“Take him into custody now.”
“He has bodyguards, Director Davidov. There may be resistance.”
“Then kill him. Kill his bodyguards, too, and make sure the picture of the bodies appears in the newspapers. Nothing political—they were killed in a bank holdup. Let us not forget the traditions of this agency.”
RIGA
Liana, still enduring fits of shakiness, bought a Diena outside the Tower souvenir shop and stared at the newspaper, without reading it, at her table in the café. Her temporary protection, whose impassive face and cheap coat obviously concealing a weapon marked him as a KGB security man, had wedged his burly frame into a small chair two tables away.
She would give up the apartment; she could never open its door again without looking at the bed for a dead body. What had Arkady done to deserve such an execution?
Liana had told the police part of the truth: that he had been an occasional research assistant and driver. She had not mentioned his work for the woman he had always referred to only as Madame Nina, or to the Feliks organization; they could find that out for themselves. The police treated it as a gang killing and a warning to her to avoid television broadcasts about the Russian mafiya’s reach into the near abroad. She was not suspected by the Latvian police, but she was certain she was suspected by Madame Nina. The sense that her life might be in danger, which she had dismissed so airily during the revolutionary days of the late eighties, was no longer a stimulus; it was a weight on her chest.
It was nearly nine o’clock and dark. Whom would she stay with that night? Her mother’s flat was out of the question; Liana had not spoken with Antonia Krumins since Independence Day, and she did not want to arrive at that hard-faced woman’s doorstep, after all these years, as some sort of scared supplicant. Her men friends in Riga were inadequate to her need tonight. To be alone was out of the question. She decided to stay with Nikolai Davidov, if he asked, as he surely would; he was strong and she felt his affection toward her. Should she carry out her assignment from Irving Fein about the three lies? Of course; she was a working reporter, not an ally of the spies, and would repay Davidov in other ways, at other times, for being with her at the moment when she was most horrified.
He arrived at last and took her hand for a long moment. Against her wishes, she felt her eyes well with tears; she shook her head angrily, pulled at his silk scarf until he handed it to her, and wiped her face. Long ago she had stopped hating herself for weeping at emotional moments; if it was not the mark of a good reporter, so be it.
She reported what she had seen of Arkady in the apartment and answered his questions about both times the veteran had accompanied her to the files at Lubyanka.
“I wish you could have known him,” she concluded. “Good man. A soldier. Faithful.”
“I do not meet many people like that.” He looked appropriately sad. “If you like, I will look to his burial. As a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, he has some privileges in Russia. Come, let us walk.”
“I have a suitcase.”
He lifted it, said, “It’s not that heavy,” and motioned to the KGB guard to carry it, following behind them. He took her hand again. “Do you have any questions for me?”
“That is your way of introducing the questions you have for me,” she said, taking long strides, running her free hand along the stubble of her hair, trying to overcome her trembling. “It is your technique.”
“While we were in America, did Berensky try to get in touch with you again?”
She paused before answering that, because it involved one of the lies. “Maybe.”
“I hoped we could be honest with each other.”
“I am not hiding a contact from you. No babushka whispered to me on Fifth Avenue. But I may have met the sleeper, just as you may have. It may be Edward Dominick, the man from Memphis at the party that night.”
“What makes you think Dominick is Berensky?”
“Hard to say. You know the English word ‘hunch’?”
“That is a word Irving Fein would use. Did he suggest this to you?”
“I told him of my hunch.” She found lying to a policeman trained to sense lying was a challenge; but she was moved by Nikolai, and needed him tonight, and felt bad about what she was doing. “As you know, I have great respect for Mr. Fein. He is a world-class journalist, and we are working together on this story.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And—do you know?—he was the one who recommended the USIA invite me to lead a seminar at Syracuse University.”
“Yes, yes, I know that, too. And when you told him?”
She enjoyed his impatience as she told him what she knew he already knew. “He said that hunches were overrated, just as there was no such thing as ‘women’s intuition.’ Irving said to concentrate on details that are sometimes revealing. He is a fine journalist. I learn so much from him.”
“Yes. He dismissed your hunch, then.”
“Not completely. He said it was possible that Dominick was the sleeper, but I think he said that so I would not be discouraged.”
“Do you think he would tell you if he knew?”
“Maybe not. He doesn’t tell me everything, which is not fair, because I shared what I learned from the files with him.” She looked behind them; the guard was trudging along with her suitcase.
“What is he not telling you? Maybe I can help.”
“He says he knows ‘why me.’ He thinks there is some sinister reason I am the one reporter chosen by the Feliks people and by you to be encouraged to find the sleeper. But he won’t tell me what it is, and I am a little irritated by that.”
“And what do you think the reason is?”
She stopped and looked at him in as forthright a manner as she could muster. “Because I have the most closely watched television news program in the Baltics, reaching even to Leningrad, I mean Petersburg. Isn’t that so? And because I am a good journalist who will not be frightened, even by dead bodies in my bed. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”
“Those are two powerful reasons, Liana. But Fein says he knows of another?”
“That’s what he says. Do you know of another? He says you do.”
