Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “And she never told us.”

  “She doesn’t know,” Irving said.

  “Least you should do, Irving, is to tell her. That girl has eyes for you.”

  “C’mon, Viveca, be serious. You left a message on my machine that’s been driving me crazy. Musta played it a hundred times. What is it that you learned that’s buggin’ you?”

  She turned the information about Liana’s lineage over in her mind, and it brought out a rueful smile. “If we had only known what was going on at that party.”

  “Sometimes the best question is no question at all,” he said, as if instructing himself. “I’ll just take my shoes off and roll up my pants and wiggle my toes in the water. Move over, pooch.”

  “Irving, I became emotionally involved with Edward.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was very much the gentleman, and I threw myself at him. And on the night of November eighteenth, in one of those huge corner suites at the Plaza Hotel in New York, we went to bed together.”

  “Bottom line, please. Spare me the details.”

  “No I won’t, because the story is in the details, you once told me that.” That was becoming painful to her, and it would be to Irving if he was in any way stuck on her, but he had come all this way and was entitled to hear it all set out.

  “We got in that canopied bed and we made love. Edward was very tender, and then very passionate, and I never opened up to a man like that in my whole life. It was more than sex. We became one person. I cried afterward, it was so beautiful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I lay there next to him, and I wanted to—to serve him, in an intimate way, so I murmured in his ear did he want me to bring him a washcloth. He didn’t say anything. I supposed he was half asleep. After a few minutes he pulled me on top of him—”

  “Hey, come on—”

  She motioned to him to shut up. “And after we made love again, Edward pulled me over to his other side, his right side, and I lay there for a while again, exhausted, thinking he needed a younger woman. I whispered again did he want me to bring him a washcloth. And this time he said what a great idea, that no woman had ever said that to him before, and he lifted his arm to let me out of bed.”

  “As my punishment for renting one porno flick, I have to listen to all this from—”

  “There’s a point to what I’m telling you, Irving.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “He’s deaf in his left ear.”

  “But he’s supposed to be, same as Julius Caesar was. We got him the hearing aid to fake it—”

  “He’s not faking it! Don’t you understand? Later on, I tried it again. I snuggled into his left side and lay there for a while and whispered to him that I loved him, which I did, more than any man in my life, ever. Nothing; no reaction. Then I got up and went to the little bar under the television that you open with a key”—she rose and bent over to demonstrate—“and got out a little bottle of Grand Marnier, he likes that, and came back to bed on his other side. And I snuggled in again and whispered I loved him into his right ear and he responded immediately and kissed my head and said he loved me, too.”

  “Brother. You sure the hearing aid wasn’t in his left ear—turned off—making it hard for Dominick to hear on that side?”

  “The hearing aid was on the night table between his watch and the open package of condoms.”

  “You’re allowed to edit some stuff out, Viveca. But if he’s really deaf in his left ear—”

  “Then Edward Dominick is really the sleeper.” She had to drive it home to him, as the realization had been driven home to her. “He is both Edward Dominick, our impersonator, and Aleks Berensky, the real sleeper. One and the same man.”

  “Oh-shit.” He looked blank for a long minute and then started bumping the butt of his palm against his forehead. “Where’d I get him from? From Walter Clauson at the CIA. Clauson and he were in cahoots.”

  “Then the whole deal was a CIA plot, using you and me. Your friend Dorothy Barclay double-crossed you, Irving. You’ve been a cat’s-paw for the spooks.”

  “Maybe. Maybe.” She watched him blinking and thinking; he reminded her of a slot machine, its lever just pulled, with the apples and oranges and lemons whirring in independent windows before coming to a stop and paying off with a torrent of coins or not. “I can’t believe Dorothy would do that to me.”

  Viveca/Arlene wasn’t finished. “So we were lying there in bed.”

  “No more, for crissake. If you tell me he got it up again, I’m going to lie facedown in this stream and drown myself.”

  “I couldn’t sleep knowing he was really Berensky, and that he was lying to us, and only playing with me. But he couldn’t sleep either, and I had a hunch he suspected I’d discovered his secret. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to double-check, but then I couldn’t be sure.”

