“Is Irving helpful on this?”
“He keeps talking about his old CIA and KGB contacts, but that’s not turning up the kind of information I need. What I need is his pattern of trading just before major events that move markets.” He looked at her, expecting the natural question about what he did need, but she crossed him up by just looking back understandingly. Irving had told her she could find out more with a long look in silence than with an obvious question.
“Sooner or later, and I hope it’s later, I’m going to have to impersonate the sleeper on his home ground in Russia. Meet his daughter, maybe his wife. I’ll have to have ammunition for that, personal information, not just this silly thing in my ear.”
Dominick cocked his head as if his new hearing aid were making a noise. “One of these days, you’ll have to meet that Krumins girl, to extract everything she knows about her mother—the family details, pet names, anniversaries. That’s in case I have to go there and impersonate her father. I’d sure hate to fly blind into that.”
Viveca liked the notion of providing this man with information he needed to protect himself. “We’re eating in the kitchen,” she announced.
The caterer had left everything in pots on the stove. She had been briefed on serving the sautéed shrimps and mushrooms first, then the salad, then the tournedos of veal with rissolé potatoes. She presumed the little brown items in the pan were rissolé potatoes. The meal would be topped off with her own personal production: a pecan pie, her father’s favorite, infusing the kitchen with the scent of blackstrap molasses. A man from Memphis had to like that, and when she went into detail about the recipe, he’d assume she’d made the rest of the meal, too.
She handed him a bottle of red wine and an opener to give him something to do. He popped the cork in a jiffy. Instead of admiring the wine, the details about which she was ready for, he ran his hand along the kitchen table.
“Where’d you get this French country table?”
“In France,” she blurted. She had no idea where the decorator had found the table. It seemed solid enough. “Shipped it over with a whole container of stuff.” She had heard somebody say that at a New York dinner party.
“You have a lovely home,” he said. “Warm and authentic.” He sampled the wine, nodded, poured hers. She had decided against candles as coming on too strong; the dimmable electric light in the big country kitchen was soft enough. “So your father was a banker,” he said. Who had told him that? She recalled that she had, at their lunch in Memphis. What else did Edward know? Should she refer obliquely to his late wife? Better not.
She judged the meal to be a success, except for the pie, which had dried out. She blamed the caterer: “I should have baked one myself. I do a helluva pecan pie.”
He went to the fridge, found a piece of Emmentaler cheese, zapped it in the microwave for ten seconds to take the chill off, and cut off slivers with a paring knife to accompany their second bottle of wine. So even the failure turned out to be a success. She felt safe with this man.
He helped her clear the table, which she would henceforward think of as her French country table—there was much to be said for previously married men—and then disappeared for a few moments, she thought to go the bathroom. He returned with a briefcase and spread the contents in neat stacks on the table.
The seminar began. He went on and on about the financial paper trail of the sleeper, about brokerage fronts and shell companies; she kept an interested look on her face. Edward was a strong man, dominant without being domineering, apparently with none of her father’s weaknesses.
“You must have a lot of questions, but it’s late,” he finally said mercifully. Viveca was sleepily his for the taking, and she knew he knew it. She also knew that their coming together would be at some other time and place of his choosing, with mature affection, and without the need to humiliate her that drove the men who were most attracted to her. With this man, she might be neither ashamed nor rigid, the consequence of not being called upon to perform.
“I’ll do my part in all this,” she promised. “Tell me what you want from me, I’ll do it.”
“You do have a certain aura of success about you,” he noted.
That drew a wry smile. “I live in dread of losing what I have. If I ever blew this career, I’d crawl in a hole and never show my face to anybody again. I mean that. A lot of people think I don’t belong where I am. They’re rooting for me to mess up.”
“What if you did? You ever look failure in the face?”
“I saw it clearly enough in my father’s face.” She saw that look mixing panic and despair every time she thought of him. “If I flopped—really badly, enough to get fired, and humiliated—I’d run away and get a job slinging hash somewhere. Yucatan, maybe.” Cutting off contact with everyone was the least she would do; suicide sounded too dramatic, but it was an option. She did not suppress a shudder; a career crash was her recurring, wide-awake nightmare.
Viveca was aware, and knew that he was aware, that their enterprise now had a romantic cast. With this surefooted man at the center, the sleeper seemed less menacing. She would let herself worry more for Edward’s safety in this than her own.
She walked him out to the car, and this time her goose bumps worked. The impersonator kissed her tenderly and rubbed her arms warm.
MEMPHIS
“Come on down to Memphis, Irv, you’ve got to see this.” Michael Shu was all excited. “We’ve got a war room here at the bank. We’re all organized. I’d say we’re making real progress.”
Irving Fein wasn’t so sure. Since Edward Dominick had been recruited, a task force of financial pros had been set up that cost too much, even though the space at the Memphis bank was free. Dominick had worked out a “search strategy” to track the sleeper’s moves that impressed the hell out of the accountant in Shu, but stuck Fein as being on the methodical, unimaginative side.
The second call dragged him down to Tennessee. “We have a real tiger in Edward,” Viveca told him, as if she were a judge of investigative talent. “He’s going to put on a briefing for me tomorrow down here. You ought to take it in, too.”
