local, it seemed, who held an unlighted cigar in his sausage-like fingers and sat on a high stool in a corner, with a clipboard on one knee. The fat man’s nails gleamed under the overhead fluorescent lights; they had been buffed, perhaps even lacquered with a clear polish. Thick rings puckered his fingers like the neckbands on Chinese fishing cormorants.
Belknap would take advantage of his anomalousness. Holding his cell phone to his ear, he wrapped up a fictitious, official-sounding conversation: “That’s right, Inspector. We appreciate your help, and please do send our best to the deputy governor. We don’t anticipate any problems with this. Bye.” Then, with an officious hand gesture, he summoned the plump bejeweled Arab. He would get what he needed not by pretending to fit in but by emphasizing his foreignness. He would be the imperious American, a government agent who expected all foreigners to be at his beck and call, his extraterritorial privileges paved by hundreds of obscure treaties and bilateral agreements.
The manager padded over to him with a look hedged between obsequiousness and annoyance.
“I’m Agent Belknap,” the American intoned. He solemnly handed the man his Virginia driver’s license, as if it were the keys to the city.
The Arab pretended to look at it before handing it back. “I see,” he replied, affecting an air of responsibility and efficiency.
“With the DEA, as you saw,” Belknap went on. “Joint service request.”
“Yes, of course.” The manager was still deciding whether to call for a superior to come over, Belknap could tell.
“P.O. Box 11417,” Belknap announced, a man with no time to waste. “Tell me the physical location.” His face was stern, the request made with no “please,” no apologies, no concessions to courtesy whatsoever. The very preemptory nature of his approach would place it above suspicion, or beneath it. He was not wheedling, appealing to the man’s discretion, as someone would who was trying to gain information that was not his by right. Nothing suggested that the Arab had even the right to decide whether to comply with the request. On the contrary. Belknap was demanding something owed him by virtue of his office. The effect was to alleviate the manager’s uncertain and anxiety: He could not make the wrong decision because he had not been invited to make a decision at all.
“Ah,” the manager said, given an easy question where he feared a hard one. “That would be the Palace Hotel. About two kilometers past the Al-Khaleej Roundabout.” The man made a flowing gesture with his hand, and Belknap realized he was describing the hotel’s distinctive shape, a sort of glass whale with a central tower shaped like a waterspout.
“That’s what I needed to know,” Belknap said. The manager looked almost grateful: Is that all?
When Belknap returned to the cab, he saw the manager peering out at the front door, looking puzzled to see the beige vehicle. He had obviously been expecting something more official. Yet it was unlikely he would discuss what happened with anyone. If he had indeed erred, it was better that nobody knew it.
“Now we go Wild Wadi Waterpark?” the driver prompted.
“Now we go Palace Hotel,” Belknap replied.
“Very good,” the driver said. “You will have whale of a time.” His wide smile was gap-toothed and khat-colored.
The driver took a shortcut through a fish souk, where turquoise-clad migrant workers gutted fish with metronomic regularity, and then onto Sheikh Zayed Road, which was lined with enormous glittering edifices, one glass-skinned leviathan after another. The Palace was among the more recent and outlandish of them. The “tail” functioned as a porte-cochère over the entrance, and, as the cab stood a discreet distance away, Belknap strode into the lobby like a man on a mission.
What now? The Palace Hotel probably had upward of seven hundred rooms. Although the Italian girl’s call had been routed through a central switchboard, the hotel itself kept a record of outgoing calls. But the managers of the Palace would be vastly more sophisticated than the man at the back-office mail center; they were accustomed to dealing with visitors, valued a reputation for discretion, knew what the authorities could and could not require them to do.
