The Debriefing Page 4

  The catalogue of trials and tribulations has worn the ambassador down; feeling very sorry for himself, he sinks back onto the couch and presses a large palm to his large forehead to calm a migraine he senses is lurking just behind his eyes. “What I need,” he says weakly—for a fleeting instant Stone is actually afraid the ambassador will burst into tears—“is official guidance.”

  Drained, the ambassador stares hopefully at Stone. The woman Friday and the army of first and second and third secretaries actually take a step or two in his direction.

  Stone studies his shoes longer than he has to; he can’t resist. He wonders at what point silences become silly, at what point someone will suddenly see the ridiculousness of it all and burst into laughter. But everyone holds out. When Stone finally looks up, the faces peering at him are still intense. “Mr. Ambassador,” Stone says slowly. The sound of a human voice speaking out loud echoes through the vast office and appears to shock several of the secretaries. “I’m going to do better than give you guidance. In two hours, two and a half on the outside, anybody asks you about the Russian upstairs, you’ll laugh and say, ‘What Russian are you talking about?’”

  There are two Marine sergeants posted in the stairwell, and two embassy security men outside the door of the room within a room, constructed by the Seabees so embassy people could talk shop without worrying whether their conversations were being picked up by hidden microphones or delicate sensors that can lift voice vibrations off windowpanes. Inside, the décor is State Department Conference Room, beige, with the only touch of color coming from a bouquet of plastic daffodils in a vase filled with the stale water that nobody has changed for years. Two more civilian security types are playing gin across a corner of the conference table and casting an occasional bored look at their charge, the diplomatic courier Kulakov, who is stretched out on the cot that has been set up for him. His face at first glance seems like a death mask: leaden features that will never change expression, eyes that appear to have closed from the weight of the lids. The diplomatic pouch, still chained to Kulakov’s left wrist, is in full view on his chest.

  As Stone enters, Kulakov swings his legs off the bed, sits up, gazes dully at the feet of the new arrival.

  Stone addresses the security men. “Could I trouble you gentlemen to step outside for a few moments?”

  They look at one another, then back at Stone. “We got instructions to maintain ourselves here,” one starts to protest.

  “It’s all right,” the ambassador’s woman Friday stage-whispers from the doorway. “He’s from Washington.”

  Obediently, the two collect their playing cards and cigarettes and leave. Stone scrapes one of their chairs over to the cot, sits down, without a word offers Kulakov a cigarette. The Russian studies the pack as if he is drawing lots and there is a prize to be had for a good guess. Eventually he settles on a cigarette and plucks it from the box. He accepts the book of matches, looks without curiosity at the advertisement on the cover, strikes one. His fingers tremble on the match. Stone looks away so as not to embarrass him.

  “What … are … you?” Kulakov asks in his slow, accented English.

  Stone answers in Russian. “I’m a representative of the American government. I’m here to help you.”

  There is a spark of interest in Kulakov’s eyes—the first Stone has seen. “You speak Russian”—Kulakov reverts to his own language—“so you are from the famous CIA.”

  Stone isn’t from the CIA, but he doesn’t correct him, not now, not ever. “I’m here to protect you,” he says. “To protect you and to help you. This is the beginning of a new life for you. The first step.”

  Stone is careful to use short sentences, to deal with Kulakov as he would deal with a child, but Kulakov’s attention wanders anyhow. “My stockings got wet,” he complains. He takes a deep drag on his cigarette, chokes on the smoke. “I don’t know how they got wet. I must have walked somewhere in water. I must have …” The thought trails off; Kulakov makes an effort to hang on to the thread, but it slips through his fingers. Suddenly he leaps to his feet and starts pacing agitatedly. “Why is there no window in this room? Where is the window? What month are we, January or February?” He returns to the cot, grips Stone’s wrist. “I must telephone Moscow,” he argues vehemently. “I must explain to them why I ran away. I must convince them I’m not a traitor. …” This thought slips away too, and Stone is reminded of other defectors he has handled: men going through the motions with an energy that comes mainly from force of habit. Experience kills, Thro told him when all the trouble over his daughter began. It kills whatever you were before you had the experience.