She had been getting briefed by this guy all too regularly; Irving felt cut out of his own story. If the two of them were making out, that was their business, but hanky-panky within the team tended to stir up emotions that warped judgment. It gave him a small stitch in his side to think of her falling for this Southern executive smoothie, outside their world. He told his euphoric partner he had to see a money-laundering guy in the Fraud section of Justice that night but would get the first plane to Memphis in the morning.
Dominick and Shu were ready for them with a dog-and-pony show—slides, charts, the analytical works, as if to justify all the time put in so far.
“Let’s assume the sleeper’s first objective was to turn three billion in gold into fifty billion within three years, starting in late 1988,” Dominick said. “The second objective has been to keep the fortune growing since then, but to conceal and tightly control the assets.”
Click went the lights, clunk went the slide projector. “Advantage over Market Investors” was first on the screen, and under that, “Ability to use (a) USSR commercial power to affect markets or (b) intelligence services to obtain valuable information.”
“Here are the considerations the sleeper must have had in his mind to make the most of his position,” Dominick said. On the screen were five criteria:
1. ability to influence prices
2. ability to predict prices
3. liquidity
4. leverage
5. visibility
“The greatest influence on market prices,” Dominick told them, “could be exerted on commodities where Moscow was the prime supplier.”
“Great grain robbery,” murmured Fein.
“Right, like wheat. The USSR produced a fifth of the world’s wheat, and imported another tenth. Expectation of the harvest affected the price of wheat futures, along with the size of the pl
anned purchases. You could have set up a grain-futures operation—which we’ve replicated in our war room down the hall—and generated enormous profits.”
“Big money, plenty of liquidity,” added Michael Shu. “The open interest of wheat futures in the U.S. is about eleven billion.”
New slide. “Another commodity is aluminum—not as liquid as gold, but you could hide big trades, with about fifty billion traded in New York in 1989. Price is volatile, which is good for manipulation, and the USSR produced fifteen percent of the world market. You get a second play in the stocks of the three big aluminum companies.”
“I dug up a story about how half the aluminum in the world went through Belgium that year,” said Shu, “and Belgium doesn’t manufacture aluminum. So something funny went on there in a big way. Could be the sleeper moving money through Belgium.”
“Gold is more liquid?” Viveca put in, obviously wanting to be a part of the conversation. Irving had a difficult time expunging his mental picture of Dominick jumping on her bones, those slim legs trying to clasp around that big linebacker’s body; that event might not have happened yet, but Irving was certain it would. “If the original stake was in gold, wouldn’t that be the commodity of choice?”
“That’s what everyone would expect him to do,” Dominick replied. “But if I were the sleeper, I would shy away from the expected. For concealment.”
“I’m looking into that, though,” said Shu. “Gold production was handled by the Glavsolot, which never released official data and is still tight as a tick, but gold bullion is exported through the Vneshtorgbank, and one of our ex-Treasury types has an in there.”
Dominick shrugged and moved on to the next slide. “Oil. Now we’re talking big price movements, absolute secrecy. Soviets produced a fifth of the world supply.”
“Yeah, but OPEC called the shots,” Irving recalled, looking for a place to doubt, “and the Sovs went along on the price.” He knew something about the oil market, because several of his money-laundering contacts were active in it and kept using words like “fungibility.”
“He must be heavy in oil,” the banker said with certitude. “As you suggest, the Soviets were in close touch with the Arabs on pricing. And KGB agents could easily have been bugging those OPEC meetings, to make certain their information was right.”
“You could hide big trading,” Shu supported Dominick, “in four hundred billion a year in oil futures that year, mostly in New York and London. And you could park a lot of inventory in tankers. The first thing the sleeper would go into would be the shipping business.”
“I’ll grant that oil is fungible,” Irving said. That drew a respectful look from Viveca; there’s a word she’d be asking her banking boyfriend about over a bottle of fine red wine, not the red ink she’d served Irving Fein. Mental-picture time again: to avoid getting crushed, she would be on top. “What about currencies?” Irving knew nothing about currencies.
“Michael here and I gave a lot of thought to the currency markets.” Dominick turned off the slide projector. “Excellent leverage, no problem with concealment, some ability to influence markets. But the risk is too great. One wrong move and you’re set back by billions.” Irving felt those mournful eyes fix on him. “The trick in amassing a great fortune quickly is not to take chances on big setbacks, to concentrate on the sure things. That’s what the sleeper has been doing, I’ll bet. I doubt he’d go for currency speculation.”
Only because Dominick resisted, Irving hung in. “What if you had a mole in the Fed?” That thought met with silence. He went on: “We all make a big deal about a penetration agent in the CIA, but what if you had a guy sitting next to the Fed Chairman at the big meetings in New York where they decide interest rates? Or, hell, just tap the room, find out what they’ll do the next day—couldn’t you make a pile?”
“The place to have had such a mole,” said Dominick, no longer so dismissive, “was in the Bundesbank. But no—too great a gamble. You can never be certain in currencies, even when governments try to intervene. The trick here is to limit your investments to sure things. That’s the only way to build a huge fortune in a few years.” He rose. “Shall we look over the war room?”