Inside the lobby, he looked around and swiftly took the measure of the place. In the center of the vast space stood a large blue-tinted aquarium. Rather than any exotic sea creatures, the tank featured a scantily clad woman in a mermaid suit and waterproof pasties who swam in slow circles to tinkly synthesized New Age music, her disciplined motions designed to look lazy and undirected; at intervals, she took breaths from an air pipe painted seaweed green. If a Muslim fundamentalist were ever to enter the lobby, the scene would confirm his worst suspicions of Western decadence. But that was extremely unlikely. Distance, in the modern world, was not measured in miles or kilometers but in units of social removal. The enclave belonged to a world that included Cap d’Antibes, East Hampton, Positano, and Mustique. Those were its true neighbors. An enclave like the Palace had no connection to the geopolitical territory known as the Middle East, save by merest accident of geography. The building had been designed by a team of architects from London, Paris, and New York; its restaurant was supervised by a Spanish chef with an international reputation; even the desk clerks and concierges were British, though, of course, able to converse in the major European languages.
Belknap sat down on a dark-blue upholstered ottoman in a corner of the lobby and placed a cell-phone call, a real one. It went through in a matter of moments. He could remember when international calls were invariably marred by a burble of distortion and static, as if one could hear the watery currents through which the transoceanic cables had been laid. These days, the signal from one affluent part of the world to another was crystal-clear—indeed, clearer than a local call made from one neighborhood of Lagos to another. Matt Gomes’s voice was instantly recognizable when he picked up, and Gomes instantly recognized who was calling him.
“Word is,” the junior officer said, “you got in a major pissing match with Wild Bill Garrison. When something like that happens, the rest of us think it’s raining.”
“Into each life some rain must fall,” Belknap replied. “Just like Pat Boone says.”
“Pat Boone? How about the Ink Spots, my brother?”
“Need a favor, little man,” Belknap said, his eyes scanning the lobby. Inside the wide, shallow tank, the mermaid kept up her ostensibly lazy circles, no doubt counting her hourly wages in her head. Her blissful smile was beginning to look strained.
“All calls may be monitored for quality assurance,” Gomes said, a casual warning.
“Do you know how many years of digital tape they’ve already accumulated? Recording is easy, because it’s automated. As for listening, nobody ever has enough man-hours. I’ll take my chances that nobody’s taking a special interest in you.”
“Your chances, or my chances? ’Cause ‘when I think of you, another shower starts.’”
“I just need you to do what Pat Boone did: Cover for me.”
“Can you assure me that this is strictly pursuant to an officially authorized operation?” There was a wink in Gomes’s voice.
“You took the words out of my mouth,” Belknap said. Then he told Gomes what he needed him to do. As to favors owed, the junior officer needed no reminding.
At all the international hotel chains, there was always someone who served the American spy agencies as a facilitator when some special service was required. It was the nature of a business that provided temporary habitation for tens of thousands of travelers that criminals, even terrorists, would occasionally seek refuge among them. In return for the informal alerts, the CIA would sometimes provide the hotels, on an equally informal basis, background checks, information about prospective security risks, and the like.
Gomes would not call anyone at the Palace directly; he would call someone at the Chicago headquarters of the holding company that owned it. That person would then call the hotel manager at the Palace. Five minutes later, Belknap’s cell phone silently vibrated. It was Gomes with the name of an assistant manager who had been reached and given to understand that he was to give Agent Belknap his full cooperation.
And he did. His name was Ibrahim Hafez, and he was a small, well-educated man in his thirties, probably the son of an hotelier who managed another of the emirate’s stately pleasure domes. He was neither overimpressed nor sullen in the American’s presence. They conferred in a small office, hidden away from the guests. It was a tidy nook, with neat stacks of envelopes and two photographs, evidently of Hafez’s wife and infant daughter. The wife was slender, with luminous black eyes, and she smiled at the camera with an expression both brazen and somehow abashed. For the assistant manager, she must have been a necessary reminder of what was real in a realm of simulacrum.
Hafez seated himself before the terminal and keyed in the Rome exchange numbers. Moments later, the screen displayed the search results. The number had been called half a dozen times.
“Can you tell me what room number these calls originated from?” The girl had told her parents that she was “someplace nice,” which was, if anything, an understatement. If she were a guest of the Palace, she was being royally treated indeed.
“A room number?” The assistant manager shook his head.
