Free The Debriefing by Robert Littell Page A

silence, Thro reaches across the table and makes small circles on the back of Stone’s wrist with a fingertip. “I’m desperately sorry about what happened,” she says softly. She avoids looking him in the eyes. “You know it was an accident, Stone. If I could undo it, I’d give anything. It would mean a great deal to me if you didn’t hold it against me.”
    “If it turns out all right in court,” Stone replies coldly, “I won’t hold it against you.”
    Her voice instantly changes tone; the circles stop. “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” she snaps.
    “What you want to hear,” says Stone, “is not my voice, but an echo of your own.”
    “We all of us want to hear echoes,” says Thro sadly. “We need to hear our voices come back at us. Echoes give us the illusion we’re not alone.”
    Outside, the guards trudge through the new snow with the body of a dog that lunged into the electrified fence during the night when he spotted a fox on the other side. “That’s the second one we’ve lost this year,” notes the oldest of the three men in the room .
    One of the aides, wearing the insignias of a lieutenant colonel on his uniform, scans the batch of morning cables. “Nothing from Geneva,” he notes worriedly .
    “Too early for Geneva,” says the older man. “This kind of thing has to ripen like a peach.”
    A second lieutenant colonel knocks once on the door, which is made of metal and not wood .
    “Come,” the older man calls .

    The second lieutenant colonel, a squat man with a thin scar over his left eye, hands the older man a folder with the words “Incoming—One-Time Pad” and “Warning: Burn both pad and message after delivery” typed on it. The older man scans the message, written in a precise, slanted longhand, then looks up. “The peach is ripening, but it’s not ready for the table yet,” he comments, and he passes the message, which originated with the Soviet military attaché in Washington, to his aides. It reads:
    “Americans appear very excited with catch. Contents of pouch in CIA hands. Courier accompanied by American male in civilian clothes landed at SAC base but disappeared and untraceable to any known intelligence organization. Assume he being debriefed. But by whom?”

CHAPTER
    4
    Swallowing, digesting, defecating and remembering all come more easily now. His mind still wanders, but never very far afield; Stone is usually able to pick up where they left off the day before with a simple, “You were saying that …” And for the first night since he’s been at the farm, which is three weeks and two days, Kulakov didn’t wake up screaming.
    “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he is telling Stone and Thro over the breakfast table. He looks excitedly from one to the other as he describes a television quiz program he saw the previous afternoon. “They opened a curtain and there was a dishwashing machine, a color television and a sewing machine. They said all three were brand-new, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Ah! New, old—what do such things matter? They gave the girl three price tags. She had thirty seconds to race across the stage and put them on the items. If she put the right tag on the right item, she got to keep it. When she discovered she had all three right, she started to cry and leaped into the arms of the announcer.” Kulakov stirs a spoonful of jam into his tea, noisily blows on the cup to cool it, sips while it is still, by Stone’s standards, scalding. “What I don’t understand,” says Kulakov, “is the advertising.”
    “What don’t you understand about it?” Thro asks.
    “In the Soviet Union,” Kulakov explains, “they only advertise products nobody buys. And nobody is buying because they aren’t well made. The products that are good don’t need publicity.Word spreads quickly. You could have a queue a kilometer long ten minutes after it goes on sale. In your country, I can’t make out whether the government is advertising the