Sleeper Spy (67 page)

Minutes later, one of the KGB searchers, feeling around the bottles, found a lever that enabled a rack to be swung back; the concealed doorway led to an alley where a car must have been waiting. Liana came down with a standing lamp and the restaurant manager, who was expostulating in rapid Latvian. Liana as interpreter said he’d heard nothing and was demanding to know what they were looking for in his wine cellar.

“Tell him to show us the plug for electricity or I’ll break every bottle in this joint.”

The manager plugged in the lamp, and the reporter panned the room with his camera.

“Slow Eddie didn’t have a chance,” said Irving, filming, to Davidov, on his knees examining an item on the floor. “Whatcha got there? Hold it up in the light.”

Through the lens, the reporter could see a small device that Dominick had once shown him: the hearing aid to simulate an attempt to improve the hearing of an ear that—in reality—did need a hearing
aid. But back then, when Dominick was preparing to play the sleeper, who knew?

“Show it to Liana, Niko.” She moved into the frame, her cheek wet, to inspect the only remnant of the great impersonation. “Yeah,” said Irving, both director and cinematographer, holding the camcorder as still as he could. “This could be the Rosebud shot.”

While his companions were focused on the shot of the hearing aid, Davidov was plotting the likely course of the pistol shot that had killed Berensky.

He assumed Madame Nina had been seated in the middle of the table, with the sleeper agent in the single chair facing her across the table, his back to the wall. The cement floor behind the chair was wet and smelled of a strong detergent, suggesting that blood had been spilled there and had been efficiently mopped up moments after the shooting. On a line past the chair and the wet spot was the opening to the alley; he rolled the wine rack back into place and started pulling out and examining the bottles.

On the shoulder of a bottle of Bordeaux he found a small blob of brown-red material, still freshly wet; he scraped it off with a credit card and put card and blob into the only container he had, a plastic floppy-disk protector. Davidov felt around in the rack behind the bottles and plucked out some splinters of what seemed to be bone, which could be skull fragments. He found no bullet.

As Irving swung his camera around toward him, Davidov slipped the plastic wrapper into a pocket of his jacket and shook his head. “No bullet. They must have picked it up, or it’s still in the body.” To distract the reporter, he asked, “What is a Rosebud shot?”

“Take too long to explain,” Irving said. “You have to be part of the culture.”

This was not the style in which Michael Shu expected the world’s newest multimedia star to be living.

The living room was what his tidy Vietnamese mother would have denounced as a mess, with books and tapes piled in corners and files stacked on the couches. In the larger bedroom, the accountant could see the back of the man the star was living with, hunched into a computer, a television set blaring the news nearby. The door to the smaller bedroom was closed, but the wail of a baby demanding to be fed or changed could be heard.

“Here, you can spread out all your papers,” said Liana Krumins, rearranging the stacks of printouts and mail on her desk by sweeping them into a basket. “Did you see the show? Did you like it?”

Shu decided it would be prudent to keep all his documents in his briefcase and work from his lap. “The program was a great success, Liana. The ratings were amazing for a documentary, and all the hype beforehand was only a part of it.”

“The network went all out,” she admitted, ruffling her hair, which was getting longer. “But did you like it? Was it good journalism? Is Irving proud?”

“Irving Fein hasn’t talked to me in a year,” he said sadly. “But the reviews—well, you saw them, it should win every prize they give. I spoke to Viveca, in California, and she’s grateful for the way you and Irving made her the heroine of the whole story.”

“You spoke to her? You’re the only one who has. Was it okay, the recreation of the bedroom scene, where she discovers he’s the real Berensky?
And it wasn’t painful for her to see the replay of the drugged newscast?”

“She thought the way you set it up beforehand, showing how the sleeper drugged her to stop her from exposing him, restored her reputation. Made a lot of network brass feel guilty as hell, which is one reason they promoted the show, to rehabilitate her.” Shu thought Liana’s personality—an admixture of old-world mystery and youthful enthusiasm—enhanced the program. Viveca would have been her cool self, and she would have had to be at least apparently modest about her role in finding out the secret of Dominick/Berensky. At any rate, Viveca’s refusal to return to television and Irving’s insistence that Liana be his narrator and star had worked out well all around.

“Wait till they read Irving’s book,” Liana said. “He credits her with brains and bravery and just about everything. Not objective. Do you suppose he loves her?” Without waiting for an answer, which Michael did not have, she ran to the baby’s room, shushed the kid, and came back. “Ace was on the phone this morning, says he has the book clubs in a bidding war. I love the title.”

“
The Return of Iron Feliks
will be a best-seller,” Shu was certain. “The videotape of the program will be in every journalism class at the Newhouse School in Syracuse, as you wanted. The CD-ROM, with all the money-transfer data and use of derivatives, will back up a Harvard Business School case study, as your late father wanted.” He snapped open the lid of his briefcase and contemplated the well-organized accordion files. “Now you and I have some work to do.”

She adopted a serious look and folded her hands in her lap.

“As sole executor of the estate of your father, Aleksandr Berensky, also known as Edward Dominick,” he said formally, “I have the fiduciary obligation to give you a preliminary accounting of the estate’s assets, and his last will and testament’s disposition thereof, one year from the date of his death.”

“Today is the anniversary,” she said. “I didn’t forget.”

