The agent knew when to wait.
“The communists back in the Nixon days, the era of détente, beat us on some grain deal. They concealed a big shortage, bought from us cheap, saved a bundle.”
“The Great Grain Robbery,” the agent said, recalling the book on the subject. “Not mine. Didn’t sell.”
“The KGB realized the need for big-time economic espionage later on.” Irving leaned forward, intensity in his voice and body. “They planted an agent here—maybe recruited him here, in some college—and let him work his way up in the banking business. Never used him, never put him at risk. They figured they’d want him for something big one day. It’s not done often, takes a lot of restraint. The agent is called a ‘sleeper.’ ”
“That’s why you had me emphasize the word ‘sleep’ twice in my conversation with Davidov. Glad you told me. I thought I was being a hypnotist.”
“You were better off not knowing when you went in there,” Fein said, not apologetically. “And the way our KGB smoothie clammed up tells me he’s sensitive to a hunt for the sleeper.”
“And it turns out,” said Ace, anticipating the plot, “this Rip Van Winkle agent has become the head of the Chase Bank, or Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or maybe even Vice President of the United States, and you’re going to expose him.” The agent thought quickly: “We’d better get a libel lawyer in at the start.”
“More to it than that, Ace.” Fein’s face took on its tradecrafty, vulpine look. “Came the late eighties, the Party’s over. Ahead is the collapse of communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Party has all these assets—not just buildings and famous paintings, they’re not hidable, but liquid assets in banks and safe deposits around the world. In gold, diamonds, who knows what else. Billions, which the old boys are not about to turn over to the new bunch.”
“And the sleeper agent in the U.S. is the man they choose to assemble and conceal the assets,” the agent assumed. The yarn was getting better. “He becomes the trustee, in effect, for all the wealth of the Communist Party.”
Fein looked at him with new respect. “You got it. How’d you get it so fast?”
The agent had seized the idea so quickly because the plot was familiar to him. “The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth. Big best-seller back in the seventies, movie, huge paperback. Nazis hid the money at the end of the war to finance the comeback of Hitler or somebody like him. Great plot. Enough time has gone by for a freshening-up.”
Fein moved from his deep couch to lean across the agent’s desk, elbows on the blotter, and glare directly into his face. “Ace, this is no novel. It’s not ‘virtual reality,’ even. This is real life, in real time. People could get killed for this, including even reporters. And literary agents who know too much.”
“Why?”
“Heavy money. Vicious people. Big political stakes.”
The prospect of personal danger did not trouble Matthew McFarland; at his age, such spice added to the piquancy of life. He met the reporter’s gaze and replied levelly: “Nonfiction would get you two bites at the apple. The actual facts first, in book and serial and on-line form, and the television dramatization later.”
Irving Fein shook that off. “Now here’s the problem. The old-timers at the top were killed in an accident recently. I hear the sleeper’s control agent has disappeared, gone off the scope. That means the new guys at the head of the KGB may not know who his own sleeper agent in America is.”
“Surely there must be some record. An old address, a name—”
Irving shook his head delightedly. “The antireformers still in the KGB may know where the file is buried, or may not. There’s an amorphous bunch of gangstercrats who call themselves the ‘Feliks people,’ after your friend Dzerzhinsky, inside and out of the KGB. They may or may not know. Could be misfiled in the Lubyanka stacks, maybe deliberately, or could be it fell between the cracks—”
Ace raised a finger. “Through the cracks. Between the stools.”
“Whatever. And nobody in Russia knows. And that leaves this one agent in the deepest cover sitting on top of all this money and power. He may be out of control. Or he and his control may be going into business for themselves.”
“That’s a good twist.”
“It’s not a goddam plot twist, Ace, for crissake—it’s what’s happening! If the wrongos in Russia glom onto the fortune, they could finance the ultranationalists, build more bridges to the new mafiya. They could lead a movement to save the ‘near abroad’ and bring back the old Soviet Union.” He started waving his arms. “A return to imperialism, Cold War Three, a new arms race, huge American defense budgets—you get some idea of it?”
“That’s the danger,” Ace nodded, drawing him on, “and the opportunity?” Happy endings were important.
“If the right guys get the fortune, they have real capital—a leg up on reform and democracy and all them good things. I mean, this isn’t penny-ante stuff we’re talking about. Or just money. The political stakes are as big as they get.”
Evidently exhausted from his pitch, Irving turned and pulled a pair of pillows off the couch and lay down atop them on the floor, twisting his neck back and forth. Ace knew it to be an exercise done to relieve back stress.
“And what, my supine friend, do your friends across the river say?” The agent was aware that Irving must have developed at least part of this story with his many sources at the CIA.
“Across what river?” Irving was rolling his head back and forth across the nubby pillow. “I got no friends in New Jersey.”
“The Potomac. I am told that ‘across the river’ is a term of art in the world of espionage, meaning the CIA. John le Carré uses ‘across the pond.’ ”
“David coined the term ‘mole,’ too, Ace.” The agent noted that Irving instantly used le Carré’s real name, David Cornwell, to show he knew him, and was on a real-first-name basis. Irving was quick. “And they never call a penetration agent a mole at Langley,” he instructed. “They say that’s novelese. Think nonfiction, Ace.”
