The Debriefing
The Debriefing
Robert Littell
Overlook Hardcover (1979)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Thriller Suspense
Thriller Suspensettt
With the publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell re-established his position as one of the top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Debriefing is finally available again as Overlook publishes Littell's classic spy novels. From the secret meeting rooms of Washington to the interrogation chambers of the KGB, The Debriefing is a novel of exquisite suspense and dazzlingly tense drama. Stone, first name unknown, is the Head of Task Force 753--an elite arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and a master of the sophisticated art of debriefing. When Oleg Kulakov defects on a mission from Russia, handcuffed to a sealed diplomatic pouch, he is brought to the United States and it is Stone's job to find out if he is genuine. The action moves from Moscow to the U.S. and back again, as Stone uncovers a truth that tears his world apart.
The Company
Walking Back the Cat
The Visiting Professor
An Agent in Place
The Once and Future Spy
The Revolutionist
The Amateur
The Sisters
Mother Russia
The October Circle
Sweet Reason
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
This edition first published in the United States in 2004 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 1979 Robert Littell
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines of poetry from
The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam translated by Burton Raffell and
Alla Burago. Copyright © 1973 by State University of New York Press. Reprinted
by permission of the State University of New York Press, Albany, New York
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ISBN: 978-1-59020-907-3
Contents
For Mel Bernstein, Ernest Finch and
Jim Riouff, who started me out on the not-so-beaten path
“Debrief? That means you will ask me questions. But I have no answers. I don’t know secrets. … How long will this debriefing take?”
“It’s already started. It will end when we know more about you than God.”
He seems at loose ends, half-hearted, polite but distant, vaguely disreputable with his crosscurrents of thick wavy hair spilling off in several directions, vaguely sinister behind his steel-rimmed eyeglasses that trap the light at odd angles and turn into tarnished mirrors. He stares vacantly over the shoulders of people and tends to become aware of their voices when they stop talking. He has trouble swallowing, digesting, defecating. And remembering; especially remembering. His mind wanders; sometimes he gets where he’s going with no memory of the trip. Sleep is out of the question. The few times he has managed to doze off, he woke up screaming—though he was never certain which of the recent events in his life he was screaming about.
“Aksenov broke a leg,” the duty officer is saying. “The report neglected to specify which one.” His upper lip curls into a suggestion of a sneer. “Walked in front of a taxi, so it seems, so it seems. You’re the only warm body on the courier list I could find.”
Oleg Kulakov stares past the pinned-up sleeve of the duty officer’s blouse at the wall calendar with the photograph of the girl driving a shiny new tractor; something in the girl’s smile—its unrestrained quality; she doesn’t stint for the photographer—reminds him of Nadia before she …
“The calendar’s on the wrong month,” Kulakov says, cutting
off the thought before it becomes painful. “We’re not January. What we are is February.”
The duty officer glances at the wall without interest, then turns back to Kulakov. “I’m sorry about you losing the weekend,” he says. “We’ll make it up to you. In any case, you’ll be back by Sunday night. There’s a military flight from Cairo to Moscow. Going, you’ll fly Aeroflot and stop over in Athens for six hours. The embassy people will hold your hand between planes.”
The pulse beats in Kulakov’s ear; he feels suddenly faint and presses his knees against the duty officer’s desk to steady himself. For an instant he is afraid he will black out.
Going, I’ll hold over in Athens for six hours! Going where?
“Going where?” he asks the duty officer, a fussy man who has obviously missed several promotions along the way. He has the same rank as Kulakov—they are both majors—but the duty officer is at least ten years older. Judging from his medals and the missing left arm, he must have been a war hero in his day. Oddly, Kulakov has never set eyes on him before. “Where is it I’m going?”
“You haven’t been listening,” complains the duty officer, who wears a small plastic plate over his medals, with his name, “Gamov.” He brushes dandruff from his left shoulder with an impatient gesture. “Aksenov has a broken leg. You’re the only one on the courier list I could get hold of on a moment’s notice. Someone has to deliver this pouch to Cairo by tonight. You’re elected. By one vote. Mine.”
Kulakov tries to concentrate on the mechanics of the assignment, but his head is spinning; he is dizzy with possibilities. “Of course I’ll go,” he says quickly. “I’m glad to fill in. Aksenov is an old comrade. He’d do the same for me.”
Kulakov is instantly sorry he spoke; to his own ear, he sounds too eager. He is sure his voice will give him away, will prompt the duty officer to look up at him suspiciously, to search out the memorandum he, Kulakov, has seen with his own eyes ordering his name stricken from the courier list. But Gamov is bending
over his blotter, stamping and signing Kulakov’s orders, which will serve as an exit visa. He deftly folds the single sheet of paper with his one hand and slides it into a brown envelope stamped “Courier Service.” For some reason Kulakov focuses on the duty officer’s fingers; they are long and thin and graceful, feminine even—the fingers of a woman on the hands of a man.
“Your travel documents,” Gamov says, offering Kulakov the envelope. “Your flight leaves Moscow in”—he studies his watch, which he wears on the inside of his wrist—“an hour and a quarter.”
Kulakov slips the envelope into the breast pocket of his civilian jacket, starts for the door in a daze.
“Ho, Kulakov, not so fast,” the duty officer calls. Kulakov turns back and stares at him, his heart pounding. Any second now he’ll wake up screaming!
