Sleeper Spy (51 page)

It was nearly midnight when he drew up to the house in Pound Ridge. His driver telephoned in to the housekeeper, so as not to alarm the woman. She came to the door accompanied by an extraordinarily large—and to Ace, suitably menacing—black watchdog, only to report no word from Ms Farr. He reported that on the phone to Irving, isolated and worried in a Syracuse hotel room, who asked him to hang around the house awhile: “When she sobers up, that’s where she’ll go to ground.” Ace agreed and took a nap in the library. At three in the morning, the faithful agent acknowledged he was getting a little old for this sort of thing and he went home.

With Liana in tow, Irving Fein arrived at the Farr estate at a little after ten in the morning, not ten minutes ahead of Edward Dominick.

“We missed her. She’s been here and gone,” the reporter, pacing around the library, told the banker when he arrived. “Housekeeper says the limo driver dropped her off here at seven in the morning, all hung over. She watched the replay of her performance on the morning shows—it was the big deal this morning—and kind of flipped out.”

“Where is she? Do we know?”

“Housekeeper, Brigid, says she went to her strongbox and cleaned it out and packed up and left in her Montero, the four-wheel-drive thing.”

“How much was in the strongbox? Does the housekeeper know? If it’s not a lot,” Dominick said, “she’ll have to use credit cards for gas. I
can get MasterCard to track her. We’ll know her whereabouts at the first gas station.”

“Maybe ten grand in cash, she thinks,” Irving said glumly. “Plus some good jewelry. She can go underground a long time with that, just crawl away and hole up and make a new life as a total nobody.”

“If she wants a life at all,” Dominick said.

“Surely she will be recognized wherever she goes,” Liana put in. “Hers is a famous face. She is a great celebrity. How can she hide?”

“Ms Krumins, you’ve never seen Viveca with her makeup off,” said Dominick, “and with her perfectly coiffed hair all a mess, and not all crisp and authoritative in a tailored outfit, and not projecting her voice from her diaphragm. Believe me, I have, and—out of context—she’s somebody else. She can hide from her shame for as long as she wants to live.”

“No. We’ll find her,” Irving assured Liana with more certainty than he felt. “The Feds owe us one.”

“They’re not the only ones indebted to us,” Dominick said, taking a deep change-of-subject breath. “Let me get on to Mike Shu.” He did his call-me-at-the-candy-store routine and reviewed a bunch of rates and numbers with the accountant. Using his subnotebook, the banker dialed into some financial service and jotted down a few numbers, shaking his head in wonderment at the results. Irving noticed he also watched Liana, inspecting the library books, out of the corner of his eye.

“Irving, you know that little trick you played yesterday on Uncle Aleks?”

Fein nodded; apparently the banker had been briefed by Michael Shu the night before on the discovery and suicide of Mort Speigal, including Irving’s ingenious changing of the coded message from black to red.

“Yesterday,” Dominick said, “that London trader put down some of the biggest trades ever made on the dollar. So did the four other banks and brokers we’ve been following who have been acting for Berensky. They went overboard on leveraging, betting the farm on the accuracy of the inside information from the mole in the Fed. It’s hard to believe, but Berensky’s brokers and acolytes may have accounted for ten percent of yesterday’s trillion-dollar world currency trading.”

“We crossed ’em up,” Irving explained to Liana, who deserved to be
in on the story. “I wanted Berensky’s network to lose its shirt, so his brokers and agents and banks would turn on him and panic him to come to us. So I fixed the message from the Fed mole so they would do the wrong thing. Not bad for a nonbanker, hey, Edward?” He was proud of that financial maneuver and glad that Liana could hear its results from a sophisticated banker like Dominick.

“You probably missed the substance of the bulletin that Viveca read on the air last night,” the banker said, “because you were concentrating on the awful thing happening to her.”

Irving had not a clue to what Dominick meant. Liana remembered, though: “It was about the Federal Reserve postponing a meeting.”

