“And then an actual impersonation?”
“If he hasn’t come to us, and if I can get more about his personal background, it would come to that.”
“Irving says he’ll try to pump some KGB file information out of Liana,” she assured him. Dominick walked her to the elevator; his chauffeur awaited her downstairs. Viveca hoped he would suggest a specific date for getting together again, but his mind was apparently on his job.
“I may have to poke around in Moscow and Riga, looking for places to invest big money. That’s something Berensky might do. Take care.”
The elevator door parted them. Viveca jabbed at the lobby button. Coming on top of Irving’s agitation about the death of his CIA friend, the prospect of Edward’s visiting the centers of the search for Berensky worried her. She told the chauffeur to stop at a gourmet food shop on the way to the airport and sent Edward a liter of extra-virgin olive oil wrapped in a big red ribbon.
SYRACUSE
Liana, elated, sat with Irving Fein on the steps leading to the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University. Behind them, a semicircular wall listed in granite the names of all the students lost in the Libyan terrorist sabotage of Pan Am flight 103. She had just participated in the first session of the first day of her two-week academic seminar. Thanks to his coaching, she had not done badly, considering she had dropped out of university to become a full-time anticommunist activist in the late eighties.
“The students looked up to me, the way I look up to you,” the Latvian told him. She pulled her mackinaw close, smiling through her shivering; Syracuse was as cold as they said it would be, but her welcome as warm.
The trip to America and her reception at the university were Fein’s doing, Liana knew. The famous reporter was behind her invitation by USIA. The seminar—Media Techniques Around the World, televised by the university station WAER—followed a short speech and long question-and-answer session by Fein to many of the Newhouse School of Journalism students.
In her much smaller seminar about reporting in newly independent states, he was a “facilitator,” shaping the discussion to play to her strengths. And the Latvian had plenty to say—more than she had thought—about television reporting in Eastern Europe, especially in a country riven by language; whenever others in the discussion group went off on tangents, Irving Fein sternly centered the students on the points she had raised. The notion of the media as participant as well as observer in the making of news was exhilarating; she would have to teach a course at Riga University on this exciting subject, based on this experience and her new academic credentials as a two-day lecturer at a great American university.
“You did all right,” he said. “English was a little weak at the start, but there’s a ferocity about you that takes over and then you forget to be worried about words. Have a glass of wine, like Viveca does, before you go on—it’ll loosen you up on your English.”
She grinned at him; a good man, getting older in an intriguing way. One of the student editors had asked her about “mentors” in Eastern European media, and Liana had asked right back—what was a mentor? To her, it was as foreign a word as “facilitator.” From the answer, she hoped this famous journalist would be her mentor and facilitator. She was honored to be working on the same story in tandem with him. She asked about his partner in New York City, Viveca Farr. From his shrugs and the ducking of his head, though never from anything he said, Liana Krumins gathered that Fein considered Farr to be more presenter than reporter; necessary in her way, but without the hunger and passion of a real journalist.
“The passion of the eighties was political revolution,” she offered, “and the passion of the nineties is the information revolution.” That was to be the theme of her second day’s seminar.
“That’s banal,” he said, waving it aside. “Think-tank thinking.” She was immediately glad she had not announced the theme in class.
“What I mean,” she amended, “is that the movement in the world is no longer dominated by political activists, as I was, but by journalists with opinions, as I am beginning to be now. We not only report the news, we help to make the news. Because we journalists focus attention on the forces of change, we become agents of change.” That was surely not banal.
“Yeah-yeah. When you get home, look up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics.” When she gave him her most helpless look, which rarely failed her, he explained: “The energy involved in the measurement of a particle knocks the particle around and makes it impossible to get a precise measurement. That’s why you can never get a true fix on both position and momentum.”
That was an insight about the news business, Liana recognized, in contrast to her feeble attempts at profundity. She took out her notepad and got the spelling of the German physicist’s name, noting next to it, “The reporting of news changes the news.”
He looked at her notes. “If you’re going to boil something down, boil it all the way down,” he instructed. “Make it ‘The reporting changes the report.’ Save words.”
She crossed out the excess verbiage, nodding yes, less was stronger. “I have so much to learn, and you have so much to teach.”
He did not deny that, but took the edge off the praise: “At least you don’t have to be taught to be straight. You either have that internal balance wheel or you don’t. It isn’t hard to get a story, but it’s a bitch to hold it straight when you got it.”
She wrote that down too, not to flatter him, but because she could use it—though she was aware it flattered him, too.
“There’s a corollary to that, which is called Fein’s Underestimation Principle.” He spelled “underestimation” for her. “For example, here we are, working on a heavy, world-class beat about the sleeper agent. There is a time in a big story when you don’t know how much you know. You make the mistake of concentrating on how little you know, and you miss the useful details already inside your head.”
She nodded, writing.
“First thing to ask yourself, Liana,” he continued, “is—why you? Here you are, still in your twenties, not much experience, not a knockout, but you have one of the KGB’s top guys eating out of your hand. You have this Madame Nina dame and her Feliks outfit, with half the crooks in the old Soviet Union, following you around. And you have Berensky himself making contact with you—something I’d give my eyeteeth for. That’s the first real evidence any of us have that the sleeper is not some sort of dream. Now ask yourself: of all the reporters in the world—why you?”