“But—”
“Each time, a different room number.” He tapped on a column of digits with the capped point of a pen.
How was that possible? “So the guest has checked into different rooms?”
Hafez looked at him as if he were dense. A small headshake. He clicked on a few room numbers, opening data fields that showed the name of each registered guest and the duration of his or her stay. Each name was different; each was male.
“Then you’re saying that…”
“What do you think?” It was a statement, and not the most polite one. Lucia Zingaretti was working as a prostitute—an “escort”—and, given that she was frequenting the Palace, undoubtedly a high-priced one. If she occasionally made a phone call from the rooms she visited—perhaps while using the bathroom—her clients were unlikely to raise a fuss with hotel management about the extra charges.
“Can you give me the names of the girls who work the place?”
Hafez looked at him blandly. “You must be joking. The Palace Hotel does not condone such activity. How could I have any knowledge of it?”
“You mean you turn a blind eye to it.”
“I turn no eye to it at all. Rich Westerners come here to play. We accommodate them in nearly every way possible. You will have noticed in the lobby natatorium that we have a sharmuta swimming around all day.” Sharmuta was Arabic slang for slut or whore, and Hafez almost spat the word with unconcealed distaste. He had made a profession of catering to the fantasies of his guests, but he would not pretend that he approved of them. He noticed that Belknap was looking at the photograph of his wife, and, with a fluid movement, he placed the picture facedown. It was not that he had taken offense: It was that the unveiled face of his wife was not meant to be seen by strangers. Belknap suddenly realized the significance of her slightly abashed expression. This was a woman who would appear in public only in a veil. The exposure of her full face and hair was something of a transgression, akin to a nude picture, for her and for him. “We wash your soiled sheets and clean the toilets and the filthy leavings of your menstruating women, yes, we do all this, and smile even so. But do not ask us to enjoy it. Grant us that much dignity.”
“Thanks for the fatwa. But I need names.”
“I have none.”
“The name of someone who does, then. You’re a professional, Ibrahim. There’s nothing that goes on in this place you can’t find out about.”
Hafez sighed. “There’s a bellhop who will know.” He pressed a five-digit extension from his telephone console. “Conrad,” he said. “Come to my office.” Again, he did not disguise his disapproval. Undoubtedly Conrad was one of the European employees foisted upon him by the foreign owners. Hafez clearly placed him in the same category as soiled sheets and used sanitary napkins.
An Irish voice could be heard on the console speaker: “Be right there.”
Conrad was a jockey-sized young man with curly red hair and a too-quick smile. “Yo, Bram,” he said to Hafez, with a mock salute from his visored Palace Hotel cap.
Hafez did not deign to respond. “You will answer this man’s questions,” he told the bellhop severely. “I leave you two together.” With a curt bow, he did so.
Conrad’s smile faded and reappeared with offputting rapidity as Belknap questioned him, his expression shifting from puzzled and solicitous to conspiratorial and lascivious, equally obnoxious from Belknap’s point of view. “So what kind of hoochie are you looking for, my friend?” he finally asked.
“Italian,” Belknap said. “Young. Dark.”
“My, my,” said Conrad. “You’re mighty particular. A man who knows what he wants. Gotta respect that.” He was obviously confused by Hafez’s involvement, however.
“You know anybody who fits the bill?”
“Well.” Conrad’s eyes were calculating. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got just what the doctor ordered.”
“When can I see her?”
Conrad sneaked a peek at his wristwatch. “Soon,” he said.
“Within the hour?”
“I could swing that. For a consideration. If you’re having a party, by the way, you might want some party favors. Ecstasy, blow, sensimilla, whatever—just say the word.”
“She’s in the hotel now?”
“Now why would you be asking me that?” Conrad said, a clumsy feint. The answer was yes.
“What room number?”
“If it’s a threesome you want…”
Belknap took a step toward the small Irishman and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him a few inches into the air. He pressed his face near Conrad’s. “Tell me the goddamn room number,” he barked. “Or I’ll have you rendered to the goddamned Egyptians for interrogation. You got me?”
