Sleeper Spy (5 page)

The woman had a familiar face, atop a long, endangered-species coat, followed by a couple of breathless sycophants. She appeared in the dark mirror, on the way to the elevator. He swung his eyes over from the referent to the real thing—a woman with almost regular features and hair that was so naturally sandy-blond and casually combed it had to have taken hours to create. Fein almost said, “Don’t I know you?”—which meant she was a television regular, not an anchorperson but a featured performer, and he remembered that he liked this one. She seemed to have a measure of
gravitas
on the air, some crispness of assurance that other pretty faces lacked. The name escaped him; she was still a personality, not yet a celebrity—a face, not yet a name.

Standing at the elevator, she jabbed compulsively at the button already lit; she looked back at him with eyes that struck the reporter slumped on the couch as registering a lack of interest bordering on distaste.

Fuck you too, lady, and the horse you rode in on, he said to himself. Irving determined that his first question to her, if she came over to him and tried to make conversation, would be “Do you have any idea how many leopards, the fastest animal alive in a short dash, died to make
that coat that some network muckeymuck probably paid for?” That would not merely wipe off the expression of mild disdain but rattle her teeth, which he judged too perfect not to be capped.

His opportunity did not arise. The elevator arrived and the young woman and her retinue marched into it. Not so young, reckoned Irving; mid-thirtyish. On second thought, to those who are late-fortyish, mid-thirtyish is young; mid-thirtyish is what people who called themselves thirtysomething wished they were. His spirits sunk further. She was not too young for that coat, which she probably paid for herself, because performers in that business pulled down ten times what they were worth as journalists. So what if it was a leopard? He didn’t like cats.

The nickel dropped; actually, it was a quarter now. Her name was Viveca something; he could hear a voice saying, “Newsbreak, Viveca something reporting.”

“Saw Viveca out there,” he told never-call-me-Ace when he finally got into the agent’s office. “Good kid. She could make it.”

“You know her?” At Irving’s shrug, McFarland assumed a worried-about-my-client pose. “I worry about that girl. So much talent, such a great future, yet so vulnerable.”

She hadn’t seemed so vulnerable to the reporter. “Armor-plated” would have been his choice of an adjective. “You going into television agenting, Matt? At your age?”

“I will soon be an octogenarian,” said the agent with pride, contemplating his well-shined shoes, placed on the footstool because his feet did not reach the floor. Fein thought of buying him a set of spats, if they still made spats; that would fit the image Ace cultivated of the intellectual dandy. “But no, like the proverbial shoemaker, I will stick to my last, that of literary representative. I lived by the written word, I will die enhancing the value of the written word.”

“So what’s with you and Miss Talking Head?”

“As you might deduce, intrepid investigator that you are, Viveca Farr is considering writing a book. I am encouraging her. A substantive book would add depth to her reputation as a newsperson. It would dissuade journalists like yourself, Irving, from thinking of her as just another pretty face.”

A title for her book leaped to the reporter’s mind—
Dancing on the Glass Ceiling
—but he had his own fish to fry and didn’t want to waste
time on someone else’s. He drew his chair close to Ace and lowered his voice. “You got into Lubyanka? Did you see the new guy, Davidov?”

“The chief of the Fifth Directorate received me, yes. He is interested in using my services in bringing some of the files to public view.”

“Did he offer any hot stuff—moles, traitors, real news? The Second Man?”

Ace shook his head. “So far all that’s on the table is stale historical files. The only surprise was the man himself. Never thought someone so high up in Russian security would be such a combination of intellectual and matinee idol.”

“But a goniff at heart. You gave him the little zinger about the Feliks people?”

“I did, in precisely the words you suggested. ‘If you run into any of Feliks’s people,’ I said, ‘I have a client who happens to be a great reporter.’ ”

“And how did he react to that?”

“No reaction. Stone face.”

“Balls!” Irving got up and started pacing, smacking the walls in the space between famous clients’ pictures. “You used the word ‘asleep’?”

“Yes, as you instructed. ‘This fellow is not asleep,’ I said about you. Again no reaction. Then again, ‘Never sleeps on the job.’ Frankly, it sounded a bit heavy-handed, saying it twice.”

“And he didn’t rise to it? Not even a flicker?”

“I don’t know if the Russians have a word for ‘poker face,’ but that was his expression.”

Irving stopped abruptly as a thought began to form. “Absolutely no reaction is a reaction. If he knew nothing about the friends of Feliks, the KGB man would have said something like ‘sure’ or ‘maybe, one of these days.’ But if Davidov just went blank, then he’s hiding what he knows about them, and maybe about a sleeper.” He drew back his lips in a kind of smile. “Lousy poker player. Doesn’t belong in that job.”

“Perhaps I could be of greater assistance, Irving, if you took me into your confidence. I am aware only that ‘Iron Feliks’ Dzerzhinsky was a presence that struck fear into Russians right up to our times. When freedom came to Moscow, his statue was ripped off the pedestal in the square in front of the former prison. You have not vouchsafed to me the significance of ‘Feliks’s friends,’ or of the need to impress the KGB with your lack of sleep.”

“Ah, the old vouchsafecracker at work.” Irving put out of his mind Ace’s inability so far to get him a decent book contract. “Can’t tell you yet. But now I can go back to my sources—having put a probe right into that goddam yellow building—and gotten a panicked reaction from the smoothie who’s fronting for them.”

“Director Davidov didn’t exactly panic. He just didn’t pick up on your phrase.”

“He froze, the sumbitch froze. I can use that.” The reporter saw how he could exaggerate to his source the Davidov nonresponse, trading that for a next step into the story. “Lookit, I know we’ve got a big one here. Not ancient history about who stuck the ice pick into Trotsky, but stuff going on right now, heavy sleeping.”

