The Debriefing (7 page)

The answer, for some reason, seems to please the admiral, who nods and twists his facial muscles into what could pass for a smile. “Tell me something else, Stone: If you had your choice, which would you take—the warm body of Kulakov or the papers?”

Stone doesn’t hesitate. “The warm body, any day of the week.”

“Why?” The admiral levels his gaze on Stone.

Stone’s intuition is at work now. “Because,” he explains, “if there’s a fly in the ointment, something tells me we’ll find it in the warm body. The papers, if they’ve been set up, will be perfect.”

Again Stone’s response pleases the admiral. “Thought you’d say that,” he mutters. He leans back, reaches for his cigar case, clips the tip off one, puts it in his mouth. One of the Philippine stewards appears from nowhere with a light. “Here’s where we’re at,” says the admiral, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke. “Charlie Evans over at CIA was furious when I put you onto the defector instead of one of his boys. Their station chief was out of town at the time, and one of our military attachés—a Navy captain, I might add—had the good sense to latch on to the Russian when he walked in the embassy door. Anyhow, the modus operandi I’ve worked out is this: Charlie Evans gets the cold paper, and you get the warm body. I had to promise Evans that his boys could have the courier, if they still want him, when you get through with him. You speak a bunch of languages, don’t you, Stone?”

“Five fluently, not counting English.”

“You don’t happen to speak Eskimo, do you?” the admiral asks seriously.

Stone has to smile. “Eskimo? Not a word.”

“Hmm. Well, in the Eskimo language there are four future tenses: the immediate future, the middle future, the far-in-the- future future, and a future that will never arrive. I was conjugating in this tense when I spoke to Evans.”

“I think I read you, Admiral,” Stone says. What he understands is what all the insiders in Washington understand: that there is a long-standing bitter feud between the admiral and Charlie Evans that dates back to the days when Evans, then a middle-echelon regional chief at the CIA, tried to pressure the admiral, then the captain of an aircraft carrier, into launching an air strike attacking the Bay of Pigs against Castro’s troops. The admiral refused (so, eventually, did the President when he was approached directly by the CIA) and Evans did his level best to ruin the admiral’s career, filing a scathing report accusing him of being personally responsible for the fiasco by failing to provide air cover at the crucial moment. In later years, the mere mention of Evans’s name would bring an instantaneous glint to the eyes of the admiral, who neither forgot nor forgave.

The admiral puts his cigar case back into his breast pocket. “How much time will you need with the warm body?” he wants to know.

“Hard to say, Admiral, until I’ve made a pass or two at him.”

“Hmm.” The admiral appears lost in thought for a moment.

“All right. Start the debriefing and set up a coordinating link with Evans’s people who will be working over the papers. But don’t tell them anything you haven’t told me first. What I mean, Stone, is don’t give away the family jewels”—he winks slyly—“if you find any family jewels.”

Again Stone says, “I read you, Admiral.”

“Hmm.” The admiral glances over his shoulder, checks to make sure that the stewards can’t observe him, removes a dead fly from his jacket pocket and, holding it by a wing, drops it
onto the uneaten jello. “That’ll keep them on their toes,” he whispers, and he laughs wickedly.

Thro is working herself up again; her slightly hysterical laughter rings through the room like crystal being tapped with a spoon. “Then there’s the dreadful possibility that we’ll be sucked into the black hole at the center of our galaxy which is pulling in stars the way a vacuum cleaner pulls in dust. Do you understand, Stone, what will happen? The gravitational force of the black hole will shrink the earth to the size of a green pea. All the Picassos and Brandenburgs and Beatle records and Porches of Maidens and Pentagons and Top Secret Eyes Only documents will be crushed, Stone, crushed and pulverized and disintegrated, their molecules and atoms intermingling.”

“I’m more interested in the gynecologist,” Stone tells her, “the one you said danced so close he gave you a Pap smear on the dance floor, while I was off on the frontier of freedom, which this time out happened to be Athens.”

“My God, Stone, don’t you know a joke when you hear one anymore?” She adds coyly, “He did dance a bit closer than I’m used to.”

