The Debriefing Page 6

  “She must be Jewish,” quips the man in charge of Clothing and Accessories. “I mean, organizing her dinners from right to left, sort of thing. …” His voice trails off. The moment is awkward. Everyone is aware that Stone is Jewish. Not to laugh would be more noticeable than to laugh, so everyone laughs.

  Stone, shuffling through his notes, finally looks up. His voice is low, modulated; his manner is slightly nervous. He is uncomfortable with groups, and feels more at home when dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. “I thought,” he begins—he speaks, as he always does in meetings of this kind, in Russian—“we’d keep this session down to section chiefs—”

  “Better fewer but better,” interjects Mozart. All the section chiefs recognize the phrase; it is the title of the last article Lenin ever wrote. More laughter. Even Stone is obliged to smile.

  “Here’s the drill,” says Stone. “First and foremost, penetration readiness must not be allowed to suffer. One of the advantages of access to a hot defector is that it gives us a way of updating our penetration files. Everyone can benefit from a defector—Clothing and Accessories, Identity, Entries and Exits, Internal Contacts. That having been said, let me add that in this case, there’s more to it—a good deal more. Your normal defector is debriefed for information, and then the information is checked and double-checked. Our defector won’t be debriefed for information; he has none. He’s a run of the mill military courier who has been carting around secrets for years without ever getting to see them himself.”

  “Aside from updating our penetration readiness, why debrief?” asks the woman who follows the soccer scores.

  “The admiral feels, and I agree, that if anything’s fishy about this affair—to dot the i’s, if it’s a Soviet operation—we’re not going to find out about it by looking at the paper. That would have been prepared meticulously. No, the place to look is the defector himself. Now, the few times we’ve done this kind of thing in the past, we’ve taped the whole debriefing, transcribed and distributed the end product for in-house use. This time around I propose we work somewhat differently. I’ll handle the actual debriefing myself. I’ll tape every morning for three or four hours, depending on how much he can take. We’ll transcribe in the afternoon and you’ll start in on the material the next day. Mozart here will run this end of it.” Stone is looking directly at Mozart now. “What you’ll do is make lists of every fact that is checkable: addresses, phone numbers, ages, descriptions of people and places, dates that certain things happened. Everything. Then you’ll distribute the list in-house to the section chiefs, who will start to run down the confirmations.”

  “Sounds simple enough,” says Planes and Trains. “If everything checks out, he gets the Topology stamp of approval on the inside of his left thigh.”

  “Wrong,” snaps Stone. “Bear in mind that nobody can accurately remember every detail of his life—except someone who has memorized an identity that’s not his. Which is why I’ve always told you, in working up identities for penetrations, to build in, without the agent’s knowledge, some minor errors.”

  “The trouble is,” the man in charge of Identity says thoughtfully, “they may have done the same thing.”

  “They may have,” agrees Stone. “But they won’t program any inconsistencies into an identity they’ve created. And it will be up to us to see if we can come up with inconsistencies. Which is what all the checking will be about.”

  “What about the pouch?” asks Mozart. “Do we get to see what’s inside?”

  “I was just coming to that,” says Stone. “CIA will be doing with the paper what we’re going to do with the warm body. I’d appreciate it if you would personally establish a liaison link on this, Mozart. You’ll deal with Charlie Evans directly. I would hope it will be on a daily briefing basis, but you may not find him that forthcoming, so take what you can get.”

  “Will I be filling him in on our product too?” Mozart wants to know.

  “In principle, yes.”

  “That’ll give me all the leverage I’ll need,” says Mozart. “Tit for tat. If they want information, they’ll have to trade.”

  “I knew I picked the right man for the job,” says Stone. “You wouldn’t give away the time of day unless you got something in return.” Stone says it lightly, and smiles, but Mozart doesn’t smile back.

  An elderly man in charge of Entries and Exits raises his hand at the back of the room. Stone nods in his direction. “I beg your pardon, Stone. As I understand it, you’ve already spent some time with the subject of this debriefing. I think it would be helpful for us to know whether you actually entertain the idea that he may be a plant.”

