Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  To Yelena, who had listened in on his meeting with his insubordinate, Davidov said: “Now we know what happened. Control was informed of the crash and realized he was the only one who knew the sleeper’s identity. When the two met, he suggested they split the fortune and defect. And Berensky killed him.”

  “Or Berensky suggested that, and the handler said no, and Berensky killed him.”

  Possible. Davidov added another: “Or the handler laid out the scheme, the sleeper objected on patriotic grounds, and the handler killed Berensky.”

  “You don’t believe that, Nikolai Andreyevich.”

  “No. The sleeper is a global financier, and a man driven by powerful purpose. He has no restrictions whatever on carrying out his mission. I think he learned from his control that everyone who knew his identity had died in the crash, and he decided to take advantage of the opportunity for total isolation. He killed the handler and he is now deciding what to do with the money.” Davidov was almost certain that Berensky, as a dedicated Soviet man, his culture more communist than Russian, would lean toward enriching the Feliks people, using the fortune to destabilize the government in Moscow. He had to stop that at all costs.

  “I want everything we have on the Krumins woman.”

  “Not the videotape again. It will wear out.”

  He ignored that. “Her birth certificate, passport, work papers, the surveillance reports, everything. We photocopied the Berensky file she asked to see, did we not? Beforehand?”

  “Yes. And we made an inventory. I have the copy of the document she stole. I have analyzed her dossier carefully, if there is a fact you want to know immediately.”

  He tested her. “When was she born and where?”

  “December fifteenth, 1968, in Riga, Latvian Republic of the USSR. The birth certificate of Liana Maria Krumins is a transcribed copy; I am trying to find the original.”

  “Find it.” There were often revealing discrepancies in transcribed documents. “Parents?”

  “Her mother is Antonia Krumins, a ballet instructor of Russian descent now living in Riga. Her father was Ojars Krumins, architect, Latvian, died fourteen years ago.”

  “Ages at the time of her birth?”

  “Mother was seventeen, father was forty.”

  Odd, but it accounted for Liana’s Russian-Latvian bilingual ability. “Where did she learn English?”

  “From a man she lived with in the independence movement. At school, she was a brilliant student, declined Komsomol membership.”

  “Go on.”

  “Troublemaker, marijuana trafficker, dissident. Jailed after an illegal independence rally, but was let go the next morning; her fellow protesters were held one to three months.”

  “Why was she released so quickly?”

  “Don’t know.” Yelena went on: “Expelled from university in 1988. Became spokeswoman for the independence movement, learned English to deal with Western press, broadcast on an opposition radio station. After the breakup of the Union, Krumins became a radio and then television news presenter, her current employment. Respected by her colleagues, big audience on the air.”

  “Lovers?”

  “Lived with dissident writer for two years, threw him out, had affair with married political leader, may be still going on. Apparently attracted to older men, but treats all men like dirt. They seem to love it.”

  Davidov did not let himself smile. “Stick to what the files tell you. Why do you think she was chosen by the Feliks people to do their digging?”

  “She’s perfect for it. Journalist’s credentials. Unafraid. Three languages. Striking appearance, so easy to follow or trace. And a good researcher, too.”

  “And why did she agree to work with them?”

  “She probably had contact with the American journalist Irving Fein, when he came through here a few years ago. He could be a CIA front.”

  That last guess did not satisfy him. And epistemological training caused him to sense a deception in the May-December marriage on her birth certificate. Moreover, there had to be more to her selection by the Feliks people—a former lover in the inner council, perhaps. She had wide experience for a woman not yet in her late twenties. “Where is she now?”

  “Here in Moscow. In Lubyanka, with the archivist in his office. This time he’s awake.”

  Davidov was surprised to learn she was at hand. From his closed-circuit monitor in Yasenovo, he punched up the Lubyanka screen, skipped through several channels, and found her talking to the archivist.

  “Yelena, where is the Krumins girl likely to go next?”

  “She has asked for the Shelepin family records,” the analyst said. “They’re on the fourth floor, in the Chekists’ Study Room.”

  He was familiar with that room, dominated by a heroic portrait of the founder of the Soviet secret police, “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky.

  “Make sure nobody is in there, and be certain no tape is made, audio or video. No surveillance at all, you understand? Tell the archivist to keep her waiting for an hour.” He could be in Moscow in thirty minutes. “Tell my driver I want to go in to Lubyanka right away. Run down the original of her birth certificate—I want to see that—and hand me her file.”

  “The extra document is in, Nikolai Andreyevich.”

  There were three thick folders. “All this on a woman so young?”

  “She was a troublemaker.”

  Liana Krumins stopped at the open doorway of the file room; a man was inside, hunched over the contents of three files spread out at the end of a long table. A low lamp lit the papers but kept his face in shadows, but he seemed youngish, with a flowing mustache in the Stalin style. An expensive black leather jacket, with the zippers and metal buttons that the fashionable set had been affecting in Moscow the last few years, hung over the chair behind him. He was wealthy or had family connections or both.

