Sleeper Spy (35 page)

Like a man with nothing to do, he sat on a bench in the fenced triangle of asphalt and azaleas and looked across the traffic of the East River Drive. Or perhaps it was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive; he never could figure out where one ended and the other began. Across the water, the New York Fire Department, to train its recruits, regularly set the same building ablaze. That incendiary facility was on Roosevelt Island, which he had read was formerly Welfare Island, and before that word gained a pejorative connotation, Blackwell Island; it changed its name as often as the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD—and the Federal Security Ministry, as the KGB was currently called. The traffic on the riverside highway made his urban oasis serenely noisy, as restful as a spot beside a waterfall. In audio contrast, a coal barge crept noiselessly upriver.

At exactly ten-fifteen, Berensky walked to the public telephone at the corner of the park. When it rang, he snapped an encryption device over the mouthpiece and a decoder over the earpiece. The transmission would be scrambled in a way that caused the FBI to oppose sale of the devices to the public. Not only did they disguise the voices; the scramblers made the mouthpiece of a public phone more sanitary.

The person on the other end of the line was similarly equipped; his voice was unnaturally tinny. He was not Berensky’s handler; the sleeper no longer had any control, nor did he plan to have one. He would operate on his own.

The caller was a fellow Russian agent, officially reporting to Foreign Intelligence rather than the KGB, but who was now working with Berensky in their own private and unauthorized channel. With Control cut off, this unofficial contact was the sleeper’s source of inside data on future American government actions.

Berensky now thought of himself as a patriot without a country, and he wasted no time. “The word from Mariner?”

“At the meeting of the Open Market Committee up in New York next Tuesday,” said the tinny voice, “the federal funds rate will be raised a full percent. That’s one hundred basis points. Three votes for this, and the Chairman will go along.”

“The Chairman still relies primarily on the price of gold? Not a basket of commodities?”

That intelligence, first relayed to him by Control as he moved his sources westward after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, was probably the most useful piece of information elicited from their agent in the Federal Reserve System. Economists’ forecasts were influenced by a variety of indicators; to know the single most important factor in the decisions of the Chairman of the Fed gave the speculator not merely a tip but a strategic advantage. His out-of-channel contact now on the telephone knew the Fed mole as well as that agent’s control in Bonn, Sirkka Numminen, but he kept the mole’s identity to himself. Berensky accepted that compartmentalism as standard practice; he knew FI’s man at the Fed only by his code name: Mariner.

“Less so, Mariner says. Soybeans are the indicator of choice now. Something about the Humboldt Current.”

Berensky understood, as his caller did not, what Mariner was signaling. Fishermen along the east coast of South America called that cold Humboldt ocean current El Niño, the Christ Child; when the current warmed, or was overfished, the supply of anchovies dropped disastrously, and fish meal became scarce. That scarcity drove up the world price of soybeans, the alternative protein on world markets. El Niño also influenced world climate, and was blamed for hurricanes in the Western Hemisphere.

“Does Rowboat confirm this?” Rowboat was a climatologist who worked for the CIA, under cover of the Bureau of Wildlife and Fisheries, measuring winds and currents from a small craft off the coast of Peru.

“He was riffed in the last budget cut,” said the voice. “I may be the next to go.”

“What will you do?”

“Going home is not an option. Run a think tank or a foundation, maybe. I know a generous philanthropist.”

Berensky did not disabuse his lone source of the possibility. “One day you must let me meet Mariner.”

“Why expose yourself? Besides, Mariner doesn’t want to meet anybody but me. And those who run him in another channel wouldn’t like that. Never intermingle operations.” That was a reference to FI. “Besides, if you met him, you might be tempted to eliminate the middleman. Me.”

“Don’t make bad jokes. You know how I feel about violence—it’s bad for banking.” If this agent was dismissed in a government-wide reduction in force, and if he then retired from the KGB and stayed in the United States, he could still be useful as Berensky’s unofficial contact with the source at the Fed. The continuance of an intermediary offered an additional advantage: it would be safer to keep the Fed source in the dark about the identity of the sleeper, in case the Fed awoke to its breached security. Sooner or later somebody was bound to discover hugely profitable currency activity based on insider knowledge of Fed interest-rate actions. “Simple enough to steer a respectable bundle into a charitable foundation,” Berensky told him, “and put you in charge. Think seriously about double retirement. You have nothing to go back to in the old country.”

“We’re in the same boat on that, you and I. You’re not concerned about what that accountant calls his war room?”

“Spinning its wheels. And the reporter is off after ‘red mercury’ and could waste months on that. You’re monitoring all his calls?”

“Unofficially. The only troublesome thing is what he keeps calling ‘a mole in the Fed.’ Nobody else on this side has ever mentioned that, ever.”

“Stab in the dark on his part,” Berensky assured him. “It’s a reporter’s profession to conjure up conspiracy theories. Lucky thing the FBI doesn’t operate on hunches.”

“Fein calls it his sniffer, but there is no bloodhound quality to his work. He seems to work intuitively—on hunches, as you say. And yet the best intelligence analyst is a lucky guesser.”