“Your program is closely watched, as you say, sometimes even in the Kremlin, on tape.” By the way he slid past her question, not lying but not responding, Liana judged Irving to be right: there must be a deeper reason for her being allowed access to the files. Now she felt less bad about lying to Nikolai; he was not telling her all he knew.
“Your hunch,” he was saying as he kept up her pace along the waterway, “when did it come to you? At Ace’s party?”
“Yes. When I shook hands with Dominick,” she said, “it just seemed to me he was more than a banker from America, or Viveca’s escort. He looked very closely at me for a second, and I thought—that’s him.”
“Oh-shit,” said Davidov in English, an expression he must have picked up on his last trip to America or listening to taps on Irving. Because that little pretense about her handshake with Dominick apparently hit home to him, she veered off the subject, lest she have to make up more about it.
“Wasn’t it awful about Viveca? Irving Fein was quite upset. She is his partner, you know. Do you know—I think there may be more there, too, emotionally. He’s jealous of Dominick.”
“I wouldn’t know about jealousy. It is an emotion I never experience.” The tight-lipped way he said that indicated he meant the opposite, which she liked.
She stopped and faced him. Behind them, the KGB man set down the suitcase, the vapor from his mouth in the cold evening air showing him to be breathing hard. “You followed us in Syracuse, too?”
“You know that.”
“And you know about our watching Viveca’s broadcast together? You had our room bugged?”
“No, but I have a vivid imagination.”
“You have no right to be jealous.”
“I have no right to be in Latvia.”
She touched his face. �
��I am so glad you are here. If you want to feel jealous, or be possessive, go ahead.”
“If you like, we can stay at our safe house.”
She looked behind her. “Just the three of us?”
“I will carry the suitcase.”
She embraced him; he held her tightly, saying nothing. She was quivering less from the earlier fright than the present cold, and it would be good to be under a blanket with him. “Nikolai Andreyevich, do you have anything to tell me?”
“Liana, I have so much to tell you.” That was all he said, implying much to tell of personal feelings, but again slipping away from her probe about the reason for her being chosen. As a result, she was happy to be at his side but not on his side, and did not feel the smallest twinge of conscience about having implanted Irving’s three bits of disinformation.
Kudishkin seemed oddly pleased.
“The new KGB responded like my old KGB,” he told Madame Nina. “Two of our Chechen friend’s fellow Chechens were shot dead, and the third, the Ingush, was beaten severely about the head. Our colleague is now in a cell in Lubyanka, where there are no longer supposed to be any cells.”
“We could not allow von Schwebel’s report at our last meeting to be transmitted to Davidov,” was the woman’s firm reply. “Arkady had to die. Your friends in Davidov’s directorate must be rewarded for betraying the informer who was betraying us.”
The former high official of the KGB remarked that the traitor’s body had been put to good use. The chairwoman agreed: it had both frightened the sleeper’s daughter and brought Davidov on the run. “Both the KGB and Liana Krumins are now more likely to be deceived,” Kudishkin noted, “by the fiction of the Memphis banker being Berensky.”
Von Schwebel reported that his wife, Sirkka, was scheduled to meet Davidov in Helsinki on the coming Sunday: she would, he promised, fuel the KGB’s falsely based suspicion that Edward Dominick was the real sleeper. “The journalist Irving Fein is selling the CIA’s creation to the KGB,” he told the board. “Davidov is an inexperienced investigator, no more than an academician with family connections in the Kremlin. Fein has him half persuaded already that the Memphis banker impersonating the sleeper is genuine.”
The Group of Fifty executive interrupted to get to what he liked to call the bottom line: “But what of Berensky, the real sleeper? He’s now sitting atop assets swollen to one hundred billion dollars. Isn’t that getting impossible to conceal?”
“He will allow his impersonator to make the approach to us, as well as to the KGB,” Madame Nina replied. “Dominick will be his conduit for the return to Russia of the assets so skillfully invested—through us, or through the KGB.”
“That is a very big ‘or,’ ” protested Kudishkin. “The CIA’s Fein may be conspiring with Davidov to deliver the fortune to the ‘legitimate’ regime in Moscow. What are we doing to make certain the sleeper—through Dominick or whoever—delivers the fortune to us?”
All eyes shifted to Madame Nina. “We are well equipped to thwart any diversion to the regime now in power,” she said, “and to seize the assets for the future government of Russia and its near abroad. I can hardly wait to meet this Edward Dominick, and through him finally to confront Aleksandr Berensky.”
NEW YORK
“I just got off the phone with our friend in the former Dzerzhinsky Square,” Ace said from his digitized cellular phone. It was advertised as secure communication, but he put nothing past the predatory nature of his fellow literary agents and spoke as cryptically as he could about Davidov to Irving Fein. “He suggests it may be time for you and him to have a tête-à-tête.”
“Hell with him, I got my hands full.”
“Irving, I realize you’re under quite a strain—”
“Where’d she go? What’s with the FBI and that cockamamie Globocop? Why can’t they find her? Viveca Farr’s got a famous face, for crissake.”
