Sleeper Spy (17 page)

He spoke their language. Passable Russian, yes, because his mother used it at home, but just as important was his understanding of the language of bookkeeping. He did not mind, left by himself in a roomful of records, turning page after page of accounts, sometimes looking for a specific shipment or transfer, more often just browsing, letting the records speak to him. The technology he brought along was useful,
enabling him to scan lists of figures into his subnotebook, downloading by modem to his New York office every night, but more useful was an inborn sense of what was missing, an attraction to the page or entry that was not there, like a black hole to an astronomer.

Michael was grateful that Irving had been ingenious enough to arrange a cover story that was fairly close to the truth. Deceit, even deviousness, was not Michael Shu’s way. His City College chums had teased him for being a straight arrow, but he was proud of his hard-earned certification, and found himself stammering whenever he had to mislead anyone. “You could have been a master criminal,” Irving once told him, “except you always get red in the face and go ‘duh-duh-duh’ when you try to lie. How do you manage to cheat on your wife? Only Chinaman I ever saw blush.”

More recently, Irving had told him to fix the cover story in his mind: “You are an accountant working for an author writing a book about the richest man in the world. Who is it? We don’t know yet. But the trail of a mysterious American billionaire leads to the old Soviet Union, because that’s where communist officials were notoriously corrupt in arms and oil dealings. That will explain our interest in dealings in 1989 and the early nineties, when our boy made his first huge profits. You got it?”

Michael got it, repeated the cover story to himself, and was almost comfortable with it. Reporters did not have a license from the state of New York to protect. Certified public accountants did.

Sitting in the Baltic sunshine, Michael Shu communed with his two-pound computer, to him the most lightly pleasant of luncheon companions. He called it Irving.

The spreadsheet of his analysis of fund-flow charts from the Soviet central bank greeted him in infinite shades of color. The peak in the outflow of money had been in February of 1989, ostensibly in grain purchases; he would have to see if the harvest had been bad the year before, and if the Federal Reserve in New York showed funds coming from Moscow central. That could mean that the fund flow was corrupt. Then his friends in the lower echelons of Commodity Credit at Agriculture could tell him where the hard currency came from, maybe gold transfers, and if there had been any suspicion of skimming, or “supplier commissions.” The data were available, not secret, or at least not a big secret, but nobody crossed international lines to compare figures. The
East went its way in those days, the West the other way, each uninterested in preventing fraud in the other’s domain. But by following the money now, he could spot the phony operators then, and discern the pattern of the sleeper’s operation.

He stored that in Irving and called up his notes on a visit the day before to the
spetsfond
, the “special collection” in the library founded by Peter the Great. That trip to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg had been an offbeat treat for a day off: it was where every book and publication that had been banned by the czars and the Soviets had been stored. The
spetsfond
was the world’s largest collection of forbidden literature, from soft pornography to hard dissidence, a treasury of the Marxist politically incorrect.

But Shu’s excursion turned out not to be a day off. When the accountant learned of the fire that had destroyed hundreds of thousands of books in late 1988, that struck him as no accident. He asked one of the librarians about catalogs of deposits to the library from the KGB dealing with money movement, or art treasure movement, or gold bullion transfers. She said she thought some items were on that subject, which she remembered because that was outside the ideology-suppressing mission of the library. Not all of those extraneous, hard-to-catalog files were destroyed in the fire; she recalled that some records had been taken to a meat-packing cold storage facility in the suburbs for safekeeping, along with fire-damaged and waterlogged books. When Michael asked if he was the first to ask her about those records, the librarian—nice lady, happy to help—said no, a man from the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry had been around the week before to ask about published articles on the Cherlyabinsk-65 plutonium-processing complex in Siberia.

If I wanted to put aside a little money for a rainy day, Michael asked himself, and I had any asset in the country to choose from, what would I pick? Not diamonds; a few hundred million dollars’ worth would upset the market, unless De Beers agreed to take them off your hands and off the market. Gold would be good; big enough market, asks no questions. Oil is fungible, valuable, and storable, but requires a series of fronts.

Stuff to make nuclear bombs? Hard to store, a bitch to transport, but a much-wanted asset in rogue nations. He jabbed the key on his computer to store his St. Petersburg trip, called up his dunno sheet—
an Irving Fein investigative-accounting device—and added a question about the portability of plutonium.

The subnotebook beeped and blinked a warning of low battery. Michael fished in his pocket for a couple of AA batteries, found none, but did not panic. Across the street, in the medieval tower basement, was a souvenir shop, where he was sure what he needed could be found. He was equally certain the place was infested with pickpockets preying on tourists. He put his paper across his plate to make sure nobody took his table and signaled to the waiter he’d be right back.

Clutching Irving tightly, he crossed the street and went into the ground-level shop. A customer was dickering over a long-lens camera; that struck Michael as a pretty expensive souvenir for Latvia, which specialized in knitted shawls and woodcarvings, but it turned out the man was just showing it to the proprietor. They shifted their attention to the subnotebook, admiring Irving’s size, power, and ability to operate on batteries available anywhere; friendly people, spoke Russian, like most of the population of Riga. That’s what bugged the Latvians, Michael knew: Stalin had Russified the country, pumping in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, while deporting Latvians to Siberia. The Latvian-Russian split in the country was now fifty-fifty, tilting heavily Russian in Riga; the newly independent Latvians were letting relatively few of the Russian-speaking residents vote. Irving—the reporter, not the computer—had told him the Feliks people were Russians who chose to operate in Latvia, unwelcome in Riga but safely out of the reach of Davidov’s directorate of the KGB in Moscow.

He returned to the restaurant to find an elderly man seated at his table.

“Excuse me, but this is my table. I had to go across the street to the shop for a minute.”