Mozart buzzes on an interoffice line. “Anytime you’re ready,” he says. “Everyone’s primed.”

“Be right in,” says Stone. He rocks back in his swivel chair, his head against the photostat of the front page of the
New York Times
dated November 9, 1917. “Revolutionists Seize Petrograd; Kerensky Flees,” reads the main headline. A small one, circled in red crayon, says: “Washington Reserves Judgment, Hoping Revolt Is Only Local.”

Thro says, “Ah, Stone, don’t be sulky. I was only trying to bug you. You made such a fuss about my ring turning black in Paris. … I was just getting back, is all I was doing.”

“The chemistry of couples”—Stone shakes his head in annoyance—“is a fascinating thing.”

“And what, pray tell, is the chemistry of couples?”

“I have a theory,” Stone explains—he starts to gather the
notes he wants to take with him—“that couples have a fixed amount of time together, and the chemistry of their relationship at any given moment depends on their perception of how much of this time is behind them, and how much ahead.”

“Working the equation backward,” Thro says, “you ought to be able to figure out how much time they have ahead by observing the chemistry.”

“You ought to,” agrees Stone.

Thro’s voice is barely audible. “Oh, Stone, it used to be so good, our chemistry. There used to be an endless amount of time ahead of us.”

“I don’t know what you want anymore,” mutters Stone. He puts his notes in a blue folder with the words “Topology—Current” stenciled on the cover.

“I want what I’ve always wanted,” pleads Thro. “I want to be imagined.”

Stone’s unit is carried on the Pentagon books under the innocuous nomenclature “Task Force 753—Topology.” Its budget, which has been hovering around the $2.5 million mark for the past several years, is buried in the Defense Intelligence Agency appropriations. The money is funneled from the DIA director’s current contingency fund to the Joint Chiefs current contingency fund to Topology Project Chief current contingency fund, where it pays for the twenty-eight staff members on the books, the two European bureaus (in Paris and Vienna), half a dozen safe houses scattered around the world, and the top two floors of the Georgetown town house which serves as the headquarters of Task Force 753—Topology. Actually, only the top floor is used for Topology work. The floor underneath was originally bought and left vacant to “insulate” the top floor; one of Stone’s innovations has been to install a working business to go along with the unit’s cover. Thus was born John Pierce Associates Inc., an international mail order house that netted $245,488 in the last calendar year, enough to pay for the upkeep (without dipping into contingency funds) of the small Virginia debriefing
operation which is the only other physical entity under Topology control. The particular advantage of raising funds this way is that it permits Stone to run an operation that is totally untraceable through funding links, even to the handful of people in Washington who know what Task Force 753—Topology really is.

And what it really is is this: the elite private intelligence arm of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The unit was originally created in 1946, as the cold war was getting under way, under the title “Penetration Feasibility Studies.” Its mandate then—and it has never been altered—was to train penetration agents, and organize support facilities, against the day when they would be sent into the Soviet Union, under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs, on one-time missions.

In all the years of its existence, Task Force 753—Topology has never sent a single agent into the Soviet Union. But it religiously maintains the capability. It has its own Clothing and Accessories Section (with a sign on the door of the storeroom that reads “Buy Russian”), which can outfit an agent with everything from a Soviet-manufactured valise to toothpaste to underwear. There is an Identity Section, which deals in internal passports, work books and various ministry or military identification cards. (The section chiefs pride and joy is a secondhand Soviet-made lamination machine, bought some years before from a source in Yugoslavia.) There is one middle-aged woman who does nothing in life but keep up to date on train and plane schedules, and someone else who compiles lists of places where a potential agent might stay in various cities without coming to the attention of the local militia. Still someone else keeps track of Soviet soccer scores, which are posted on a bulletin board; Stone’s staffers are the only Americans in Washington who run an office pool on Russian teams. Even the dentistry (for the few, Stone among them, who are carried on the books as potential penetration agents) is performed by a Russian exile who drills and fills exactly as he did when he practiced in Minsk. (One of the running arguments between Stone and Mozart has been on
just this sore point, with Mozart representing the staffers who prefer high-speed drills and more modern dentistry techniques, and Stone insisting on verisimilitude down to the poorly done lead fillings in his molars.)

