Sleeper Spy (45 page)

“Hadn’t thought of that myself. But I think the CIA interest died with Clauson.” He looked at her proudly. “Good for you, kid, you’re getting the hang of it. Nothing is certain in the who-uses-who-dodge.” He frowned. “Who-uses-whom, it may be.”

Liana expressed her interest in his examination of the dead CIA man’s cabin. To her surprise, Fein filled her in eagerly: the room, the dog, the trooprs, the computer, the books on the chair, how the poem in the open book might be a clue.

“What was the other book?” The question was so obvious she was afraid she looked foolish in asking.

“I dunno. Why?”

“If you think he was sending you a message with the poetry book,” she said with what seemed to her logic, “why not the other as well?”

Irving Fein did a strange thing. He stopped and closed his eyes, gently tapping the butt of his palm against his temple. After a bit, he
said, “
Moneybags. FDR’s Moneybags
. Wasn’t open, no pages turned down, nothing written in it, nothing fell out when I shook it.”

“What was it about? Who wrote it?”

“Economic history, President Roosevelt, the New Deal. I forget the author.”

“I guess it’s not important.” They walked for a while, briskly, passing clumps of students sauntering across the quadrangle at the heart of the school. She stopped him to look at a statue in a sculpture garden of the biblical figure Job, the innocent sufferer who questioned God’s injustice, by the Serb sculptor Mĕstrovíc. The reporter took a deep breath of the late November air, exhaled, and set off on a march back to where they had been sitting, farther down the hill to a large new building marked
BIRD MEMORIAL LIBRARY
.

“The lesson here,” he said, pushing her in the door ahead of him, “is to follow up every lead even when they’re blind alleys. After ten blind alleys you’re entitled to a hit, like an oil wildcatter deserves a gusher after a string of dry holes. The commodity-of-wheat theory was a blind alley. This’ll be blind alley number six.”

He said to the woman at the desk, “You got a gizmo that will see if you got a book, like a card catalog? I got a title, not an author.”

The librarian said the card catalog had been computerized and showed them to a workstation. Irving Fein entered “FDR’s Moneybags” in the title slot and the screen instantly showed author, publisher, date of publication—1951—and the fact that the book was in the Bird Library stacks, gift of an economic foundation.

“I don’t have a library card, but I’m a friend of this foreign scholar who just ran a seminar here,” he explained. The librarian said he could not take the book out, but he was free to examine it in the reading room behind her. In a few moments, she produced the book, rebound in buckram without the jacket.

Fein turned to the title page and read aloud, “ ‘
FDR’s Moneybags: A Biography of Marriner Eccles.’
Oh-shit.”

Liana asked what that last stood for.

“That’s the Mariner I’ve been looking for. ‘By Mortimer Speigal.’ Oh-shit. I know him. He still works at the Fed.”

Liana flipped back through her pages of notes. “ ‘There is a time in a big story,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘when you don’t know how much you know.’ ”

He took the notebook out of her hand, enfolded her in his arms for a long hug, lifted her a couple of inches off the ground and swung her slowly from side to side, and—on less of an impulse, she thought—kissed her hard on the mouth before going back to the avuncular hug. Over his shoulder, she could see the librarian shoot them a mock-frown.

A driver in a worn army uniform met him at the airport gate in Riga carrying a hand-lettered sign that read
UNIMEDIA
. Karl von Schwebel handed the veteran his rolling overnight case and followed him to the car. Though most of the limousines were German or Swedish, a few British, this car was an old Russian Zis. In the airport lounges all the signs were in Latvian, not, as he recalled, in Russian; these Balts were eager to turn westward and throw off the detritus of a half century of hated Russification.

The publisher remembered the Feliks organization driver, Arkady, from his last visit to his corporate benefactors. Arkady would be discreet, trustworthy, uninformative, a good soldier in their clandestine army. Von Schwebel had read his reports about accompanying Liana Krumins to Lubyanka to inspect the Berensky and Shelepin files.

“Is Madame Nina well, Arkady?”

“As well as can be expected, Herr von Schwebel,” Arkady said over his shoulder in German. “She is under great pressure.”

That invited communication; though their roles in the organization were wholly different, they were under the same command. “And what is the source of the stress?” A generation ago, the word used was simple “pressure”; these days, it was psychologically dressed up as “stress,” from “distress,” in Old French
estrece
, drawing tight, like a noose. Von Schwebel, whose media communicated words in many languages all over the world, dabbled in the roots of words.

“That is the subject of the meeting of the committee. The search for
the agent who disappeared in America. Our concern is that the KGB and the CIA are ahead of us.”

The committee would have to be disabused of that. He half-changed the subject: “Your friend the television reporter I met the other night in New York. She was charming, in a shy way.” In fact, he thought of the Krumins girl as ill at ease and withdrawn, with no future in the media world, in contrast to the self-assured Viveca Farr, who was obviously an incipient star.

“The committee wants a full report on that gathering. Madame Nina will ask why you were invited.”

Arkady’s unexpected communicativeness was good news. Evidently Madame Nina—he knew the woman only as that, and accepted the secrecy around her as part of the mystique of the organization—wanted him to be prepared for the questioning. That meant she had an interest in his success. Following up on Arkady’s opening, he asked: “Who will be at the meeting?”