“I have the news program in Riga that everybody listens to,” she declared. “And it reaches Petersburg, too, and because it is in Russian, its rating is high.” She was not yet in a position to boast, but that was not nothing.
“Gotta be more. So keep asking yourself: ‘Why me?’ Got it?”
“ ‘Why me?’ ” She said it again to please him, writing it in capitals and underlining the words. “Why me? I will try it on Nikolai Davidov.”
“You and he—close?”
“We have had sex, but we are not close.”
The American reporter shook his head as if slapped, then pressed on: “That was when you told him you knew about the bug in your pendant, huh? Dumb of you. Never give ’em anything for nothing. Always trade.”
She would remember that, but his advice struck her as contradictory. “You mean Davidov does not know,” she wondered, “that you are aware of his listening to your calls at home?”
“Nope. He thinks we’re stupid. That’s okay with me.”
“Davidov thinks you are a tool of the CIA.”
“Then he’s the one who’s not only stupid, but paranoid.”
Liana was glad to hear the journalist verify that. She remembered she was at a university, and asked a professional question in a stiffly academic way: “What should be the relationship between the media and the intelligence services?”
“You gave me the answer to that a minute ago about you and Nikolai Davidov. Okay to fuck around, but don’t get too close.”<
br />
The great reporter gave her a smile, more lopsided than leering, that warmed her heart. “The spooks and the reporters, we’re both in the meaning-of-information dodge. We both gather up all the facts we can and then we noodle them around in our heads to see what it all means. Then the spooks tell the government secretly what a little of it means, while the press tells the people publicly what it all means.”
“Then the spies and the reporters are very much alike in what we do.”
He shook his head vigorously. “Big difference. It’s fashionable to be cynical in this dodge, but you mustn’t be afraid to get cornball now and then. Get this: At the heart of secrecy is mass manipulation, but at the heart of publicity is democratic dealing. That’s why reporters and spooks can be occasional bedfellows, but never permanent allies. We use each other for our different ends, and whoever gets the most use out of the other wins.”
He stood up, pulled her to her feet, and set off across the campus. “Here’s the deal. Up to last month, I’ve been letting Davidov in on a lot of what Mike Shu and I learned about Berensky. That stirred the pot and used the KGB to put the heat on the sleeper. But as soon as Davidov got hooked on our data, we crossed him up.”
“How did we do that?” Her “we” was intentional; she considered herself more on his side than on the side of the Feliks people or the KGB.
“We encrypted. Whammo, like that, everything in code. All he gets on his earphones out of our Memphis operation is static. His fax tap is a garble. He knows that Dominick is right on the edge of closing in on the key bank Berensky owns, way ahead of the KGB accountants, who can’t count beans.” He licked his lips. “We have Davidov’s mouth watering. By the way, you got a dog? Could you use a dog?”
“No, I live in a tiny apartment in Riga, and I’m not home every night.”
“Never mind. You like him? Davidov?”
“I hate the KGB. Nikolai is personally attractive.”
“He’s a smoothie, but he’s KGB. He’s not on our side. We’re after the truth and he’s after the money. You won’t turn into a lovesick puppy and forget that?”
“I will be careful.” She had never been happy enough to be a lovesick puppy, but was pleased that he thought she had had a normal girlhood.
“Can I trust you to plant three lies on him? See how he reacts? You’d better write these down.” They sat on a bench. “First, you’re telling him I know ‘why you.’ Here: you said to me, ‘Why me?’ And then I said to you: ‘I know all about why you, Liana Krumins, of all people, were selected as the stalking horse.’ ”
“The horse?” Fein was going too fast.
“Tell your playmate Nikolai that I know why you’re in this right up to your sweet little keister.” He shook his head in irritation at language gaps and started again. “Tell him—this is important—tell him I told you that I know why you personally are so central to the search for the sleeper.”
“You do?”
“No, I don’t.” She could see he was trying to be patient. “But I want you to lie to him—tell him I told you I do know. Okay? Then tell him another lie—you don’t know why you were chosen, and the fact I won’t tell you why makes you irritated with me. Got it? It’ll shake him up. Maybe he’ll give you a hint. At any rate, he’ll have to operate as if I do know, and wonder why I’m not acting on it.”
“I understand.” Almost; she would work it out later. It did not bother her at all to help play a trick on the KGB. “And what is the third lie you want me to plant on him?” She kept count, even when he did not, and liked the mental picture of “planting” lies.
“The third lie. Duh. It’ll come to me in a minute—this four-wall-squash-court deception stuff is tricky, and I got a lot going on in my head. Yeah, here it is: you want him to believe that you believe that the sleeper may be Edward Dominick.”
“The man who brought Viveca to the party in New York? The banker from Memphis, Tennessee?”
“The same. You’re not sure, but you suspect. No reason, just intuition. A hunch. They can never argue with that.”
“Is it true? Is Dominick really Berensky?”
