The videocassette recorder beeped at him; the tape was rewound. He fingered the button that would bring back Liana Krumins but did not press it. He asked himself: was the supreme security protecting Berensky a wise precaution against exposure during the time of turmoil? Yes. But now, anxiety was rising in the Kremlin about the lack of supervision of the sleeper. The KGB, as presently constituted, did not know where its major overseas financial assets were; Davidov was certain of that. Did FI—once the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, now fiercely independent—know any more about Berensky? Davidov could not safely inquire. Did the Feliks people know? He had squeezed a few to no avail, and was offering others financial reward.
That fortune placed in the sleeper’s hands to hide or to invest belonged to the Russian government, though some of the other former Soviet republics would lay claim to part of it; getting it back was Davidov’s central KGB assignment. He had a fallback position, if recovery of the money proved impossible: to deny the fortune to the Feliks people.
He clicked off the power and buzzed for Yelena. “Step one is to find out more about the eighteen-year-old who had been selected for implantation in 1968,” he told her. “Find me somebody in the American Village then who trained Aleks Berensky.”
“Yes, Director. But that is not going to tell you where he is in America today. Or what happened to his control.”
His assistant knew the KGB far better than he did, and Davidov was not above asking for advice. “How would you find him?”
“Control is dead or defected or turned by the CIA or stealing the money.”
“Agreed. So?”
“Control had two agents, the sleeper and the mole. Foreign Intelligence knows who the mole is. We should establish contact with him.”
Davidov shook his head. “Foreign Intelligence would have my head if I so much as asked about his identity.” Definitely not a good idea for a new man, fresh from the academy; such inquiry would be used to cast suspicion on him as a bureaucratic empire-builder or a Western double agent. “Besides, we do not know if FI’s Washington agent was ever in direct contact with Berensky. The mode of operation was to use the handler as the intermediary. The Washington mole was not to know Berensky’s identity or vice versa.” That was a guess, but he thought an informed one.
“What about our man at the Federal Reserve in New York?”
“He would be doubly cut out, twice removed from knowledge of the identity of the sleeper.” And he did not want to stir bureaucratic anger by trying to communicate with that agent, either, at least for now. Yelena was trying hard, but not being helpful. And it could be she had a friend at FI; in this job, he could trust nobody. He dismissed her again, listened to the door shut, and clicked on the power.
He froze the tape at the frame that showed the deception of the stupid searchers, forcing his eyes away from the stiff nipple to her hand at her back. It reminded him how a deft magician worked his trick by distracting his audience, and he swore not to allow himself to be distracted by this deceptive young woman again.
RIGA
Michael Shu, CPA, savored working on assignment for Irving Fein. The normal accounting life in New York required a suit and tie and was deskbound-dreary at times, but the interludes of research for Irving lit up his life’s landscape.
Together, with Irving working the sources and Michael working the books, they had exposed wrongdoing in the government’s commodity-financing schemes; had embarrassed the White House Chief of Staff in his family’s ventures into Treasury-influenced businesses; had illuminated the maneuvering of a fugitive financier in the Bahamas who was running dope and guns through Panama; had made life miserable for a Federal Reserve Chairman for failing to follow up evidence of vast money movements financing illegal arms sales.
In all these prizewinning newspaper series and newsmagazine cover stories, Michael never asked for or received a byline. Media fame was for Irving to enjoy, and surely helped him open doors to other sources, but anonymity held no horrors for Michael. He took his pleasure in plumbing the lower depths of bureaucracies, where having a famous face or name would be an obstacle. His attraction was to the faceless people bearing secret grudges down below, smoldering not at abuse of power or policy misjudgments, but at short pay, lack of promotion, sexual harassment or rejection, or any of the mundane office grievances that led an unappreciated employee to take up the invitation to blow a very loud whistle.
Surely Irving was a cheapskate with his own money. Michael could charge a higher hourly rate for doing the tax returns of the clients of his four-man firm. And Irving demanded his tax returns be done gratis as a kind of commission for the borderline-profitable business he brought in. Bottom line: working with Irving didn’t bring much to the bottom line.
But ah, the perks in journalism. Irving was extraordinarily generous when it came to expenses paid by a third party. Here was Michael Shu, whose father was a Vietnamese boat person and whose mother was an impoverished daughter of a Soviet diplomat who had defected to the U.S., seated in the garden of the best restaurant in Riga, Latvia, across the narrow street from the city’s medieval tower. His hotel, a short stroll away, was the finest that the Baltic city had to offer, and was determinedly restoring itself after two generations of dreary Soviet occupation. The accountant took out his subnotebook computer, punched up his expense account to date, and tut-tutted at the extravagance some publisher would have to pay. Not in this city, so much—Riga was an inexpensive stop for the traveler, like nearby St. Petersburg—but Moscow cost a bundle.
