Sleeper Spy (14 page)

“What about the wife he left behind—would she know his current identity?”

“Tell you the truth, Viveca, I hadn’t thought of her,” Irving admitted. “She could be pretty pissed about being left in the lurch with a brat on her hands. More likely he has a friend or two from the training days, now in the Feliks people, who’d know him. Or maybe a mole over
here. He was originally selected by some KGB big shot, remember. The KGB operates in cliques, schools of thought, even more than CIA.”

“You’re both missing the point of the book,” said Ace. “This is a manhunt story. Who’s going to find the sleeper first and kill him? How does he stay a fugitive and stay alive? Focus on the protagonist.”

“Ace, think reality. Don’t you know how to sell nonfiction?”

“A plot’s a plot. You need a central character. Yours is in hiding.”

“I have a plan to flush him out,” Irving said.

“And you are going to vouchsafe that to us now.”

“No.” He looked out the window at Madison Avenue, pretending to think, in fact listening to the nylonic sound of Viveca uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “How we get him to come to us is a matter between me and my partner here. Not you, Ace. Can you sweat a big advance out of a publisher on the basis of an investigative book by Irving Fein and Viveca Farr, giving no other details to blow the story?”

“No outline, no sample chapter, no documents, nothing?”

“Just your word that you know what the story is, and it’s big.”

Ace steepled his fingers. “A challenge. I cannot think of another agent capable of rising to it.” He handed each of them a manila envelope. “This contains our agreement: straight fifty-fifty partnership on all royalties, including television rights, between the two of you, after my modest commission. You can take these documents home and study them if you wish, or you can lock this up right now.”

Irving took his out and scrawled his name on the last page. Viveca took a few moments to read the six pages of boilerplate, then signed her name neatly at the end.

“It’s appropriate to shake hands,” the Ace said.

The squeeze of her perfectly manicured fingers was cool and sure, as Irving knew it would be. He heard her saying to Ace, “The authors would like a seventy-thirty split of the paperback.”

Rather than offer to buy her a drink, he suggested they walk over to the East River, where there was a bench he knew. “I call it the Irving Fein Bench of Inspiration.”

She nodded and hailed a cab. That bothered him. First, the East River was maybe six blocks away, tops seven, and it was a fair November
day. Furthermore, when he was with a woman, he’d hail the damn cab. He let her open the door and slide in first, the skirt of her suit riding up to show those perfect legs.

“New shoes,” he noticed. “They hurt?”

She did not reply. The cab promptly got stuck in the crosstown traffic, and the bus ahead spewed its fumes their way. They sat uncomfortably and he said nothing back.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said finally. “Hoity-toity broad, can’t walk a few blocks, has to have a cab if her limo isn’t on standby.”

“You’re a mind reader, all right.”

“Look. If we started to walk, within thirty seconds you would see people stop and look at me. When they passed, they’d turn around and look some more. Some nice old lady would come up and say, ‘Don’t I know you?’ Believe me, just walking down the street when you’re on television regularly is an ordeal.”

“Hadn’t thought of that, tell you the truth.”

“You’re lucky to be in print. You have your famous byline and you keep your privacy.”

He thought that over. Would he like walking down the street and having women snap their heads around and say, There-goes-Irving-Fein,-isn’t-he-adorable? Wouldn’t bother him all that much, certainly not at first. Privacy was something he had too much of. It was like the guys who complained bitterly about all the junk mail that stuffed their mailboxes. Irving liked to get junk mail; he hated to look in his mailbox and find it empty.

If his face were famous, would women he dated feel protective of him, as he now felt protective of the famous face beside him? He’d like that. Maybe if this book went over big, he’d be a part of the television special, get his face a little better known, which might lead to some speaking fees. The pundits he knew went on panel shows for peanuts to stimulate the lecture agents to book them at conventions for heavy money. He would do no promotion tours for the book, though—not that anybody wanted him to after that hoo-ha over the libel release. Let Viveca Farr, face too famous to walk across town among the Great Unwashed, do that.

“When’s your birthday?”

She looked suspicious. “Next week. Thirty-three,” she reminded him. “Why?”

“I was thinking of getting you a pair of those glasses with the fake nose attached,” he said. Her face tightened; she opened her purse, took out a few dollars, and thrust it through the opening in the plastic barrier protecting the cabbie from passengers. He added, “They have ’em without the funny mustache, for women.”

She burst out of the taxi on her side and started walking fast. He hurried to catch up, and they sped across town toward the river, her heels clicking on the cement. Nobody coming at them looked at her twice. He craned his neck back; nobody had turned around. A few particularly cutting remarks came to mind, but he bit his tongue.

If it hadn’t been for the river, he thought, she would have kept going until he dropped. Breathing hard, he plopped on the bench along the riverfront with the FDR Drive traffic behind them. Time to make peace, he told himself.

“How come you know from paperback splits?”

“I do my homework before a meeting.” She stared at a slow barge going upriver. “Tell me I shouldn’t bother my pretty little head.”

He stuck his legs out, crossing his feet near the fence. Careful, now. “On a seventy-thirty split, which of us gets the seventy?”

She looked at him for the first time since they’d left Ace’s office. “You don’t know?”

“I have a long dunno sheet for contracts, and I just put that on.”

“After the hardcover sale,” she explained, “if the book does well, or gets a big book-club sale, the hardback publisher will hold a telephone auction for the paperback rights. It used to be that half the money for those rights went to the hardback publisher, the other half to the author, to be applied against the advance on royalties. You really don’t know about this?”

“Never had the problem,” he said truthfully. “No book of mine ever sold enough to reach the advance. I’m glad when they don’t come after me for the difference.”

She put her feet out, too. “This one will sell, and reflect well on both our reputations. But this time, seventy percent of the paperback money comes to us, the authors, and thirty percent goes to the hardback publisher.”