  “You didn’t say anything to him, confront him or anything?”

  “No. Frankly, I was afraid he’d kill me. We finally got to sleep, and the next morning, he seemed to forget about it. He put the thing in his ear natural as pie and could hear fine, the way Dominick did. When he went into the bathroom and the shower started running, I called you.”

  “I got that message the next day.”

  “I knew you’d catch the signal about the fireflies—remember the assassination beetle you told me about, from the Angleton days? Dominick was our assassination beetle, the phony firefly, our fake impersonator.”

  “Sure,” he said in a smaller voice. “I got that immediately. But I checked my service a day too late, after your show. Davidov heard your message too, on his tap. He didn’t know what the fireflies meant, the dumb schmuck.”

  “But there was a phone extension in the bathroom, and I think now Edward was listening. But he never let on, and I was less sure when he came out all hard and ready and—” At Irving’s dismayed look, she skipped ahead lest he lie down in the creek. “The rest of the day we spent together, at the Met Museum, in the park, dinner in the grillroom of the Four Seasons, and then he delivered me to the studio for the broadcast. I was feeling a little woozy, but I thought it was just the two glasses of wine, and I could always handle that.”

  “He drugged you.” The Fein judgment admitted no other possibility. “He slipped something in your food or wine that would hit about nine o’clock.”

  “I think so. I wish I could say for sure.”

  “It’s for sure. Get that? No equivocation, no ifs. The sumbitch commie agent drugged you, knowing what it would do to you on the air, and knowing what a disaster it would be for you.” Irving was adamant and getting angry. “He caught you in the act of exposing him, and he wanted you out of the way. Murder would have been the hard way, and your message was already on record, on my machine. He took the easy way, which was even more effective in wiping you off the board, because it didn’t also involve a homicide investigation.”

  “That’s what I think,” she said tentatively, “and what you think, because you’re my friend. But are other people ever going to give me the benefit of the doubt? Not going to happen, Irving. The sight of me falling on my face—Ice Maiden dead drunk—gave too many people too much of a thrill. No excuses.”

  “I can give public opinion a swift kick in the head,” he said with supreme confidence, “and turn it the hell around. Come back with me now. We can strategize with Ace about how to handle it.”

  She shook her head, no. “My name is Arlene Paltz. I’m safe here. No media conferences, no backstabbing, no pressure. You can write your book and keep all the proceeds. All I want from you, my dear friend, and that’s what you are, is protection of my privacy. Can you make that part of your deal with Davidov?”

  “Only if you let me put the transmitter back on Spook’s collar.” He was not joking; he seemed very firm about remaining in touch, and although she would never trust anyone completely, she decided to trust Irving for a while. “I have to be the one who knows where you are. Gotta be some connectio
n. Otherwise, so help me, it’s the National Enquirer and—” he groped for a headline—“ ‘Boozy Newsie Turns Massage-Parlor Floozie.’ ”

  That pulled a smile out of her. She extended her hand for a formal shake on the deal, the way they had in Ace’s office eons ago. He held out his arms and she reached her arms up around his neck, holding on without hugging. Irving Fein was not part of what she was running away from; in his perverse way, he probably loved her. “Ain’t nobody’s fuckin’ cat’s-paw,” she heard him murmur in her hair, which was, as he said, mousy and messy, the way she wanted Arlene Paltz to be.

  HELSINKI

  Sirkka Numminen von Schwebel sat in the private computer lounge of the Helsinki airport between two men to whom not telling the truth might have serious consequences.

  “If you lie to me,” said Nikolai Davidov in a measured voice, “I will have you arrested by the Finnish police out in the hallway and extradited to Russia by the Moscow prosecutor. You will be convicted of stealing tens of billions of rubles from the Russian Federation and you will never see the outside of a prison camp for as long as you live.”