“Forget the reporter,” said Berensky. “This whole group is off after commodity trading and plutonium sales. ‘Wild goose chase’ is the local expression. What about High Five?” That was what the two of them labeled Davidov of the Fifth Directorate. Berensky knew he did not have to make up half-coded allusions like “High Five”—either the encryption chips worked or they did not—but the habit of a lifetime under cover made him feel safer avoiding the verbalization of names and incriminating words. To a sleeper, guardedness was next to godliness.

“I’m told High Five has put in a request to visit the U.S.,” the voice reported, sounding as worried as the garbling would allow. “Mainly the state of New York. Now that the FBI has an office in Moscow, CIA can’t very well object. And the DCI wants to meet him, I think.”

“High Five worries me less than the independent operators with their headquarters in Riga. Find out what you can about the woman who runs it.” He knew her as Madame Nina, but the Washington double agent might have access to a CIA file on her. “Somebody’s pulling together the family authorities and our old friends. She may be the one.”

“I don’t believe in a world underworld,” said his colleague.

“All I know is, somebody’s competing with me.” Competition for money-laundering channels had become keen; legitimate fronts were harder and harder to find. Berensky consulted his watch. “I’m going to short the yen heavily on the basis of what Mariner says, and plunge in soybean future derivatives.”

“A butterfly straddle?”

“You don’t even know what that means. You must have read about them somewhere.”

“You’re right. I sure hope you know all about them.”

“It’s a very shapely swap, but it’s playing it safe. What I have in mind, if Mariner is correct, should take us up to fifty biggest ones.”

“Getting over half the magic number.”

“By then, I’ll know what to do.” He either would have a country to return to as a hero, or would have a big player’s place at the table of the “world underworld,” as his contact rather creatively put it. A third possibility would be to go into business for himself, a patriot without a country, reviled as a traitor by all—but very, very rich. That was what Control had had in mind in Barbados, and the would-be defector to greed’s lust had rightfully paid with his life. “It’s getting harder to hide
the profits than to make them. Your messenger delivered the message to—” He stopped himself from saying “my daughter” and substituted “—the younger woman in Riga?”

“She got it and sent a return message.”

Berensky frowned. “She was not supposed to. I specifically said this was to be a one-way channel.”

“She told the messenger to go to hell with his orders and to deliver her reply. She wants to set a time and place for you two to meet. Pushed hard for it.”

Her aggressive attitude could get them both in trouble, but the spiritedness of the girl’s response did not displease him. “Let her learn the value of patience.”

“She wasn’t the only one to get your message,” said the Washington contact. “As you expected, everyone did. They’re all looking for you. You’re in play.”

“You’re eating up your advance on these expenses down in Memphis,” Ace told Irving sternly, “and I don’t see a line on paper.”

“Yeah-yeah. Big story takes time.”

“It’s been three months, and the world’s greatest reporter doesn’t seem to have much to show for it.”

“Goddam red mercury threw me off. Turns out there ain’t no such thing, it’s just a cover for piddling little sales of plutonium and enriched uranium. Four hundred grams of enriched Russian uranium went to Iran last month for eighty million bucks. Chicken feed. Wild goose chase.”

“And what of your secret endeavor in Memphis?”

“Mike Shu thinks he’s on the edge of something, but he’s been saying that from the start.”

“Viveca?” Ace had not heard from her, which was uncharacteristic.

“She’s banging some guy down there who works with us. Practically commutes between here and there.”

Ace nodded; the green-eyed monster was probably the main reason Irving was distracted. “Is there any way of dispensing with her—” the agent rejected “boyfriend” as puerile and “companion” as euphemistic—“inamorata, so the two of you can work without emotional distraction?”

“Nah. I got somebody coming over next week from Latvia, maybe flush out some action from the sleeper. She says she’s bringing along an even bigger fish, your friend Davidov from Moscow. That should stir the pot.”

Too many metaphors, from flushing to fishing to stirring; Irving was not a classy writer, nor was his partner in this endeavor. The expectation
of the visit to New York of a high KGB official, however, triggered a creative synapse in the agent’s mind.

“I should be pleased to give one of my legendary little dinner parties for Director Davidov, Irving. Perhaps he has a few properties now that he was reluctant to part with before.”

Fein was not a social being, but the agent’s notion of using an elegant Park Avenue dinner party to commingle disparate sources intrigued him. “Let me check around before you invite anybody. A friend of mine may have an idea for a guest or two.”

Ace presumed Irving would seek a suggestion from his sources within the cloak-and-dagger world. “Be highly selective,” the experienced host cautioned. “My parties are for twelve—never more, never less.”

Viveca was astonished at the virulence of the attack Irving launched at Michael Shu.

“You’ve been screwing around down here for three months, with all these fancy maps and charts”—he grabbed a handful and threw them up in the air—“and what the hell do you have to show for it? Zilch!”

“We have a line on a bank in the Antilles,” Shu offered. “Could be the sleeper owns it.”

“Five guys on computers, a chronology of every big trade that ever happened for the past five years, and all you’ve come up with is one lousy clue about a bank that every drug runner uses to launder his money? You call that progress?”

Shu took it in silence.

“We should have a pattern by now,” Irving went on, “of where and how the sleeper operates and what he’s doing to hide his assets. That would be progress.”

Edward Dominick, in whose office this explosion was taking place, was staring determinedly out the window at the damn Mississippi River.