Sleeper Spy (54 page)

“Smart of him. Killing handlers is nothing, but killing reporters is taken very seriously. Would change the nature of the pursuit on the American side.” That reminded him of the Latvian reporter so central to the case. “What of Liana?”

“I have a report on her intimate relationship with the CIA’s Fein that you don’t want to hear.”

“Right.” Impetuous young woman. He wished now he had never let her take possession of the only copy of the strip-search tape.

“You were certain,” said Yelena coolly, “that if she went to the U.S., the sleeper agent would make direct contact with her there. Apparently that did not happen.”

“Apparently. Unless Edward Dominick is the sleeper.”

That caught his assistant unawares. “You suspect that? On what evidence?”

“First, on the absolute absence of evidence to support that theory.” The impenetrability of the Memphis operation, in contrast to the ease with which all other eavesdropping could be conducted in America, troubled him. “Second, have you noticed how everything we do get points to a CIA parallel operation to simulate the sleeper? Everything. It is as if we are being led to the conclusion that Dominick is being
trained for an impersonation. Could it be—I’m not saying it is—but could this be a deliberate CIA manipulation?”

The beeper hooked to his belt went off. He looked at the number it registered for him to call: 371, the code for Latvia.

“It’s Liana,” he said. “I gave her this number in case of an emergency, and this is the first time she’s used it.”

He pulled his telephone over and punched in the digits showing on the beeper.

One ring and Liana was on the line, sobbing. “Come here, Nikolai, I need you. Now, right away, I don’t know what to do. I’m frightened, I may be next—”

“I’m on my way.” He motioned to Yelena to arrange an aircraft. “Who has frightened you?”

“Arkady. He’s here—”

He wanted to tell her not to worry, that Arkady worked for Madame Nina but was a KGB double agent and would not harm her, but to say that on the open line would jeopardize his life.

“I just got home,” she cried. “He’s on my bed, and all is blood. He’s dead. Nikolai, he’s dead. The sleeper will kill me next.”

He could not tell the distraught young woman that the corpse on her bed was not a message to her from Berensky, but to the KGB from Madame Nina. The bloody body was not a warning to Liana, but to Nikolai Davidov—that his KGB penetration of the Feliks people would meet the most savage retaliation.

“Get out of that room and go to the Tower café,” he told her. “One of my men will be there to protect you. You will not know him, but he will know you and make sure you’re safe. I will be there in a couple of hours. Just sit in the café in a table against the wall looking at a newspaper and talk to nobody. Do you hear, Liana? Say yes.” She stammered that she would do as he said and hung up.

“The car is downstairs and the plane with two guards will be ready,” Yelena said. She held out the phone. “Here is the executive for operations.”

He knew how he had to respond to Madame Nina. “You have a location fix on the Chechen who was at the meeting in Riga last week?”

The answer from operations was yes; the chief enforcer of the Feliks
organizatsiya
was in Moscow today.

“Take him into custody now.”

“He has bodyguards, Director Davidov. There may be resistance.”

“Then kill him. Kill his bodyguards, too, and make sure the picture of the bodies appears in the newspapers. Nothing political—they were killed in a bank holdup. Let us not forget the traditions of this agency.”

Liana, still enduring fits of shakiness, bought a
Diena
outside the Tower souvenir shop and stared at the newspaper, without reading it, at her table in the café. Her temporary protection, whose impassive face and cheap coat obviously concealing a weapon marked him as a KGB security man, had wedged his burly frame into a small chair two tables away.

She would give up the apartment; she could never open its door again without looking at the bed for a dead body. What had Arkady done to deserve such an execution?

Liana had told the police part of the truth: that he had been an occasional research assistant and driver. She had not mentioned his work for the woman he had always referred to only as Madame Nina, or to the Feliks organization; they could find that out for themselves. The police treated it as a gang killing and a warning to her to avoid television broadcasts about the Russian mafiya’s reach into the near abroad. She was not suspected by the Latvian police, but she was certain she was suspected by Madame Nina. The sense that her life might be in danger, which she had dismissed so airily during the revolutionary days of the late eighties, was no longer a stimulus; it was a weight on her chest.

It was nearly nine o’clock and dark. Whom would she stay with that night? Her mother’s flat was out of the question; Liana had not spoken with Antonia Krumins since Independence Day, and she did not want to arrive at that hard-faced woman’s doorstep, after all these years, as some sort of scared supplicant. Her men friends in Riga were inadequate to her need tonight. To be alone was out of the question. She decided to stay with Nikolai Davidov, if he asked, as he surely would;
he was strong and she felt his affection toward her. Should she carry out her assignment from Irving Fein about the three lies? Of course; she was a working reporter, not an ally of the spies, and would repay Davidov in other ways, at other times, for being with her at the moment when she was most horrified.

He arrived at last and took her hand for a long moment. Against her wishes, she felt her eyes well with tears; she shook her head angrily, pulled at his silk scarf until he handed it to her, and wiped her face. Long ago she had stopped hating herself for weeping at emotional moments; if it was not the mark of a good reporter, so be it.

She reported what she had seen of Arkady in the apartment and answered his questions about both times the veteran had accompanied her to the files at Lubyanka.

“I wish you could have known him,” she concluded. “Good man. A soldier. Faithful.”

