The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  Gurenko notices the waiter heading their way with a tray full of food, tucks the tip of his napkin into his shirt collar. “I was told you would show me some papers with information about NATO bases in Germany. If the information was … suitable, I was instructed to pay you twenty-five thousand United States dollars.”

  “I expected more,” Stone says. “I expected twenty-five thousand.”

  Gurenko is confused. “That’s what you’ll get, if the information is worth it.”

  The first course—the oysters—is placed before them. Gurenko rubs his palms together in anticipation. Stone studies the assortment of utensils available to him, settles on a small fork.

  “No, no, with the fingers,” Gurenko insists.

  “I prefer a fork,” says Stone.

  They eat in silence, Stone with his head angled down, lifting his eyes quickly every now and then to study the Russian. Gurenko chews noisily, helps himself to more wine, says with his mouth full, “Why me? Why not someone else at the embassy? This is not my line of work. There are others—”

  “I wanted you,” Stone tells him, “precisely because it isn’t your line of work. This is a one-shot affair for me. I don’t want to deal with professionals who will try to find out who I am and come back for more. Which is why I prefer your bodyguards outside.”

  “Yes, I see the logic of that,” Gurenko says. “Still, you might change your mind; you might decide to do it again. After all, this”—he gestures to the room full of well-dressed people talking in undertones, to the bouquets of flowers strewn with impeccable attention around the old restaurant, to the waiters hovering discreetly and silently—“this could become a habit. You might change your mind. You might decide to do it again.”

  Stone smiles faintly. “I’m not fool enough to risk this twice.”

  The table is cleared and the second course—leeks and truffles in olive oil—is laid before them.

  “This time you are permitted to use your fork,” the Russian informs Stone with a straight face.

  At the next table, a heavily made up American lady raises her voice in mock horror. “Look what we’ve been reduced to,” she complains dramatically to her companion. “Happiness is an empty parking space.”

  Gurenko snorts. “She is speaking American,” he whispers to Stone, showing off his linguistic abilities. “She tells that happiness is when you find a vacant parking space. The Americans are a special race, I think.”

  They are finishing the endives and mushrooms—the Reblochon has been judged by Gurenko overripe and sent back—when Stone casually pulls a long envelope from his breast pocket and slides it across the table to the Russian diplomat. Across the room Kiick and Mozart stop talking, and their lady friend opens her handbag to look for something.

  “At last,” Gurenko says. He pushes away his plate, wipes his mouth on his napkin, begins to examine the documents. The American lady at the next table explodes in laughter. “Nothing’s sacred,” she tells her table companion.

  “If you’ll excuse the intrusion,” Stone addresses the lady directly in slow, accented English, “there are still things that are sacred.”

  “Name one,” the American lady challenges.

  “The speed of light squared.”

  Stone signals for the bill, which is quickly placed before him on a small silver dish. The Russian nods as he reads, then reaches into his breast pocket and extracts a thick brown envelope, which he passes to Stone, who glances at the contents. “Is this all?” he asks, disappointed.

  “What did you expect?” the Russian inquires.

  “At least twenty-five thousand dollars,” says Stone. “The material I gave you is worth more than ten thousand dollars.”

  Gurenko’s eyes narrow. “What ten thousand dollars? There is twenty-five thousand dollars in the envelope. What game are you playing?”

  Stone looks again at the contents of the envelope. “I’m a bit confused,” he says vaguely. He pockets the envelope, starts to get up. “Let us hope,” he says, “that we don’t meet again.”

  A waiter dashes over to pull back the chair. Stone smiles and gestures with his thumb toward the Russian. “My friend here will take care of the check.”

  “You should have seen his face”—Kiick laughs—“when he realized he would have to pay.”

  “You should have seen it when he saw the size of the bill,” says Mozart.

  Stone comes out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel. The three-day growth of beard is gone; clean-shaven, Stone looks younger than his forty-four years, but tired—an accumulation of restless nights full of dreams he remembers only too well; he has the face of someone driven by things he deeply believes in but doesn’t stop to question for fear of wearing away the edges of his commitment. Now he says, “No trouble cleaning up afterwards?”

