Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “Look, a plot’s a plot, this one’s a proven winner. If a publisher can’t sum up a book in a few words, forget it. Irving, all we have to do is tell this under a seal of secrecy to a publisher and he’s going to say, ‘Gee, a post–Cold War Odessa File,’ and he’ll snap it up.”

  Irving leaned across the agent’s desk. “This is what is happening right now in the world, Ace. It could mean the overthrow of the Russian government, bloody civil war, a new arms race, God knows what-all. Nobody knows it but me and a few spooks and one underground banker who may just be a goddam financial genius.” How could he impress on this man the scope and importance of the story? He took Ace’s tie in his hand and pulled the little man to within three inches of his face. “It’s a fucking … world … beat.”

  Viveca’s potato-chip voice came from behind him. “What happened when the Soviet control met the sleeper agent in Barbados?”

  The reporter whipped around. “That’s number one on the dunno sheet. Possibility: the two of them got in cahoots, said let’s steal the whole bundle and screw both the Russian government and the Feliks people. Possibility two: they’re working together right now to invest the money and set up front companies and take over banks to deliver to the new Russian government and be heroes. Three: they’re running up the pot until they get enough to deliver to the Feliks people to overthrow the elected government. Four: one of them killed the other.”

  After a long moment, Ace said, “I like possibility four.”

  “Actually, four makes the most sense,” Irving said. “The handler would logically have stripped the files in Moscow before setting out, because the government was in a state of flux. There must be at least a couple of higher-ups in the KGB who know all about the sleeper. The handler would surely have reported back to Moscow by now—if he were alive.”

  “Reported back to whom?” The crisp voice, the schoolmarm’s “whom.”

  “Makes no difference, if he’s dead,” said Ace.

  “I’m guessing the handler is the one that’s dead,” Irving said, basing it on a hunch of Clauson’s, whose identity he was not ready to reveal to his colleagues. “That’s because only the sleeper would know how to handle the assets and be in a position to conceal them or return them.”

  “If the sleeper killed the control, as you suspect,” reasoned Viveca, who was doing better at this than Irving had a right to expect, “he would have done it to keep the money from the Russian state. That means the sleeper wants to deliver it to the hard-liners, the Feliks people. Or keep it himself.”

  “Which is why,” Irving led them along, “our boy Davidov in Moscow must be having fits. Somebody up top in the KGB must know who the sleeper is, but if the link of the control is broken, how does the new management of the KGB make contact with their boy?”

  “You’re sure that some of the KGB higher-ups must know his identity,” Viveca said.

  “Yeah, well, they must—but for some reason, they don’t seem to. Why not? That’s also on the dunno sheet.”

  “What’s to keep the sleeper from becoming an entrepreneur?” asked Ace. “Money is a powerful motivator, as the agenting life has taught me.”

  “Gotta remember, this spy was indoctrinated when he was a kid, in the old days, when communism was an ideology. He sat tight for over twenty years and then did what he was told when he was activated. He’s a true believer—my guess is that he’s not in business for himself.”

  “What about the wife he left behind—would she know his current identity?”

  “Tell you the truth, Viveca, I hadn’t thought of her,” Irving admitted. “She could be pretty pissed about being left in the lurch with a brat on her hands. More likely he has a friend or two from the training days, now in the Feliks people, who’d know him. Or maybe a mole over here. He was originally selected by some KGB big shot, remember. The KGB operates in cliques, schools of thought, even more than CIA.”

  “You’re both missing the point of the book,” said Ace. “This is a manhunt story. Who’s going to find the sleeper first and kill him? How does he stay a fugitive and stay alive? Focus on the protagonist.”

  “Ace, think reality. Don’t you know how to sell nonfiction?”

  “A plot’s a plot. You need a central character. Yours is in hiding.”

  “I have a plan to flush him out,” Irving said.

  “And you are going to vouchsafe that to us now.”

