He sat for a moment, his heart pounding. Then he went to Speigal’s desk and poked around for anything resembling intercourse with an international brokerage operation; no luck. The computer was on, showing a screen-saving pattern of moving lines. He touched the mouse; the directory came on the screen. Irving looked down the list, touched the space bar, looked further down to the end; no filename triggered an obvious response. He used a search program to look for the names Berensky and Numminen and Baker and came up with nothing.
Fein figured Mort had had time to erase his current file before coming to the door or while Irving was keeping up a line of patter in the kitchenette. He cleared the screen, went to DOS, and called up the “undelete” program; it showed that three files had been recently deleted and might possible be brought back. He marked down the filenames: “Rates,” “ToDo.7,” and “Fkft.tie.” He worked the “undelete” process and hoped for the best.
“Shit, piss, and corruption!” He got the worst; not one of the erased files could be retrieved. Only the Feds could do that with sophisticated equipment, the way they did with the erased Iran-contra White House files. He jabbed at the button and turned off the computer.
Sore at himself, furious with the dead Fed mole, Irving punched out Hanrahan’s cellular number on Speigal’s telephone and told him there was a suicide and to come on up to apartment 606. The officer was already in the lobby banging on the button for the elevator. The reporter picked up his recorder, removed the tape, and stuffed it in his wallet; he inserted a blank tape and put the little machine in his pocket in case the police asked for the recorder. He did not get near the corpse; the last time Irving Fein had been in the same room with a body outside a funeral home was in his police days a generation ago. The remainder of the corned beef sandwiches lay on the coffee table. “You never even touched your pickles, Mort,” he said to the body of the faithless Fed economist.
A sudden thought occurred: check Speigal’s modem for phone numbers, as he had Clauson’s. He turned on the computer again, only to get “Error reading Drive A”; that meant a floppy disk was still inserted. He released the floppy inside, and wondered if Mort dutifully did what Irving so often forgot to do: to save to the floppy, protecting against loss on the hard disk. When the C prompt came up, he switched to the A drive and called up the directory of the floppy. No “Rates,” no “ToDo.7,” but there was “Fkft.tie.”
Rap on the door and a furious jiggling of the doorknob. He went back to the modem directory in the C drive, found a “Fkft.tie” entry under frequently dialed numbers, and copied down the number next to it. On the modem directory, among the most frequently used numbers, was “Fkft.tie,” and a local New York number. Should he erase it, gaining time on the Feds? No, he was a law-abiding citizen; you destroy evidence, you wind up in the slammer. Besides, it would take the Feds weeks to figure out where to look for what.
The reporter shut down the machine. Looking morose, he opened the door to Hanrahan & Co.
NEW YORK
At his colleague’s not-too-cryptic message, “Get your ass up here,” Michael Shu caught the 6:00 A.M. flight up from Memphis and made it to Irving’s West Side apartment on 86th Street by midmorning. Fein claimed it was the oldest apartment building in New York, older than the Dakota, and to Shu the quarters looked their age, but the lobby with its high ceilings and ornate moldings had its appeal. However, the elevators, a century-later addition, looked cramped and ramshackle; the accountant chose to walk up three flights of worn marble stairs.
“What’s so hush-hush,” he asked a haggard-looking Fein, “that we can’t trust it to the most secure communications system outside the Pentagon? We don’t even go through the phone company anymore—we got our own satellite setup. Not only that, I burn the stuff that comes out of the shredder.”
“I need your sharp pencil, kiddo. Had to be now, because I’m going up to Syracuse tonight.”
“Liana still up there?”
“It’s the last day of her seminar. I brief her tonight on what to plant on Davidov, and bring her to Idlewild tomorrow.” Irving still called New York’s JFK International “Idlewild,” as the tract of land had been known in the fifties; Michael assumed Fein’s unwillingness to go along with the name change had something to do with an old political score. “Liana and Davidov go back to Riga tomorrow night via Helsinki on Finnair. Then in a week or so we send Dominick over to stir the pot, if he’s ready. That should get a rise out of the sleeper.”
