Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “Who activated the sleeper?” asked Kudishkin. “The KGB or Foreign Intelligence?”

  “Not Foreign Intelligence. Clauson told me not to discuss it with FI. I presume it was a part of Federal Security, but not the part of the KGB that Davidov knows anything about.”

  “Did anyone mention an ‘inner KGB’?” Kudishkin asked.

  “No. But whoever it was had three billion dollars to invest.”

  “Could Clauson’s independent operation, as you call it,” the former KGB official pressed, “could it be run by the CIA?”

  Sirkka paused. Her husband put in: “Are you suggesting a triple agent—a Soviet agent pretending to be working for the Americans and actually working for the U.S.?”

  They all turned at the sound of the Chechen sliding down the wall to a sitting position, his gun in his lap.

  “If the mole were caught,” Kudishkin continued, “—if an Ames, for example, betrayed him—it would be just as easy to turn a double agent as any other.”

  “No,” said Sirkka. “Clauson controls Speigal at the Fed. And last week, Speigal gave me the information about Fed plans that Berensky was able to use to make twenty billion dollars in currency trading. The biggest financial coup in history. And Berensky came here, to make arrangements for transfer of the money to you.”

  “Running an enormous personal risk,” her husband added. “Davidov has a dozen men in this city and is prepared to kill Berensky if he finds out the money is going to you.”

  “The greater risk would be the CIA’s if it were a CIA operation,” said Sirkka. “If they did make all that money, and then put their agent in enemy hands and lost it all, the American Congress would put the Agency out of business forever.”

  “It is one thing to lose a dozen agents,” added Karl, sharpening his wife’s point, “but losing a hundred billion dollars is a serious business. No, Clauson’s loyalty does not ultimately run to the CIA. To construct a brilliant defense, Clauson set up a parallel operation with the reporters Fein and Farr, sending them to the sleeper for him to impersonate himself. Truth and falsehood in one man. Breathtaking.”

  “You may go now,” said Madame Nina abruptly. The couple rose, Karl smiling confidently. Leaving, von Schwebel was certain he and his wife had accomplished the mission they had undertaken for their client. Berensky’s bona fides had been well attested to; his persuasive appearance before the board would put the icing on the cake.

  “You believe them?” asked the Group of Fifty representative.

  Madame Nina looked at Kudishkin for reply.

  “He’s working for the sleeper, she’s working for Davidov, and both are betraying us,” the former KGB man said. “With that clearly understood—yes, I believe them.”

  Madame Nina came as close to smiling as the new capitalist had ever seen. “Tell him why.”

  “Berensky’s operation is a replica of the Shelepin Plan of 1958,” said Kudishkin. “An inner KGB to disinform and manipulate the enemy, an outer KGB to engage and be captured, never knowing the strategy. Parallel organizations that are one and yet not one. Just the sort of thing Shelepin’s son would do. He’s Berensky, all right.”

  “And you discount the testimony of Antonia Krumins, Berensky’s wife?” The capitalist was uncertain. “She says he’s not Berensky, and she should know.”

  Kudishkin looked to Madame Nina, who shrugged and said: “Could be just a jealous woman.”

  Berensky/Dominick did not know if Liana had made contact with her mother, to persuade her to change her story of disbelief. Nor did he know if the von Schwebels had been successful in persuading the Feliks organization leadership that their switch in judgment was genuine. He knew only that, in the end, the success of his lifelong mission rested on his own shoulders, in his own capacity for creative duplicity, which was as it should be.

  Before he could form a judgment about the worthiness of the Feliks people to receive the fortune, Berensky knew, he would first have to persuade them that he was not the instrument of a reformist culture or a foreign power. He would weigh them and they would judge him; if either fell short in the other’s estimation, the disengagement would turn ugly.

  The irony, however, was not lost on him: after a lifetime of pretending to be someone else, and after a strange, dark interlude pretending to be someone else pretending to be that pretender, he would now have to assert the reality of his identity and hope it would be believed.

