Sleeper Spy (3 page)

That was not at all the reaction that Berensky had planned. Had he miscalculated the dosage? Was Control especially susceptible to sedation, or allergic to this drug? He tried to awaken the agent by slapping him and then with cold water on his head, with no success. The man would have to sleep it off. He lifted the light body and carried it in his arms into the closer bedroom, momentarily forgetting it was his own; then, rather than maneuver the limp Control through the small bathroom, the big man kicked away the garment bag and laid him down on Berensky’s own bed.

Irritated with himself for the miscalculation, he went out on the porch, sat on the steps to the sand, and took in the mild, starlit Caribbean night. He resolved never again to use any kind of drug on anybody until he had first studied the literature. In this case, the unexpected reaction was not a major problem; if Berensky decided against any extreme measure, Control would get up in the morning with a headache and feel sheepish about drinking too much and passing out.

He looked at his watch; past ten-thirty. He decided to take a walk along the beach to think through the crisis posed by the death of the directorate chief. The music and lights of the casino attracted him for
a few moments; he looked from the outside, then started to walk back slowly. He needed only a month’s delay, to make a series of deals that would mushroom the fortune to a size that could be decisive to one or the other of the forces that would direct his motherland; surely Control could be talked into a month. The secondary decision about Control’s fate then made itself: Berensky would let him sleep it off.

The explosion ripped the roof off the cabin and lit up the night sky. Even at a distance down the beach, Berensky felt the shock and then the heat. Heart racing at the realization of the fiery end that had been meant for him, he folded his arms across his chest and watched the blaze destroy what was left of the bungalow and the bits of body in it. He had to admire the impeccable tradecraft: Control had prepared the elimination of Berensky in a way that permitted no successful investigation.

He had no further business in Barbados. The sleeper spent most of the rest of the moonlit night walking to the airport.

The pedestal remained in the center of the former Dzerzhinsky Square like a great unfilled tooth. The statue that had stood atop it, of Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Feliks,” the founder of Stalin’s secret police, had been toppled and dragged away in the heady days following Gorbachev’s downfall and the failed coup of 1989.

“That must have been a sight. Were you here, right at this window, to see it? How did it make you feel?”

The questions popping out of the American agent drew a studied smile from the Russian just installed as head of the Fifth Directorate of the Federal Security Ministry, called the Cheka in Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s long-ago day.

“I would hardly have been here in Lubyanka,” Nikolai Davidov countered, “unless as a prisoner in the torture cells downstairs. I was an academician at the time, something of a dissident.” He was exaggerating; he had been a reformer, perhaps even an oppositionist within the Party when that took some courage, but could hardly claim to have been one of those hardy souls who lived in constant fear of the Gulag. But agents, especially Americans, preferred Manichaean clarity to the shadowy ambiguities of life in the Soviet era.

“I was down there in the square just after the attempted coup,” Davidov recounted, “helping affix the cables to the statue so that the mob, the people, could pull it down.” In fact, the mob with its ropes could not manage the feat; Davidov had had to send for a government crane. But shading the truth, whether for dramatic effect or for more serious disinformation purposes, came as second nature to him.

The agent—an American literary agent, not a member of the intelligence
community—looked at him sharply. “You don’t strike me as the sort of person to be a high official in an organization like this.”

That pleased Davidov even as he frowned. The mustachioed Russian was tieless; his black leather jacket was draped casually over an office chair. He knew his easy demeanor and youthful good looks were the opposite of what Americans would expect in a high official of what they still called the KGB, especially the head of the directorate responsible for foreign economic intelligence.

“And what do you expect us to look like?”

“Fat and evil, like Beria in Stalin’s day. You don’t fit the stereotype. You’re out of character.”

“Ah, Ace—may I call you that?”

“You may not,” said the agent. “My name is Matthew McFarland. My lifelong friends call me Matt, and there aren’t many of them left, because I’ve had a very long life. My business associates and clients, one of which you may be lucky enough to become, call me Mr. McFarland. The only people who call me by that odious nickname ‘Ace’ ”—the supremely confident American spat out the word—“are my competitors and the rude or uninformed.”

The Russian held up his hands, palms out, to ward off the burst of irritation. Davidov had been made aware of this sensitivity of the man universally called Ace—it was detailed with gusto in the published profiles—but wanted to present a naiveté about American literary agents.

The KGB had something to sell: its secret files. Not files it had any need to keep confidential, of course; only those that would reflect discredit on the bad old days and rehabilitate victims of Stalin’s purges whose example would be useful today. More to the point, Davidov’s assignment was to sell files created by the KGB’s newly reinstated disinformation section to reveal secrets that never were. In the headquarters regrouping, old scores remained to be settled all over the world: selected foreign helpers had to be rewarded with silence, while expendable and expensive agents could be usefully burned.

The pose Davidov intended to strike for his agency was a genteel poverty. Here was the once-mighty Soviet security and espionage apparat, now come on hard budgetary times, reduced to peddling its innermost “family jewels,” as its CIA counterparts like to call the deepest secrets, turning to capitalist publishers for sustenance. It was illusory,
of course—internal security and foreign intelligence remained as well financed as before—but out of this illusion of weakness came a devious strength.

