The Debriefing Read online

  The judge, a frail, near-sighted man in his sixties who appears to peck like a bird at the papers in front of him, barely glances on the attorneys. The talk, for the first twenty minutes, is a good-natured exchange of legal mumbo-jumbo—affidavits, jurisdiction, statutes, precedents. Eventually the judge comes to what Stone considers the point.

  “If I understand you correctly, Mr. Stone, you are contesting a ruling handed down in this court, by a judge now deceased, prohibiting you from having any contact whatsoever with your daughter, Jessica.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. I believe—”

  “And you, Mrs. Stone, contend that the original reasons for denying access are still valid.” The judge shuffles through some papers, finds the one he wants, pecks at it for a moment, then looks up again. “Yes, I think I have it now. The original case concerned Mrs. Stone’s allegations that on such and such a day”—the judge is scanning now—“in such and such a place, the father, then exercising weekend custody of the child, was negligent in that he permitted a woman who was his mistress to punish the child by scratching her fingernails across the child’s arm and shoulder, thereby inflicting wounds that required emergency medical treatment, and subsequent psychiatric therapy sessions for the child, who was badly frightened by the incident.” The judge looks up at the lawyers. “That’s quite a mouthful. Well, where do we start?”

  “Your Honor.” Stone is on his feet—they are seated around the judge’s desk in his chamber. “I swear to you it was an accident. We were roughhousing, and—”

  “Mr. Stone.” The judge waves him back into his chair. “What’s in question in this new hearing you’ve requested is not the original incident, which led to a ruling denying you access. What’s in question, now as then, is the best interests of the child. Your attorney has represented you as claiming that loss of access for two years has had a profound effect on you and the child; that any negligence on your part was unlikely to be repeated, given what was at stake; that the best interests of the child would be served by reinstating reasonable visitation rights. And she has attached various affidavits from child psychiatrists and pediatricians and prominent people who are acquainted with you. Am I correct in assuming that the admiral who put his name to one letter of recommendation is in fact the admiral who is currently serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”

  “One and the same,” says Stone’s lady lawyer, obviously content that they have scored a point.

  “Well, there’s no getting around it, is there?” The judge appeals good-naturedly to Mrs. Stone’s civilian monseigneur. “That’s a very impressive testimonial.” The judge clears his throat, pecks again at various papers. “Now, your attorney, Mrs. Stone, has represented you as saying you still fear for the physical and emotional well-being of your daughter, inasmuch as the lady who inflicted the original fingernail wound, for which Mr. Stone has been held accountable, is still very much associated with Mr. Stone. Another mouthful! And he has attached various affidavits from child psychiatrists and pediatrians”—Stone thinks he detects a hint of mockery in the judge’s tone—“and the like to support your claim.”

  “My client,” the monseigneur says smoothly, “maintains that her daughter has grown accustomed to living without a father, that to reintroduce visitation rights would reopen what in effect has become a closed chapter in the child’s life. In essence, Your Honor, reinstating visiting rights would create a problem for the child where none presently exists.”

  The judge fixes his attention on the two attorneys again. “What I would like to do, if it meets with no objections from you, is invite each of the parties to respond to the legal presentation of the other side, in writing, with counterarguments. Secondly, would either side object to my ordering a social inquiry into the private lives of the two parties?”

  Stone’s lawyer leaps at the offer. “We’d be delighted to cooperate, Your Honor. My client is a well-respected man making a valuable contribution to his country.”

  “Naturally,” chimes in the monseigneur, “we would not object. Mrs. Stone has nothing to hide.”

  “Ask the child,” Stone’s ex-wife blurts out. “Ask her if she wants to see him again.”

  “She’ll say what she’s been told to say.” Stone is on his feet again. “How can you ask an eight-year-old—”

  “We were doing so nicely,” the judge says mildly. Stone sinks back into his chair. “Naturally, we will interview the child,” the judge tells Mrs. Stone. He turns to Stone and adds, “And naturally, we will bear in mind we are talking to an eight-year-old who may or may not have been influenced to say what she says by her mother. Our social people aren’t idiots. They know how to deal with situations such as this one. So we’ll follow the procedure I’ve suggested. And then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  “It went very nicely,” the lady lawyer with the “Ms.” before her name assures Stone.

