Sleeper Spy (15 page)

She sensed that somebody was looking over her shoulder, even though the Shelepin file room was empty. Liana Krumins straightened, looked back, saw nobody there. She buttoned the top button of her blouse and pulled the shawl off her shoulders, placing the gauzy Latvian garment atop a file she had opened.

She had decided it was wiser to come alone this time, because the Feliks people’s escort, Arkady, whom she had come to trust, said somebody else from the organization had been assigned to come with her that day; besides, male librarians tended to be more accommodating to a young woman by herself.

The archivist who sat at the desk used by the floor’s chief jailer in the old Soviet days had been more than helpful this time. Liana flirted with the fellow, took his mind away from the television he was watching, explained her exasperation, beseeched his expert guidance, and sure enough, the misplaced files on the offshoot of the Shelepin clan named Berensky had been miraculously found.

She was now looking for any reference, in any of the surveillance reports, official letters, family correspondence, tombstone bills, newspaper clippings, and scrawled memoranda, to a particular member of the Shelepin family whose last name was Berensky. If she could then track him down, if he was alive, she would be the finder of a leading international spy and surely become the most respected journalist in Latvia and throughout the Baltic nations. Liana Krumins would not only have her own television program, as she already had, but as a famous journalist she would become an owner of the station. Then she would have total freedom to broadcast the truth far and wide, to
Helsinki in the north, Vilnius in the south, St. Petersburg in the east, even to Berlin in the west.

She was aware that the group most eager to find the sleeper spy called themselves “the Feliks people” because they did not view the memory of “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s vicious chief of the Cheka, with dread. On the contrary, many of them longed for a return to the days when the manacles on the walls of some of the Lubyanka cells held dissidents for torture.

Today, the Feliks people were using her, because of her journalist’s credentials, to find Berensky, just as she was using their intelligence and mafiya connections to help her; together, they were more likely to get to the sleeper. Her philosophy, gained in the ranks of the Latvian opposition to Soviet rule: use and be used. That had been driven home to her one frigid night in a prison cell when she was seventeen. Their immediate goals, though different, did not conflict: the Feliks people were after the sleeper to get their money, and she was after him for the stunning reportage, with the fame and power that would bring.

Thanks partly to Arkady, who was one of the Feliks people, she knew more than most about the sleeper’s family tree.

Aleksandr Berensky’s mother was Anna Berensky, a single woman who was secretary to a rising but married KGB bureaucrat whose identity was kept secret, and who probably fathered the boy. Anna and her son were sent by her married lover to live in Latvia. When the boy became seventeen, he married a Riga girl, Antonia, but after a year the marriage was annulled and its record destroyed on orders of the KGB. After abandoning his wife, who soon after gave birth to a child, Aleks Berensky volunteered for, or was sent to, the American Village operated by the First Chief Directorate’s training department. Later, speaking perfect American English, he was given a “legend”—a complete background for a false identity—and slipped into a new life somewhere in the United States.

Because she was a step ahead of the Feliks people, she felt less a captive of her sources. By one of those odd happenstances, Liana knew—and was determined to keep to herself—a part of the sleeper’s genealogy about which the Feliks organization was unaware. As a child, Liana’s mother, Antonia Krumins, had known Anna Berensky when both were part of Stalin’s Russification of Latvia. As the dictator deported hundreds of thousands of Latvians to labor camps in Siberia,
he injected Russians in their place as colonists, especially around Riga; this was his plan to water down the native population and absorb the republic into Russia.

Though a generation apart, the Russian Anna Berensky and the Latvian Antonia Krumins became close friends. Liana’s mother once let slip that before Anna died in 1980, she had revealed that long ago she had been the private secretary to Aleksandr Shelepin, who then rose to become the chief of the KGB through most of the sixties. That master of disinformation had worked here in this very building in Moscow. Liana could not be certain, but she had a strong hunch that Aleks Berensky not only was the sleeper, but was Shelepin’s bastard son.

That must have been why, Liana reasoned, this young man had been chosen for special training in the most difficult assignment in espionage: as a “sleeper agent,” implanted in another country, denied any contact with friends, relatives, or supervisors at home. He had to be young enough to build a new life with new friendships; intelligent and resourceful enough to make a success of himself in the chosen field; and ideologically reliable enough to remain loyal for decades and be ready at the moment of awakening. Who could fit those qualifications better than the son of the KGB Director?

Arkady had told her that the time to activate the sleeper had come toward the end of the eighties, in Riga, hotbed of the movement to break up the Soviet Union. The Baltic nations, unlike the other Soviet republics, had once been independent; they had been swallowed up in a deal made by Hitler and Stalin, an offense to sovereignty that was never recognized by the West. As a result, agitation for independence in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had special force in America; when the deep cracks began to appear in the communist economy and the Baltics demanded freedom from the Soviet empire, that force carried over to Ukraine and tore the Soviet Union asunder.

“The KGB knew the end was coming,” Arkady had told her. “The Party had billions hidden away, in gold, diamonds, foreign bearer bonds. Certain Politburo members held hundreds of millions more in secret accounts around the world. How to conserve those assets for a day when all the talk of disunion and reform would pass away, and the time of strong central authority would come again? An American banker was needed who could be trusted with it all. One of us, over there. That’s when they awakened their sleeper.”

