Sleeper Spy (34 page)

He started to take her arm, and she gave him the heavy bag of tapes and books to carry instead. He fed her a fact: “Syracuse in the winter is almost like Moscow.” Riga was relatively temperate.

“Wait here.” She darted into a food store, picked up an order waiting for her in a string sack, came out, and took his free arm. “You are coming home with me and I will feed you, and give you wine, and you will tell me everything.”

Her room was just that, one room looking out on 13 Janvara Iela and across the narrow river. A few revolutionary posters hung on the wall, some askew; dreary furniture from pre-independence times; a picture of a couple he presumed were her parents; a narrow couch to
sleep on. Evidently Liana had little interest in her surroundings. She put the food in the half-kitchen and handed him the wine to open as she lit two half-consumed candles.

“First tell me why it is so important to the chief of the Sixth Directorate of the KGB that I not accept the American offer.”

“You are being manipulated, used as bait. And who told you about my directorate?”

She smiled mysteriously, as if she knew. He knew she was just guessing. The Sixth Directorate, formerly the home of the antidissident ideologues, was now in charge of “constitutional protection” and was a parking place for the President’s hacks who could not find honest work. Davidov’s directorate, the Fifth, was now the center of economic intelligence and counterespionage. When it came to the real world of intelligence, Liana was naive. But he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt; perhaps she was using a reporter’s trick, throwing out a number so that he would correct her by saying his was the Fifth, which was why he did not.

“I asked Michael Shu to tell me more about Irving Fein, because our meeting last year was too brief,” she said. “He told me that even in ordinary conversation, Fein would always finish what he said with a question. You do the same.”

Davidov wanted to ask more, but now she had intimidated him; he kicked himself for being less than masterful in this situation. He was hungry, too. To assert himself, he went to the bag of food and tore a chunk off a loaf of bread.

“I admire Fein greatly,” she said. “Everybody agrees he is a wonderful reporter. I don’t believe what you say about his being a tool of the government. You’re a Russian, you must be nearly forty years old—what do you know about a free press? We’re just beginning to get one here. If Irving Fein was the one who persuaded the USIA to offer me a university fellowship, that only shows his generous nature. That doesn’t mean the government controls him.”

“I’m thirty-eight.” He added another fact: “Fein is forty-eight.”

“Did you see him on the Skytel that night of the hijacking? Wasn’t he enterprising?” He knew she knew this was getting to him. “He knew just who to reach, and even had the home telephone number of the chief aide to the President of the Russian Federation, in his little book.
That was a lesson in journalism.” She gave an elaborate sigh. “You are an attractive man in some ways, Nikolai Andreyevich, but no man is so attractive to me as a man of integrity. Because of the business you are in, corrupting people for some reason of state, you cannot understand the purity of motive of a journalist like Irving Fein.”

“He sent you a message the other day. Did you get it?”

“No.”

“One of my men in New York says he arranged for a message to be given to you by a CIA agent disguised as a babushka selling dolls,” he said. He took a large bite of the bread and chewed for a while; not the brown bread he liked, but not bad for Latvia. He did not elaborate his lie; let her ask him about it, which he was certain she would. In the interim, as if idly, he peered at the photograph on the wall. “This picture wasn’t in your file. Your parents?”

“My papa has been dead since I was a little girl. Mama does not approve of the way I live.” Looking at the picture of the grim-faced woman, he waited for more. “Five years ago she threw me out of the house. Called me a counterrevolutionary whore.”

“And now that your counterrevolution won?”

“An ordinary slut. An improvement, no? She lives in the past. We had a terrible fight and we don’t see each other anymore. I told her I will not attend her funeral and I hope it comes soon.” She shook off that memory and came around to the point: “What did you mean about a message from Fein?”

“We’ve been listening to his telephone in New York, as you can imagine. He told your friend Shu in the Antilles that he had a plan to send you a message, supposedly from the sleeper, telling you not to look for him, but to wait for word from him.”

She froze. As if to keep the conversation going, the KGB man added: “I guess they never made contact with you. We would have known. I’m not criticizing Fein, or his CIA control—we also have difficulty getting messages through in the U.S. Tradecraft is difficult, operating in another country.”

Liana thought about that for a long while, twisting the glass in her hand. “If Fein wanted me to stay here last week, why did he send for me through the USIA today?”

Davidov did not have a good answer to that good question. He took
the honesty escape: “I don’t know. The Americans are not being consistent. That’s why I wish you would put them off, at least for a while.”

His purpose in this simple deception was to induce Berensky to come to Riga to find his daughter rather than have Liana go to the United States. If the sleeper came here, he could be kidnapped easily, taken to Moscow, and interrogated. Or put together with Liana, with their classic recognition scene eavesdropped on. One way or another, through psychological coercion, truth drugs, or more old-fashioned methods, the sleeper could be made willing to reveal the extent and disposition of the fortune he held in trust for Russia. Not for the detritus of the Communist Party; not for corrupt apparatchiks nimble enough to survive in the new atmosphere. Davidov’s mission was unequivocal: to recapture that money for the democratically elected, legitimate government of Russia. If he failed in that, his fast rise would be followed by a faster fall.

Davidov could not tell Liana why he wished her to stay in Eastern Europe, of course, but his job obliged him to dissuade her from trusting Fein. The quickest way to do that was to impugn the American journalist’s independence. Though it troubled him to mislead her on the babushka messenger—whom the idiots or subversives who worked for him had failed to detain—Davidov suspected that his concoction was not wholly false. Fein might well be working for or with some faction of the American intelligence agency, perhaps in a rogue or tightly compartmented operation. Therefore, the blatant lie to Liana could be construed as a subterfuge within a larger truth.

