Sleeper Spy (49 page)

“Change the word ‘black’ to the word ‘red.’ Simple.”

“Too simple. C’mon, think it through. A lot rides on this.”

Michael quickly concluded Irving was right, of course. The rate’s rising a point, when all the world was speculating about whether or not it would drop, would not only be absurd but would panic the markets. The Fed was not in business to destabilize markets.

“If you changed ‘black’ to ‘red,’ ” said the accountant carefully—an awful lot of money was at stake here—“you would have to deal with the ‘one whole chip,’ meaning ‘one full percentage point.’ You’d have to say ‘a quarter chip,’ but that would sound like a code, because chips don’t come in quarters.”

“The disinformation I want to send,” said Irving, “is that the Fed will do nothing. You and I know it will cut rates by a whole point; but I want to misinform our gal Sirkka in Frankfurt, or Helsinki or wherever the hell she really is. I want to make her think that the Fed won’t change rates at all.”

“Then let’s drop the reference to a chip completely. Instead of ‘put one whole chip on black for me,’ make the message read ‘bet on red for me.’ That would mean ‘Fed does nothing to rates—act accordingly.’ That would be an order to sell marks on a grand scale, and buy dollars. Berensky would lose his shirt.”

“You slants are geniuses.” Because the slur was wrapped in a compliment, Shu did not take offense. Irving edited the message on the machine.

“But who’s Reg?” Mike asked. “Reginald somebody? Regina?”

“I think he was interrupted as he was writing the sign-off,” said the reporter. “That could be the beginning of ‘regards.’ ”

“Regards who? You can’t just leave it unsigned, it’ll look funny.” Shu looked up at the routing code. “It’s to ‘number’ from ‘marin.’ There’s a Marin County in California, big on hot tubs.”

“ ‘Number’ should be Numminen, Sirkka’s maiden name,” said Irving, his vulpine grin returning. “And the signature is ‘Mariner.’ Now let’s see if the tieline works.”

The reporter called up the modem’s frequent-calls menu, to which “Fkft.tie” and a local number had been added at the bottom. He plugged the telephone cord into the computer and into the wall outlet and hit the button. “Now it should make a noise like a long fart when it connects, if the number works.”

When the modem did its discordant raspberry, Michael Shu raised his fists and gave a cheer. “It’s connected! They’ve got it, and now Berensky’s brokers will be selling marks and buying dollars like there’s no tomorrow. Oh, Irving, somebody is going to be very angry about this when the mark jumps and the dollar dives. The sleeper’s whole setup will be in an uproar. Wait’ll I tell Dominick.”

“Better not. In fact, definitely don’t.”

“Why not, Irv? We could make a few bucks and cover expenses.”

“But if Dominick should win while Berensky loses, the sleeper will figure out it was us who screwed him. Better Berensky should think it was his own people. Disinformation that breeds distrust, and gets people ratting on each other—Jesus, Angleton would be proud of me.” Irving looked at his watch. “I gotta get a guy on the
Times
to do me a favor and kill an obit. Then I gotta make a plane.”

“How do you like American food?”

“I’m sure it’s very nourishing.” Liana was guarded in her reply. She did not want to appear a bumpkin by giving an uncosmopolitan opinion.

“That night at Ace’s apartment, you must have been on a diet,” Irving Fein said. “You were eating with long teeth.”

She looked quizzically at him, head tilted; she and the American reporter had worked out nonverbal signals to overcome communication gaps.

“It’s an expression, dunno where from, meaning eating because you have to, not because you enjoy it. But tonight we’re really gonna tie on the feedbag.” He rolled his eyes. “Horses, oats in a bag you tie on their nose. Maybe it’d be easier for me to learn Russian.”

“If you speak only Russian,” she explained, “even if you have been living in Latvia all your life, you cannot be a citizen unless you learn Latvian. That is the new law to keep Latvia from being overwhelmed by the Russian colonists. I speak both, so I am okay, but it is hard for the half of the people in our country who don’t speak Latvian.”

She enjoyed feeding Irving Fein facts like that. He sucked them all in, digested them, seemed to forget about them, but up they would pop at the right time, sometimes a little altered to fit the point he was making. Nikolai Andreyevich was not that way; he did not trust her as Irving Fein did. The KGB man would listen to an observation of hers, weigh it to see if he could trust her judgment, then reject it if it did not fit his specific needs. Or so it seemed to her. And if she was not trusted, she had no obligation to be trustworthy.

Irving drove her in his rental car for forty minutes to a restaurant
called Krebs, in the town of Skaneateles. The eating place was like none she had ever seen. In a great, rambling house, people were seated at a blizzard of white tablecloths, with ruddy-cheeked waitresses running around the tables ladling out soups and gravies, offering platters of roast beef and roast chicken, buckets of fresh peas and candied carrots tasting unlike any vegetables she had tried in America. Whenever an empty spot appeared on a customer’s plate, busboys would cover it immediately with sections of a crumbly golden cake or dark rolls with raisins embedded.

This was “family style,” Irving explained while eating prodigiously, with no menu or apparent plan, in an atmosphere of hearty appetites, plentiful servings, and happy diners. Liana did not know if she could say no to the healthy-looking waitresses and kept eating as fast as she could to clear a spot for the next helping. When she reached for the crumbly golden cake, Irving told her not to fill up on the corn bread, to leave room for the great pudding desserts.