  “No, no,” Kiick replies. He is an overweight, balding, shabby man in his fifties, given to making gestures that are delicate, effeminate almost. “We recovered the bug without anyone knowing it was even there. Carted it off with the flowers. The film looks to be first-class. I don’t think he suspected a thing.”

  “Other than the fact that the handbag was pointed our way,” says Stone, “I wouldn’t have either.”

  Kiick takes this as a compliment and beams like a schoolboy. “We’ll doctor the tapes before the end of the week. I found a pro who works for the Israelis and free-lances on the side.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t get to know more than he has to,” cautions Stone.

  “He doesn’t even know my nationality,” boasts Kiick.

  “What about the bank account?” asks Mozart, Stone’s lazily efficient second-in-command; he makes everything, including brilliance, seem effortless, something one does with one’s left hand. He is lounging on a couch, his vest and jacket unbuttoned, his Ivy League Phi Beta Kappa key dangling on a gold chain stretched across his generous stomach.

  “The bank business will be taken care of when Gurenko makes his next run to Geneva,” Kiick explains, a noticeable tightness to his voice; it makes him uneasy to deal with ambitious people. “The fifteen thousand dollars will be deposited in a numbered account under a phony name. The signature will be in Gurenko’s handwriting, no mistake about it. Christ, the signature alone is costing me two grand, but it’s worth every penny.”

  “Everything will depend on how you play him,” Stone says. He throws the towel back into the bathroom and settles into Kiick’s swivel chair. “There’s a tendency in these affairs to rush things, but the secret is to go slow. The slower, the better.”

  Kiick nods in eager agreement. “We let him know we’ve arrested a German for selling him NATO documents for ten thousand dollars, and we say we found out he pocketed the other fifteen thousand dollars and stashed it in a numbered account. We play him the doctored tapes to prove you only got ten thousand dollars.”

  “He’ll deny it,” Mozart offers, competing with Stone. “He’ll be angry as hell. Remember it’s an anger that comes from innocence.”

  Stone ignores Mozart. “That’ll be the crucial moment,” he tells Kiick. “He could go either way. It’s your business to make him go our way. He’ll be angry, but he’ll be frightened too—frightened to death. You’ve got to play to the fright. The important thing is to ask him for a favor so inconsequential that it’ll seem easier for him to do it than go to his security people and open up the can of worms. In the back of his mind he’ll know that even if they believe he paid over the whole twenty-five thousand dollars, there’ll be that minuscule grain of doubt, and that doubt will ruin his career.”

  “Once he does you a small favor,” Mozart chimes in, “you reward him, but the reward has to be small enough so that he’ll accept it. Send him a Sony portable, or better still a kitchen appliance that his wife won’t want to give back.”

  “If he keeps the reward,” Stone says, “you’ll have him. The next time you go back at him, you’ll have the original business to hold over his head, plus the fact that he’s already d
one you a favor—”

  “—and accepted a gift,” says Kiick.

  “—and accepted a gift; exactly,” agrees Stone. “So then you escalate. You wait a few weeks and ask him for a second favor, hardly more important than the first—the makeup of an economic delegation due to turn up here, or the guest list at one of their receptions. Then you come across with another reward. Not cash; never give cash. A fur coat for his wife. A color TV. Something like that. Something a friend would give to another friend who does him a favor. If you take each phase slow and easy, if you play him like you would a fish, you’ll have the combination to the office safe in six months and copies of the embassy’s coded correspondence in a year.”

  “We could use a coup like that,” Mozart says pointedly. “It would put an end to all those rumors about us going out of business.”

  “You can get a lot of mileage out of a good coup,” agrees Stone.

