The Bancroft Strategy Read Online Free PDF

His lips, his ears, his chin, his cheeks, were full, soft, round, cushioned. He wore a white silk caftan, Belknap saw, which draped loosely around his bulk as the man padded toward his desk with a distracted air. Only the Yemeni’s eyes were sharp, scanning the room like a samurai’s rotating sword. Had Belknap been seen? Hehad counted on the darkness of the closet to provide concealment. He had counted on many things. Another miscalculation, and he would be counted out.
    The Yemeni eased his avoirdupois upon the leather chair at his desk, cracked his knuckles, and typed in a rapid sequence—a password, no doubt. As Belknap continued to squat uncomfortably in the recessed bay, his knees started to protest. Now in his mid-forties, he had lost the limberness of his youth. But he could not afford to move; the sound of a cracking joint would instantly betray his presence. If only he had arrived a few minutes earlier, or Ansari a few minutes later: Then he would have had the keystroke logger in place, electronically capturing the pulses emitted by the keyboard. His first priority was just to stay alive, to endure the debacle. There would be time for postmortems and after-action reports later.
    The arms dealer shifted in his seat and intently keyed in another sequence of instructions. Messages were being e-mailed. Ansari drummed his fingers and pressed a button inset in a rosewood-veneered box. Perhaps he was setting up the conference call via Internet telephony. Perhaps the entire conference would be conducted in encrypted text, chatroom style. There was so much that could have been learned, if only…It was too late for regrets, but they churned through Belknap all the same.
    He remembered his exhilaration, not long before, when he had at last tracked his quarry to earth. It was Jared Rinehart who had first dubbed him “the Hound,” and the well-earned honorific had stuck. Though Belknap did have a peculiar gift for finding people who wished to stay lost, much of his success—he could never persuade people of it, but he knew it to be true—was a matter of sheer perseverance.
    Certainly that was how he had finally tracked down Khalil Ansari after entire task forces had returned empty-handed. The bureaucrats would dig, their shovels would bang against bedrock, and theywould give it up as futile. That was not Belknap’s way. Each search was different; each involved a mixture of logic and caprice, because human beings were a mixture of logic and caprice. Neither ever sufficed by itself. The computers at headquarters were capable of scanning vast databases, inspecting records from border control authorities, Interpol, and other such agencies, but they needed to be told what to look for. Machines could be programmed with pattern-recognition software—but first they had to be told what pattern to recognize. And they could never get into the mind of the target. A hound could scent out a fox, in part, because it could think like a fox.
    A knock at the door, and a young woman—dark hair, olive skin, but Italian rather than Levantine, Belknap judged—let herself in. The severity of her black-and-white uniform did not disguise the young woman’s beauty: the budding sensuality of someone who had only recently come into her full physical endowments. She was carrying a silver tray with a pot and a small cup. Mint tea, Belknap knew at once from the aroma. The merchant of death had sent for it. Yemenis seldom did business without a carafe of mint tea, or shay, as they called it, and Khalil, on the verge of a concluding a vast chain of trades, proved true to form. Belknap almost smiled.
    It was always details like those that helped Belknap track down his most elusive subjects. A recent one was Garson Williams, the rogue scientist at Los Alamos who sold nuclear secrets to the North Koreans and then disappeared. The FBI spent four years searching for him. Belknap, when he was finally assigned to the