Sleeper Spy (23 page)

“I quite understand what you want of me. You set a banker to catch a banker. But I’m no detective. How’s it going to work?”

“We’ll have a way to make the KGB, and the other elements in Russia that are looking for the sleeper, suspect that you’re him. We want them to come to you.”

“Why?”

“Irving can explain this better than I can, but the idea is to become a player. Then people trade information. You find out what the investigative agencies are looking for, how much they know. He’s done this before, and it works—he’s won every journalistic prize that counts.”

She gave him time to think it over. Then he asked the question Irving had hoped he would ask, showing he had the imagination necessary
for the role. “Sooner or later, the real sleeper will get wind of this, won’t he? I mean, you can’t set up a parallel operation, tracking a pattern of successful trading over the past five years, without the coon gettin’ wise there’s a coon dog after him.”

Viveca was briefed and ready for that. “There’s at least a good possibility that he’ll soon be aware of your impersonation, Edward. Then we have reason to believe he will approach you to act as his intermediary in some major deal.”

“Why would he do that? What’s the deal?”

She skipped over the why; Irving hadn’t told her why. “The Russians, both the government and the antigovernment group, want their money back. That’s their business. Let the sleeper work something out with either of them, I don’t care. Our business, Irving’s and mine, is to get the story—how the sleeper did it, who he involved, especially in our government, where the money is, and where it goes.”

“If all you say is true,” Dominick mused, “he’s the richest man in the world. And hardly anybody knows he’s alive.”

“It’s a fantastic story, and it will make my career.”

“That’s a fine deal for you, little lady, but how did you come to pick me?”

“First of all, your physical appearance. He’s six-four.”

“You ought to come to an American Bankers Association convention. That narrows down the field to a couple thousand.”

“And you were recommended by some people in the government.”

“Who?”

“Irving didn’t tell me, and I don’t blame him for holding his sources very tightly. I do the same. But he surely didn’t get your name out of the Memphis phone book.”

Dominick seemed to relax; she was telling the truth. “Viveca, if I may call you that, I can make a pretty good guess at who our mutual friend in Washington is. But I’m a businessman, right? I hate to sound crass, but this would be a lot of trouble, take a lot of time …”

He wanted to know what was in this for him. She had that down pat: “You would be at the center of the book, as the hero, and the star of the television series. You and I would narrate the whole story. You’d become one of the most famous bankers in the country. In the whole world.”

“Fame counts, there’s no denying that. But no fortune. That’s not much of a return on the investment of time.”

When he said that, her stomach constricted, and she took a gulp of wine. She did not want to lose him, and tried her first fallback position. “The monetary return is something we could work out with the governments that pay a fee for recovering lost assets. Or with our own government on an income-tax whistleblower reward if the sleeper evaded taxes, as he surely must have. Or if the sleeper wants to make a deal with you, to act as his agent in dealing with the Russians—” She shrugged and didn’t finish that possibility. Irving had said that Michael Shu suspected that if our ringer had a little larceny in his soul, he might try to make a deal with the real sleeper to get a small cut of the fortune.

“The risk is higher than you think, Viveca. If I am to impersonate a possibly criminal figure, our investigation would have to have the color of law.”

That was almost a setup; she knew precisely what to say. “We anticipated that. You are to call—do you have a pen?—a man named Walter Clauson in the counterintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. The central switchboard is in the telephone book, or the information operator will give it to you.” That was so he would know he was calling a real person at a real agency, not somebody who would answer a precooked number. “You are to say you would like to discuss a matter about a man with insomnia. Remember that the call is recorded. He will make an appointment for you to come to his office in Langley, Virginia, or on F Street in the District of Columbia, all open and aboveboard.”

She had memorized this perfectly, wasn’t tripping over a word. A memory intruded of the mentalist reciting secrets in an ancient movie called
The 39 Steps
with Robert Donat, a reference to which would drive Irving up the wall, because this was real reality, not virtual reality. “When you get there, tell him of our visit to you and what we want you to do. He will then say these exact words: ‘I cannot confirm or deny the existence of a KGB sleeper agent in the United States. You are one hundred percent on your own. Thank you and good afternoon.’ Listen for that ‘one hundred percent.’ ”

“Is that all?” He did not seem reassured.

“What that should tell you is that we are in touch with a high official in counterintelligence; that we have worked out with him who will call
him and what he will say; and your recorded interview will be part of the CIA’s record of the case.”

She watched him assess that. As she expected, it came up short. “That’s not a whole bunch of protection.”

“Edward, I’m told that you’re not entirely an innocent in these matters. You said it yourself—we may have a mutual friend in Washington. You can check our bona fides”—she pronounced it in proper Latin, bone-a feedays, as instructed—“by the exact way Clauson answers. He cannot give you a go-ahead, but this proves to you that he sent us to you.”

Dominick remained noncommittal; she supposed he would check this out. Irving had told her not to expect an answer right away. She took out her business card, wrote on it her private numbers in New York City and Pound Ridge, and gave it to him. Personal chemistry was important here; the prospect of working with her might attract him, and she felt that she had established some rapport. “Let me know. I’d really like to work with you.”

A group of men passed their table, said hello to him, looked at her, and one looked back at Dominick, eyebrows up, impressed. She was grateful for that.

“You haven’t been entirely frank with me, Viveca, and I don’t hold that against you, considering the business you’re in. But I’m going to be very straight with you.” The banker’s large brown eyes were now more penetrating than mournful. “This sleeper fellow, if he exists, has to be resourceful. He isn’t going to want to be found out. He’s not going to want a partner. He could be dangerous, not just to the impersonator, but to you.”

