Sleeper Spy Page 7

  “If we do this book together,” she said slowly, “and I say if we do it, we are going to keep the hell out of each other’s private life. That’s rule number one. You can pad your expense accounts and go whoring around all you like, the way the database says you do—that’s none of my business—so long as you move the story along.”

  “Never missed a deadline in my life. And the expression in the journalism field is to ‘advance the story.’ ”

  “Your problem isn’t deadlines, it’s assignments. You can’t get them. And that’s why you need me.”

  The muscles in his cheeks worked. “I don’t take assignments. I get stories on my own that force assignments from editors. And I don’t just sit there and look pretty and read.”

  “You used to be a big name,” she stayed on the attack, “a power in the news business—how did you make it, anyway?”

  “I didn’t make it on my back.”

  “You prick!” she yelled, and threw the cigarette at him. She had not slept with anybody to get a job for years and bitterly resented the charge. But she regretted the loss of control immediately; it gave him the upper hand.

  He picked the burning butt off the carpet and looked at it. Sighing at his weakness, he took a puff, inhaled, and coughed before dropping it in her wine, which she had been looking forward to finishing more than she was ready to admit. “So you’re not the Ice Maiden after all.”

  “Which is it, then—Ice Maiden, untouchable, iron pants—or the girl who screws her way to the top?” Both reputations had plagued her. “You can’t have both. One or the other,” she said.

  He weighed that. “Not necessarily. You can coldly calculate whose bed it’s profitable to sleep in.”

  She saw red. The sexist charge of sex use was untrue, at least since she fought her way onto the air, and it was the classic put-down that men she outdid so often used to steal the pleasure out of her success. “What do you know,” she lashed at him, “about what an attractive woman has to go through every day on the set?”

  “And don’t give me this phony feminist shit, either.” He picked up one of his books and dropped it in her lap. “I wrote the series on sexual harassment years ago that damn near busted up the Business Council, and you never gave the woman’s movement more than the back of your hand.”

  “Here’s your hat,” she said, crossing her arms. This was not going to work out.

  “Don’t get up,” he agreed. “I’ll let myself out.”

  WASHINGTON

  Irving Fein waited until ten in the morning, flashed a phony ID that said he was over sixty-two, and bought a senior citizen’s fare ticket on the Delta shuttle to Washington. He remembered how he used to do that with the youth fare until he was twenty-five and couldn’t get away with it anymore. He asked himself: Should a reasonably healthy man of forty-eight be able to pass for sixty-two? His face was creased, not wrinkled; hair was messy, not missing. He chalked up to experience his look of knocked-about maturity. The time would come soon enough, he realized with rue, when he wouldn’t have to fake senior status at all.

  He could finesse the hotel expense in expensive Washington by sleeping on the couch of a reporter he’d once helped. Figuring the four airline snacks (two for the round trip, two more he could always get by complaining to the stew about the other ones) and what was in his friend’s fridge, the bus to La Guardia and the Metro to D.C., and breakfast at the McDonald’s on the site of the old Sans Souci, he could do the whole trip for under $150. His accountant, Mike Shu, could write that off against a royalty, if he had any royalties coming; lately, his sales never ate up the advance.

  He did not feel bad about having to scrimp in a way that most salaried correspondents thought demeaning. No matter how lavish the expense account, Irving Fein would ostentatiously continue to move about on the cheap. Frugality in travel was the way of the transgressor, as Negly Farson, his journalistic predecessor, used to claim. When a newspaper or magazine popped with an assignment, or a producer romancing Vera Similitude hired him as a consultant, Irving would charge top dollar for meals and transportation and pocket the difference. To fussbudget administrators who asked for verifying bills on travel and entertainment, he gave the excuse of the harried freelance too busy with genuine oh-shit stories to worry about bits of paper, not to mention his need to protect his sources from the prying eyes of the politicized IRS. It was not merely that he was cheap, he insisted to himself—though he was profoundly cheap—nor that he would brook a breach of ethics; his enterprising approach to T&E was a good habit gained in youth and carried with pride into maturity, like beating up on airline ticket agents who conspired to seat him in the middle of a row.