  Kiick smiles and nods. He knows the story only too well. There are very few professionals who don’t. Back in the early sixties, Stone had put the company on the intelligence map with a coup that was a classic in its time. In those days, the Russians were ahead of the Americans in nuclear missile development, and Washington was worried sick about it. To offset the Soviet advantage and buy time, Stone came up with an idea whose beauty was in its utter simplicity. American agents were ordered to monitor Soviet submarine ports, military units, code traffic, deliveries of spare parts to air bases, call-up of specialists, for any indication that the Russians were mobilizing for war. When the Russians discovered, as they were meant to, that the Americans were monitoring them for signs of mobilization for war, they asked themselves the question they were supposed to ask: “What are the Americans doing which, if we found out about it, would cause us to mobilize?” The Americans, of course, weren’t doing anything except play catch-up ball, but the ploy kept the Russians off balance and guessing for two full years before they tumbled to this.

  “You pulled off some beauties in your day,” Kiick says admiringly.

  “Let’s hope my day isn’t over,” Stone says, looking directly at Mozart, who makes no bones about being unhappy acting (in company argot) as Stone’s “deputy dawg.”

  “You guys at the top have to make a mistake sometime,” Mozart says quietly. There is a glint in his eye, a hint of mischief. “Then us youngsters will get our turn at the helm. It’s a law of nature in our business. Survival of the youngest.”

  The intercom buzzes. Mozart is summoned to the top floor of the town house, which serves as a communications center. As soon as he leaves, Kiick leans toward Stone. “These young guys get on my nerves,” he says. “Listen, Stone, before I forget, I want to thank you again,” he adds earnestly. “If it hadn’t been for you, well …”

  Stone waves away Kiick’s thanks. “The CIA’s loss is my gain. They were dumb to dump you, is how I look at it.”

  “I want you to know I’m grateful, is all. And I won’t let you down. If there is ever something I can do for you, well, you get the idea.”

  Mozart comes back into the room on the run; he is amazingly light on his feet despite his size, a characteristic that Stone attributes, with no substantiating logic, to the fact that Mozart is a very wealthy young man; work, for him, is indoor sport. “Looks like we have a Soviet defector on our hands in Athens,” he says excitedly. “A diplomatic courier with a pouch full of goodies. The admiral wants us to pick him up at the starting gate. I’ve already checked. I figure I can be there in six hours if I get a move on—”

  “If anybody’s going to Athens, it’ll be me,” says Stone. “Rank has its privileges. You head back to Washington and mind the store. I’ll collect the pouch full of goodies and the warm body attached to it.”

  “What a very nice guy you are,” sulks Mozart.

  Stone, already scribbling a note to Thro, smiles sweetly. “It’s a law of nature in our business: Nobody is nicer than he has to be.”

  The antennas on the roof are being whipped about by an icy wind that cuts in from the Moscow River, bending even the birch trees in its path. Inside the cement structure, at a desk behind the double winter windows with the seams stuffed with cotton, the officer in charge puts tiny tick marks next to items on a yellow pad.

  Recall three embassy security men assigned as escorts (dereliction of duty, 15 years)

  Recall second secretary (go through motions)

  Fire general in charge of courier service, order revision of procedures for clearing couriers for foreign assignments

  Issue general alert to military intelligence agents in Middle East, Europe, United States (use code Americans known to have broken)

  Get copies of all documents in pouch, advise senders that documents may have fallen into American hands, invite reports on consequences and suggestions for cutting losses

  Put our team in Geneva on 24-hour alert status

  Invite minister of defense to order us, and not KGB, to backtrack on defector (family, friends, etc.) to uncover motive

  “You’ve left off the duty officer,” points out the lieutenant colonel, looking over his shoulder. “You’ve forgotten about Gamov.”

  The officer in charge writes in longhand:

  “Duty Officer Gamov to disappear. No trial.”

  He studies the item for a moment, then puts a small check mark before it.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The image that leaps to Stone’s mind is that of a lap dog in heat—a combat between instinct and decorum. With decorum coming out second best. He spots it first in the taut faces of the Marine guards at the entrance, in their hands making edgy passes over the undone flaps of their Navy-issue holsters. He sees it in the maniacal gleam in the eyes of the ambassador’s woman Friday, a near-sighted career officer who speaks seven languages, none of them really well. Muttering under her breath in ancient Greek, she plucks Stone out of a gaggle of journalists being held at bay by the Marines, plows through corridors full of milling staffers as if she is the prow of an icebreaker, barges past the civilian security contingent into the oak-paneled inner sanctum, with the limp American flag at one end, hissing hysterically, “He’s come, he’s here, I have him in tow.”

