Sleeper Spy (53 page)

Sirkka Numminen von Schwebel recognized his defeatism as rooted in the same feeling of helplessness that had afflicted her when she was again pulled into economic espionage: the self-destructive step you were about to take was inescapably determined by the terrible steps you took before. Her past had a stranglehold on her future. Spying was irreversible; nobody resigned from the KGB or the CIA, from the old
organized-crime mafiya or from the new world underworld; these institutions and “families,” more than nations or social establishments or companies, were the last demanders of lifetime loyalty.

Or so everyone said. But that was the mind-set left over from the Cold War, before the information revolution and the collapse of ideology. She stopped, released his hand, took his arm, and squeezed it hard.

“The paradigm has shifted,” she told him, knowing he would grasp her meaning. From the start, she could talk in philosophical shorthand to Karl; their minds had always leaped ahead together, bypassing the long conversational valleys traversed by traditional European couples. “Think through, brother Faust, your idea of the opposing devils.”

Karl looked surprised. Then his face went into its Germanic blankness that obliterated all expression during financial deals, personal crises, and original thinking. For the first time, Sirkka felt truly married to the man, and allowed herself to be slightly hopeful about their future together.

Von Schwebel was reminded suddenly of his reason a few years before for all the emotional trouble and financial pain in rearranging his marital life. Not for him the sophomoric lust to recapture lost youth with a tall Nordic goddess, nor the self-indulgent desire, felt by so many of his pretentious executive cohorts, for a trophy wife to celebrate his success. The primary reason he had been attracted to Sirkka, as her latest signal reminded him, was her genius for Mephistophelian manipulation.

The old Faustian analogy, when seen in the light of the “paradigm shift” now popular in the literature of fresh thinking, illuminated the tectonic changes in their espionage landscape: if he had sold his soul to the devil of the Feliks people, and if Sirkka had sold her soul to the devil of the KGB—could the doomed couple not find its salvation in exploiting the opposition of the two antithetical devils? A less mythic metaphor came to mind: the two locked-in agents had a breakout possibility in the enmity of their two imprisoning organizations.

“The central question,” he posited, “is, who is the sleeper?”

“The immediate question,” she countered, “is, who is this Edward Dominick? Is he the sleeper?”

For purposes of exploring this conundrum, he decided to trust her. “I know, from my intimate and complete surveillance of their Memphis operation, that Dominick is a creature of the CIA, run by the journalists Fein and Farr and Shu.”

“You’re certain of this.”

“Sirkka, it’s my own satellite they’re using. Our overhears and searches show that their method of entrapment has been set up to parallel the real sleeper’s trading, to track him down or to attract him into making a deal. That is what I have accurately reported to Madame Nina. She will be ready to confront and expose Dominick when he comes to impersonate Berensky.”

“While I suspect,” she continued in satisfying symmetry, “from my accurate trading information received from Dominick and Fein and Speigal, that Dominick is the real Berensky. In my construct, all the evidence of your overhears and transcripts is part of a grand deception. I believe that the Memphis operation is an elaborate CIA device to fool both the KGB and the Feliks people in Riga.”

Though he gave her outlandish notion no credence himself, Karl saw the attractiveness of Sirkka’s construct to a deeply duplicitous mind. But a theory alone did not present an effective dangle. “Nikolai Davidov is not an Angletonian paranoid or a Shelepin clone,” he observed. “How are you going to persuade him of your deception theory?”

“With the greatest trading profit in all of human history.” Instinctively, she covered her lips with her fingers as she put a profound secret into words. “Three days ago, Speigal sent me a red signal—sell marks, buy dollars. The Dominick-Fein-CIA group transmitted that message. You and I are independently certain of that.”

He nodded; his surveillance had intercepted and read the message from the Fed mole, Speigal, just as it was received by her.

“The advance information to me from Speigal, transmitted as you know by Fein, was absolutely accurate,” she informed him. “Contrary to the market’s expectations, the Fed did nothing, just as Speigal’s fax to me said it would do.”

He was almost afraid to ask: “How much did the sleeper make as a result?”

“Berensky made over twenty billion dollars on the currency markets. Twenty billion, mainly through London and Philadelphia, the real
sleeper’s regular conduits.” As he absorbed that figure, he was more willing to accept what had at first seemed an absurd theory. “This huge profit, Karl, is the culmination of the sleeper’s success. Ergo, Dominick—posing as the fake sleeper—must be the real sleeper.”

The scope of the financial coup staggered him; he had had no idea that the Americans were so daring as to let the sleeper accomplish his $100 billion goal. Certainly it gave some legitimacy to the proposition Sirkka was planning to make to Davidov: that what seemed to be the CIA’s parallel Memphis operation was actually the real sleeper, Berensky-Dominick, at work.

Her hypothesis could not be dismissed out of hand by the KGB. “Davidov is already prepared to think that Dominick is the real sleeper,” he mused, “because the KGB has not been able to penetrate the security of the Memphis operation. He knows that no normal bank is so secure in its communications. He does not know that it is my subsidiary Globocop, not the CIA, blocking his penetration.”

“By adding the hard fact of a twenty-billion-dollar profit to his suspicions,” Sirkka said, “I will let him come to his own conclusion.”

“Don’t overplay it,” Karl cautioned. At her look, he apologized: “You are too subtle for that.” She was. He let himself say what suddenly came to mind: “Why do I have the urge to make love to you right here, right now?”

“Must be the mirrors.”

