Sleeper Spy (33 page)

“The place to have had such a mole,” said Dominick, no longer so dismissive, “was in the Bundesbank. But no—too great a gamble. You can never be certain in currencies, even when governments try to intervene. The trick here is to limit your investments to sure things. That’s the only way to build a huge fortune in a few years.” He rose. “Shall we look over the war room?”

Shu led the way. In a midsized, windowless area—secure, and less valuable than space with a view—the accountant’s minions were working computers and looking at teleconferencing screens.

“To parallel the other operation,” the accountant said proudly, “we’ve set up a hedge fund in the Antilles, ostensibly run by an attorney of record in Liechtenstein. Mr. Dominick, at my suggestion, bought a little bank in the Bahamas—remember our crooked source there?—and we can put trading profits there with no questions asked.”

“We’ve set up about thirty trading relationships with commercial and investment banks in the past three weeks,” Dominick explained to Viveca, who was observing the operation with her arms crossed defensively. “Every one of the trades we’ve made was completely hedged, which means that what we make buying with one, we lose selling to the other.”

“What’s the point in that?” Good question; Irving was glad she asked.

“Makes us players, people who pay up promply, folks to trust. Here—you see this man buying and selling oil futures simultaneously? We break even, maybe costs us some small change, but we establish a relationship with both banks at the same time on millions of dollars of trading. That’s surely what the sleeper did when he started.”

“While we’re mimicking his operation today, walking back the cat,” Shu said, appropriating Irving’s term.

“Mike means we’re looking at past events now that we know what
happened,” Irving told Viveca. In tracking the first steps leading to the sleeper’s overseas Soviet fortune, the idea was to find out what past events his advance knowledge would have led him to capitalize on, and what new funds and banks were set up in that time frame to contain the profits.

At each of the seven desks, an investigator researched large-scale trades in wheat, oil, aluminum, and gold. The transfers of Soviet assets to Swiss, Panamanian, and offshore banks, many of them monitored by Western financial regulators and intelligence agencies, were charted against a calendar of global news events: sharp drop in the U.S. stock market, the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, publication of surprising commodity price jumps, the teardown of the Berlin Wall.

All very well organized, but there was something in the approach that Irving did not like. He looked over some shoulders, punched in a few queries, in general looked as sour as Viveca looked impressed.

“You seem to think we’re missing something,” Dominick said on the way back to his office. “If it’s the stock market, forget it. You have to put up a fifty percent margin, and that’s not leverage. And even options are too regulated.”

“No goddam imagination,” Irving told him. “You’re playing by the book, playing not to lose. I have a hunch the sleeper is smarter than that.”

“You’ve got to be methodical about this,” Shu said.

“You have to think like a banker, not a reporter,” Viveca added.

“Bullshit.”

“Come now, brother Fein,” Dominick said, “don’t conceal your true feelings from us. Let it all hang out.”

“You talk about commodities. What the hell is the most valuable commodity in the world? What asset did the commies have that everybody in the world wanted?”

After a pause, Viveca offered: “Diamonds?”

“He’s talking about plutonium, Viveca, and he’s right. It’s rare. It’s portable. And it wasn’t as tightly controlled within the Soviet Union as we were led to think.”

“If I were the sleeper,” said Irving, “and I got the word from Moscow to set up shop with a bunch of gold, I would want to tell my control that I needed a material more valuable than gold, so I could start off with a killing.” He quickly changed that to “a financial killing.
Iran was on its ass after the war with Iraq, wanted the bomb. Iraq wanted to take over the Gulf, and Saddam was pushing for a nuke. Pakistan wanted to get even with India, and Libya with Israel, and North Korea with the rest of the world. And who can afford the kind of money we’re talking about? Governments. If I were a country, and wanted to be a big power fast, I’d damn well cough up five billion or so for enough plutonium for five or six bombs.”

“You have a point,” Dominick conceded.

“Irving must have a line in somewhere,” Michael Shu told the others. “You got a source on this, Irv? It would speed things up.”

Irving did not; all he had was a theory of the story, and he did not want it flushed out as yet; he hadn’t worked it over in his mind. “A friend of mine in the Bureau of Mines told me about a radioactive material called red mercury.” It was a vague lead; he didn’t want to say more about it until he spoke to a reporter friend in Rome. “The Russians got a real mafiya working over there on selling this sort of stuff.”

“More financial assets were sent out of Russia in the past year,” Viveca declared, “than were generated in their GNP. I just did a line on that Russian underworld, maybe ten seconds, but it struck me.”

“The more you can get on that,” Irving told her, “the better. See what the Dialog databank says about the underground network.” Her network had access to that electronic morgue; he didn’t want to run up a big bill on the competing Nexis. “The KGB is after our boy’s money, and the Russian mafiya must be after it too. There’s got to be a competition here, and the sleeper’s got to know about it, and worry about it.”

“Not just a banking line inquiry,” Shu said to Dominick. “Irving thinks there should be international underworld links. That should fit into the money-laundering end of our banking line. All these guys like to know where the money is.” He thought about it a bit. “Could mean that organized crime types here in the U.S. are probably after the sleeper, too, in cahoots with the Feliks people, the Russian mafiya. Jeez.”

“More the merrier.”

That comment of Dominick’s raised him in Irving’s eyes: either the man was gutsy or crazy. It was the impostor’s ass that was sticking up over the parapet.

“I gotta get over there to work my end of this,” Irving said. The
opening to be exploited was the division between official and unofficial Russian interests. He also wanted to meet Davidov, who had probably been placed in his new job by the Kremlin specifically to find the fortune before the Feliks people did. Then there was the girl in Riga that he had met the year before and sent Shu to see. He suspected Liana Krumins knew more than she knew she knew and wondered how he could dig it out.