  “No.” He looked out the window at Madison Avenue, pretending to think, in fact listening to the nylonic sound of Viveca uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “How we get him to come to us is a matter between me and my partner here. Not you, Ace. Can you sweat a big advance out of a publisher on the basis of an investigative book by Irving Fein and Viveca Farr, giving no other details to blow the story?”

  “No outline, no sample chapter, no documents, nothing?”

  “Just your word that you know what the story is, and it’s big.”

  Ace steepled his fingers. “A challenge. I cannot think of another agent capable of rising to it.” He handed each of them a manila envelope. “This contains our agreement: straight fifty-fifty partnership on all royalties, including television rights, between the two of you, after my modest commission. You can take these documents home and study them if you wish, or you can lock this up right now.”

  Irving took his out and scrawled his name on the last page. Viveca took a few moments to read the six pages of boilerplate, then signed her name neatly at the end.

  “It’s appropriate to shake hands,” the Ace said.

  The squeeze of her perfectly manicured fingers was cool and sure, as Irving knew it would be. He heard her saying to Ace, “The authors would like a seventy-thirty split of the paperback.”

  Rather than offer to buy her a drink, he suggested they walk over to the East River, where there was a bench he knew. “I call it the Irving Fein Bench of Inspiration.”

  She nodded and hailed a cab. That bothered him. First, the East River was maybe six blocks away, tops seven, and it was a fair November day. Furthermore, when he was with a woman, he’d hail the damn cab. He let her open the door and slide in first, the skirt of her suit riding up to show those perfect legs.

  “New shoes,” he noticed. “They hurt?”

  She did not reply. The cab promptly got stuck in the crosstown traffic, and the bus ahead spewed its fumes their way. They sat uncomfortably and he said nothing back.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said finally. “Hoity-toity broad, can’t walk a few blocks, has to have a cab if her limo isn’t on standby.”

  “You’re a mind reader, all right.”

  “Look. If we started to walk, within thirty seconds you would see people stop and look at me. When they passed, they’d turn around and look some more. Some nice old lady would come up and say, ‘Don’t I know you?’ Believe me, just walking down the street when you’re on television regularly is an ordeal.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that, tell you the truth.”

  “You’re lucky to be in print. You have your famous byline and you keep your privacy.”

  He thought that over. Would he like walking down the street and having women snap their heads around and say, There-goes-Irving-Fein,-isn’t-he-adorable? Wouldn’t bother him all that much, certainly not at first. Privacy was something he had too much of. It was like the guys who complained bitterly about all the junk mail that stuffed their mailboxes. Irving liked to get junk mail; he hated to look in his mailbox and find it empty.

  If his face were famous, would women he dated feel protective of him, as he now felt protective of the famous face beside him? He’d like that. Maybe if this book went over big, he’d be a part of the television special, get his face a little better known, which might lead to some speaking fees. The pundits he knew went on panel shows for peanuts to stimulate the lecture agents to book them at conventions for heavy money. He would do no promotion tours for the book, though—not that anybody wanted him to after that hoo-ha over the
libel release. Let Viveca Farr, face too famous to walk across town among the Great Unwashed, do that.

  “When’s your birthday?”

  She looked suspicious. “Next week. Thirty-three,” she reminded him. “Why?”

  “I was thinking of getting you a pair of those glasses with the fake nose attached,” he said. Her face tightened; she opened her purse, took out a few dollars, and thrust it through the opening in the plastic barrier protecting the cabbie from passengers. He added, “They have ’em without the funny mustache, for women.”

  She burst out of the taxi on her side and started walking fast. He hurried to catch up, and they sped across town toward the river, her heels clicking on the cement. Nobody coming at them looked at her twice. He craned his neck back; nobody had turned around. A few particularly cutting remarks came to mind, but he bit his tongue.

  If it hadn’t been for the river, he thought, she would have kept going until he dropped. Breathing hard, he plopped on the bench along the riverfront with the FDR Drive traffic behind them. Time to make peace, he told himself.

  “How come you know from paperback splits?”

  “I do my homework before a meeting.” She stared at a slow barge going upriver. “Tell me I shouldn’t bother my pretty little head.”