“Dominick will be ready.” The accountant was proud of the recent breakthroughs. “I have a graphic representation of the Berensky empire on the Macintosh. Still some gaps, but I can pinpoint over fifty billion dollars in assets, with the trading and shipping companies, the front lawyers, the shell corporations in Liechtenstein, a Japanese hotel chain, the two key banks in the Antilles, and another in of all places Biloxi, Mississippi. Mark-denominated securities up the kazoo. We probably got a better picture of the fortune than Berensky himself does.”
“Maybe he’ll retain you as a consultant when all this is over.”
Shu shrugged. “Got any more Fed printouts? They were great. Our big break was our switch to studying currency trading, where the turnover makes it possible to hide trades that take your breath away—”
“Do you have a currency outfit in London begins with Baker?”
“You mean Baker, Warren & Pease?” His Memphis operation had been unable to establish which broker was the sleeper’s major London connection; Dominick had acknowledged it was a weakness in their search. “You sure it’s them, Irv? How did you find out about that when all the computers couldn’t track it down?”
“Shoe leather.”
“That could account for—jeez, another ten bil.” Shu had taken to referring to billions familiarly as “bils”; he could remember not so long ago when “big ones” were $1,000 banknotes. This project had exponentially expanded his thinking.
“Don’t get carried away with the war room shit,” Irving cautioned. He tapped his forehead. “The theory of the story is still up here.”
Shu nodded; he did have a tendency to get wrapped up in details. “I’ll get tracking the Baker firm right away.”
“Our trouble is that the sleeper, the real one, has not yet approached Dominick,” said Fein. “Hell, he hasn’t even approached Liana again, and she’s right here in the States. So we’re gonna have to shake him up, give him more of a reason to come to us. You know how he never loses his bets? My plan is to give Berensky a big financial kick in the head. His first major reversal, and it’s gonna be a beaut. And he’ll know it’s our doing.”
He took Michael to his notebook computer, a cheap monochrome job, outdated, but with a removable hard disk that meant its guts did not have to be left at home for searchers to rummage through. He called up the file labeled “Fkft.tie” that was on the floppy disk he told Shu he’d lifted from Speigal’s machine. At the top was the routing: “@bt/qu:number/sl:marin,” which the accountant presumed was the transmission coding to direct the message through the system at the other end, and then a short message: “On your trip tomorrow to the casino in Rhein/Main, would you put one whole chip on black for me. Just have a feeling it could be my lucky day. Reg.”
“Doesn’t look very mysterious,” said the accountant. “Not like one of your Barefoot Contessa specials that calls attention to the fact you’re using a code. This seems like a pretty straight request to put down a little bet. Who’s Reg?”
“This is a transmission that has not yet been sent,” said Irving slowly, “of data about what will happen at tomorrow’s meeting of the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve. Now tell me what you think it means.”
Shu looked at the message with new eyes. “Well, Rhein/Main is the name of the military airport in Frankfurt. I suppose that would have to do with buying or selling German marks. If you wanted to trade in the pound sterling on that analogy, you’d use Heathrow, the big airport near London. Or speculating in the yen, you’d say Nar
ita, the airport near Tokyo that costs a couple hundred bucks in taxi fare.”
“Okay, so the message is saying to buy or sell marks. Which—buy or sell?”
Shu shook his head. “No way of telling. The ‘one whole chip’ would be one whole percentage point in interest rates—a hell of a big move by the Fed—but it says the bet is on ‘black.’ The colors would be black or red. Black could mean rates up, and red could mean down, or vice versa.”
“Nobody’s guessing the Fed will be raising rates,” said Irving. “It’s either stay the same or cut. This says a cut.”
“Then you’re saying, on the basis of this message, they’ll cut a whole point. That would weaken the dollar, of course, so if marks is your medium you would sell dollars and buy marks. You could make …” He calculated quickly, on a 98 percent margin, with the billions Berensky had available. “Hoo-boy, you could make a killing that would be the mother of all killings.”
“That’s why I wanted you here, to tell me that. Now, here comes the beauty part. I have a little disinformation scheme in mind. What could I tell them to get them to do exactly the wrong thing?”
