The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  “Volkov himself mounted the operation,” explains Stone.

  “The faceless Volkov who runs their military intelligence show?”

  “One and the same. In the end, he wanted to take a look at the man he ruined. So he played the role of the duty officer. He used the name Gamov because that was the pseudonym his father used in the thirties while interrogating suspects for Stalin. What Volkov didn’t know was that Kulakov’s real father worked as a janitor in the Ministry of Defense. He’s been there thirty years. The father recognized Volkov coming out of the duty office after his son. And he told me about it.”

  The admiral grinds out his cigar in an ashtray, then empties the ashtray into his wastepaper basket. “Hate butts accumulating,” he explains, his brow furrowed, his mind obviously elsewhere. “All right, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. You’ve explained how they did it. But not, why? What’s the piece of paper they wanted us to swallow?”

  Stone says, “The one that reads: ‘You owe me a hundred rubles.’ “ He glances at the clipping that says: “The fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting,” then looks back at the admiral, who is lighting another cigar. “They counted on our breaking into the safe of the diplomat in Geneva who wrote the note. They wanted us to think that all we had to do was hang tough at the disarmament talks and the Russians would give in.” Stone is suddenly very tired; his mind wanders. He thinks of Katushka defying moral conventions by playing the whore, defying fashion with her boyish clothes, defying winter with her greenhouse. “They wanted us to think that, Admiral, because the military knows that the party people, which is to say the civilians, have no intention of making concessions. And the military wanted to make sure we wouldn’t make concessions either. They want a standoff at Geneva. They don’t want a disarmament agreement. They like things just the way they are, with each side chasing the tail of the other.”

  “I’ve known you a long time, Stone,” the admiral muses. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard you sound … judgmental. I can appreciate this hasn’t been easy for you. Hmm. How many people on our side are in on all this?”

  “I know it, Admiral. Now you know it. That makes two.”

  The admiral swivels a hundred and eighty degrees and stares out the window. A gray dusk, with traces of blue in it, is beginning to settle over the city like soot. Silhouettes are softening. The admiral’s voice drifts back over his shoulder to Stone. “How do you see our options?”

  “You can blow the whistle on the operation,” Stone says. “Charlie Evans and the CIA will wind up with egg on their faces; they bought Kulakov, and they were dead wrong. Evans would probably end up job-hunting, but I doubt if he’d find anything in Washington. In Moscow, the penalty for being wrong is more serious. If we handle the whistle-blowing right, Volkov and several others will be put up against a wall and shot for defying party authority. The most repressive group in Russia, the KGB, will use the affair as an excuse to cut into the power of the military establishment, which is the one institution in the Soviet Union that stands as a counterbalance to the party. What else? The President will be very pleased with you; he’ll invite you to breakfast in the Oval Office and pat you on the back before the cameras and offer you a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He’ll undoubtedly authorize his negotiators at Geneva to make the necessary concessions, because he’s counting on a disarmament agreement with the Soviets for domestic political reasons. That’ll be the big gain; we’ll wind up signing a disarmament agreement with the Russians.”

  “On their terms,” notes the admiral. “What if I don’t blow the whistle?” He is speaking very carefully, weighing the possibilities. “What if I forget the whole thing?”

  “Volkov’s counting on you to do just that, Admiral.”

  “I asked you to explore options,” the admiral snaps, “not make judgments.”

  “If you don’t blow the whistle,” Stone says, “our side will hang tough in Geneva and wait for the Russians to make the concessions that Charlie Evans said they would make. The Russians won’t make concessions, and there won’t be a disarmament agreement.”

  “If there’s no disarmament agreement”—the admiral is talking to himself now—“Charlie Evans will have a bit of explaining to do anyway. He’ll have to answer for the fact that things didn’t work out the way he said they would.”

  “He can always claim the Russians, under heavy pressure from the military people, simply changed their minds,” suggests Stone.

  The admiral absently picks up his pocket calculator and starts squaring numbers. “Some things puzzle me. For starters, why didn’t Volkov simply kill you and dump your body in a very deep Siberian lake?”

  “Volkov assumed I went in on a formal penetration,” Stone explains. “If I had disappeared, the people who sent me in would presumably have begun asking questions. Agents aren’t killed these days; they’re traded. Volkov reasoned that you would have held the KGB responsible for my disappearance. The KGB would know they had nothing to do with it, so they’d start to wonder what an American agent checking on Kulakov found that caused him to disappear. The whole plot would unravel. Remember, Volkov had to keep the real reason for the defection secret not only from us, but from the KGB, which is to say the civilians, who very much want a disarmament agreement if they can get it on what they consider reasonable terms.”

  “Hmm. It bothers me,” says the admiral, “that they gave away so many secrets to make us swallow one piece of paper.”

