Sleeper Spy (30 page)

The agent rose and went to the hotel-room window facing Grant Park. He felt he had almost come to know Liana through videotapes of her recent Riga telecasts in Russian. In appearance, culture, and attitude, the vibrant and self-sufficient young woman seemed closer to him than his American daughters. Those two looked and acted like their
late blond, all-American mother—materialistic predators roaming the shopping-mall jungle.

So much for the strangely inefficient KGB search. The pursuit of Berensky by the Feliks organization was another story. Latvia, now outside the KGB orbit, was its base; an extensive cabal of secret police old-timers was a part of its network; many of the new mafiya of entrepreneurs had become the Feliks organization’s source of support. Some of those black marketers were aware of the ways Berensky offered to draw oil profits out of the country.

The dominant Madame Nina, and those in league with her, presumed—correctly—that Berensky was assembling this vast fortune for their use. He was inclined to think their trust was well placed, provided they could first bring the new Russian “reformers” to the economic brink of disaster. Yet he was aware that the clandestine organization’s leaders were growing impatient with him, even as they knew they could not afford to offend him.

Berensky wanted to be sure that the vast wealth he was assembling would be used for the original purpose Shelepin had drilled into his mind: to save and serve the strong Russia he was born to. His conception of Russia was as a nation whose people were under the firm control of a central government in Moscow, with a leader who had a sense of Russia’s imperial destiny. Communism had failed, but Russia must never be less than a superpower. The current regime in Moscow was drifting toward convergence with the West; Berensky had to be certain that the organization in Russia whose assets were entrusted to him was truly the heir of Shelepin’s vision.

He wished he knew more about the leader Madame Nina. Control had failed to provide hard information about the shadowy woman.

His other pursuers were almost laughable. He viewed the American news reporters, the flamboyant Fein and the neurotic television girl Farr, as more of an inconvenient amusement than a threat. He had devised a way to monitor their amateur investigation patterned on what his father had told him about the Trust, a KGB entrapment operation started in the 1920s. Nothing they were doing was a source of concern to him.

Except for their employee, the Eurasian accountant, Michael Shu. Berensky turned away from the window and looked into the darkness of the room, irritated at a mere coincidence. Of all the offshore banks
where major money could be run, why did this naive accountant have to have close connections with the Yellowbird Bank of the Bahamas? It happened to be the bank Berensky had bought five years ago and taken out of the dangerous business of laundering drug money, to be free for his far more lucrative currency trades and asset transfers. It was highly unfortunate that Shu knew most of the employees from the bank’s former narcotics days.

Berensky determined to keep a close eye on Shu’s poking around. If he came too close, and could not then be suborned, the accountant would have to be removed.

The sleeper found this prospect of violence neither troubling nor enjoyable; it would not be the first time he had protected his mission by creating an accident victim. Berensky recalled how, to protect his identity in the early days in America, he had arranged for the apparent suicide of a fellow agent when he discovered him doubling for the CIA. More recently, when the owner of a Swiss bank that handled the original $3 billion stake posed a threat, Berensky had been forced to direct his confederate in Helsinki to go to Bern and arrange another suicide. Now, with a $30 billion empire at stake, and the moment not yet ripe for the financing of a counter-counterrevolution, the sleeper remained ready to do whatever was necessary to protect his enterprise.

The telephone rang. He ignored it, knowing the call could not be for him.

He felt a great responsibility pressing on his chest: no less than the rejuvenation of Russia as a superpower and the regaining of an empire. He had been willing to live a lifelong lie, on his own, in enemy territory, to be ready for this moment. He presumed that his father, a Soviet man of extraordinary foresight, had envisioned as an eventuality the economic ruin of the socialist state, and had sent him into the heart of capitalism to assemble the capital needed for the recovery of national power. The sleeper agent was not about to let anything interfere with his historic mission. Especially not when it was so close to completion.

In an age when information was power, he had the information: at first from the Russian side, where advance knowledge of economic news and political acts that would affect trading had enabled him to multiply his initial stake tenfold on the anonymous and liquid currency markets.

More recently, he had been applying the same technique in the West.
A former East German Stasi cadre had offered itself for sale soon after the Berlin Wall fell, and Control had snapped it up. That was how he had gained a most valuable personnel asset, a Finnish economist, a striking and brilliant woman with ties to a source in the American Federal Reserve. Sirkka Numminen’s access to inside information about moves planned at the Bundesbank and the Federal Reserve had helped Berensky build his fortune. And when called upon for wet work in Bern, she had justified the training of a lifetime.

He had positioned himself financially for one great final coup, one that would take his hoard to $100 billion. That would be enough to affect the balance of power in an impoverished Russia needful of the Shelepin vision of global dominance.

Thinking of his father, who had been hard of hearing, the sleeper pulled at the lobe of his left ear, where a small hearing aid nestled deep in the canal. One of his American daughters was complaining of not being able to hear her professors clearly. He hoped the genetic weakness had not affected Liana.

“We have the first useful results of the surveillance of the sleeper’s daughter, Director Davidov,” Yelena said. She was irritated with herself; she was upset at the Director’s unrelenting interest in the Riga television woman.

