Deep Lie

by Stuart Woods

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Now, let me take you through the biography in broad strokes to give you the picture. Your name, as I have said, is Carl Bengt Swenson. Your parents emigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1948, vouched for by cousins who had been in Minnesota for a generation. You attended the University of Minnesota as an art student. In the spring of your senior year, both your parents were killed when a tornado struck the family farm. You sold the land and went to New York City to be an artist. There, you spent some years trying to paint successfully, but failed, and when your inheritance began to run out, you turned to commercial illustration. It was tough at first, but gradually, you established yourself, and now you do quite nicely. You earned eighty-four thousand dollars last year. You live in the basement and ground floor of a Greenwich Village townhouse and work in your home studio. You have a girl friend, whose picture is in the wallet, suitably signed. It’s a quiet life, though, and you don’t have many acquaintances, working at home as you do. An agent solicits work for you and delivers it on completion. Most of your clients have never met you.

  “Tell me,” Helder said, “what will happen if someone tries to check on any of this?”

  “It will hold up perfectly,” Jones said, “for the simple reason that Carl Swenson is real. For a short time, during your mission, he will leave New York for a holiday, and for that time, you will be he. He will cooperate perfectly, because he is addicted to heroin and cocaine, and his supply of these drugs is controlled by people who are sympathetic to our efforts. Oh, before I forget …” Jones took a small tape recorder from a desk drawer and handed Helder a sheet of paper. “Speak those words into the tape recorder, please, in your best midwestern accent.”

  Helder picked up the paper and read, “Hi, this is Carl Swenson. If you’re a friend of mine, I’m on vacation for a couple of weeks; just leave your name and number at the tone, and I’ll call you when I get back. Oh, if you’re a burglar, I was just kidding about being away; I’m out feeding the Dobermans at the moment.”

  Jones pocketed the cassette. “This will be in Swenson’s telephone answering machine at the right moment.” Helder spent the rest of the afternoon with Jones and made an appointment for the following day. By dinnertime, he felt oddly like a dual personality.

  “Good evening, Carl,” Ragulin said, smiling crookedly at him as she slid onto the barstool. They were dining at Caprice, Malibu’s rendering of a good French restaurant.

  He was surprised. “You know?”

  She ordered a Campari and soda. “Of course. I’m meant to help rehearse you. “Tell me, what fraternity were you in at college?”

  Helder shook his head and tried to look bitter. “I didn’t join a fraternity; the idea seemed stupid to me.”

  “Oh, really? I seem to remember seeing you at a rush party our freshman year.”

  He felt a sharp prick of what would have been panic had the situation been real. So this is what it would be like. “Oh, were you at Minnesota?”

  “How soon you forget, Carl. Don’t you remember the little fling we had during our freshman year? I’m a bit hurt.”

  Helder smiled. “I certainly would have remembered, I think. My freshman year wasn’t that exciting. And you’re right, I was at some of the rush parties, but I didn’t get a bid. They were looking for athletes, not art students.”

  “Well,” she said, opening the menu, “you’ve obviously been romantically deprived. I can see I’m going to have to make it up to you.

  They dined on pate maison, coq au vin, and a bottle of the Beaune-Greves, then walked, hand-in-hand, back to Helder’s room. It amazed Helder that he hadn’t tired of making love to her; even more that she didn’t seem to have tired of making love to him. Still, they were through the first rush of passion; the relationship was changing, somehow. He took her face in his hands and kissed her lightly, then again, more firmly. She came back with tongue and teeth, but he held her away, looked at her for a moment, and kissed her softly again.

  She stared back at him, her eyes wide, her lips trembling. “This isn’t supposed to happen, you know. It isn’t part of your training. When this is over, we won’t see each other again.”

  “Yes, we will,” he said firmly. “I promise you. Believe it.”

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I do believe you. Is this possible? Can you make it happen?”

  “Majorov has promised me that when this assignment is over, anything will be possible. I believe him.”

  She turned her head and put it on his shoulder. “Majorov can make it happen, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “I’m going to give Majorov what he wants,” Helder said. “I’m going to make it my business to amaze him with what I can do. And when it’s over, he’ll give me what I want.”

  “Yes,” she said dully. “We must both give Majorov what he wants.”

  They stood for a long time in the dark, holding each other.

  6

  RULE sat down and inserted her key in the computer terminal that rested on the typewriter shelf of her desk. When the monitor had warmed up, the date and time appeared the upper right hand corner of the screen, and a single sentence was centered.

  TELL OLD COSMO WHO YOU ARE, PLEASE.

  She tapped a ten-digit number into the keypad. There was a brief pause while the computer, which was called Cosmo for no other reason than that the name had popped into the mind of whoever did the original programming, checked the number against its files and started to record. Rule knew that, at any time, somebody in the computer center could check the record of her computer usage and learn immediately what programs she had run and when.

