The Bancroft Strategy (17 page)

“Yeah?”

“
Enough's enough.
Oh, sure, widows and orphans—you gotta love 'em. But the secret to life is balance. You gotta show love to the hordes of Lukas fans out there. And you gotta show love to little Ari Sanders, who's been busting his heinie for you out on the front lines every day.”

“A twenty percent cut's not enough, all of a sudden?”

“Do this,” Ari said. “I made history today. I made history for
you.
Eighty percent of box office receipts—the Pope doesn't get that.” He paused to take a breath. “Then again, how many Grammy Awards has
he
won?”

“I'll think about it, okay,” Lukas said weakly. “But I've got these benefit concerts all lined up, and—”

“So they'll be heartbroken in Ouagadougou for a day. Change your plans. You cannot say no to this.”

“I'll—I'll get back to you.”

“Jesus, Lukas, you sound like someone's got a gun to your head.”

Lukas clicked off. He noticed that he was sweating.

Moments later, his personal cell phone chimed its Jimi Hendrix ringtone. “Lukas here,” he said.

It was an all-too-familiar voice: electronically altered, eerily devoid of humanity, of affect. “Stick to the plan,” the voice said. If a lizard could speak, Lukas thought, this is what it would sound like.

He swallowed hard. It felt as if there was a stone lodged in his throat. “Look, I've done everything you told me to—”

“We still have the videotape,” the voice said.

The videotape. The goddamn videotape. The girl had sworn she was seventeen. How could he have known that she was exaggerating by three crucial years? Which made it statutory rape. A criminal offense. Deadly to his endorsement deals, his career, his reputation, his marriage. Lukas needed reminding of none of this. There were some musicians who could weather a revelation like that, especially the ones who deliberately cultivated a bad-boy image. That wasn't Lukas's way, though. If anything, a few had even accused him of sententiousness, of a holier-than-thou streak: They would pounce on the slightest weakness. And if he were prosecuted? He could readily imagine the headlines:
LUKAS TO FACE THE MUSIC. ROCK STAR JAILED ON CHILD MOLESTING RAP. CHILDREN'S CRUSADER ARRAIGNED ON KIDDIE SEX CHARGES.

Maybe there were some who could survive that. Lukas wasn't among them.

“All right,” Lukas said. “I get it.” What sickened him the most was the rapidity with which the call had followed Ari's. His every call was evidently monitored, and must have been for the past three years. Indeed, he could only guess at how much of his life was under surveillance by these faceless manipulators. There seemed no limit to what they knew about him—whoever “they” really were.

“Stick to the plan,” the voice repeated. “Do the right thing.”

“Like I have a choice,” Lukas replied shakily. “Like I have a friggin' choice.”

Dubai, the United Arab Emirates

It was a skyline out of Jules Verne: the Arabian sands sprouting vast structures of glass and steel, contours undulating like spacecraft.
Ancient souks huddled in the shadow of vast new shopping malls; dhows and abras nestled besides vast freighters and cruise ships; low, crowded street markets displayed DVD players and karaoke machines alongside rugs, leather goods, and trinkets. Dubai was a place that had everything—except mailing addresses. A building was on Sheikh Zayed Road, and on some official map that building had a number. But mail was delivered according to P.O. boxes, not street numbers. At Dubai International Airport, an area larger than the city center, Belknap took a tan-colored metered taxi, paying for the three empty seats at the driver's voluble insistence.

The man, evidently a Pakistani, wore a local-style keffiyeh of white-and-red checked fabric, like the tablecloth of an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, and rattled off one sales pitch after another. But he had to repeat his chief mid-trip suggestion three times before Belknap was able to understand him: “You want to go Wild Wadi Waterpark?” It was evidently a tourist attraction, twelve acres of water rides, and the driver probably got a finder's fee for bringing visitors over.