“About time.”

“Our surveillance of her has been very expensive,” she said. “Two people on two twelve-hour shifts. Not to mention the technical backup.”

“I will retire some border guards. What results?”

“The transmitter on the clasp of her amber pendant worked this time,” Yelena reported. The tiny, sensitive bug made in Taiwan had a broadcast range of nearly one hundred meters; the previous transmitter, manufactured years before in Soviet Ukraine and planted with great difficulty after a surreptitious entry of Liana’s apartment, had emitted nothing but useless squeaks that were the cause of an intemperate outburst by Davidov, ordinarily a calm person. “She was accosted by a woman with a baby on a carpet selling
beriozka
dolls. Here is the transcript.” She handed him the single page.

He read aloud the entire exchange between Liana Krumins and the messenger disguised as a babushka, from “I have a message for you from America” to the final “Walk away now.”

Davidov held out his hand. “And now you will give me the report of the interrogation of the messenger,” he said, “who we took into custody immediately.”

“Unfortunately that did not happen.”

The directorate chief closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I gave
specific orders to pick up anybody who made contact with this woman to pass on any information. The three men in the truck heard the exchange. The two shadows on the street saw it. The babushka messenger is the only known connection to the sleeper, if she is genuine. What happened to her?”

“Unfortunately she disappeared around the corner.”

“Baby and blanket and souvenirs and all?”

“Those items were left behind. The baby turned out to be a doll. The messenger may have been a man. We can’t tell from the voice.”

“Fingerprints on the doll?”

“Nobody thought to check for that, Director. I’ll see to it right away.”

“There won’t be any,” Davidov said wearily. “The messenger was a professional. The sleeper agent is a professional. The only amateurs in this entire operation work for me. Unless they are extremely professional operatives who are working against me.”

The intelligence analyst could not blame her boss for his touch of self-pity; a major tracing opportunity had been missed. “These are all new men and women on the case,” she assured him. “So there will be no old loyalties.”

He put his head in his hands, elbows on his desk. Then he looked up at her. “The sleeper is alive. He is active. He knows we are after him. He knows the Feliks people are after him. And he certainly knows we are both using his daughter to get to him. This seems to be worrying him.”

“One thing he does not know,” she jogged his memory, “is that we know the journalist in Riga is his daughter.”

“He doesn’t know whether Liana knows he is her father, either. Which she does not. An interesting epistemological situation.” Yelena waited for him to come to the logical conclusion about Liana’s status, and it took him longer than usual. “Which means she is a kind of hostage. And she does not realize it,” he said finally.

“ ‘Bait’ is the word you used,” she reminded him. In the old days, under a different kind of Director, the sleeper’s daughter would be more than “a kind of” hostage. She would be used, cruelly if necessary, to bring the father in, if the sleeper agent had any kind of paternal feelings. Perhaps he did not; a generation ago, the sleeper had willingly left his pregnant wife behind to take his American assignment. Berensky
might be one of those purposeful men who treated water as thicker than blood.

“That message to Liana was like a nibble on our fishing line,” he said, rising from the chair, sitting on the corner of the desk. “Not a strike, just a nibble, but we know the fish is there.”

“History of hearing loss in your family?”

The banker frowned. “My mother used to favor her right side, as I recall. She died thirty years ago, never wore a hearing aid. You really need to take a history?”

The hearing technician moved down her list of questions briskly; this guy was one of those executive types who wanted to waste no time. Yolanda Teeter, licensed audiologist, as the diploma on the wall attested, was the first black woman to reach the peak of her profession, and she refused to be anything less than thorough. “When did you first become aware you were having trouble in your left ear?”

“Hard to say, ma’am, been coming on a long time. Didn’t want to admit it, I guess.”

“But it’s gotten worse recently? How can you tell?”

He moved his head to one side. “When I go like this”—he moved his head to the other side—“I can hear better than when I go like that.”

“Do you have trouble distinguishing among voices when several people are speaking?”

“Yes, that too. Perhaps we can move on to the testing.”

One of those. To him, the technology was more important than the technologist. “I need to know this, young man,” she said with some severity. “Was there an explosion, or any loud noise trauma in the past, or any accident to the head recently, that might be connected to your loss of hearing?”

“No. It’s come on slowly. I’ve been thinking of getting a hearing aid for years.”

The audiologist noted “maternal history of presbycusis” on the chart and led him into the testing booth.

“Put these earphones on. I’ll be on the other side of that window. Respond when you hear the tones.” She put him through an air conduction test with the phones on to determine his sensitivity to sounds; based on his verbal responses, he had a moderate 45-decibel loss in his left ear.

She went into the booth, removed the phones, and attached a vibrator to determine the conduction of sound in his inner ear. Then, through the window again, to speech recognition; she played a tape saying: “Repeat after me—
cowboy, railroad, baseball.
” As she lowered the sound of the recorded voice, the patient said he thought
baseball
was
eraser
. He was able to discriminate
sail
from
fail
but said he heard
chew
when she said
shoe
, which suggested to the audiologist a difficulty in differentiating high-frequency sounds like the hissing of consonants.