Sleeper Spy (11 page)

“Aah, twenty years, people change, people forget.” That was a weakness in his plan, and Irving wanted to slip past it.

“Who do you have in mind to impersonate the sleeper?”

Irving turned the query back on the questioner. “Need your help on that. Maybe somebody you’ve dealt with before.” It would help to have one of the many global bankers who had done chores for the Agency, maybe on contract, to give this impersonation the coloration of legality in case some regulatory agency got too curious. Also, someone who had shown an inclination toward espionage; though Irving did not want to exaggerate the danger, things could get a little messy for the phony sleeper at the moment of confrontation. He waved himself off that worry; surely the ringer could be extricated in time, and he’d be the star of the story, be a hero to the banking world, make a bundle in psychic income lecturing on the basis of the best-seller. Irving knew a White House aide who would put the successful impersonator up for the Medal of Freedom. “Who’s your candidate for the job?”

“You want a choice of three?”

Irving could not see himself running around the country interviewing heavyset bankers six foot four or taller and spreading the story of a secret Russian controlling billions of dollars in assets of the defunct
Communist Party.
The Wall Street Journal
would print the rumor in a week and the competition would be baying and treading all over the trail. He told the counterspy to recommend the best of the bunch.

Clauson held half of a cinnamon-raisin bagel in front of his mouth, which Irving presumed was to absorb the sound, or prevent lip-reading from outside, or whatever other surveillance the spooks fantasized about. “I have a friend in the marble halls of 21st Street. Might have a suggestion.”

Irving took a fast mental walk up and down 21st Street in the nation’s capital. Not the State Department, on 23rd. The F Street Club? Brick, and on 20th. Finally the quarter dropped: the Federal Reserve buildings, both white marble. As casually as he could, Irving said, “If the Fed doesn’t know a banker who could fill the bill, nobody does. When can I see him?”

“My friend might not want to see you. But I can be your conduit.”

Clauson was keeping control, the first element of counterintelligence tradecraft. “You think he’ll have a linebacker-banker on tap who’s a little hard of hearing?”

“You can always fake a little deafness,” the CIA man replied, lowering the bagel.

“What’s that you say?”

The archivist had standing instructions to alert Nikolai Davidov, new chief of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, if anybody—no matter what the authorization, no matter how powerful the countersigner—asked for any of the files even remotely touching on Aleksandr Shelepin, or any of that former KGB chief’s relatives or intimates.

He looked up from the requisition in his hand at the man and woman behind the counter. The aging fellow wore the jacket of what had been a uniform, now bereft of insignia, a sign of a Red Army veteran in dignified financial distress. The striking young woman with him, her dark hair chopped too short, might have been his daughter.

“This requisition is in good order,” the archivist said in a friendly way. Davidov had ordered him to adopt a cooperative demeanor whenever this circumstance arose, as it had before. All who came were taken to the correct cabinet in the right room, were left alone, were secretly videotaped as they looked in vain and left in frustration. Their requisitions, along with a photocopy of their identity papers and a transcript of their visit conversation, created a new file in a cabinet upstairs labeled “Shelepin searchers.” That one was fattening nicely, into its fourth drawer in a second cabinet, but nobody except the Deputy Director himself and a few of the KGB old-timers had access to it. When the archivist dared to suggest that the file be one of those entered into the new computer, he had been told it was not intended for easy recall. He wondered why Shelepin, the apostle of deception and disinformation who had been ousted by the Khrushchev reformers, was
suddenly of such interest, but the archivist knew better than to ask his superiors.

“The purpose of your research?”

“Family history,” the man said.

“I think an uncle of mine may have been related by marriage to someone in the Shelepin family,” the young woman explained. “I am a television journalist. It might make an interesting reportage.”

The archivist nodded encouragingly, as if accepting all that. Her identity papers, in which the requisition was folded, showed her to be a Latvian—but a Russian Latvian, one of the “near abroad,” those waiting to be made citizens of the broken-away republic. Her television station, if he recollected correctly, broadcast in Russian, and was probably unpopular with native Latvians, who wanted the Russian-speakers out. Yet she had a Latvian name: Liana Krumins.

Rather than let his curiosity show, he waved over his assistant and told him to accompany them to the stacks. When the trio were out of earshot, the archivist turned on the taping system and brought the picture of his visitors up on his monitor.

“Is this where the files have always been?” he could hear the woman with the chopped-short hair ask the attendant.

“You are in Lubyanka,” the guide answered. “Up to three years ago the rooms on this floor were prison cells.”

“This is where the torture went on?” the man in the civilianized uniform asked. The archivist turned from the monitor and reached for the man’s internal passport: Arkady Volkovich, sixty-six, Russian from St. Petersburg. The stamping showed he had been to Riga four times this year.

“All you have heard is true,” the guide was saying to them. “This was the central spot for all the evil that was inflicted on the Soviet peoples for seventy years.”

He opened the door to a cell and pointed, with perverse pride, to a wall with manacles still attached, an identifying sign beneath it. “It was felt that this was the most suitable place for the records of those years when the old KGB oppressed us. God knows, it’s secure enough.” Farther on, he touched another door: “This is where Wallenberg was executed. The Swedes were never told.”

