“Without saying what the story is,” Viveca cautioned. “We don’t want anyone else to get onto this, or to jeopardize the man who’s to impersonate the sleeper in any way. Only the three of us—Irving, me, Michael here—know.”
“Relax,” Irving told her. “Ace made it all up to jack up the bid.”
“I then proposed not to open the bidding to others,” the agent continued, obliquely confirming Fein’s analysis, “for an advance of half a million dollars. Of course, that was my asking price, to get them thinking munificently.”
When neither of the coauthors wanted to ask the next question, Michael stepped in: “And what will they hold still for?”
“Three-fifty advance in two pieces, as Irving wanted, not three; plus twenty-five thousand for research, that’s your fine associate here; and twenty-five more in reimbursable expenses, mainly travel.” He held a triumphant finger aloft. “And—and—a seventy-thirty paperback split, as Viveca wanted. Ninety-ten on first serial, eighty-twenty on foreign sales. Of course, we retain all movie, television, and electronic rights, including CD-ROM and anything on-line.”
“Grab it,” said Irving.
“Take it,” she agreed.
“I took it.”
“I agree, too,” Michael put in.
Ace seemed to ponder a moment. “I should also put in a clause retaining all dramatic rights, to give us the basis for a claim in case anybody tries to make a miniseries based on the facts you report.” He held up his hand to prevent an outburst from Irving. “I still say, after this is over, there are still fictional possibilities—”
“This is not a novel,” said Irving grimly, repeating it like a mantra. Michael knew of Irving’s only attempt at fiction, done after a bitter experience at a magazine: a short story about a magazine editor who was murdered by a rejected author. The accountant always thought Irving’s title was lively—“Kill Fee”—but publishers said the plotting was so convoluted and the background so burdened with facts that the story never got off the ground.
“I have to work out a new theory of the story,” Irving declared.
Michael Shu knew what Irving was working on, but it must have been a mystery to Viveca.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
Michael was surprised at her hostility; it was as if they had come too close in the coverage of the hijacking and she wanted to push him away. They were downstairs in a delicatessen near Ace’s office, Irving helping himself to great forkfuls of the free sauerkraut, cupping his palm to catch the dripping juice.
“Like a prosecutor starts with a theory of a case,” the accountant explained to her. “It’s the hypothesis, what you go on. Irving starts with it, but he doesn’t have to stick with it.”
She seemed not to like the change of subject. “Michael here has an appointment with Edward and me tonight,” she told Irving, “to go over his memo about the bank in the Bahamas. Now you want to go off in some other direction?” The accountant was glad she made that point; Irving did have a tendency to take sharp turns, sometimes wasting a lot of research time.
“An essential element has just changed, kiddo. Used to be, we were using the fake sleeper to play the KGB off the Feliks bunch. We didn’t have a dog in their fight.” Irving seemed to be thinking this through as he was talking. “We figured both sides would come after our boy, the fake sleeper, to get their hands on the money. That way, we’d be players, and find out from both the KGB and the Russian mafiya what they knew about what the assets were.”
“Which would make it easier to find out where to find the assets,” Shu put in.
“But now the Russian government tried to do the U.S. a big favor, and the President thanked them for it right in public. All very palsywalsy. Up to now, the CIA has been antsy about this whole thing, except for my guy. But I got my Russian source’s home number from Dorothy Barclay the other night, which she has surely told the President. She wants to get a little credit for the Russian gesture, too. Presidents look kindly on spooks who try to save their lives.”
“So how does this change the plan?” Viveca was out of it, but Michael could see where the reporter was heading.
“Now the CIA might want to return the gesture of good faith to the KGB. They may want to line up with the good-guy Russians against the Feliks people.”
The accountant stopped him there. “That gets us into Russian politics in a big way. What if Davidov and the good guys in power now get shoved out by the Feliks people?”
“We lose.” Irving threw up his hands. “Story’s blown, we never find the money. The real sleeper uses the fortune to finance the Feliks people, who are no better than the commie crowd that sent him over here in the first place.”