  She entered, looked at the slip in her hand, went to the cabinet with the files on the Shelepin family. The numbered folder was there. An inventory sheet—done on a typewriter, which meant recently—included a cross-reference to another folder about the Berensky family, but did not give its file number. She took two Shelepin family folders out of the cabinet; they were heavy, and hit the table with a thud.

  “Shhh,” said the man.

  “Shhh yourself,” she replied. She had as much right to be here as he did.

  “I’m trying to concentrate. This is important work.”

  She glared at him, pulled up a chair with a loud scraping noise, and went to work on her quest. She was looking for any reference to Anna Berensky, Shelepin’s private secretary in his early days at the KGB, or their illegitimate son Aleks, who she suspected was the young man that some of the Feliks people sent to America when they dominated the KGB. The cryptic cross-reference in the file to a Berensky family supported her theory.

  Five minutes later, the man at the end of the table looked up and said, “I apologize. I was rude to you.”

  She nodded her acceptance, slowly turning over another document. A handsome man, and she liked the strong black mustache, but a fool; how could he not know that these rooms were not only bugged but televised?

  “I’m looking for the truth about a fascinating woman,” he said, tapping the papers before him.

  She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, the universal signal of warning about surveillance.

  “Oh, that.” He rose, went to the mirror on the far wall, removed it from its hook, and put it on the floor. He then hung his jacket over the lens that the one-way mirror had concealed. He came toward her—moving with grace, like an athlete or a dancer—reached under the table, and pulled out a small microphone, snapping its wire with a short jerk. “Mustn’t forget the audio backup. Now we’re alone.”

  “You’re going to get us in trouble. The guards will notice the blackout and be here in a minute.” The man was a fool.

  “Relax, I work here. I’m new, but I frighten the file clerks. Name is Nikolai.” He extended his hand. She shook it f
irmly, as always; he had a strong hand, sensitive fingers. Instead of being a fool, he was a charmer, which put her doubly on guard. He was not wearing a pass; she asked where it was. He pulled out his wallet and showed her his ministry identification: Nikolai Andreyevich Davidov, All Floors. She interpreted that to mean he was no minor functionary. The picture showed him smiling; she had never seen a pass of any kind, even a passport, with a person smiling. She waited for his questions.

  He went back to his end of the table, tapped the papers. “Fascinating, what you can learn from these. Frightening, too—in the old days, they wasted God knows how much time and money following innocent people, listening, compiling dossiers.”

  She pointed to his coat hanging on the lens and the ripped-out wire on the table. “Only in the old days?”

  “You’re right. Some of these are recent,” he said, caressing the file. “But most of the reports were in the late eighties, when she was working subversively for independence.”

  “Where?”

  “Baltics.”

  Probably somebody Liana knew, perhaps in Estonia; more women were trusted there by the independence movement leaders than in Latvia. “I worked for Latvian independence,” she said forthrightly. It was no secret. “Maybe I know her.”

  He motioned her over.

  On top of the file’s contents was a picture of a room in what seemed like a political headquarters, a familiar sight, with a dozen or so people working on mimeograph machines in the days before photocopiers and faxes. She knew some of the faces, and looked closer. The man she had lived with at the time was in the center. It was their headquarters.

  She pushed the picture aside to see the one underneath. There was her own face in the photograph, elated, the night the Americans recognized Latvian independence, holding out a bottle of champagne. A moment later, she remembered, she had poured the champagne over the head of her coworker. To the left of the pictures she saw an official document, a birth certificate in Russian, a copy of which she had at home.

  “This is my file,” she breathed.

  “Of course, Liana Krumins. That’s why we’re here.”

  Despite the violation of her privacy, she would not let him intimidate her. “Move over,” she said. “I want to look.”

  First, the old pictures. Her mother and father, Antonia and Ojars Krumins, on their wedding day, a brown picture in an oval mat. She had seen it before, on her mother’s dressing table when she was young, but this was a slightly different pose; the photographer had given the second picture to the KGB. A high school graduation photo that the whole class bought, but another candid shot with her history teacher that she had never seen before; he was the one—gentle, malleable—she had chosen to end her virginity. A woman friend of her mother’s standing at the ballet practice bar; she had come to the house often when Liana was young. A tall man she did not know standing in front of a house she did not recognize; why was that in her file?

  The old documents. Application for a driver’s license. A letter to her school director apologizing for leading a demonstration for better food in the cafeteria and asking not to be expelled.

  Newer documents. The expulsion order from university, with backup reports from fellow students that she had not been permitted to see. Application, with DENIED stamped on top, for a visa to a media conference in Helsinki, where she had hoped to meet Western reporters. She flipped through to see who had informed on her, and her heart sank; her best girlfriend. They were still close; Liana had helped her get a job at the station. Her mind found it hard to accept such continual betrayal.

  The arrest papers and booking at the prison in Riga after the rally. The memory of that building seized her: the KGB headquarters had previously been the Nazi headquarters during the war. It was the most dreaded place in Latvia.

  “Just a short stay,” he noted, his finger under the date of discharge. “Overnight. The others must have been greater offenders.”