“Sirkka, you will persuade Davidov that Dominick is the real sleeper. At the same time, I will inform Madame Nina of exactly the opposite—that Dominick is an impostor. That will put you and me in a unique position vis-à-vis the gentleman from Memphis.”

Her graceful head inclined in a nod. “It is we who will determine if his mission succeeds. If either one of us finds it opportune to switch our position, Dominick is believed, or—”

“Or he is a dead man.” Karl von Schwebel took the deep breath of liberation. “We cease to be manipulated by others. We become pivotal players ourselves in the disposition of the world’s largest fortune.”

He formally offered her his arm. His current duchess probably had a heart too soon made glad, but he could indulge himself in letting her think they could be a married couple in love. Her guard was up in anything to do with espionage, and a natural skepticism permeated her
economic analysis, but he suspected a certain sentimentalism might creep into her assessment of their marital relationship, which he could take advantage of.

She took his arm, and they caught up with the group in time to catch the curator’s concluding remarks about the enhanced brilliance in the diamonds in the crown of Louis XIV.

Davidov marveled at how easy it was for a person to disappear in America.

In the days of the Soviet Union, a fugitive would soon have to produce an internal passport to move about, or to work; now in Russia, such controls were loosened, but it was still relatively easy to track a suspect down. Sooner or later a man on the run would have to produce his papers to work or to find a place to live. He knew that in China, a system of local informing was in place that made it impossible for anybody to hide among more than a billion Chinese.

But in America, a person—even a famous television personality—could go underground and, provided she took care to avoid using credit cards and getting arrested for minor offenses, could go undetected for years, perhaps decades. Nobody had to produce papers on demand; that’s why millions of illegal immigrants went undetected. Hideability was a measurement of the freedom Americans enjoyed, though it was also a measure of the difficulties ordinary police faced.

Were it not for the low-tech position transmitter his agent had placed in the dog’s collar, and Viveca Farr’s curious decision to take the animal along with her into hiding, Davidov would have had no way of knowing where Fein’s partner in the CIA’s search for the sleeper had gone. The message left by the disgraced telecaster on Fein’s voice mail the morning of her drunken on-air debacle indicated no plan for flight; on the contrary, she had left a message for her journalistic partner that Davidov was certain would lead directly to Berensky. That message had not yet been delivered; Davidov wanted to be the first to get it.

He was fairly certain the CIA was in the dark about her whereabouts,
because Fein was frantic in his calls about her to friends at the FBI and the Federal Reserve. Nor did the private security agency, Globocop, that so tightly protected the Memphis bank have a lead on the Farr woman, despite Fein’s open-wire pleas to Dominick to get that agency to track her down. Only Davidov’s directorate of the KGB knew of her location in Sedona, Arizona, two hours’ drive north of Phoenix, but Davidov had no agent he trusted to visit her there. The head of his Memphis team, a hero of the Afghan war, had an inordinate fear of large black dogs. Davidov was not about to turn for help to Foreign Intelligence; KGB detractors there would surely cause trouble in the Kremlin if they knew of his unauthorized contact with their Bundesbank spy, Sirkka Numminen von Schwebel.

That woman was an agent he had to see again, and soon, whatever the bureaucratic cost. Sirkka had to have some knowledge of Berensky’s colossal coup three days before; he suspected that her Davos Forum friend, Mortimer Speigal, was probably a Foreign Intelligence mole in the Fed. Through an informal channel—an old lover of Yelena’s in FI—Davidov had learned that their mole Speigal had broken off all contact since his last transmission, which was accurate as usual. He had not even appeared at work.

“Where is Sirkka Numminen now, Yelena?”

“Still at the Trianon Hotel in Versailles,” he was informed, “with her husband. They seem to be having a second honeymoon.”

“Arrange for me to see her in Helsinki this weekend.” She was a Finn, had family there, and could get away from her supposedly reenamored husband on that score. That media magnate, whom the KGB knew to be financed by the Feliks people, would welcome the time alone in Paris. He made a mental note to see if Ari Covair could be recruited, but as quickly set it aside; nobody worked for ideology anymore, and the economic intelligence directorate did not have the budget to attract a top actress. And if he did not produce results quickly on the sleeper, his directorate would have no budget at all; the Kremlin’s pressure to find the sleeper’s fortune was growing as rumors spread of a recent $20 billion coup.

“While you were in America, you had an urgent message from Arkady Volkovich in Riga,” his aide reminded him. Davidov could not be everywhere, and was afraid to delegate these contacts to potentially
disloyal handlers; the man he had inside the Feliks network of criminal authorities was especially vulnerable to betrayal from within the KGB. Arkady, though reliable, tended to exaggerate the importance of his information; Davidov believed the KGB, with its Memphis surveillance, was well ahead of Madame Nina’s organization in the search for the sleeper, and he could treat information about her meetings in Riga as not all that urgent.

“What is your analysis of the voice-mail message the woman left on Fein’s machine?” he asked. Yelena was good at such evaluation.

“The reference to Portofino was their silly
Barefoot Contessa
code to set up a breakfast at the coffee shop. The only word that might indicate a better code is ‘fireflies,’ but we have no context for that. ‘Hear tell’ is an American idiom meaning ‘get information aurally’ and may be a reference to Berensky’s hearing impairment—or not. I think she had specific information about the identity of Berensky. I think the sleeper had somebody drug her and arrange for her public humiliation, knowing she would run and hide or perhaps commit suicide.”