Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “We crossed ’em up,” Irving explained to Liana, who deserved to be in on the story. “I wanted Berensky’s network to lose its shirt, so his brokers and agents and banks would turn on him and panic him to come to us. So I fixed the message from the Fed mole so they would do the wrong thing. Not bad for a nonbanker, hey, Edward?” He was proud of that financial maneuver and glad that Liana could hear its results from a sophisticated banker like Dominick.

  “You probably missed the substance of the bulletin that Viveca read on the air last night,” the banker said, “because you were concentrating on the awful thing happening to her.”

  Irving had not a clue to what Dominick meant. Liana remembered, though: “It was about the Federal Reserve postponing a meeting.”

  “That’s exactly right, little lady. The Fed was planning to lower interest rates substantially. The mole, Speigal, wrote that message to Berensky’s brokers. But when the mole was found out, and committed suicide, the Fed Chairman wisely decided to postpone the meeting entirely.”

  Irving began to feel queasy. “So what happened?”

  “Well, if the mole’s original message had been delivered correctly, the Berensky group would have lost a fortune—several fortunes, bankruptcies down the line like a row of dominoes, and all furious at being misled by Berensky.”

  “But I changed the message from black to red,” Irving said slowly.

  “Which made the message fit the actual last-minute action to postpone taken by the Fed,” said Dominick. “You changed the mole’s leak; the Fed Chairman did not do what he planned to do; and your signal of ‘red’ paid off big this morning for those who bought dollars and sold marks.”

  “Then Berensky came out ahead,” Irving frowned.

  “Ahead? My God, man, there’s never been such an ‘ahead’ in the history of currency trading. Mike and I figure—on the basis of your ultimately correct ‘red’ signal—Berensky made a profit of nearly twenty billion dollars.”

  The reporter stood silent, trying to digest the turn of events. Liana came up to him and put her hand on his arm. “You were able to help the Russian sleeper make twenty billion dollars?”

  “Nuthin’ to it,” Irving said weakly. “You got to know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em.”

  Dominick was doing his long, low chuckle. Then he stopped. “Your strategy will still have the desired effect, Irving. I think this coup puts the sleeper at or near the hundred-billion level, a sum that must be getting impossible to conceal. And when word gets out about the biggest currency killing ever, governments everywhere will want to know who was behind it. That means Berensky has to make a decision quickly about the disposition of the fortune.”

  Irving took that a step forward. “Which means the financial press will be hot on the sleeper’s trail, too—now we’ve got competition. It means it’s time for you to get your ass over to Riga, maybe with Our Gal Sunday here.”

  “Yes. If I’m to play Berensky to his people, now’s the time. The sleeper looks like a hero after yesterday’s huge coup, and I know all the details.”

  Irving reviewed the status of the impersonation. “I’m pretty sure we’ve got Davidov’s KGB hooked. He now suspects you may be the sleeper.”

  “That’s so,” Liana confirmed. “Nikolai told me to be very careful of what I said to the banker from Memphis. And I will tell him I am sure you are Berensky when I see him next.”

  “That tracks with what I’m getting,” Dominick said. “Our Globocop security people say somebody’s been trying desperately to penetrate our communications with a second satellite. The more we frustrate Davidov, the more he thinks our operation is the real thing.”

  “And we know the Feliks people have plenty of lines into the KGB,” figured Irving. “That means that what Davidov suspects, Madame Nina suspects.”

  “The seed of suspicion has been planted everywhere,” said Dominick. “The only one on the other side who knows for sure I’m not the sleeper is the sleeper. Now I must persuade the hunters that I’m indeed the one they’re hunting.”

  “Wait,” Liana said. “If you convince them you’re Berensky, why won’t the KGB or the Feliks people just seize you and torture you until you give them all the money?”

  “Not to worry,” said Irving quickly, before she took the edge off Dominick’s desire to go. “Goose that laid the golden egg.”