“I take it you will not vouchsafe—that you do not want to tell me how much our government knows about this?”
“I think they want to use me to help them find out. Doesn’t bother me, long as I get the story first. But I have to cover my nut.”
The “nut,” McFarland knew, would be rather large: the expense of an extensive investigation. “I can get you a substantial advance, Irving, only if I can assure a publisher that the end product can be promoted with great panache.”
The reporter sat up. “I promise to work with an editor this time, if they get me a good one. Not some tight-ass broad fresh out of Wellesley who never heard of James Jesus Angleton.”
“Think bigger. Think best-seller. Think of a collaborator with the ability to ensure a television dimension. That’s what gives a book legs. Think of a full partner who could help, at your direction, to open doors in the banking world.”
“Don’t need a partner. I work alone, except for a researcher.”
Ace gave him a dash of cold water: “Alone, this idea is worth seventy-five thousand tops. Less my seventeen percent commission.”
Irving arched his back three times; this was stress. “You have another of your clients in mind, I can tell. How much with him?”
“With her. With her, I feel confident I could get two hundred and fifty thousand, fifteen percent royalty from book one, with a seventy-thirty split on paperback and a hell of a miniseries sale.”
“Her?”
“Viveca Farr.”
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
The new Director of Central Intelligence was the first acknowledged homosexual appointed to that post, and the first woman. Dorothy Barclay was determined to conduct the nation’s new era of espionage in a manner that would be unassailable by historians: no dirty tricks, no assassinations of foreign leaders, no backdated findings, no fancy office buildings hidden from oversight, no brutish informants, no feuds with the FBI about cooperation in finding potenti
al penetration agents. Covert action would be undertaken only with the approval of the designated members of the relevant committees of Congress. Notification “in a timely fashion,” as the agreement between the Agency and Congress specified, would no longer be interpreted loosely; “timely” meant within a hard-and-fast twenty-four hours.
Her two primary missions had been defined by the President in their initial meeting. One was to correct the Agency’s most glaring weakness by infiltrating terrorist groups with human agents. Plenty of money would be available for such “humint.” The budget was tighter for the satellite surveillance of signal intelligence, “sigint,” but those facilities had to be maintained and focused to support the other mission: to rebuild the network of agents within the Russian Federation that had been rolled up during the disastrous eighties. Of course, Moscow was an ally of sorts today, but precautions had to be taken for the future.
“You’re going to tell me about the family jewels,” she said to Walter Clauson, who had asked to see her. She used that expression to show her familiarity with the in-house term for the Agency’s most intimate secrets.
Clauson was known to the new intelligence community as the Last of the Mohicans; he had made plain his discomfort with both the downsizing of the CIA and the near abdication of counterintelligence, leaving all that tracking of Russian and Chinese agents to the FBI. She planned to ease him out quietly, but because his record included a written warning to his superiors in the early nineties to fire Aldrich Ames for drunkenness, the old hand could not be ousted without repercussions in Congress. The previous DCI had promoted Clauson to chief of counterintelligence, even as the retiring executive snatched away most of that discredited section’s responsibilities.
“Your predecessor in this office already reviewed those ‘family jewels’ matters with you,” the counterintelligence chief said in his gentle—she thought oily—voice.
“You’re certain we have no other mole?”
“With the exception of Ames and one Chinese agent, nobody has ever penetrated the Agency at a middle level, or been what novelists call a mole. And nobody has ever penetrated at the Philby level, near the top.” Clauson put in a cautious afterthought: “Or at least our ambassador in Moscow was so assured by Nikolai Davidov soon after that young man took over the Fifth Directorate.”
“You trust Davidov?”
“I don’t even trust you, Madam Director, much less the academician they think so much of at what we used to call the KGB.”
“What’s the matter, Clauson, you can’t handle the idea of lesbian-Americans?” She let him have that right in the choppers to see how he would react.
He reacted like a pro. “Your sexual preference, being public, is not a security risk. My institutional loyalty to whoever serves as DCI is unstinting. Personal trust is something to be earned over time. I hope to earn yours.”
Unlikely. She let him make the next move; he had asked for the meeting.
“One family jewel, Director Barclay, is current and troubling. You have been briefed on the sleeper agent somewhere in our midst?”
She nodded. “I was briefed and cannot say I like your approach. Why bring in a reporter?”
“Mr. Fein brought himself in with his intriguing questions,” Clauson said. “We were presented with a choice: either we let him print a sketchy story about a Russian sleeper agent in the U.S.—thereby driving the threat further underground, not to mention embarrassing our friendly rivals in Moscow. Or we cooperate with the reporter to some extent in the hope of helping him help us flush the sleeper out.”
“This sounds like FBI work, counterintelligence,” she told him, knowing he would hate the thought. He probably knew that the FBI considered the threat from a sleeper far-fetched.
“Mr. Fein’s journalistic goal,” he pressed, “is to expose the sleeper and disclose his assets. He thinks those assets may be considerable. Our goal is parallel but goes beyond mere revelation. It is to seize those assets. At the least, it is to make certain a huge fortune that could destabilize a government does not get into the wrong hands in Russia. To that end, I propose that we deal with Mr. Fein rather creatively.”
