The Debriefing (14 page)

“I assume,” says Nicholas Toland, “that your people will be going over all traffic in the compromised code to see what the damage is.”

“Berenson’s people over at DIA are onto it,” says Evans. “We both thought they would be in a better position to assess damage, given the fact that the compromised code dealt exclusively with military matters.” Evans glances at the paper in front of him. “Item: Notification of a defect in the low-level parallax input on the radar tracking system for SAM missiles. Up to now, gentlemen”—Evans pauses for effect—“we’ve only had probable confirmations. Here we get into our first positive confirmation. The Israelis have owned up to being aware of the defect for some time. They ran a computer study on SAM firings in the ’73
war and came up with the fact that supersonic passes at low altitudes led to an apparent displacement of the target and a subsequent lag in SAM tracking—”

“If I follow you right,” says the senator, smiling broadly, “the SAMs missed the target.”

“That’s what happened,” says Evans. “There is a defect that causes the SAMs to miss low-flying jets.”

“Uh huh.” The senator nods. “What else you got in that kit bag of yours?”

“Item,” continues Evans. He has their attention now; the senator and Nicholas Toland are leaning forward, their elbows on the table, their chins resting on their hands. “Eighteen letters from various people at the Soviet Ministry of Defense procurement, to Egyptian procurement officers, listing which spare parts for MIG 17s, 19s and 21s are available, and in what quantity. Again, we have firm confirmation. The handwriting on one of the eighteen letters matches that of a Soviet Air Force procurement officer who served a tour as Air Force attaché in Tokyo a few years ago. Also, the first shipment of spare parts to arrive in Alexandria since Kulakov’s defection—six crates of wheel-assembly housings for MIG 19s—matched exactly the notification of what was available.” Evans regards the paper again. “Item: A letter to the Soviet ambassador in Cairo from his brother-in-law, who happens to be the general in charge of Soviet logistical support facilities in Kazakstan on the Chinese frontier. Once again, we can offer you positive confirmation. The handwriting is the general’s; we have in our possession various letters he wrote to his wife while observing Warsaw Pact war games two years ago. In his letter to the ambassador, he mentions that the Chinese are thinning out their frontier forces and pulling units back to cities. This detail, too, has been confirmed by our satellite monitoring program.”

“That’s one program that’s paid its way, and then some,” says the senator. “Sorry, Charlie; go on.”

“Item: A letter to the daughter of the Soviet ambassador in
Cairo from a young man who signed only his first name, Dmitri. He’s apparently someone she knew from when she studied at Lomonosov University.”

“No confirmation on this one, I take it?” asks Ohm Berenson.

“On the contrary, we have positive confirmation,” says Evans. “The letter mentions, in passing, that there were bread shortages, and subsequent riots, in the city of Nordvik. One of the Russian dissidents in Moscow was visiting his sister in Nordvik at the time of the riots, and told Western reporters about it when he returned to Moscow. It was never published because they weren’t able to obtain independent confirmation.”

“We ought to play the riots back at them over Radio Free Europe,” comments the senator. “Don’t want to waste anything, do we?”

“It’s already been played back,” says Evans. “Went out a week ago.”

“Might have known you wouldn’t let a juicy one like that slip past you.” The senator chuckles.

“Item: Four personal letters, two typewritten, two handwritten, to embassy staffers in Cairo. One confirmation here. One of the handwritten notes was a love letter from the niece of the minister of heavy armaments to a female translator—”

“You did say female?” asks Nicholas Toland.

Evans nods. “We were able to confirm both the handwriting and the homosexuality; both young ladies traveled with a student group to Paris several years ago. The niece of the armaments minister was tagged for possible blackmail on the homosexuality if she ever came out again; the female translator is being approached in Cairo now. Okay, we’re getting down to the bottom of my list. Item: Instructions to the military intelligence resident in Cairo to notify a certain Ahmid that ten thousand Swiss francs has been paid into his numbered account in the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich. Here we were able to obtain one hundred percent confirmation. We traced the payment through our sources in Zurich—”

“Didn’t know you people were into numbered Swiss accounts,”
the senator says uneasily. “I reckon nothin’s what’s sacred these days.”