The stakes in this began to dawn on Viveca. “The sleeper could use the money to foment another Russian revolution.” When Michael nodded encouragingly, she added, “Upheaval. Financial panic. Maybe civil war.”
“And it could spread, and there’s nukes in that country,” Michael noted. He believed they were embarked on a significant quest, beyond exciting journalism.
“Like I say, it’s a helluva story,” said Irving in his parochial way. “And there’s a risk in our government betting on the losers. I think that’s why Dotty wanted to keep the Agency out of it. The CIA estimate may have been that the Feliks people will win in the end.”
“But now that hands-off mind-set may be changed,” said Michael, picking up Irving’s drift. He found this strategic stuff exciting. “The White House may want to get more involved on the side of the current regime. Help it find the money to stay afloat. Irv, you’ve got a good source at the CIA, and now you’ve got an in with the DCI herself. Maybe we should try to work a little closer to Langley?”
The heavy plates of overstuffed sandwiches, with seeded rye soaked in the juice of cole slaw and Russian dressing, were slammed down on the table. Viveca lifted off the top slice of bread and proceeded to eat the smoked turkey and corned beef with fork and knife. Irving stared at her plate as if he’d never seen that done before.
“They’re very thick sandwiches,” said the accountant, to avert a fight. “Hard to get your mouth around.” The incredulous waiter stared, too, until Michael waved him off.
Irving was giving Michael’s suggestion some thought. Shu knew the reporter hated to get in bed with spooks anywhere, even our own, because he believed the media business and the world of spies worked at cross-purposes. But the Agency’s new impetus toward helping the KGB on this might open a new channel to the story.
“Our plan was to get in bed with nobody,” Irving mused aloud, “not the CIA or the KGB or the Feliks people. Pick up a little here, a little there, dangle our fake sleeper out there to see what comes in.”
“Doesn’t Edward have anything to say about this?” Viveca seemed defensive about the banker she had helped reel in. “He’s the one who’s being dangled.”
“Run Mike’s idea about working with the CIA past Dominick at your dinner tonight,” said Irving, and sank his chops deeply into his triple-decker Reuben. Michael could tell the reporter was just as glad not to be the one to recommend danglehood to the impersonator. He averted his eyes as Viveca daintily fed herself another forkful of wet sandwich.
“Irving, is that you?”
“If it sounds like me, and you dialed my number, it’s very possibly me.”
“I’m here at the grillroom of the Four Seasons restaurant,” Shu said, shielding the phone with his hand. “Ed Dominick just went downstairs to take a leak. I’m using a cellular phone at the table.”
“I always knew you’d make it big, Mike.”
“This place was his suggestion. Look, I’ll give you a full fill when I see you, but you ought to know right away that our boy doesn’t like my new idea about the Bahamas at all. I mean, he made no bones about it. Play the field, he says, no going steady.”
“He digs being dangled, then? Good for him; we stick to the plan. He like your memo?”
“He thi
nks like a banker and has his own ideas. I fear he may want to take the investigative bit in his teeth, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t ride horses. Come on over to my hotel when you’re through. See if you can draw our boy out on his own theory of the case.”
“Check. And by the way, what do I do when the check comes?”
“You’re only a pipsqueak bean counter and he’s a big-shot banker. What do you think?”
Michael Shu hit the END button and returned the phone to the waitress, a severely attractive woman dressed like a man who gave him a nutted roll in return. It was his third delicious roll; no sooner did he finish than another appeared on the plate.
“Who’s here I should know?” he ventured to ask.
She nodded toward the booths against the rosewood wall. He recognized a former National Security Adviser with a beautiful, earnest young woman who Michael presumed was his researcher. A serene television interviewer more celebrated than any celebrity booked on her show was in another booth listening to the reveries of an aging pundit whom Shu recognized from an occasional television appearance. When the accountant asked whether anyone was there from the publishing or banking worlds, the waitress smiled and said, “The rest of them.”
