Sleeper Spy (8 page)

“If this Irving Fein person,” she said, “who has been hostile to some of the Agency’s covert actions in the past, wants to hire an impersonator, that’s strictly his business. We’re not involved. We cannot recommend one of our contract employees. If they do anything illegal, or get themselves hurt trying to get a big story, it’s their responsibility.”

She would lock this in with a memo to the DDO, who had expressed a worry about Clauson’s compromising his own indirect monitoring of the sleeper rumor. “All you’re authorized to do,” she told the veteran operative, “is to stay in touch with Fein to see what he comes up with. Your role is strictly passive.” She drove it home: “Which means if some banker calls us to see if an impersonation has our approval, the CIA has no position. Not yes, not no. Understood?”

Clauson sighed. “Your order to monitor passively is understood, Madam Director. If developments warrant,” he added, “I may ask for a reclama.”

She had been warned about those reclamas. They were time-consuming appeals to executive decisions that permitted counterintelligence to prevent an executive decision from being recognized as permanent. “Forget the damn reclama, Walter. You should have plenty of other things to do.”

So did she. As he nodded curtly at his dismissal and left, she consulted a budget summary: $4 billion was being cut out of the intelligence community this year. She was determined the cuts not come out of antiterrorism. Counterintelligence was a likely target for the
budget-cutters, with its function basically having been moved across the river to FBI headquarters on 9th Street. The vestigial CIA mole-hunters had failed to come up with the “Second Man” protecting Ames; as a result, operatives like Clauson were scorned at the Bureau and in the oversight committees.

Dorothy Barclay was not going to resist Congressional demands for an Agency less mean and more lean. Time for a major Reduction in Force: she had read that in the seventies one such bureaucratic bloodletting was called the Halloween Massacre. It occurred to her that an appropriate time for another major riffing would be in the coming month, on St. Valentine’s Day.

As he left the Mercantile Exchange for his studio apartment in Marina Towers, the saying that stuck in Berensky’s mind was “The house is burning and the clock is ticking.”

With the nonpublic information provided by the KGB over the past four years, he had multiplied the original stake of $3 billion by ten. He estimated it would take $100 billion in equity to finance a destabilization and takeover of the Russian Federation, if that was the political purpose of the Feliks people. He would judge their character and goals later. Now he was under pressure to make major trades to run up the fortune quickly, before his moment of independent action ended.

The Fifth Directorate had been decapitated by an airline accident. The only remaining member of the KGB hierarchy who knew the sleeper agent’s American identity—his longtime control agent—had blown himself up in Barbados. He presumed the KGB must now be turning itself inside out to reestablish contact with him.

Berensky further assumed that the CIA had penetrated the KGB enough to determine that a sleeper was using the former Party assets and current KGB intelligence to amass a fortune. He did not believe U.S. newspaper accounts of the CIA’s handing over counterintelligence to the FBI; that was almost certainly disinformation of the sort that Shelepin pioneered in the fifties.

That meant that both the Russian and American espionage services were looking for him and trying to trace the fortune. In addition, the Feliks people—who knew of his existence, and whose money had formed his original stake—were surely using all their underworld contacts to find him. Sooner rather than later, the sleeper was certain,
one of these organizations would break through the complex series of cutouts and fronts he had established to hide and leverage the assets; at that point, his historic decision of what to do with the money might be wrested from his hands. That was why he felt an urgency to make big money in the coming quarter.

The final intelligence from Control about Russia’s oil consortium with Japan had been useful; it meant an increase in the supply of oil, and augured a small dip that day in the world price. Through a series of investments in financial derivatives based on oil futures, he had made a couple of hundred million dollars. The gold production figures were more valuable; his London gold broker relied on the likelihood of a shortfall in Russian production to take a strong position.

But this was relatively small potatoes. Inside information about Russian dealings would not permit dramatic gains, even when leveraged as heavily as Berensky now could manage. For major moves, he needed to get key figures from the KGB sources inside the U.S. government. Then he could play currencies, the most concealable major form of speculation.

Control’s death made that more difficult: the mole in Washington did not want to be contacted, and he would have to wait; the agent at the Federal Reserve in New York was unknown to him, and passed along information only through the Washington man.

In retrospect, the sleeper knew he had erred in not taking Control’s unconscious body out and drowning him. Of course, his lack of firmness had turned out to be fortunate: if he had killed the greedy handler, Berensky would have gone back to sleep in the bungalow and been blown up. But he could not count on that luck in the future. He vowed to act with more vigor next time a confederate showed signs of crossing him.

Where was he most vulnerable? In Bern and in Helsinki. The banker in Bern was the longtime contact of, and probably partner of, the faithless Control. The banker had on deposit only the first $3 billion in gold—the original Communist Party stake—but it was likely that he shared Control’s plans to seize the entire fortune. Berensky would be safer if the banker died.

The economist in Helsinki had an idea of the sleeper’s identity and could be a source of blackmail. She was connected to too many agencies: certainly Stasi in Germany, probably the KGB or Russian Foreign
Intelligence, possibly his Washington contact. The sleeper was more inclined to trust her, however; there was a simple way to put her loyalty to the test.

