The Bancroft Strategy by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page A

step, fifth step, sixth step: Belknap stumbled, as convincingly as he could, pretending he had missed hisfooting. Now he pitched forward, gently, falling on his slack left shoulder, while secretly breaking his fall with his right hand. “Shit!” Belknap yelped, feigning dismay as he rolled down another couple of steps.
    â€œ Vigilanza fuori! ” the seasoned guard, the man who called himself Yusef, muttered to his partner. The guards would have only seconds to decide how to respond: A captive had value—the value of the information he could provide. Killing him at an inopportune moment could, in the fullness of time, lead to recriminations. Yet a nonlethal shot had to be aimed with great care, all the more so when the target was in motion.
    And Belknap was in motion, righting himself from a sprawl and now springing off a step as if it were a starting block, bounding down the rest of the staircase, his ankles like tightly coiled springs, and then surging toward the Palladian-style door. Yet the door itself was not his target; it, too, would have been magneto-locked shut.
    Abruptly, Belknap veered off to one side of it—to a two-foot-wide ornamental segment of leaded glass, an echoing, though narrower, Palladian shape. The city of Rome forbade any visible change to the villa’s facade, and that included the ornamental panel. The blueprints ultimately called for it to be replaced with an identical-looking panel that would be rendered of a bulletproof and unbreakable methacrylate resin, but it would be months before the replica, which required the collaboration of artisans and engineers, would be ready. Now he threw his body at the panel, leading with his hips and averting his face to avoid laceration and—
    It gave way, noisily popping out of its frame and shattering upon the stone outside. Elementary physics: The energy of motion was proportional to mass times the square of velocity.
    Belknap righted himself swiftly and took off down the stone path in front of the villa. Yet his pursuers were merely seconds behind him. He heard their footfalls—and then their gunfire. He darted erratically, trying to make himself a difficult target, as muzzle flashespunctuated the darkness outside like starbursts. Belknap could hear bullets ricochet off the statuary that decorated the villa’s front grounds. Even as he tried to dodge the handgun fire that was aimed at him, he prayed that no unaimed ricochet found him. Gulping for breath, too frenzied to inventory his injuries, he veered to his left, sprinting to the brick wall that marked the end of the property, and vaulted over it. Razor-edged concertina wire slashed and sliced at his clothing, and he left half his shirt on its barbs. As he dived through the gardens of neighboring consulates and small museums on the via Angelo Masina, he knew that his left ankle would soon start sending shooting pains, that muscles and joints would eventually protest their abuse. For the moment, though, adrenaline had taken his body’s pain circuitry offline. He was grateful for that. And grateful for something else, too.
    He was alive.
    Beirut
    The conference room was rank with the foulness of perforated bodies betraying their contents: the old-penny stench of blood, mingled with odors alimentary and fecal. It was the fetor of the slaughterhouse, an olfactory assault. Stuccoed walls, pampered skin, costly fabrics: All were drenched in a syrup of exsanguination.
    The smaller of the American’s bodyguards felt a searing pain spread across his upper chest—a bullet had hit his shoulder and possibly pierced his lung. But consciousness remained. Through slightly parted eyelids, he took in the carnage in the room, the awful swagger of the keffiyeh-clad assailants. The man who called himself Ross McKibbin alone had not been shot, and, as he stared, evidently paralyzed by horror and disbelief, the gunmen roughly slammed a mud-colored canvas hood over his head. Then