  Stone’s eyes drift to the diplomatic pouch. Kulakov follows his gaze, clutches it to him. A cloud passes across his face. Dark suspicions hang there like suits in a closet, cleaned, pressed, ready to wear.

  “Would you be willing,” Stone asks quietly, “to let me have the pouch?”

  “When I arrive in America, I’ll give it to you,” Kulakov says. “I warn you, don’t try to take it from me. If there is a struggle and I pull on the chain, the contents will be destroyed.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

  Kulakov can’t restrain a sneer. “Papers that are too important to send through the mail.”

  The woman Friday suddenly pokes her head in the doorway. “Do you have the pouch?” she stage-whispers in English. Kulakov, startled, clutches the chain in his right hand and prepares to pull on it.

  “Get out,” Stone coldly orders her. “Don’t open that door again until I tell you to.” The woman Friday shrinks back in confusion. The door clicks closed.

  “Have you eaten?” Stone turns back to Kulakov. “Have you had something to drink?”

  The Russian nods. “They gave me a sandwich, a beer.”

  “Listen to me carefully,” Stone tells him. “If all we wanted was the goddamn pouch, we could have slipped you a drug and taken it. All we had to do then was find the key. It will be hidden in a coat lining, or tucked behind a collar. We could have taken the pouch. We could have dumped you back into the hands of the local KGB. But that’s not how we operate. We’re not like them. You’ll see that for yourself, Kulakov. You’ll see we’re not like them. You keep the pouch. I’ll take you to America. You can give it to me when we get there. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Kulakov agrees.

  “Okay.” Stone stands up. “I know this is very difficult for you—not knowing what’s going to happen to you, wondering if you did the right thing after all. You have to hang on to two things. You can’t undo what you’ve done. If you go back, they’ll kill you. The second thing to hang on to is the belief that it will all work out.” He puts a kindly hand on Kulakov’s shoulder—the first of many gestures Stone will make to win his confidence. “It will work out, I promise you. It always works out.”

  The arrangements take longer than Stone thought they would. He has difficulty getting authorization from the Navy to commandeer one of their mail planes parked on the Athens tarmac, and once he gets the authorization he has trouble tracking down the pilot and crew. They are finally run to ground in a Pireaus nest called the Black Cat Inn and brought back to life with pots of black coffee mixed with dire threats about what will happen to them if they don’t turn to. Four hours after his conversation with the ambassador, Stone is ready to put the show on the road. All the embassy’s Cadillacs, including the ambassador’s pride and joy, which is bulletproof, along with several civilian cars belonging to the security people, are pressed into service. The convoy, when it finally pulls down the curved driveway, is very impressive. In the lead are two Greek police cars with flashing blue lights on their roofs. (The Greek government will later deny any of its vehicles participated, and will confiscate photographs that prove the contrary.) Then come nine embassy cars, with the bulletproof Cadillac sandwiched in the middle. Halfway down the first narrow street, the last of the nine cars swerves to a stop across the road, blocking the dozen or so cars full of journalists c
hasing after the convoy.

  Fifteen minutes after the convoy departs, a small Greek van with the faded markings of a laundry company on the panel sides pulls unobtrusively to a side door. Two workmen in white overalls carry in several large straw hampers, and return moments later with the hampers full of dirty linen, which they stow in the back. The van starts off down the side streets in the general direction of the coast. In one of the narrow back alleys in the rat’s maze of roads between Athens and Pireaus, a Mercedes suddenly veers in front of it, forcing it to the curb. A second Mercedes jams up behind. While two heavies hold the two frightened workmen at gunpoint, four others pull open the rear doors and rip the straw lids off the hampers. Much to their astonishment, all they come up with are armloads of dirty napkins and tablecloths from official embassy dinners.