The archivist, watching from his station, switched to a camera in the
room where searchers for these particular files were led. The man and young woman entered, were shown the drawer and given a work table. The guide said, “When you’re finished, call for me down the hall. Please be neat with the files, and bring what you want for photocopying. It’s five thousand rubles a page this month, or one dollar, or one mark. I should warn you, you may be searched afterward, because we don’t want to lose any original material.” He left them to the privacy of their monitored search.

It seemed to the archivist, who had observed much idle rummaging since the files were half-opened to the public, that the man, who was leading the young woman through the search, knew the particular file he was looking for. He opened one drawer, checked the headings of the musty records, then went to another. In the third cabinet, he came across what he was apparently seeking, wrenched the file out of the tightly packed drawer, and placed it on the table. Before plunging in, the veteran looked at the three-inch-thick accordion-pleated file in its entirety.

“It’s been sanitized,” he told the woman.

“How can you tell?”

He showed her the broken pleats that revealed an old file, once stuffed, now slimmed by gleaning; the strings that tied it were worn at their outer edges where they had once held the bulging contents. “But let’s go through it systematically,” Arkady said, emptying the contents on the table in an orderly fashion. “They may have missed a clue to the whereabouts of the son.”

After turning over each page, he handed it to the young woman, who tidily replaced it in the folder. He stopped at a newspaper clipping. “The obituary of Shelepin’s brother. Make a list of these survivors.” She started to write down the names, but he stopped her. He shook his head in wonderment. “Must have been a hundred people go through this file, but they didn’t know how to look for the boy. Here—take this and this, and this, for the photocopier.”

“Not the clipping? I want the clipping.”

“Can’t draw attention to it.” He held it for a moment, apparently weighing the risks in stealing it. The archivist, watching the monitor screen, hoped he would, but the man returned it to the folder. “Now, do we dare ask for the file on—” He dropped his voice, lest the room was bugged, but the archivist could read his lips forming a “B.”

“We’re here, why not?” The young woman was impulsive, perhaps daring; the observing archivist hoped it would lead her into trouble. “They can’t put us in jail for asking. It’s not as if he’s a nonperson anymore. This is not the old days.”

“It’s not the new days either. You ask them,” he said, “after I leave. You’re the journalist.”

The man in the khaki jacket with the insignia removed, Arkady Volkovich, insisted to his superiors in the Feliks
organizatsiya
that he had not made a mistake in letting Liana Krumins press ahead to the next file.

“She is a journalist, a real one. It is not a cover,” Arkady explained. “I gave her a name to look up. Following it to the next file was the natural thing for her to do.”

“Did it alert the archivist?” The question came from a former high official in the KGB, ousted as soon as the Yeltsin reformers took over, who had found a hard-liner’s home in the Feliks organization’s power goals and investigative techniques.

“If it did, he gave no sign.” As Liana had gone off with the guide to the next filing room, Arkady had chatted up the apparatchik in charge, a drone more interested in his television set than his work. The Red Army veteran had told the archivist the file had been picked apart over the years and contained little of family interest. But the woman was a reporter, he added, and had to impress everyone with her thoroughness. Chopped her hair short to look like a man; never any makeup, not even to cover a pimple; furrowed brow, pursed lips—you know how they get. The archivist had acknowledged that with a grunt and presented no bureaucratic obstacles to Liana Krumins’s quest for the file on the survivor at Shelepin’s brother’s funeral.

A heavyset woman with iron-gray hair at the middle of the table wanted to know what had happened after Arkady left Liana behind at Lubyanka. She spoke with authority. The veteran saw how everyone in
the stark basement room, including the former high official of the KGB, deferred to her.

“I waited across the square, as she and I had agreed,” he began. “At the bazaar where the Kazakhs sell their copper pots and pans. After about an hour and a half, she came out. You can’t cross the square because of the traffic going around the pedestal, so she turned left and walked down Mysnitskaya Ulitsa to the bookstore.”

“Was she followed?”

“No, Madame Nina. I would have seen.”

“Were you followed?”

“If so, they were very good.” The sauciness of that remark did not seem to please the woman at the center. Her impassive cross-examination troubled him. He knew her only by her first name, which was a diminutive at that; her hair was drawn back in a tight bun. In a matronly dress and a heavy cardigan sweater, she peered at him through thick glasses.

Arkady was not fearful of the former KGB man, or of the Chechen hooligan with the assault weapon standing against the wall. As a courier in various branches of Internal Security, he had come across more than his share of those. But Madame Nina gave him the impression she could see through him, which troubled a man with much to hide.

He had learned that after the breakup of the Bratsky Krug, or Circle of Brothers, in the early 1990s, a new criminal politburo had been formed. Seven
avtoritety
, authorities, controlled the major population centers from Petersburg to Vladivostok, each with its representatives from the new capitalist mafiya, the old
vory
underworld, the former KGB, the Caucasian enforcers. The summit meetings of the inner
avtoritet
were held in Riga, capital of newly free Latvia, out of reach of the new KGB and with easy air access to the West.