Sleeper Spy (61 page)

“A double double cross,” said Fein, still shaking his head as if all this were news to him. She assumed the reporter’s thunderstruck demeanor was all a charade. “Beautiful. So Clauson had this great idea to make a bundle.”

“Walter Clauson had a daring plan to set up a separate operation—a rogue operation, if you will.” If their intent was to test her reliability, she would surprise them with the truth. “Speigal at the Fed would supply the inside information on the American side. I would supply the economic intelligence from the KGB side. And Berensky, the sleeper, would use the data to invest the Communist Party money to generate one hundred billion dollars in assets.”

“And who would get the jackpot at the end?” Fein asked.

“I always presumed it would be you, the CIA,” she said with care. “Or split up among the CIA and FBI and KGB and FI, which would fund their operations for years. But I don’t know the arrangement Clauson and Berensky made among the agencies.”

Fein asked if she had heard from Speigal lately. “Not since he sent me the fax that made possible our coup on interest rates,” she replied. “I suppose he’s entitled to a few weeks off.”

“And Clauson?”

“Sometimes months go by and I don’t hear from him.” Why was he asking this? Had they been turned? If so, what were they saying about her?

“And the sleeper?”

Time for a lie, not checkable. “The first time I met him was with the both of you, at the literary agent’s dinner party.” She remembered watching the quick, casual encounter of the sleeper with his unknowing daughter and shook her head in wonderment at the memory. “That was some party.”

Davidov’s turn. “Did you exchange any words with the man who called himself Dominick privately that night?”

“No.” True.

“Hard to believe. You were his colleague in a rogue operation for years, and when you find yourself in a room together, you gave no hint of recognition?”

“Of course not, Nikolai. The KGB rule is never to speak unless spoken to by an undercover superior. You’re trying to trick me. I cannot be tricked because I am sticking to the truth.”

“You told me before,” said Davidov, “that you believed Edward Dominick was not just pretending to be Berensky, but was actually him. Did you ever deal directly with the sleeper?”

“No. Clauson is my cutout.”

“Has Speigal of the Fed ever met him?”

“No. The only person who deals directly with the sleeper is Clauson.” She turned to Fein. “And recently, you. You dealt with him all the time, in his role as Edward Dominick. And you forwarded the message to me from Speigal—that fax I passed on to the sleeper’s brokers—and it led to the biggest currency trading profit ever. Isn’t that the truth?”

“I know what I know,” the stone-faced Fein replied. “I want to know what you know. And I don’t like the way you’ve been diddling us.”

“What means ‘diddling’?”

“It means to gently raise and lower the male genitalia.”

“Very colorful.” She decided the moment had come to take offense and push back. “The truth, gentlemen, is that I have been working for the KGB for nearly a decade on a penetration of the Federal Reserve. You, Davidov, know that. At the same time, I have been working with the CIA since the fall of the Soviet Union on its profitable operation with the traitorous sleeper to finance the Agency for years to come. You, Fein, surely know that.”

That was the truth as far as it directly affected each of them and their organizations; her separate activity with her husband in Riga to get a cut of the fortune was strictly the private business of the von Schwebels.

She heard the public address system voice in Finnish and told them coldly, “They are calling the Riga flight. Because your two agencies have decided to work together, you have been able to force me to betray two men I deeply respect. I have given you Walter Clauson, one
of the great minds in espionage, and Mort Speigal, who has become my good friend. I hope you are satisfied.”

“I presume you intend to warn them they have been compromised,” said Davidov. “Do not.”

“They have no place to run to,” Fein added. “I will conduct their interrogation and we will see how much of what you told us is true.”

She picked up her pocketbook and pulled her rollaway bag out into the corridor without a bon voyage. They had squeezed her hard, and she had been forced to reveal much, because the combination of KGB and CIA interrogators was like a nutcracker on a double agent. At least they did not associate her with the death of the private banker in Bern.