“I know. The photographer in that shop is taking pictures of us right now, as we are speaking.” The man in the khaki jacket made a pouring motion to the waiter for a pot of tea. “He works for the Russian KGB.”

Michael felt a thrill; now he was in the business. “Can he hear what we say?”

“No.” The elderly man picked up the sugar bowl, emptied the packages onto the table, put them back one by one. “It is what they call a visual cover. They want to see who meets you. I want them to see me meeting you.”

Irving had once instructed him never to ask questions of somebody who was trying to convey information. The way the reporter put it was “Never murder a man who’s committing suicide,” but that was his colleague’s way of adding drama to a simple instruction.

“My name is Arkady Volkovich.” He reached a hand across the table. “Let us pose shaking hands.” Michael shook it cordially, wondering why this man wanted this picture together to be studied by Moscow.

“Why do I want us to be seen together?” Silence worked. “Because we have nothing to hide. You met Liana, our television news presenter, in the grand hall of the Metropole in Moscow. She suggested you come here and you would be contacted by one of us. No secrets.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“We call ourselves the
organizatsiya
, a social group. You call us the Feliks people. The KGB, or Federal Security or whatever they call themselves now, suspect we may be plotting to drag the near abroad back into the old Soviet Union. That charge is a fiction, of course, but it gives the KGB what they need—an enemy and a purpose. It provides employment for many of their agents who would otherwise be out on the street.”

“You mean it’s all a matter of budgets?” Michael didn’t believe him, but the story had a certain internal logic. The impression he had from Liana Krumins, however, was that the Feliks organization was large and strong, and that it was using her to try to get information out of the KGB files. He had been planning to pull up his notes about her and go over that fascinating Metropole dinner during dessert today; he had been saving it till last.

“Liana is not Russian,” his tablemate said. “She broadcasts in Russian, her mother is Russian, but her late father was a Latvian and she is a true Latvian.”

“Remarkable young woman.”

“More than you know. She was the student leader in the underground campaign for independence. Because she speaks Russian, she was the liaison with the dissidents and reformers in Moscow and Pete. Because she also speaks some English, she was the movement’s liaison with the Latvian émigrés in America.”

So that was how Irving Fein had come to know her; all Irving had told him was that a female Latvian reporter would meet him at the hotel in Moscow and put him in touch with the Feliks people.

“None of us knew it at the time,” Arkady was saying, talking freely, “but looking back, when she was nineteen years old, she was doing as much as anyone to begin the breakup of the Soviet Union. The key was here in the Baltic republics, where the Allies never recognized the Soviet annexation.”

“She must have political ambitions,” Michael offered, not asking a question.

His tablemate nodded, poking about in the sugar bowl for packets of artificial sweetener, which he pocketed. Maybe in his first search of the bowl he had been looking for a bugging device. “First she will become a person we all know in our homes on television every night. Then, within a decade, she will run for President of the United Baltic Republics, and lead them under the NATO umbrella.” Arkady shook his head as if to admit the possibility of the unbelievable. “Did Liana tell you about her ambitions?”

“Didn’t tell me anything of the sort. Nothing personal came up.” Michael felt his face getting hot. Liana had been awfully frank about her future, but he hadn’t sent that incidental intelligence about her grandiose political ideas on to Irving in New York. Nor was he about to confirm it to this stranger.

“Sounds crazy,” his possible new ally summed up, “and I remember saying the same thing five years ago about her notions of independence for Latvia. How did your associate Fein become friendly with her?”

That, Michael knew instantly, was the question Irving had warned him not to answer. The truth was that Irving had stopped in Riga some years back doing a general piece on captive-nation dissidents and looked her up on a friend’s tip. No coincidence; there weren’t that many interesting young women journalists in Riga at the time who were getting into trouble with the authorities and who spoke English. Could be she was the only one in town at the time, so they met and had a few drinks and she filled him in. Journalism is a small world, like accounting. Then, when Riga became an important spot for this sleeper story, Irving had a Latvian contact in Liana Krumins.

Nobody in the intelligence world would ever believe something as simple as that. Better the KGB and the Feliks people should think Irving and Liana were in cahoots—Michael liked that term, Irving used it all the time—because it made Irving more of a player, maybe a front for the CIA or the FBI, maybe someone who had a hint about the
sleeper’s whereabouts. When you are a player, people come to you with information to trade, or at least with questions that give you leads. Irving always said that acting as if you knew more than you did gave you traction.

“I have no idea what started their relationship,” Michael replied slowly. “It could have to do with their being in the same business. How did the Feliks people come to know her?”

“She has strong feelings against the KGB, as you know,” said Arkady. “So do we.” Michael knew that Irving wanted some inkling as to why the mafiya types were using this particular journalist, but the accountant got the feeling that Arkady did not know.

“Yeah, I got the impression she wasn’t friendly with the KGB.”

“You want to find this Russian in America who knows where are some hidden monies belonging to the former Soviet republics, including Latvia. So do we. How can we help you?”

Michael Shu was ready. “The Baltic states swapped food and manufactured goods to the central Gosplan for electricity and oil. There must have been an imbalance. How was it resolved? Where are the records of the swaps? Do you have any connections with the bank in Helsinki who can tell me of transactions from ’88 to ’91? Your association of young businessmen—Riga’s Group of Fifty—who’s their investment banker in New York? And do you know a person, low-level, I can see at your central bank tomorrow who monitors wire transfers?”

That was for starters. He watched Arkady Volkovich draw out an old-fashioned pencil and write the questions down in a pocket notebook, battered but ergonomic in its way. Michael wished the representative of the Feliks people would hurry; he wanted to go back to his hotel room and set up a videocassette recorder so he could make a tape of Liana’s Riga evening newscast to send to Irving.