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Authors: Robert Littell
Tags: Thriller & Suspense
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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 onjust 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
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
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