Sleeper Spy (13 page)

“Maybe you can, but I can’t. Look, Ace—if whatshername is willing to shape up and go to work and not act like a snotnose star, I might be willing to go ahead with her.”

“Think about it some more. Call me back in ten minutes.”

The matchmaker signaled to his secretary to get his other client back.

“Viveca, I let him have it. I know you told me not to, but I just could not abide being the one who brought you together with someone who caused you such pain. So I told him off, and then some.”

“Wish you hadn’t, Matt. How did the pompous son of a bitch react?”

“He was penitent, of course. And the prospect of losing half of a huge advance, and having to find a less experienced television newswoman to be a partner, has him deeply troubled. But he deserved it. Now let’s be constructive. Before I put out my feelers in the industry, tell me: can you think of someone—young, ambitious, good-looking, willing to put up with an iconoclast in pursuit of a global exclusive—someone I can recommend at your network?”

“Nobody,” she said instantly. Ace suspected she knew of a few news presenters breathing down her neck who would leap at the chance. “And don’t peddle the idea around yet. If he’s genuinely sorry, and willing to act like a grown-up, we may be able to salvage it.”

“You’re sure? What if he backslides, under some tension? He may be driven by his own insecurity to assert some macho dominance. Will you be able to handle a somewhat volatile character?”

“If it means a lot to my image and my career, I can handle anybody.”

The agent nodded gravely, made a date for the three of them in his office, and slapped his chest to hang up.

When Irving called again, the agent said, “You won. She says she’ll behave herself. But Viveca is a nervous wreck, everybody knows that. The stress of climbing up the greasy pole of television politics to talk to thirty million people is unbelievable. Frankly, my friend, I’m worried. What if, down the line, she gets scared and starts acting like a star to cover up her vulnerability? I’ve done some more checking around, and her reputation is as you suggested, what we used to call high-strung.”

“Borderline psychotic is what they call it now.”

“That’s unkind and inaccurate, and you know it. But will you be able to handle the creative tension between you?”

“For a whopping advance, I can handle anything. This story needs a big investment.”

Ace told him the time and place of their meeting, with not a word to be mentioned of her apology or regret. He took the earphones and microphone off his head, wrapped them in a tidy package with the
cellular unit, took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and lay down on the couch for his restorative preluncheon nap. If the world of books collapsed and there were no more role for literary agents, he could always become an arranger of high-finance hostile mergers, or a UN mediator, or a marriage counselor.

Irving arrived at Ace’s office, with its depressing black mirrors, determined to give the knockout television announcer a second chance.

He reminded himself not to call Viveca “kid.” That was what he called everybody, whatever their age, but some people took it to be a put-down, and the reporter, though content to be known as an iconoclast, did not want to insult anybody inadvertently. As Ace had explained, Viveca Farr had lived a tough life, was under debilitating strain, and had to be gentled along. She had expressed her apology to Ace for mouthing off like a goddam star—which she was not, having only the trappings of incipient stardom—and Irving was not about to be a sore winner. He resolved to keep in mind his primary interest in her was to get the big book advance, enabling him to travel and hire Mike Shu’s accounting help. Any other reporting service she could perform in advancing the story would be gravy.

He would also, if she showed a hint of the proper respect, teach her a thing or two about the news business. She had spunk, Fein conceded, but it was of the lashing-out variety, sometimes useful—he used it himself on occasion—but only when intentional. He suspected her spunkiness to be brittle, not running to intellectual honesty or anywhere near moral courage. The trick, as he worked it out in his head walking down the hallway, looking in doorways, browsily snooping, was to consider her not so much a colleague but a necessary source of sustenance. And he was always prepared to do nip-ups, changing mood and approach, turning alternately sweet and sour, confiding and confidential, to milk a source. Sources deserved protection so as to earn the respect that comes from reliability.

In the doorway ahead, he could see her seated in a side chair, legs crossed, high-heeled blue shoes and a matching suit, real blond hair without one strand loose, not a long drink of water but a nice gulp. He was obliged to protect his source of funds. He hoped Ace would ignore the previous meeting and plunge directly into the business at hand: preparing enough of an outline to attract a substantial offer.

“Irving! Viveca here was telling me of your mutual interest in fine wines. I never knew you were a oenologist. To celebrate on pub date, I shall send you a case of my favorite, a Château Cheval Blanc.”

Irving forced a smile at her, and she blazed a much better one back. Viveca’s smile was some power smile, but warm and authoritative. Crisp. Everything about her was crisp: her demeanor, her direct gaze, the alert way she carried her head, the sound of her voice. Even her physical fragility had an element of toughness; if he were a peanut brittle sponsor, he’d snap up her show.

“I got some traction out of F Street,” he told them, plunking himself down on the couch.

“What is the significance of F Street?” asked Ace.

“And what put you in traction?” she said.

Patience, he told himself; don’t be a wise-ass and blow the deal. “One of the intelligence types,” he explained, “who works out of the CIA house on F Street down the block from the Old EOB, gave me a few more leads to go on. My dunno sheet is longer than ever, but that’s a good sign.”

“Your what shit?” Ace looked offended at the language in front of a lady.

“My dunno sheet. When I’m at the beginning of a story, like everybody else, I draw up a list of what I know. Then I crack my head over it and draw up a sheet with all I do not know. That second list, the dunno sheet, is the hard part, but it’s what gets you going. You have to keep adding to it, but there comes a moment in digging out a story when it begins to get shorter.”

“Start with what you know,” said Ace. “Like—who are the Feliks people you had me ask that attractive Russian, Davidov, about?”