  “How could you tell?” he asks. He isn’t sure how it went.

  “The business about the letter from the admiral. The fact that he bothered to order the social inquiry; if he was going to rule against you, he would have done it on the spot. In my opinion, he’s looking for the factual basis to rule in your favor. It made a very bad impression on him when she blurted out, ‘Ask the child,’ at the end. Remember what I told you about speaking out of turn? The trick, in all court cases, is to keep your mouth shut. The one who talks the least gives away the least.”

  “What about my still being with the woman who accidentally hurt Jessica?” Stone asks. “How will that stand up under scrutiny?”

  The lady lawyer shrugs. “I told you when you began this it would be better to be able to say that she no longer figured in your life.” She sees Stone’s gaze drift dejectedly to the empty coffee cup. “Cheer up,” she says brightly. “With or without her in your life, it’s in the bag. I wouldn’t have taken on the case if I didn’t think I was going to win it.”

  “You were saying that the duty officer phoned—”

  “It wasn’t the duty officer who phoned,” Kulakov corrects Stone. “Someone else phoned and told me to report to the duty officer in civilian clothes.”

  “Oleg, I want you to concentrate on this. I want you to try and remember every detail, no matter how trivial,” Stone tells him. “Didn’t you consider it odd that one day you could be called before an examining officer, informed that charges were being lodged against you, shown a memorandum ordering your name stricken from the active courier list, and the very next day you could be summoned to the duty officer as if nothing had happened and sent abroad?”

  “I’ve thought about it a great deal,” admits Kulakov. “It was a bureaucratic mistake. Every bureaucracy makes mistakes. Memorandums have to circulate. That takes time. They can get lost, or misplaced. Or lie around unopened and unread on desks. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times. So have you.”

  “In all your years as a courier,” asks Stone, “have you ever heard of someone being sent out of the country by accident?”

  Kulakov is silent.

  “If it was an accident,” says Stone, “it was one hell of an accident.”

  “It has to be an accident,” insists Kulakov. “Why would they want a diplomatic pouch to fall into your hands?”

  This time it is Stone who falls silent. He stares out the window for a long while. Finally he says, “Coming back here on the plane, you described your conversation with the duty officer. Do you still remember it?”

  Kulakov nods. “He said someone had to deliver the pouch to Cairo by that night.”

  Stone finishes it for him. “He said, ‘You’re elected. By one vote. Mine.’ ”

  “Yes,” agrees Kulakov. “That’s what he said. What of it?”

  “What was his rank?”

  “He was a major,” answers Kulakov, “same as me.”

  “ ‘Someone has to deliver this pouch to Cairo by tonight. You’re elected. By one vote. Mine.’ That’s not the way one major talks to another. It sounds more like a su
perior talking to a junior.”

  Kulakov shrugs.

  “How old was this Gamov?” Stone asks.

  “Sixty. Sixty-two maybe.”

  “Old for a major,” Stone muses. “Describe him again.”

  Kulakov closes his eyes. “He was missing an arm—his left arm. The sleeve was pinned up. He had dandruff on his shoulders, which he brushed off with his right hand. His fingers were not the fingers of a man, but more like a woman’s—long and thin. He wore his wrist watch on the inside of his wrist. He had a tendency to sneer. He had quite a few medals on his chest.”

  “Can you remember which medals?” Stone asks intently.

  Kulakov shakes his head.

  “Try,” insists Stone.

  Kulakov closes his eyes again, concentrates.

  “Try, damn it!”

  Kulakov says slowly, “One was all red with a hammer and sickle in the middle.”

  “The Order of the Red Banner,” murmurs Stone.

  “Another was … red with black stripes.”

  “Vertical or horizontal?”

  Kulakov opens his eyes. “Horizontal,” he says. “The stripes were horizontal!”