The agent sympathized; Viveca’s disappearance only added to the media firestorm about her public disgrace. After the first news cycle of the daily newspapers and morning TV talk shows focused on her drunken performance, a second wave of sensational coverage crashed over her disappearance in the newsmagazines, supermarket checkout scandal sheets, and TV magazine documentaries. “Dragnet for Boozy Newsie” was one checkout headline that effectively captured the spirit of the search for Viveca Farr. “Abused ‘Airhead’ Had Hollow Leg” shouted another, pretending to defend her on the grounds that parental abuse had caused her alcoholism and downfall. The serious and responsible press, deploring all the sensationalism and professing to use the Farr episode merely as an example, examined in exquisite detail the role of the communications industry in the destruction of its own personalities.
“You see Soft Copy last night?” Fein demanded. “They played that goddam half-minute clip for the thousandth time. Kids can recite the whole thing, like we used to the Gettysburg address, with all the drunken slurring. The damn thing’s on T-shirts.”
“An abomination. I’m suing one do-gooder for using Viveca’s likeness in his antidrug advertising.” The agent then directed his attention to business: “Fortunately, none of this craziness seems to have affected your publisher. Not a word from them about cancellation of the book contract or demand for repayment of the advance.”
“Aah, they’re afraid they’d get hit with a ton of sauerkraut.”
“It could well be,” Ace agreed, “that our social contact with Karl von Schwebel of Unimedia gives pause to his American publishing subsidiary. Whoever suggested you put them on the party list did you a big favor.”
“That poor bastard is dead now,” said Fein. “Where the hell is Viveca, Ace? You suppose she’s watching everybody who ever knew her dump on her on national television? Does she get the goddam magazines with her face on the cover when she goes to buy food? Is she gonna stick her head in the oven?”
“We can hope she’s far away from major media. This will all die down in a few weeks.” Ace did not mention the two books contracted on her life by other agents, and the television miniseries based on one of them; a lawsuit to stop that was next week’s headache. “But Irving, life goes on. Remember your great story. Surely Viveca would want you to pursue it, and Liana as well.” He was reluctant to use Davidov’s name on the line. “What shall I tell the fellow you irreverently call Niko?”
“Let him talk to Dominick. Eddie’s over in London anyway, getting prepped for opening night.”
“No, Irving, it’s you he wants to see.” He glanced at the notes of his conversation with the KGB man. “Said you could have a late dinner in Moscow and watch the fireflies. I could get you a reservation at the Metropole.”
“Not budging out of here till I get a line on Viveca. Let him miss me.”
“Should I countersuggest London? You could do it over a weekend.” Ace felt the reporter should go; the buzz on Wall Street was rising about the mysterious currency coup of the previous week, and he sensed it had to do with the sleeper. The exclusivity of the sleeper story might soon be in jeopardy. In the long pause, Ace could envision Irving tapping his temple.
“Fireflies?” Fein said at last. “It’s practically December. No fireflies in Moscow now, the damn bugs would freeze their asses off. Was that your word or his word?”
“His exact word.”
“I’m missing something.” The blank spot apparently changed his mind: “Okay, tell Niko I’ll meet him in London at the Lawns Hotel, a fleabag in Knightsbridge. None of his taps or bugs. Maybe that’s what he means by fireflies. And tell him he’d better be ready for some heavy trading. My time is valuable.”
LONDON
“Put another quarter in the heater.”
“Doesn’t work on quarters, or rubles,” Davidov said. “Do you have any British change?”
Irving, sitting in the room in his overcoat, shook his head; heavy English money made holes in his pockets. He presumed that Niko, as a KGB big shot, had become accustomed to fancy living; proletarian lodging would bring him
down a peg.
“Can’t the CIA afford better than this?” Davidov looked around in wonderment. “Russia is not a rich country, but we treat our agents to decent hotels on official business. You don’t even have a phone in here.”
“I don’t work for the CIA.”
“And I don’t work for the KGB. I’m just an epistemologist helping out for a few weeks.”
“Lookit—you want to think I’m a spook? Be my guest, but I take that as an insult. Reporting is a noble business and spying is a grubby business. Now put a slug or whatever in the heater and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Tough guys like it cold. Have you heard from Liana?”
“She told me how you helped out when she was scared shitless,” Fein acknowledged. It bothered him that Davidov had to be the man Liana turned to when in trouble. “I’m sure you took advantage later.”
“No more than you in Syracuse. And at least I am closer to her age group.”
“Too-shay. Okay, brother-in-law, what do you have to trade?”
“The body in her apartment was that of a double agent. Liana doesn’t know that. Arkady Volkovich had penetrated the Feliks organizatsiya for us. They have their headquarters outside our jurisdiction, in Latvia. He was killed before he could give me a report on their last meeting.”
“So let’s make a little Chinese menu of what you want and what I want,” Irving told him, taking out his pad. “Item one in Column A—what you want—is the report of Madame Nina’s session in Riga.”
“No. That would probably just be von Schwebel’s account of the surveillance of your Memphis operation, which may or may not be better than ours. I want more than that. I want to know what your CIA has going on in that bank building in Memphis.”
Irving wondered which von Schwebel he meant, the husband or the wife, but did not want to show ignorance by asking. “Don’t tell me you’re getting into Sirkka’s pants, too,” he tried.
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