  “They gave away some little fishes for a big one,” says Stone. “When it comes right down to it, they didn’t give that much away anyhow. The night sight on their T-62 was bound to fall into our hands as soon as the Israelis captured one of the Egyptian tanks. The fact that Moscow got NATO code Alpha Delta from a code clerk in Germany won’t change very much. The clerk who gave it to them is in jail, but the Russians may have a dozen more sources, for all we know. And we seldom put priority material into NATO codes because we assume the system’s riddled with leaks. Then there’s the defect of the low-level parallax input on the SAM tracking system. By now the defect’s probably been corrected. They could afford to give it away.”

  “What about the man they planted in the Egyptian cabinet secretariat?”

  Stone shrugs. “They may have wanted to write him off for any one of a dozen reasons.” A sudden thought comes to him. “He may even be innocent. The trail of money that leads to him may be a plant to keep us away from someone else in the cabinet secretariat who really works for them. Who knows? What does that leave? Some letters about bread riots or someone’s sex life. Lists of spare parts for Egyptian MIGs. What does it really amount to?”

  The admiral focuses on his Havana. “What would prevent us from sitting on what we know and blackmailing Volkov at some future date?”

  “Won’t work,” Stone says flatly. “The fact that you didn’t blow the whistle when you could have—that you let the disarmament talks go down the drain—can be turned against you. No. It would be a standoff.”

  The printout on the admiral’s calculator is beginning to get dimmer. “Goddamn contraption needs new batteries,” he mutters absently. “The girl—she must be important to you?”

  “She’s important, yes.”

  “If I blow the whistle on Volkov, what happens to her?”

  “He’ll get rid of the evidence,” Stone says. “She’s evidence.”

  “If she’s important to you,” the admiral wants to know, “why didn’t you just report back that you didn’t find anything to indicate Kulakov is a phony?”

  “We’re talking about the disarmament talks,” Stone says softly. “We’re talking about the arms race going on and on. I don’t make decisions like that. You do.”

  The admiral snickers. “You’re like everyone else, Stone. You pass the buck. You want me to do what you haven’t the guts to do. You want me to forget the whole thing to save the girl—”

  “You’ve got it backwards, Admiral.
I want you to blow the whistle on them even if it kills the girl! I can’t do it, but you can. You must.”

  The admiral’s voice is hard now. “I don’t give a damn about the girl. What I care about are all the civilian know-it-alls who are trying to take from us the weapons we need to guarantee victory in the next war.”

  “That’s exactly Volkov’s view,” Stone says wearily. And from the end of a long tunnel, he hears his own voice coming almost as if it is an echo: “The victor, Admiral, belongs to the spoils.”

  Thro’s heart just isn’t in it. “Do you know that every time it rains,” she says vaguely, “it rains acid rain, polluting lakes, wiping out fish life, stunting forest growth, penetrating the soil to attack… Stone, you’re not listening.”

  “The world will end,” he says quietly, “when people in it stop making love.”

  Thro turns toward him so that the length of her body is stretched out along the length of his. “What happened to you over there, Stone? You’re not the same.”

  Stone shuts his eyes tightly. “I’m nostalgic for things I never experienced,” he says. He makes an effort to explain: to her, also to himself. “All my life I’ve hated Communist Russia and loved America the way only an immigrant loves America. This was the promised land for me. But too many promises have been broken.” He shakes his head in confusion. “I don’t know heads from tails anymore. Both sides of the coin look the same to me.”

  At the last moment, Mozart remembers protocol: juniors enter first and leave last. He squeezes his bulk into the back of the Buick and slides across the seat to make room for the admiral, who asks, “How do you like Topology now that it’s your shop?”

  Mozart glances uncomfortably at the cigar protruding from the admiral’s mouth. “I waited for it a long time, Admiral. It’s my cup of tea.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs lights up and relishes the first drag on the cigar. “Stone said it would be when he recommended you,” he says.

  The Buick is caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic going down Pennsylvania Avenue. The driver, an army corporal, asks over his shoulder, “Want me to use the siren, Admiral, sir?”

  “Better not,” snaps the admiral. “Some wise ass on the Washington Post will accuse the Joint Chiefs of misusing the siren to attend a cocktail party.”

  Mozart says, “Too bad about Geneva,” and when he gets no reaction from the admiral, he adds, “Funny how everyone assumed an agreement was in the bag. I hear scuttlebutt that Charlie Evans has been on the carpet all morning over at the Oval Office trying to explain where the CIA went wrong. Claims the intelligence estimates were correct, but that the Russians changed their minds about wanting an agreement. Word is that Evans’s lease on his job has just about expired, that he’ll wind up as ambassador to India in his next incarnation.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” says the admiral with a straight face. They pass a group of fifty or so women, some carrying signs that read “Disarmament Now,” on their way to demonstrate in front of the White House. “What do you have for me this week?” the admiral asks Mozart.

  Mozart extracts a Manila folder from his briefcase. “The congressman we talked about last week, the one making all the fuss about the cost overruns in the shipbuilding program—well, it turns out he’s got himself a mistress over in Georgetown. We’ve got footage on him going in and out, and ticket stubs when he passed her off as his secretary on a junket to London last fall.”