  He stuck his legs out, crossing his feet near the fence. Careful, now. “On a seventy-thirty split, which of us gets the seventy?”

  She looked at him for the first time since they’d left Ace’s office. “You don’t know?”

  “I have a long dunno sheet for contracts, and I just put that on.”

  “After the hardcover sale,” she explained, “if the book does well, or gets a big book-club sale, the hardback publisher will hold a telephone auction for the paperback rights. It used to be that half the money for those rights went to the hardback publisher, the other half to the author, to be applied against the advance on royalties. You really don’t know about this?”

  “Never had the problem,” he said truthfully. “No book of mine ever sold enough to reach the advance. I’m glad when they don’t come after me for the difference.”

  She put her feet out, too. “This one will sell, and reflect well on both our reputations. But this time, seventy percent of the paperback money comes to us, the authors, and thirty percent goes to the hardback publisher.”

  “And you and I split the seventy?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “That’s pretty good. You were smart to ask for that.”

  She gave a small shrug and smiled. “I’m glad you have your breathing under control. The way you were puffing I thought you’d have a heart attack. You need more exercise.”

  Irving knew that, just as he knew all about paperback splits, of course, though Ace was never able to get him more than sixty-forty. But this little victory boosted Viveca’s easily damaged amour propre at no cost to him—on the contrary, her homework and chutzpah in upping the author share would produce money in the bank for him. He gave her credit for that.

  “Now tell me what you don’t want Ace to know,” she said, reaching for her notebook. “How we get the sleeper agent to come to us.”

  “Two ways to fish after you have a lead. One is to get into print in a New York Times or a Washington Post or International Herald Trib with what you have. Then sources come to you—packages over the transom, messages in creepy voices, spooks passing tips through all sorts of cutouts. Trouble with that way is it stirs up the competition. We got to get way out ahead on this first, so it’s all ours, nobody can catch up.”

  She nodded, making no notes in the failing light, doodling on the page. She doodled tight little boxes.

  “Any questions so far?”

  “What’s a transom?”

  He ignored that. “The other way, our way, is to get our duck by setting out a decoy duck. We set up a parallel sleeper, our guy, a credible impostor, to attract either the Feliks people or the KGB, or both. Or”—here was where Irving hoped to get lucky—“to attract the real sleeper. Takes a banker to catch a banker.”

  He sketched out the plan to recruit Edward Dominick, Clauson’s pick at the Memphis Merchants Bank. “I have a hunch our spooks have used him before, for minor chores, but we’re not supposed to know that.” He did not give her the name of his CIA source, nor did he tell her he did not know who had originally tipped him to go to Clauson. She had no need to know that, at least not yet, and if she should get cold feet he did not want her to be able to pass the source on to another reporter. He did review with her what little he had gleaned about the real sleeper: mid-forties, hard of hearing, big guy, the married name of his abandoned wife.

  “Do we know his name?”

  “We know his real name, the one on his Soviet birth certificate: Aleksandr Berensky. The cover name, the one he goes by here? Dunno.”

  “Fireflies are out. See?”

  He was glad she did not want to know more; if their positions were reversed, he would be pushing, pushing to get more on the sources, more on Dominick, more on the connection—or lack of it—between the sleeper and his new handler, if there was one, or with his Feliks people contact, if that’s what the sleeper preferred. There was some value to working with an amateur as a partner: she was too busy digesting what he’d told her to show a hunger for what he had not.

  “There goes another one.” The fireflies were out in force, early this year. It seemed to him she was not too eager to get to her television studio and other life. Irving had no place to go. “That’s a female, attracting a mate,” she observed.

  “If it’s a firefly.”

  She frowned, pointing at a lightning bug floating in the air with its abdomen brightly lit a greenish yellow. “You’re telling me that’s not a firefly?”

  “Did a piece on insects once,” he said. “The firefly has a natural predator, which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d be up to our ass in fireflies. The predator is called an assassination beetle. It has the same ability to glow, and it can replicate the code of flashes of a mating firefly. The firefly moves in to mate and is devoured by the beetle.”