“That’s exactly right, little lady. The Fed was planning to lower interest rates substantially. The mole, Speigal, wrote that message to Berensky’s brokers. But when the mole was found out, and committed suicide, the Fed Chairman wisely decided to postpone the meeting entirely.”

Irving began to feel queasy. “So what happened?”

“Well, if the mole’s original message had been delivered correctly, the Berensky group would have lost a fortune—several fortunes, bankruptcies down the line like a row of dominoes, and all furious at being misled by Berensky.”

“But I changed the message from black to red,” Irving said slowly.

“Which made the message fit the actual last-minute action to postpone taken by the Fed,” said Dominick. “You changed the mole’s leak; the Fed Chairman did not do what he planned to do; and your signal of ‘red’ paid off big this morning for those who bought dollars and sold marks.”

“Then Berensky came out ahead,” Irving frowned.

“Ahead? My God, man, there’s never been such an ‘ahead’ in the history of currency trading. Mike and I figure—on the basis of your ultimately correct ‘red’ signal—Berensky made a profit of nearly twenty billion dollars.”

The reporter stood silent, trying to digest the turn of events. Liana came up to him and put her hand on his arm. “You were able to help the Russian sleeper make twenty billion dollars?”

“Nuthin’ to it,” Irving said weakly. “You got to know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em.”

Dominick was doing his long, low chuckle. Then he stopped. “Your
strategy will still have the desired effect, Irving. I think this coup puts the sleeper at or near the hundred-billion level, a sum that must be getting impossible to conceal. And when word gets out about the biggest currency killing ever, governments everywhere will want to know who was behind it. That means Berensky has to make a decision quickly about the disposition of the fortune.”

Irving took that a step forward. “Which means the financial press will be hot on the sleeper’s trail, too—now we’ve got competition. It means it’s time for you to get your ass over to Riga, maybe with Our Gal Sunday here.”

“Yes. If I’m to play Berensky to his people, now’s the time. The sleeper looks like a hero after yesterday’s huge coup, and I know all the details.”

Irving reviewed the status of the impersonation. “I’m pretty sure we’ve got Davidov’s KGB hooked. He now suspects you may be the sleeper.”

“That’s so,” Liana confirmed. “Nikolai told me to be very careful of what I said to the banker from Memphis. And I will tell him I am sure you are Berensky when I see him next.”

“That tracks with what I’m getting,” Dominick said. “Our Globocop security people say somebody’s been trying desperately to penetrate our communications with a second satellite. The more we frustrate Davidov, the more he thinks our operation is the real thing.”

“And we know the Feliks people have plenty of lines into the KGB,” figured Irving. “That means that what Davidov suspects, Madame Nina suspects.”

“The seed of suspicion has been planted everywhere,” said Dominick. “The only one on the other side who knows for sure I’m not the sleeper is the sleeper. Now I must persuade the hunters that I’m indeed the one they’re hunting.”

“Wait,” Liana said. “If you convince them you’re Berensky, why won’t the KGB or the Feliks people just seize you and torture you until you give them all the money?”

“Not to worry,” said Irving quickly, before she took the edge off Dominick’s desire to go. “Goose that laid the golden egg.”

“He means that the real Berensky is too fragile to touch, Liana. One heart attack and they lose a hundred billion dollars, the salvation of their respective movements, the economic control of Russia. Access to
much of the fortune is in his head. Both the KGB and the Feliks people want him to be alive, and to be their agent, not their enemy.”

She was not persuaded. “But they want the money, and Edward Dominick, no matter who he pretends to be, does not have it.” She pointed this out in what Irving noted was a sound reportorial way. “What happens when you can’t put real money on the table?”

“In a short time, I think I’ll be able to,” Dominick replied. “Focus on the sleeper. Berensky is a financier who always deals through fronts. He now has every reason to use me as his front in dealing with both groups of Russians. With what I know about his mode of operation, I’m in the perfect position to be his middleman, his agent or broker.”

