The Debriefing (26 page)

The young officer watches in a noncommittal way as Stone gets out of bed and pads across on bare feet to the window. There are no bars on it. Stone looks out at the compound, which is bathed in bright sunlight. There are several small wooden buildings. Smoke rises from chimneys. At the center of the compound is a two-story cement structure with a forest of antennas on the roof. Two or three soldiers can be seen walking around the compound. Stone turns back to the young officer, puzzled. “Where are the others? Where is Katushka and Morning Stalin?”

But the officer only repeats, “You are invited to take breakfast with the officer in charge.”

Stone showers and shaves, finds his clothes (cleaned and pressed) on a hanger in the closet, and dresses. The young officer motions with his head, and leads Stone out of the building and across the compound toward the two-story cement building with the antennas on the roof. Inside, the officer indicates the staircase and says, “Upstairs, first door on your right.”

Stone hesitates before the door, wonders if he has any alternatives, decides he hasn’t and goes in without knocking. The officer eating breakfast at a small table in front of the window turns, rises politely, motions with his only hand for Stone to take the seat across from him.

The one-armed officer, who is wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general with the Order of Stalin conspicuous on his tunic, pours a cup of coffee for Stone. “So you are the famous Stone we’ve heard so much about. Sugar? Cream?” He pushes the two bowls across the table, and Stone notices his fingers—long and thin and graceful, the fingers of a woman on the hands of a man.

Stone’s thoughts race as he tries to figure out how the one-armed officer learned who he was. “My name is …” Again he supplies the Russian identity that he gave to the KGB.

The one-armed officer smiles grimly. “It is a little late to start playing games with each other,” he says. “We have identified you through your left thumbprint as the Stone, first name unknown, who is in charge of a small group that works exclusively for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and goes by the relatively innocent though poetic name Topology. Curious choice of names: Topology—the study of surfaces! Actually, we have followed your career with interest ever since you devised that very original gambit in the early 1960s of watching us to see if we were mobilizing for war. It was about that time that we purchased an envelope with your thumbprint on it—you will bear with me if I don’t mention the identity of the seller—for the tidy sum, as I remember it, of three thousand American dollars. Until yesterday, we had no idea what you looked like. You will be interested to know that your great idea of watching us for mobilization didn’t work quite the way you thought it would. Instead of asking ourselves: ‘What are the Americans developing which would cause us to mobilize if we found out about it?’ we instead posed the somewhat more intelligent question: “Why do the Americans want us to
think
they are watching us for mobilization?’ The answer was relatively simple once we asked the right question. You wanted us to think you were developing
weapon systems which you weren’t developing. To match weapon systems you thought we had
already
developed. And you thought we had developed them because we wanted you to think we had developed them. Well”—the general uses his one hand to brush away the past—’“all that’s water under the bridge. Do you have the same expression in English? Water under the bridge?”

It seems like an innocent question, but Stone understands that the general is asking him if he is ready to stop pretending he is Russian. And Stone is ready; something, he is not sure what, is in the air. He was arrested by the KGB, but now finds himself calmly taking breakfast across the table from none other than Comrade Volkov, the head of Soviet military intelligence, who happens by coincidence to be the duty officer Gamov who sent Kulakov on his way to America. And so Stone says simply. “Yes, General Volkov, we have the same expression in English.”

“Ah,” sighs Volkov, “that’s what I call progress. Well done, Mr. Stone. Yes, indeed, that was very well done. I take it you put the Gamov-Volkov puzzle together after you talked to the old man Davidov. The one you call Morning Stalin told us all about it while you were sleeping. It’s curious, isn’t it, how you plan an operation down to the smallest detail, and then something unforeseen trips you up.”

“How long were you working on the Kulakov operation?” Stone asks conversationally.

Now it is Volkov’s turn to smile at the innocence of the question. “We devised the general idea about two years ago. It took us a while to come up with the right man, and then develop the various teams to deal with his daughter and son and wife. Speaking as one professional to another, the whole operation was incredibly complicated, you can imagine. The thing nearly fell through when the military prosecutor, acting on his own initiative, decided to give Kulakov a lie detector test. If he had passed that, it would have all gone down the drain. Fortunately for us, Kulakov was lying about his father, though it wasn’t the
lie we accused him of. But no matter. One lie was as good as another.”

“It was a spectacular operation,” Stone agrees.

Volkov smiles at the memory. “We even had some of our people stop the laundry van in Athens, knowing the defector wasn’t in it. We calculated you would be impressed by our efforts to get back the pouch.”

“The defection of Kulakov,” says Stone, “is probably one of the great intelligence operations of our time.”

Volkov accepts the compliment gracefully. “It wasn’t an intelligence operation,” he says mildly. “It was a
military
intelligence operation.”

Stone says, “Excuse me. Military intelligence operation.” And suddenly he begins to see some light. “Of course. A
military
intelligence operation. In which your civilian counterparts, the KGB, played no role.”

“Our civilian counterparts don’t know, even now, that Kulakov was an operation.”

Stone, tingling down to his fingertips, is one small jump ahead of Volkov. “And now you are about to break every rule in the book and tell me
why
you organized the defection of Kulakov.”

Volkov nods. “You are very quick, Mr. Stone. I am going to tell you why because only by telling you why will the operation stand a chance of success.” And Volkov, speaking in a low voice, occasionally flicking dandruff off his shoulder boards, tells Stone what the military hoped to gain by the defection of the diplomatic courier Kulakov.