Could he make the mountain come to Mohammed? That was a thought; if he could bring Liana over to the United States, then the KGB types, maybe Davidov himself, might follow. Both the KGB and the Feliks people seemed to be using her. What’s more, by inducing her to come over here, with her KGB follower, Irving could save a bundle on expenses. He hated having a fixed amount to draw down for expenses, because it seemed like spending his own money. Besides, it would do Viveca good to see what a hungry Eastern European TV newswoman, somebody who had suffered under communism, looked and acted like. And was twentysomething, not thirtysomething.

Liana’s curious centrality in this, despite her age, stopped him. “Why is a young broad in some hinky-dink Baltic city,” he wondered aloud, “the only other reporter on this story? She’s got no credentials.”

That got a rise out of Viveca. “You are one sexist bastard, Irving Fein.”

He rolled his eyes to say he knew how all of them stuck together. But something was out of whack in this. He tapped his palm against the side of his head, gently, time and again; it was his way of jarring loose an idea. In less than a dozen taps, he had it and fished his address book out of his wallet.

“It came in routinely, so I looked at it,” said Nikolai Davidov, not in the least uncomfortable in the cramped space of a television control room in what was now the capital of a foreign country. “Nothing personal.”

“You have no right to read my mail. You are a foreigner in Latvia. You have no authority here.” Liana Krumins kept hammering at him with short, declarative sentences, strong as her opinions. “Latvia is no longer enslaved by the Soviet Union. I ought to have you arrested.”

“I have taken an interest in your safety,” observed the man recently placed atop the Fifth Directorate. He was feeling good, not merely because he was again in the company of this remarkable young woman, but because his bureaucratic scope had been expanded in the last week to include all economic counterintelligence.

There was a growing interest up top in the possibility of finding the sleeper and laying hands on more money than had originally been thought of. Under personal pressure from Davidov, a Swiss investigator had found that the banker in Bern who supposedly had committed suicide soon after Berensky’s control was blown up in Barbados had converted the $3 billion in gold to marketable securities years ago. That suggested the money had been invested for profit rather than held in gold at no interest. There could be much more to the fortune.

He was seated in her tiny office in the television station, his jacket slung over the back of a rickety Latvian-made chair. His central purpose in Riga was to look into the activities of a woman with the pseudonym Madame Nina, who was apparently the leader of the Feliks
organization. His secondary purpose was to dissuade Liana Krumins from going to America.

The United States Information Agency, acting on what it announced was “the recommendation of a panel of distinguished American journalists,” had extended a one-month, all-expense-paid visiting fellowship to the young Riga newscaster. Davidov knew she had never applied, nor had such an invitation ever been issued to a Latvian broadcaster. The CIA must want her presence in America quickly, and had used USIA as its magnet. Perhaps the CIA had learned of the relationship of Liana Krumins to the sleeper.

The cover story was a logical one: she had just shaken up the local power structure with a report on government corruption, and favorable public comment quoted in emboldened newspapers made it impossible for Latvian authorities to discipline her. This young pioneer in post-communist television journalism would visit the studios of U.S. networks to learn the latest techniques, and would participate in a seminar on investigative reporting at the prestigious Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University in the state of New York.

“It’s the doing of Fein,” Davidov told her, “who, as you must know, is a tool of American intelligence.”

“I don’t know that at all. And how do you know it’s his doing? You still have a mole in the CIA?”

He closed his eyes; that was a question he never dared ask any of his colleagues. As a matter of compartmented fact, Davidov did not know if the Foreign Intelligence Service, now independent of the KGB, had made further penetrations of its American counterpart. However, because of the enlargement of his directorate to include protection of economic secrets, Davidov did know of a longtime Soviet penetration agent in the United States who might provide a lead to Berensky: the KGB had for decades had an active agent in the Federal Reserve in New York.

Did Berensky know about this agent at the Fed, code-named Mariner, or vice versa? Certainly access to his inside knowledge of coming interest-rate changes could do wonders for Berensky’s moneymaking mission, now that the death of the control agent had broken off his access to Russian data. Davidov’s new scope now entitled him to know about Mariner, which was why he had pressed for the additional
responsibility—certainly it was not to protect economic secrets, of which Russia had so few.

“Liana, you are already caught up in the web of the Feliks people and Madame Nina, who are enemies of freedom. Are you also planning to become a pawn of the American spy service?”

“Of course not. I am thinking of visiting America to become a better journalist.”

“You haven’t decided yet.”

“If you tell me not to go, you will see me decide in one second.”

He was aware of that. “How can I persuade you not to go?”

She rose, threw some papers, books, and videotapes in a large cloth sack, slung it over her shoulder. “You can try offering me the one thing you have that I want.” She smiled. “Information.”

He followed her down the stone steps into the darkening street. The television station was in the maze of streets in the Old Town, near St. Peter’s Church. He gambled on asking a question he had carefully prepared: “What is your relationship to this sleeper, that makes you want to compromise your journalistic integrity to go to work for the Americans to find him?”

“That’s your idea of giving me information—asking questions?”

That told him she did not know. If she knew, this woman with a flair for the dramatic could never have resisted giving the direct and stunning answer: I am his daughter. Liana would have blurted it out to see him turn white. But everybody was keeping her in the dark—the Feliks people, the KGB, perhaps CIA-Fein if they knew, even the sleeper himself in that do-nothing message through the slippery babushka.