Sleeper Spy (52 page)

Walking alone back from the airline gate at JFK where he had seen Liana off on her flight to Helsinki, Irving Fein remembered he had not called his message service for more than a day and a half. Too much had been happening for him to go looking for more communication: man blew his brains out in front of him; Liana came along in his life; billions of dollars were made instead of lost; Viveca disappeared.

“You have six messages,” said his permanent sweetheart, the sexy robot’s voice that was there for him when all others let him down. “To get your messages, press two.” Irving slipped into his automaton mode, doing what he called the dominatrix of the dial directed, except you couldn’t use “dial” anymore. “Call answering message at ten-eighteen
A.M
., Thursday, November eighteen. To get your message, press zero.” He obeyed. Message came on that his shoes were not ready to be picked up because they weren’t making the plantation rubber soles anymore for his old Wallabees, and would Vibram soles do, and call with the answer; but the shoemaker forgot to leave a number. He pressed star-D and deleted that; a man who could earn $20 billion in a day for somebody else deserved new shoes for himself. The next message announced by the android operator was also from the previous morning, and he pressed zero again to get it.

“This is me.” Viveca’s voice. “I’ve got something kind of important that I found out last night. It’s—it’s something I can’t make head or tail out of, but you ought to hear tell about it, might change your whole theory of the story. Can you call me back real soon? I’m at home in the country and the fireflies are out. I can’t leave you a hint or anything on this machine; it’s too confidential. It has me a little shaken
up, to tell you the truth—my judgment isn’t getting any better with age. If we miss connections, leave word on my machine that you can meet me in Portofino tomorrow at the usual time. Who knows, you may discover that you have a real reporter for a partner after all. Call back quick, Irving—whoops, sorry, Sam, Harry, whatever your name is. I need you.”

The girl robot said, “To save this message, press one. To delete this message, press star-D. To skip to the next message, press the pound key.”

He pressed 1 and played Viveca’s call for help again and again, every nuance of her worried voice etching itself onto his memory with each repetition. He wanted to believe that she had not self-destructed, that she did not have her weakness to blame. He preferred to think that she was the latest victim of the sleeper, who had swept this particular chess piece off the board without having to kill her. In every instance of protecting his identity, the sleeper played on the weakness of his target: Clauson’s passion for arcana amid rusticity led to a seeming accident; Speigal’s weakness was the fear of disclosure that led to suicide; Viveca’s vulnerability was a horror of humiliation, and she was now running far away, with whatever clue she had discovered buried in her isolation.

He pressed 1 again. “This is me.… ”

“The Mirror Gallery was one of the great technological achievements of the seventeenth century,” the curator was telling the small group of patrons inspecting restoration plans in the palace of Versailles. “Artificial light was at a premium at the time. The diamonds in the crown of Louis XIV could hardly be seen at dinners.”

Karl and Sirkka von Schwebel fell behind the others to be able to confront their latest marital strain. The couple had contributed nearly a million marks toward the refurbishment of the castle and new landscaping in the gardens; they were being solicited again to resilver some of the deteriorating portions of the historic Hall of Mirrors, scene of grand balls, the crowning of a German emperor, and peace treaties ending the war to end wars.

Ahead, the fund-raising curator ambled on. “Candles set in front of polished metal backings doubled the candlepower, but it was not until the development of silvered glass that reflected light could be multiplied many times. Here in this hall, for the first time, great sheets of the silvered glass were created by palace artisans to line both sides of a gallery, bringing unprecedented light to a state dinner and properly showing off King Louis’s crown.” The heads of his audience angled upward to follow his pointing finger.

“I was assured by the publisher personally,” Karl von Schwebel told his wife, “that the magazine would not run the picture.”

“You are too trusting, Karl. She was the sensation of this year’s festival in Cannes. And here she was looking so adoringly at you.”

He had gambled on being with Ari Covair that evening without attracting attention, and lost. The paparazzi’s photographs—placing
his mysterious-mogul respectability against her Gallic vivacity and deeply backless dress—were taken, sold, distributed, and published. Karl was less concerned at the chagrin of his wife than at the reaction of his moralistic backers at the headquarters of the Feliks organization in Riga.

“I can state categorically that Ari and I are not having an affair,” he lied.

“You poor man. Getting all the credit and none of the fun.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“What does it matter to me if you sleep with every woman in your communications empire? But you used to be discreet. That made it easier for us to go out with our friends.”

“I harass nobody. This young woman started ‘coming on to me,’ as they say, at the party in New York. You must have seen how I rejected her advances.”