  Stone sees it—shoots of panic breaking through what appears to be an ordered surface—in the person of his holiness the ambassador, a tall, heavy-handed, very rich political appointee whose name appears regularly on someone or other’s ten-worst-dressed list. “Welcome aboard—yes, indeed—welcome aboard,” gushes the ambassador, wringing Stone’s hand as if he is trying to pump up water from a reluctant well, smiling all the while with his facial muscles but not his eyes. “Mighty glad,” he mutters, and he repeats it several times without specifying precisely what he is mightily glad about. He takes Stone by the elbow and steers him toward an enormous suede couch, out of earshot of the half dozen or so first and second and third secretaries, clipboards at the ready, parked around the vast room. Stone, worn out from the trip, sinks gratefully into the soft cushions, catches a glimpse of several framed photographs over the couch. One shows the ambassador chatting amiably with a woman Stone takes to be his government-issue wife; others show him chatting amiably with various Presidents or Heads of State or Film Stars. In every photograph his expression is precisely the same: his shoulders are hunched, his head is thoughtfully inclined, frozen in a nod of agreement, his lips are pursed, his eyes are squinting as if he is hard of hearing.

  “Let me put you in the picture,” the ambassador begins. In keeping with the atmosphere, which has more in common with a library reading room than an ambassador’s inner sanctum, his voice is a hoarse whisper. “What I’ve got is trouble with a capital T.” He impatiently waves off one of the young second secretaries, who tiptoes over with an outstretched clipboard marked “Incoming—Eyes Only.” “I’ve got this Russki courier, name of Kulakov, holed in upstairs with a diplomatic pouch chained to his wrist which he says will blow up if anybody tries to take it away from him by force. I’ve got State breathing
down my neck to open the pouch and take a look-see what’s in it, never mind the guy it’s chained to. That’s for starters. I’ve got the Russian ambassador lodging diplomatic protests with anybody dumb enough to return his calls. I’ve got security people at the airport telling me the Russkies are flying so many warm bodies into town you’d think they booked the Parthenon for a convention of Old Bolsheviks. I’ve got—”

  One of several phones on the large mahogany desk purrs. The woman Friday lifts the receiver, listens, says something in modern Greek, smothers the mouthpiece in her ample bosom. “Mr. Ambassador,” she stage-whispers, “I’m afraid it’s the undersecretary of foreign affairs, Mr. Tsistopoulos, on the line again. He is very insistent. They have him on hold.”

  “Hold him on hold,” whines the ambassador. To Stone, he offers this as a potential last straw. “I’ve got the Greek undersecretary of foreign affairs, Mr. Whoosis—”

  The woman Friday coughs discreetly to catch the ambassador’s attention. “Mr. Tsis-to-poulos,” she prompts him.

  The ambassador’s eyes strain for a moment at the top of their sockets. “I’ve got the Greek government climbing the wall for us to get this guy out of here, with or without his pouch, before the whole diplomatic shebang comes down around our heads. I’ve got the English and French and Germans—our Germans, of course, not theirs—clamoring for a piece of the action. I’ve got a passel of congressmen of Greek ancestry flying in day after tomorrow. I’ve got a reception on some Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier scheduled for five P.M. I’ve got an operation that’s ground to a dead standstill. Did you see them standing around the halls downstairs? You couldn’t get a passport processed here in anything under two months, for love or money. What else I got? I’ve got journalists from countries I never heard of shooting questions I’m not sure I’m supposed to answer even if I knew the answer, which most of the time I don’t. Sweet Jesus! For all I know, the only thing in the damn pouch is Brezhnev’s unpaid laundry bills!”