  At that moment, the ambassador’s bulletproof Cadillac, with Kulakov in the back seat and Stone riding shotgun, is pulling through an unmarked gate of the Athens airport straight onto the tarmac. On the far side of the runway, its engines warmed, its takeoff clearance already granted, sits the Navy mail plane that will carry them to Malta, where an Air Force Globemaster will take them, with only a fuel stop in the Azores, to a SAC base in Virginia.

  The throbbing of the Globemaster engines makes Stone drowsy, and he has to struggle to keep his eyes open and the conversation, however intermittent, going. Kulakov, in a window seat, seems to be mesmerized by the thin wisp of smoke that spirals up from his cigarette in the ashtray. “I can’t remember,” he says slowly, troubled by the lack of memory, the failure to come up with names or details that he is sure he knows.

  Stone does his best to reassure him. “The peasants say you have to forget something seven times before you can commit it to memory.”

  “Yes, that’s so,” Kulakov says thoughtfully. “The peasants know many things we don’t know.”

  After a while Stone asks, “Considering all the things that happened to you in the last—what was it?—six or eight months, how is it they let you leave the country?” His tone is casual, the delivery offhand, but the question is the first direct one Stone has put. It is the start of a very precise debriefing process that will go on and on until Kulakov has been drained of every last drop of information.

  “I don’t know how to answer,” says Kulakov. He stares out the window into the darkness. “I saw a memorandum—the colonel conducting the investigation showed it to me—ordering my name eliminated from the courier list. I was told I was not permitted to leave Moscow. I was told there was every chance I would be formally charged, and that it would be in my interest to hire a lawyer. I was told that if I didn’t hire a lawyer, the court would appoint one. And then … then … out of nowhere, that phone call …”

  Kulakov is losing the thread again, but Stone gently nurses him along. “What phone call?” When this gets no response, he says, “You were talking about a phone call.”

  “Yes, out of nowhere. Summoning me to the duty officer. In civilian clothes, they specified. As if nothing had ever happened. As if … and he … said I was to take this”—Kulakov taps the pouch—“to Cairo. He said I was elected by one vote. His.” Kulakov’s lips twist into a vicious smile. “You can bet that’s the last time that poor son of a bitch will vote for anything. He’s probably on his way to Siberia right now.”

  The copilot, a young man with a blond mustache and a broad open smile, makes his way down the aisle to them. “Everything all right?” he asks conversationally. Without waiting for an answer, he hands Stone a metal message board that opens like a book. “I reckon this here’s for you. You’re Mr. Simon, aren’t you?”

  Stone reads the message, which has been decoded and printed out in capital letters. “Reception preparations laid on as per your instructions. Judging from the fuss the Russians putting up on all fronts there is nothing less than solid gold in the pouch, so handle with tender loving care. FYI White House plus State Department plus CIA plus various foreign governments expressing curiosity bordering on interest. Treat affair like proverbial hot potato. Report only to me.” The cable is signed “Elbow Room,” which is the operational code signature of the crusty admiral who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and the man Stone happens to work for.

  “Our estimated time of arrival is 2230,” the copilot informs Stone. “Weather conditions will be clear but cold, somewhere in the low twenties.”

  “We’re not listed on the manifest, are we?” Stone checks. He doesn’t want to leave any trace of how he came into the country.

  “Just like you specified, there’s nothing on the manifest. As for us monkeys, we haven’t heard nothin’, we haven’t seen nothin’, we don’t know nothin’.” The copilot flashes a conspiratorial grin as he leaves.

  Kulakov drifts into a fitful doze, his cheek pressed to the windowpane. Stone looks at his wrist watch, calculates the time left to the flight, settles more deeply into his seat, his mind going over for the thousandth time the details of the court case that his lady lawyer with a good line to the judge says he stands every chance of winning. “When you explain how it happened,” she reassured him—he reproduces her exact tone of voice, her precise words; she seemed so sure, he remembers, so confident—“you’ll get your rights back. Look, it could have happened to anyone, so stop worrying.”

