Sleeper Spy (36 page)

Viveca was not one to let such bullying continue. “Five hundred million dollars in oil future profits to one trading company is not ‘zilch,’ Irving. Michael tracked that down, and the war room is following it up. Might lead to more leads.”

Fein turned that around and threw it at Shu. “Maybe fifty billion bucks socked away, and you find one percent? Chicken feed! After two months of digging with all this hotshot machinery? You satisfied with that, Shu-fly? Tell her.”

Michael said, “What can I say? We’re not getting as much traction as we hoped.”

Then Irving wheeled on Viveca. “And have we had so much as one goddam useful fact out of you? You’ve been commuting to Memphis every weekend. What the hell for?”

“What about your ‘red mercury’?” she shot back. “I checked with our network man in Rome and he said it was the biggest journalistic hoax of the year. There’s no such thing as red mercury—it was a fence for two or three sales of uranium to Germany worth a few million dollars. You were spinning your wheels on that for a month.”

“Not every lead works out,” Irving muttered.

Viveca had him on the defensive and knew better than to let up: “What did you come up with? Zilch! That great dunno sheet of yours is longer than ever.”

“I was sure wheat futures would pay off for us,” Michael Shu said, still shaking his head at Irving’s attack. “We know all there is to know about that particular commodity now. One thing we know: Berensky sure didn’t make his money on wheat.”

Irving returned to the offensive. “You gonna find him by the process of elimination? By what he’s not doing? That’ll take forever, and we don’t have the budget for forever.”

Viveca looked again at Dominick, who at last swiveled in his chair and interceded.

“Haven’t heard a word you said, brother Fein.” He tapped the new hearing device in his ear. “Hard of hearing, you know. Our colleague Shu, here, has done a superb job in a process more infinitely complex than you can imagine. He is thorough, careful. My hat’s off to him.”

Irving leaned forward and knocked on the table. “Hello? Hello? It’s all been a flop, Eddie. Wake up to reality.” He turned to Viveca. “I got a buddy at USIA to bring Liana Krumins over here from Latvia on a cockamamie fellowship. That suckered Davidov into following her, which tells me he’s using her as bait for something. So we’ll have a chance to work them over right here on our turf. I’m pulling my weight, which is more than I can say for you guys.”

“Let’s have a private cup of coffee, Irving,” Shu said. To Viveca, as if the great reporter were not in the room, the accountant said, “He gets this way when a story doesn’t come together. But sometimes Irving’s at his best when he’s at his worst.”

As the two of them left, Viveca called out to Irving, “You’re lucky to have such an understanding associate.”

He shot a look at Dominick. “You, too.”

“What do you suppose that last crack meant?”

Dominick chuckled. “He’s jealous, is all. He thinks I moved in on his woman.”

She could hear herself sputtering, but she couldn’t stop. “I’m not his woman. I never was his woman. I found him repugnant from the start, and he knows it. He has no right to be jealous. He never had any claim on me of any kind—”

“Not a question of legal standing.” Dominick was still chuckling—a warm, low laugh that usually charmed her but was a source of irritation now. “It’s how he feels. He looks at you, and then at me, and he sees a real affection there that he’s been denied. Plain as day.”

That stopped her. She was convinced he was wrong about Irving—professional frustration at being denied a story, not personal jealousy, was at the core of his blowup—but Dominick had at last alluded to their own relationship. “The real affection Irving sees—is it there?”

“Of course, Viveca. You know that.”

“Oh. The Process.” She bit her knuckle to keep quiet. He must have known from the start that she was his for the taking, but she had not thrown herself at him. He kept talking about “the Process,” as if a love affair were like making peace in the Mideast or arriving at courtroom justice, and aside from some affectionate holdings and fraternal kisses, nothing had happened to complicate her life. Usually this was because of her icebox reputation, or the way she intimidated the men she worked with; but when she liked somebody, she thought she sent out unmistakable signals of availability. Edward Dominick surely received them—he was, if anything, sensitive—but he kept saying he didn’t want to hurry the Process.

She veered back to the subject. “Is Irving right? Are we spinning our wheels? You know, finding Berensky could make all the difference in my career.” Failure in this project would hurt her at the network. The remote possibility of losing her job always gave her the feeling she was standing at the edge of an abyss.

“We’re on the right track, don’t worry. Remember the story of the
turtle and the rabbit? I’m the turtle, slow and steady, and we’ll win in the end.”

It’s the tortoise and the hare, she felt like telling him, but restrained herself; Southerners had their own slant on the folklore. “I’m not being much help to you,” she admitted.

“Maybe you can find out what Irving was hinting at,” he suggested, “when he spoke of a mole at the Federal Reserve. That’s a fascinating thought. And it would help if we had some sources at the Fed’s enforcement branch.”

“Why not ask him yourself? We’re all in this together.”

“He may be reluctant to share his source with me, but perhaps he’d be more forthcoming with a fellow journalist.”

She promised to try to find out. It wasn’t being disloyal to Irving to pass on a lead to Edward; as she said, they were all on the same team. But she allowed herself to admit that there might be an edge of jealousy involved.

“And I’d like to be exposed to Liana Krumins,” he went on. “It would be great if you could establish some rapport with her. Shu says she knows about Berensky’s early years in Russia from the KGB files, his family life especially. Little things—nicknames, birthdays, schools, whatever. Somebody’s going to ask me about his early past,” he explained, “and I’d better be familiar with it.”