Subdued by his deception, she said, “I brought you here with the promise of food, Nikolai Andreyevich.” She brought out the sausage and cheese, heated some bean soup on a one-burner electric grill, dished it out, and watched him eat. She nibbled as if she had lost her appetite, leaned back, and brushed her stubbly hair with her fingertips. No more questions. He tried to envision her with long hair and could not.

When he finished, she poured the last of the wine and looked at him in her direct way. “I said I would take you home and feed you, and you would give me information.”

“That was the arrangement,” he agreed.

“We both did our part. Now I will be the one to give you information. That message you spoke about? I received it.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes, a babushka selling dolls whispered to me around the corner from the Tower café that she had a message from ‘the one who sleeps.’ I thought it was truly from him—how was I to know it was from Fein and the CIA?”

“You couldn’t know.” Davidov began to feel a little guilty about taking advantage of her intelligence inexperience, but it was for a greater good. He added a touch of authenticity, knowing she knew of her own surveillance: “I’m surprised that our man following you didn’t see the contact.”

She looked at the red wine in her glass for what seemed like a long time. “There is something I want to show you, Nikolai.” She undid the two top buttons of her blouse, reached inside, and took out an amber pendant on a long silver chain. “I was given this by a man who loved me before the day of freedom.”

“You were very young then.” He was reminded of her file, and the deal she had made for her early release; she had matured early. “Brave, too, they say—this is where the breakup of the Soviet Union began.”

She nodded yes. “It is a memento of some sentiment. The other day, I was wearing it outside my blouse. The engineer in the control room asked if he could look closely at it. I let him.”

Davidov did not know where this uncharacteristic story was leading, but he felt uneasy.

“The sound engineer looked very closely at my pendant. And then he used a little screwdriver to pick at the clasp here. Right here, you see? And what do you suppose he found? He found a tiny transmitter.” She rose from the table, went to a chest of drawers, and came back with a KGB bug held between her thumb and forefinger. Davidov noted it was one of the ones that worked, made in Taiwan. “The technology is amazing. Every word I said was overheard.”

The KGB official awaited the rest.

“Of course, I was wearing it when the babushka offered me the
beriozka
doll. The message from the sleeper was transmitted to the KGB surveillance unit in the area. And you heard it all.”

Denial was not an option. “True. Your engineer friend deactivated the damn thing last Tuesday.”

“And this information you have given me, in return for my food and wine, is all a lie.”

All he could do was nod yes.

“That babushka’s message,” she continued in a steady, cold voice, “did not come from Fein or the CIA, as you pretend, but from Aleksandr Berensky, the sleeper.”

“There’s a lesson in this,” he said. “You should never trust anybody from the KGB.”

“I won’t. Get out.”

He stood up and looked around for his jacket. He was disappointed with himself in the way he had overplayed his hand; overconfidence, or the need to manipulate her, had gotten the better of him.

She had the leather jacket in her hands, held in front of her, concealing her unbuttoned blouse and the amber pendant. In the now-unromantic candlelight, he could see her eyes moist with hot tears. “I hate this jacket,” she growled, throwing it on the floor and kicking it out of her way. She stepped up to him, placed five hard fingers of her hand on his chest, and surprised him by pushing sharply. The backs of his knees were against the couch and he fell backward onto it.

Next he knew she was pulling at his belt and then dragging his pants down. She straddled him before he was ready—he even had his shoes on—and she reached inside her skirt, pulled her blouse over her head, and freed her breasts from her bra. “Live, in color,” she hissed. “Better than videotape.” That made him ready instantly, and she forced herself down on him, pale horse on impaled rider.

The sex act must have lasted forty minutes, because every time he came close to climax he realized he was trapped with his pants around his shoes; that absurd thought would pull him back from the brink long enough to permit a fresh bout. After a time, her attack softened, his strokes lengthened, they cried out together as she rode him to their consummation. After a few moments, she gave a moaning laugh, but he was too exhausted to do anything other than let his heartbeat slow down. He became acutely aware of his shoes held immobile by his pants.

“You need a younger man.” He watched her slender back twist and stoop as she took off his shoes. Freed at last, he stretched his legs alongside hers on the couch and contemplated the consequences of lying to an underestimated member of the near abroad.

“Something I’ve wanted to do ever since that afternoon in Lubyanka,” he told her in a restrained form of tenderness, “is this.” He
passed his fingers along the top of her chopped-off hair. It felt like rubbing an army shoebrush.

She pulled her head back. “Don’t do that. I’m not your possession.” Davidov, rudely reminded of who he was and where he was, went into full emotional withdrawal.

Liana must have sensed his retreat, because she got up and, still naked, brought back a washcloth, presenting it to him with what he thought might be a trace of affection. “I’m going to the seminar at Syracuse, you know.”

“I’ll be in America at the same time, whenever it is,” he told her. “I don’t trust you alone with Fein.”

“Possessive again, with no right to be.” She sat alongside him on the couch and dragged her fingertips across his chest down to his navel. “Won’t they miss you at the Fifth Directorate?”

Her previous guess was a deception; someone had told her exactly where he worked and what he did. At thirty-eight, an age that no longer required him to participate in the KGB’s exercise program, he amazed himself with his response.

Camel’s-hair topcoat draped over his shoulders, Aleksandr Berensky, who had not been known by his real name for more than twenty years, walked down the steps to the Sutton Place park a few minutes after 10:00
A.M
.