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famous. “Picture it,” she says, her voice pitched high, her penciled eyebrows dancing. “She starts off by choosing the dessert. Then she figures out what cheese goes with that dessert, then decides what main course goes with that cheese, and then selects what guests go with that main course!”
    “She must be Jewish,” quips the man in charge of Clothing and Accessories. “I mean, organizing her dinners from right to left, sort of thing. …” His voice trails off. The moment is awkward. Everyone is aware that Stone is Jewish. Not to laugh would be more noticeable than to laugh, so everyone laughs.
    Stone, shuffling through his notes, finally looks up. His voice is low, modulated; his manner is slightly nervous. He is uncomfortable with groups, and feels more at home when dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. “I thought,” he begins—he speaks, as he always does in meetings of this kind, in Russian—“we’d keep this session down to section chiefs—”
    “Better fewer but better,” interjects Mozart. All the section chiefs recognize the phrase; it is the title of the last article Lenin ever wrote. More laughter. Even Stone is obliged to smile.

    “Here’s the drill,” says Stone. “First and foremost, penetration readiness must not be allowed to suffer. One of the advantages of access to a hot defector is that it gives us a way of updating our penetration files. Everyone can benefit from a defector—Clothing and Accessories, Identity, Entries and Exits, Internal Contacts. That having been said, let me add that in this case, there’s more to it—a good deal more. Your normal defector is debriefed for information, and then the information is checked and double-checked. Our defector won’t be debriefed for information; he has none. He’s a run of the mill military courier who has been carting around secrets for years without ever getting to see them himself.”
    “Aside from updating our penetration readiness, why debrief?” asks the woman who follows the soccer scores.
    “The admiral feels, and I agree, that if anything’s fishy about this affair—to dot the i ’s, if it’s a Soviet operation—we’re not going to find out about it by looking at the paper. That would have been prepared meticulously. No, the place to look is the defector himself. Now, the few times we’ve done this kind of thing in the past, we’ve taped the whole debriefing, transcribed and distributed the end product for in-house use. This time around I propose we work somewhat differently. I’ll handle the actual debriefing myself. I’ll tape every morning for three or four hours, depending on how much he can take. We’ll transcribe in the afternoon and you’ll start in on the material the next day. Mozart here will run this end of it.” Stone is looking directly at Mozart now. “What you’ll do is make lists of every fact that is checkable: addresses, phone numbers, ages, descriptions of people and places, dates that certain things happened. Everything. Then you’ll distribute the list in-house to the section chiefs, who will start to run down the confirmations.”
    “Sounds simple enough,” says Planes and Trains. “If everything checks out, he gets the Topology stamp of approval on the inside of his left thigh.”
    “Wrong,” snaps Stone. “Bear in mind that nobody can accurately remember every detail of his life—except someone whohas memorized an identity that’s not his. Which is why I’ve always told you, in working up identities for penetrations, to build in, without the agent’s knowledge, some minor errors.”
    “The trouble is,” the man in charge of Identity says thoughtfully, “they may have done the same thing.”
    “They may have,” agrees Stone. “But they won’t program any inconsistencies into an identity they’ve created. And it will be up to us to see if we can come up with inconsistencies. Which is what all the checking will be about.”
    “What about the pouch?” asks