  A guard at the foot of the basement steps brought him into the room, darkened and chilly for human contact but suitable for the preservation of the wall of wine bottles. An elderly, pale woman in a bulky Russian peasant’s dress, magnified eyes noticeable in the murkiness, spoke first.

  “I would like to interview this man alone,” Madame Nina told her colleagues in a hoarse whisper.

  “That is irregular,” said the man the sleeper presumed to be Kudishkin of the old KGB.

  “Go home, both of you,” she said, flicking them away with her hand. Kudishkin and another man, dressed in jacket and tie, whom Berensky took to be the representative of the Group of Fifty, left together. That was a nice assertion of power.

  She nodded to him to sit across the table from her and told the armed Chechen to wait outside with the two guards.

  “Before we begin,” she said with great authority, “I want the name of the private bank, the name and number of the original account, the basis of your trading.”

  Berensky interpreted that as a demand for a chip to put in the pot to begin the game; earnest money. The sleeper gave it to her. “The Sennenhund Bank in Bern. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Account number 456345234—easy to remember. Three billion, all in gold, of course not bearing interest.” He had replaced the original stake in that first account. He repeated the number and she jotted down the information on a yellow pad. He did not have to repeat Iron Feliks’s full name.

  She walked heavily, with a slight limp, to a cabinet, opened it to reveal a small box of electronic equipment, and flicked a switch. “The jammer will fade. Your friends trying to listen in the truck down the street can soon hear clearly.”

  For her to characterize Fein and Davidov as his friends was disconcerting; perhaps the von Schwebels had failed, and Liana had not been able to reverse her mother’s testimony.

  “Why do you banish your own colleagues,” he asked, “and broadcast to the competition?”

  She did not answer.

  “I established my bona fides with a small contribution,” he said. “In return, Madame Nina, before we begin—who are you?”

  Bowing her head forward slightly, she took off her thick lenses and laid the spectacles on top of her yellow pad. She reached behind her head, pulled a couple of pins out of the knot at the nape of her neck, and slowly pulled off an iron-gray wig. The short hair beneath was auburn. She looked up at him. In the dim light, he was able to make out, stripped of makeup, the same face he had seen in London one week ago and in Moscow twenty-three years before that.

  “Nina,” he said.

  The diminutive of Antonia; how, in all his memory-searching, could he have forgotten the name of endearment he had called his young bride? Perhaps some unadmitted guilt of his abandonment repressed all recollection of the simple detail. The naked face wrenched him back to the reality of his own past, unleashing memories that the tarted-up persona of the woman he had met a few days before in London had failed to evoke.

  The sleeper felt a perverse surge of delight at being the dupe of so delicious and extended a deception. For him, the sudden knowledge that the wife of his teens, the mother of his Liana, the embittered daughter-in-law of Shelepin, was the woman at the head of the Feliks people opened a field of trails for walking back the cat.

  He began to calculate rapidly what she knew of the sleeper’s operation, when she learned of his duality, why she used their daughter as bait, and what Nina’s prior knowledge of Dominick’s dual identity meant for the disposition of the fortune.

  He opened with a compliment.
“You fooled me. The Americans have a saying, ‘Never kid a kidder.’ But you did, successfully. I am well and truly flummoxed.”

  She did not accept his invitation to savor her victory. “What is the extent of the assets you control in our behalf?” Her voice became the clear voice of the woman at Claridge’s.

  “I calculate close to a hundred billion,” he replied truthfully, “including the original stake of gold I have just turned over to you. My accountant is more conservative and says eighty-five billion because most of the assets are not liquid.” Berensky then employed the technique he had learned from Irving Fein, never to end a statement without a question. “How would you and your Feliks organization propose to put that to use?”

  “That is not for you to judge. My esteemed father-in-law sent you to America to be ready for a great task. We assigned you that task five years ago. We gave you the capital and gave you the information needed to multiply the capital. Now all that remains is for you to transfer the assets with your usual skill.”

