Sleeper Spy (16 page)

Davidov shut his office door. He told Yelena, the code analyst who doubled as his secretary, that he was not to be disturbed. He picked up the clicker, sat on the ottoman in front of his television set, and played the tape again.

Not the first part of the tape showing the Latvian reporter stealing
the document in the file, of course. Nothing was to be learned from that, other than what type of document it was—a letter and envelope—and where she hid it, not over her belly but in the small of her back. The part worthy of close study was the search at the front entrance.

The young woman journalist had an admirable bosom, no doubt about that. He froze frame at the crucial moment of revelation; the hidden camera eye gave him a profile view of breasts that the guards, lucky fellows, looked at directly. Davidov pressed the play button, telling himself not to be distracted. It was difficult not to be distracted; the young Latvian woman showed herself without shame, without pride, more in defiant mockery. He fast-reversed, played it again.

The security official had a legitimate purpose for studying the tape closely. She took the document from the file room—the evidence of her theft was plain—and did not have it when searched. What had she done with it? Had she stopped in some other file room unobserved by the archivist, who would not soon again fall asleep on the job? Davidov went to his easy chair, hooked his leg over the upholstered arm, played the tape again. Aside from getting a rising lump in his pants, he was getting nowhere.

Yelena knocked. He pressed the off button and told her to come in. She brought in the first report on the surveillance of the Latvian woman after she left Lubyanka late the previous afternoon.

“You are going to wear out that tape, Nikolai Andreyevich.”

“In the line of duty.” Yelena had a strict moral code, as did a select few of the women recruited from their service as “swallows.” Trained from their teens in the arts of male satisfaction, they had skillfully prostituted themselves for their country until their age and looks no longer appealed to potential defectors; having shown themselves trustworthy, often on foreign assignments, those women with analytical skills deserved second careers.

Yelena, now in her late thirties, his own age, remained attractive, but unlike most Russian bosses, he kept their relationship on a mutually respectful level; if there was any personal encroachment, it was in her mother hen’s possessiveness of a young superior. He kept in mind that he derived his power directly from the Director, who was not above indiscretions himself but who stiffly disapproved of office affairs even among his unmarried staff. Davidov was not only the first trained epistemologist ever to be appointed to this sensitive post, but the first
brought in from outside the security services; he could not afford the slightest slip that would give his many bureaucratic enemies an opportunity to bring him down.

“Here, we will watch it together,” he told his assistant, proving to his own satisfaction his interest in Liana was not lascivious. He clicked rapid reverse to get away from the best part, stop, then play. They watched both scenes. He shook his head in puzzlement. All Yelena said was “Humph.”

“What means ‘Humph’?”

His policy analyst went to his desk, picked up a blank piece of paper, and slipped it into an envelope. She stood before him, pulled out the back of her blouse, and placed it in the small of her back, held in place by her belt.

“That is where she put it,” he agreed.

Yelena went to the door and closed it. She returned, turned her back to him, and started to take off her blouse. Davidov, troubled, looked at the closed door; this might be a mistake, but it might teach him something. She shrugged the blouse backward; it hooked on the envelope sticking up; she reached back, as Liana had, easily concealed the envelope in the blouse, and dropped it on the floor.

“You have not forgotten your training in the clandestine service,” he said, feeling stupid. He hoped she would not turn around.

Yelena stooped, retrieved her blouse, and, after buttoning it, faced him again. “Shall I put the tape in the files, Nikolai Andreyevich?”

“Leave it right where it is. I may want to play it for my instruction on searches,” Davidov replied. “But thank you. Where did she go afterward?”

“Three blocks south to the Hotel Metropole, the grand dining room, the one with the painted glass ceiling.”

“Russians don’t go there.” In that historic room, as in the rest of the hotel, hard currency was required.

“She met an American male, and we assumed you would want him followed. No report on that yet, but our men following her to the hotel noticed another shadow.”

“I hope they didn’t pick him up.”

“No, Director. They cellulared for backup to follow the second tail. We have a photograph of him.” She produced it. “He followed her to the airport hotel and then to Riga this morning.”

“And the person she met at the Metropole salon?”

“An American tourist. An accountant.” She handed over a thin dossier containing nothing more than a facsimile of a passport and visa application of an American named Michael Shu.

He took the file and nodded dismissal. In what he took to be a subtle gesture of defiance, she firmly closed his door, as if to ensure his privacy. He clicked on the set and rewound the videotape, wondering about the sleeper agent.

The KGB had no written record of Aleks Berensky’s current identity, at least not to Davidov’s knowledge; it was possible the sleeper’s background and legend was hidden in some other file. After he had taken over the dead Director’s office, he had launched an exhaustive search for any slip of paper that might offer a hint of the agent’s whereabouts. Nothing; apparently the late Director and his deputy had never considered the possibility of dying in the same plane accident, and had presumed the other would retain the secret.

The excuse for that lack of documentation about an important operation was its extreme sensitivity. The entire matter had been assigned to a single handler, the same assistant to Shelepin who had helped train the young agent for his implantation in the United States a generation before. Contrary to normal procedure, this handler was not required to report to a superior about the sleeper agent, because no contact at all was called for. In 1989, as the need for hiding assets became apparent to Communist Party officials, the control officer was dispatched to Barbados to resume control of Berensky. Davidov was able to infer that only from an examination of the control’s expense accounts, not from any reports. After a massive initial transfer of funds and gold, years followed in which economic intelligence about Russia and from inside the United States was fed to the sleeper. Then, after the crash killed the KGB officials, not a word from the control about the operations of the sleeper or of his other field agent, the remaining mole in Washington.