He reached out as if to pat her on the head, then drew his hand back. “No, kid, that’s why I called it a lie. But we want the KGB and the Riga crowd to think it’s true. Then it’ll get back to Berensky and he may see how we could be helpful to him. It could draw him into doing business with us. See? Worth trying, and you can help. Give it a shot.”
He turned to the information she had gathered from the Berensky file. Irving asked a lot about Arkady Volkovich, what he knew about Madame Nina and the Feliks people, and if she thought Arkady was a double agent, working for the KGB as well. She had not considered that before; she thought not. “And I certainly don’t think he’s a double agent for the CIA.”
“Hadn’t thought of that myself. But I think the CIA interest died with Clauson.” He looked at her proudly. “Good for you, kid, you’re getting the hang of it. Nothing is certain in the who-uses-who-dodge.” He frowned. “Who-uses-whom, it may be.”
Liana expressed her interest in his examination of the dead CIA man’s cabin. To her surprise, Fein filled her in eagerly: the room, the dog, the trooprs, the computer, the books on the chair, how the poem in the open book might be a clue.
“What was the other book?” The question was so obvious she was afraid she looked foolish in asking.
“I dunno. Why?”
“If you think he was sending you a message with the poetry book,” she said with what seemed to her logic, “why not the other as well?”
Irving Fein did a strange thing. He stopped and closed his eyes, gently tapping the butt of his palm against his temple. After a bit, he said, “Moneybags. FDR’s Moneybags. Wasn’t open, no pages turned down, nothing written in it, nothing fell out when I shook it.”
“What was it about? Who wrote it?”
“Economic history, President Roosevelt, the New Deal. I forget the author.”
“I guess it’s not important.” They walked for a while, briskly, passing clumps of students sauntering across the quadrangle at the heart of the school. She stopped him to look at a statue in a sculpture garden of the biblical figure Job, the innocent sufferer who questioned God’s injustice, by the Serb sculptor Mĕstrovíc. The reporter took a deep breath of the late November air, exhaled, and set off on a march back to where they had been sitting, farther down the hill to a large new building marked BIRD MEMORIAL LIBRARY.
“The lesson here,” he said, pushing her in the door ahead of him, “is to follow up every lead even when they’re blind alleys. After ten blind alleys you’re entitled to a hit, like an oil wildcatter deserves a gusher after a string of dry holes. The commodity-of-wheat theory was a blind alley. This’ll be blind alley number six.”
He said to the woman at the desk, “You got a gizmo that will see if you got a book, like a card catalog? I got a title, not an author.”
The librarian said the card catalog had been computerized and showed them to a workstation. Irving Fein entered “FDR’s Moneybags” in the title slot and the screen instantly showed author, publisher, date of publication—1951—and the fact that the book was in the Bird Library stacks, gift of an economic foundation.
“I don’t have a library card, but I’m a friend of this foreign scholar who just ran a seminar here,” he explained. The librarian said he could not take the book out, but he was free to examine it in the reading room behind her. In a few moments, she produced the book, rebound in buckram without the jacket.
Fein turned to the title page and read aloud, “ ‘FDR’s Moneybags: A Biography of Marriner Eccles.’ Oh-shit.”
Liana asked what that last stood for.
“That’s the Mariner I’ve been looking for. ‘By Mortimer Speigal.’ Oh-shit. I know him. He still works at the Fed.”
Liana flipped back through her pages of notes. “ ‘There is a time in a big story,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘when you don’t know how much you know.’ ”
RIGA
A driver in a worn army uniform met him at the airport gate in Riga carrying a hand-lettered sign that read UNIMEDIA. Karl von Schwebel handed the veteran his rolling overnight case and followed him to the car. Though most of the limousines were German or Swedish, a few British, this car was an old Russian Zis. In the airport lounges all the signs were in Latvian, not, as he recalled, in Russian; these Balts were eager to turn westward and throw off the detritus of a half century of hated Russification.
The publisher remembered the Feliks organization driver, Arkady, from his last visit to his corporate benefactors. Arkady would be discreet, trustworthy, uninformative, a good soldier in their clandestine army. Von Schwebel had read his reports about accompanying Liana Krumins to Lubyanka to inspect the Berensky and Shelepin files.
“Is Madame Nina well, Arkady?”
“As well as can be expected, Herr von Schwebel,” Arkady said over his shoulder in German. “She is under great pressure.”
That invited communication; though their roles in the organization were wholly different, they were under the same command. “And what is the source of the stress?” A generation ago, the word used was simple “pressure”; these days, it was psychologically dressed up as “stress,” from “distress,” in Old French estrece, drawing tight, like a noose. Von Schwebel, whose media communicated words in many languages all over the world, dabbled in the roots of words.
“That is the subject of the meeting of the committee. The search for the agent who disappeared in America. Our concern is that the KGB and the CIA are ahead of us.”
The committee would have to be disabused of that. He half-changed the subject: “Your friend the television reporter I met the other night in New York. She was charming, in a shy way.” In fact, he thought of the Krumins girl as ill at ease and withdrawn, with no future in the media world, in contrast to the self-assured Viveca Farr, who was obviously an incipient star.
Sleeper Spy Page 31