  “He means that the real Berensky is too fragile to touch, Liana. One heart attack and they lose a hundred billion dollars, the salvation of their respective movements, the economic control of Russia. Access to much of the fortune is in his head. Both the KGB and the Feliks people want him to be alive, and to be their agent, not their enemy.”

  She was not persuaded. “But they want the money, and Edward Dominick, no matter who he pretends to be, does not have it.” She pointed this out in what Irving noted was a sound reportorial way. “What happens when you can’t put real money on the table?”

  “In a short time, I think I’ll be able to,” Dominick replied. “Focus on the sleeper. Berensky is a financier who always deals through fronts. He now has every reason to use me as his front in dealing with both groups of Russians. With what I know about his mode of operation, I’m in the perfect position to be his middleman, his agent or broker.”

  “Why?” Irving was glad she’d asked, and looked at Dominick for the answer.

  “Whichever group he decides to give the money to, he will make the other an enemy. The rejected party will be out to kill him, and those people are good at that. Berensky will have to remain anonymous all his life. He needs me—the fake Berensky—to be his shield. Bankers call that intermediation.”

  “Spooks call it a cutout,” Irving added. “Our whole object here is to make Edward a player in this game. Berensky will have to play with his impersonator—it’s in his interest, he can’t avoid it—and we’ll have the story.”

  “Dangerous,” Liana said, shaking her head.

  “Less of a risk to me,” Dominick told her, “than to Irving here, or Mike Shu. Or Viveca. Or you, Liana. Big players don’t get hurt; the lives of all others are expendable.”

  Irving did not express his disagreement with that notion; it was better Dominick thought that way on the eve of placing his head into the jaws of the bear. “So you want to be careful, kid,” the reporter told Liana. “You want to get close to Davidov, but not too close, and tell him you’re sure Edward Dominick here is really Aleks Berensky.”

  “He’ll ask why I think so.”

  “Woman’s intuition. Reporter’s hunch. Whatever. And remember to insist on a trade—that always makes your info more believable. Niko’s got to tell you what’s the basis of Madame Nina’s interest in you. Find out from him why everybody elected little you to be the top banana on the story.” Before she could ask, he amended the trope about the banana: “That’s the central journalist, my counterpart in Europe.”

  “Be careful of this Nina woman,” Dominick added. “I wish I had warned Viveca to be on her guard, too.”

  “You think somebody deliberately made Viveca Farr drunk?” Liana got right to the point. “To stop her from finding Berensky?”

  “Definitely,” said Dominick. “She drinks, as we know, but she’s no drunk. I’m willing to bet somebody spiked her drink with some kind of timed-release drug.”

  “Maybe,” said Irving, wishing it so. “But even if that’s so, nobody would believe it. Too many people have seen her boozing it up, and too many knives are out for her at all the networks, and not just from the men.”

  “That is why she wants to crawl into a hole and disappear?”

  “She once told me,” Dominick said, “that if her career crashed or she was otherwise humiliated, she would either kill herself or pack up and get in a pickup truck and drive to Yucatan.”

  “Told me that, too. Dunno why Yucatan. Could be the sound of the name.”

  Dominick said he would head back to Memphis to get his global security people tracking Viveca, and to prepare for
his own visit to Moscow and Riga as Berensky.

  “I have a detail for you,” Liana offered. “Irving said you wanted anything about Berensky’s family from his file that he would be expected to know. A friend of the wife that was abandoned wrote to Shelepin. She complained of the pain her husband’s assignment had caused herself and Masha.”

  Irving caught the detail. “The kid’s nickname could help, Eddie.”

  “Many girls are called Masha, and boys Sasha,” she cautioned, “not just those with Maria and Sergei in their names. I still turn when I hear Masha; it’s the most common endearment of all. But I hope it may help a little.”