“Why?” Irving was glad she’d asked, and looked at Dominick for the answer.

“Whichever group he decides to give the money to, he will make the other an enemy. The rejected party will be out to kill him, and those people are good at that. Berensky will have to remain anonymous all his life. He needs me—the fake Berensky—to be his shield. Bankers call that intermediation.”

“Spooks call it a cutout,” Irving added. “Our whole object here is to make Edward a player in this game. Berensky will have to play with his impersonator—it’s in his interest, he can’t avoid it—and we’ll have the story.”

“Dangerous,” Liana said, shaking her head.

“Less of a risk to me,” Dominick told her, “than to Irving here, or Mike Shu. Or Viveca. Or you, Liana. Big players don’t get hurt; the lives of all others are expendable.”

Irving did not express his disagreement with that notion; it was better Dominick thought that way on the eve of placing his head into the jaws of the bear. “So you want to be careful, kid,” the reporter told Liana. “You want to get close to Davidov, but not too close, and tell him you’re sure Edward Dominick here is really Aleks Berensky.”

“He’ll ask why I think so.”

“Woman’s intuition. Reporter’s hunch. Whatever. And remember to insist on a trade—that always makes your info more believable. Niko’s got to tell you what’s the basis of Madame Nina’s interest in you. Find out from him why everybody elected little you to be the top banana on the story.” Before she could ask, he amended the trope about the banana: “That’s the central journalist, my counterpart in Europe.”

“Be careful of this Nina woman,” Dominick added. “I wish I had warned Viveca to be on her guard, too.”

“You think somebody deliberately made Viveca Farr drunk?” Liana got right to the point. “To stop her from finding Berensky?”

“Definitely,” said Dominick. “She drinks, as we know, but she’s no drunk. I’m willing to bet somebody spiked her drink with some kind of timed-release drug.”

“Maybe,” said Irving, wishing it so. “But even if that’s so, nobody would believe it. Too many people have seen her boozing it up, and too many knives are out for her at all the networks, and not just from the men.”

“That is why she wants to crawl into a hole and disappear?”

“She once told me,” Dominick said, “that if her career crashed or she was otherwise humiliated, she would either kill herself or pack up and get in a pickup truck and drive to Yucatan.”

“Told me that, too. Dunno why Yucatan. Could be the sound of the name.”

Dominick said he would head back to Memphis to get his global security people tracking Viveca, and to prepare for his own visit to Moscow and Riga as Berensky.

“I have a detail for you,” Liana offered. “Irving said you wanted anything about Berensky’s family from his file that he would be expected to know. A friend of the wife that was abandoned wrote to Shelepin. She complained of the pain her husband’s assignment had caused herself and Masha.”

Irving caught the detail. “The kid’s nickname could help, Eddie.”

“Many girls are called Masha, and boys Sasha,” she cautioned, “not just those with Maria and Sergei in their names. I still turn when I hear Masha; it’s the most common endearment of all. But I hope it may help a little.”

“I’d have to be careful with it,” Dominick said. “Berensky left before the child was born, and might not know what his wife called her. On the other hand, it would be natural for him to check up on them from over here, if only out of curiosity.” He thanked Liana, shook her hand solemnly, and suggested she call him at the Metropole in Moscow if any other such information came to her.

When he left, she said, “A brave man.”

“He’s too old for you.”

“He’s your age.”

“You got it.” Irving looked around Viveca’s library, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “I’m missing something.” He started tapping the side of his head with the butt of his palm, wondering what it was that should be in the library and was not, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did not bark.

That was precisely it. He snapped his fingers. “Housekeeper!” he shouted, and the woman appeared. “Where’s the pooch? My big black dog?”

Brigid told him Ms Farr had taken the animal with her in the car that morning along with one of the twenty-five-pound sacks of dry meal. Irving permitted himself one small sigh of relief; the presence of Spook in the utility vehicle was the most hopeful news he had heard all morning.