The videocassette recorder beeped at him; the tape was rewound. He fingered the button that would bring back Liana Krumins but did not press it. He asked himself: was the supreme security protecting Berensky a wise precaution against exposure during the time of turmoil? Yes. But now, anxiety was rising in the Kremlin about the lack of supervision of the sleeper. The KGB, as presently constituted, did not know
where its major overseas financial assets were; Davidov was certain of that. Did FI—once the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, now fiercely independent—know any more about Berensky? Davidov could not safely inquire. Did the Feliks people know? He had squeezed a few to no avail, and was offering others financial reward.

That fortune placed in the sleeper’s hands to hide or to invest belonged to the Russian government, though some of the other former Soviet republics would lay claim to part of it; getting it back was Davidov’s central KGB assignment. He had a fallback position, if recovery of the money proved impossible: to deny the fortune to the Feliks people.

He clicked off the power and buzzed for Yelena. “Step one is to find out more about the eighteen-year-old who had been selected for implantation in 1968,” he told her. “Find me somebody in the American Village then who trained Aleks Berensky.”

“Yes, Director. But that is not going to tell you where he is in America today. Or what happened to his control.”

His assistant knew the KGB far better than he did, and Davidov was not above asking for advice. “How would you find him?”

“Control is dead or defected or turned by the CIA or stealing the money.”

“Agreed. So?”

“Control had two agents, the sleeper and the mole. Foreign Intelligence knows who the mole is. We should establish contact with him.”

Davidov shook his head. “Foreign Intelligence would have my head if I so much as asked about his identity.” Definitely not a good idea for a new man, fresh from the academy; such inquiry would be used to cast suspicion on him as a bureaucratic empire-builder or a Western double agent. “Besides, we do not know if FI’s Washington agent was ever in direct contact with Berensky. The mode of operation was to use the handler as the intermediary. The Washington mole was not to know Berensky’s identity or vice versa.” That was a guess, but he thought an informed one.

“What about our man at the Federal Reserve in New York?”

“He would be doubly cut out, twice removed from knowledge of the identity of the sleeper.” And he did not want to stir bureaucratic anger by trying to communicate with that agent, either, at least for now. Yelena was trying hard, but not being helpful. And it could be she had
a friend at FI; in this job, he could trust nobody. He dismissed her again, listened to the door shut, and clicked on the power.

He froze the tape at the frame that showed the deception of the stupid searchers, forcing his eyes away from the stiff nipple to her hand at her back. It reminded him how a deft magician worked his trick by distracting his audience, and he swore not to allow himself to be distracted by this deceptive young woman again.

Michael Shu, CPA, savored working on assignment for Irving Fein. The normal accounting life in New York required a suit and tie and was deskbound-dreary at times, but the interludes of research for Irving lit up his life’s landscape.

Together, with Irving working the sources and Michael working the books, they had exposed wrongdoing in the government’s commodity-financing schemes; had embarrassed the White House Chief of Staff in his family’s ventures into Treasury-influenced businesses; had illuminated the maneuvering of a fugitive financier in the Bahamas who was running dope and guns through Panama; had made life miserable for a Federal Reserve Chairman for failing to follow up evidence of vast money movements financing illegal arms sales.

In all these prizewinning newspaper series and newsmagazine cover stories, Michael never asked for or received a byline. Media fame was for Irving to enjoy, and surely helped him open doors to other sources, but anonymity held no horrors for Michael. He took his pleasure in plumbing the lower depths of bureaucracies, where having a famous face or name would be an obstacle. His attraction was to the faceless people bearing secret grudges down below, smoldering not at abuse of power or policy misjudgments, but at short pay, lack of promotion, sexual harassment or rejection, or any of the mundane office grievances that led an unappreciated employee to take up the invitation to blow a very loud whistle.

Surely Irving was a cheapskate with his own money. Michael could charge a higher hourly rate for doing the tax returns of the clients of
his four-man firm. And Irving demanded his tax returns be done gratis as a kind of commission for the borderline-profitable business he brought in. Bottom line: working with Irving didn’t bring much to the bottom line.

But ah, the perks in journalism. Irving was extraordinarily generous when it came to expenses paid by a third party. Here was Michael Shu, whose father was a Vietnamese boat person and whose mother was an impoverished daughter of a Soviet diplomat who had defected to the U.S., seated in the garden of the best restaurant in Riga, Latvia, across the narrow street from the city’s medieval tower. His hotel, a short stroll away, was the finest that the Baltic city had to offer, and was determinedly restoring itself after two generations of dreary Soviet occupation. The accountant took out his subnotebook computer, punched up his expense account to date, and tut-tutted at the extravagance some publisher would have to pay. Not in this city, so much—Riga was an inexpensive stop for the traveler, like nearby St. Petersburg—but Moscow cost a bundle.

The Hotel Metropole there had been worth it, though. Michael was not much at making contacts, but whenever he asked some midlevel bureaucrat at the Oil Ministry to breakfast at the great hall of the Metropole with the glass ceiling, he immediately had a date. Few of the Russians had ever been to the hard-currency palace before, or would likely be invited again. Michael offered them the opportunity to plunge into the lavish breakfast buffet—eggs, cheeses, blinis, yogurts, honey cakes—about which they could later regale envious colleagues. And Michael wasn’t after contracts, which the low-level types could never deliver, or secret information, which they didn’t have; all he wanted was a look at books and waybills that the bosses upstairs usually did not know existed, and the names of foreign banks and importers and shipping companies that had done business with the Soviet government in its dying days. What was wrong with telling anything about the USSR? It was another country, dead and gone.