  With a stifled scream, Kulakov straightens in his seat. Stone sees that his body is rigid, his forehead laced with perspiration. “I always wake myself up like that,” Kulakov explains sheepishly, “but I never seem to be able to remember what I’m screaming about.” Almost apologetically, he adds, “I have a lot to scream about.” He takes out a handkerchief and mops his brow. “It’s strange: we call a man who has lost his wife a widower, and we call a child who has lost his parents an orphan, but there’s no word to describe a father who has lost his children.”

  “It’s the same in English,” Stone observes grimly. “We have no word for it either.”

  Kulakov obviously wants to change the subject. “Tell me,” he asks, “if you are permitted to tell me, what will happen to me in America?”

  And so, in very general terms, Stone explains the drill: a farm tucked away in some remote part of the countryside; a staff that will take him under its collective wing, teach him English, American history, American money, American sports; will teach him how to blend into mainstream America on the assumption that the powers that be will one day be finished with him and throw him back in. “Eventually we’ll set you up with a brand-new name and a brand-new identity. You can have a business if you want one, or you can retire on a pension. While all this is going on, we’ll debrief you, of course.”

  “Debrief? That means you will ask me questions. But I have no answers. I don’t know secrets. I am just a messenger. Whatever you find in the pouch is all I have to give you.”

  “There are things you can tell us, just the same,” Stone insists. “Look, Kulakov, you’re an intelligent man; figure it out for yourself. We must make absolutely certain, to begin with, that you are a genuine defector.”

  All this seems to astonish Kulakov. “And how long will this debriefing take?”

  “It’s already started,” Stone says in his disarmingly frank way. “It will end when we know more about you than God.”

  The touchdown is as smooth as any Stone has ever experienced; one moment they are airborne, then the eight giant wheels kiss the earth, the engines reverse, the plane vibrates slightly, and they are in out of the night, taxiing toward a distant hangar with military police posted at every entrance and two cars, their motors idling, waiting in the semidarkness.

  “This is where we part company,” Stone tells Kulakov as they walk toward the second car. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes are standing around, but their faces are masked in shadows. Kulakov peers anxiously inside the car, then looks over his shoulder at the airplane as if he is weighing the possibility of going back—to the plane, to Russia. He shrugs imperceptibly, takes a deep breath, and starts to duck into the back seat.


  “Kulakov,” Stone says gently. The Russian turns to face him. “You agreed to give me the pouch when we got to America. We’re in America now.”

  The men in the shadows move forward into the light; their faces are anxious. Stone tenses. Since he is the closest one to Kulakov, it will be up to him to punch him in the stomach with all his force at the first sign of hesitation. But Kulakov doesn’t hesitate; he only nods tiredly, retrieves the key from his shoe, unlocks the chain from his wrist, and hands the key and the diplomatic pouch to Stone. “There are two small locks,” he explains. “You must first turn the left one left, half a rotation, then the right one an entire rotation to the right, then the left one another half rotation to the left. If you don’t follow the sequence, the contents will be destroyed.” As if guessing what Stone is thinking, he shakes his head. “Don’t try it. There is no other way into the pouch. If you try to cut into it, you will trip a circuit and it will all go up in smoke. You must use the key.” He smiles almost sadly. “And you must take my word for the sequence. It goes without saying, I understand the consequences if I should … disappoint you.”

  Kulakov takes his place in the back seat; he seems to have shrunk in size and looks lost against the cushion. One of the men in civilian clothes climbs in alongside him, two others take their places in front. Just before they move off, Kulakov rolls down his window. “Tell me,” he asks Stone, “if you are permitted to tell me, how is it you can know more about someone than God?”

  “All right, Stone, in ten words or less, what’s he got?”

  The admiral, in dress blues and gleaming black shoes (he spit-shines them himself every morning, claims it is his only completely serene moment of the day), leads the way into the private dining room just off his suite of offices in the Pentagon. The metal Venetian blinds are drawn; the admiral feels ill at ease in bright sunlight. Philippine stewards in starched whites hold the backs of two chairs at the only table in the room. The admiral settles his bulk into place, sets his leather cigar case and a pocket calculator on the table, switches on a small black box with a circular antenna (which emits “noise” designed to jam any microphone in the room), turns his full attention on Stone for his ten words or less.