She wondered if she should try to get a message to the sleeper; perhaps Berensky/Dominick could warn Clauson and Speigal, or put them out of their misery.

“Class act,” said Irving.

“Lies with a nice intricacy,” Davidov replied, “like a fine oriental rug.”

“You ever tie into that, Niko?”

The context made the American’s colloquial meaning clear, and Davidov replied obliquely, “We were friends once.” Not so; Finns were tough for Russians, even as fellow agents; he had tried to breach that Mannerheim Line and been thrown back with such adroitness and good humor that he was unsure to this day if he had been permanently rejected. “The man who has dominated her life has been the sleeper, and it is difficult to imagine they dealt with each other only from afar. I would put that on your dunno sheet, along with the true identity of the sleeper.”

“Lookit, I understand if you don’t trust me. I gave you a bum steer on Dominick last time. I have since found out from Viveca that my boy Eddie is damn well Berensky, and I was a horse’s ass.”

To confirm his suspicion about Berensky’s self-impersonation had been Davidov’s purpose in providing Irving with the address in Arizona so valuable to him. “How did Viveca find out?”

“The hard way. Nibbled the wrong ear.”

A slipup at an intimate moment; Davidov was surprised that the
sleeper had let himself get caught that way. “At least he didn’t kill her, the way he did Clauson.” The death of the CIA official had not been announced, and apparently Sirkka thought he was still alive, but Davidov’s Washington sources were alert. “I liked the way you let Sirkka continue to believe Clauson is among the living.” He concluded his compliment with “Even if you had to confirm you are a CIA operative.”

“Confirm, conshmirm. Believe what you like.”

“I take it that Speigal is also no longer working for Russian Foreign Intelligence.”

“No freebies,” said Fein. “You got something to trade? Like—was Clauson really a Soviet mole in the CIA? Or is Sirkka von Schwebel making it all up?”

“Walter Clauson was a KGB mole in the CIA for more than twenty years until Berensky killed him last month.”

Long, head-in-hands take by the reporter. “Twenty years. Then he fooled Angleton, even. Our own little Philby.”

“He fooled you, too?”

“Suckered me to a fare-thee-well. I came to Clauson, a pretty good source over the years, with a lead on the sleeper story. Who knew he was a mole? And not your run-of-the-mill mole, but one who had gone into business with the sleeper in a little private project to rip off the whole world?” Irving looked slightly ill as the extent and import of his gullibility sank in. “So when I gave him my great idea for an impersonator, he protected his operation by sending me to the sleeper himself. They had total control.”

“Don’t flagellate yourself,” Davidov told him, tending to believe his story. “It happened to be the luck of the world’s greatest reporter to have as a source the world’s greatest double agent, who happened to be in business with the world’s greatest sleeper agent. Of course they penetrated your operation and turned you without your knowing it. It was second nature to Clauson. And Berensky has been a splendid actor all his life.”

“Gotta find out why Dominick—Berensky, that is—killed old Walt. That’s a loose end.”

“A fundamental difference in motivation, of course.” Davidov enjoyed being the instructor’s instructor; the world of rational journalism could never keep pace with the world of empiric espionage in epistemological
constructs. “Clauson set up the rogue operation for the straightforward purpose of making an enormous fortune, to be shared with the sleeper, with a small percentage to Speigal and Sirkka. But Berensky was in the plot to assemble a fortune for a political purpose and to justify his life’s work. The essential interests of the two men were in conflict from the start. In the end, one had to kill the other.”

“Yeah, but Clauson was the go-between for leaks from the Fed. Berensky didn’t know Mort Speigal from Adam. Clauson was the cutout, which was his life insurance policy.”

Davidov made a guess. “There came a moment when Berensky made a direct connection to Sirkka, and through her closed his circuit to the mole at the Fed, Speigal. At that moment, Clauson was a dead man.”