“Bejabbers!” Conrad flushed, beginning to understand that he was in over his head.
“You want to interfere with an international investigation, I suggest you get yourself lawyered up. And when our Egyptian friends offer you the option of scrotal electrodes, say yes. Because the alternative is even worse.”
“Fourteen-fifty, sir. Floor fourteen, straight to the left from the main elevators. All I ask is that you leave me the hell out of it.”
“You gonna call and warn them?”
“After what you were saying about scrotal electrodes? I don’t think so, mate.” A forced guffaw was meant to convey nonchalance but conveyed the opposite. “Those were the magic words. Quite vivid.”
Belknap just held out a hand. “Master key,” he demanded.
Reluctantly, the bellhop handed over his keycard. Then he hovered, in a way peculiar to the serving professions, as if expecting a tip. “Scrotal electrodes”: Belknap mouthed the words as he brushed past him.
Less than four minutes later, he was outside Room 1450, two-thirds of the way up the hotel’s central tower. He paused at the door, could hear nothing. The Palace was a well-engineered building, constructed of premium materials. He placed the card in the slot, watched the light blink green, and turned the knob. On the other side of the door he would find Lucia Zingaretti: his one thread. Hang on, Jared, he silently urged. I’m on my way.
Andrea Bancroft had meant to clear out her desk at Coventry Equity Group, but as she sat there she had another thought. The office’s resources would be helpful to her. Her colleagues were sorry to see her go; they would hardly begrudge her the right to spend her last day as she wanted to.
There was something else, too. She kept thinking about what her nameless visitor had said: You look a lot like your mother. What was the significance of that? Was she becoming undone by suspicion? Perhaps it was the result of some delayed grief reaction from her mother’s death, the jolting abruptness of the Bancroft bequest, perhaps—but no, she wasn’t some hysteric. That wasn’t the kind of person she was. Except that she wasn’t sure she knew what kind of person she was anymore.
You’re a professional. Do what you’re trained to do. The foundation was ultimately another organization—a nonprofit corporation—and she had expertise in doing due diligence on corporations, in researching companies both public and private, in peering beneath the glossy assurances of their brochures and press releases. She might as well take a closer look at the Bancroft Foundation itself.
Seated before the networked computer terminal at her desk, she roamed through a series of arcane databases. A nonprofit entity that was chartered in the United States—even a private one like the Bancroft—had to abide by various statutes and regulations; mandated federal filings included the original charter, bylaws, and employee identification numbers for certain senior officers.
After peering through digitized documents for two hours, Andrea worked out that the foundation was—at least formally—a complex of separately incorporated entities. There was the Bancroft Estates, the Bancroft Philanthropic Trust, the Bancroft Family Trust, and on and on. Funds seemed to slosh through them as through the pipes and valves of a manifold.
All around her she saw her colleagues—former colleagues, she corrected herself—working busily at their stations. They seemed drone-like, in a way that she’d never noticed before; seated at desks, fingering keyboards, speaking on telephones—performing hundreds of tasks through about three or four basic motions that were repeated all day long.
What makes me any different? she thought. I’m doing the same thing. It felt different from inside, that was all. It felt different when you knew that what you did truly mattered.
Her phone purred, intruding on her thoughts.
“Hey, girl!” Brent Farley’s smooth baritone was dialed up to its most ingratiating pitch. “It’s me.”
Her voice was tundra-dry. “How can I help you?”
“How much time you got?” he breezily replied. “Look, it’s just that I hated the way we left things. We need to talk, okay?”
“And what would this be in regard to?” Maintaining the secretarial permafrost took surprisingly little effort.
“Hey, don’t be that way, Andrea. Look, I got us a couple of tickets to—”
“I’m just curious,” she cut in. “Why is it that you’re calling me out of the blue? Why now?”
He stammered. “Why—why am I calling? No special reason,” he lied. At that moment, she knew for sure: The word had reached him. “I just, like I said, I just thought we needed to talk. Maybe start over again. But, however it goes, we really need to talk.”