  “And if you lie to me,” said Irving Fein, who seemed to her more excitable than the KGB man but trying to be equally menacing, “I will do a series on your meal-ticket husband that will trigger Congressional hearings that will be telecast by his competitors all over the world. He’ll be sued by every stockholder in every company he corruptly controls. You will see, Sirkka baby, what happens when the media turns on one of its own—there’ll be SEC suspensions, Fed freezes, Interpol exchanges, and criminal prosecutions in a half-dozen countries. Blood all over the floor.”

  Davidov’s threat she took more seriously. “It will be hard to break a habit of a lifetime,” she told them as coolly as she could, “but you have made clear that it is now in my interest, and my husband’s interest, to tell what I believe to be the truth.” She had worked out with Karl the night before in Rome what truth she should tell to the KGB and CIA-Fein, and what truth he should tell to the Feliks people. “Further intimidation of me would be counterproductive. Let us proceed.”

  Davidov came at her first. “What has been your relationship with the Feliks people?”

  “Nil,” she said, which was the truth. “They know I have been working with you. Karl’s business empire, as you know only too well, is entirely under Russian mafiya control. Madame Nina and Kudishkin have warned my husband about me and ordered him not to reveal to me his knowledge of my Stasi or KGB work.”

  “But he did.”

  “No,” she lied safely. “It was you who told me he knew, Nikolai. That is why I cannot trust him.” She and her husband were allies, however, an island of self-interest interfacing Davidov’s KGB, Fein’s CIA, and Madame Nina’s Feliks people in the search for a percentage of the sleeper’s money.

  Fein broke in. “How are you in cahoots with the sleeper in America?”

  With her command of languages, Sirkka presumed “cahoots” was related to “cohort” and alluded to conspiracy among those of like interests. “Only indirectly. Through my work for Russian Foreign Intelligence, as Director Davidov knows, I became friendly with Mortimer Speigal of the Federal Reserve. We meet every year in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I am his channel to FI.”

  “He sends you inside stuff about the Fed’s plans,” asked Fein, “and you pass it on to the KGB?”

  “In recent years, it has been to Russian Foreign Intelligence,” she corrected him, because Davidov would know, “now separate from the KGB. I also handle the Russian payments to Speigal, in cash personally in Davos, as well as by transfers to his Swiss bank accounts.”

  Fein again: “Then is Speigal working for the Russian government, or for the sleeper in America?”

  The reporter she assumed to be working for the CIA was getting to the heart of the matter; she could not safely deceive him with Davidov present. Nor could she deceive Davidov, with the CIA’s Fein present, about her connection to the rogue operation in America run by the CIA mole Clauson and the sleeper. Her usual lines of duplicity were closed; it was smart of the rival agencies to join forces to elicit what she knew.

  Sirkka took refuge in the truth: “Mort is working for both,” she answered. That was the first time she betrayed a fellow agent, but she had no choice, because the KGB, by Davidov’s presence at this interrogation, approved; he would have to fight the bureaucratic battle with FI. “Speigal was originally recruited by the KGB in the mid-eighties. Ever since, in one channel, he has been a useful source about the economic plans of the American government to Soviet and then Russian planners.”

  “Tell us about the other channel,” Davidov ordered. “Outside the KGB.”

  She tried to buy a little time. “Why not ask your CIA friend here? Mr. Fein knows all about the other channel.”

  “Don’t play games,” said Fein, jet-lagged eyes burning into her. “You’re right on the edge of public exposure. Answer his goddam question and answer it straight.”

  She shrugged. “We now come to the CIA’s cooperation with the sleeper Berensky to build the fortune.”

  “I thought so,” Davidov said, giving Fein a cold look.

  “I was contacted by Walter Clauson of the CIA just after I married Karl, in 1989,” she said truthfully. “It was in Washington. Clauson knew of my Stasi and KGB work, and I thought at first he wanted to turn me, have me report back to Russia what the Americans wanted sent back. But he had somthing more complex in mind than making me a double agent.”

  They waited. She was puzzled by the reporter’s interest, which did not seem feigned. Did the CIA’s Fein not know this already? Perhaps it was compartmentalized and he was not in the compartment. She looked to Davidov: “You are ordering me to tell him about Walter Clauson?” It would mean betraying a second agent.