“The Feliks people are the Outs of the KGB, plus a network, fairly large, of former communist big shots. Tough bunch who dream of the mean old days. They have ties to the Russian mafiya—a network of fastbuck
operators and Lepke-type gangstercrats who give capitalism a bad name.”

Viveca put in a question. “Who’s the boss of all bosses?”

At least she didn’t try to put it in Italian. “Dunno. Good question, though—I’ll add it to my list. Anyway, this association of no-goodniks, the Feliks people, squirreled away a bunch of money just before the Soviet Union went under. The guy who handled the squirreling-away was a sleeper.”

“A sleeper,” said Viveca. Not with a rising inflection, to ask a question, but as a kind of statement, as if she knew what the hell he was talking about, which Irving was sure she did not. She didn’t know what a Lepke type was, either—he remembered Louis “Lepke” Buchalter as an extortionist labor racketeer in the thirties—but at least she ran up a quick flag on this one.

“A sleeper agent,” he said, spelling it out without patronization, “is a spy who was planted here a generation back. His assignment was to burrow into the American woodwork and make a respectable life for himself. He never did any spying, never took any chances, but just got himself into position for a big job when the time came.”

“How do you know it’s a man?” Viveca asked.

That caused him to look at her blankly. His original tipster had said “he”; Clauson had referred to the sleeper as “he,” and suggested a man to handle the impersonation; Irving had just assumed it was a he. Could the sleeper be a woman? No; he left a pregnant wife behind in a marriage that had to be annulled. “It’s a man, and I’ll explain why later, but that was a good question. Assume nothing.” Then she did something else Irving liked: she pulled a notebook out of her purse and began to take notes.

“In the early summer of 1968,” Irving continued, “a very bright kid of eighteen—trained in their American Village, where they feed you apple pie and coffee and tell you Joe DiMaggio’s brothers were named Vince and Dom—was selected to be planted here. The choice of the kid came right from the top of the KGB, so there may be a connection there. I’m told he left a pregnant young wife behind.”

“One of those.”

Irving could not envision Viveca Farr identifying with a jilted bride. “Either he was forced into marriage because he knocked her up and left
because he wasn’t a family man, or—more likely, given the assignment—this was a very dedicated young commie. Okay, a generation passes. Gorbachev comes on, the Soviet economy goes in the tank, the Baltics start to pull out. Just before the shit hits the fan, the KGB sends the sleeper’s handler to Barbados—that’s in the Caribbean somewhere—to unload all the Party holdings onto this guy. He’s now an international banker here in the U.S. and knows what to do to bury big assets, or even to make a buck or two investing them.”

“The Odessa File,”
Ace interrupted, for Viveca’s benefit. “Frederick Forsyth. The Nazis hid the German gold after the war hoping to bring back Hitler. Helluva novel, big paperback—”

“Ace, you’re starting up again,” Irving warned. “This is not a novel.”

“Look, a plot’s a plot, this one’s a proven winner. If a publisher can’t sum up a book in a few words, forget it. Irving, all we have to do is tell this under a seal of secrecy to a publisher and he’s going to say, ‘Gee, a post–Cold War
Odessa File,
’ and he’ll snap it up.”

Irving leaned across the agent’s desk. “This is what is happening right now in the world, Ace. It could mean the overthrow of the Russian government, bloody civil war, a new arms race, God knows what-all. Nobody knows it but me and a few spooks and one underground banker who may just be a goddam financial genius.” How could he impress on this man the scope and importance of the story? He took Ace’s tie in his hand and pulled the little man to within three inches of his face. “It’s a fucking … world … beat.”

Viveca’s potato-chip voice came from behind him. “What happened when the Soviet control met the sleeper agent in Barbados?”

The reporter whipped around. “That’s number one on the dunno sheet. Possibility: the two of them got in cahoots, said let’s steal the whole bundle and screw both the Russian government and the Feliks people. Possibility two: they’re working together right now to invest the money and set up front companies and take over banks to deliver to the new Russian government and be heroes. Three: they’re running up the pot until they get enough to deliver to the Feliks people to overthrow the elected government. Four: one of them killed the other.”

After a long moment, Ace said, “I like possibility four.”

“Actually, four makes the most sense,” Irving said. “The handler would logically have stripped the files in Moscow before setting out,
because the government was in a state of flux. There must be at least a couple of higher-ups in the KGB who know all about the sleeper. The handler would surely have reported back to Moscow by now—if he were alive.”

“Reported back to whom?” The crisp voice, the schoolmarm’s “whom.”

“Makes no difference, if he’s dead,” said Ace.

“I’m guessing the handler is the one that’s dead,” Irving said, basing it on a hunch of Clauson’s, whose identity he was not ready to reveal to his colleagues. “That’s because only the sleeper would know how to handle the assets and be in a position to conceal them or return them.”

“If the sleeper killed the control, as you suspect,” reasoned Viveca, who was doing better at this than Irving had a right to expect, “he would have done it to keep the money from the Russian state. That means the sleeper wants to deliver it to the hard-liners, the Feliks people. Or keep it himself.”

“Which is why,” Irving led them along, “our boy Davidov in Moscow must be having fits. Somebody up top in the KGB must know who the sleeper is, but if the link of the control is broken, how does the new management of the KGB make contact with their boy?”

“You’re sure that some of the KGB higher-ups must know his identity,” Viveca said.

“Yeah, well, they must—but for some reason, they don’t seem to. Why not? That’s also on the dunno sheet.”

“What’s to keep the sleeper from becoming an entrepreneur?” asked Ace. “Money is a powerful motivator, as the agenting life has taught me.”

“Gotta remember, this spy was indoctrinated when he was a kid, in the old days, when communism was an ideology. He sat tight for over twenty years and then did what he was told when he was activated. He’s a true believer—my guess is that he’s not in business for himself.”