Sleeper Spy (18 page)

“Do I have to read a fax intercept of an American accountant to find out about KGB records in the
spetsfond?
” Davidov was seething. “Cherlyabinsk-65 plutonium was a find you considered unimportant? Do you realize we are up against a global operation that is stealing our resources? Or have you gone over to their side?”

The public prosecutor was rattled, as Davidov intended the man to be.

“We had no idea those KGB files were at the Academy of Sciences, Nikolai Andreyevich. Neither did you. It is a huge library—nobody knows what has been filed where. Books, ledgers, are still being found in industrial refrigerators where they were put after the fire.”

The new KGB official slammed his leather jacket down on the conference table, upsetting the glasses of tea.

“This is not the Kirov murder or the ‘doctors’ plot’ or the execution of Czar Nicholas. I am not talking about ancient history. I am talking about the records of payments that a spy who was working for us made to numbered accounts in Swiss banks only a few years ago.”

“Those accounts were closed. The money disappeared,” the prosecutor said, blotting the tea with his napkin.

“But we owned one of the private banks through a Swiss designee,” Davidov charged, unsure of his facts but dressing his guess in authority. “At least there we should know where the money went.”

“We should, but there was a suicide in Bern last month.” Davidov’s guess had been on the mark. “The bank is out of business, and the records were not found in the suicide’s home.” He shrugged hopelessly.

Davidov suspected that the sleeper agent, Berensky, had arranged for the murder of the Swiss front man whose numbered accounts included more than $3 billion in gold.

“You are certain it was a suicide? When did it take place?”

The prosecutor said the Swiss authorities had closed the case. He consulted his notebook and read off a date. Davidov nodded; it was two weeks after the control officer was killed in Barbados, fifteen days after the airplane death of his predecessor as head of the Fifth Directorate. Berensky had moved quickly and ruthlessly to cut off all possibility of contact.

That murder in Bern, committed or arranged for by the sleeper, was not even suspected by the prosecutor, who had bought the Swiss police’s explanation; Berensky or his accomplice was evidently skillful in faking a suicide and buying official unconcern.

Davidov was growing fearful at the extent of what he did not know about the sleeper spy or his method of operation. Worse, he was coming to doubt the ability of the organization he headed to cope with the complexity of the man’s maneuvers and of his crimes. The KGB’s “international sources” at the moment were not the four thousand foreign operatives in place, reporting to the Foreign Intelligence Service, no longer under KGB control. On the contrary, the source of this specific information was one American accountant of Russo-Vietnamese extraction whose daily data dumps to a journalist in New York was stretching the KGB’s conception of the investigation. The list of questions apparently code-named “the Dunno excrement” was especially troubling to Davidov, because they dealt with possible assets far beyond the KGB’s current understanding of how much money had originally been transferred to the sleeper.

The prosecutor, chosen by Davidov’s predecessor, had no grasp of the potential danger. “We have a simple case of theft,” he said. “The biggest theft in history. Rubles worth three billion dollars, transferred in bullion from the central bank depository here to the bank in Bern.”

“Where are the missing gold bars?”

“We have the date of inventory that disclosed the shortfall,” said the prosecutor, “and the guards are under extended interrogation.”

“Leading nowhere so far.”

“Maybe your missing agent was the recipient, maybe not. First we
have to pick up the trail here. Police work is not as certain as in your academic world.”

Davidov ignored the dig; the prosecutor would have to be replaced, but for now, circumvented. He snatched his tea-stained jacket and went to the local KGB headquarters. The handler for Arkady Volkovich, the KGB’s agent within the Feliks organization, was waiting for him.

“Arkady reports he was sent by Madame Nina to meet the accountant Shu at the Tower restaurant in Riga yesterday,” the handler reported. “Open café meeting.”

“We gave him cover?”

“Everybody in the neighborhood saw our photographer keeping them under surveillance. Here is the transcript from the wire we had on Arkady.”

Davidov assumed the Feliks people had another transcript from their own wire; there were financial efficiencies in a double agent. The questions asked by Shu were outlined by yellow marker; they corresponded to the list code-named “Dunno” sent out by the accountant last night.

The KGB chief was dismayed; his investigators, forty of them on this case, were not up to asking sophisticated questions like Shu’s. Global financial manipulation requiring computer tracking was foreign to traditional KGB operations. The longtime Soviet need to control all information from the center—rooted in the Kremlin’s fear of instant samizdat through personal computer networks—had limited the number of the new machines in the former Soviet Union; as a result, aptitude in what the Americans called “hacking” had not been developed in Russia in the late eighties. Today some Russian agents were placed in overseas banks to support industrial espionage payoffs, but even that was under Foreign Intelligence, beyond KGB reach. All the while that communists had prided themselves on the use of political fronts, capitalists in the West had quietly perfected financial fronts.

That made the sleeper in America all the more important; Berensky was one of the few Russians who knew the tricks of money manipulation and vast embezzlement at the moment in the recent past when such knowledge was vital to preserving the secret assets of the collapsing Soviet state. Davidov shook his head at the folly of entrusting so much money to one man and his vulnerable control. But that was not
the half of it; the KGB did not have agents who knew how to police the international financial markets and stock exchanges, or who understood the methods necessary for recovering the fortune the sleeper was stealing.

“It would help me,” Arkady’s handler prodded, “to know the direction we are taking with our double agent.” The handler was a professional just graduated from the ranks of field agent, and not one of the old crowd; Davidov almost trusted him.

