Sleeper Spy (42 page)

“You missed the whole Lavoro swindle. Billions to build Iraqi nukes through a hinky-dinky branch bank in Atlanta. Remember?”

Hanrahan nodded grimly and stirred his coffee. “My belief that you are operating in the public interest is the only reason I’m stretching the rules a little to give you a look at the old trading.”

“You were telling me what we know about Vasco da Gama. Italian outfit?”

“No, a lot of the funds like the names of explorers. Like they’re
going to find something. This one is headquartered in Liechtenstein, represented by a front-man lawyer there, with the ownership of the mutual fund in the Antilles. But the names listed there will just be nominees.”

“So they made two billion dollars. Where did the money go?”

“We spotted some big transfers late that year to U.S. banks—maybe half of it—and the biggest bite of that to Chicago National. Another to a multinational controlled by a shipping magnate. It’s all there in the printouts. For the overseas transfers, you’ll have to talk to the big ears.”

“No Such Agency?” That was what the ever-eavesdropping NSA, or National Security Agency, was called. Irving didn’t like those high-budget snoops and had few contacts at their Fort Meade headquarters.

Hanrahan nodded. “The other things I flagged in that stuff are, one, the Privet Fund had nearly four hundred million in currency profits the week the Berlin Wall fell, and two, that’s the outfit that’s been killing the competition in gold futures ever since. I have my eye on the Privet Fund managers, who mainly live in Coral Gables, because they’re so good at guessing Fed actions. I put the key transactions in there even though you didn’t ask for it.”

“And now it’s payback time, hunh?”

“Exactly,” said the official. “You got us all steamed up about a mole in the Fed and now I got to show progress. The Chairman nearly peed in his pants, never saw him so excited. What do you have in the way of specifics?”

“Has to be somebody who started making real money in ’89,” Irving said. “You got a Fed governor, or a staffer in close, had his net worth increase then, or was doing a lot of traveling to the Bahamas or Switzerland?”

“We’re working on that. I need a name, Irving, or a few names.”

“I don’t have it. But I got a lead. Check to see if you have any old sea dogs in sensitive spots, maybe Navy veterans, or yachtsmen. Or a retired Marine.”

“What’s the basis of your lead?”

Irving shook his head; he couldn’t very well quote a poem. “Another word you want to run through your computers is ‘albatross.’ ”

“That’s what you’ll be to me—hung around my neck—if none of this pans out.”

“Baloney. Who’s gonna prove a negative, that there’s no mole? You get a safe run on this clear through to retirement.”

“Yeah, but I got this conscience. Irving, what does your sniffer say?”

The reporter wiped his nose. “You got a mole, all right. Oceangoing. Look into that.”

“We’re getting some traction,” said Michael Shu on one of his trips to New York. “The Privet Fund? Same outfit that cashed in on the drop in aluminum when the sleeper went into business. And the banking relationships of the two funds are almost parallel.”

“Which means?”

“Irv, it’s as if somebody said not to put all the action in one fund, to split it between two.”

“Why not three?”

“I’m way ahead of you. We’re running a computer check of the transfer patterns of these two funds against similar-sized funds, or against funds and banks that changed hands during Berensky’s launch. The two funds, plus the Antilles bank—it’s like a Rosetta stone. We have all sorts of leads to real places that made real money.”

“You got a list of every political event in ’89 and ’90 that affected the markets? Ones that Berensky would know about in advance?”

“Right out of the almanac,” Mike said, “and we’re cross-checking the activity on each by the suspect funds and bank.”

“Now fast-forward ahead a few years. He kills his KGB handler in Barbados, and kills the banker in Bern, and that costs him his stream of inside poop from Russia.” Irving had the feeling they were indeed getting what Shu called traction. “He begins using his KGB connections in the West. You got anything on somebody making big bucks anticipating the Fed’s changes in interest rates?”

“We’re working on that. Just a matter of time.”

“Same with the Bundesbank?”

“Haven’t started on that yet, but it won’t be a big deal to get.”

Irving looked at his telephone. “That phone, as you know, is tapped.” His counterspy equipment, an electronic toy that had cost a bundle, indicated at least two taps on the same number.

“I never say anything on it, Irv, or fax you here. Everything by snail mail, like you said, or if it’s urgent, FedEx.”

“I want you to call me on it from Memphis,” Irving told him, “and say you got a lead on the Memphis Merchants Bank as a possible sleeper front. Don’t use the word ‘sleeper.’ Instead, get cute—’the one who snores,’ which should make it seem like you’re worried about being overheard. And then ask me if I have a lead on the old Mariner.”

Shu made a note. “That’ll get somebody suspecting Dominick is Berensky, maybe, if the guy doing the tap doesn’t screw up. Who’s the old Mariner?”

“That’s right near the top of the dunno sheet. It may be the code name of somebody in contact with the sleeper.”

Irving hoped that by now Berensky, and perhaps the KGB, and maybe the Feliks people out of Riga—and maybe even the FBI at Dorothy’s request—would be attempting to tap the Memphis operation’s phones. The countertap activity, including bug sweeps twice daily and a Taiwanese encryption chip to block the FBI’s access to a clipper chip, was to mimic the security at the real sleeper’s home base. Any business office so secure would be suspect to all interested parties, especially when it became known to the parties listening to Irving’s home phone that Shu was staking it out. Only Berensky himself could then be sure the Memphis bank was not the sleeper’s front.