“The pouch,” the duty officer reminds him. “You forgot the pouch.”
“Yes, of course, the pouch.” Kulakov smiles weakly.
Shaking his head, the duty officer squats before an old office safe. Shielding the dial from Kulakov with his body, he carefully spins the knob. The heavy door clicks open, swings back. Gamov rummages in the shadowy interior and extracts a worn leather diplomatic pouch. Kulakov, who has been a diplomatic courier for twenty-eight years, hefts it, locks the thin linked bracelet around his left wrist, sets the destruct mechanism, then stoops and deposits the key in a compartment sewn into the inside of his shoe. Straightening, he reaches across the desk and signs in triplicate the receipt acknowledging that he, and not Major Gamov, is now in possession of one sealed diplomatic pouch, the contents of which he vows to protect with his life.
As Kulakov leaves, Gamov stares after him in a peculiar way. His upper lip curls into a suggestion of a sneer as he absently turns toward the wall, tears off January and throws it away.
The driver, who doubles as an embassy heavy because of a
budget squeeze, keeps glancing at Kulakov in the rear-view mirror to catch his reaction. “So our Soviet adviser tells the Egyptian general staff—”
“I spent two years in Cairo,” interrupts the pale second secretary sitting next to the driver. He nervously grinds out his American cigarette in the ashtray, which is already overflowing. “Give me Athens anytime.”
They are speeding along the coast road in a Mercedes toward the Athens embassy. Another Mercedes, with two embassy heavies, follows right behind them.
“So our Soviet adviser tells the Egyptian general staff,” the driver begins again, casting an annoyed look at the pale second secretary, “ ‘The trick is to do as we did with Napoleon. You let the Jews penetrate deep into the country until their supply lines are very long and yours are very short. Then, when they’re inside the trap, you sit back and wait for winter!’ ” The driver observes Kulakov’s failure to react in the rear-view mirror. “You wait for winter,” he explains. “Get it?
There is no winter in Egypt!”
“It’s an old joke,” snaps the pale second secretary. “Everyone’s heard it. Here—” He twists in his seat belt toward Kulakov, stares at him for an instant before he catches himself staring and finishes what he started to say. “You’ll get a glimpse of the Acropolis any second now.”
The car turns inland up a broad avenue and Kulakov sees the Acropolis in the distance through the front window. It glistens in the cold sunlight, bleached laundry drying on an ancient skyline. He inches to his right to get a better look at it, and casually rests his fingertips on the door handle.
“I’ve been here fourteen months,” the pale second secretary remarks—he is uneasy with silence and tries to fill it—“and I never get tired of looking at it.”
“One ruin is the same as the next,” grunts the driver.
Kulakov’s fingers tighten around the door handle. He wonders if he’ll have the nerve to do it.
In a curiously detached way, he has been wondering ever since he walked out of the duty office. The old janitor was in the corridor, standing on a step ladder changing light bulbs in the ceiling. Kulakov didn’t trust himself to look up at him. Instead he gripped his ankle as he passed—his way of saying goodbye. Outside, a Ministry of Defense Moskvich was waiting to take him to Moscow Airport. Kulakov settled into the back seat, expecting at any moment to hear the car radio burst into life and a voice blurt: “The diplomatic courier Kulakov must not be permitted to leave the country.” But there was no voice, only the droning of traffic and the running comments of the driver, a cranky civilian who thought that pedestrians had been put on earth by God to torture the lucky few who found themselves behind steering wheels.
At the airport, Kulakov was ushered into a small lounge set aside for ministry personnel, along with two colonels and an inspector general, all on their way for one reason or another to Cairo. His papers were carefully checked by an unsmiling frontier officer, who studied his passport photograph, and then his face, for a nerve-racking moment. When the flight was finally called, Kulakov mingled with the other passengers and headed for the gate. Trying to breathe normally, suppressing a last-second urge to turn and run, he passed the control point and then the two armed soldiers who stood on either side of the boarding ramp. Inside the plane, Kulakov sucked in a lungful of stale air and sank into a seat in the first-class section on the aisle next to the inspector general, a red-faced bureaucrat who demanded ice and poured himself a stiff vodka from a small flask without offering one to his neighbor. No matter. Kulakov’s stomach was in no condition for vodka.
The plane taxied to the end of the runway—and then abruptly stopped. Through the small, scratched oval window, Kulakov saw several limousines approaching at high speed. He slumped in his seat, breathing with so much difficulty that the stewardess bent over him and asked if anything was wrong. No, nothing was wrong, he muttered, and he turned his head and watched
the limousines pull up with a squeal of brakes, saw the crew open the plane door and let down a portable ladder. Outside, a tall, immaculately dressed man in his early fifties—Kulakov recognized him as a junior minister whose photograph had recently appeared in
Pravda
—shook hands with half a dozen men. A woman thrust a bouquet of lilacs wrapped in cellophane into his arms as he turned to climb into the plane. Three aides followed. Everyone was very polite, very deferential. The minister himself found places for his aides before he permitted himself to be ushered to a seat across the aisle from Kulakov.
A new breed
, Kulakov thought, taking in the cut of the minister’s suit, the new leather attaché case, the discreet hammer-and-sickle pin in his lapel.
This is how Gregori would have ended up if only he had …if only … if … if … if …