He dialed her direct extension at the Econometric Institute in Helsinki and recognized the voice that answered the phone.

“This is Dr. Gold,” he announced briskly. “The veterinarian in North Carolina. Your vet in Davos sent the slides of your Bernese mountain dog’s lung to my laboratory.”

“Of course,” she said. “How good of you to call so promptly. What’s to become of my Berner Sennenhund?” She used the Swiss name of the breed; Berensky admired her quick take of an unrehearsed code.

“The prognosis is not good. Your Berner has a form of cancer that is a genetic fault of the breed. I have to advise you to put him down.”

A pause. “That saddens me. The Berner has been a faithful companion.”

“You owe it to him, then, to put the animal to sleep before the onset of great pain.”

“I understand, Doctor. How long do I have?”

“Three or four days. No longer than a week. I feel for you, ma’am—I lost one of my own not a couple of weeks ago. It’s sad, but necessary.”

“You’re right, of course. I will do what a responsible pet owner must do.”

Viveca Farr confronted herself with a direct question: What does a legendary reporter drink? Irving Fein was coming to see her, at Matt’s instigation. She decided he’d probably drink Scotch.

She checked the bar in the den; plenty of Scotch. No bourbon; she had finished the bourbon herself the other night. White wine? She was ready to bet Irving Fein would never ask for white wine. Maybe red wine. She hesitated, then pulled down a bottle of the cheaper stuff, sank the screw in the cork, and deftly opened it. “Breathe,” she told it, and poured herself a glass.

Matt had suggested this first meeting be held in his office, but Viveca didn’t want the agent to act as her chaperon; she wanted to handle the world’s greatest investigative reporter, as he liked to bill himself, all by herself. She could have had him come to her apartment on Central Park West, near the studio, but that was decorated in whites and silks and Man Ray photos; even so, now that she thought of it, that might have been better. Living in a storied stone house in Pound Ridge—Tudorstyle, eighteen rooms, on four landscaped acres—was as pretentious, in its way, as calling yourself the world’s greatest reporter.

She could hear him saying “What a goddam palace” and thinking of her as some kind of princess complaining about a pea under the mattress. Impressing him that way was a mistake, but this is where she came to escape from the television crowd on weekends when all its Manhattan members traipsed out to the Hamptons as one impenetrable mass. She could explain how rich she was not, what a regular person she was, if that turned out to be important to him; she suspected that it would. From that one glimpse of him in Matt’s waiting room, the
journalist struck her as one of those prestigious smart-asses who resented success in others whom they considered lightweights, success they assumed was too easily gained.

She was fearful he would see through her in a minute. She couldn’t write; she could ask a list of questions with fervor, but she lived in dread of a surprise answer that required a follow-up. Who needed this?

It wasn’t that she was dumb, or not naturally curious, but there had been little time to become a policy wonk on the way to television news celebrityhood; by the time your brain became convoluted enough to understand the nuances of foreign affairs and economic dreariness, your face was too wrinkled to attract an audience. All the producers who brought her along too fast later criticized her for coming up too fast, for not “paying her dues.” One year she was running copy, the next year she was on the air, station managers pushing her for their ratings, viewers taking her every word so seriously. The reviewers all used the same word to describe her delivery: “crisp.” Would Irving Fein be hungry? She put out the potato chips.

Waiting for her potential new collaborator, Viveca looked in the bar mirror; the slight worry line between her eyes added to the illusion of authority. Her makeup was understated for this occasion, the blond hair mid-length, carefully casual, no spray glazing her head the way it had to be on camera. Her face’s saving grace, she knew, was its slightly crooked nose; the imperfection added character. Nobody wanted a fashion model doing the news. What was wanted—sought desperately, by producers and advertisers—was mastery without age, good looks without glamour,
gravitas
without weight. On the air, she had the rare ability to transmute attractiveness to authority, and she knew it.

That confidence faded when the camera’s red light went off. What if Fein asked her about the Kurdish tribes in Iraq or the black gangs in L.A.? In that case, she would turn the question back on him; men so handled invariably spun out their answers. But what if this one really wanted to know what she thought? He was a reporter; he was, if not great, certainly good; he would not be put off. Her schedule did not include time to develop any of the wide knowledge he would probably demand.

The hell with him. What she brought to this marriage was the beginning of fame—potential stardom—and the art of presentation. He could do the digging and the thinking and the writing. As Matt had
explained, selling her on this notion, the television dimension provided synergy to the story and sales to the book. And what the hell did “synergy” mean? What if she used that word and Fein asked her what it meant? He was sure to judge her, as they all did; suddenly Viveca was afflicted with the sinking feeling that this might not work. The moment he started hitting on her professionally, she would threaten to throw him out; Matt had confided that, commercially, he needed her more than she needed him.

A gray station wagon crunched up the driveway, and she went out to meet it, her glass of wine in hand, hospitable in a defiant way. His car, as she had feared, was a disgrace to the neighborhood. The dilapidated state of the vehicle, despite its “no radio” sign for burglars, was a statement that he was poor and honest and proud and would make putting her down part of his life’s work.