His purpose in the whole impersonation business was to force Berensky into initiating contact with Dominick. The trick was in deceiving all the others tracking Berensky into the belief that Dominick was their man. Irving was not competing with other news organizations, which would require him to hoard what little he knew, but was competing with world spookery, drawn up in vast, cumbrous array; that’s what made this enterprise so different and required such an elaborate trap. As long as the others did not suspect Irving suspected his conversations were overheard, his home telephone would be his double-agent conduit, feeding disinformation back to his adversaries. By transmitting back to the surveillers the pretense that he knew who Mariner was—the mole at the Fed—he might flush out the real Berensky himself.

Irving asked himself what he would do if he were the sleeper and found out that the investigators were closing in on Mariner at the Fed. Though a protective cutout was a possibility, the reporter presumed
that Berensky and Mariner knew each other’s real identities. With the fate of Clauson in mind, he said aloud, “I’d rub him out.”

“You’d what? You’re mumbling, Irving.”

“Need a rubdown. Gonna go to the gym.” He caught himself asking himself: What was the number for disinformation?

Davidov told the statuesque Finn he hoped she had not found it too difficult getting away from her husband for a few hours.

“My husband,” the former Sirkka Numminen coolly informed him, “is probably with the young actress who was at the party last night, indulging in what the Americans call a ‘matinee.’ I wonder what the French word is for matinee.”

Nicely embittered, Davidov judged, and she was adept at the nuances of multilingual slang. “Is he aware of your service for Stasi?”

“No. And I would do anything to keep it from him.”

But that showed the Finnish economist was not very well informed. The KGB man could recall documents demonstrating beyond doubt that Karl von Schwebel was fully aware of his second wife’s work for Stasi, the East German secret service, and suggesting he was at least partially aware of her subsequent service to Russian FI. Obtaining that information about Sirkka and suppressing it at the source had cost the publisher a great deal of money. Von Schwebel was either very much in love with his second wife or eager to protect his reputation for sound judgment at the Bundesbank. Probably the latter; if he were motivated by love, the media magnate would have told her what steps he had taken to protect the both of them. As matters stood, he could take advantage of her guilty conscience about what she thought she was withholding from him.

The Fifth Directorate chief held up his hand lightly, indicating he would not take advantage of his position or hers. The woman in his thoughts along those lines at the moment was Liana, who he considered
had comported herself with more dignity than the other women at the party. Her departure with Fein disturbed him more than he wanted to admit; the KGB tail had lost them in a noisy bar in Greenwich Village. Davidov presumed the other shadow, reporting to the Feliks people, had not been so easily shaken. Those followers were longtime professionals.

He had to work his way around to the “Who is Mariner?” question lest she refer him to her Foreign Intelligence handler. “I have seen some of your economic reports,” he lied, “and congratulate you on their value.” He assumed she had passed on the early realization by the Bundesbank directors that the incorporation of East Germany would depress the Federal Republic’s economy. “Your assessment of the likelihood of Kohl’s raising taxes to avert a huge deficit was on the mark.”

“You are the first to say that. My work is rarely appreciated.” She corrected herself: “The Memphis banker told my husband last night my piece on disintermediation was brilliant. That was extra nice of him, to say it behind my back that way.”

When he asked what were some of her other achievements, she inundated him with useful data about transmissions to Moscow of the German central bank’s deliberations in the early nineties. He wished he had his own Michael Shu to follow them up instead of his bumbling crew at Yasenovo; to remember the specifics, he used his epistemologist’s trick of placing key words and names in three-dimensional mental space.

“And more recently, were you able to coordinate with your counterpart at the American Fed?”

She hesitated. “These are matters for you to discuss with my handler, or his superior in Moscow.”

That door back home would surely be slammed in his face. “The correct answer. But I must move quickly on a matter while I am here, and will straighten out the channels when I return.” He used the code word picked up from a Memphis wiretap: “Have you dealt directly with the old Mariner?”

Reluctantly, Sirkka answered, “Usually not. Someone in the U.S. coordinates our data. I should not be discussing this with anyone, even you, with no disrespect.”

“Usually not, but sometimes you deal directly with him.” He hardened
his voice. “Madame von Schwebel, I am a KGB counterintelligence officer. I have reason to suspect the Mariner may have been turned by the Americans. I expect you to help my investigation.”

“Of course, Director Davidov.”

He could not reveal he did not know the Fed mole’s identity. “When did you see him last?”

“At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Acting as spinmeister to the press on behalf of the Americans. He has credibility, assisting the Chairman of the Federal Reserve on international negotiations, as always.”

“As always.”

“Yes. Mort has had that job with Fed Chairmen going back to Arthur Burns. It’s as close as the Americans come to a British civil service.”

First name Morton or Mortimer; that was all he needed, but Davidov continued questioning as a cover. “Careful, now. Has he given you any reason to think he is under suspicion by American counterintelligence? Or has already been turned? Any sign at all?”

She leaned back in the armchair of the cocktail lounge and drew her tawny hair back. Scandinavian women bloomed in their forties; Davidov enjoyed playing with her this way. “Recently we had occasion to speak on the telephone—openly, as sherpas for our countries, preparing for next year’s Davos meeting. He seemed worried, not his usual smooth self, and cut me off in the middle of a sentence. Said he was under great stress.”