Barclay knew Irving Fein’s skill at manipulating manipulators. She decided to build a firewall between herself and Clauson’s involvement in this one. It would be impolitic within the Agency to stop his inquiry, but she was determined to keep him unaware of a larger picture. The Deputy Director for Operations would oversee and limit Clauson’s poking-about, and close it down after he was retired in an Agency-wide reduction in force.
“Do I need to know all these details?”
“Your need to know,” said Clauson formally, “is limited to this: an American citizen, a banker of repute, will be approached by Mr. Fein. He will be asked by Fein to impersonate the Russian sleeper agent.”
She did not want to appear to be drawn in. “How do we know this?”
“The reporter told me that was his plan. He asked us to suggest a credible impersonator, someone with banking experience, a conspiratorial bent, and a willingness to undertake a dangerous mission.”
“Why does Fein need our help? Why doesn’t he find his own ringer?” She could hear the FBI Director, as well as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, asking her the same question.
“Whoever he enlists will undoubtedly come to us to verify what national service Mr. Fein claims to be performing. Both the banker and the reporter will want to have the coloration of law in their project.”
“That’s not ours to hand out.”
“A private effort to find the sleeper, if one exists, is certainly in the public interest,” the counterspy said. “I think we should give Fein, and the banker he selects to flush him out, our sanction.”
“I nonconcur.” She chose that verb because it had more bureaucratic resonance than “disagree.” Barclay wanted Clauson to know she disapproved of a loose-cannon operative, especially one under the control of a reporter. She knew Irving Fein well, from their student days at City College in New York, a bit of data she was not about to share with this old espionage hand. Irving had protected her on a story when she badly needed a journalistic guardian, and she owed him one. But this was not necessarily the one.
She knew that Clauson’s suspicion about a sleeper building a fortune in the United States for KGB use had been indulged by her predecessor in his final weeks; if she flatly denied this request for tacit support of an off-the-books probe, it might invite criticism later. But she did not want any sleeper hunt to compromise one of her primary missions, and Dorothy Barclay would be damned if she would let Clauson’s cooperation with Fein get out of hand.
“If this Irving Fein person,” she said, “who has been hostile to some of the Agency’s covert actions in the past, wants to hire an impersonator, that’s strictly his business. We’re not involved. We cannot recommend one of our contract employees. If they do anything illegal, or get themselves hurt trying to get a big story, it’s their responsibility.”
She would lock this in with a memo to the DDO, who had expressed a worry about Clauson’s compromising his own indirect monitoring of the sleeper rumor. “All you’re authorized to do,” she told the veteran operative, “is to stay in touch with Fein to see what he comes up with. Your role is strictly passive.” She drove it home: “Which means if some banker calls us to see if an impersonation has our approval, the CIA has no position. Not yes, not no. Understood?”
Clauson sighed. “Your order to monitor passively is understood, Madam Director. If developments warrant,” he added, “I may ask for a reclama.”
She had been warned about those reclamas. They were time-consuming appeals to executive decisions that permitted counterintelligence to prevent an executive decision from being recognized as permanent. “Forget the damn reclama, Walter. You should have plenty of other things to do.”
So did she. As he nodded curtly at his dismissal and left, she consulted a budget summary: $4 billion was being cut out of the intell
igence community this year. She was determined the cuts not come out of antiterrorism. Counterintelligence was a likely target for the budget-cutters, with its function basically having been moved across the river to FBI headquarters on 9th Street. The vestigial CIA mole-hunters had failed to come up with the “Second Man” protecting Ames; as a result, operatives like Clauson were scorned at the Bureau and in the oversight committees.
Dorothy Barclay was not going to resist Congressional demands for an Agency less mean and more lean. Time for a major Reduction in Force: she had read that in the seventies one such bureaucratic bloodletting was called the Halloween Massacre. It occurred to her that an appropriate time for another major riffing would be in the coming month, on St. Valentine’s Day.
CHICAGO
As he left the Mercantile Exchange for his studio apartment in Marina Towers, the saying that stuck in Berensky’s mind was “The house is burning and the clock is ticking.”
With the nonpublic information provided by the KGB over the past four years, he had multiplied the original stake of $3 billion by ten. He estimated it would take $100 billion in equity to finance a destabilization and takeover of the Russian Federation, if that was the political purpose of the Feliks people. He would judge their character and goals later. Now he was under pressure to make major trades to run up the fortune quickly, before his moment of independent action ended.
The Fifth Directorate had been decapitated by an airline accident. The only remaining member of the KGB hierarchy who knew the sleeper agent’s American identity—his longtime control agent—had blown himself up in Barbados. He presumed the KGB must now be turning itself inside out to reestablish contact with him.
Berensky further assumed that the CIA had penetrated the KGB enough to determine that a sleeper was using the former Party assets and current KGB intelligence to amass a fortune. He did not believe U.S. newspaper accounts of the CIA’s handing over counterintelligence to the FBI; that was almost certainly disinformation of the sort that Shelepin pioneered in the fifties.
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