  The pictorial memory of level gray eyes and manicured bare feet traveled with him, enlivening his reverie as he fastened the seat belt that he still called his safety belt. Whatever protective network executive or guitar-humping rock star was shtupping Viveca Farr was one fortunate fellow. Size six shoe, he judged; size six dress; nothing out of the ordinary front and back, but legs curved stunningly to perfect ankles; the ankle, he was certain, would just fit in the circle of his thumb and middle finger, a method of measuring ankle perfection with which he was blessed. Curious that Viveca Farr never showed her legs on television; the only time he had seen her full-length was on a morning interview show, and she was wearing slacks. Presumably, great legs did not lend themselves to the persona of crisp authority.

  And she was about five feet four, which made him feel tall.

  Pity she was such a hifalutin sourpuss. Would it have been worth it, teaching her how to pump a source, how to extract a new fact and then walk back the cat to see what had been misleading and who never again to trust? Irving shook his head and said, “Uh-uh, fuhget it,” out loud, drawing a look from his shuttle seatmates on either side. He had tried that tender pedagogy a few times in his life, and the girls had always fallen for him until that moment of stupendous stupidity when he fell for them, at which point everything fell apart—the affair and the story and the job and what the psychobabblers called the self-esteem. Why did the greatest teachers have to be the worst lovers?

  Still, he could have used her as a come-on and a front, as Ace suggested; on this trip alone, he would have made a few hundred on expenses. Viveca was a scrapper, to her credit, and verbally gave almost as good as she got, but Irving sensed she just didn’t have the killer instinct. It wasn’t enough to be a bitch; you had to have an innate talent in order to elevate insult and innuendo and irritation into a knack for control.

  April in the inherently Southern city of Washington always lifted his spirits. Not the cherry trees around the basin near the memorials; he scowled at the hordes of Japanese visitors with their Japanese cameras snapping pictures of their Japanese kids in front of the long-ago gift from Japan. He had once rented a house here with a flowering cherry tree in the front yard and in April put out a “Remember Pearl Harbor” lawn sign just to stir up the tourists.

  What the reporter liked was the leakiness of the capital in the springtime. For no apparent reason, the lips of sources who would clam up in the winter would open up like the petals of flowers in spring. Clandestine meetings in the parks were warmly natural, never frigidly furtive. His favorite spot was in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, near the central statue of Andy Jackson waving his cocked hat. The bench had a plaque next to it: THE BERNARD M. BARUCH BENCH OF INSPIRATION. It was where the elder statesman had liked to sit and receive administration visitors in the Truman years, despite the irritation of the President, who never appreciated Baruch’s too-well-publicized advice.

  Fein sat on Barney’s bench for a while, killing time; he had a date soon at the nearby McDonald’s with the CIA source. He used the moment to relive his scene at Viveca Farr’s house, spicing his repartee with should-have-saids and slipping in a hint of a come-on that he wished she had flashed. He would have spurned it; his philosophy was never to mix business with pleasure unless a really worthwhile oppo
rtunity presented itself. He was no fetishist, but those small feet stuck in his mind. Did she manicure and polish the nails of her own toes? A person could slip a disk that way.

  Facing the White House on that bench, he thought of the story of Lincoln shining his shoes and being asked, “Mr. President, do you black your own boots?” Lincoln had answered, “Whose shoes did you think I blacked?” But it was just one of those Lincoln stories; no source. He rose from the bench, mildly inspired, and strolled over to the fast-foodery.

  “I admire your selection of a rendezvous,” Walter Clauson said, in line for an Egg McMuffin. “Nobody would ever look for me here, and yet the location has historic resonance.”

  One block from the White House on 17th Street, on the site of the Sans Souci restaurant that had carelessly ruled and failed decades ago, the yellow arches marked a place of noisy privacy. Clauson picked up his tray and paid the tab for both of them. At the table, Irving laid two dollars down to pay his share, less to establish his independence than to suggest that he had a publishing patron.

