Sleeper Spy (65 page)

Skillful. That was designed to protect the sleeper from KGB retaliation. He had wondered how Sirkka would accomplish her assignment from Berensky of protecting him from the fury of the Feliks people.

“First Berensky must see for himself that the Feliks apparat is just another underworld mob,” Davidov said, just to make her job difficult. “If I took him in before that—assuming, as you say, Berensky and Dominick are one and the same—I would have a prisoner who would
never talk. Another pauper in a Lubyanka cell. To transfer the tangled assets, the former sleeper must be ready to cooperate with us actively. Only he knows where everything is.”

“You have his daughter.”

“You don’t know this man, Sirkka, though you have always been valuable to him. He is not merely focused, he is messianic. He would see his daughter die in agony before being diverted from his purpose.”

Irving chewed on his unlit cigar and watched the multimedia mogul and his economist wife leave. “Where do you suppose the happy couple are headed, Niko?”

“Around the block and in the back way,” the KGB man said. “The pre-meeting meeting is to start soon.”

“You got it all rigged so we can listen right here?”

“No. Von Schwebel knows his tradecraft—sweeps, jamming, the electronic works. With Arkady dead, we have no way of knowing what is going on downstairs.”

Irving frowned; that probably meant Davidov had a line in and didn’t want to share the information with his trusted American comrade. He brightened when Liana came running in, her breath coming in gasps.

“Mama’s not there. The neighbors didn’t know where she went.”

Davidov asked, “What about the dance studio?”

“Not there either.” She sucked in air and ran her hand along her hair, back and forth, angrily. “I don’t know where to look, and it’s getting late. Irving, help me.”

Forthright begging was the last, best refuge of a journalist; Irving was pleased that she turned to him. “She’s right here in this building, kiddo. Been here all along. Your pal Niko here didn’t want to tell us.” That little jab was in payment for Niko’s holding out on the surveillance.

“You’re an evil man,” she flashed at Davidov and ran for the stairs in the front of the restaurant.

“That was foolish,” the KGB man told Fein. “Remember what happened to Arkady.”

“She’s the love of your life. Go save her. I’ll watch your jacket.”

That cost Davidov his cool. “You’re a meddling idiot. You were fed a tip by Clauson and he reeled you in. You accepted his choice of an impersonator because you were too lazy to find one of your own. You danced to Berensky’s tune for months, wasting time following blind alleys he suggested. You let Berensky turn your researcher, Shu, because you underestimate the seductive power of money. You let Berensky ruin your partner because she didn’t return your hots. If you’re the world’s greatest reporter, God help journalism.”

Irving contemplated the dry end of his tobacco lollipop. “But I’m here with a stringer upstairs getting the story. And you—big-shot spymaster, with goons at your disposal all over town—are sitting here, passive, not playing to win but only playing not to lose. You’re praying your damn counter-jammer works and you’re stupidly refusing to play ball with the one person in this whole deal who’s not doubling on you.”

The reporter was satisfied with his riposte, but Niko’s shot about Viveca went home. Why hadn’t he competed for the girl with Dominick from the start? He knew why: his assumption that he had no chance with her had driven him to make certain he would have no chance with her. That timidity had led to her needless endangerment. Irving wanted to make that up to her, and to himself, if she would let him.

Liana tried all the doorknobs in the upstairs rooms. Waiters were setting up for dinner, and some nail-biting British management consultants were placing charts on easels for some gathering of the Group of Fifty. In the ladies’ lounge, a heavyset woman with iron-gray hair and thick glasses was sitting by herself, facing a faded lithograph on the wall, intently smoking a cigarette. Liana whirled, and setting her face grimly, barged into the men’s room. This intrusion interrupted what she supposed was a homosexual liaison and she hurriedly slammed the door. Behind another door with an
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign was an empty closet. Antonia Krumins was nowhere to be found.

Liana ran down two flights of stairs to the basement, but two swarthy guards—she supposed them to be Chechen or Ingush—barred the way. Offering them money did no good. She took the stairs up to the restaurant on the ground floor two at a time, but saw that Nikolai and Irving
were gone. She felt suddenly helpless, having failed her newfound father, and knowing firsthand the abiding spirit of bitterness and lust for vengeance in her mother’s heart.

She knew that at this stage neither Nikolai nor Irving would let the other out of his sight. They would be somewhere together, watching if they could, only listening if they had to. One had a need to know, the other a need to tell. The heartsick television reporter walked through the streets around the Tower, banging her fist on the back of every windowless van until she found the surveillance vehicle containing two of the three men in her world who meant most to her.