She took on that assignment, too. If Dominick was going to play the sleeper, especially to Russians who might have known the young Berensky, he would have to be supplied with the kind of detail that actors needed for their roles. Twenty-odd years of aging would explain away the change in features, but an impersonator could be trapped by not knowing some silly detail a family member would know.

“I’m surprised you can get a bagel in Memphis.”

Michael Shu tidily placed a napkin in the saucer under his coffee cup to absorb the spillage. “Don’t be ethnocentric, Irving. More bagels are consumed in America today than doughnuts.”

“How the hell can you be so sure of that?”

“One of the Big Six firms did a study for a doughnut bakery chain. They tried to keep the results from the bagel people, but it leaked.” He
watched Irving smear cream cheese on half his toasted poppy-seed bagel. “You think we rattled Dominick?”

“You could have whimpered a little more, for crissake. The day of the stoic Oriental is long gone.”

“I like the way Viveca came to my defense.”

“Wasn’t you she was protecting, it was the guy who’s been shtupping her.”

“I don’t think they’re having an affair, Irving. Nothing wrong if they are, but I doubt it.”

Irving and he had worked out a charade to jar Dominick off his careful, methodical course of investigation without offending and losing him. The solution was for Fein to blast Shu; the banker would get the message. Viveca’s intercession was unexpected; Shu liked to think it was rooted in a respect she had for him, but he suspected it had more to do with defending Dominick, as Irving suggested. “Could it be he’s in business for himself on this?”

“Sure he is. We all are.” Irving gave his foxy grin. “This guy wants to contact the sleeper in his own way, in his own time, on his own terms, and cut himself in on the biggest fortune in the world. He’ll sell us out in a minute.”

“If you say so.” Shu did not want to believe it. Dominick operated in a sensible, businesslike way, even if his strategy had not turned up really major movements of money into the likeliest banks and mutual funds. “You do tend to be impatient, Irv.”

“I get heat, I pass it along. And if you come across a real lead to Berensky, tell me first—we can’t trust Dominick completely, and he’s got Little Miss Icebox in his pocket, no matter what you say. So don’t confide in her, either.”

“Helluva team.”

“It’ll work. We’re only striking out on the tracking-down of Berensky through the money end. We’re not doing so bad, I bet, on—” He took a large bite of the bagel, and his conclusion was difficult to hear through the chewing.

“On making him come to us?” the accountant guessed.

“That’s what I said. I got a guy in the enforcement branch of the Fed, and he’s grateful to me. I gave him a tip last week about a Chinese mole in his agency.”

“How’d you find out about a Chinese mole, Irving?” The reporter’s sources were the best.

“Lookit—I don’t have the foggiest notion if there is or ever was a mole in the Fed, Chinese or Martian. But it’s logical, isn’t it? If you’re gonna penetrate the CIA, or the Defense Department, why not the Fed? So I dress it up as a tip and give it to my guy in the enforcement branch. It’s catnip to him. He can then go to his boss, say he heard about it from the great reporter Fein, and get all sorts of money and staff to go after him. Big bureaucratic power play; nobody at the Fed can stop it, because nobody wants to be the one on record for blocking an investigation that, who knows, may turn up something. Bulgarian mole, whatever. And in a year, maybe the horse will fly.”

Shu assumed that last was the punchline of a joke but did not want to take Irving off the point. He marveled at his associate’s approach; Irving was able to create an indebtedness in a source out of nothing but an idea. “So then what does your guy at the Fed do for you? Give you the story if the nontip leads to something?”

“That’s not to hold your breath waiting for. You just don’t have the feel for this, Mike.” He held up a finger smeared with cream cheese. “One—I can get an answer from him right away on all whopping transfers he looked into since late ’89.”

“That saves us a lot of time.”

“Two.” Up went a thumb of the other hand. “He runs the traps for me.”

Michael knew that was one of Irving’s metaphors that he was expected to understand. To “run the traps” was a hunting-trapping expression, he supposed; in early morning, the trapper ran around to all the traps he had set out the night before, to see if any animal had been caught. So the Fed source was checking for Irving on all other current investigations of major money transfers. Shu nodded for Irving to go on.

“Three.” Fein licked the cream cheese off another finger and added it to the display. “In his investigation of the mole, he looks into the recent surreptitious banking activities of one Edward Dominick of Memphis, Tennessee.”

Shu’s heart sank. “And me.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll cover your ass. Part of my theory of the story is this: the sleeper, once activated, had to have developed some of the
Soviet assets here. Obvious places to get advanced information to make money: Treasury, maybe the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the FTC, but especially the Fed.”

Which meant currency trading. Which Dominick thought that the sleeper would have thought was too risky. “So why do you want the Fed looking into our fake sleeper operation?”

Irving made a beckoning gesture. “You tell me, Mike.”

The landscape was suddenly illuminated. “Because whatever contact Berensky has at the Fed will sure as hell tell him all about the trading we’re doing to parallel his. And about the banks we’re dealing with. And then the sleeper will think we’re hot on his trail and will come to us to buy us off.”

“Neat, huh?”

“Jesus, Irving, I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”