Because suddenly the “small-time” girl is worth more than you’ll ever make?
“We did need to talk,” she replied calmly. “And, thank goodness, we just have. Good-bye, Brent. Please don’t call again.”
She hung up, feeling vindicated, excited, and, oddly, tired.
She walked over to the coffee machine, waved at Walter Sachs, the firm’s tech guru, who seemed to be in the middle of a riff with an assistant on the subject of granola bars. He was a brilliant guy, really, and a classic underachiever. Sachs, oddly, took satisfaction in being absolutely indifferent to what he did for a living; he did it well, but found it entirely undemanding, which was to his liking.
“Hey, Walt,” she said. “Working hard or hardly working?”
He turned his long, rectangular head toward her and blinked hard, as if there was something stuck in his contact lenses. “Running the systems here is something I can do in my sleep and with my left hand or, come to think of it, with my left hand asleep. The ‘or’ is inclusive, not exclusive: My claim, in its strongest form, is that the tingling left hand of a sleeping Walt Sachs would suffice. Sorry, Andrea, I’m feeling very Boolean today. I blame granola-bar intoxication. Did you realize that granola bars are essentially conduits for com syrup? Do you know how many products on the supermarket shelves are essentially conduits for corn syrup?” He blinked again, a hard, windshield-wiper-style clench. “Consider, of all things, ketchup.”
“See you, Walt,” she said, and returned to her desk with a Stryro-foam cup of coffee.
She downloaded more documents, more digitized filings. The honeycombed intricacy of the foundation’s structure presented an intellectual challenge. She tried to be alert both to small irregularities and larger patterns. As she paged through the federal filings over the past decade, she was taken back to find that the officers of the principal foundation once included her own mother, Laura Parry Bancroft.
It was startling. How was it that her mother, so deeply disaffected with everything to do with the family she married into, had once served as a foundation officer? Andrea peered at the document more closely and noticed something even stranger. Her mother had resigned her position just one day before the car accident that killed her.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
In one corner of the darkened room, a man was seated on an overstuffed blue velvet chair; seated upon the man, in turn, was a lissome young woman. At the sound of the door closing behind Belknap, the man—sixtyish, with a sun-reddened, smooth-shaven head, white-blond hair chest hair, and sagging pectorals—sat upright with a jolt, threw the woman off him, and scrambled to his feet.
“The girl’s under new management,” Belknap growled.
“What the hell?” The man spoke with a Swedish accent. His assumption was that he was being set up, that the whore was in cahoots with the intruder. It was the assumption of a worldly man who was experienced with the sex trade and had no illusions about the limits of human knavery. “Get the hell out of my—”
“Why don’t you make me?” Belknap replied, cutting him off.
The older man sized up his opponent swiftly; he was a businessman, someone used to assessing the odds and acting accordingly. Making a swift decision, he grabbed his wallet and a couple of items of clothing and bolted from the room. “You’re not getting another Euro out of me, you hear?” he hissed to the girl on his way out.
When Belknap turned back to the girl, she was no longer sprawled on the floor, but had put on a silk robe and stood with her arms crossed.
“Lucia Zingaretti?” he asked.
A look of shock passed across her face. She knew it would be pointless to deny it. “Who are you?” she demanded in a throaty Italian accent.
He ignored her question. “Your parents have no idea, do they?”
“What do you know of my parents?”
“I spoke to them yesterday. They were worried about you.”
“You spoke to them.” Her voice was deathly.
“As have you. Except you ply them with lies only. Not exactly the daughter they imagine.”
“What do you know about them, or about me?”
“They’re good people. Trusting people. The sort people like you take advantage of.”
“How dare you judge me!” the Italian girl spat. “What I do, I do for them!”
“Does that include killing Khalil Ansari?”
The girl blanched. She lowered herself to the blue velvet chair and spoke in a quiet voice. “They promised great sums of money. My parents struggled every working day of their lives, and what can they afford? They said if I did what they asked, I would be able to set them up in luxury for the rest of their lives.”
“They?”
“They,” the girl repeated defiantly.