“The account was in the name of a Liechtenstein holding company, which in turn was controlled by a Panamanian company, and the Panamanian company was totally owned by one Khalid Tawfiq, who worked until the day before yesterday in the Egyptian cabinet secretariat.”

Prentice whistles. “The Russians had a man in the cabinet secretariat! This material’s got to be genuine—they’d never give that away.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” says the senator, “you’ve still got one item to go.” He wags his finger playfully at Evans. “I’ve been down the road before with you, Charlie, and I know you save the best for the last.”

“You’ve got my number, Senator,” admits Evans. “Item: A short handwritten note from someone named Khrustalev-Nosar on the Soviet SALT negotiating team in Geneva to his brother-in-law, a junior diplomat in the Soviet Embassy in Cairo. The note has five Russian words. It translates, ‘You owe me one hundred rubles.’ ”

The senator squints foxily. “What was the bet?”

“Well, we had some of our Swiss friends take a peek around one night when Khrustalev-Nosar was attending an embassy reception. We were looking for handwriting confirmation mainly, but I’ve got to admit, I was curious about the bet too. Our young Russian friend kept his letters in a shoe box—”

“That doesn’t sound too difficult for people with qualifications.” The senator laughs.

“The shoe box, Senator, was in a safe. The safe didn’t give them much trouble. The problem in these affairs is to get in and out again without leaving a calling card. Which means the lock has to be picked without physically damaging the safe. But more important, the contents has to be put back precisely the way it was found.”

“The bet,” the senator prompts Evans. “What was it?”

“In the safe,” Evans explains triumphantly, “was a letter to
Khrustalev-Nosar from his brother-in-law in Cairo offering to bet one hundred rubles there would be no SALT agreement before the negotiations adjourned.”

“I’m not sure I follow all this,” says Nicholas Toland.

“Me neither, I don’t follow,” says the senator. “There has been no SALT agreement, and there doesn’t look as if there’ll be one before adjournment—what’s that, in six weeks from now?—unless one side or the other gives in on Cruise Missile force levels. …” The senator’s voice trails off. His face lights up. “And your Russian would be in a position to know if they were going to give in to us?”

“He’s an expert in air-to-ground missile systems,” says Evans. “That’s what he’s in Geneva for.”

“So his claiming the hundred rubles
before
there’s an agreement means he knows there will be an agreement. Which means he knows the Russians plan to give in to us on the Cruise. Which means”—the senator slaps the table in excitement—“all we have to do is sit tight, stick to our guns, and we get the new SALT treaty on our terms!” The senator turns to Prentice. “You realize, Al, what you boys over at State are being handed?”

“It’s even better than it appears,” notes Evans. “It’s usual when you get a gem like this for the other side to know you have it, and that almost always undermines the usefulness of the gem. This time out, we have a gem that
they don’t know we have.”

Prentice is not convinced. “Khrustalev-Nosar will hear about the loss of the pouch.”

“Sure he’ll hear about the pouch,” agrees Evans, “but he won’t be sure that his letter was in it. Remember, he slipped a private note into the diplomatic bag going to Moscow. It could have gone on to Cairo in a dozen different ways. Even if he thinks we got our hands on his note, he’ll check his safe, see nothing is missing, and figure we could never know what the bet was about. Also, if he tells his superiors what he’s done, he’ll be
ruined, or even jailed. No, his instinct will be to sit tight and see what happens.”

“His brother-in-law in Cairo can’t blow the whistle on him either,” the senator chimes in, “because he couldn’t know the note was coming.”

“And Khrustalev-Nosar will never tell the brother-in-law he sent the note if he finds out later that he never got it,” says Evans.

Prentice shakes his head stubbornly. “What if this Khrustalev-Nosar is the patriotic type? What if, rather than see his country lose out in the negotiations, he owns up?”

“Careful,” the admiral cautions coolly. “You’re using the worst-case contingency.”

General laughter around the table.

“Touché, Admiral,” says Prentice, obviously annoyed but trying to hide it. “But where does it leave us?”

“Fair question, Al,” says Evans. “If he owns up, if he tells his superiors what’s in his five-word note, they will recall him and punish him immediately. First, because they’ll be furious at him. And secondly, they’ll do it to signal us that they are aware of the contents of the note, and hence we can no longer count on it being of value to us.”