  Stone chooses his words carefully. “It seems to me,” he says, “that we’ve got to accept this as a very real possibility in order to attack the debriefing material with any kind of enthusiasm.”

  There is some discussion of Topology business. One of the section chiefs has come up with a newly arrived Russian émigré in Israel who, through a bureaucratic oversight, still owns his own cooperative apartment in Moscow, just off Gorky Street. The section chief is interested in exploring the idea of setting it up as Topology’s first and only safe house in Moscow. Stone vetoes the project. “There are too many unknowns,” he says. “Who is the Russian in Israel? What do we know about him other than the fact that he claims to own an apartment in Moscow? Also, a safe house in a Communist country, according to our operating charter, would have to be registered as a ‘potentially dangerous asset’ with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And that just might prompt this same Select Committee on Intelligence to inquire what the hell a group called Topology is doing with a safe house in Moscow.”

  “We could probably get the DIA to front for us,” suggests the section chief lamely.

  “And they’d scream their heads off to the admiral about us poaching,” warns Stone. “No, it’s just not worth the candle. I think our penetration readiness will survive nicely with the methods already worked out—living with people who take roomers without residence permits, whorehouses, that sort of thing.”

  Mozart asks if Stone has decided about budgeting three thousand dollars to finance the Russian-speaking Cornell student on a summer camping trip through European Russia. “The boy is an excellent prospect,” argues Mozart. “His grandfather fought with Wrangel, his father fought with Vlasov in the Ukraine during the war, and escaped through Czechoslovakia afterwards. His Russian is fluent. He’ll make a good recruit for us someday.”

  “I’m okay on the three thousand dollars,” agrees Stone, “on the condition that the money isn’t linked to Topology.”

  “The money will be funneled through a DIA front in New York that hands out summer scholarships,” Mozart explains. “The guy who runs it is a Harvard classmate of mine.”

  “If there’s nothing else?” inquires Stone.

  The elderly man who specializes in Entries and Exits has his hand up again. “I’m sorry to bring this up, Stone, but there have been too many rumors making the rounds in recent weeks for comfort. They all point to the same thing—that penetrations, which is our basic brief, are no longer considered to be even remotely possible; that Topology is going out of business.”

  “I have every reason to believe,” Stone answers, looking around the room, “that these rumors are completely false. To my way of thinking, we may have the most difficult brief in the intelligence establishment—preparing for something that may never happen, sharpening a knife that may never cut. But the option is everything. Penetration is an option that the Joint Chiefs want to keep open.”

  The old man with white hair nods slowly in agreement. Stone has told him what he wants to hear.

  “Admit it, Stone,” Thro whispers. She presses the buzzer to the apartment just under Topology’s in the Georgetown town house. “Admit I changed your life.”

  “I admit it,” Stone whispers back sarcastically. “I give credit where credit is due. You changed my life. I’ll give you an affidavit if you want o
ne. Thro changed Stone’s life. Signed, Stone.’ I’m not the man I was. At the ripe age of forty-four, I’ve given up pajamas completely and wake up every morning with a serviceable erection.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” hisses Thro furiously. “You distort every word I say.”

  Stone can see Cross bouncing across the room, his latchkey thrust forward, to open the glass door with “John Pierce Associates Inc.” stenciled in gold letters on it. “Words awaken other words”—Stone reverts to Russian—“like ants touching antennas.”