  “Who’s subsidizing you?” the intelligence official asked, pocketing the bills.

  “Book publisher together with a television producer,” Fein lied. “Ace is making a helluva deal for me. I’ll find the sleeper, make a bundle, and retire. What do you know about him?” Irving made it a practice never to end a response to a source without a question of his own.

  “You don’t reveal your sources and methods, we don’t reveal ours.” Having established that, the Agency veteran took a sip of coffee and confided: “The mention of a hearing impairment of his left ear was on a military conscription report in the KGB’s Berensky file.”

  “Who’s Berensky?”

  “The older Berensky, who died in 1980, was the man chosen to be the ostensible father of the illegitimate son of Aleksandr Shelepin.”

  Irving knew that name; Shelepin was the young KGB chief who developed the disinformation department in the fifties.

  “And what happened to the little bastard?”

  “Under the name of Aleksandr Berensky, born in 1950, the man you are looking for transferred to duty abroad at age twenty-two—that’s the sleeper whose American name and address we do not know.”

  “Anything else about him? Cross-eyed, flat feet, whatever?”

  “Big, like a linebacker. Six foot four, two hundred pounds back then, must be two-fifty or so now, in his mid-forties. The only other information is about his mental acumen: he led his class at the Leningrad Academy, with special aptitude in mathematics. Unless he’s been dulled by life in America, the sleeper is smart.”

  “If he’s smart, he should be making great piles of dough with all the money they’ve been stashing with him.” Irving wound up and gave him the big question: “So how many six-foot-four guys that emigrated from Russia in 1972, and are bankers who have been raking it in lately, can there be? Don’t you guys have an in to the American Bankers Association?”

  “Ah, but he’s not a traceable Russian immigrant. The KGB trained him in their American Village and slipped him in with a prepared identity, no accent, and a ‘memory’ of an American childhood—schools, camps, recollections of a suburban paper route.”

  “The whole legend.”

  Clauson nodded. “All that leaves us with is that he’s physically big and tall, in his forties. He could have had his hearing fixed. And probable training at a bank or business school. A fairly large cohort.”

  Irving made that the end of a page in his mind and started a new mental page of notes. The picture in his mind would be recallable for about an hour after the meeting, during which time he would transcribe his mental notes.

  The reporter got up and got them both refills of their coffee. “So Berensky was the name the sleeper had in Russia before he got tapped for this job.” He thought of Ace talking with Davidov about the extensive KGB records and files. “Have any of your agents or assets looked for that name in the KGB files?”

  “No, because their archivists are alerted to report on anyone who asks about that family. The KGB then follows the searcher to his or her source.”

  “So that’s why Nikolai Davidov lets people poke around the files in Lubyanka?”

  “To find out who wants to know what, including about the sleeper,” said Clauson, “or better still, who knows what file to search for him. Maybe one of the searchers has a clue to the identity and location of the sleeper agent that the new generation of KGB officials doesn’t know about.”

  Fein started a new page of notes in his head. “Who besides the KGB wants to know?”

  “The Russian anti-KGB, in this case. The nomenklatura capitalists; the four hundred or so vorovskoy godfathers; the unreconstructed communists; the KGB hardest-liners who were shoved aside in the early nineties—a motley crew that some of us put under the general rubric of ‘Feliks people.’ You and I talked about this already—why are you wasting time?”

  “Because your time isn’t valuable, brother Clauson.” Irving was cheery about it. “You’re about to get your ass kicked out into the Old Spook Retirement Home, according to my contacts—who, by the way, really despise you. You must have upset a lot of people in your day.” He knew how to ingratiate himself perversely with the beleaguered Clauson, who nodded grim agreement. “Your purpose in meeting me here, and in filling me in on these details,” Irving told him, “is less to help me than to find out what I know and don’t know. Right?”

  Clauson did not nod or not nod.

  “I am now about to lay on you my plan to find the sleeper,” the reporter announced. “Its daring concept will astound you, because you guys don’t think big anymore. And your knowledge of it will make you a hero with your new Director, because you can run back to her to say how closely you are monitoring my efforts.”