“Change the word ‘black’ to the word ‘red.’ Simple.”
“Too simple. C’mon, think it through. A lot rides on this.”
Michael quickly concluded Irving was right, of course. The rate’s rising a point, when all the world was speculating about whether or not it would drop, would not only be absurd but would panic the markets. The Fed was not in business to destabilize markets.
“If you changed ‘black’ to ‘red,’ ” said the accountant carefully—an awful lot of money was at stake here—“you would have to deal with the ‘one whole chip,’ meaning ‘one full percentage point.’ You’d have to say ‘a quarter chip,’ but that would sound like a code, because chips don’t come in quarters.”
“The disinformation I want to send,” said Irving, “is that the Fed will do nothing. You and I know it will cut rates by a whole point; but I want to misinform our gal Sirkka in Frankfurt, or Helsinki or wherever the hell she really is. I want to make her think that the Fed won’t change rates at all.”
“Then let’s drop the reference to a chip completely. Instead of ‘put one whole chip on black for me,’ make the message read ‘bet on red for me.’ That would mean ‘Fed does nothing to rates—act accordingly.’ That would be an order to sell marks on a grand scale, and buy dollars. Berensky would lose his shirt.”
“You slants are geniuses.” Because the slur was wrapped in a compliment, Shu did not take offense. Irving edited the message on the machine.
“But who’s Reg?” Mike asked. “Reginald somebody? Regina?”
“I think he was interrupted as he was writing the sign-off,” said the reporter. “That could be the beginning of ‘regards.’ ”
“Regards who? You can’t just leave it unsigned, it’ll look funny.” Shu looked up at the routing code. “It’s to ‘number’ from ‘marin.’ There’s a Marin County in California, big on hot tubs.”
“ ‘Number’ should be Numminen, Sirkka’s maiden name,” said Irving, his vulpine grin returning. “And the signature is ‘Mariner.’ Now let’s see if the tieline works.”
The reporter called up the modem’s frequent-calls menu, to which “Fkft.tie” and a local number had been added at the bottom. He plugged the telephone cord into the computer and into the wall outlet and hit the button. “Now it should make a noise like a long fart when it connects, if the number works.”
When the modem did its discordant raspberry, Michael Shu raised his fists and gave a cheer. “It’s connected! They’ve got it, and now Berensky’s brokers will be selling marks and buying dollars like there’s no tomorrow. Oh, Irving, somebody is going to be very angry about this when the mark jumps and the dollar dives. The sleeper’s whole setup will be in an uproar. Wait’ll I tell Dominick.”
“Better not. In fact, definitely don’t.”
“Why not, Irv? We could make a few bucks and cover expenses.”
“But if Dominick should win while Berensky loses, the sleeper will figure out it was us who screwed him. Better Berensky should think it was his own people. Disinformation that breeds distrust, and gets people ratting on each other—Jesus, Angleton would be proud of me.” Irving looked at his watch. “I gotta get a guy on the Times to do me a favor and kill an obit. Then I gotta make a plane.”
SYRACUSE
“How do you like American food?”
“I’m sure it’s very nourishing.” Liana was guarded in her reply. She did not want to appear a bumpkin by giving an uncosmopolitan opinion.
“That night at Ace’s apartment, you must have been on a diet,” Irving Fein said. “You were eating with long teeth.”
She looked quizzically at him, head tilted; she and the American reporter had worked out nonverbal signals to overcome communication gaps.
“It’s an expression, dunno where from, meaning eating because you have to, not because you enjoy it. But tonight we’re really gonna tie on the feedbag.” He rolled his eyes. “Horses, oats in a bag you tie on their nose. Maybe it’d be easier for me to learn Russian.”
“If you speak only Russian,” she explained, “even if you have been living in Latvia all your life, you cannot be a citizen unless you learn Latvian. That is the new law to keep Latvia from being overwhelmed by the Russian colonists. I speak both, so I am okay, but it is hard for the half of the people in our country who don’t speak Latvian.”