He drew a breath. “I have the privilege of informing you that you are the major beneficiary of your father’s estate. As your television program indicated, the value of the estate is in the neighborhood of eighty-five billion dollars, pretax. Since most of the assets are held outside the
United States in various tax havens, I estimate the after-tax corpus to be about sixty billion. Half of that goes to you.”

“Half?”

“Thirty billion. Liana, you are a very wealthy woman.” He cleared his throat to utter a sentence that would sound like hyperbole but was a simple statement of fact. “You are the wealthiest person in the world—not just that but you have more assets in your name than anybody has ever had in the history of the world.” The accountant was overwhelmed by what he was saying. “What this means is, you’re richer than hell.”

“Good. I promise to spend it wisely.”

“You’ll need an accounting firm, legal advisers, investment advisers—”

“I want you to meet my chief adviser.”

She gestured toward Nikolai Davidov, brushing his jet-black hair, shirt open to the waist, standing at the bedroom door. “How much?” he asked Shu.

“Thirty net to her.”

“What we figured.”

Shu, who had been able to buy a major accounting firm with part of his bequest and his anticipated ability to direct the award of great chunks of long-term accounting business, suggested that the adviser would have a full-time job, ultimately employing hundreds of people full-time.

“Niko’s unemployed,” Liana explained, as if that settled it. “Fired the minute Antonia Krumins was appointed Minister of Federal Security. Irving faxed us a draft of his chapter on how the Feliks people took over the KGB in Moscow.”

“Three billion in gold helped Madame Nina,” Davidov added. “The President in Moscow was plenty sore at me for failing to stop her seizure of the gold. I was lucky to be fired instead of being prosecuted.”

Mike Shu thought fast of a way to keep him occupied. “The second major beneficiary of the will is the Shelepin Foundation, fifteen billion to provide pensions to veterans of the KGB and the old Red Army. Liana was given the power to appoint the board. You could be chairman. It would be a post of enormous power and prestige.”

“We’ll think about it,” Davidov said. “You’re right about hiring the
best advisers. Liana has in mind funding a Berensky Institute of Epistemology in a new University of Riga.”

“The most modern university anywhere, multilingual, multinational, multicultural, multimedia, multi-everything.” She did not hide her excitement. “And a huge fund to help Russians in Latvia who are unhappy here to build houses in Russia. And—”

“You’ll need an accountant who knows where all the bodies are buried.” Shu bit his tongue; that might not have been the best figure of speech.

“I’ll ask Irving,” she said brightly. The accountant cleared his throat; that was not a reference he wanted checked. “Come see my baby, Michael. Fourteen weeks old today.”

At the door to the tiny nursery, Shu ventured to whisper, “Davidov’s?”

“Um,” she answered. He could not tell whether that was yes or no.

“You two going to marry?”

“I would like to. Niko is thinking about it.”

“Be sure to make a marriage contract first,” he advised. “Your husband, especially as the father of your child, would have a claim on billions.” He looked down at the red-faced, sandy-haired, kicking baby in the crib, swinging a tiny fist at the mobile overhead. The accountant started, swallowing hard, as he saw what he could swear was the infant image of Irving Fein.

“That damnable, libelous program has all but ruined me, Mr. Shu,” Karl von Schwebel fumed. “The lie that I am backed by mafiya money has been perpetrated by my media enemies, and they are legion. You are the executor of Berensky’s estate?”

The accountant nodded.

“I have a substantial claim against it,” the media baron declared. “I was his silent partner. It was solemnly agreed between us the day he was murdered by that Nina fanatic.”

“You have a contract in writing?”

“Of course not. Sirkka here, who was his closest colleague throughout the earning of his fortune, who was indispensable to him, is my witness to our verbal contract.”

“Meaning no disrespect, we have a saying in America that a verbal contract is not worth the paper it’s written on.”

“We shall see, in court if necessary. Why have you come?”

“To see your wife, sir. May I talk with her in private?”

“No. We are a team. We have no secrets from each other.” He turned to Sirkka Numminen von Schwebel, seated quietly at a writing desk in the couple’s library.

The tall, slender woman, with what struck Michael as the most intelligent violet-blue eyes he had ever seen, agreed: “My husband’s interest and my own are inseparable.”

“That’s admirable, ma’am. But I was directed by Mr. Berensky, as he was preparing his will, to deliver a message to you privately before discussing his bequest. I must carry out his wishes to the letter.” To take the sting out of what might be construed as an insult to her husband, or to avoid his nascent suspicion, the accountant added, “For all I know, it may be a coded security matter.”

“Ah, then,” said the husband. “Take him into the garden, darling, where there is no possibility of being overheard.”

Shu reminded himself that overhearing was a specialty of Karl von Schwebel’s, who had penetrated the elaborate security of the “war room” at the Memphis bank by owning the company that set it up. The Finnish woman led him out to the formal garden, where Shu figured directional microphones were hidden in every bush. He insisted to Mrs. von Schwebel that they talk in his rental car in the driveway. She acceded without argument.

“How much?”

“Five hundred million dollars to you, with an ‘if.’ ”

“Though the sleeper sleeps, he does not rest,” she said. “What must I do?”

Good way of putting one of Berensky’s final manipulations, the accountant judged. But despite her sardonic smile, she appeared ready to do whatever was required.