The Hotel Metropole there had been worth it, though. Michael was not much at making contacts, but whenever he asked some midlevel bureaucrat at the Oil Ministry to breakfast at the great hall of the Metropole with the glass ceiling, he immediately had a date. Few of the Russians had ever been to the hard-currency palace before, or would likely be invited again. Michael offered them the opportunity to plunge into the lavish breakfast buffet—eggs, cheeses, blinis, yogurts, honey cakes—about which they could later regale envious colleagues. And Michael wasn’t after contracts, which the low-level types could never deliver, or secret information, which they didn’t have; all he wanted was a look at books and waybills that the bosses upstairs usually did not know existed, and the names of foreign banks and importers and shipping companies that had done business with the Soviet government in its dying days. What was wrong with telling anything about the USSR? It was another country, dead and gone.
He spoke their language. Passable Russian, yes, because his mother used it at home, but just as important was his understanding of the language of bookkeeping. He did not mind, left by himself in a roomful of records, turning page after page of accounts, sometimes looking for a specific shipment or transfer, more often just browsing, letting the records speak to him. The technology he brought along was useful, enabling him to scan lists of figures into his subnotebook, downloading by modem to his New York office every night, but more useful was an inborn sense of what was missing, an attraction to the page or entry that was not there, like a black hole to an astronomer.
Michael was grateful that Irving had been ingenious enough to arrange a cover story that was fairly close to the truth. Deceit, even deviousness, was not Michael Shu’s way. His City College chums had teased him for being a straight arrow, but he was proud of his hard-earned certification, and found himself stammering whenever he had to mislead anyone. “You could have been a master criminal,” Irving once told him, “except you always get red in the face and go ‘duh-duh-duh’ when you try to lie. How do you manage to cheat on your wife? Only Chinaman I ever saw blush.”
More recently, Irving had told him to fix the cover story in his mind: “You are an accountant working for an author writing a book about the richest man in the world. Who is it? We don’t know yet. But the trail of a mysterious American billionaire leads to the old Soviet Union, because that’s where communist officials were notoriously corrupt in arms and oil dealings. That will explain our interest in dealings i
n 1989 and the early nineties, when our boy made his first huge profits. You got it?”
Michael got it, repeated the cover story to himself, and was almost comfortable with it. Reporters did not have a license from the state of New York to protect. Certified public accountants did.
Sitting in the Baltic sunshine, Michael Shu communed with his two-pound computer, to him the most lightly pleasant of luncheon companions. He called it Irving.
The spreadsheet of his analysis of fund-flow charts from the Soviet central bank greeted him in infinite shades of color. The peak in the outflow of money had been in February of 1989, ostensibly in grain purchases; he would have to see if the harvest had been bad the year before, and if the Federal Reserve in New York showed funds coming from Moscow central. That could mean that the fund flow was corrupt. Then his friends in the lower echelons of Commodity Credit at Agriculture could tell him where the hard currency came from, maybe gold transfers, and if there had been any suspicion of skimming, or “supplier commissions.” The data were available, not secret, or at least not a big secret, but nobody crossed international lines to compare figures. The East went its way in those days, the West the other way, each uninterested in preventing fraud in the other’s domain. But by following the money now, he could spot the phony operators then, and discern the pattern of the sleeper’s operation.
He stored that in Irving and called up his notes on a visit the day before to the spetsfond, the “special collection” in the library founded by Peter the Great. That trip to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg had been an offbeat treat for a day off: it was where every book and publication that had been banned by the czars and the Soviets had been stored. The spetsfond was the world’s largest collection of forbidden literature, from soft pornography to hard dissidence, a treasury of the Marxist politically incorrect.
But Shu’s excursion turned out not to be a day off. When the accountant learned of the fire that had destroyed hundreds of thousands of books in late 1988, that struck him as no accident. He asked one of the librarians about catalogs of deposits to the library from the KGB dealing with money movement, or art treasure movement, or gold bullion transfers. She said she thought some items were on that subject, which she remembered because that was outside the ideology-suppressing mission of the library. Not all of those extraneous, hard-to-catalog files were destroyed in the fire; she recalled that some records had been taken to a meat-packing cold storage facility in the suburbs for safekeeping, along with fire-damaged and waterlogged books. When Michael asked if he was the first to ask her about those records, the librarian—nice lady, happy to help—said no, a man from the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry had been around the week before to ask about published articles on the Cherlyabinsk-65 plutonium-processing complex in Siberia.
If I wanted to put aside a little money for a rainy day, Michael asked himself, and I had any asset in the country to choose from, what would I pick? Not diamonds; a few hundred million dollars’ worth would upset the market, unless De Beers agreed to take them off your hands and off the market. Gold would be good; big enough market, asks no questions. Oil is fungible, valuable, and storable, but requires a series of fronts.
Stuff to make nuclear bombs? Hard to store, a bitch to transport, but a much-wanted asset in rogue nations. He jabbed the key on his computer to store his St. Petersburg trip, called up his dunno sheet—an Irving Fein investigative-accounting device—and added a question about the portability of plutonium.
The subnotebook beeped and blinked a warning of low battery. Michael fished in his pocket for a couple of AA batteries, found none, but did not panic. Across the street, in the medieval tower basement, was a souvenir shop, where he was sure what he needed could be found. He was equally certain the place was infested with pickpockets preying on tourists. He put his paper across his plate to make sure nobody took his table and signaled to the waiter he’d be right back.