She enjoyed feeding Irving Fein facts like that. He sucked them all in, digested them, seemed to forget about them, but up they would pop at the right time, sometimes a little altered to fit the point he was making. Nikolai Andreyevich was not that way; he did not trust her as Irving Fein did. The KGB man would listen to an observation of hers, weigh it to see if he could trust her judgment, then reject it if it did not fit his specific needs. Or so it seemed to her. And if she was not trusted, she had no obligation to be trustworthy.
Irving drove her in his rental car for forty minutes to a restaurant called Krebs, in the town of Skaneateles. The eating place was like none she had ever seen. In a great, rambling house, people were seated at a blizzard of white tablecloths, with ruddy-cheeked waitresses running around the tables ladling out soups and gravies, offering platters of roast beef and roast chicken, buckets of fresh peas and candied carrots tasting unlike any vegetables she had tried in America. Whenever an empty spot appeared on a customer’s plate, busboys would cover it immediately with sections of a crumbly golden cake or dark rolls with raisins embedded.
This was “family style,” Irving explained while eating prodigiously, with no menu or apparent plan, in an atmosphere of hearty appetites, plentiful servings, and happy diners. Liana did not know if she could say no to the healthy-looking waitresses and kept eating as fast as she could to clear a spot for the next helping. When she reached for the crumbly golden cake, Irving told her not to fill up on the corn bread, to leave room for the great pudding desserts.
“The whole meal is thirty-six bucks for the two of us,” Irving announced when the check came. “That’s value. In New York City or in Paris, that sort of money won’t buy two people a goddam appetizer.”
“I am grateful to you for taking me here. This is another America,” she said, happily stuffed, ruffling the stubble of her hair. “Not Ace’s elegant America, or the dormitory luncheonette America, but Irving Fein’s America.”
“The white Protestant sauce at Krebs is not exactly my dish of tea. And the earliest seating here lets you out at—” he checked his watch—“not even seven o’clock, which is not yet time for dinner in a real city. But I wanted you to see this, Liana Krumins from Riga, Latvia, because they do good work here, they’re proud of their reputation, they make a profit, nobody gets slammed against the wall, people laugh a lot and don’t learn to lie to stay in the game.” He dropped the white napkin on the clean plate that had held the heaping of creme caramel atop the nutted brownie. “Now let’s go back and
scheme and plot and connive and otherwise commit journalism.”
Though she was staying at the Sheraton on the Hill, Irving took her back to his downtown hotel for a couple of drinks in the Persian Room bar. The memory of the moment of Speigal’s suicide weighed on him, but he did not want to burden Liana with that, and besides, it was not one of the three lies he wanted her to lay on Davidov. He was getting deeply into the disinformation dodge now; not only Angleton but Shelepin, master of that game, would have been impressed.
“Are you ever worried about the way we are all using each other?” she asked.
He allowed to himself as how that was pretty insightful for a kid, even one who had been a successful counterrevolutionary in her teens. “What worries me more,” he told her, “is you going back to Riga right now.” He was glad he’d put his finger on what was bothering him. “Berensky and his bunch, and the Feliks people too, are likely to be pretty pissed next week. Lotta money will be lost.”
“Davidov says I should not worry about danger from Berensky.”
“Easy for him to say not to worry. He doesn’t know what’s set to hit the fan.” At the tilt of her head, he said, “It’s only the punchline of an old joke, and I forget the joke.”
“He did warn me about Madame Nina and the Feliks people, but they are the KGB’s rivals. And Arkady, who works for Madame Nina, I am sure is a good man.”
Why was Davidov worried about Liana’s safety with Madame Nina and not with Berensky? Irving could not add it up. On the other hand, Davidov must be wondering what the hell Dominick was doing in that Memphis bank, and might now be buying into Irving’s fiction that the Memphis banker was Berensky himself. Liana would have to breathe on that spark of suspicion in the KGB official’s mind. “One of these days I’ll have to have a heart-to-heart with your boy Davidov.”
“I would like to be a fly on the wall,” she grinned. That was an expression he had taught her on their long walk down Fifth Avenue, shadowed by God knew how many different outfits.
Sleeper Spy Page 34