“I take it you’re watching this Khrustalev-Nosar,” comments Prentice.

“Twenty-four on twenty-four.” Evans smiles. “Last night he had dinner with a woman clerk in the Czechoslovak Embassy. Then he slept with her. This morning he reported for work at nine. Yawning.” Evans glances at his watch. “I don’t know what he had for lunch yet, but I soon will.”

Evans leans back in his chair, purses his lips thoughtfully. All eyes turn to Stone. “Given all these confirmations,” says Nicholas Toland, “do you still hesitate to accept the defection as genuine?”

Stone refuses to let himself be intimidated. “It doesn’t feel right,” he says. “The pieces have fallen into place too easily.”
He shakes his head briskly. “My instinct tells me to go slow.”

Toland exchanges looks with Evans and shrugs. The senator snorts. “Looks to me, son, as if you’ve got a terminal case of euphobia.” To the others he explains, “That there means fear of good news.”

The admiral’s back, straight as a ramrod, is turned toward Stone. He lights up one of his precious Havanas (smuggled in to him from Moscow by the naval attaché at the embassy), lets his head sink back on his shoulders as he enjoys the sensation. Then, slowly, like a main battery searching for a target of opportunity, he swivels one hundred and eighty degrees to face Stone. “Out with it,” he orders, flicking on the microphone jammer. “In ten words or less, what makes you think he’s a phony?”

Stone, sitting in one corner of the admiral’s leather couch across the room, focuses on the framed clipping from the
New York Times
. It is dated March 18, 1970. Two sentences have been underlined in red. They represent the author John Barth as saying: “The fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting. I’m prepared to be bored by the man who murders me.” Stone remembers a framed clipping from
Pravda
that his grandfather had hung over his desk. It had also been underlined in red. It quoted Stalin, in one of his six-hour marathon speeches, as saying: “Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery.” At the time of the doctors’ purge, in the early fifties, his grandfather shattered the glass with his fist. Stone remembers the old man, his white hair falling over his eyes, switching on the desk lamp and picking out, with a tweezers, splinters of glass from his bleeding hand.

The admiral sucks patiently on his cigar.

Stone strides across the room and sinks into a seat across the desk from the admiral. “It seems to me that we can observe the same set of facts,” he says thoughtfully, “yet some of us see the tragedy of the human comedy, while others see the comedy of the human tragedy.”

“Which do you see, Stone?”

“I’ve got a foot in both camps, Admiral,” Stone says, smiling self-consciously. “Sometimes I go one way, sometimes the other, depending, I suppose, on what I had for breakfast, or whether the last time I made love, I made it well.”

“Hmm.” The admiral studies his cigar with admiration. “What you’re saying, if I have it right, is the hell with consistency.”

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” says Stone. “That’s Oscar Wilde.”

“No one to my knowledge has ever accused you of being unimaginative,” comments the admiral.

Stone closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and plunges. “I’ve got a gut feeling, Admiral. Nothing more. No facts. No glaring inconsistency. No chapter and verse.”

The admiral treats himself to another puff. “I’m listening.”

Stone leans over the edge of the admiral’s desk. “Everything that happened to Kulakov—to his daughter, his son, his wife running off with someone, the actress violating his sense of manhood, then the business of being accused of lying about how his father died—all this represents enough personal tragedy for two lifetimes.
But it all happened to Kulakov during an eight-month period.”

“Hmm.” The admiral is not overly impressed.

“Then there’s the duty officer who made the fatal mistake of giving Kulakov an overseas run,” continues Stone. “He was obviously a war hero—he was missing an arm, and wore a chestful of medals, including the Order of Stalin—yet he was still a major.”

“Maybe he wasn’t politically reliable,” offers the admiral.

Stone shakes his head sharply. “He wouldn’t have been in a politically sensitive job, dispatching couriers around the world, if he was unreliable. And since the defection, we can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared as surely as if he never existed.”

“Maybe the senator hit the nail on the head,” says the admiral. “Maybe the duty officer was shot.”

“It’s possible,” Stone admits grudgingly.