  “If I so choose.”

  “Not a matter of choice. It is your duty.”

  “I am the one to interpret my duty, Nina. I will decide what government commands my loyalty. Is yours a government? Is the Feliks organization capable of maintaining the sovereignty and sway of Greater Russia? Or are you a giant gang, interested only in gaining the power to enrich yourselves?”

  “Was Feliks Dzerzhinsky a gangster?” she countered. “Were Beria or Shelepin or Andropov gangsters?”

  “No. They were rulers. They made possible the consolidation and expansion of the state.” Perhaps not Andropov, who began the weakening of the KGB, but this was broad-brush argument, not the time for close analysis. “Those men controlled the criminal element, they were not controlled by criminals. They were a force against the tendency of Russians toward anarchy. Can you say the same of your Feliks people?”

  She placed the glasses in her hand on the table, using her sleeve to wipe strained eyes. “I will not stoop to justifying the purposes of this organization to an agent. Perhaps your stay in the United States has turned you toward democracy. Perhaps you now disapprove of the kind of criminal democracy that served Russia so well for seventy years.” She looked directly at him as she never had as his wife. He felt the force of her glare. “Your reformist notions are of no importance. We want a schedule from you on the transfer to our authority of the assets you hold only in trust.”

  “First I must see your table of organization and meet your key lieutenants.”

  “You are in no position to bargain.”

  “I am in an excellent position. I have the money.”

  “We have you. We have your daughter.”

  “She is your daughter, too.”

  “I would snuff out her life in a moment, as well as yours.”

  He took that as a transparent bluff. “You would throw away a hundred billion dollars merely to indulge your personal bitterness? I don’t believe that. And if you did, your own people would tear you apart.”

  “It would be interesting to determine,” she said, “to what extent I have control of this organization.” Her coolness in assessing the possibility of such a gamble struck him as the mark of a potential dictator. She would have to be irrational to test her strength by losing such a fortune, but rationality was never the central characteristic of the strong leaders of Russia. Historians would later see it as a bloodily defining moment, and the fact that it was even a prospect made Berensky begin to see why she was able to dominate the leadership of the Russian mafiya. The thought formed in his mind of heading a Shelepinstyle KGB in support of an authoritarian woman leader.

  She interrupted his rush of revisionary thinking to observe, irrelevantly, “You never said goodbye.” He was forced to think of her back then—a whining, pregnant, clinging child, inviting his abuse by threatening his future.

  Nina brought a large pistol out from under the table, held firmly in both hands, and leveled it at him in a way that suggested she knew how to use it. “Now you can say goodbye.”

  Berensky shook his head, no; it made no strategic sense for her to kill the potential financier of a grasp for national power. Yet he could not set aside the possibility that something as primal as a desire for vengeance could upset the work of his lifetime. The gun was clasped in steady hands.

  He began to think of what he could say to pique her curiosity about the fortune or their daughter, but Nina’s ominous serenity persuaded him he had no time for such delay. Better to gamble on a physical move than a mental game. The room was badly lit, her eyesight was bad, her glasses were on the table. He remembered how, when they were married, she would flinch at his threatening gesture. All he needed now was a moment’s flinching.

  In a slow, natural move, he raised his hand to his ear, inserted his fingertip, and took out the hearing aid, saying, “There is one more thing you have to know before the banker will give your messenger that money.” As that notion caught her attention, he flicked the tiny plastic device to his right; it made a pinging noise when it hit a wine bottle, distracting her for an instant as he lunged across the table to slap away the gun. The last thing the sleeper saw was the whitening of her finger as it squeezed the trigger.

  The roar of a gunshot caused Irving, in the truck, to rip off his earphones. Liana pressed her hands to her head and wailed, subsiding into sobs. Nikolai said into a transmitter, “Grab the woman in the basement and leave the body behind. Three guards—kill them if necessary. Assemble at the plane.”