Between the blast-furnace heat and the bleaching dazzle from the sun overhead, Belknap felt he had arrived at a planet that did not naturally support life, and had to move from one oxygenated pod to another. Certainly most of Dubai's superstructure was devoted to creating a wholly artificial environment: an oasis of freon and steel and polarized glass. It was a place of portals, and yet curiously guarded, if your interest was not in shopping or the luxuries of a resort existence: Depending on the nature of one's pursuits, one would find it to be a place of a thousand welcome mats or a thousand locked gates. In Rome, Gianni Mattucci had supplied the address that corresponded to the number from which the Italian girl had telephoned. In Dubai, Belknap learned that the address led him to no residence or hotel, but rather a commercial post office that handled mail for several of the swank hotels along the beach.

If it weren't for the gentle azure of the Gulf, he could have been in
Las Vegas in summer: There was the same garish display of affluence, the sleek pop-modernism of the construction, the boundlessness of human greed emblematized in architecture. And yet in the real wadis and escarpments nearby were Koranic holy men who sought to establish a global
ummah
, and to unhorse what they regarded as the American imperium. Dubai existed for the delectation of foreigners in an arid country that dreamed fervently of their humiliation. The serenity that obtained was as perishable as a rainbow.

“No Wild Wadi Waterpark,” Belknap grumbled warningly when the driver had brightened with the thought of another tourist snare. “No Dubai Dinner Cruise. No Dubai Desert Class Golf.
No.
”

“But Sahib—”

“And don't ‘Sahib' me. I'm not some colonel out of Kipling.”

The taxi driver reluctantly let him off at the small mail-sorting facility. Belknap stepped out of the car, was struck by a riptide of sheer heat, and ducked back inside. “You wait here,” he instructed the driver, handing him another sheaf of pink and blue dirhams, the currency of the Emirates.

“I take dollars,” the driver said hopefully.

“Of course you do. Isn't that what Dubai exists for?”

A sly look crept over the man's face. Belknap was reminded of an Arab proverb: Never seek to know what the camel thinks of the camel driver. “I wait,” the man said.

The facility was a white-painted, low-slung concrete box, windowless except for the grated front. It was infrastructure, not superstructure: one of those buildings designed not for public display but for serving those that were. It received mail addressed to many separately designated post boxes, and made deliveries up and down the small rear lane that serviced the gargantuan pleasure palaces on the beach roads.

Belknap would rely upon an air of officialdom, his unwrinkled blue tropical-weight suit and white shirt. He knew immediately upon entering that the establishment was not set up for visitors.
There was no receptionist, nobody minding a counter. Instead, an expanse of grip-textured laminated flooring—the kind one found in sweatshops that did not use heavy machinery—opened onto a space where workers sorted mail into wire-mesh bins. They looked, at a glance, to be Filipinos; it took Belknap just a few moments to determine who the manager was. It was a fat man, a local, it seemed, who held an unlighted cigar in his sausage-like fingers and sat on a high stool in a corner, with a clipboard on one knee. The fat man's nails gleamed under the overhead fluorescent lights; they had been buffed, perhaps even lacquered with a clear polish. Thick rings puckered his fingers like the neckbands on Chinese fishing cormorants.

Belknap would take advantage of his anomalousness. Holding his cell phone to his ear, he wrapped up a fictitious, official-sounding conversation: “That's right, Inspector. We appreciate your help, and please do send our best to the deputy governor. We don't anticipate any problems with this. Bye.” Then, with an officious hand gesture, he summoned the plump bejeweled Arab. He would get what he needed not by pretending to fit in but by emphasizing his foreignness. He would be the imperious American, a government agent who expected all foreigners to be at his beck and call, his extraterritorial privileges paved by hundreds of obscure treaties and bilateral agreements.

The manager padded over to him with a look hedged between obsequiousness and annoyance.

“I'm Agent Belknap,” the American intoned. He solemnly handed the man his Virginia driver's license, as if it were the keys to the city.

The Arab pretended to look at it before handing it back. “I see,” he replied, affecting an air of responsibility and efficiency.

“With the DEA, as you saw,” Belknap went on. “Joint service request.”

“Yes, of course.” The manager was still deciding whether to call for a superior to come over, Belknap could tell.

