Sleeper Spy (48 page)

He tried to push back his panic. “Tell me his name and I’ll tell you when.”

“Don’t play games with me! A good American is dead because of your goddam spying! There’s blood all over your hands! Who’s your handler?”

Speigal blanched and backed off. He had nothing to do with violence and was not responsible for what happened to the profits earned from the information he passed along. But now it was vital for him to find out one fact from the newsman. “I’ll get you the file,” he said.

He went to his desk and used the combination to open the locked double drawer. He straightened up with a gun in his hand. He had never used a gun of any kind, not even in the Army in the Korean conflict, when he was a company clerk. He had been told by his Washington handler, who had given him the gun, that the .38 was loaded.

“Mr. Fein, do not make me use this.” A pistol was heavier than he thought. “I am not a violent person.”

Fein did not treat the threat seriously. “Nobody shoots journalists, Mort. It isn’t done. Put that damn thing away before you hurt yourself. Do you really want to protect the guy who sold you out?”

Everything Fein said ended in a terrifying question. Speigal had a question of his own: “Does any other reporter have this story?”

“You never know. We don’t tell each other, but I’m part of a team, you know?”

“As far as I know, you’re alone. And not even the government knows, or they would be here, not you.” He raised the gun, holding it with both hands; it was growing very heavy.

“For crissake, Mort, are you gonna take your little misdemeanor and raise it to Murder One? Look out the window there. You’ll recognize Hanrahan and his assistant across the street from the front entrance. He’s got guys in back, too.”

The economist, certain it was a bluff, stole a quick look over his shoulder out the window. It was no bluff; Hanrahan, who had been in his nightmares for years, was there.

“Going crazy is not the answer. Use your head. Give me a little color, get a great lawyer, and you’ll never have to serve time. I can turn you into a kind of hero, the man who turned the tables on the baddies.”

He raised the gun again and pointed it at Fein behind the coffee table full of sandwiches and pickles and kiwi Perrier. “You don’t know much beyond what I just told you, do you?” If it all could only be contained to one nosy reporter—

“You mean about Berensky and the fifty billion stashed away to overthrow the government in Moscow? And about Madame Nina and the Feliks people with their Chechen hitmen who are going to be very angry with you? And about Davidov’s KGB coming after you, and—”

Speigal’s last hope collapsed, and he turned the gun around, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pushed his thumb against the trigger.

“Oh-shit,” Irving breathed. This was turning into some story. Then to the tape recorder he added, “He blew his brains all over the window behind him. I’d better call the police right away.” The bullet had passed through his head and broken the window; the cops were surely on their way. He turned the tape machine off.

He sat for a moment, his heart pounding. Then he went to Speigal’s desk and poked around for anything resembling intercourse with an international brokerage operation; no luck. The computer was on, showing a screen-saving pattern of moving lines. He touched the mouse; the directory came on the screen. Irving looked down the list, touched the space bar, looked further down to the end; no filename triggered an obvious response. He used a search program to look for
the names Berensky and Numminen and Baker and came up with nothing.

Fein figured Mort had had time to erase his current file before coming to the door or while Irving was keeping up a line of patter in the kitchenette. He cleared the screen, went to DOS, and called up the “undelete” program; it showed that three files had been recently deleted and might possible be brought back. He marked down the filenames: “Rates,” “ToDo.7,” and “Fkft.tie.” He worked the “undelete” process and hoped for the best.

“Shit, piss, and corruption!” He got the worst; not one of the erased files could be retrieved. Only the Feds could do that with sophisticated equipment, the way they did with the erased Iran-contra White House files. He jabbed at the button and turned off the computer.

Sore at himself, furious with the dead Fed mole, Irving punched out Hanrahan’s cellular number on Speigal’s telephone and told him there was a suicide and to come on up to apartment 606. The officer was already in the lobby banging on the button for the elevator. The reporter picked up his recorder, removed the tape, and stuffed it in his wallet; he inserted a blank tape and put the little machine in his pocket in case the police asked for the recorder. He did not get near the corpse; the last time Irving Fein had been in the same room with a body outside a funeral home was in his police days a generation ago. The remainder of the corned beef sandwiches lay on the coffee table. “You never even touched your pickles, Mort,” he said to the body of the faithless Fed economist.

A sudden thought occurred: check Speigal’s modem for phone numbers, as he had Clauson’s. He turned on the computer again, only to get “Error reading Drive A”; that meant a floppy disk was still inserted. He released the floppy inside, and wondered if Mort dutifully did what Irving so often forgot to do: to save to the floppy, protecting against loss on the hard disk. When the C prompt came up, he switched to the A drive and called up the directory of the floppy. No “Rates,” no “ToDo.7,” but there was “Fkft.tie.”

Rap on the door and a furious jiggling of the doorknob. He went back to the modem directory in the C drive, found a “Fkft.tie” entry under frequently dialed numbers, and copied down the number next to it. On the modem directory, among the most frequently used numbers, was “Fkft.tie,” and a local New York number. Should he erase it, gaining
time on the Feds? No, he was a law-abiding citizen; you destroy evidence, you wind up in the slammer. Besides, it would take the Feds weeks to figure out where to look for what.

The reporter shut down the machine. Looking morose, he opened the door to Hanrahan & Co.