“I do not meet many people like that.” He looked appropriately sad. “If you like, I will look to his burial. As a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, he has some privileges in Russia. Come, let us walk.”

“I have a suitcase.”

He lifted it, said, “It’s not that heavy,” and motioned to the KGB guard to carry it, following behind them. He took her hand again. “Do you have any questions for me?”

“That is your way of introducing the questions you have for me,” she said, taking long strides, running her free hand along the stubble of her hair, trying to overcome her trembling. “It is your technique.”

“While we were in America, did Berensky try to get in touch with you again?”

She paused before answering that, because it involved one of the lies. “Maybe.”

“I hoped we could be honest with each other.”

“I am not hiding a contact from you. No babushka whispered to me on Fifth Avenue. But I may have met the sleeper, just as you may have. It may be Edward Dominick, the man from Memphis at the party that night.”

“What makes you think Dominick is Berensky?”

“Hard to say. You know the English word ‘hunch’?”

“That is a word Irving Fein would use. Did he suggest this to you?”

“I told him of my hunch.” She found lying to a policeman trained to
sense lying was a challenge; but she was moved by Nikolai, and needed him tonight, and felt bad about what she was doing. “As you know, I have great respect for Mr. Fein. He is a world-class journalist, and we are working together on this story.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And—do you know?—he was the one who recommended the USIA invite me to lead a seminar at Syracuse University.”

“Yes, yes, I know that, too. And when you told him?”

She enjoyed his impatience as she told him what she knew he already knew. “He said that hunches were overrated, just as there was no such thing as ‘women’s intuition.’ Irving said to concentrate on details that are sometimes revealing. He is a fine journalist. I learn so much from him.”

“Yes. He dismissed your hunch, then.”

“Not completely. He said it was possible that Dominick was the sleeper, but I think he said that so I would not be discouraged.”

“Do you think he would tell you if he knew?”

“Maybe not. He doesn’t tell me everything, which is not fair, because I shared what I learned from the files with him.” She looked behind them; the guard was trudging along with her suitcase.

“What is he not telling you? Maybe I can help.”

“He says he knows ‘why me.’ He thinks there is some sinister reason I am the one reporter chosen by the Feliks people and by you to be encouraged to find the sleeper. But he won’t tell me what it is, and I am a little irritated by that.”

“And what do you think the reason is?”

She stopped and looked at him in as forthright a manner as she could muster. “Because I have the most closely watched television news program in the Baltics, reaching even to Leningrad, I mean Petersburg. Isn’t that so? And because I am a good journalist who will not be frightened, even by dead bodies in my bed. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

“Those are two powerful reasons, Liana. But Fein says he knows of another?”

“That’s what he says. Do you know of another? He says you do.”

“Your program is closely watched, as you say, sometimes even in the Kremlin, on tape.” By the way he slid past her question, not lying but not responding, Liana judged Irving to be right: there must be a deeper
reason for her being allowed access to the files. Now she felt less bad about lying to Nikolai; he was not telling her all he knew.

“Your hunch,” he was saying as he kept up her pace along the waterway, “when did it come to you? At Ace’s party?”

“Yes. When I shook hands with Dominick,” she said, “it just seemed to me he was more than a banker from America, or Viveca’s escort. He looked very closely at me for a second, and I thought—that’s him.”

“Oh-shit,” said Davidov in English, an expression he must have picked up on his last trip to America or listening to taps on Irving. Because that little pretense about her handshake with Dominick apparently hit home to him, she veered off the subject, lest she have to make up more about it.

“Wasn’t it awful about Viveca? Irving Fein was quite upset. She is his partner, you know. Do you know—I think there may be more there, too, emotionally. He’s jealous of Dominick.”

“I wouldn’t know about jealousy. It is an emotion I never experience.” The tight-lipped way he said that indicated he meant the opposite, which she liked.

She stopped and faced him. Behind them, the KGB man set down the suitcase, the vapor from his mouth in the cold evening air showing him to be breathing hard. “You followed us in Syracuse, too?”

“You know that.”

“And you know about our watching Viveca’s broadcast together? You had our room bugged?”

“No, but I have a vivid imagination.”

“You have no right to be jealous.”

“I have no right to be in Latvia.”

She touched his face. “I am so glad you are here. If you want to feel jealous, or be possessive, go ahead.”

“If you like, we can stay at our safe house.”

She looked behind her. “Just the three of us?”

“I will carry the suitcase.”

She embraced him; he held her tightly, saying nothing. She was quivering less from the earlier fright than the present cold, and it would be good to be under a blanket with him. “Nikolai Andreyevich, do you have anything to tell me?”

“Liana, I have so much to tell you.” That was all he said, implying much to tell of personal feelings, but again slipping away from her
probe about the reason for her being chosen. As a result, she was happy to be at his side but not on his side, and did not feel the smallest twinge of conscience about having implanted Irving’s three bits of disinformation.

Kudishkin seemed oddly pleased.

“The new KGB responded like my old KGB,” he told Madame Nina. “Two of our Chechen friend’s fellow Chechens were shot dead, and the third, the Ingush, was beaten severely about the head. Our colleague is now in a cell in Lubyanka, where there are no longer supposed to be any cells.”