“P.O. Box 11417,” Belknap announced, a man with no time to
waste. “Tell me the physical location.” His face was stern, the request made with no “please,” no apologies, no concessions to courtesy whatsoever. The very preemptory nature of his approach would place it above suspicion, or beneath it. He was not wheedling, appealing to the man's discretion, as someone would who was trying to gain information that was not his by right. Nothing suggested that the Arab had even the right to decide whether to comply with the request. On the contrary. Belknap was demanding something owed him by virtue of his office. The effect was to alleviate the manager's uncertain and anxiety: He could not make the wrong decision because he had not been invited to make a decision at all.

“Ah,” the manager said, given an easy question where he feared a hard one. “That would be the Palace Hotel. About two kilometers past the Al-Khaleej Roundabout.” The man made a flowing gesture with his hand, and Belknap realized he was describing the hotel's distinctive shape, a sort of glass whale with a central tower shaped like a waterspout.

“That's what I needed to know,” Belknap said. The manager looked almost grateful:
Is that all?

When Belknap returned to the cab, he saw the manager peering out at the front door, looking puzzled to see the beige vehicle. He had obviously been expecting something more official. Yet it was unlikely he would discuss what happened with anyone. If he had indeed erred, it was better that nobody knew it.

“Now we go Wild Wadi Waterpark?” the driver prompted.

“Now we go Palace Hotel,” Belknap replied.

“Very good,” the driver said. “You will have whale of a time.” His wide smile was gap-toothed and khat-colored.

The driver took a shortcut through a fish souk, where turquoise-clad migrant workers gutted fish with metronomic regularity, and then onto Sheikh Zayed Road, which was lined with enormous glittering edifices, one glass-skinned leviathan after another. The Palace was among the more recent and outlandish of them. The “tail”
functioned as a porte-cochère over the entrance, and, as the cab stood a discreet distance away, Belknap strode into the lobby like a man on a mission.

What now? The Palace Hotel probably had upward of seven hundred rooms. Although the Italian girl's call had been routed through a central switchboard, the hotel itself kept a record of outgoing calls. But the managers of the Palace would be vastly more sophisticated than the man at the back-office mail center; they were accustomed to dealing with visitors, valued a reputation for discretion, knew what the authorities could and could not require them to do.

Inside the lobby, he looked around and swiftly took the measure of the place. In the center of the vast space stood a large blue-tinted aquarium. Rather than any exotic sea creatures, the tank featured a scantily clad woman in a mermaid suit and waterproof pasties who swam in slow circles to tinkly synthesized New Age music, her disciplined motions designed to look lazy and undirected; at intervals, she took breaths from an air pipe painted seaweed green. If a Muslim fundamentalist were ever to enter the lobby, the scene would confirm his worst suspicions of Western decadence. But that was extremely unlikely. Distance, in the modern world, was not measured in miles or kilometers but in units of social removal. The enclave belonged to a world that included Cap d'Antibes, East Hampton, Positano, and Mustique. Those were its true neighbors. An enclave like the Palace had no connection to the geopolitical territory known as the Middle East, save by merest accident of geography. The building had been designed by a team of architects from London, Paris, and New York; its restaurant was supervised by a Spanish chef with an international reputation; even the desk clerks and concierges were British, though, of course, able to converse in the major European languages.

Belknap sat down on a dark-blue upholstered ottoman in a corner of the lobby and placed a cell-phone call, a real one. It went through in a matter of moments. He could remember when international
calls were invariably marred by a burble of distortion and static, as if one could hear the watery currents through which the transoceanic cables had been laid. These days, the signal from one affluent part of the world to another was crystal-clear—indeed, clearer than a local call made from one neighborhood of Lagos to another. Matt Gomes's voice was instantly recognizable when he picked up, and Gomes instantly recognized who was calling him.

“Word is,” the junior officer said, “you got in a major pissing match with Wild Bill Garrison. When something like that happens, the rest of us think it's raining.”

“Into each life some rain must fall,” Belknap replied. “Just like Pat Boone says.”

“Pat Boone? How about the Ink Spots, my brother?”

“Need a favor, little man,” Belknap said, his eyes scanning the lobby. Inside the wide, shallow tank, the mermaid kept up her ostensibly lazy circles, no doubt counting her hourly wages in her head. Her blissful smile was beginning to look strained.