  “I’d have to be careful with it,” Dominick said. “Berensky left before the child was born, and might not know what his wife called her. On the other hand, it would be natural for him to check up on them from over here, if only out of curiosity.” He thanked Liana, shook her hand solemnly, and suggested she call him at the Metropole in Moscow if any other such information came to her.

  When he left, she said, “A brave man.”

  “He’s too old for you.”

  “He’s your age.”

  “You got it.” Irving looked around Viveca’s library, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “I’m missing something.” He started tapping the side of his head with the butt of his palm, wondering what it was that should be in the library and was not, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did not bark.

  That was precisely it. He snapped his fingers. “Housekeeper!” he shouted, and the woman appeared. “Where’s the pooch? My big black dog?”

  Brigid told him Ms Farr had taken the animal with her in the car that morning along with one of the twenty-five-pound sacks of dry meal. Irving permitted himself one small sigh of relief; the presence of Spook in the utility vehicle was the most hopeful news he had heard all morning.

  NEW YORK

  Walking alone back from the airline gate at JFK where he had seen Liana off on her flight to Helsinki, Irving Fein remembered he had not called his message service for more than a day and a half. Too much had been happening for him to go looking for more communication: man blew his brains out in front of him; Liana came along in his life; billions of dollars were made instead of lost; Viveca disappeared.

  “You have six messages,” said his permanent sweetheart, the sexy robot’s voice that was there for him when all others let him down. “To get your messages, press two.” Irving slipped into his automaton mode, doing what he called the dominatrix of the dial directed, except you couldn’t use “dial” anymore. “Call answering message at ten-eighteen A.M., Thursday, November eighteen. To get your message, press zero.” He obeyed. Message came on that his shoes were not ready to be picked up because they weren’t making the plantation rubber soles anymore for his old Wallabees, and would Vibram soles do, and call with the answer; but the shoemaker forgot to leave a number. He pressed star-D and deleted that; a man who could earn $20 billion in a day for somebody else deserved new shoes for himself. The next message announced by the android operator was also from the previous morning, and he pressed zero again to get it.

  “This is me.” Viveca’s voice. “I’ve got something kind of important that I found out last night. It’s—it’s something I can’t make head or tail out of, but you ought to hear tell about it, might change your whole theory of the story. Can you call me back real soon? I’m at home in the country and the fireflies are out. I can’t leave you a hint or anything on this machine; it’s too confidential. It has me a little shaken up, to tell you the truth—my judgment isn’t getting any better with age. If we miss connections, leave word on my machine that you can meet me in Portofino tomorrow at the usual time. Who knows, you may discover that you have a real reporter for a partner after all. Call back quick, Irving—whoops, sorry, Sam, Harry, whatever your name is. I need you.”

  The girl robot said, “To save this message, press one. To delete this message, press star-D. To skip to the next message, press the pound key.”

  He pressed 1 and played Viveca’s call for help again and again, every nuance of her worried voice etching itself onto his memory with each repetition. He wanted to believe that she had not self-destructed, that she did not have her weakness to blame. He preferred to think that she was the latest victim of the sleeper, who had swept this particular chess piece off the board without having to kill her. In every instance of protecting his identity, the sleeper played on the weakness of his target: Clauson’s passion for arcana amid rusticity led to a seeming accident; Speigal’s weakness was the fear of disclosure that led to suicide; Viveca’s vulnerability was a horror of humiliation, and she was now running far away, with whatever clue she had discovered buried in her isolation.

  He pressed 1 again. “This is me.… ”

  VERSAILLES

  “The Mirror Gallery was one of the great technological achievements of the seventeenth century,” the curator was telling the small group of patrons inspecting restoration plans in the palace of Versailles. “Artificial light was at a premium at the time. The diamonds in the crown of Louis XIV could hardly be seen at dinners.”

  Karl and Sirkka von Schwebel fell behind the others to be able to confront their latest marital strain. The couple had contributed nearly a million marks toward the refurbishment of the castle and new landscaping in the gardens; they were being solicited again to resilver some of the deteriorating portions of the historic Hall of Mirrors, scene of grand balls, the crowning of a German emperor, and peace treaties ending the war to end wars.

