The Bancroft Strategy by Robert Ludlum Page A

venture Arab militants were involved.” He spoke with exaggerated precision. “I bet you were Phi Beta Kappa in college.”
    â€œI didn’t do the Greeks,” Gomes muttered.
    Garrison made a sibilant pfut . “Goddamned greenhorn. Somebody gets snatched in Beijing, you’d announce you think a Chinaman did it. Some things go without saying. If I ask you what kind of van, don’t tell me ‘the kind with wheels.’ Com -fucking- prende ?”
    â€œDark green, dusty. Curtained windows. A Ford, our guy thought.”
    A tall, reedy man with a thin face and a nimbus of graying hair stepped into the office. A herringbone tweed blazer draped loosely around his narrow torso. “So whose operation was this?” asked Mike Oakeshott, the deputy director for analysis. He dropped himself on another of the more-green-than-not chairs, folding up his long, attenuated arms and spindle shanks like a Swiss Army knife.
    â€œYou know damn well whose,” Garrison growled. “Mine.”
    â€œYou’re the officer-in-charge,” Oakeshott said, with a knowing stare. “Who designed it?”
    The burly man shrugged. “Me.”
    The senior analyst just looked at him.
    â€œMe and Pollux,” Garrison amended, with a concessive shrug. “Pollux, mainly.”
    â€œAnother Tour de France of backpedaling, Will,” said Oakeshott. “Pollux is a brilliant guy when it comes to operations. Not a guy for needless risk. So factor that in.” A glance at Drucker. “What was the game plan?”
    â€œHe was undercover for four months,” Drucker said.
    â€œFive months,” Garrison corrected. “Legend was ‘Ross McKibbin.’ An American businessman who walked on the shady side of the street. Supposedly a go-between, scouting out laundering opportunities for narco-moohla.”
    â€œThat’s the right kind of bait if you’re after minnows. He wasn’t.”
    â€œDamn right,” Drucker said. “Pollux had a slow-infiltration strategy. He wasn’t after the fish. He was looking for the other fisherman. The bait just got him a place on the wharf.”
    â€œI get the picture,” Oakeshott said. “It’s George Habash revisited.”
    The senior analyst did not need to elaborate. In the early 1970s, the Palestinian resistance leader George Habash, known as the Doctor, hosted a secret summit in Lebanon for terror organizations around the world, including ETA in Spain, the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Iranian Liberation Front. In the years that followed, Habash’s organization, and Lebanon generally, became a place where terrorists from all over came in search of armaments. The Czech-model Skorpion machine gun that was used to murder Aldo Moro had been acquired in the Lebanon arms mart. When the leader of Autonomia, the Italian revolutionary group, was arrested with two Strela missiles, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine actually claimed the missiles as their property and requested their return. By the fall of the Berlin Wall, though, the Lebanon arms markets, the relay systems through which extremist organizations from around the world could buy and sell the tools of their deadly campaigns, had settled into a long decline.
    No longer. As Jared Rinehart and his team had confirmed, the nexus was being revived: The circuits were buzzing again. The world had changed—only to change back. A ballyhooed new world order had grown old fast. The intel analysts recognized something else as well. Armed insurrection did not come cheap; the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research estimated that the Red Brigade spent the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year maintaining its five hundred members. Extremist groups today had extreme needs: plane travel, special weaponry, marine vessels for transport of munitions, the bribery of officialdom. It added up. Plenty of