Clutching Irving tightly, he crossed the street and went into the ground-level shop. A customer was dickering over a long-lens camera; that struck Michael as a pretty expensive souvenir for Latvia, which specialized in knitted shawls and woodcarvings, but it turned out the man was just showing it to the proprietor. They shifted their attention to the subnotebook, admiring Irving’s size, power, and ability to operate on batteries available anywhere; friendly people, spoke Russian, like most of the population of Riga. That’s what bugged the Latvians, Michael knew: Stalin had Russified the country, pumping in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, while deporting Latvians to Siberia. The Latvian-Russian split in the country was now fifty-fifty, tilting heavily Russian in Riga; the newly independent Latvians were letting relatively few of the Russian-speaking residents vote. Irving—the reporter, not the computer—had told him the Feliks people were Russians who chose to operate in Latvia, unwelcome in Riga but safely out of the reach of Davidov’s directorate of the KGB in Moscow.
He returned to the restaurant to find an elderly man seated at his table.
“Excuse me, but this is my table. I had to go across the street to the shop for a minute.”
“I know. The photographer in that shop is taking pictures of us right now, as we are speaking.” The man in the khaki jacket made a pouring motion to the waiter for a pot of tea. “He works for the Russian KGB.”
Michael felt a thrill; now he was in the business. “Can he hear what we say?”
“No.” The elderly man picked up the sugar bowl, emptied the packages onto the table, put them back one by one. “It is what they call a visual cover. They want to see who meets you. I want them to see me meeting you.”
Irving had once instructed him never to ask questions of somebody who was trying to convey information. The way the reporter put it was “Never murder a man who’s committing suicide,” but that was his colleague’s way of adding drama to a simple instruction.
“My name is Arkady Volkovich.” He reached a hand across the table. “Let us pose shaking hands.” Michael shook it cordially, wondering why this man wanted this picture together to be studied by Moscow.
“Why do I want us to be seen together?” Silence worked. “Because we have nothing to hide. You met Liana, our television news presenter, in the grand hall of the Metropole in Moscow. She suggested you come here and you would be contacted by one of us. No secrets.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“We call ourselves the organizatsiya, a social group. You call us the Feliks people. The KGB, or Federal Security or whatever they call themselves now, suspect we may be plotting to drag the near abroad back into the old Soviet Union. That charge is a fiction, of course, but it gives the KGB what they need—an enemy and a purpose. It provides employment for many of their agents who would otherwise be out on the street.”
“You mean it’s all a matter of budgets?” Michael didn’t believe him, but the story had a certain internal logic. The impression he had from Liana Krumins, however, was that the Feliks organization was large and strong, and that it was using her to try to get information out of the KGB files. He had been planning to pull up his notes about her and go over that fascinating Metropole dinner during dessert today; he had been saving it till last.
“Liana is not Russian,” his tablemate said. “She broadcasts in Russian, her mother is Russian, but her late father was a Latvian and she is a true Latvian.”
“Remarkable young woman.”
“More than you know. She was the student leader in the underground campaign for independence. Because she speaks Russian, she was the liaison with the dissidents and reformers in Moscow and Pete. Because she also speaks some English, she was the movement’s liaison with the Latvian émigrés in America.”
So that was how Irving Fein had come to know her; all Irving had told him was that a female Latvian reporter would meet him at the hotel in Moscow and put him in touch with the Feliks people.
“None of us knew it at the time,” Arkady was saying, talking freely, “but looking back, when she was nineteen years old, sh
e was doing as much as anyone to begin the breakup of the Soviet Union. The key was here in the Baltic republics, where the Allies never recognized the Soviet annexation.”
“She must have political ambitions,” Michael offered, not asking a question.
His tablemate nodded, poking about in the sugar bowl for packets of artificial sweetener, which he pocketed. Maybe in his first search of the bowl he had been looking for a bugging device. “First she will become a person we all know in our homes on television every night. Then, within a decade, she will run for President of the United Baltic Republics, and lead them under the NATO umbrella.” Arkady shook his head as if to admit the possibility of the unbelievable. “Did Liana tell you about her ambitions?”
“Didn’t tell me anything of the sort. Nothing personal came up.” Michael felt his face getting hot. Liana had been awfully frank about her future, but he hadn’t sent that incidental intelligence about her grandiose political ideas on to Irving in New York. Nor was he about to confirm it to this stranger.
“Sounds crazy,” his possible new ally summed up, “and I remember saying the same thing five years ago about her notions of independence for Latvia. How did your associate Fein become friendly with her?”
That, Michael knew instantly, was the question Irving had warned him not to answer. The truth was that Irving had stopped in Riga some years back doing a general piece on captive-nation dissidents and looked her up on a friend’s tip. No coincidence; there weren’t that many interesting young women journalists in Riga at the time who were getting into trouble with the authorities and who spoke English. Could be she was the only one in town at the time, so they met and had a few drinks and she filled him in. Journalism is a small world, like accounting. Then, when Riga became an important spot for this sleeper story, Irving had a Latvian contact in Liana Krumins.
Sleeper Spy Page 12