Sirkka’s genuine laugh stung him. He asked what was so funny, and she parried it as if his lie were of little importance to her; that made him furious. He demanded an explanation.

“Karl, you were making love to that delicious little string bean all the next afternoon. I’m not a spy, but it was common knowledge at the hotel—”

“You are not a spy, then?” He could not contain his fury. “And at the very moment that you seem to think Ari and I were consummating our relationship, were you not conspiring with the KGB in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel?”

That stopped her. Her face ashen, she stared straight ahead at the curator and the group.

“Well?”

“Tell me the rest, Karl.”

He caught himself; an atypical loss of temper had caused him to tip his hand. Knowledge of her Stasi past was a useful secret not to be wasted to indulge a sophomoric passion. He turned his interrogation away from suspicion of espionage. “What more is there? Are you having an affair with the handsome Nikolai Davidov? Not that I mind, but it would make it difficult to go out with our friends—”

She looked directly at him. “He told me that you managed to suppress my Stasi file in Germany.” He had never before seen tears glisten
in those gray Nordic eyes. “Why did you never tell me, Karl? Why did you make me live a lie with you?”

He turned the question back on her. “Why did you never confess to me?”

She shook her head in bitterness. “All my fault. Blame me. You, a German patriot, married a Russian spy.”

How much did she know about what he knew about her? Beyond that, how much had Davidov told her about the control of Karl von Schwebel’s fabled “vast media empire” by the amalgam of Russian mafiyas and politico-capitalists centered outside KGB jurisdiction in Riga? He had to assume that Davidov knew of his backing by the Feliks people and had informed Sirkka. Because he had to anticipate her using that against him, he preemptively confessed: “I married a spy, and so did you. We are not only man and wife, but we are brothers under the skin.”

“You are working for the Feliks people?”

He knew she already knew that. “Capital they siphoned out of Russia provided my initial financing,” he said as if he were revealing a secret to her. “Not all their money went to the sleeper agent. Enough went to me to buy control of the communications empire that enables me to harass starlets and secretaries—”

“I should not have said that. I was angry and jealous.” He hoped she would say more, and she did: “I don’t care so much what our friends say. We don’t have real friends.” He accepted that as true enough. “It is just that I think I can make you happier—in every way—than any little slut trying to buy your favor. May I be frank? It hurts me when you turn elsewhere for love.”

Was she being frank or being a very good spy? He suspended judgment and took her hand. “We are in a unique position, you and I …”

Unique was the word.

Against what she presumed were all museum rules, her husband struck a match to light a cigarette. She could see its ever-reflecting image in the mirrored walls disappearing into infinity. He obviously did not fully trust her, nor did she him. “Do you ever wish, Karl, there could be a way of breaking away?”

“You’ve read
Faust
,” he said, shaking his head. “You make your deal with the devil, you deliver up your soul. In our case, you and I made a deal with opposing devils. We cannot deny them their due.”

“What about what everybody calls your ‘vast media empire’? Your programming can sway public opinion in cities that are a world apart. Why can’t you use that power to break free of your mafiya?”

“No more than you can tell Davidov that you resign from Russian intelligence,” he said. “We have more in common than we thought, Sirkka. We are together in quicksand, and every move we make draws us in deeper.” When she shook her head, rejecting that despair, he stopped her to instruct: “Media power is reputation times momentum. If my reputation is besmirched, that causes me to lose my momentum, to break stride, and I become vulnerable to terminal slowdown.”

“Nonsense. You can counterattack and crush whoever criticizes you. You can hire bodyguards to block whoever threatens you. You can reveal the worst about anyone you want. You are invulnerable.”

His face took on the rueful, sardonic cast that once attracted her. “Live by exposé, die by exposé. With your fine economic background, Sirkka, you have been led to believe that media power is an amalgam of stations, and publications, and software and programming.”

“The synergies—”

“Do not be taken in by notions of ‘synergy’ in controlling both production and distribution. That’s a lot of mechanistic mogul talk to romance the security analysts and bemuse writers of market letters. Do you know what would happen if Madame Nina, or Kudishkin, or one of those nasty little neocapitalists in Riga chose to reveal the dirty sources of my investments, to expose the real owners and creditors of my ‘vast empire’? My competitors would trumpet it, legitimate investors would run, governments would start investigations, deals would disappear, talent turn away, credit dry up—the vaunted synergy would devour itself and me. Nobody invests in a laughingstock.”