Edward Dominick, in a dark banker’s suit, trotted up the steps to the grillroom, nodded to a couple of the men at a table on the way in, but did not stop to visit; Michael assumed it was not done. As soon as he slid into the seat to Michael’s left, the “power lunch” was served: a naked piece of fish, a salad of esoteric leaves, and a bottle of imported mineral water. It reminded Shu of a Mexican breakfast—a glass of water and a cigarette—but that was now an ethnic slur, and anyway, nobody in this health-conscious place drank or smoked. It would be the wrong restaurant to bring Viveca to.
“I’ve been thinking about your friend Fein’s ‘theory of the case,’ ” said Dominick. “I like the idea of beginning with such a hypothesis. Let me suggest one of my own that will be more useful.”
Shu listened as Dominick politely dissected and dismissed much of the work he had been doing, especially in the Bahamas. “The trouble with most journalists,” he said, “is that they approach the amassing of great fortunes in terms of ill-gotten gains. You want to know—where is the ‘hot’ money? Your mind concentrates on gambling and drugs and armaments. And that’s where your sources are, right?”
The accountant nodded; that was the trail he was on.
“Here is why I would set that aside. Drug profits are laundered through gambling operations that deal in cash. The lines of power are laid, and it would be foolish for a new operator like our sleeper to try to break in.”
“But dealing in armaments generates megabucks,” said Michael. What was bigger than mega? “Gigabucks.”
“But armaments are heavy to transport, not easy to steal without a trace. You ever try to hide a tank or an airplane?” The accountant shook his head. The banker nodded and went on: “Suppose the Communist Party leaders toward the end of the eighties said to the sleeper, here are two hundred of our latest tanks, worth ten million each. Or a hundred fighter-bombers, worth a hundred million each. Or a year’s production of missiles. How does he transport them? And who will he sell them to—with nobody noticing in either the Red Army or in the CIA? It’s absurd.”
He had a point. “You’d have to cut in a few arms dealers, too,” Mike noted, “and they take a big bite.”
“Same thing with a cutout country, I think it’s called. So set aside, Michael Shu, Certified Public Accountant, the obvious asset sales of military equipment. You could make a few billion that way, mind you—just as you could transfer a few billion in gold to certain banks we both know—but that’s not thinking big.”
“Diamonds? Russia’s a big producer.”
“Couple of hundred million dollars. Waste of time.”
Shu liked that. He rolled his big idea forward: “Plutonium?”
That stopped the banker. “It’s portable. It was surely stealable. And it’s the most valuable substance in the world. Buyers like Libya and Iran could afford five billion for twenty pounds of plutonium, enough for a half-dozen bombs. You have something there. I’d invest some time in that.”
Another nutted roll appeared, and Shu took it automatically. Dominick declined, sipping his fizzy water. “Commodities,” Michael offered eagerly. “BCCI got away with murder, and the Banco Lavoro was worse—a hinky-dinky branch office in Atlanta ran more than five billion in grain, and it was rolled over into arms. Right under the Fed’s nose.”
“That’s thinking bigger. The trick in making huge profits in grain is to know what the world supply will be. My guess is the Russian sleeper would be heavily into the grain business. Using U.S. Department of Agriculture guarantees for his loans, he could draw on his advance knowledge of secret Russian crop reports and Soviet satellite intelligence of Canadian and Australian production.”
Shu laid down another card. “He’d use some of his original stake to buy a bank in one of the ABC islands offshore. And to buy a commodities broker in Chicago and a stockbroker in Canada. I’d also want to take over a small, classy investment bank in New York.”
“Good thinking. Now what about transport?” said Dominick, urging him on.
“Yeah, ships. I would set up a front company, or better still, buy a shipping company and hollow it out, to assemble a fleet of tankers and freighters. My assets would be floating on the seas, with other commodity assets inside, every delivery a guaranteed profit.”
“The trick is not to get greedy, but never to lose,” Dominick said. “Keep going.”
“In two years,” Michael said, “I would also own a major money-exchange broker. London would be my choice. Who made a killing in the decline of the pound in 1990? Who sold the ruble short that year? And where did that profit go?”
