Sleeper Spy (41 page)

Liana, ignored by Nikolai Davidov, resolved to retaliate by fixing her attention on Irving Fein and the way he was working his way around the room. Watching him at work would be a journalism lesson. Why had he not approached the American Director of Central Intelligence? Perhaps because they were working closely together and did not want others to know. Although Nikolai wanted her to believe that Fein was a CIA agent in the search for the sleeper, Liana was not so sure; she decided on the direct approach and went directly to the source Fein was avoiding.

“Your appointment gave heart to many women around the world,” she said to Dorothy Barclay, and then asserted her anticommunist credentials. She awaited the what-brings-you-to-America reply. When it came, Liana said: “The surface reason is to speak at a seminar for journalists in Syracuse. The real reason is to make contact with a Russian agent who has disappeared.”

“It’s wonderful that your country now has a free press,” said Barclay, veering to another subject, “after so many decades of occupation by the Nazis and the communists.”

Liana would not be so easily parried. “I would be interested in talking to somebody here who might know about such a deep-cover agent.”

“The FBI, but don’t tell them I sent you. Or better still, try Irving Fein over there. God knows what you could learn from him. And you’ll find he’s not only a great journalist, but a wonderful man.” The DCI
beckoned across the room, and the reporter came over. “Irving, this young woman and you share an abiding interest in the same subject. Help each other.” She slipped away.

“When you and I had that great lunch a year ago,” he said, “you were a knockout. Why do you make yourself look like such a schlump?”

“What means ‘schlump’?”

He ignored the counterquestion and came at her with another. “You’re after the sleeper, same as me, and you’re important enough to have Davidov follow you all the way over here. Why? What makes you such a big deal to the Russians?”

She admired such directness. “My program is not limited to Riga. The signal carries to Petersburg and is talked about in Moscow.”

“So who’s Madame Nina?”

She blinked; he was so direct so quickly, here at a dinner party. Was this how journalism was done here? “I don’t know. Yet.”

“You got a line on this guy Berensky over here?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes. Where are you staying?”

She told him the name of her inexpensive hotel; he described it as a “fleabag,” another word to look up. Then he said, “Lookit”—yet another word she did not know—“I like you. You can trust me. We’ll leave here together tonight. We’ll take a long walk down Fifth Avenue, which is safe enough, and we’ll compare notes, and then we’ll find a bar and talk some more. It’ll drive your friend Davidov up the wall.”

“Yes to everything.”

“Good. I’ll leave you alone till it’s time to go. I checked the place cards and you’re sitting between me and the German. Talk to von Schwebel about television stuff—it couldn’t hurt your career—and he may be worth cultivating about Berensky. This is not a social occasion. Use every minute. Remember why you’re here.”

She nodded vigorously, feeling much better. She had told him, through Mike Shu, that the sleeper was named Berensky; Fein owed her that. She went to the bathroom—an amazing, spacious room, all marble and mirrors and a tub with marvelous nozzles inside—and made the concession to vanity of applying a small amount of eyeshadow.

At the dinner table, flanked by Liana and the senator’s shrewd wife, Evangeline, who worked a motherly shtick, Irving treated himself to his favorite mental party game: who was going to wind up in the sack with whom—not necessarily that night, but soon.

Ace, pushing eighty, was out of it; all cattle and no hat, or whatever the Texans said. His dinner partner, the sexy French actress, was probably too weak from hunger to make it with anybody, but the likeliest to bed her down was von Schwebel. He was working at it right now, stealing glances at her; guys with clout in showbiz like him didn’t miss.

Viveca and Edward—Slow Eddie wasn’t so slow—either were already having what used to be called a torrid affair or, if Mike Shu was right, were about to make it, maybe that very night for the first damn time. Viveca was watching her boy watch the others: seeing a person you are about to get involved with interacting with others at a dinner party was not a deliberate tease but nevertheless a turn-on. The odious mental picture drew a sigh from Irving; Dominick was too big for her, a bit too detached, and she’d wind up hurt, which she couldn’t complain about, because she would have brought it on herself. That was some consolation to Irving.

Davidov of the KGB was going to jump on the bones of Sirkka von Schwebel. The way the two of them avoided each other—maybe one brief conversational pass—was a dead giveaway, considering all they had to say to each other about economic intelligence. Moreover, Irving could sense the tension. Next to his corruption sniffer, his sexual-tension sensor was his major reporting asset. Hard to put a finger on how he could tell, but Irving was certain the KGB man was going to waste a lot of time in America in the sack with the Finnish financial whiz. That was fine; it would cut down his snooping around after Liana Krumins.