“You’re only guessing,” said Fein, “but you’re a good guesser. When I get back to Langley, I’m going to have a little chat with the DCI and maybe arrange for her rapid retirement.”

“Too bad. You respect Dorothy Barclay, I take it.”

“Lookit. I know it looks like I am in the CIA’s pocket on this, and they jerked me around pretty good, but I’m not an agent or an asset. I was hooked in by Clauson.”

“How did he hook you?”

Irving gave that some thought. “The blind tip that started me on this, left on my message machine. Said I should check with one of the old Angleton types. That drew me to Clauson, because he was the only logical one I’d call. He sent me that tip, to get me to call him. I was suckered.”

“That is believable.”

“It doesn’t mean there’s no wall between spooks and reporters. Do you believe me about that, too?”

“I do.”

Fein squinted at him. “Why?”

“I am, as your dossier on me explains, an epistemic logician. Your employment by the CIA makes so much logical sense that it becomes illogical. Real life is rarely so symmetrical.”

“Cut the shit, Niko. Why do you believe me?”

“Because I am not authorized to deal with the CIA directly on this matter. But the Chief Directorate authorized me to deal with the press. By accepting your protestations that you are a pure journalist, not a
CIA agent or asset, I protect my bureaucratic position back home.” If anything would have the ring of truth to it, that would.

Davidov listened to the airport loudspeaker making a last call for the plane to Riga. “This has become a conversation all in Column B, for your benefit,” he said. “Now for me—what’s become of Mortimer Speigal?” He suspected the FBI had caught the Fed mole and the CIA was blocking a prosecution in the hope of turning him. Davidov could not allow his newly expanded economic counterintelligence unit to appear to be misled by disinformation.

“I shook him up with a few questions,” Fein replied, “and he blew his head off with his handy-dandy .38. Didn’t like publicity or something. Then I changed his message to Sirkka from a buy to a sell. I thought that would cost Berensky a bundle, but the Fed Chairman changed his mind at the last minute and so the message I sent along made megabucks. Gigabucks.”

That was like a shortwave burst from an agent behind the lines. Davidov permitted himself to blink. After he separated out its dramatic components, the Russian considered the implications of Fein’s revelation. With Speigal dead, and Sirkka blocked, and his cutout Clauson removed, Berensky was cornered. Very rich and thus powerful, the sleeper was no longer anonymous and no longer the possessor of the infallible crystal ball. The flushed-out spy would have to make his decision and cast his lot with either Moscow or the mafiya right away.

The KGB man judged that illumination by the reporter to be a fair return on his investment in Irving of the information about Clauson’s molehood. “What bothers me,” Davidov said to his fellow traveler on the journey to the fortune, “is that Berensky now has a clear field in Riga. All he has to do is prove to Madame Nina’s politburo that he is who he is, and show good faith by turning over a sample of his assets. Then he’ll be able to take over the major criminal authorities in Russia and most of the near abroad, along with a large part of the KGB and Foreign Intelligence. And if he promises to pay the army veterans a pension with a piece of his billions, Berensky could move right into the Kremlin.”

“I say we accompany Sirkka to Riga.”

Davidov produced two tickets. “That has been my plan.”

He had no plan, only several options dependent on the sleeper’s state
of mind, which he hoped was undecided. Perhaps he could appeal to the practical side of Berensky’s patriotism, advocating the investment in a vital capitalist infrastructure. Or there might be a way of driving a wedge between Madame Nina and Berensky, assuming a natural rivalry for the leadership of the Feliks people. Failing that, Colonel Nikolai Andreyevich Davidov had been invested from the start with the authority to terminate the longtime KGB sleeper operation with what the Americans once were said to call “extreme prejudice,” a nice euphemism for execution. The best outcome of his quest was to return the fortune to the treasury of the legitimate Russian government; the fallback goal was to deny it, at any cost, to the force that would use its vast resources to oust the present government and perhaps destabilize the world.