  Not so; but she had been the only young woman among the ringleaders. A guard said, “This one needs a bath,” doused her, fully dressed, with a bucket of water, and pushed her into a solitary cell with a harsh overhead light and a chair but no bed. The January night was below freezing. She had to strip off her sweater and shirt and jeans and wring them out and hope they dried before she froze to death. An hour later, exhausted from moving around the tiny room and rubbing her naked skin where it was turning blue, she looked up to see a uniformed KGB officer enter. He said she had the choice of staying in the cold cell or coming upstairs to share a warm bed with him. She accepted his kind of invitation, and even as he brutalized her, she counted herself lucky to survive. Before dawn, she was released. She did not hate him; he had kept his word, and she never forgot her unsolicited instruction on how sex could be useful.

  “No,” she told today’s KGB representative, “it’s just that I found a friend.”

  “Some friend.” He was reading a document that had been attached to the arrest paper. “Says here you were released because you testified against the others you were arrested with, and provided a list of names to be rounded up.”

  She snatched the document and read it, choking with anger at the damning detail, none of it true. “This is a lie. I never gave him any of this. He never even asked for names.”

  “Let me see who signed that.”

  Reluctantly, she handed the official document back to him. It would follow her the rest of her life. The existence of it in this file was an invitation to blackmail, useful to anyone who wanted to bring her low and besmear her too-early patriotism.

  “Ah, I’ve heard of him,” Davidov said. “This was a favorite trick of his to take advantage of women prisoners. It worked, too—none of them ever complained about rape, and none of his superiors wondered why he released some prisoners early. He’s no longer with the new KGB. I think he’s one of the Feliks people.” He set the document aside.

  Liana, livid at the outrage in the past that would threaten her career in the future, continued through the file. Toward the back, where the most recent additions were placed, the handwritten papers changed to typed reports of surveillance. A night spent at the apartment of an incumbent political leader, and the next night in the rooms of the opposition leader; that evidence was true enough, and not immoral or illegal, but might be hard to explain if someone wanted to charge her with using her body to get her information. In truth, she enjoyed the interplay of the two men and never revealed any of one’s political secrets to the other.

  There was the last month’s register of all the telephone numbers she dialed from her home. She saw one surveillance document dated only the week before—“Meeting with Michael Shu, defector’s son, now U.S. citizen, accountant and possible CIA investigator”—and leaned back from the table. Now she knew why this man was in the room with her.

  “Proceed with your interrogation,” she said with dignity.

  He signaled with upraised hands that he was not about to step into that trap. “And have you go back to Riga and go on the air to tell about how you were interrogated by the bullies of the KGB?” He shook his head. “No, thanks, Miss Krumins.” He pointed to the portrait of Iron Feliks on the wall over the fireplace. “His day is over.”

  She picked up one of the videotapes, a white label across the back reading KRUMINS VISIT SHELEPIN FILES and the date. She put it down and picked up the next: KRUMINS VISIT BERENSKY FILES, KRUMINS SEARCH BY LUBYANKA GUARDS. The skin around her neck reddened as she looked directly at him: “You saw these?”

  He nodded. She was doing the questioning, which apparently did not disturb him. She hefted the second box of tape in her hand.

  “What did this show you?”

  “The first part shows a commission of a minor crime, the theft of a document from the files. The second part shows you being searched by the guards, doing their duty after being told of possible theft. They properly offered to detain you until a female guard came on duty, which you declined.”

  “A lens like tha
t, was it?” She pointed to his jacket hanging over the lens on the wall. “In front of me? Did you get the full view?”

  “From the side. Not the full view.”

  “Then you saw I was innocent. I stole nothing.”

  “All that could be charged is that you removed a letter from one room—no doubt of that, it’s right on the tape—and left it somewhere else on the premises. It’s a minor infraction, as I said. Don’t worry about it. They won’t even take away your library card.”

  “Why are you letting me see my own file? That’s never done. Why are you here with me now? What do you want?”

  “I hate interrogations,” he said. “I always confess in the end.”

  She smiled nervously. “Stop playing with me. Tell me what you want.”

  “You are conducting a legitimate search for a story you can show on television,” Davidov said, his voice gentle, almost as if he were not conducting an interrogation. “The story has to do with a KGB agent you have been told is in America. I cannot say if it is true or not. We don’t discuss those things.” He awaited another question, which she took as an invitation to draw him out.

  “What can you discuss about it?”

  “What concerns me is that you are letting yourself be used by a group whose interests are not your own. We know, and you know we know”—he indicated the recent surveillance reports—“about the Feliks organizatsiya. These are not your people, Miss Krumins. These are the people you fought against ever since you were a schoolgirl.”

  “How can you be sure I am not using them?”

  “Ah, that’s it—you think you are. But they are manipulating you, sending you in here, arranging for you to meet the American investigator at the Metropole.” He lightened. “Wonderful breakfast buffet, wasn’t it, under the great glass ceiling? More European than Russian, except for the damn herring.”