“The Feliks organization is using this television presenter Liana Krumins,” Davidov briefed, “as a front.” Highlights of the film showing the nubile Latvian’s front fast-forwarded through his mind. “They are hoping she will get information from us and our files that will help them to find the sleeper they think of as their man, because they planted him in the U.S. when they ran the KGB.”

“They have lost contact with him, too?”

“He does not want to be found by any of us. Yet.”

“I have a theory, sir. The sleeper and his handler decided to betray a Soviet Union that no longer exists, and to go into business for themselves.”

Davidov could not bring himself to think that a child of Shelepin himself, inculcated with the visions and values of the old KGB, spending half a lifetime preparing himself for a mission, would in the end turn against his people for selfish gain. Or even worse, ally himself with an organization like the Feliks people, dedicated to snatching back power from the elected representatives of the Russian people. The likelihood, Davidov calculated, was that Berensky was at this moment weighing the alternatives, waiting to see if the government was stable or if the Feliks people would become a useful counterforce.

“Put this into your theory,” he told Arkady’s handler. “The Krumins woman is the contact of the American reporters Shu and Fein, whose business may be an American intelligence proprietary.”

“So we are looking for the sleeper by watching the Feliks
avtoritet,
” the handler said quickly, showing he understood. “And the Feliks people are looking for their man by following the television reporter who is working with the American media, which is an arm of the CIA.”

“You have it,” said Davidov, admiring the symmetry. “Here, just beyond our reach in the Baltics, the old Soviet KGB crowd is tied in with mafiya thugs and is using the Latvian media to find the man with
the money. Over there, the CIA is probably using the American media to find the same man.”

“Does it not make us appear impotent,” said the young handler, with a touch of arrogance, “to be following other organizations instead of finding the sleeper ourselves?”

The truth was as bad as it sounded. “We have been at the end of the parade,” Davidov admitted. “Now we are going to lead it. We will set up a team that will find the sleeper in America on our own.”

All very neat, but who in the CIA had chosen Fein, a frequent critic of the Agency whose stories had cost it budget cuts, to lead a search for the sleeper? Was Fein’s a redundant or a rogue operation duplicating the CIA’s own probe? And why did the Feliks organization choose to work through Liana, an independent and politically unreliable young woman who knew nothing about international fraud? And why would she so readily consent to work for the worst elements of Russian society?

In his academic field of epistemology, the study of knowledge, a central question was always “How do we know what we know?” That leads to “How do we recognize what we think we know is untrue?” He had not even approached that in this case; he was still trying to get a handle on what he did not know. And to find that out, where in Russia was he going to find a team of experts that could cope with a runaway cryptocapitalist financial brain?

Davidov rode alone in his car to the airport, uncertain of his organization’s ability to counter a threat it had never faced before. If the Fein-Shu trackers found the sleeper first, Davidov could not survive the terrible embarrassment of a Russian government pleading for a return of the $3 billion plus assets in America. If the Feliks-Liana track found him first—and if the cache had grown substantially, which the Americans seemed to think—the Feliks movement would use those assets to undermine the state’s economy, overthrow its government, and revive Russian despotic imperialism.

But until he could put a sophisticated financial team in place, Davidov was confined to following the followers. For his own and his President’s survival, he had to identify and recover what could possibly be a vast array of stolen assets. He found it hard to believe that the KGB could not find out who its own sleeper was. Files could be expunged; records could be stolen; the keepers of secrets could die; but people
remained in this vast bureaucracy with memories that no computer could erase.

Davidov boarded the train to Moscow, following that train of thought: if information about the sleeper in America was being kept from him, then the Feliks challenge went deeper than he had originally thought. The KGB would be effectively penetrated, not by a foreign service, but by disloyalists within. He could never mount a serious effort to find the worldwide assets until he crushed the clique that was protecting the sleeper.

He telephoned Yelena from the Moscow train station; he wanted the head of Section K of the Fifth Directorate to be waiting in his office when he arrived.

Yasenovo was the old Soviet imitation of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. A half mile outside Moscow’s outer ring, equivalent to what Washington called its Beltway, twin twenty-two-story buildings rose in proud nonsecrecy in a suburban setting. For an agent far out in the field, to be “in the woods” of Yasenovo was to be at the epicenter of intelligence activity, at the source of all concerns.

“I find it inconceivable that you have been unable to find your own agent.” He remained standing behind his Finnish-made desk in his wood-paneled office and did not invite his subordinate to sit down.

“The sleeper’s handler made sure there were no files—”

“People here have memories. You were in the First Chief Directorate for fourteen years. You knew people there who go back to Shelepin’s time, before Andropov. Somebody who worked for you knows Berensky. I want to know.”

When Foreign Intelligence was separated from the KGB in Yeltsin’s early days, responsibility for counterintelligence had been left in the KGB, part of the Federal Security Ministry. In the past, the combined operation had had stunning success: the Soviet mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, worked for KGB foreign intelligence, sending back information about American agents in Moscow. KGB counterintelligence would then pick them up, turn them, and send to the Americans whatever intelligence Moscow wanted implanted in the minds of strategic planners. The two units nicely complemented each other, resulting in the misleading of the American government about the size and health of the weak Soviet economy for a decade. Of course, the KGB’s brilliant success backfired: when the Americans were misled into
believing the Soviets were getting stronger, the Reagan hard-liners sped up the arms race, forcing the Kremlin to spend more until the Soviet economy buckled under the strain.