  “The Order of Stalin!” Stone walks over to the window and stares out at the white picket fence. “The rows of ribbons. The Order of Stalin. The missing arm. He was a war hero. But only a major. Why was someone with an Order of Stalin to his credit still a major? And what was he doing as a duty officer in the Ministry of Defense?”

  Kulakov laughs nervously. “He was giving me a chance to save my neck.”

  Stone looks at Kulakov without seeing him. “That’s one possibility,” he says. “There are others.”

  And then it is over. Spring has come; the air is suddenly soft and warm and moist, the ground spongy underfoot. The civilian guards, carting valises and locked metal boxes to the station wagons, squint because of the brightness of the sunlight.

  “I feel as if I’m graduating,” Kulakov tells Thro happily. “Sometimes I thought it would never end.”

  One of the guards knocks twice on the door, and comes in without being invited. Thro points to two brand-new leather valises. “Those are his. They go in the Plymouth.”

  When the guard has left, Thro opens a very thick attaché case. “Here is the new you,” she says. “Your name is Martin Kemp. It was shortened from Kempny when you became an American citizen in 1970. Your father was Czech, your mother Russian. Your parents divorced when you were a baby. You lived in Moscow with your mother, who died in 1964. You were visiting your father in Prague when the Russians occupied it in 1968. You left Czechoslovakia in the chaos that followed. Crossing to Austria was no problem. The frontier was open for weeks. Thousands left. You were one of the thousands. You spent two months in a Red Cross camp in Vienna before you received permission to emigrate to the United States. Here.” Thro hands him an account, in Russian, of a Czech who fled after the Soviet occupation in 1968. “You’ll find this full of useful details. Your date of birth and age have been changed on all your documents. You must memorize the new ones, along with all the other material—parents’ names, their dates of birth and death, et cetera. Now, in Moscow you worked in an art gallery across the street from the Hotel Ukraine. There was a man who was half Czech named Martin Kempny, incidentally, who actually worked at that gallery.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Thro looks up brightly. “He’s dead, of course.” She hands Kulakov a packet of documents. “Here is your original birth certificate—”

  “It looks very old,” Kulakov says admiringly. “How do you manufacture such things?”

  “It’s not manufactured,” Thro explains. “It’s the genuine article. Here are your citizenship papers, your American passport, a New York driver’s license, a Social Security card, an American Express credit card, a bankbook from the First National City Bank—”

  Kulakov opens the bankbook. “Is this money mine?”

  “The twenty-five thousand dollars in the account is all yours,” says Thro. “So is the Plymouth parked outside. Here’s the registration for the car, made out in the name of Martin Kemp. There’s an apartment in Los Angeles waiting for you. The rent has been paid for one year. The furnishings in the apartment are yours. Here is one thousand dollars cash to get you started. Also, you’re being carried, for pension purposes, on the Army books as a retired major, which means you’ll receive nine hundred and sixty dollars a month for the rest of your life.”

  Kulakov is overwhelmed. “You have been very generous. … I have never had a car of my own.”

  Thro has saved the best for the last. “Oleg, we’ve organized a job for you in Los Angeles. It’s in a very fine art gallery. …”

  “Ah, it is all coming out as you said it would,” Kulakov says softly. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Be careful,” Stone tells Kulakov. They are shaking hands in front of the Plymouth. The civilian guards, Kulakov’s English teacher, the cook and Thro all look on from a distance. “Grow a beard, memorize your new identity. If anyone looks as if they’re too curious about your background, all you have to do is call the number I gave you and we’ll find out who they are.”

  “This is like a dream,” says Kulakov. “To get in a car and drive across America like this …” There is a nervous edge to his voice. “You make it sound so easy, so possible.”

  “Here people do it all the time,” says Stone. “Here getting in a car and going where you want is an everyday occurrence.” He opens the driver’s door for Kulakov. “I told you we weren’t like them, Oleg.”

  “I didn’t dare believe it,” says Kulakov. “I still don’t dare believe it.”