  Ahead, the fund-raising curator ambled on. “Candles set in front of polished metal backings doubled the candlepower, but it was not until the development of silvered glass that reflected light could be multiplied many times. Here in this hall, for the first time, great sheets of the silvered glass were created by palace artisans to line both sides of a gallery, bringing unprecedented light to a state dinner and properly showing off King Louis’s crown.” The heads of his audience angled upward to follow his pointing finger.

  “I was assured by the publisher personally,” Karl von Schwebel told his wife, “that the magazine would not run the picture.”

  “You are too trusting, Karl. She was the sensation of this year’s festival in Cannes. And here she was looking so adoringly at you.”

  He had gambled on being with Ari Covair that evening without attracting attention, and lost. The paparazzi’s photographs—placing his mysterious-mogul respectability against her Gallic vivacity and deeply backless dress—were taken, sold, distributed, and published. Karl was less concerned at the chagrin of his wife than at the reaction of his moralistic backers at the headquarters of the Feliks organization in Riga.

  “I can state categorically that Ari and I are not having an affair,” he lied.

  “You poor man. Getting all the credit and none of the fun.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “What does it matter to me if you sleep with every woman in your communications empire? But you used to be discreet. That made it easier for us to go out with our friends.”

  “I harass nobody. This young woman started ‘coming on to me,’ as they say, at the party in New York. You must have seen how I rejected her advances.”

  Sirkka’s genuine laugh stung him. He asked what was so funny, and she parried it as if his lie were of little importance to her; that made him furious. He demanded an explanation.

  “Karl, you were making love to that delicious little string bean all the next afternoon. I’m not a spy, but it was common knowledge at the hotel—”

  “You are not a spy, then?” He could not contain his fury. “And at the very moment that you seem to think Ari and I were consummating our relationship, were you not conspiring with the KGB in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel?”

  That stopped her. Her face ashen, she stared straight ahead at the curator and the group.

  “Well?”

  “Tell me the rest, Karl.”

  He caught himself; an atypical loss of temper had
caused him to tip his hand. Knowledge of her Stasi past was a useful secret not to be wasted to indulge a sophomoric passion. He turned his interrogation away from suspicion of espionage. “What more is there? Are you having an affair with the handsome Nikolai Davidov? Not that I mind, but it would make it difficult to go out with our friends—”

  She looked directly at him. “He told me that you managed to suppress my Stasi file in Germany.” He had never before seen tears glisten in those gray Nordic eyes. “Why did you never tell me, Karl? Why did you make me live a lie with you?”

  He turned the question back on her. “Why did you never confess to me?”

  She shook her head in bitterness. “All my fault. Blame me. You, a German patriot, married a Russian spy.”

  How much did she know about what he knew about her? Beyond that, how much had Davidov told her about the control of Karl von Schwebel’s fabled “vast media empire” by the amalgam of Russian mafiyas and politico-capitalists centered outside KGB jurisdiction in Riga? He had to assume that Davidov knew of his backing by the Feliks people and had informed Sirkka. Because he had to anticipate her using that against him, he preemptively confessed: “I married a spy, and so did you. We are not only man and wife, but we are brothers under the skin.”

  “You are working for the Feliks people?”

  He knew she already knew that. “Capital they siphoned out of Russia provided my initial financing,” he said as if he were revealing a secret to her. “Not all their money went to the sleeper agent. Enough went to me to buy control of the communications empire that enables me to harass starlets and secretaries—”

  “I should not have said that. I was angry and jealous.” He hoped she would say more, and she did: “I don’t care so much what our friends say. We don’t have real friends.” He accepted that as true enough. “It is just that I think I can make you happier—in every way—than any little slut trying to buy your favor. May I be frank? It hurts me when you turn elsewhere for love.”