The charade required Western literary agents, especially the American superagents. Those middlemen conferred enough credibility on Russian writers, and on KGB documents, to persuade Western publishers to market the memoirs most useful to Russia today. Under the agents’ eager aegis, political reputations would be made and destroyed, historical myths demolished, and new fantasies created, to serve the purposes Nikolai Davidov and his colleagues had in mind. Best-sellers could be created, accompanied by much Western media attention, with the label “exposé.” Lenin once said the capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves; now that Russia had embraced capitalism, the sale of memoirs and secret documents was a nice variation on the Leninist theme. And it would generate some hard currency, always desirable for the directorate concerned with foreign economic intelligence.

“I withdraw the Ace. Mr. McFarland, then. Let us put aside this suspicion, rooted in a bygone age.” The Russian indicated a chair at a small table in front of his desk and took a chair opposite. Davidov picked up the brown glass ashtray and looked the question about smoking at his visitor; McFarland shook his head in distaste. The Russian sighed to himself and made ready to suffer through another meeting with an American who preferred an environment called “non.” He put aside the ashtray and took up a manila folder.

“The Kirov file,” he announced. “One of the great mysteries of the early Stalin era—”

“Not interested in ballet,” snapped Ace. “Not the Bolshoi, much less the Kirov. Never sell. People who like dancing don’t like books.”

Davidov did not respond right away. Did the American not know about the murder of Stalin’s rival, Kirov, the mayor of Leningrad, by one of the assassins working for Iron Feliks? Was Ace playing the fool? Of course, the St. Petersburg ballet school was named after the beloved mayor, and Rudolf Nureyev had made the name synonymous in the West with ballet rather than with Stalin’s treachery. But surely an American literary agent would know of the earlier, sinister meaning of the Kirov affair. An eminent Kremlinologist at Harvard had concocted a novel about Stalin’s murder of his popular rival: Ace must know that. Davidov concluded that McFarland was pretending to be ignorant of
Soviet history to the point of boorishness, thereby establishing a position of patronization. His estimation of his interlocutor rose a notch.

“Perhaps you have a particular secret in mind,” he inquired.

“Your Lee Harvey Oswald file was the obvious first choice,” said McFarland, “with the surveillance of Kennedy’s assassin when he was here. But you already gave that one away.”

Davidov let himself look pained. “Gave it away? We sold the literary rights, and then made a separate deal with Unimedia for the television rights. Maybe we could have gotten more, but that was last winter and we were desperate—”

“Babes in the woods, you were. No guaranteed paperback, no first serial sold beforehand, no percentage of the gross on movie rights, electronic rights never even mentioned in the contract—don’t you people know about CD-ROM or on-line publishing?” The agent slumped back in disgust. “No wonder you lost the Cold War. You don’t know the first thing about negotiation.”

Davidov did not respond to the American’s provocation, which he assumed was a negotiating ploy. He silently recalled SALT negotiations in which the Americans had been trapped into strategic disadvantage for decades, and the negotiations for agricultural purchases at the 1972 summit, which the Americans later indignantly called “the great grain robbery.” But what the literary agent said was troubling. If the Oswald file looked like a giveaway, it would lack credibility; only what was paid for dearly would be believed.

“On the other hand,” Ace went on, “you stripped that Kennedy file clean before you sold it. You probably have the real file for sale later. I can handle that for you, if you permit debriefings of the handlers that are still alive.”

Davidov shifted in his chair. Not one of the handlers in that case was alive; fortunately, the deposed apparatchiks had seen to that long ago.

A discreet knock and his aide, Yelena, entered with a written message. She was reformist and reliable; his predecessor had years before rescued her from the ranks of “swallows” assigned to seduce foreign diplomats and trained her to be an analyst. The note she handed him read: “Feliks visitors asking archivist for follow-up file. Cooperate or delay?”

“Cooperate, by all means,” he told her, flashing a grin, and as she left he tossed out a thought to the literary agent: “How about our man in
FDR’s Oval Office? We knew about Einstein’s letter that started the Manhattan Project before your President did.”

“Your guy who hit Trotsky sold that already, fingering Oppenheimer and Fermi. Sold pretty well, but the KGB man couldn’t produce the smoking gun, and you can’t get the scientific establishment riled up twice.”

Davidov refrained from pointing out that Stalin’s legendary hit man Sudaplatov, in his recent memoirs, had not revealed the identity of the mole in FDR’s Oval Office. He suspected that McFarland had been sent to see him with a specific project in mind, and this was preliminary sparring. “The Cuban missile crisis?”

“Never sell, after Dobrynin’s memoirs, and he got an up-front advance that guaranteed a first printing of a hundred thousand copies. Twelve-city book tour, the works. I could have done better for him, but the agent selling it was capable.” The dapper American leaned forward, tapping a large ring on the table for emphasis. “C’mon, Davidov, ante up—something big, an oh-shit story.”

“I am unfamiliar with that expression.”

“An oh-shit story. It’s a plot that makes the reader clap his hands to his cheeks—like this—and say, ‘Oh-shit!’ It’s what every publisher dreams about.”

“Like—”

“Like wiretaps of Castro and Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe all involved together. Or a mole high up in the CIA. You could bring the guy out and have him write a book,
I Was Aldrich Ames’s Handler
.”