  Two men wearing electrician’s overalls, sneakers, long gray smocks and surgeon’s gloves crouch before the door of an apartment on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in downtown Geneva. One has a walkie-talkie pressed to his ear. The other fiddles with a ring of passkeys, finally opens the door. Soundlessly, the two men let themselves in, wait inside the threshold in the dark until they hear two soft clicks on the walkie-talkie, then make their way to a wall safe hidden behind a mirror in the bedroom.

  The taller of the two men hands the walkie-talkie to the other one, adjusts a stethoscope and places the business end on the tumblers. In less than a minute, the tumblers fall into place and the safe snaps open. Inside is a cardboard shoe box. The shorter man photographs the open safe with a Polaroid before removing the box. He lifts the cover and photographs the letters scattered loosely inside, then starts to hand them one by one to his companion, who flattens each letter on the floor and photographs it with a Minox. When they finish, they put the letters back in the box, last letter first. One of the two carefully checks the Polaroid photo of the shoe box and meticulously adjusts the letters until they match the photograph. Then the shoe box is returned to the safe, and the Polaroid photograph is again consulted to make certain the box is exactly where they found it. The safe is closed, the dial returned to the number it had been on. A last look around. Two soft clicks on the walkie-talkie, and the two men are out the door and down the fire stairs to a waiting car.

  From start to finish, the operation has taken eighteen minutes, involved six men, two inside, four outside, and cost (including bonuses and bribes) $18,745.

  The cleanup team waits in an apartment two floors below until the telephone rings once. They mount quickly to the target apartment and begin work. One probes the front door lock with a long, thin strip of metal, extracting barely visible magnetized filings, which he examines under a powerful magnifying glass. Two others, on their hands and knees, search the living room carpet to recover the bits of straw they planted. One of them motions with his head toward the bedroom. The mirror is scrutinized, removed, the safe dial is photographed, then the door is opened. Measurements are made with draftsman’s instruments, more photographs are taken with a camera fixed to a tripod, angled straight down, the tripod feet and the shoe box on predrawn marks on a sheet of paper.<
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  From start to finish, the operation has taken forty-eight minutes, involved eight men, six inside and two outside, and cost (including bonuses and bribes) 3,137 rubles.

  CHAPTER

  5

  If Washington, D.C., is, psychologically speaking, a mixture of Wall Street and Disneyland, then the Forty Committee, that discreet interdepartmental big brother that watches over the shoulder of the American intelligence community, is its spiritual halfway house. It represents a judicious mix of reality and fantasy essential for the successful pursuit of its goals (which unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—are only vaguely defined). It is, for instance, keenly aware of precedents without being tied to them; by the same token, it has nothing against an occasional flight of imagination—as long as everyone concerned takes along a parachute.

  The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Charlie Evans, a tall, handsome, impeccably pin-striped man whose wife obliges him to wear garters so his pale skin will not be visible when he crosses his legs, is entertaining Senator Howard, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, with tales of cloaks and daggers; Evans, a career CIA officer who came up through the ranks, has found over the years that it is easier to deal with senators as if they were children—make them feel you are letting them in on trade secrets.

  “What he do then?” demands the senator eagerly. “How’d he get his self out of that pickle?”

  “He didn’t,” Evans says dramatically. He leans back in his chair and crosses his legs; the only thing that shows is stocking. “The moment he saw the hair he’d planted was gone, he knew he was blown, so he went around putting notes in dead-letter drops that implicated the wrong general. When he thought they were about ready to pick him up, he killed the man who was staked out at his apartment—broke his spine with his knee sort of thing—and disappeared into a safe house. He had to stay out of sight fourteen weeks before our people could spirit him out of the country. By then the general he implicated had been shot by a firing squad, and our general had moved up a notch in the junta.” Evans taps the senator on the knee. “See what I mean about planning? In this business, you’ve got to anticipate. There’s no substitute for doing your homework. When the roof fell in, he had an alternative plan ready at hand that took advantage of adversity.”