Sleeper Spy (63 page)

Liana finally had the answer to Irving Fein’s why-me. She ordered a black balsams and sat nursing the Latvian drink, trying to digest the personal revelation that Nikolai had just given her.

Did Irving know, too, that she had been chosen by both the KGB and the Feliks people as the favored reporter because she was the daughter of Aleksandr Berensky, and was not, as she had believed all her life, the natural daughter of Ojars Krumins? Davidov would not say. He, at least, had a reason for keeping the secret from her; she was his “bait.” But she felt strongly that Irving, if he knew, should have trusted her; they were working on this story together.

She shook off that minor resentment, a ripple in the roiling emotions churned up by the revelation. One fact was that she was a Russian, on both sides, not half Latvian, half Russian as she had always believed. It might affect her citizenship status. An even more important fact to deal with was that she had a living father.

She had met him and not known it; how could that be? At Matthew McFarland’s dinner party, the man who went by the name of Edward Dominick had never approached her for a direct talk, though he must have known her relationship to him. She had seen no physical resemblance; she had felt no sense of kinship. That struck her as incredible; a person should get some kind of strange feeling, a premonition or sixth sense of family, in the presence of a natural father.

Beyond that new fact of paternal presence was its terrible political circumstance: he had been working all his long adult life for a regime she had been working all her short adult life to defeat. He was even now dealing with the apparatchiks and criminals who would end democratic reform in Russia and perhaps reannex the Baltics and all the other near abroad.

She had to reexamine who she was. Liana Krumins, Latvian nationalist, anticommunist dissident since her early teens, discovered herself to be the granddaughter of Aleksandr Shelepin, last of the old-line internal security chieftains, a bloodily repressive line that had begun in Lenin’s time with “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky. She knew she should be politically ashamed of her lineage, but she could not help feeling a curious
new sense of pride in those rapacious roots. Why had her good-communist mother said nothing all these years? Had she so despised the husband who had deserted them that it had become an obsession corroding her life and ultimately her attachment to her daughter? She felt a new rush of distaste for the unsmiling woman who had frozen her daughter out of her life, reviled Liana’s revolutionary ardor, and cruelly withheld the truth about her parentage.

She was startled out of these thoughts when the stuffy German media magnate—the one married to the brilliant Finnish economist whom Liana had admired at the dinner party—came up to her in the cocktail lounge, reintroduced himself, and said that Mr. Dominick awaited her in his suite. She hoisted her leather backpack and went to what she knew would be the most significant interview of her life.

“Now let me really look at you.” His hands gripped her shoulders. His gray eyes were more familiar to her, now that she knew who he was; like her own eyes, but his face was not. “You are fortunate, Masha. You look more like your mother than me.”

“Who are you?” she demanded. Davidov’s opinion was one thing; Liana wanted to hear the news from the source.

“I am Aleksandr Berensky. Your father.”

She started to cry, which was not the reaction she had had in mind at all. Mortified at her display of weakness, she looked away and started to rummage in her knapsack for a handkerchief or a notebook. He touched her stubbly hair but did not embrace her.

She brought herself under control quickly and asked, “Are you the sleeper agent that the KGB says you are?”

“I have been a Soviet agent in the United States for more than twenty years, yes. I am proud to say I have served my country well.”

“And what of the man who was supposed to be helping my journalist friends find the sleeper by impersonating him?”

“That was a trick. An undercover colleague, a man named Walter Clauson, who was for many years a Soviet mole in the CIA, sent your friends to me. By the device of impersonating myself, we were able to keep full control of the pursuit.”

“I suppose you are proud of that, too.”

“Masha—may I call you that?—my assignment is my life. I gave up
everything for it—your mother, you, my life in Russia, my real identity. I pledged my life to my father, Shelepin, your grandfather. And now his vision, and my sacrifice, has given us an amazing opportunity.”

“Us? Whose side are you on? What do you represent?” She reminded herself she was a journalist and this was a world-class story, and wondered if she would inhibit him by taking notes. She decided not to; she would write down all she could remember when she left.

“That is what I have been trying to find out,” he told her. “I was sent to America by my father—your grandfather, I repeat—the last truly visionary chief of the KGB. I was later entrusted with three billion dollars in gold by strong communist leaders when they saw the apostles of weakness and division taking over. I created an operation to run that up to a massive fortune for worthy political purposes—to stop the Kremlin’s slide into chaos, to bring disciplined central government back to Moscow, and to recapture the lost territory of the Soviet Union.”

“Including independent Latvia.” He was the enemy. “I will expose you and fight you.” Though his ideas were frightening, as a person he did not strike her as a hater and a bully.

“I told you my purposes. That was a few years ago. Now, before I deliver this economic power, I must make a new assessment.” He seemed sincerely concerned about the impact of his actions. She reminded herself to be wary, but to keep an open mind about him. “I want to hear your opinion about the near abroad. And I want to find out firsthand, from Madame Nina and her colleagues, how they would use the assets I hold in trust. I am not turning them over to a group of greedy capitalists allied with street gangsters, if that is what the ‘Feliks people’ really are. What do you know, for example, of Madame Nina?”

“She is a mystery. Arkady, rest his soul, said none of them knew her background. She appeared at the beginning of the breakup of the Soviet Union and began rallying the underground antireform forces. He said she rules by the power of her personality and by her ruthlessness—even the Chechens and the Ingush don’t cross her.”

“Is she a political leader, or our own Russian brand of mafiya godmother? That would make all the difference to me.”

“Mr. Dominick—”

“You may call me Father, if you wish.”