“And you, too, no doubt. Where did they end up taking you?”
“Not a place like this,” the girl said quietly. “Not like they said. Not like any place fit for human being. Like for animals.”
She seemed bewildered that they had failed to live up to their promises. Yet to Belknap, the greater perplexity was that they had even allowed the girl to live. Why were they so confident she would maintain her silence? “This came as a surprise?” he asked mildly.
She nodded grimly. “When they fly me to Dubai, they say it is for cooling-off period. Just to stay out of the way for a while. To keep me safe. Then when I come, they say I must work. I must earn my keep. Otherwise I will be on the street or killed. No money. No papers.”
“You were a prisoner.”
“After one day, they take me out of hotel. They take me to this…magazzino, this…warehouse. On outskirts of Dubai. They say I must do this thing. Customers must never complain. Otherwise…” She faltered, a victim of sexual servitude who had sought to repress the degradation she had been forced to accept. “But they say that at the end of one year, I can go free. After one year, they say, Lucia write her own ticket. Set up for life. All of us.”
“You and your parents,” Belknap said. “Set up for life, they told you. And you believed them?”
“Why I not believe them?” the Italian girl demanded stormily. “What else can I believe?”
“When they had you poison Ansari, they never told you that you’d end up a high-class whore, did they?”
Her silence was her assent.
“They lied to you once. You really think they’re not lying to you now?”
Lucia Zingaretti said nothing, but he could see the contending emotions in her face. Belknap could easily imagine what had happened. It was a phenomenon that plagued nested organizations, each part of which had its own particular needs. In Dubai, the girl’s beauty meant that she could be of great value to those who provided sexual services to rich visitors. What’s more, she was, after all, a mere servant girl: Many Arabs would be inclined to think that such a girl was likely to be a sharmuta anyway. Nor was she in any position to bargain, as she acknowledged: They knew what she had done. The deed did not put them in her debt, as she had supposed; it put her in their power.
“And still you protect them, the very people who have forced you into a life of degradation.”
“It is not for you to say what is degradazione.” Lucia Zingaretti pouted and rose to her feet. “Not for you.”
“Tell me who they are,” Belknap said steadily.
“It is not for you to interfere.”
“Tell me who they are,” he repeated, more urgently.
“So that I should be in your clutches rather than theirs? I think I take my chances. Yes, I think I take my chances, thank you very much.”
“Goddammit, Lucia…”
“What must I do to make you go away?” the girl asked. Her voice was breathy, sultry. “What can I offer you?”
With a shrug of her shoulders she let her robe fall to the floor. Now she stood naked before him. He could feel the heat of her body, could smell the scent of her honeyed skin. Her breasts were smallish but perfectly shaped.
“There’s nothing you can offer me,” Belknap replied contemptuously. “That body can pay for a lot. But not in any currency I accept.”
“Please,” she said, purring, taking a step toward him, caressing her breasts with one hand. Her gestures were sensual, but motivated by sheer survival. Her eyes narrowed to slits, vampishly—and then, suddenly, they blinked open.
Belknap saw a red dot blossom in the center of her forehead a split-second before he heard a quiet popping noise from behind him. Time became viscous as Belknap dived to the floor and rolled behind the large, skirted bed.
A silenced shot had been fired.
Silencing Lucia Zingaretti forever.
He flashed back to what he had glimpsed of the assailants, forced himself to piece together visual fragments into a whole. There had been…two men at the door, each armed with a long-barreled, sighted handgun. Both had short dark hair. One, wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket, had the dead eyes of a hammerhead shark—obviously a combat-seasoned veteran, and a marksman of considerable skill. A precise head shot from a handgun across a room lay beyond the competence even of most professionals. On the base of a shiny brass floor lamp, Belknap caught the reflection of the two men. They were moving their handguns in sweeping arcs, but had stepped only a few feet into the room. They were cautious, more cautious than Belknap would have been in their situation. At least one of them should have seized the opportunity of surprise and pushed clear across the bedroom.
