Sleeper Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

scent of an exclusive that would peel the onion of post–Cold War espionage down to where the tears were.
    Clicking high heels snapped the ruminating Fein back to the present. He was in a superagent’s reception room, not on a park bench trying to milk an intelligence official.
    The woman had a familiar face, atop a long, endangered-species coat, followed by a couple of breathless sycophants. She appeared in the dark mirror, on the way to the elevator. He swung his eyes over from the referent to the real thing—a woman with almost regular features and hair that was so naturally sandy-blond and casually combed it had to have taken hours to create. Fein almost said, “Don’t I know you?”—which meant she was a television regular, not an anchorperson but a featured performer, and he remembered that he liked this one. She seemed to have a measure of
gravitas
on the air, some crispness of assurance that other pretty faces lacked. The name escaped him; she was still a personality, not yet a celebrity—a face, not yet a name.
    Standing at the elevator, she jabbed compulsively at the button already lit; she looked back at him with eyes that struck the reporter slumped on the couch as registering a lack of interest bordering on distaste.
    Fuck you too, lady, and the horse you rode in on, he said to himself. Irving determined that his first question to her, if she came over to him and tried to make conversation, would be “Do you have any idea how many leopards, the fastest animal alive in a short dash, died to makethat coat that some network muckeymuck probably paid for?” That would not merely wipe off the expression of mild disdain but rattle her teeth, which he judged too perfect not to be capped.
    His opportunity did not arise. The elevator arrived and the young woman and her retinue marched into it. Not so young, reckoned Irving; mid-thirtyish. On second thought, to those who are late-fortyish, mid-thirtyish is young; mid-thirtyish is what people who called themselves thirtysomething wished they were. His spirits sunk further. She was not too young for that coat, which she probably paid for herself, because performers in that business pulled down ten times what they were worth as journalists. So what if it was a leopard? He didn’t like cats.
    The nickel dropped; actually, it was a quarter now. Her name was Viveca something; he could hear a voice saying, “Newsbreak, Viveca something reporting.”
    “Saw Viveca out there,” he told never-call-me-Ace when he finally got into the agent’s office. “Good kid. She could make it.”
    “You know her?” At Irving’s shrug, McFarland assumed a worried-about-my-client pose. “I worry about that girl. So much talent, such a great future, yet so vulnerable.”
    She hadn’t seemed so vulnerable to the reporter. “Armor-plated” would have been his choice of an adjective. “You going into television agenting, Matt? At your age?”
    “I will soon be an octogenarian,” said the agent with pride, contemplating his well-shined shoes, placed on the footstool because his feet did not reach the floor. Fein thought of buying him a set of spats, if they still made spats; that would fit the image Ace cultivated of the intellectual dandy. “But no, like the proverbial shoemaker, I will stick to my last, that of literary representative. I lived by the written word, I will die enhancing the value of the written word.”
    “So what’s with you and Miss Talking Head?”
    “As you might deduce, intrepid investigator that you are, Viveca Farr is considering writing a book. I am encouraging her. A substantive book would add depth to her reputation as a newsperson. It would dissuade journalists like yourself, Irving, from thinking of her as just another pretty face.”
    A title for her book leaped to the reporter’s mind—
Dancing on the Glass Ceiling
—but he had his own fish to fry and didn’t want to wastetime on someone else’s. He drew his chair close to Ace and lowered