What makes all this accumulated expertise possible is the fact that Task Force 753—Topology is staffed by second- and third-generation anti-Communists, all of them the offspring of people who at one time or another fled the motherland—or died trying. The first requisite for membership in Topology is fluency in Russian. Russian is the office language. Copies of
Pravda, Izvestiya, Literaturnaya Gazeta
(preferred by most, though not at all for its articles on literature),
Yonost, Oktyabr
and
Novy Mir
are scattered around desks. All told, Stone’s unit subscribes—via a cover library facility in the Pentagon—to one hundred and twelve Soviet publications.

With all this Russian expertise at its fingertips, the unit—under Stone’s prodding—took to performing odd jobs in its spare time. (The admiral describes this as “honing the blade.”) Stone’s attempt to turn a Soviet diplomat in Paris was a typical extracurricular activity. Before that, the unit had concentrated its resources on examining the private life and loves of a first-term congressman who was rallying his colleagues on the Hill against military appropriations. Topology got into the debriefing business when it was charged by the Joint Chiefs with questioning the American scientist Lewinter, a rare bird who defected to the Soviet Union several years ago and was then unaccountably handed back to the Americans. Stone concluded that the Russians had released him to convince the U.S. that they didn’t believe Lewinter really possessed the signature trajectories for America’s ballistic missile force. Ergo, they did have their hands on the crucial trajectories, a breakthrough which would permit them to distinguish, during a missile attack, the decoys from the real McCoys by their flight paths. Stone’s conclusion was instrumental in obliging the Joint Chiefs to change the missile trajectories, a project that cost the American taxpayers four billion dollars over a three-year period.

After the success with Lewinter, the odd job that Topology undertook more often than not involved debriefing Soviet defectors who, for one reason or another, had aroused the interest of the Joint Chiefs.

Kulakov is just such a defector.

The woman who follows the soccer scores is making book on an upcoming match between the Moscow Dynamos, known for playing unflappable position soccer, and a squad from Bratsk, which has a reputation for improvisation, a rare trait among Soviet teams. The smart money (led by Mozart, who has put himself down for five dollars) is on the Dynamos. Stone, characteristically, risks two dollars on the boys from Bratsk as he makes his way through the small, crowded room to the desk.

The atmosphere, as always, is casual. The woman who has as her bailiwick Planes and Trains is describing how a Washington hostess organizes the dinner parties for which she is universally famous. “Picture it,” she says, her voice pitched high, her penciled eyebrows dancing. “She starts off by choosing the dessert. Then she figures out what cheese goes with that dessert, then decides what main course goes with that cheese, and
then
selects what guests go with that main course!”

“She must be Jewish,” quips the man in charge of Clothing and Accessories. “I mean, organizing her dinners from right to left, sort of thing. …” His voice trails off. The moment is awkward. Everyone is aware that Stone is Jewish. Not to laugh would be more noticeable than to laugh, so everyone laughs.

Stone, shuffling through his notes, finally looks up. His voice is low, modulated; his manner is slightly nervous. He is uncomfortable with groups, and feels more at home when dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. “I thought,” he begins—he speaks, as he always does in meetings of this kind, in Russian—“we’d keep this session down to section chiefs—”

“Better fewer but better,” interjects Mozart. All the section chiefs recognize the phrase; it is the title of the last article Lenin ever wrote. More laughter. Even Stone is obliged to smile.

“Here’s the drill,” says Stone. “First and foremost, penetration readiness must not be allowed to suffer. One of the advantages of access to a hot defector is that it gives us a way of updating our penetration files. Everyone can benefit from a defector—Clothing and Accessories, Identity, Entries and Exits, Internal Contacts. That having been said, let me add that in this case, there’s more to it—a good deal more. Your normal defector is debriefed for information, and then the information is checked and double-checked. Our defector won’t be debriefed for information; he has none. He’s a run of the mill military courier who has been carting around secrets for years without ever getting to see them himself.”