  “I gotta get some film of this,” Irving said aloud, then to Liana, “Come on, get with it, you hardly knew the guy.” He was no cameraman, but the only way his book would sell was as an adjunct to a television show, and the video camera he had lugged along now had to do its stuff. He wished he could count on Liana, who was taking the murder of her long-lost father by her estranged mother personally. He wished even harder he had Viveca around, intense and sober, to take the video dimension of the coverage off his hands.

  Davidov, gun in hand, was first out of the truck parked behind the Tower, racing around the corner, across the street into the café, Irving close behind, Liana trailing. Down the stairs to the locked door of the basement; urgent time wasted shooting out the lock and breaking through the door jammed by an iron bar under the handle.

  Inside, no guards; no body; no anybody. They were at the scene within five minutes only to find no scene; Madame Nina must have been premeditating this murder for years. In a moment, Davidov’s KGB men appeared and began feeling around the walls of the wine cellar for the hidden exit. Irving filmed them but could not be sure there was enough light. “Bring down a goddam lamp,” he told Liana. “There’s got to be traces of something—a bullet, blood, whatever—unless we were tuned in to a radio program.”

  Minutes later, one of the KGB searchers, feeling around the bottles, found a lever that enabled a rack to be swung back; the concealed doorway led to an alley where a car must have been waiting. Liana came down with a standing lamp and the restaurant manager, who was expostulating in rapid Latvian. Liana as interpreter said he’d heard nothing and was demanding to know what they were looking for in his wine cellar.

  “Tell him to show us the plug for electricity or I’ll break every bottle in this joint.”

  The manager plugged in the lamp, and the reporter panned the room with his camera.

  “Slow Eddie didn’t have a chance,” said Irving, filming, to Davidov, on his knees examining an item on the floor. “Whatcha got there? Hold it up in the light.”

  Through the lens, the reporter could see a small device that Dominick had once shown him: the hearing aid to simulate an attempt to improve the hearing of an ear that—in reality—did need a hearing aid. But back then, when Dominick was preparing to play the sleeper, who knew?

  “Show it to Liana, Niko.” She moved into the frame, her cheek wet, to inspect the only remnant of the great impersonation. “Yeah,” said Irving, both director and cinematographer, holding
the camcorder as still as he could. “This could be the Rosebud shot.”

  While his companions were focused on the shot of the hearing aid, Davidov was plotting the likely course of the pistol shot that had killed Berensky.

  He assumed Madame Nina had been seated in the middle of the table, with the sleeper agent in the single chair facing her across the table, his back to the wall. The cement floor behind the chair was wet and smelled of a strong detergent, suggesting that blood had been spilled there and had been efficiently mopped up moments after the shooting. On a line past the chair and the wet spot was the opening to the alley; he rolled the wine rack back into place and started pulling out and examining the bottles.

  On the shoulder of a bottle of Bordeaux he found a small blob of brown-red material, still freshly wet; he scraped it off with a credit card and put card and blob into the only container he had, a plastic floppy-disk protector. Davidov felt around in the rack behind the bottles and plucked out some splinters of what seemed to be bone, which could be skull fragments. He found no bullet.

  As Irving swung his camera around toward him, Davidov slipped the plastic wrapper into a pocket of his jacket and shook his head. “No bullet. They must have picked it up, or it’s still in the body.” To distract the reporter, he asked, “What is a Rosebud shot?”

  “Take too long to explain,” Irving said. “You have to be part of the culture.”

  RIGA

  This was not the style in which Michael Shu expected the world’s newest multimedia star to be living.

  The living room was what his tidy Vietnamese mother would have denounced as a mess, with books and tapes piled in corners and files stacked on the couches. In the larger bedroom, the accountant could see the back of the man the star was living with, hunched into a computer, a television set blaring the news nearby. The door to the smaller bedroom was closed, but the wail of a baby demanding to be fed or changed could be heard.