Stone is silent for a long while after the general finishes. Finally he shakes his head in admiration. “It’s really incredible. All that effort to make us swallow the contents of one small scrap of paper. And the only mistake you made was to play the role of the duty officer yourself.”

Volkov purses his lips. “I was curious to see the face of the man whose life I had manipulated—”

Stone remembers his own curiosity to see the face of the Russian diplomat in Paris. “Ruined,” he corrects Volkov.

Volkov accepts the correction. “Ruined.”

“And Kulakov’s Jewish father, who you didn’t know existed, happened to work as a janitor in the ministry building and saw you come out after him,” says Stone.

“He saw me come out, and knew who I was,” agrees Volkov. “And told you about it. Which is why we’re having our little breakfast this morning.”

Stone stares out the window; they are changing the guards posted at various points along the electrified fence that surrounds the compound. “What do you expect me to do now?” he asks Volkov.

“Assuming you could leave the country and return to Washington,” says the general, “what would you normally do?”

“I’d report directly to my boss, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I’d tell him Kulakov was an intelligence—I mean, a
military
intelligence operation. And he’d blow the whistle on you.” And Stone adds sweetly, “We have the same expression in English—blow the whistle on someone.”

Volkov drums his long, delicate fingers against the side of a glass. “I’m arranging for you to return to Washington on the condition that you do precisely what you said you would do—report directly to the admiral who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs. No one else. Only him. And let him make the decision what to do with the information you give him.”

Stone is still feeling his way. “What if I skywrite?” He traces a message in the air with his index finger. “Kulakov is a phony.”

“We will salvage what we can,” Volkov says evenly. “We will claim that it is a Topology operation designed to turn us against each other. Of course, the girl will be dead; you must understand this. We are after all in the same line of work. …”

“We may be in the same line of work, General,” Stone tells him with sudden passion, “but we’re still on different sides of the fence.”

Volkov glances at his watch, which he wears on the inside of his wrist, then looks at Stone with unconcealed contempt. “It is my understanding that the various sides more or less resemble each other.”

“Oh, no, they don’t, General. My side would never do to someone what you did to Kulakov—ruin a man’s life like that, ruin the lives of the people around him. That’s the basic difference between our systems. On my side, there are limits. You crossed. We wouldn’t.”

“You are dead wrong, Mr. Stone,” says Volkov. “There are no limits. During the Great Patriotic War, I spent fourteen months in a German concentration camp. Once we locked ourselves in our barracks. The guard cut off our food to starve us out. After a while they grew impatient and sent in dogs. We ate them and threw out the bones. And then we ate each other.” Volkov’s upper lip curls into a suggestion of a sneer. “We are still eating each other.”

“So you got what you came for,” says Katushka. “And now you’re going home … wherever that is.”

They are talking quietly, the midday sun playing on their heads, in the middle of the compound. Stone sees the general looking down at them from the second-floor window. Just outside the main gate of the compound, a black limousine and an Army jeep wait, their engines idling. The young officer who woke Stone that morning stands next to the limousine, looking impatiently in his direction.

“I must go now,” Stone says.

“Will we be all right—me, Morning Stalin? Will we be … taken care of?”

Stone looks Katushka in the eyes. “You’ll be taken care of. Not to worry.”

Katushka looks back with her enormous eyes, mulling over what hasn’t been said. Then she starts to walk with him toward the limousine. At the gate, she puts a hand on Stone’s arm. “I’ll get news of you by opening a book at random.” They stand in silence for a long, long moment. “It is a tradition,” she explains, “to wait quietly on the threshold of a home before going on a journey.”

Stone nods and turns away, and then turns back to look at her a last time. And he hears her say, very softly, her lips barely
moving, “You came into our lives as casually as a raindrop. All things considered, I am very pleased with you.”

The marshal leans forward and taps the driver on the shoulder. “Slow down. I don’t want to get there until I’ve finished this conversation.” To Volkov he says, “What about our friends over at Lubyanka? What about the KGB?”

Volkov absently watches a burly woman push her way into a queue outside a toy store. “They think it’s a
Grani
operation” he says. “They’re looking under the sheets for a team of êmigrés. And they’re doing all the looking quietly; they’re not too proud about having had a
Grani
courier lifted from under their noses, so they’re not advertising.”

The marshal takes this in. “You’re sure he’ll go directly to the admiral? He won’t take it to some congressman, or the White House?”

“He’s been in the game a long time,” Volkov assures him. “He’ll go up the chain of command. It’s a big decision, what with the girl and everything. He’ll let the admiral make it.”

The marshal turns toward Volkov and asks bitterly, “And what will the admiral do?”

Volkov avoids the marshal’s eyes. “I wish I knew,” is all he can bring himself to say
.

CHAPTER

10

The admiral punches the button on his intercom. “Only interrupt me if war is declared.” He thinks a moment, adds, “No half wars either.” He switches on the black box with the small circular antenna, then swivels back toward Stone and observes him through the dark haze of Havana cigar smoke hanging like a rain cloud over his enormous desk. “All right. In ten words or less, what did you find when you looked under the rock?”

“I was right,” Stone tells him. There is no trace of smugness in his voice. “The defection of Kulakov was an intelligence operation mounted by the Soviet military establishment. They required a genuine defector to plant information on us that we would swallow. So they created the defector. They drugged his son and turned his daughter on to girls and seduced his wife and framed him with some trumped-up charges. They did it all so he’d run when he got the chance, and then they gave him the chance. And he ran. The poor son of a bitch who had lost everything ran just the way he was supposed to.”

“Where’d they go wrong?” the admiral wants to know. “Where’d they trip up?”

“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?”