Karl von Schwebel squinted to see the figures in the half-darkness. His wife seated at his side, he faced the panel across a farm table: Kudishkin on the left, a nameless member of the Group of Fifty on the right, Madame Nina in the center, a bearded guard—apparently a lieutenant of the leader captured by the KGB—standing, arms crossed, against the wall.

“I have never had to do this before,” he told them, “but I want to correct my evaluation of the Memphis operation. When I stated to you at our last meeting that Edward Dominick had mounted a detailed impersonation of Aleks Berensky, I was disinformed.”

“Your judgment now?” Kudishkin was impassive as ever.

“Dominick is Berensky. He is also playing the role of his impersonator. A classic double game, in the Shelepin tradition, and I was taken in. I apologize to the committee.”

The capitalist wanted to know what had made him change his evaluation.

“Information supplied by my wife, Sirkka. I will let her speak for herself.” He hoped she could bring it off; the truth, with its gaps and inconsistencies, was now what she had to tell, and it was never as believable as a well-crafted legend.

“I am an agent of Russian Foreign Intelligence,” she began. “Before that, I was an active informant for Stasi in Germany.”

“We have long been aware of that,” said Kudishkin. “And we noted the cordiality of your dinner upstairs tonight with Davidov of the Ministry of Internal Security and Fein of the CIA.”

“Which we made no attempt to conceal,” her husband interjected. “To refuse their invitation would have aroused suspicion.”

The Russian dismissed that as obvious. “And why, Madame von Schwebel, are you now offering your services to us?”

“It suits my financial interest, sir.” The sallow Group of Fifty capitalist slowly clapped his hands in applause at her refreshing honesty, and Sirkka acknowledged the mockery with a nod.

“I have been doing two jobs,” she said. “Not a double agent, pretending to work for one side while working for the other; more an agent working simultaneously for two noncompeting parties.”

Kudishkin nodded understanding; the Chechen against the wall stirred uncomfortably; the capitalist looked blank; the lenses of Madame Nina’s glasses magnified her eyes out of all readability.

“Working for Foreign Intelligence,” Sirkka continued, “I maintained contact between Moscow and its penetration agent in the American Federal Reserve System, as well as its mole in the CIA.”

“Their names?” asked Kudishkin.

“I would prefer not to say.”

“The names,” rasped Madame Nina.

“Mortimer Speigal of the Fed and Walter Clauson of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch.”

“Continue.”

“Soon after the sleeper was activated in 1989, Clauson set up what I believe to be an independent operation—not Russian, not American, but private—with the sleeper and Speigal of the Fed.”

“Who activated the sleeper?” asked Kudishkin. “The KGB or Foreign Intelligence?”

“Not Foreign Intelligence. Clauson told me not to discuss it with FI. I presume it was a part of Federal Security, but not the part of the KGB that Davidov knows anything about.”

“Did anyone mention an ‘inner KGB’?” Kudishkin asked.

“No. But whoever it was had three billion dollars to invest.”

“Could Clauson’s independent operation, as you call it,” the former KGB official pressed, “could it be run by the CIA?”

Sirkka paused. Her husband put in: “Are you suggesting a triple agent—a Soviet agent pretending to be working for the Americans and actually working for the U.S.?”

They all turned at the sound of the Chechen sliding down the wall to a sitting position, his gun in his lap.

“If the mole were caught,” Kudishkin continued, “—if an Ames, for example, betrayed him—it would be just as easy to turn a double agent as any other.”

“No,” said Sirkka. “Clauson controls Speigal at the Fed. And last week, Speigal gave me the information about Fed plans that Berensky was able to use to make twenty billion dollars in currency trading. The biggest financial coup in history. And Berensky came here, to make arrangements for transfer of the money to you.”

“Running an enormous personal risk,” her husband added. “Davidov has a dozen men in this city and is prepared to kill Berensky if he finds out the money is going to you.”

“The greater risk would be the CIA’s if it were a CIA operation,” said Sirkka. “If they did make all that money, and then put their agent in enemy hands and lost it all, the American Congress would put the Agency out of business forever.”

“It is one thing to lose a dozen agents,” added Karl, sharpening his wife’s point, “but losing a hundred billion dollars is a serious business. No, Clauson’s loyalty does not ultimately run to the CIA. To construct a brilliant defense, Clauson set up a parallel operation with the reporters Fein and Farr, sending them to the sleeper for him to impersonate himself. Truth and falsehood in one man. Breathtaking.”

“You may go now,” said Madame Nina abruptly. The couple rose, Karl smiling confidently. Leaving, von Schwebel was certain he and his wife had accomplished the mission they had undertaken for their client. Berensky’s bona fides had been well attested to; his persuasive appearance before the board would put the icing on the cake.