“Kudishkin from the old KGB. Then our Agrarian Party man, close to the former communists. One of the bankers in the Group of Fifty capitalists. The leader of the Chechen gangs, a killer, becoming more important now that enforcement is needed.”

The only one von Schwebel did not know was the Chechen. Oleg Kudishkin had been head of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, in charge of internal security and counterintelligence, and had been fired when Yeltsin first took over. The long-feared counterspy was able to maintain a network of unreconstructed agents still inside, as well as an allied network of apparatchiks who had left to become strategically placed in major industries. The Agrarian Party politician was a man von Schwebel knew to be at the center of political payoffs by the new capitalists, because he had employed his fixing services himself.

Whichever banker came from the Group of Fifty was unimportant, because its members were interchangeable; that group was the Baltic window on the West for the mafiya fiefdoms channeling untaxed money out of the republics of the former Soviet Union, and the source of funds that made possible the creation of von Schwebel’s empire in television news, books, feature films, broadcast stations; it was also the source of $2 billion in seed money for his newest venture in computer hardware and software. He presumed that the Chechen gangs, from
the rebellious area of corruption and violence in the midst of Russia, dispersed after the uprising in Chechnya had been crushed, provided extortion and enforcement muscle to the other parts of the Feliks organization.

He flipped open his subnotebook and called up the directory of files. Before the meeting, he would have to print out hard copies for the committee, whose members still liked the feel of paper reports in their hands. He was especially proud of the report on his penetration of what he was sure was the Fein-CIA proprietary in Memphis; that would prove he was ahead of both the KGB and the CIA in the hunt for the sleeper, not behind them.

He closed the lid and looked out at the bleak Baltic countryside and the cheap housing built on it by the Russian colonizers. Madame Nina had just let him know that she would be asking why he had been invited to the New York party of Matthew McFarland; Kudishkin would probably follow up by asking who had suggested he and his wife, Sirkka, be included. It was known that the literary agent called Ace had visited Nikolai Davidov in Moscow; did the new head of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate know of Unimedia’s control by the Feliks organization?

Why me? he had to ask himself. Who wanted Sirkka and me there? And he had to have an acceptable answer.

The former KGB chief, Kudishkin, asked the first question: “On your advice, we permitted the Krumins woman to accept the CIA trip to New York. Has the sleeper tried to contact her there, as you said was likely? And was the contact made and observed?”

Von Schwebel hated the atmosphere of these meetings. Instead of being conducted in a conference room with decent lighting and audiovisual capabilities, the
organizatsiya
insisted on the melodramatic venue of a basement room in an old café. The murky lighting made it difficult to catch expressions on faces, much less refer to documents. It was as if organized crime in the East refused to accept the need for modern organization, as had its counterpart in the West; instead, the Russians preferred the dank atmosphere of forgotten penny mysteries. The cultural gap was troubling, but he could not
argue with success; in their own archaic way, the disgruntled and corrupt Feliks people had created a syndicate in a few years with a savage esprit that had taken the Italian mafiosi centuries and the Americans generations to attain.

“I call your attention to section three of my report, in your blue folder, on the simultaneous Davidov and Krumins visits.” There was some shuffling of papers around the table, but in this light he would have to summarize orally.

“American intelligence, through its front of Irving Fein and his so-called literary agent McFarland, arranged the Krumins visit and her surveillance. Fein established close rapport with her and traveled with her to Syracuse, a city in New York State about a fourth the size of Riga. They have separate rooms on the eighth floor of the Hotel Syracuse; our man is in the room adjacent to hers with through-the-wall surveillance. No contact has been made so far by Berensky.”

“Does Krumins know that she was selected because the sleeper is her father?” Kudishkin was following section three of the report the most closely.

“No.”

“Does the CIA know?”

“Evidently not.” Von Schwebel was not certain. “Their agents Fein and Farr have given no indication that they know.”

“The Fifth Directorate knows.”

“Of course. Davidov saw the files that the Krumins girl led us all to, and has access to the Shelepin file. He is fully aware of Shelepin’s selection of his bastard son, Berensky, as the sleeper, and of the pregnant wife the young man left behind.”

“I believe the KGB is working with the CIA on this,” said Kudishkin. “They are in direct contact. They have a mutual interest in keeping the Feliks fortune out of our hands.”

“All I can report,” von Schwebel said carefully, “is that we have picked up no evidence that Davidov has informed the CIA or the Krumins girl of her relationship with Berensky.”

Madame Nina, arms folded and sitting back in her chair, said nothing. Her round, lined faced impassive, she looked to the representative of the Group of Fifty, who changed the subject.

“What did you observe at the remarkable party hosted for Davidov by American intelligence? Forget the French actress—focus on the search for Berensky.”

“Section two, green folder.” Did they know about his rendezvous the afternoon afterward with Ari Covair? Unlikely; his Globocop security subsidiary was on the lookout for a second surveillance, and reported none, not even KGB. Unimportant in any event, except it might show a lack of seriousness on his part.

“As we expected, the front man Fein used the occasion to cement his relationship with Krumins. Davidov’s contact with the Director of Central Intelligence and the senator was minimal; everyone was being careful not to be alone with anyone for more than a few moments.”