  At Davidov’s nod, she said, “A nod of the head is not sufficient. I am sure you are recording this, and you will have to say your order out loud.”

  “What did Clauson say to you when he made contact?”

  She felt his verbalization to be a small victory, although he could cut it out of the tape. “Clauson revealed himself to me as a Soviet agent inside the CIA.”

  “Oh-shit,” whispered Fein. He looked at Davidov: “Is she telling the truth?”

  “About that, yes.” Davidov told her to continue.

  “Clauson said he knew of the Soviet sleeper agent in America who had been given three billion in gold to invest. He also said he knew—either through the KGB or the CIA, I don’t know which—of the Soviet mole in the Fed, Speigal.”

  Davidov wanted to know if the sleeper and the Fed mole—Soviet agents in the U.S.—knew the other’s identity; she said no, which was true. “Clauson was the only bridge between the mole and the sleeper,” she said. “And he said nothing to the CIA or KGB.”

  “A double double cross,” said Fein, still shaking his head as if all this were news to him. She assumed the reporter’s thunderstruck demeanor was all a charade. “Beautiful. So Clauson had this great idea to make a bundle.”

  “Walter Clauson had a daring plan to set up a separate operation—a rogue operation, if you will.” If their intent was to test her reliability, she would surprise them with the truth. “Speigal at the Fed would supply the inside information on the American side. I would supply the economic intelligence from the KGB side. And Berensky, the sleeper, would use the data to invest the Communist Party money to generate one hundred billion dollars in assets.”

  “And who would get the jackpot at the end?” Fein asked.

  “I always presumed it would be you, the CIA,” she said with care. “Or split up among the CIA and FBI and KGB and FI, which would fund their operations for years. But I don’t know the arrangement Clauson and Berensky made among the agencies.”

  Fein asked if she had heard from Speigal lately. “Not since he sent me the fax that made possible our coup on interest rates,” she replied. “I suppose he’s entitled to a few weeks
off.”

  “And Clauson?”

  “Sometimes months go by and I don’t hear from him.” Why was he asking this? Had they been turned? If so, what were they saying about her?

  “And the sleeper?”

  Time for a lie, not checkable. “The first time I met him was with the both of you, at the literary agent’s dinner party.” She remembered watching the quick, casual encounter of the sleeper with his unknowing daughter and shook her head in wonderment at the memory. “That was some party.”

  Davidov’s turn. “Did you exchange any words with the man who called himself Dominick privately that night?”

  “No.” True.

  “Hard to believe. You were his colleague in a rogue operation for years, and when you find yourself in a room together, you gave no hint of recognition?”

  “Of course not, Nikolai. The KGB rule is never to speak unless spoken to by an undercover superior. You’re trying to trick me. I cannot be tricked because I am sticking to the truth.”

  “You told me before,” said Davidov, “that you believed Edward Dominick was not just pretending to be Berensky, but was actually him. Did you ever deal directly with the sleeper?”

  “No. Clauson is my cutout.”

  “Has Speigal of the Fed ever met him?”

  “No. The only person who deals directly with the sleeper is Clauson.” She turned to Fein. “And recently, you. You dealt with him all the time, in his role as Edward Dominick. And you forwarded the message to me from Speigal—that fax I passed on to the sleeper’s brokers—and it led to the biggest currency trading profit ever. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “I know what I know,” the stone-faced Fein replied. “I want to know what you know. And I don’t like the way you’ve been diddling us.”

  “What means ‘diddling’?”

  “It means to gently raise and lower the male genitalia.”

  “Very colorful.” She decided the moment had come to take offense and push back. “The truth, gentlemen, is that I have been working for the KGB for nearly a decade on a penetration of the Federal Reserve. You, Davidov, know that. At the same time, I have been working with the CIA since the fall of the Soviet Union on its profitable operation with the traitorous sleeper to finance the Agency for years to come. You, Fein, surely know that.”