The Bancroft Strategy by Robert Ludlum

at the junior operations officer. “Gomez, right?”
    â€œGomes,” the junior officer corrected. “One syllable.”
    â€œThat’ll fool ’em,” the older man said heavily, as if indulging a lapse of taste. He was Will Garrison, the Beirut operation’s officer-in-charge.
    The junior man’s swarthy cheeks reddened slightly. “I’ll let you two talk.”
    Garrison sought and obtained a glance of approval from Drucker. “Stay here. We’re both going to have questions.”
    Gomes stepped into the office with a chastened, summoned-to-the-principal’s expression. It took another impatient gesture from Drucker before he sat down on one of the green—somewhat green, had been green, more green than anything else—chairs.
    â€œWhat’s our move here?” Drucker asked Garrison.
    â€œYou get kicked in the balls, you double over. That’s the move.”
    â€œSo we’re screwed.” Drucker, the winds of outrage having gusted out, now looked as worn and battered as everything else in his office, and he was by far the newest thing in it, having held the position of D.O. for just four years.
    â€œRoyally screwed.” Will Garrison was perfectly cordial around Drucker, but he could not be called deferential. He had more years on him than any other senior Cons Ops manager, with an accumulated store of experience and connections that, just often enough, proved invaluable. The years had not mellowed him, Gomes knew. Garrison had always been a hard-ass by reputation, and if anything, he was only more so now. Around the shop, people liked to say that if there were a Mohs scale of hard-assedness, he’d pretty much top it out. He had a long memory, a short temper, a jut-jaw that jutted more when he was irate, and a temperament that started out at the setting “Vaguely Pissed” and got worse from there.
    When Gomes was in college, at Richmond, he once bought a used car that had a broken radio: The frequency dial was stuck on aheavy-metal station and the volume dial was stuck at the halfway point, so that it could only be turned louder. Aside from the heavy-metal part, Garrison reminded him of that car radio.
    It was just as well that Drucker had little interest in any org-chart rituals of subservience. The bureaucratic nightmare, Gomes’s colleagues all agreed, was the classic “kiss-up, kick-down” kind of guy. Garrison might kick down, but he didn’t kiss up, and Drucker might kiss up, but he didn’t kick down. Somehow it worked.
    â€œThey took his shoes off, too,” Drucker said. “Dumped on the side of the road. So long, GPS transponder. They’re no fools.”
    â€œMother of Christ,” Garrison rumbled, and then, shooting a glance at Gomes, he charged, “Who?”
    â€œWe don’t know. Our man at the scene said—”
    â€œWhat?” Garrison jumped.
    Gomes felt like a suspect under interrogation. “The asset said the captors barged in on a meeting that had been set up between—”
    â€œI know all about the goddamn meeting,” Garrison snapped.
    â€œAnyway, it was a hood-and-hustle job. The bad guys threw him into a van and disappeared.”
    â€œThe bad guys,” Garrison repeated, dyspeptic.
    â€œWe don’t have much on the captors,” said Gomes. “They were fast and they were brutal. Shot up everybody else in sight. Headdresses, automatic weapons.” Gomes shrugged. “Arab militants. That’s my opinion.”
    Garrison stared at the young man the way a butterfly collector with a long needle stares at a specimen. “Your opinion, huh?”
    Drucker turned to the OIC. “Let’s get Oakeshott in here.” He barked the order over the intercom.
    â€œI’m just saying,” Gomes continued, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
    Garrison folded his arms on his chest. “Our boy got snatched in Beirut. You