He put down one of his three forks—Ace was big on silverware and glassware—closed his eyes, and gently banged his palm on the side of his head five, six times. The answer did not come as to what made this Latvian kid valuable to both the KGB and the Feliks organization. He looked to his left at her, as she was getting her second wind, talking animatedly to Karl von Schwebel, as Irving had instructed, about the radar base the Russians still held a lease on in Latvia.

He couldn’t tell in that outfit if Liana had much of a figure, but she was fresh and eager, and maybe Irving would get lucky. No; he put that
thought out of his mind; worse than dishonorable with a source, it would be a mistake for him to knock over a girl half his age. Certainly not tonight. Something could happen with her in Syracuse, where he would call a buddy on the faculty of the journalism school to arrange for him to give a lecture during her seminar.

Even then, he promised himself he would make a move on her only if it moved the story along and she expressed an interest: maybe she’d open up to him when she was opening up to him. The Latvian girl was one of the good guys in all this, he was sure; something about her reverberated with journalistic integrity, a value akin to virginity, and it was not his way to violate either. He noted that even Dominick, as he was getting ready to have his way with Viveca’s body, kept stealing observations of Liana in the mirror, not so much attracted as fascinated.

Dorothy Barclay? She would sleep with her lifelong companion in Washington that night, a relationship Irving had not exposed when it might have been a story long ago; he liked both women, and personal loyalty sometimes got in the way of printing gossip. He justified that lapse by thinking how it had ultimately paid off with a bigger story.

The senator would sleep with his wife. Harry and Evangeline Evashevsky had enjoyed each other’s company for forty years, complaining but not meaning it all the way, and each was the repository of a different set of the nation’s secrets. Irving had to smile. If those two ever disgorged what they knew about who was doing what to whom in Washington and Moscow, the intelligence establishment in the United States would be in the same leakage mess as its counterpart in Russia.

Ace raised a champagne flute. “This evening is symbolic of the new era, which some call ‘post–Cold War,’ and which someone will soon find a really good name for in the title of a book.

“Here, at one table, are the top intelligence brains of the twentieth century’s great powers. In some matters, and I shall not elaborate, they still compete, although now as peaceful rivals and not as angry adversaries. In other fields, such as antiterrorism and international crime, these intelligence professionals are joined as Globocops. But who am I, a mere literary man, to toast this unique new relationship? I yield to the senator from Nebraska, who was overseeing espionage when Dorothy
Barclay and Nikolai Davidov were teenagers dreaming of being lawyers and epistemologists.”

The senator rose to give the toast to the two spymasters, recalling the duplicities of the past, noting the tentative and limited working-together of the present, looking toward the cooperation of the future. Nice toast, spiced with a couple of anecdotes Ace had heard before, and so carefully couched that it would not get him into trouble if the two nations found themselves at loggerheads overnight. Davidov responded informally and briefly; Barclay rose and at some length recalled the Russian help at a time of danger for the U.S. President, a message of appreciation that Ace presumed Davidov would carry back to his superiors in Lubyanka, if he wasn’t already wired and transmitting. He wondered how many recorders were going in vans on the street outside.

Later, seeing Irving and Liana to the door, Ace said: “Enjoy the party?”

“It was an honor to be included,” the Latvian reporter said.

“Advanced the story,” said Irving.

“These are not exactly the secrets of the Republic,” the Federal Reserve’s enforcement chief told Irving, pushing the printouts across the coffee-shop table, “but you don’t want to get the butter from your bialy all over them.”

The reporter stuffed the sheaf into the pocket of his overcoat, hanging within reach on a wall hook. “What do they tell me?”

“There were two hedge funds and one bank that led the parade in buying marks and selling dollars in the last quarter of ’89,” the Fed official, Hanrahan, said. “Really heavy plunge by the Vasco da Gama Fund, maybe came out ahead by two billion bucks, if they were leveraged out to ninety-five percent. Not that big a fund, either, and they were new back then.”

“What do we know about them?”

“Not a hell of a lot. This isn’t securities, with the SEC and registrations and stock exchange rules—this is the currency market, Irving, does a trillion dollars a day, and more on busy days. We miss a lot.”