  She rubbed her arms briskly. “Wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  He had never done a piece on bugs. He knew this because Clauson had told it to him one night, along with arcana about the deceptiveness of orchids he’d picked up from his Agency hero, Jim Angleton. That famed molehunter had been fired for paranoid zealotry when the smooth new bunch took over in the seventies and later let the Russian moles penetrate the Agency. After a money-grubbing mole named Ames, operating in the eighties and nineties, all but crippled the Agency and caused the execution of its best spies in Russia, the guys at fault blamed their laxity on the reaction to Angleton’s “paranoid witchhunts.” Irving was never much for insect metaphors but had filed it in his head in case he ever needed to liven up a feature lead.

  “Do people still get killed in this espionage business?” she wanted to know. “I’m not afraid for myself, but I’d hate for you to get knocked off and then I’d have to finish the book all alone.”

  The hell she wasn’t afraid. He set her mind to rest: “Cold War’s over. And nobody ever kills, or even threatens, a reporter—too big a hoo-ha.” He thought of Michael Shu, the accountant he’d hired on spec to go to Moscow and Riga to do some low-level digging. “That goes for people who work for reporters, too,” he reassured her preemptively.

  “Wonder what happened when the handler and the sleeper met in Barbados?”

  He wished she hadn’t brought that up. “The control was a Russian spook. They call it mokry delo; our boys call it ‘wet work.’ What those guys do to each other is their business.”

  “What’s wet about the work?”

  His heart sank; she didn’t know anything about this business. What was wet was blood; he mumbled something about underwater frogmen.

  She flipped her cigarette over the rail into the river. Time for the news on television. “I have to do my script. Our next step?”

  A
hundred words; big deal. She probably needed the time for makeup and hairdresser.

  “I have a call in to Dominick in Memphis,” Irving said, frowning. “He didn’t call back yesterday, so I had to tell his nosy secretary who I was but not what I wanted. If he keeps ducking, I’ll have to show up at his home Sunday. Don’t like to do that—it makes ’em nervous.”

  “Why don’t I call him?” she suggested. “He’ll take my call. We want a meeting in his office, right? In the morning, so I can get back in time for the newscast.”

  True. Most executives, no matter how impressed with themselves, would take a call from Viveca Farr, the famous television newslady on every night at nine for forty-five snappy seconds. He gave her Dominick’s number, hailed a cab, opened the door for her, said good night politely. Fame had its function. He hoped that rigmarole he’d given her about the fireflies and the assassination beetles was accurate, in case she ever checked, but that was unlikely.

  MOSCOW

  She sensed that somebody was looking over her shoulder, even though the Shelepin file room was empty. Liana Krumins straightened, looked back, saw nobody there. She buttoned the top button of her blouse and pulled the shawl off her shoulders, placing the gauzy Latvian garment atop a file she had opened.

  She had decided it was wiser to come alone this time, because the Feliks people’s escort, Arkady, whom she had come to trust, said somebody else from the organization had been assigned to come with her that day; besides, male librarians tended to be more accommodating to a young woman by herself.

  The archivist who sat at the desk used by the floor’s chief jailer in the old Soviet days had been more than helpful this time. Liana flirted with the fellow, took his mind away from the television he was watching, explained her exasperation, beseeched his expert guidance, and sure enough, the misplaced files on the offshoot of the Shelepin clan named Berensky had been miraculously found.

  She was now looking for any reference, in any of the surveillance reports, official letters, family correspondence, tombstone bills, newspaper clippings, and scrawled memoranda, to a particular member of the Shelepin family whose last name was Berensky. If she could then track him down, if he was alive, she would be the finder of a leading international spy and surely become the most respected journalist in Latvia and throughout the Baltic nations. Liana Krumins would not only have her own television program, as she already had, but as a famous journalist she would become an owner of the station. Then she would have total freedom to broadcast the truth far and wide, to Helsinki in the north, Vilnius in the south, St. Petersburg in the east, even to Berlin in the west.