The banker shook his head. “Now you’re tempted to go into financial derivatives, swaps, butterfly straddles, all that trading on thin margin that became the craze in the early nineties. But the sleeper had to move fast in ’88 and ’89. Put yourself in his shoes, back then.” Dominick paused, lost in a momentary reverie; Shu was just as glad not to have to dig into the world of derivatives, of which he knew little. Besides, in that market it was possible to lose big, and the trick in assembling a huge fortune quickly was never to lose. Dominick came back: “Do you know anything about transfer rubles?”
Michael did not. “I was absent the day we took transfer rubles.”
“That was the currency the Comecon banks, the Soviet bloc, used for dealings between, say, the USSR and Poland. Its value was artificially set by bureaucrats, not by the market. God, the money you could steer into secret accounts by manipulating the spread between regular rubles and transfer rubles. The sleeper wouldn’t speculate in ordinary currencies—only the ones he couldn’t lose on.”
“Stop there,” the accountant said firmly. “We gotta get organized. We can’t even begin to get a line on all the dealing you got in mind, and I got in mind, unless we pull the investigation together. You need a place, a setup to do this from. A war room, like they have in political campaigns. Your bank sophisticated enough?” Michael had been told by Irving to get Dominick to use his Memphis office. If the imitation sleeper was going to attract attention from the real article in the United States, it would help for the fake setup to be at an accessible address.
“We’re not the hayseeds Irving Fein thinks, Michael. Memphis is the hub city of Federal Express.” The accountant started to stammer an apology, but Dominick waved it off. “Do you suppose the Feliks organization, with its old KGB contacts, is ahead of everybody in this manhunt?”
“That was not the impression I got from Liana Krumins in Moscow last week. The Feliks crowd thinks he should be their man, and they’re good and pissed he’s disappeared.”
“Tell me about her.”
The accountant did not know where to begin. How could he describe what an independent force in a colorful Latvian blouse was like
? As a young woman, Liana was, to Michael Shu, like no other he had ever met: serious but easily amused, sexy but aloof, a manipulative idealist. He kept telling himself to mistrust her because she was in cahoots with the sleazy Feliks outfit, but he felt a quality of authenticity about her, and thought he saw a depth of painful experience in her eyes that belied her years. None of that would he tell the banker.
“She’s old for her age—twenty-six going on forty, you know? She’s tied in tight to the Feliks people, and out to help them squeeze what they can learn out of the new KGB types.” The accountant felt it necessary to add: “But she’s a journalist. I mean, Liana’s after a story, even though the wrong gang set her out after it. She’s a born user, and she’s using them by letting herself be used. Does that make sense?”
“Very perceptive.” Then the banker threw him a fast one. “Is the CIA using Irving Fein, and Viveca Farr, and you?”
“Gee, no.” Shu kicked himself for ever suggesting a close tie with the CIA; it had made Dominick suspicious. “You know, Irving zapped the Agency when everybody else was afraid to. Back when those fellas had real clout. But the reason he doesn’t pop ’em much now is that they’re down and out. Irving can get mean, and loves to bring down big shots, but he doesn’t shoot the wounded. That doesn’t mean we let the spooks manipulate us.”
“I’m glad to hear that, though it would be nice to have the color of law in this enterprise.”
Shu consulted an index card with the points he wanted to cover at this lunch. One to go. “Irving said to be sure you went to an ear doctor. You want to be hard of hearing in your left ear, like the sleeper.”
“So Viveca told me. I have an appointment with an acoustics specialist at New York Hospital tomorrow.” Dominick touched his left lobe. “And anything you can learn, from whatever source—maybe the Krumins girl—about the sleeper’s first twenty years in the Soviet Union would be helpful.”
The banker signaled to the captain and slid out of the booth. The accountant realized Dominick was not even going to bother signing a check; the captain would do that for him, presumably adding a prearranged tip. Shu was impressed.
Sleeper Spy Page 20
