The Bancroft Strategy Read Online Free PDF Page A

been better—or worse. In the two decades he had spent as a field agent, he had come to dread thestroke of luck that arrives almost too late. It had happened near the beginning of his career, in East Berlin. It had happened seven years ago, in Bogotá. It was happening again here in Rome. Good things come in threes, as his good friend Jared Rinehart wryly insisted.
    Ansari, it was known, was on the verge of a major arms deal, one that would involve a series of simultaneous exchanges among several parties. It was, from all indications, a deal of enormous complexity and enormous magnitude—something that perhaps only Khalil Ansari would be capable of orchestrating. According to humint sources, the final settlement would be arranged this very evening, via an intercontinental conference call of some sort. Yet the use of sterile lines and sophisticated encryption ruled out the standard sigint solutions. Belknap’s discovery had changed all that. If Belknap was able to plant a bug in the right place, Consular Operations would gain invaluable information about how the Ansari network functioned. With any luck, the rogue network could be exposed—and a multibillion-dollar merchant of death brought to justice.
    That was the good news. The bad news was that Belknap had identified Ansari only hours before. No time for a coordinated operation. No time for backup, for HQ-approved plans. He had no other choice but to go in alone. The opportunity could not be allowed to pass.
    The photo ID clipped to his knitted cotton shirt read “Sam Norton,” and identified him as one of the site architects involved in the latest round of renovations, an employee of the British architectural firm in charge of the project. It got him in the house, but it could not explain what he was doing on the third floor. In particular, it could not justify his presence in Ansari’s personal study. If he were found here, it was over. Likewise if anyone were to discover the guard he had knocked out with a tiny Carfentanil dart and stowed in a cleaning closet down the hall. The operation would be terminated. He would be terminated.
    Belknap recognized these facts dully, dispassionately, like the rulesof the road. Inspecting the arms dealer’s study, he felt a kind of operational numbness; he saw himself from the perspective of a disembodied observer far above him. The ceramic element of the contact microphone could be hidden—where? A vase on the desk, containing an orchid. The vase would serve as a natural amplifier. It would also be routinely inspected by the Yemeni’s debugging team, but that would not be until the morning. A keystroke logger—he had a recent model—would record messages typed on Ansari’s desktop computer. A faint chirp sounded in Belknap’s earpiece, a response to radio pulse emitted by a tiny motion detector that Belknap had secreted in the hallway outside.
    Was someone about to enter the room? Not good. Not good at all. It was an appalling irony. He had spent the better part of a year trying to locate Khalil Ansari. Now the danger was that Khalil Ansari would locate him.
    Dammit! Ansari was not supposed to be back so soon. Belknap looked helplessly around the Moroccan-tiled room. There were few places for concealment, aside from a closet with a slatted door, at the corner near the desk. Far from ideal. Belknap stepped quickly inside and hunched down, squatting on the floor. The closet was unpleasantly warm, filled with racks of humming computer routers. He counted the seconds. The miniaturized motion detector he had placed in the hall outside could have been set off by a roach or rodent. Surely it was a false alarm.
    It was not. Someone was entering the room. Belknap peered through the slats until he could make out the figure. Khalil Ansari: a man tending everywhere toward roundness. A body made of ovals, like an art-class exercise. Even his close-trimmed beard was a thing of round edges.