“And you and I split the seventy?”

“You’ve got it.”

“That’s pretty good. You were smart to ask for that.”

She gave a small shrug and smiled. “I’m glad you have your breathing under control. The way you were puffing I thought you’d have a heart attack. You need more exercise.”

Irving knew that, just as he knew all about paperback splits, of course, though Ace was never able to get him more than sixty-forty. But this little victory boosted Viveca’s easily damaged amour propre at no cost to him—on the contrary, her homework and chutzpah in upping the author share would produce money in the bank for him. He gave her credit for that.

“Now tell me what you don’t want Ace to know,” she said, reaching for her notebook. “How we get the sleeper agent to come to us.”

“Two ways to fish after you have a lead. One is to get into print in a
New York Times
or a
Washington Post
or
International Herald Trib
with what you have. Then sources come to you—packages over the transom, messages in creepy voices, spooks passing tips through all sorts of cutouts. Trouble with that way is it stirs up the competition. We got to get way out ahead on this first, so it’s all ours, nobody can catch up.”

She nodded, making no notes in the failing light, doodling on the page. She doodled tight little boxes.

“Any questions so far?”

“What’s a transom?”

He ignored that. “The other way, our way, is to get our duck by setting out a decoy duck. We set up a parallel sleeper, our guy, a credible impostor, to attract either the Feliks people or the KGB, or both. Or”—here was where Irving hoped to get lucky—“to attract the real sleeper. Takes a banker to catch a banker.”

He sketched out the plan to recruit Edward Dominick, Clauson’s pick at the Memphis Merchants Bank. “I have a hunch our spooks have used him before, for minor chores, but we’re not supposed to know that.” He did not give her the name of his CIA source, nor did he tell her he did not know who had originally tipped him to go to Clauson. She had no need to know that, at least not yet, and if she should get cold feet he did not want her to be able to pass the source on to another reporter. He did review with her what little he had gleaned about the real sleeper: mid-forties, hard of hearing, big guy, the married name of his abandoned wife.

“Do we know his name?”

“We know his real name, the one on his Soviet birth certificate: Aleksandr Berensky. The cover name, the one he goes by here? Dunno.”

“Fireflies are out. See?”

He was glad she did not want to know more; if their positions were reversed, he would be pushing, pushing to get more on the sources, more on Dominick, more on the connection—or lack of it—between the sleeper and his new handler, if there was one, or with his Feliks people contact, if that’s what the sleeper preferred. There was some value to working with an amateur as a partner: she was too busy digesting what he’d told her to show a hunger for what he had not.

“There goes another one.” The fireflies were out in force, early this year. It seemed to him she was not too eager to get to her television studio and other life. Irving had no place to go. “That’s a female, attracting a mate,” she observed.

“If it’s a firefly.”

She frowned, pointing at a lightning bug floating in the air with its abdomen brightly lit a greenish yellow. “You’re telling me that’s not a firefly?”

“Did a piece on insects once,” he said. “The firefly has a natural predator, which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d be up to our ass in fireflies. The predator is called an assassination beetle. It has the same ability to glow, and it can replicate the code of flashes of a mating firefly. The firefly moves in to mate and is devoured by the beetle.”

She rubbed her arms briskly. “Wish you hadn’t told me that.”

He had never done a piece on bugs. He knew this because Clauson had told it to him one night, along with arcana about the deceptiveness of orchids he’d picked up from his Agency hero, Jim Angleton. That famed molehunter had been fired for paranoid zealotry when the smooth new bunch took over in the seventies and later let the Russian moles penetrate the Agency. After a money-grubbing mole named Ames, operating in the eighties and nineties, all but crippled the Agency and caused the execution of its best spies in Russia, the guys at fault blamed their laxity on the reaction to Angleton’s “paranoid witchhunts.” Irving was never much for insect metaphors but had filed it in his head in case he ever needed to liven up a feature lead.

“Do people still get killed in this espionage business?” she wanted to know. “I’m not afraid for myself, but I’d hate for you to get knocked off and then I’d have to finish the book all alone.”

The hell she wasn’t afraid. He set her mind to rest: “Cold War’s over. And nobody ever kills, or even threatens, a reporter—too big a hoo-ha.” He thought of Michael Shu, the accountant he’d hired on spec to go to Moscow and Riga to do some low-level digging. “That goes for people who work for reporters, too,” he reassured her preemptively.

“Wonder what happened when the handler and the sleeper met in Barbados?”

He wished she hadn’t brought that up. “The control was a Russian spook. They call it
mokry delo;
our boys call it ‘wet work.’ What those guys do to each other is their business.”

“What’s wet about the work?”

His heart sank; she didn’t know anything about this business. What was wet was blood; he mumbled something about underwater frogmen.

She flipped her cigarette over the rail into the river. Time for the news on television. “I have to do my script. Our next step?”

A hundred words; big deal. She probably needed the time for makeup and hairdresser.

“I have a call in to Dominick in Memphis,” Irving said, frowning. “He didn’t call back yesterday, so I had to tell his nosy secretary who I was but not what I wanted. If he keeps ducking, I’ll have to show up at his home Sunday. Don’t like to do that—it makes ’em nervous.”

“Why don’t I call him?” she suggested. “He’ll take my call. We want a meeting in his office, right? In the morning, so I can get back in time for the newscast.”

True. Most executives, no matter how impressed with themselves, would take a call from Viveca Farr, the famous television newslady on every night at nine for forty-five snappy seconds. He gave her Dominick’s number, hailed a cab, opened the door for her, said good night politely. Fame had its function. He hoped that rigmarole he’d given her about the fireflies and the assassination beetles was accurate, in case she ever checked, but that was unlikely.