Shu led the way. In a midsized, windowless area—secure, and less valuable than space with a view—the accountant’s minions were working computers and looking at teleconferencing screens.
“To parallel the other operation,” the accountant said proudly, “we’ve set up a hedge fund in the Antilles, ostensibly run by an attorney of record in Liechtenstein. Mr. Dominick, at my suggestion, bought a little bank in the Bahamas—remember our crooked source there?—and we can put trading profits there with no questions asked.”
“We’ve set up about thirty trading relationships with commercial and investment banks in the past three weeks,” Dominick explained to Viveca, who was observing the operation with her arms crossed defensively. “Every one of the trades we’ve made was completely hedged, which means that what we make buying with one, we lose selling to the other.”
“What’s the point in that?” Good question; Irving was glad she asked.
“Makes us players, people who pay up promply, folks to trust. Here—you see this man buying and selling oil futures simultaneously? We break even, maybe costs us some small change, but we establish a relationship with both banks at the same time on millions of dollars of trading. That’s surely what the sleeper did when he started.”
“While we’re mimicking his operation today, walking back the cat,” Shu said, appropriating Irving’s term.
“Mike means we’re looking at past events now that we know what happened,” Irving told Viveca. In tracking the first steps leading to the sleeper’s overseas Soviet fortune, the idea was to find out what past events his advance knowledge would have led him to capitalize on, and what new funds and banks were set up in that time frame to contain the profits.
At each of the seven desks, an investigator researched large-scale trades in wheat, oil, aluminum, and gold. The transfers of Soviet assets to Swiss, Panamanian, and offshore banks, many of them monitored by Western financial regulators and intelligence agencies, were charted against a calendar of global news events: sharp drop in the U.S. stock market, the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, publication of surprising commodity price jumps, the teardown of the Berlin Wall.
All very well organized, but there was something in the approach that Irving did not like. He looked over some shoulders, punched in a few queries, in general looked as sour as Viveca looked impressed.
“You seem to think we’re missing something,” Dominick said on the way back to his office. “If it’s the stock market, forget it. You have to put up a fifty percent margin, and that’s not leverage. And even options are too regulated.”
“No goddam imagination,” Irving told him. “You’re playing by the book, playing not to lose. I have a hunch the sleeper is smarter than that.”
“You’ve got to be methodical about this,” Shu said.
“You have to think like a banker, not a reporter,” Viveca added.
“Bullshit.”
“Come now, brother Fein,” Dominick said, “don’t conceal your true feelings from us. Let it all hang out.”
“You talk about commodities. What the hell is the most valuable commodity in the world? What asset did the commies have that everybody in the world wanted?”
After a pause, Viveca offered: “Diamonds?”
“He’s talking about plutonium, Viveca, and he’s right. It’s rare. It’s portable. And it wasn’t as tightly controlled within the Soviet Union as we were led to think.”
“If I were the sleeper,” said Irving, “and I got the word from Moscow to set up shop with a bunch of gold, I would want to tell my control that I needed a material more valuable than gold, so I could start off with a killing.” He quickly changed that to “a financial killing. Iran was on its ass after the war with Iraq, wanted the bomb. Iraq wanted to take over the Gulf, and Saddam was pushing for a nuk
e. Pakistan wanted to get even with India, and Libya with Israel, and North Korea with the rest of the world. And who can afford the kind of money we’re talking about? Governments. If I were a country, and wanted to be a big power fast, I’d damn well cough up five billion or so for enough plutonium for five or six bombs.”
“You have a point,” Dominick conceded.
“Irving must have a line in somewhere,” Michael Shu told the others. “You got a source on this, Irv? It would speed things up.”
Irving did not; all he had was a theory of the story, and he did not want it flushed out as yet; he hadn’t worked it over in his mind. “A friend of mine in the Bureau of Mines told me about a radioactive material called red mercury.” It was a vague lead; he didn’t want to say more about it until he spoke to a reporter friend in Rome. “The Russians got a real mafiya working over there on selling this sort of stuff.”
“More financial assets were sent out of Russia in the past year,” Viveca declared, “than were generated in their GNP. I just did a line on that Russian underworld, maybe ten seconds, but it struck me.”
“The more you can get on that,” Irving told her, “the better. See what the Dialog databank says about the underground network.” Her network had access to that electronic morgue; he didn’t want to run up a big bill on the competing Nexis. “The KGB is after our boy’s money, and the Russian mafiya must be after it too. There’s got to be a competition here, and the sleeper’s got to know about it, and worry about it.”
“Not just a banking line inquiry,” Shu said to Dominick. “Irving thinks there should be international underworld links. That should fit into the money-laundering end of our banking line. All these guys like to know where the money is.” He thought about it a bit. “Could mean that organized crime types here in the U.S. are probably after the sleeper, too, in cahoots with the Feliks people, the Russian mafiya. Jeez.”
“More the merrier.”
That comment of Dominick’s raised him in Irving’s eyes: either the man was gutsy or crazy. It was the impostor’s ass that was sticking up over the parapet.
Sleeper Spy Page 23