Yet their movements made one thing plain. They were hunting him. Their mission would not be complete until there was a slug in Belknap’s brain as well.
Belknap snake-bellied himself under the bed until he was within arm’s length of one of the gunmen. Now he lashed out with an arm curved like a grappling hook, striking with all his might.
A risky move: He had just given away his position.
The man fell heavily to the ground. Belknap grabbed his weapon, firing it at him a second later. Close-quarters combat was like speed chess. You stop to think, you lose. Swiftness of response was paramount. He could feel his face wetted with a spray of warm blood. No matter. Where was the second assailant, the one who had moved to get an angle on the rest of the room?
Belknap seized the torso of the slain man and hoisted his body into the air. The sudden movement drew gunfire, as he had expected, a quick reflexive rat-a-tat that must have emptied the gun—and that identified the other man’s exact firing position. Belknap set his newly acquired pistol to single-shot action and squeezed off a returning round. Accuracy of gunfire counted more than volume. Better to have to squeeze a few times than to be caught with an empty chamber.
The man’s cry told him that the bullet had connected—but not with a vital organ.
Then he heard the sound of glass shattering, and another pair of men stepped into the room from the balcony outside. Belknap rolled the corpse over himself, drawing the limp body over him like a saddlebag. He was conscious of the slain man’s body heat, the acrid smell of his sweat. The members of his unit could not be certain that he was dead—at least not at first—and would not fire freely toward him.
It would buy Belknap only seconds, but seconds were all he needed.
One of the late arrivals—tall, husky, muscled—was wearing a combat vest and holding a Heckler & Koch MP5, a compact automatic weapon known as a “room broom.” He directed a spray of bullets into the mattress. Nobody hiding beneath it could have survived. It was a sensible precaution, Belknap thought as he squeezed a carefully aimed shot into the sternum of each balcony boy. Two rounds spaced by a second-long interval. Conveniently, they were almost exactly the same height; the adjustment between shots was slight.
Belknap heard the other man slam a new magazine into his pistol—the one he had wounded, the one he had forgotten about. Dammit! A mistake he could not afford.
With lightning rapidity, he swept his gun arm around and squeezed the trigger, knowing that success or failure would be determined in the next two-tenths of a second. He watched as his one remaining round punched through his assailant’s neck, and the man slumped to the ground. Had Belknap been two-tenths of a second slower, the round would have been fired by his victim, and Belknap, not him, would have been the last man down.
Unsteadily, Belknap rose to his feet and looked at the dizzying carnage around him. Here, in a well-appointed hotel bedroom, were four bodies of powerful young men—nourished and exercised for well over two decades, trained at considerable expense. Dead. So was a beautiful girl, scarcely out of adolescence, doted on by hardworking parents to whom the world had never given a break, not one. Dead. Human lives transformed into jointed meat. If they were outdoors, not protected by the air-conditioned sanctuary of this glass-skinned whale, botflies would have already started to hover and alight. Belknap had just taken on four well-armed gunmen and survived. Close-quarters combat was a rare art, and he was more experienced at it than his opponents. Yet he felt no sense of conquest, no sense of triumph. He felt only a bone-deep sense of waste.
If we do not treat death with respect, Jared used to say, it will reciprocate in kind.
He spent the next three minutes searching the combat vests of the slain men. There were wallets stuffed with faked identity cards—generic in nature, identities designed to be swiftly adopted and swiftly discarded. Finally, in an interior pocket in the combat vest of the skilled marksman, he found a torn scrap of paper. The kind that came on narrow rolls, like a cash-register receipt. In a simple sans-serif font was a typed list of names.
Belknap rinsed the blood from his face in the bathroom and hastened from the hotel. Only after he had rented a rugged SUV from a nearby Hertz office and motored off did he scrutinize the list.
He recognized a few of the names. A recently slain investigative reporter for La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper. A Paris-based magistrate whose murder had also made the papers recently. Marked for death? Most of the other names were a bewildering jumble of personages who were unknown to him. One name, however, was Lucia Zingaretti.
Another was his own.