Ace blinked; Irving did not want to speculate further about sleeper agents in place, or whom they worked for, or what their mission was. He didn’t know much himself beyond the slender leads. But the reporter could feel the questions bubbling up, the sort of questions that created a vacuum into which answers rushed. Who planted the sleeper? Who has been controlling him, the new KGB or the old apparatchiks who make up part of the Feliks people? What triggered his activation? Does he have a network within the U.S. government? What is his assignment, and if it is to steal economic secrets, how successful has he been? How big are the bucks involved? Who are the sources of Irving’s tips, and what is their motive for getting him on the trail? Those were for starters.

“I hope you have the big one at last. I’ll go on representing you for old times’ sake, Irving, but frankly, you’re becoming a stain on my firm’s escutcheon.”

“Mark my words, Ace, the first serial rights on this story will be a newsmagazine cover.” When the agent looked skeptical, the reporter felt pressured into tipping a little more of his hand. “What we’ve got here is some kind of financial mastermind operating underground in America, with megabucks from the old KGB, out of the reach of the law. He’s maybe got access to all the intelligence resources of the KGB to give him insider stuff all around the world.” Now Irving was guessing. “And he’s been building up a pile of dough big enough to cause a financial panic, destabilize the government in Moscow, and help the mafiya and the old commies take over and start grabbing back the old empire.”

Now Ace looked suitably alarmed. Irving thought he could put it across with a happy-ending possibility: “Or—if the stash gets big enough and is used right—he could use those assets to help the Russian people make it under capitalism. A whole lot of the future of the world hangs on finding this guy, and making sure he delivers his bundle to the right people.”

“Or giving it back to the investors he stole it from,” Ace amended.

“Nah, this is bigger than cops and robbers. Ace, for crissake, open your eyes.” Irving, flying on hunch alone at this point, took the agent to the mountaintop. “This is a story about, first, the corruption of the world financial markets to build up a fortune; and second, about the struggle between the good and evil elements in Russia to find and use those assets. By digging out the first story, of how the sleeper does it, I can have an impact on how the second story comes out. If I can get the news, then I can make the news. Don’t you see?” Until that moment, Fein himself had not quite seen it that way; talking it through had helped. Had he sold Ace?

“I recall the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt,” said the agent, “and telling his scribe of his plan to miraculously part the Red Sea.”

Irving beat him to the punchline: “ ‘If you can bring that off, Moses, I can get you four pages in the Old Testament.’ You’ll see, Ace. There’s a huge story here, and I can dig it out if you can get me a good advance without tipping it.”

He rushed out past the smoked mirrors to the elevator, irritation with Ace mingling with a perfumed sense of a woman’s recent presence and the tingling in his fingertips he got when he was on to something.

He touched the arrow that summoned the down elevator; it did not light up. He hated that sort of thing, because it made him feel impotent. He jabbed at it again, as Viveca Farr had done earlier, and wondered if the unlit button stirred her hidden anxieties as well. Third time, the light came on; the damn machine in Ace’s fancy office building needed fixing.

Six minutes to air. She took her position at the anchor desk this early to get over the willies that had afflicted her since she began on-air work five years before. She was certain that red-light fright would never leave her even when she sharp-elbowed her way onto the anchor desk of the evening news.

The newsbreak, one word, was perfect for Viveca Farr: sky-highlights short enough to make an impression and not so long as to get boring about any subject. The prime of prime time, between entertainment shows at 9:00
P.M
. EST, reaching thirty million viewers, did not arouse envy among the network news anchorpeople because it ruined dinner right though the week; besides, the slot was usually filled by a newcomer not seeming to be competition for them. But as Viveca saw it, the newsbreak was her own show; the camera never left her face, even with film running over her shoulder on the screen. She was the forty-five-second star.

She shot a glance at her head on the monitor. The highlights on her blond hair attested to the teamwork of hairdresser and lighting man: not brassy, not like the surface of a glazed doughnut, but not too softly feminine either; rather, a sensible hairdo for a woman doing serious work. The makeup person was on her side, too: eyeshadow that seemed heavy in the flesh came across with just enough emphasis on the screen. The one attribute she could not see on the monitor, slightly off to the side, was what her favorite reviewer said was unique to Viveca Farr: a direct look into the camera with cool deep-blue eyes that riveted the viewer.

Nodding curtly to the stage manager, she told the prompter operator,
“From the top,” and started to run through her lines. She came to a word she didn’t like in a line about the President’s appearance that evening: “The President praised her indomitable will …” She knew she would fluff “indomitable.”

“Give me another word for ‘indomitable,’ ” she told the producer in the booth.

Through her earphones, she could hear the wiseguy’s voice: “You pronounced it perfectly, Viveca, and that’s the word the President used.”

“Let’s not argue. I want another word, if you know one.”

“How’s ‘indefatigable’?” She could hear the snickering in the booth and on the set.

“I want another word or I want another producer,” she snapped. “Get professional.” She could see her lip glistening in the monitor, and motioned for makeup. “Who writes this stuff, anyway?”

“Sometimes the on-air reporters have been known to write their own news,” the producer said sweetly. That stung; Viveca knew she could not write well and resented the fact that everybody else knew it. Her talent for communication was oral and visual, not bound to a word processor. A stagehand attaching the microphone to her blouse fumbled and brushed the lapel of her jacket; she recoiled, hating to be touched by the stage help, and would have done it herself but for the union rules. Her assistant, placing the water glass under the table out of camera range, picked up the newscaster’s nervousness and spilled some. “Mop it up, for crissake!” Viveca hissed at her, then, “Never mind, wasn’t your fault,” because she did not want the reputation of driving her aides to tears.