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

they hustled the startled American away, swarming back down the stairs.
    The bodyguard, gasping for breath, as his poplin jacket slowly reddened with his blood, heard the low growl of the van’s engine. Out the window he was able to catch a final glimpse of the American, his arms now bound together, roughly thrown into the back of the van—a van that now roared off into the dusty night.
    The poplin-clad guard withdrew a small cellular phone from a concealed interior pocket. It was an instrument to be used only for emergencies: His controller at Consular Operations had been emphatic about it. His thick fingers slick with arterial blood, the man pressed a sequence of eleven digits.
    â€œHarrison’s Dry Cleaning,” a bored-seeming voice prompted on the other end.
    The man gulped for air, trying to fill his injured lungs before he spoke. “Pollux has been captured.”
    â€œCome again?” the voice said. American intelligence needed him to repeat the message, perhaps for voiceprint authentication, and the asset in the poplin suit did so. There was no need to specify time and location; the phone itself contained a military-grade GPS device, providing not merely an electronic date-any-time stamp but a geolocation stamp as well, accurate to within nine feet in the horizontal plane. They knew where Pollux had been, therefore.
    But where was he being taken?
    Washington, D.C.
    â€œGoddammit to hell!” the director of operations roared, his neck muscles bunching visibly.
    The message had been received by a special branch of the INR, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and was relayed to the top of the operations org chart within sixty seconds. Consular Operations took pride in its organizational fluidity, a far cry from the sluggish and lumbering pace of the larger spyagencies. And the top managers at Cons Ops had made it clear that Pollux’s work was a high priority.
    Standing at the threshold of the D.O.’s office, a junior operations officer—café-au-lait skin; black, wavy hair that grew tight, dense, and low—flinched as if he himself had been berated.
    â€œShit!” the director of operations shouted, slamming his desk with a fist. Then he slid back his chair and stood up. A vein in his temple pulsed. His name was Gareth Drucker, and although he was staring at the junior ops man in the doorway, he was not actually seeing him. Not yet. Finally, his eyes did focus on the swarthy young staffer. “What are the parameters here?” he asked, like an EMT verifying pulse-rate and blood-pressure stats.
    â€œWe just got the call in now.”
    â€œâ€˜Now’ meaning—?”
    â€œMaybe a minute and a half ago. By a recruit of ours who’s in pretty bad shape himself. We thought you’d want to know ASAP.”
    Drucker pressed an intercom button. “Get Garrison,” he ordered an unseen assistant. Drucker was a lean five foot eight, and had been likened by one colleague to a sailboat: Through slight of build, he bulged when he got the wind in him. He had the wind in him now, and he was bulging—his chest, his neck, even his eyes, which seemed to loom behind his rectangular rimless glasses. His lips were pursed, growing short and thick like a prodded earthworm.
    The junior ops officer stood aside as a burly man in his sixties strode into Drucker’s office. Light from the early afternoon sun filtered through Venetian blinds, bathing the cheap government-issue furniture—a composite-topped desk, a badly veneered credenza, battered enameled-steel file cabinets, the faded velvet-covered chairs that had once been green and were still not quite any other hue. The nylon industrial carpeting, always having been the approximate color and texture of dirt, was a triumph of camouflage if not of style. A decade of foot traffic could scarcely detract from its appearance.
    The burly man craned his neck around and squinted