Sleeper Spy (25 page)

“And if this journalistic enterprise entraps a foreign agent here in control of vast sums, which is surely in the public interest—would I become the target of an investigation?”

Clauson turned to the general counsel. “Perhaps you are in a better position to give this gentleman the legal advice he seeks.”

“Mr. Dominick, you know the difference between right and wrong, especially in the financial world. If you see evidence of a crime,” said the counsel, joining in the general dictation to the record, “or have reason to suspect that someone is an unregistered foreign agent, you have the obligation to report it to local law-enforcement authorities or to the FBI. The CIA is not a law-enforcement agency. If in the course of your ‘journalistic enterprise,’ as you call it, you are tempted to commit a crime—don’t do it. Simple as that. The end, no matter how worthy, or in this case newsworthy, does not justify unlawful means.”

“Good advice,” said Dominick, and rose to go. He took Clauson’s thin hand into his own large hands and shook it enthusiastically.
“Da svidaniya,”
he said to the retirement-list counterspy. “That means ‘goodbye’ in Russian. I don’t know how they say it in Kiev.”

“Sorry about that. I hope your short course in Russian serves you in good stead someday. Goodbye.”

After the banker left, the counsel said: “So what the hell was all that about?”

Clauson rose and steered him out of the office into the hallway, requiring the counsel to activate his personal recorder, which meant starting a whole new file, unless the old hand was wearing an electronic blocker.

“That was an independent individual seeking the color of law,” said Clauson, “which is not ours to give. Frankly, I wish him well. How I would have liked to be able to tell him that the sleeper was planted here some twenty years ago, and was activated four or five years ago. That although the sleeper may pose no direct danger to us—hence this Agency’s determined lack of interest—he does pose a danger to the stability of our Russian ally, or partner in peace, or friendly rival, or whatever we call our former adversary, which my old boss used to call our deadly enemy.”

“But you’re not going to file a reclama, are you, Walt?” The request for a review of a policy decision caused no end of paperwork, or whatever they called paperwork done on word processors with no printout capability.

“No, no. I just wanted you to know that the Agency is constrained from doing what I consider to be its duty in an affair of state. That I think it’s scandalous that the FBI is uninformed and the Federal Reserve is asleep. And that our visitor today, if he chooses to become the impersonator of the sleeper, could easily get himself killed.”

The general counsel suspected that Clauson knew more than anybody else in the Agency wanted to know about the KGB sleeper. How wise was the Director to close down official Agency interest? Perhaps they should have been more direct in telling Dominick to see the FBI. But it was not an attorney’s job to intervene in evaluations or operations, unless they ran afoul of the law and required legalization through a presidential finding.

“Send me the transcript, brother Clauson, and I’ll buck it upstairs. You were not in the least out of line.”

“… and that’s tonight’s update, Viveca Farr reporting.”

The red light went off and she lowered her eyes from the prompter. She gathered up the blank white pages that stood for a script, tapped them together on the desk with leftover authority, and heard the director say on the floor loudspeaker, “Perfect as always, Viveca.” A floor manager came to remove the mike from her lapel; when he dawdled over the simple task, she took it off and handed it to him, extricating herself from the wire in her jacket. She swiveled to watch the monitor replay. When her news spot did not readily appear, she snapped, “Let’s see it.”

“Rewinding.” The director took his own good time, knowing it would annoy her. She had asked for a new director, but the network had turned her down, because this was the third replacement she’d asked for in a month. It was as uncomplicated a directorial job as existed; one camera started with a medium shot with Viveca on the left, the bites of film over her shoulder illustrating what she read, the last ten seconds slowly filling the screen with her face.

Those final seconds belonged to Viveca; they were the equivalent of “Walter time,” the seven minutes out of twenty-three contractually guaranteed to network anchors that their faces would be on-screen. She had mastered the technique of memorizing the last ten seconds of the script so that her eyes would not appear to be reading as she looked at the prompter words scrolling up across the camera lens.

Her heart was pounding, as it always did after the light went off. She was rock-steady during the moment on the air, but beforehand she was tense and remote, and afterward she was, for no reason, frightened, and
covered it by being snappish. She knew that; it was life; others who could not do what she did would have to adapt to it. And a rewind should take only a few seconds. Her impatience boiled over: “Roll it, for crissake!”

The replay began. Her delivery was near-perfect—she would prefer more modulation in her voice between a summit headline and an obituary of an actress, but that was her own high standard, nobody else’s. The director, she noted, had been at least two seconds late on dollying in, and the close-up seemed hurried to her.

“Your cue was late,” she said, “unless you want to blame the cameraman.”

“Sor-ry, Viveca, I’ll get it right one of these nights.”

She threw the fake script across the set, pages fluttering, and stormed into makeup. Evelyn was quick and comforting; she closed the door—nobody was to use the other chair when Viveca Farr was being made up—tilted the chair back, and put cold, wet cotton compresses over Viveca’s eyes. “You’re the only one who knows what the hell she’s doing around here,” Viveca told the comforting aide as the heavy pancake was removed with cold cream followed by an astringent.

“You looked marvelous, if I do say so myself,” the makeup technician said, dabbing and wiping. “This jacket was a good color for you, too, ’specially with the lighter hair.” She stepped back, tilting her head for a good look. “It looked better on the screen, to tell the truth. You have a knack for that.”

“I don’t dress for myself. I dress for the fifty-year-old men who run the network and all the women at home who don’t want to be threatened.”

“Did you see the new writer? Cute. Young enough to be my son.”