  “You will put some sort of price on your revelations, I presume.”

  Irving brushed that aside. He thought of the cartoon of the two prison inmates manacled to the walls of a dungeon with one saying to the other: “Here’s my plan.”

  “Here’s my plan to find the sleeper in a hurry, at low cost, without a whole bureaucracy tied up for years running taps and polys and filing reclamas and fluttering each other and all that shit.” He had Clauson’s full attention. “I’ll make the sleeper come to me.”

  “That certainly would save time, Mr. Fein. And how do you propose to induce this experienced agent, who has imbedded himself in American society for a generation, and has been running money on a scale far beyond the normal dreams of avarice, to meekly give himself up to you?”

  “I’m gonna create an impostor. I’m going to tie up with a banker who knows how to run big money in a way that’s hard to trace—futures, derivatives, swaps, whatever. And he and a little team I’m setting up are gonna walk back the cat on the big financial killings that the real sleeper has been making. By tracing them back, I’ll find him.”

  Irving knew the CIA man knew what he meant by “walking back the cat”: looking critically at the past’s activities through the present’s eyes. Counterintelligence did that every time a defector’s bona fides were accepted and the spy debriefed: interrogators could walk back the cat to past events and apply the new information to see who had to know what about old operations.

  “The Feliks people are going to hear about my boy,” said the reporter. “Same with the KGB, or whatever the hell initials they use now. And because the real sleeper has his lines into both of those outfits, he’ll find out about this ‘other’ sleeper. Of course, Berensky will know it’s an impostor, and he’ll want to find out how close my banker, operating in parallel, is getting to him. And he’ll come after us.”

  “Ingenious,” Clauson said promptly. “Dangerous, too.”

  “What’s dangerous? This guy came over here as a kid, never been in trouble. He’s a goddam banker, doesn’t know from wet work. And he doesn’t have any KGB connections, except maybe his one handler, right?” It was important to get confirmation of that.

 
“As far as we know,” said Clauson.

  Irving relaxed a little. “So what’s the danger?”

  “Berensky—under whatever name he goes by here—is the custodian of great wealth, perhaps the largest agglomeration of privately held assets in the world by now. He and his clients have a great deal to lose. Not only the political object of his long-term assignment, but real money as well. I think the term is ‘megabucks.’ ”

  Irving turned that over. “He’s the richest man in the world.”

  “Except that it’s not his money,” Clauson cautioned. “He could protect his hoard, and himself, with non-KGB personnel.”

  “The Russian mafiya, with its underworld connections over here.” Irving had heard they were sharing turf with Italian mobsters in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.

  The agency man nodded. “Or the real sleeper could come after the impostor himself. Violence is usually in the character of a sleeper agent. This one would think nothing of arranging for somebody’s death.”

  “If it gets to that, I can come to you, right? The Agency wants to find him, too, no?”

  “You might be better off calling your local sheriff,” said Clauson. “But I may be able to help if you’re successful.” A thin smile of admiration appeared on his face. “If I were the real sleeper, and my contacts back home or in the financial markets alerted me to the fake sleeper’s operation, I’d want to engage somehow. He just might, as you say, come to you.”

  At least Irving could be sure that the Feliks organization, and probably Davidov at the KGB, would be tracking down his impostor; the Americans, too, if the FBI and CIA were on the ball. “The trick is to become a player in this,” said Irving, “not just a goddam observer. If my guy’s any good, he’ll attract all the spooks looking for the real sleeper. The KGB and the Feliks types over there, and your buddies at the FBI here.”

  That would give Irving some information to trade. You had to have some chips to put down on the table in these big stories before you could rake any other chips in; if he could get some intelligence traction with his fake sleeper, he could play these other outfits the way he was playing Clauson of the CIA. Other reporters “cultivated” sources at agencies, hoping to get dribbles of information; Irving Fein got the agencies to cultivate him because he found out things they wanted to know, which became the currency to buy other secrets.