The Debriefing (4 page)

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 done 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
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