The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  Far away, from a saner world, comes the braying sound of a zebra in heat.

  They come at Stone in relays, two to a team, patiently posing questions as he sits in a straight-backed wooden chair, his wrists handcuffed behind him, a spotlight trained on his face, the voices coming out of the impenetrable blackness around it.

  “What is your real name?”

  “What is your nationality?”

  “What is your parent organization?”

  “Only admit you are the Grani courier and we will switch off the light and let you sleep.”

  “Your name?”

  “Your nationality?”

  “Your organization?”

  Stone struggles desperately to keep hold of certain threads. He has been arrested by the KGB, of that much he is sure; he recognized Lubyanka Prison, the headquarters of the KGB, as the car into which all three had been bundled drove through the gate. His inquisitors realize he is a foreigner; Stone caught a glimpse of his phony passports and his money piled on the desk just before the spotlight was trained on his face. From the questions thrown at him, he understands that they are convinced that he is the Grani courier who disappeared ten days before from the Hotel Rossiya, leaving behind a single copy of Grani in his valise lining. Which means they don’t know he is American. Stone means to keep it that way.

  “I’ve told you again and again,” he says tiredly—his head is spinning with fatigue, and he has to struggle to organize his sentences sequentially—“my name is …” He gives them the identity of an engineer in a remote Georgian city on the theory that it will take at least a day for them to track down the man who really goes by that name. Buy time, Stone keeps repeating to himself. The only thing that counts now is to buy time.

  One of the interrogators, a young man by the sound of his voice, laughs wickedly, and the other moves behind Stone and whispers in his ear: “If you don’t cooperate, it will go hard on you. We know you work for the anti-Soviet émigré groups. We know you were tracking down the relatives of the defector Kulakov to write a story on how they were made to suffer.”

  “You will be charged with the murder of the boy Gregori,” sneers the younger man.

  “Save yourself,” coaxes the man behind Stone.

  “What is your name?”

  “What is your nationality?”

  “What is your parent organization?”

  Somewhere in the building, a woman screams; Stone convinces himself it is Katushka, and he strains against the handcuffs until they cut into the flesh on his wrists. “You’re making a mistake,” he says weakly. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”

  “You are without hope,” the man behind Stone whispers. “Think of yourself. What is your name? Only tell us your real name and you will be permitted to sleep.”

  Dazed, his head drooping onto his chest, Stone is half dragged, half marched through an endless corridor, down a narrow back staircase to a waiting van. Katushka and Morning Stalin are already inside. They reach down and help him climb in. The metal door is slammed shut, bolted on the outside, and the van lurches forward.

  “Are you all right?” Stone asks Katushka. “I thought I heard you scream.”

  “They never questioned us,” she explains. “They said we would be charged with harboring an agent sent in by one of the anti-Soviet exile groups. They said they would get back to us when they finished with you. Then some others came and whisked us down the stairs to the van. Then you came. Where are they taking us?”

  Stone can tell from her voice that she is very frightened, though she is trying hard not to show it. “How long ago did they arrest us?” he asks.

  “Forty hours,” Morning Stalin tells him. “They fed us twice—a breakfast, a lunch.” He grimaces. “My face made them very nervous. You should have seen the heads turn as I walked down the hall. Didn’t I make them nervous, Katushka?”

  “They thought you were a ghost who had come to haunt them,” Katushka agrees. To Stone she says softly, “Are you really an anti-Soviet agent?”

  There is no answer. His head bobbing on his chest, Stone has fallen into a deep sleep.

  Stone surfaces slowly. The first thing he sees when he finally manages to open an eye are the shoulder boards of the young Army officer standing alongside the bed. The bed! Stone jerks upright, blinks several times, looks around. The small room is as neat as a pin. The cot he is lying on is Army-style, with khaki blankets and a footlocker next to it that serves as a night table.

  “You can shave if you like,” says the Army officer. “You’ll find an electric razor in the bathroom. After which you are invited to take breakfast with the officer in charge.”

  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 q
uietly; 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?”