The Bancroft Strategy by Robert Ludlum

Author:Robert Ludlum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2006-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

From just behind the berm line of a wheatfield across the road, two men peered with binoculars.

“Do you think he felt much pain?” one of them asked.

“Nitrogen asphyxiation is about the kindest way you can take a life,” the other, who was more experienced, said. He called himself Mr. Smith, at least when he was on assignment. “You don’t feel breathless, because there’s no carbon dioxide buildup in the blood. You run out of oxygen, but you don’t know what’s happening to you. It’s like someone has turned out the lights.”

“I think you always know when you’re dying,” said the other, a tall man with sandy hair, who went by the name Mr. Jones.

“Marco Brodz didn’t.”

“No,” his companion agreed. “A large-caliber bullet to the head. He never had time. I think that’s the kindest way.”

“They’re both kind. Even fast-acting poisons are kind compared to what nature has in store for us. Cancer, with its jaws munching away at your gut. That’s how my mom went, and it was rotten. Even the horrible crushing sensation of a heart attack—my dad told me about how it felt, the first time he had a coronary. Natural death is a bitch. Really, it’s much better this way. Our way.”

“How did you know that Javier would go to the garage, not anybody else?”

“What, and let another person drive his brand-new sedan? A man like that? You obviously don’t know these parts very well.” He pressed the button of an augmented radio-frequency transmitter; two hundred yards away, a garage door rolled up.

Replacing the air in the garage with a pure nitrogen from the tank of liquid gas had taken nearly half an hour. Now the atmosphere would equilibrate in less than a minute.

Mr. Jones looked through the binoculars, adjusting the focus until he saw the stricken man on the concrete, an area of urine darkening his crotch, a fog of flies darkening his face. “There’s never any real dignity in death,” he observed. “But he does look peaceful, don’t you think?”

The second man, Mr. Smith, took the binoculars and peered carefully. “Does he look peaceful? It’s hard to tell. He certainly looks dead.”

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