“I’ll take that chance. Will you?”

“Don’t know why I should. The monetary reward you speak of is highly problematical. The notion of being a big celebrity if we succeed is kind of attractive. I could run for office on it, but I have no political ambitions.”

She put her hand on his arm. “Still, you’re considering it. Tell me why.” She remembered her father’s advice: give a prospect a chance to sell himself on a deal.

He leaned back and looked out over Memphis and the river. “Your approach is sound. The sleeper would find out about the parallel operation
soon enough, even on a small scale, because this world of big-league banking is a tight circle, and he might just reach out in one way or another. Second, working with you journalistic types would be kind of exciting, no bones about that.”

He flexed his arm and she removed her hand. “Most important, though, there’s the challenge. Can’t ignore that. How do you take a few billion, and using the inside information of a superpower, run it up to the biggest private fortune in the world? And all the while, keep it hidden?” He all but licked his lips at that. “I bet I could figure it out, with some really good staff support backtracking market movements. Be a hell of an exercise.”

He sent her to the airport in his chauffeured car.

“He sent you out alone? No riding along with you, neckin’ in the backseat? That’s where a lot of sexual harassment takes place, you know. In corporate cars.”

She seemed so pleased with herself that Irving could not resist giving her a little zotz. But Viveca had done well, better than he could have done with the tight-assessed bank executive, and when she glared at him, the reporter hastened to say he was only kidding. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

“Hey, where’d you get that stuff you used in his office about moles and sleepers?” he asked to make amends. “That was pretty good. Accurate, too.”

“It came from
Principles and Practices of Counterespionage
by Cooper and Redlinger,” she answered. “I do my homework. This espionage business is not as arcane as you think.”

He shot his eyebrows up at her forty-dollar word. “I used to go to the penny arcane. You’re so hot on Cooper and Redstuff, where do you come out on Golitsyn and Nosenko?”

“I haven’t read their work yet.”

“Lookit. Golitsyn was a Russian defector, came over here in 1960 with the whole story of the disinformation plan of Shelepin, the head of the KGB at the time. Shelepin was feeding all our spies phony stuff, in the biggest deception operation ever run. Then another defector, named Nosenko, came over after the Kennedy assassination and reassured
everybody here that the Kremlin had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald. The two defectors’ stories collided. The question: Was Nosenko a ‘dangle’?” Irving waited for her to figure out that a dangle was a false defector, not hard for a quick student.

“What was the answer?”

“Angleton at the CIA believed Golitsyn, but Hoover at the FBI believed Nosenko. For decades, that disagreement split the spook world, until a new crowd took over the CIA and decided to believe Nosenko. They fired Angleton.”

“Do I have to know this?”

“ ’Course not. But when you start giving me arcane, it’s important for you to understand that in this business there are a lot of bodies buried you don’t know about.”

She said nothing. He let her brood about being caught with a superficial knowledge of the intelligence dodge, and they sat in silence waiting for the flight to be called. Finally she said, “So was Nosenko a dangle?”

He was not sorry he’d bitten her head off for being a wiseass, because a little humility was called for in this business, but at least she hung in there and asked her question again. She could get herself and a lot of other people in deep trouble with a smattering of ignorance and her inclination to fake the rest. Her knowledge was shallow, a little book-learning here and a short briefing there, no depth of experience to call up when the puzzle got complicated. Great for a forty-five-second newsbreak, but deadly in an all-day seminar or a year’s sustained work on a book.

“Neither one was a dangle, I think.” He wasn’t sure even now. “They were both real defectors, which seems like a contradiction. The lesson is,” he instructed, “students of spooks have to live with maddening contradictions. Because Angleton of the CIA was probably wrong about Nosenko, the crowd that came in during the seventies assumed he was a paranoid about penetrations. So they kicked him out—and later on, in came the moles like Ames. Jim Angleton was our counterpart to Shelepin, a scholar of deception, simultaneously right and wrong. Raised orchids.”

“Why orchids?”

“Orchids fake out wasps to get pollinated.”

“I can handle that,” she said with her misplaced self-confidence. “It’s called an anti-syzygy, and I won the spelling bee in high school on that word.”

“You must have been a pisser in high school.”

“You and your friend the accountant had better give me a complete briefing on the sleeper. Every detail we know. Dominick wants to deal with me, not you. This is going to take more of my time than I thought.”

“You tell Dominick we think maybe the handler got his ass blown off in Barbados?”

“I didn’t want to alarm him. But Dominick is sensitive to the potential danger.” She fell silent. Irving hoped the banker hadn’t scared her off the story.

“Lookit, some of this may be heavy-duty stuff,” he warned her. “If the sleeper has a big moneymaking operation going, using inside stuff from Russia, he could get very upset at our dangle.” His purpose in teaching her about the controversy over dangles was to alert her to the way they would use Dominick to stir up the KGB, the Feliks people, our CIA and Fed, and the sleeper himself. She had a lot to learn in a hurry. He, on the other hand, had no need to know how to spell “anti-syzygy.”

He fed it to her gently. “I ran a Dialog search on the words ‘Fifth Directorate.’ ” He assumed everybody in the business knew about this computerized morgue, capable of instantly searching most of the key publications in the world. “Seems that a couple of months ago, the Director and his deputy got killed in an airplane accident. Within days, there was the explosion on Barbados that wiped out a guy I think was the sleeper’s handler. My guess is that the handler believed he had slipped past all central control, what with the top KGB guys who knew about the sleeper dead, and tried to put the squeeze on the sleeper and got blown to smithereens.”