  “Hm. I’ll have one of Stone’s people over at the Defense Intelligence Agency drop around to his office and ask some routine questions about her as part of a security clearance,” says the admiral. “He’ll get the point.”

  “We’ve got the suicide of the defector Kulakov on our hands,” continues Mozart. “You remember, the courier with the diplomatic pouch full of goodies. Hanged himself with some picture wire in an art gallery. Funny part is he left a note addressed to Stone. Something about how things like this don’t happen in real life.”

  “Things like what?” the admiral asks.

  “He didn’t specify,” says Mozart. “It required a bit of doing, but we managed to keep the story out of the papers.” He looks up. “Wouldn’t want to do anything to discourage future defectors.”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” agrees the admiral. “Have you given any thought to the matter I mentioned last week?”

  “I put an ad hoc team onto it, and I think we’ve come up with something,” says Mozart. “As I understand it, the Joint Chiefs want to build a new generation of mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed in long trenches so the Russians could never pinpoint their location and destroy them in a preemptive first sinke.”

  “The problem,” says the admiral, “is to get Congress to spring for the thirty billion to fund the project.”

  “I think we’ve come up with a workable scenario,” says Mozart, toying with his Phi Beta Kappa key. “In my opinion, we can get Congress to come up with the money if we can offer them evidence that the Russians are developing a new generation of missiles accurate enough to threaten our existing force of nonmobile missiles.”

  The admiral doesn’t follow Mozart’s drift. “But the Russians aren’t developing a new generation of superaccurate missiles.”

  Mozart has arrived at his point. “But they will,” he says triumphantly, “if they can somehow be made to believe that we are secretly developing a new generation of missiles accurate up to one yard at six thousand miles!”

  The admiral is intrigued. “And how can we make the Russkies believe we are secretly developing a new missile system?”

  “All we have to do,” Mozart explains, as if it is as plain as the nose on his face, “is have someone carrying the right bit of information defect.”

  He seems at loose ends, half-hearted, polite but distant, vaguely disreputable with his crosscurrents of thick hair spilling off in several directions. He stares vacantly over the shoulders of people and tends to become aware of their voices when they stop talking.

  “Did you hear what I said?” asks Kiick, the balding man who runs the Paris shop for Topology. He is hot and perspiring and mops the back of his neck with an oversized handkerchief. He stares at Stone, then catches himself staring and looks elsewhere.

  “I’m sorry,” says Stone. “I was thinking about greenhouses.” He checks his watch, and then studies the departure board. “There it is—Air France 613 to Istanbul, gate six.”

  They start down one of the wings of Orly toward the departure gate. Stone’s mind wanders—to the telegram from the lady lawyer who puts an “Ms.” before her name, telling him the judge has ruled against him; to her defensive letter that followed, claiming that some kind of scandal was brewing around Stone and the hint of it had undermined his case; to the long, almost incoherent letter from Thro, admitting (in a rambling parenthesis) that the scratching incident had not been an accident after all, and announcing (in a brutal P.S.) the end of their little world.

  Kiick has trouble keeping up with Stone. “I never got to congratulate you on the new post. Defense Intelligence is a bigger canvas than Topology—more room to be creative, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s nice not to have Mozart breathing down my neck,” Stone admits.

  Kiick laughs uneasily, looks nervously around at the passengers behind them. “Listen, Stone, you did me a good turn once”—Kiick is speaking quickly now, almost as if he wants to get it over with as soon as he can—“and I owe you one.”

  Stone glances at Kiick, only mildly interested.

  “It’s like this,” says Kiick. “Someone’s after your scalp. They’re putting together a dossier—they’ve got film, they’ve got tapes—of you selling NATO stuff to that Russian in the Grand Vefour.”

  Stone stops in his tracks. “But you know that was an operation.”

  “I have your word for it,” Kiick says, “and I believe you.” He mops his neck again. “You got the authorization in writing?”

  They both know the answer; autho
rizations of this kind are always verbal.

  “You were in on it,” says Stone, starting to walk again. “You can prove it was an operation—you can tell them what happened to the money.”

  “They found the money, Stone,” Kiick says. “In Zurich. In a numbered account that’s been traced back to you.”

  Over the loudspeaker system, a female voice announces in French, English and Turkish the imminent departure of Air France flight 613 to Istanbul. Stone looks at Kiick without seeing him, then turns toward the desk to present his ticket.

  Kiick says, “I almost forgot why I came here. The embassy heard you were going to check out the lay of the land in Istanbul. They asked, as long as you were going, would you mind taking this along with you.” Kiick unlocks the thin gold-colored bracelet around his wrist and offers Stone the diplomatic pouch. “Save them a courier run, if you know what I mean.”

  To Stone, it is suddenly just another solution. “ On my side, there are limits An echo of his own voice comes back to mock him, to haunt him. “ You crossed. We wouldn’t Frowning as if he has confirmed the absence of a great scheme of things, he snaps the bracelet onto his wrist and turns his back on Kiick.