At his colleague’s not-too-cryptic message, “Get your ass up here,” Michael Shu caught the 6:00
A.M
. flight up from Memphis and made it to Irving’s West Side apartment on 86th Street by midmorning. Fein claimed it was the oldest apartment building in New York, older than the Dakota, and to Shu the quarters looked their age, but the lobby with its high ceilings and ornate moldings had its appeal. However, the elevators, a century-later addition, looked cramped and ramshackle; the accountant chose to walk up three flights of worn marble stairs.

“What’s so hush-hush,” he asked a haggard-looking Fein, “that we can’t trust it to the most secure communications system outside the Pentagon? We don’t even go through the phone company anymore—we got our own satellite setup. Not only that, I burn the stuff that comes out of the shredder.”

“I need your sharp pencil, kiddo. Had to be now, because I’m going up to Syracuse tonight.”

“Liana still up there?”

“It’s the last day of her seminar. I brief her tonight on what to plant on Davidov, and bring her to Idlewild tomorrow.” Irving still called New York’s JFK International “Idlewild,” as the tract of land had been known in the fifties; Michael assumed Fein’s unwillingness to go along with the name change had something to do with an old political score. “Liana and Davidov go back to Riga tomorrow night via Helsinki on Finnair. Then in a week or so we send Dominick over to stir the pot, if he’s ready. That should get a rise out of the sleeper.”

“Dominick will be ready.” The accountant was proud of the recent
breakthroughs. “I have a graphic representation of the Berensky empire on the Macintosh. Still some gaps, but I can pinpoint over fifty billion dollars in assets, with the trading and shipping companies, the front lawyers, the shell corporations in Liechtenstein, a Japanese hotel chain, the two key banks in the Antilles, and another in of all places Biloxi, Mississippi. Mark-denominated securities up the kazoo. We probably got a better picture of the fortune than Berensky himself does.”

“Maybe he’ll retain you as a consultant when all this is over.”

Shu shrugged. “Got any more Fed printouts? They were great. Our big break was our switch to studying currency trading, where the turnover makes it possible to hide trades that take your breath away—”

“Do you have a currency outfit in London begins with Baker?”

“You mean Baker, Warren & Pease?” His Memphis operation had been unable to establish which broker was the sleeper’s major London connection; Dominick had acknowledged it was a weakness in their search. “You sure it’s them, Irv? How did you find out about that when all the computers couldn’t track it down?”

“Shoe leather.”

“That could account for—jeez, another ten bil.” Shu had taken to referring to billions familiarly as “bils”; he could remember not so long ago when “big ones” were $1,000 banknotes. This project had exponentially expanded his thinking.

“Don’t get carried away with the war room shit,” Irving cautioned. He tapped his forehead. “The theory of the story is still up here.”

Shu nodded; he did have a tendency to get wrapped up in details. “I’ll get tracking the Baker firm right away.”

“Our trouble is that the sleeper, the real one, has not yet approached Dominick,” said Fein. “Hell, he hasn’t even approached Liana again, and she’s right here in the States. So we’re gonna have to shake him up, give him more of a reason to come to us. You know how he never loses his bets? My plan is to give Berensky a big financial kick in the head. His first major reversal, and it’s gonna be a beaut. And he’ll know it’s our doing.”

He took Michael to his notebook computer, a cheap monochrome job, outdated, but with a removable hard disk that meant its guts did not have to be left at home for searchers to rummage through. He called up the file labeled “Fkft.tie” that was on the floppy disk he told
Shu he’d lifted from Speigal’s machine. At the top was the routing: “@bt/qu:number/sl:marin,” which the accountant presumed was the transmission coding to direct the message through the system at the other end, and then a short message: “On your trip tomorrow to the casino in Rhein/Main, would you put one whole chip on black for me. Just have a feeling it could be my lucky day. Reg.”

“Doesn’t look very mysterious,” said the accountant. “Not like one of your
Barefoot Contessa
specials that calls attention to the fact you’re using a code. This seems like a pretty straight request to put down a little bet. Who’s Reg?”

“This is a transmission that has not yet been sent,” said Irving slowly, “of data about what will happen at tomorrow’s meeting of the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve. Now tell me what you think it means.”

Shu looked at the message with new eyes. “Well, Rhein/Main is the name of the military airport in Frankfurt. I suppose that would have to do with buying or selling German marks. If you wanted to trade in the pound sterling on that analogy, you’d use Heathrow, the big airport near London. Or speculating in the yen, you’d say Narita, the airport near Tokyo that costs a couple hundred bucks in taxi fare.”

“Okay, so the message is saying to buy or sell marks. Which—buy or sell?”

Shu shook his head. “No way of telling. The ‘one whole chip’ would be one whole percentage point in interest rates—a hell of a big move by the Fed—but it says the bet is on ‘black.’ The colors would be black or red. Black could mean rates up, and red could mean down, or vice versa.”

“Nobody’s guessing the Fed will be raising rates,” said Irving. “It’s either stay the same or cut. This says a cut.”

“Then you’re saying, on the basis of this message, they’ll cut a whole point. That would weaken the dollar, of course, so if marks is your medium you would sell dollars and buy marks. You could make …” He calculated quickly, on a 98 percent margin, with the billions Berensky had available. “Hoo-boy, you could make a killing that would be the mother of all killings.”

“That’s why I wanted you here, to tell me that. Now, here comes the beauty part. I have a little disinformation scheme in mind. What could I tell them to get them to do exactly the wrong thing?”