“The whole meal is thirty-six bucks for the two of us,” Irving announced when the check came. “That’s value. In New York City or in Paris, that sort of money won’t buy two people a goddam appetizer.”

“I am grateful to you for taking me here. This is another America,” she said, happily stuffed, ruffling the stubble of her hair. “Not Ace’s elegant America, or the dormitory luncheonette America, but Irving Fein’s America.”

“The white Protestant sauce at Krebs is not exactly my dish of tea. And the earliest seating here lets you out at—” he checked his watch—“not even seven o’clock, which is not yet time for dinner in a real city. But I wanted you to see this, Liana Krumins from Riga, Latvia, because they do good work here, they’re proud of their reputation, they make a profit, nobody gets slammed against the wall, people laugh a lot and don’t learn to lie to stay in the game.” He dropped the white napkin on the clean plate that had held the heaping of creme caramel atop the nutted brownie. “Now let’s go back and scheme and plot and connive and otherwise commit journalism.”

Though she was staying at the Sheraton on the Hill, Irving took her back to his downtown hotel for a couple of drinks in the Persian Room
bar. The memory of the moment of Speigal’s suicide weighed on him, but he did not want to burden Liana with that, and besides, it was not one of the three lies he wanted her to lay on Davidov. He was getting deeply into the disinformation dodge now; not only Angleton but Shelepin, master of that game, would have been impressed.

“Are you ever worried about the way we are all using each other?” she asked.

He allowed to himself as how that was pretty insightful for a kid, even one who had been a successful counterrevolutionary in her teens. “What worries me more,” he told her, “is you going back to Riga right now.” He was glad he’d put his finger on what was bothering him. “Berensky and his bunch, and the Feliks people too, are likely to be pretty pissed next week. Lotta money will be lost.”

“Davidov says I should not worry about danger from Berensky.”

“Easy for him to say not to worry. He doesn’t know what’s set to hit the fan.” At the tilt of her head, he said, “It’s only the punchline of an old joke, and I forget the joke.”

“He did warn me about Madame Nina and the Feliks people, but they are the KGB’s rivals. And Arkady, who works for Madame Nina, I am sure is a good man.”

Why was Davidov worried about Liana’s safety with Madame Nina and not with Berensky? Irving could not add it up. On the other hand, Davidov must be wondering what the hell Dominick was doing in that Memphis bank, and might now be buying into Irving’s fiction that the Memphis banker was Berensky himself. Liana would have to breathe on that spark of suspicion in the KGB official’s mind. “One of these days I’ll have to have a heart-to-heart with your boy Davidov.”

“I would like to be a fly on the wall,” she grinned. That was an expression he had taught her on their long walk down Fifth Avenue, shadowed by God knew how many different outfits.

“You got those three lies in your head that I want you to plant on Nicky-boy?”

She nodded.

“Tell me. I think I forgot one.”

“One, that you know why I was chosen by Madame Nina to conduct the search for the sleeper. And two, that I am angry at you for not telling me ‘why me.’ Three, that I suspect Edward Dominick of Memphis is the sleeper.”

“Right. I forgot the last one, and it was bothering me.”

What was really bothering him was that he wanted to take this not especially good-looking but—to him, tonight—profoundly attractive young woman upstairs and to bed. But did not want to come on to her, get rejected, and introduce an awkward note in a budding mentormentee relationship with a journalistic colleague and altogether nice person who was, as they used to say, young enough to be his daughter. Harassment was not his style. On the contrary, getting ignored and standing aside with his hands in his pockets while another guy made out was his style.

That bleak recollection of rejection caused him to glance at his watch; Viveca’s news spot, which he never missed, would be on in an hour. And Liana, who struck him as not the sort who slept around, had already admitted she had something going with Davidov. That left Irving Fein as odd man out again.

“You got a lot of packing to do for tomorrow morning, huh?” All the women in his life had been serious packers.

“No. I bought some jeans and T-shirts here, and some CDs in New York, but I stick them all in the duffel bag. Takes a minute.”

He had offered her an excuse and she hadn’t picked it up, so he took the plunge: “Lookit, you want to come upstairs and sleep with me tonight? I’d really like that, but it has nothing to do with our working together, so—”

“I would be honored.”

He did not quite know how to deal with that; “honored” was not a reaction he had ever experienced after a proposition. “It’s not like I was the Pulitzer Prize, kid.”

She picked up her heavy bag, slung it over her shoulder, and waited for him to lead the way to the elevator. Inside his room, she sat on the edge of the bed, smoothed her skirt, and seemed to be waiting for him to take the initiative. At the window, he observed a light snow falling and made some conversation about hoping it would not affect their travel plans in the morning.

Irving remembered how he had kissed her hard on the mouth at the Bird Library, but that was an impulse, and this was not a moment that called for a masterful male. She seemed to him more than ever youthful and vulnerable, and he felt guilty already about taking advantage of his position. He reached for her tenderly, and when she asked, “You
will be gentle with me?” he found that not in the least cornball and it made him feel more protective than passionate.

She was tentative at first, disappearing into the bathroom to get into a robe rather than let him see her nude. He waited for her in bed in the dark. Davidov, he was certain, must have raped her, the commie bastard.