She veered away from her question to set him straight: “No man who deserts his wife and unborn child deserves to be called Father.”

“Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, then,” he amended quickly. A patronymic was neutral and not formal. “So, then—you are as angry at me as your mother.”

“I can never forgive you for putting the State before your own flesh and blood. It is brutal, inhuman. Your former wife is right about that.”

“I saw her last week.”

“Don’t tell me about it. I have no interest in Antonia Krumins at all.”

“I notice you don’t call her Mama. Why does she call you a whore?”

“She hates my politics, and my style of life, and me.”

“And you feel the same way.”

“I pity that woman.”

“But not enough to reach out to her.”

That was exasperating. “Who are you to preach family loyalty?”

He gave the short, stifled laugh best described as a chuckle, which to her was his most endearing sound. “You’re right—I have no credentials as a husband and father at all. Still, it seems to me that your abandonment of her and her disgust with you are not all that different from my desertion of the both of you. At least I had a patriotic motive.”

She changed the subject. “Why did you want to identify yourself to me after all these years? You must have a selfish reason, or what a professional spy would call a patriotic reason.”

He rose and went to the window looking across the river and park toward Latvia’s Freedom Monument. “To business, then. First, do you have any doubt in your mind that I am your father, Aleks Berensky?”

“I have a feeling you are,” she answered truthfully; his eyes now reminded her a little of what she saw every day in the mirror. “But I can’t say for certain. Only your former wife”—the words “my mother” did not come naturally to her—“would know that.”

“That is precisely my problem. Your dear mother hates me, Masha, even more than she despises you, which is to say a lot. We have that problem with her in common, you and I.” He looked at her and added, “Just as we share a certain inner toughness.”

“I will do nothing for you, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich.”

“Yes, you will. Not because I am your father, but because I have a
great story for you. One that will astound Irving Fein and Viveca Farr and all the journalists in the world. But you will have to earn it.”

Liana felt a surge of anger at his treatment of her as a child. “What would I have to do?”

“Here is the deal, daughter of mine. I will supply to you a complete list of the assets, nearly one hundred billion dollars, of the sleeper operation. I have prepared a step-by-step account of how it was amassed. It’s in a diary I placed in your name in a bank box, the number of which you will need. Complete with the sort of anecdotes and twists and human-interest revelations that all you journalists hold dear.”

She waited for what he wanted from her; if it required the betrayal of her country, she would walk out and never see him again.

“What I want of you is the truth from your mother. She knows full well I am myself; she has no doubt I am Aleks Berensky, her husband. But out of that perversity and hatred that consume her life—and you are well aware of that, Masha—she has lied to Madame Nina. She has told them I am an impostor. This will make it impossible for me to find out about their operation, to judge for myself if the Feliks people are worthy of the fruits of Shelepin’s vision.”

“Her lie will also endanger your life,” she pointed out.

“That, too. And if anything should happen to me, tonight or years from now, call Michael Shu at my Memphis bank immediately. Sometime after you met him here, I confided in him, and now he’s the executor of my will.” She had liked the innocent-appearing Shu; could he have been seduced by the sleeper’s billions to betray Irving Fein? Perhaps her father was lying to her. “But focus on this,” he was saying. “I am asking you to go and confront your mother. Demand from her, as you did from me, the truth about your parenthood. And then find out why she is lying about me to the Feliks organization.”

She knew from experience with Davidov, another man who professed to feel close to her, what the spy had in mind. “And here in my amber pendant,” she said, fingering the jewelry once used to invade her privacy, “you will place a tiny transmitter.”

He appeared surprised at her espionage sophistication, and nodded. “I am not asking you to lie. Get the truth from Antonia Krumins. In return, you will get the full truth about the sleeper from me—including a justification for necessarily violent acts.”

“Like murders, you mean.”

“Acts of self-defense in an affair of state. What is being a good reporter, Masha, but getting all the facts and putting them together into the truth? Irving Fein—a reporter I have come to admire even as I duped him on a grand scale—will be both jealous and proud of you.”

Liana knew that she was being manipulated by her father. But how could getting the truth be wrong? And why should she be any less demanding of her mother than her father in finding out her true parentage?

But that was thinking like a daughter, not a role she relished. Thinking like a reporter, she asked herself what she would tell Irving Fein of this interview, and tried to anticipate his criticism of the questions she had failed to ask.

She tried one that she thought would shake her father’s composure. “You mentioned acts of self-defense. Did you kill your handler in Barbados?”

“No. He blew himself up with a bomb he intended for me.”

“Did you murder Walter Clauson?”

“Yes.” The response was unhesitating. “For the same reason I ordered the killing of a banker in Switzerland. Both tried to take control of my operation for their own ends. To them, money became more important than country, and I had to retain the power—the fortune—to achieve my purpose. Clauson told me the impersonation scheme was necessary to control the journalist who had come to him with a tip about the sleeper agent. I suspect Clauson arranged to place an anonymous tip in Fein’s ear, knowing Irving was likely to check it out with him.”

“Irving Fein is not going to be happy to learn of that.”

“In a way, he will, just as Angleton was entranced as well as embittered at the way Philby manipulated him. Clauson had a brilliantly deceitful mind. When I discovered he was manipulating me, contesting control of the fortune, I had no choice but to arrange his death.” He breathed deeply. “That is on ‘deep background,’ as Fein likes to say. Never attribute it to me.”

She thought of the night in Syracuse, watching with Irving as a woman reporter working closely with him ruined her career. “Did you drug Viveca Farr?”