  Cross, who is the business manager of John Pierce Associates, flings open the door. Once again Stone is struck by his appearance; seen in three-quarters profile, Cross is the spitting image of Harry Truman, so much so that Cross was once called upon to portray Truman in a television semidocumentary about the Korean War. “Ah, Stone, if you knew how delighted I am to see you.” Cross’s voice even has something of Truman’s nasal twang to it. “Good of you to squeeze in time … absolutely essential … taken on items … anxious for you …” Disjointed phrases spill from his chapped lips as he leads Stone through a maze of rooms. Cross is one of those people who fall just short, not for any lack of trying, of being eccentric. At any given moment he generally has more solutions than there are problems. But he produces a profit, and doesn’t interest himself in where the money goes when it is siphoned off. “Yes, indeed, now look at this … going to star them in our next catalogue … yes, indeed.” He produces for Stone a glossy soft-cover booklet entitled “Everything You Want to Know About Mushrooms,” then a second volume, thinner than the first, with the words “Body Hair” printed boldly on the cover, and finally a boxed three-volume soft-cover series with the title “E-Z Guides to Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Pyramidology.” “I’ve already had half a dozen phone calls on body hair,” boasts Cross. “Word of mouth will make a volume like this … surprised if it became a best seller … yes, indeed, ah.”

  Later, at the apartment they share, Thro teases Stone about Cross. “From Topology to body hair in one easy leap. The eclectic mind takes it all in its stride.”

  “Don’t knock Cross or John Pierce Associates,” Stone says. “It pays for the farm. And speaking of the farm, that’s where we’re going to be for the next few weeks.”

  “You got the warm body?” Thro is surprised. “Will the CIA sit still for that?”

  “They’ll sit still for the admiral,” says Stone. “You’ll be in charge of resettlement. I’ll give him to you for an hour every afternoon. Use any Topology facilities you need when it comes time to work up a new identity for him.”

  “What about settlement money?” Thro asks.

  “A lot will depend on how valuable the paper he brought with him turns out to be. We’ll decide that later.”

  “He’s going to want to know right off,” Thro says. “They always ask about money first.”

  “You can say there’ll be a pension, plus a lump sum in a bank somewhere. But stay vague on the numbers until we come up with some.”

  After dinner, which they both eat in silence, Thro reaches across the table and makes small circles on the back of Stone’s wrist with a fingertip. “I’m desperately sorry about what happened,” she says softly. She avoids looking him in the eyes. “You know it was an accident, Stone. If I could undo it, I’d give anything. It would mean a great deal to me if you didn’t hold it against me.”

  “If it turns out all right in court,” Stone replies coldly, “I won’t hold it against you.”

  Her voice instantly changes tone; the circles stop. “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” she snaps.

  “What you want to hear,” says Stone, “is not my voice, but an echo of your own.”

  “We all of us want to hear echoes,” says Thro sadly. “We need to hear our voices come back at us. Echoes give us the illusion we’re not alone.”

  Outside, the guards trudge through the new snow with the body of a dog that lunged into the electrified fence during the night when he spotted a fox on the other side. “That’s the second one we’ve lost this year,” notes the oldest of the three men in the room.

  One of the aides, wearing the insignias of a lieutenant colonel on his uniform, scans the batch of morning cables. “Nothing from Geneva,” he notes worriedly.

  “Too early for Geneva,” says the older man. “This kind of thing has to ripen like a peach.”

  A second lieutenant colonel knocks once on the door, which is made of metal and not wood.

  “Come,” the older man calls.

  The second lieutenant colonel, a squat man with a thin scar over his left eye, hands the older man a folder with the words “Incoming—One-Time Pad” and “Warning: Burn both pad and message after delivery” typed on it. The older man scans the message, written in a precise, slanted longhand, then looks up. “The peach is ripening, but it’s not ready for the table yet,” he comments, and he passes the message, which originated with the Soviet military attaché in Washington, to his aides. It reads:

  “Americans appear very excited with catch. Contents of pouch in CIA hands. Courier accompanied by American male in civilian clothes landed at SAC base but disappeared and untraceable to any known intelligence organization. Assume he being debriefed. But by whom?”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Swallowing, digesting, defecating and remembering all come more easily now. His mind still wanders, but never very far afield; Stone is usually able to pick up where they left off the day before with a simple, “You were saying that …” And for the first night since he’s been at the farm, which is three weeks and two days, Kulakov didn’t wake up screaming.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he is telling Stone and Thro over the breakfast table. He looks excitedly from one to the other as he describes a television quiz program he saw the previous afternoon. “They opened a curtain and there was a dishwashing machine, a color television and a sewing machine. They said all three were brand-new, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Ah! New, old—what do such things matter? They gave the girl three price tags. She had thirty seconds to race across the stage and put them on the items. If she put the right tag on the right item, she got to keep it. When she discovered she had all three right, she started to cry and leaped into the arms of the announcer.” Kulakov stirs a spoonful of jam into his tea, noisily blows on the cup to cool it, sips while it is still, by Stone’s standards, scalding. “What I don’t understand,” says Kulakov, “is the advertising.”

  “What don’t you understand about it?” Thro asks.

  “In the Soviet Union,” Kulakov explains, “they only advertise products nobody buys. And nobody is buying because they aren’t well made. The products that are good don’t need publicity. Word spreads quickly. You could have a queue a kilometer long ten minutes after it goes on sale. In your country, I can’t make out whether the government is advertising the products because they’re good, or because they’re bad and aren’t selling.”

  “It isn’t the government that advertises,” says Stone. “It’s the company that makes the product. Most of the time a number of companies make the same thing. So they advertise to convince people that their model looks prettier or works better or lasts longer or costs less.” Stone smiles at Kulakov warmly. “It’s a different world, Oleg, but it will all fall into place. Give it time. Don’t become impatient.”

  But Kulakov is impatient: with the daily routine, with the English lessons, with the scenery, with the food, and most of all with the questions that Stone fires at him from nine to twelve every morning, seven mornings a week.

  “Can’t we break off now?” Kulakov had a habit of complaining, his eyes glued to the Japanese wrist watch Stone had given him the second week they were there.

  “It’s only eleven-thirty,” Stone answered. “Let’s give it another half hour.”

  “But we’ve been over this before,” Kulakov groaned.

  The debriefing, in fact, had reached the point where there was almost nothing they talke
d about that they hadn’t talked about before. But Stone, poring over the transcripts of previous sessions late into the night, was purposefully leading Kulakov over the same ground again and again, and then once again, looking for a word, a phrase, a hesitation, an inconsistency, a flaw, a discrepancy; looking even for a failure to change wording, which could indicate that a response had been memorized.

  “Tell me about your daughter again,” Stone urged him.

  “Don’t you get tired of listening to the same thing over and over?” Kulakov whined. He plucked a cigarette from a box and inserted it in the ivory holder that Thro had given him when he had admired hers. “Nadia,” he began—he leaned toward the match that Stone held for him—“was an open book from the day she was born. If she was ever sad, or lonely, or anxious about something, if she was falling in love or out of love, it was written on her face.” Kulakov sucked on the ivory holder and stared out the window.

  “You met some of the boys she fell in love with, didn’t you?” Stone prompted.

  “She brought them to the house if she really liked them,” Kulakov said. “She respected her parents. She wanted us to like the people she liked. It was normal.” And more forcefully: “She was normal.” Again Kulakov’s gaze was fixed on the rolling hills that surround the farm.

  “She also brought girl friends home,” Stone said carefully. “You told me she brought girl friends home.”

  “Yes, she brought girl friends to the house,” Kulakov replied quietly. He had himself under tight rein. “But she never thought of them in that way. I tell you, I knew her like a book. I would have known.” Kulakov was talking more for himself than for Stone by then; if he had been rehearsed, Stone thought, it was a brilliant job of acting. “When my wife showed me the photographs—”

  Stone cut him off. “Describe the photographs.”

  “They were taken with a telephoto lens. They came in the mail. No letter. No return address. Just photographs. One showed her holding hands … one with her arm around the other’s waist, laughing, kissing a shoulder. The black-and-white one was taken head on and said ‘With love, from Lina’ on it. I used to carry it around in my wallet. I had a vague idea about trying to find this … this Lina. I noticed it was gone when you returned my wallet the other day.”