Liana pushed her shawl aside and pulled out the contents of the next accordion file, but the musty air and the lateness and the complexity of the search were becoming too much for her. As she pushed the contents together, a personal letter of many pages became caught in the string around the file. She pulled it away, looked at it briefly, threw it in the file.

Then she pulled the letter out again, flipping through to the last page; her eye was caught by the signature “Anna.” It was written to “Aleksandr Nikolayevich”—the patronymic of the KGB’s Shelepin—from some Black Sea resort, saying it enclosed snapshots of herself and her son at the beach. But no pictures were in the envelope attached to the letter by a pin. She read: “Aleks is on the verge of tears because of the sunburn, but he reminds me he will be eight next week and is taking it like a man.”

Aleks. The letter was undated, but the postmark on the envelope was June 16, 1958, about the time Shelepin made it to the top of the KGB and began his plan to oust Khrushchev and the reformers. The birth would have taken place in the third week of June in 1950 in Moscow, possibly at a hospital, surely recorded on that date in the city’s bureau of birth records. Liana folded the pages quickly, took a deep breath, pulled out her blouse, stuffed the document inside her panties, tucked the blouse back in. The bulge was unmistakable; she reached in and moved it around to the small of her back.

She needed fresh air and a place to think.

After putting the files back in the cabinet, she left her shawl draped over the chair to provide an excuse for coming back if she needed it. Instead of ringing the bell for the guide, she made her way back to the main desk by herself.

The archivist was lolling back in his chair, snoring. She smiled and went to his desk to leave him a cheerful note and glanced at the television set on his desk to see what old movie had put him to sleep. The picture on the screen did not move. It showed a room with a table neatly stacked with files, her shawl draped over a chair. She felt the clutchfist of fear in her stomach: they had been looking over her shoulder. Had he seen her take the document? The snoring archivist seemed to be genuinely asleep. But was it also being taped? If so, putting the letter and envelope back would do no good. She wrote a note he could not show his superiors—“Didn’t want to wake you. Back in the morning. Liana.”

She walked unhurriedly down the hall to the elevator, took it down to the ground level, and walked to the checkpoint where they tested for metal objects on the way in. Two guards stood in her way, one short and balding, the other huge. She handed her visitor’s pass to the smaller one and waited for them to step aside, as they had the week before. They did not.

“Are you going to let me pass?” she said, flashing a smile.

The guard motioned for her to step back and went to a telephone. He gave the number on the visitor’s pass and waited. She wondered if they could hear her heart pounding. He hung up, shook his head at her, waited with his hand on the phone. After a minute it rang and he listened to the order.

He motioned her to a small room next to the entrance. Uncertain, she went in. The guard held out his hand for her attaché case, and she gave it to him. He went through it and put it aside. “Strip search.”

“I will not. What do you think this is, the old days? Let me out immediately! Do you realize I am a journalist?”

The balding soldier, unsmiling, pointed at her blouse and flicked his finger.

“No. I will report you. This is a form of rape.” She did not want to ask for the obvious, a woman guard, because that would mean sure discovery of the letter. The last thing she wanted was to be searched by a woman.

The huge guard tapped on the door, entered, closed it behind him. He wanted a view, too.

“Who’s watching the front entrance of Lubyanka, then?” she demanded.

“We have orders to see if you have hidden any materials on your person, Miss Krumins,” the bald one said. “The archivist says if you have taken nothing, you may go. If you refuse to prove that to us, we will not harm you. We will put you in a cell until further orders.”

When she hesitated, the big one said, “We have seen a naked woman before.” If he steps behind me, she decided, I will ask for the cell and try to brazen it through. He remained at the door; both men were in front of her. Perhaps she could get away with a visual deception, unless there was a hidden camera behind her.

She reached to her side, undid the button of her skirt, and let it fall to the floor, stepping back. They did not examine the skirt on the floor;
she took hope that they were more interested in seeing than searching. Her long legs looked best in the shoes with medium-high heels, and she left them on. She wore no stockings. She unfastened the buttons on her blouse. The guards tried to keep an official look on their faces as she opened it but did not take it off; instead, she fiddled with the catch in the front of her bra. Her object was to keep their attention focused on her breasts, which were full and firm and always had a marked effect on men.

As the catch came apart, she straightened up and shrugged her blouse back off her shoulders, reaching back with one hand to pull it back away and folding it around the letter sticking up out of her panty band. Her breasts still not fully exposed, with the guards’ eyes riveted on the half-opened bra, she dropped the blouse with the enfolded document on top of her skirt on the floor.

Gaining confidence, she thumbed off her bra and took a deep breath, putting her hands on her hips and turning one way, then the other. The guards were silent, not breathing. She threw the bra at the huge man, whipped off her panties, turned around, and threw the panties at the other guard. “Now, out!” she shouted.

The big one turned to go, but the balding man was not to be fooled. “The shoes,” he said. She stepped in front of the pile, hesitated as his face turned grim, then took off one shoe, handed it to him, the other to the other. The big one examined it closely and smiled; as the balding guard apologized formally, they handed back the shoes and, tossing her bra and panties toward the skirt and blouse in the pile behind her, left the room.

She reminded herself it was not over; from someplace in the room, she was still being watched. She backed close to a wall, and the letter went invisibly inside the skirt as she dressed. She left the examining room head high, winked at the guards and said, “You must enjoy your work,” and marched out in Lubyanka, formerly Dzerzhinsky, Square.