“You tell him to keep the sentences short, then. I had to rewrite the whole thing.” She stretched her head back to let the woman remove the makeup from her neck. “If I was short with you before the show, Evelyn, I apologize. I sometimes go into a real funk when the director is bad and the writer is new.”

“You’re always impossible before a show; the word around here is ‘Stay out of her way.’ And right after the show, for a couple minutes, you’re hell on wheels. But then you turn into a human being, like now. Maybe the makeup turns you into a monster.”

Viveca turned that over in her mind. “Am I such a monster?”

“You’re a pro, like me. They hate me, too, because I’m the union shop steward and I don’t kowtow. Screw ’em all. You’re breathing down the anchor’s neck on the evening news, and he’s terrified. So’s his producer.”

“You know for a fact, or just hear it?”

“They don’t talk to me, they talk to each other like I’m not here. They say all the surveys show the viewers trust you more than anybody.”

Viveca knew that was the Holy Grail of anchorhood: not smooth delivery, not familiarity with the material, not even good looks, but trust. It was why she was afraid to fix her slightly crooked nose; she would be trusted less. In the combination of news business and show business and corporate business that was the television business, trust was all.

She had come up fast—too fast, the newsies said—but she knew her strength was not in knowing the nuances of political or economic stories. She could do a human-interest interview with empathy and give a quick summary with flair, and if “paying your dues” meant sitting in the rain staking out a dodging news source, she was not prepared to pay. As Evelyn said, screw ’em.

“All finished. You want a light foundation and a little eyeshadow for going home?”

Irving Fein was picking her up here at the studio; he was probably in the Green Room now, where she had told him to go to watch her spot. She didn’t need any makeup to impress him; on the contrary, he was probably more impressed by pure plain in a woman. Tonight, at her apartment, he was going to review some of the facts about the real sleeper’s background and physical characteristics for her to convey to Edward. Was Dominick enough of an actor? That was an area she could help the banker with; she knew plenty about putting on a performance.

“Pretend you’re not finished, Evelyn.” Irving could wait.

Evelyn understood; she turned off one of the two lights in the small room and let her rest, slowly rubbing some cream around her temples. Viveca began to relax; her thoughts turned to a man she used to date and the way she had come to numb herself to the verbal abuse she had to take from him. She had needed somebody’s company at the time because she hated to be friendless, as she was now. But she no longer put up with a hint of a put-down; that was why she would take none of
that patronizing lip from Irving Fein, no matter how badly her reputation as a newsie needed building up.

The thought of the man she had met earlier in the week in Memphis was soothing to her mind. Edward Dominick was not like her father, who was a fraud in many ways, but more like the man she thought her father had been when she was a girl. Dominick was secure; sure of himself and his abilities; not in the least condescending, except to Irving, whose great-reporter snottiness invited a counterattack of condescension. And brave; this assignment, though Irving was flip about it, might have its risks.

Their Memphis skytop lunch had gone well. She found him to be a sexy man in his way, partly because no romantic involvement was in prospect. She would have the respect of a man she respected at work; that had not happened to her in as long as she could remember. She encouraged herself to think this sleeper story could be fun to work on; Edward might turn out to be a real hero in the post-book docudrama.

A hard two knocks on the door nearly jolted her out of the chair. “Viveca! You in there?”

The makeup woman wiped the cream off the newscaster’s forehead in a single swipe and opened the door. The head of the newsroom and the director looked agitated.

“There’s been a hijacking, Air Force One, for God’s sake. Come into the studio quick—we’re gonna have to bust into programming and go on the air.”

“Has it been announced? You sure?”

“We ran the AP bulletin out of Washington. C’mon, quick.”

Her first thought, twisting out of the chair, was that she had no makeup on. Then: “Air Force One? With the President on it?”

“We don’t know for sure, but probably.” They were all running down the hall.

“Where’s Connie?”

“Out in the goddam Hamptons, two hours from here. We’re sending a chopper.”

“Sam—where’s he?”

“He’s supposed to be here in an hour, but he’s out of pocket, doesn’t answer the beeper. So there’s nobody to anchor until then but you. You okay?” She nodded yes, but she was instantly terrified. A breaking story
was not her strong suit; what the hell could she say with no copy to read and nobody to interview? This could be the end of her career.

They burst into the newsroom, where everyone’s eyes were fixed on monitors displaying wire service bulletins.

“I don’t want to step on anybody’s story, is all. What do I have to work with? Is there any wire copy? Where’s our writer?”

“There’s a monitor on your anchor desk—you can read wire copy from that,” the director said. “I’ll be on your earphone with whatever I can get.”

“The President is aboard,” said a man on a telephone, “and the SecState, and the First Lady. And the press secretary and a press pool and everybody.”

“Find out where the VP is!” the producer called. “Give me a feed from the White House briefing room now, quick, never mind if nobody’s there.” To Viveca, he said, “I’ll try to find somebody to sit at the desk with you, help you fill. Terrorism expert, gotta be reachable quick. Or another reporter.”

She thought of Irving. He had written a whole book about terror and the Mideast, and he was in the Green Room, twenty steps away.

“CNN’s on with it,” the director groaned, pointing to a monitor. “Maybe we can still beat the other nets.”

Viveca started to say something, but her voice choked. She raced for the Green Room, the producer right behind her, saying no, no, the other way.

Irving Fein was lying all over the couch, eating from the lavish spread set on the coffee table out for guests, watching the network sitcom. She had never been so glad to see anyone in her life; now she had a journalist with a reputation who could share the blame.