  GOOD MORNING, MRS. RULE. YOU’RE UP EARLY. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?

  Rule had long stopped being irritated that the programmers had a sense of humor; anyway, she had begun to think of Cosmo as practically a person. She typed in IDMUG.

  FILE DESIGNATION?

  REVIEW, she typed. She didn’t have a file number, but no one would think it odd that she was reviewing photographs. She did it a couple of times a week.

  NATIONALITY? Cosmo asked.

  SOVIET, she typed back.

  LOCALE?

  D.C.

  SEX?

  M.

  DESCRIPTION?

  N/A.

  LEGAL?

  YES.

  INTERVAL?

  She typed a one.

  TYPE P FOR PAUSE, C FOR CONTINUE, ESC TO LEAVE PROGRAM.

  Mug shots of all male Soviet embassy personnel began to appear on the screen at one-second intervals. Rule was so accustomed to this drill that she didn’t need a longer look. She watched the faces closely as they went by, pausing now and then for a closer examination when the subject was the right age and shape. Nothing. She ran methodically through the legals in every Eastern Bloc embassy in Washington. Still nothing.

  ANYTHING ELSE, MRS. RULE?

  NO, she typed.

  LISTEN, WHY DON’T WE HAVE A DRINK AFTER WORK?

  Cosmo said this to all the girls. She wondered if the director of the computer center knew it. Probably, she decided.

  GET LOST, she typed, and switched off the terminal.

  One thing about Cosmo, you couldn’t hurt his feelings. Sometimes she wished you could. The newly approved computer expansion would bring in voice activation, and Rule wasn’t sure she was looking forward to it.

  As usual, even before she had come to a rational conclusion about her problem, she knew how she felt about it: she was depressed. When she thought about it rationally, it didn’t help. Nothing added up. First of all, the face didn’t register. The face should have been there in the computer. Every visa photograph of every opposition legal was in the computer; it was updated daily. Surveillance wasn’t the sort of work illegals did, ever; they were too expensive and too valuable to risk, so the guys had to be legals. And yet, the one whose face she’d seen just wasn’t there. It wasn’t Will they were tailing, either; they had been with her coming and goi
ng. And there were only two of them—that was inexcusably substandard work. Still, maybe they had expected her to be at Will’s all night, maybe the other two were cooping somewhere, waiting for daylight. Maybe.

  She knew what she had to do: she had to go down to Alan Nixon’s office and report it. That was procedure; you went to your immediate superior, and you reported it. She stood up. She could already see the look on Alan’s face: imagining things; intuition again. She gritted her teeth. Still, he’d have to go through the motions. They’d put a home team on her, day and night, until they made the watchers and figured it out. She hesitated. She wouldn’t be able go to Will’s, couldn’t even phone him. They’d sweep her phones, then put in a tap. She didn’t want his name turning up in the reports. She sat back down. She didn’t want to stop seeing him, not even for a couple of weeks. With Peter at his father’s, Will was the only company she had. Well, not the only company, but the only company worth bothering with. The home team would make her go out all the time, too; they’d want her on the move, the better to watch the watchers. She’d stir up the whole social cauldron, and when the incident was wrapped, it would still be bubbling; she’d be left with a lot of telephone calls she wouldn’t want to answer, invitations she wouldn’t want to accept. Shit. She picked up a stack of cables and started to scan them. She’d think about it tomorrow, that was what she’d do. Scarlett O’Hara had been nobody’s fool.

  She speed-read the cables, the stuff that came in from every embassy, every station every day; fodder, mulch, the compost of intelligence, not very much of it very interesting. How many facts like these were somewhere in her brain, waiting? When she had finished the stack, most of it was consciously forgotten. Only a few random pieces of information hovered in the front of her brain, for no particular reason: 2,000 American-made Ingram submachine guns intended for the British Special Air Service commandos had been stolen from a depot near Aldershot, in Surrey, IRA suspected; a woman member of the German Bundestag had a girl friend stashed in a Bonn flat, as well as a husband at home in her constituency; the Soviets had markedly increased the teaching of the Swedish language in their universities and language training centers, apparently beginning two years before; the vestibule outside the chemistry lab at Moscow University had a strong odor of urine; the laundries at two Soviet Marine Infantry training camps had had a sudden drop in the number of shirts laundered weekly, 16 percent in one case, 20 percent in the other. There had been a further rash of what the Stockholm station called “periscope fever”—purported sightings among Swedes of Soviet submarines, minisubs, and frogmen—since the front-page story of the Swedish fisherman whose nets had become caught on what was claimed was a Soviet sub. It all seemed routine, as did the rest of her day, but when at six o’clock she packed it in and went home, she had had a better day than she knew.

  All the way home, she kept looking in the rearview mirror. Nothing. Maybe they had dropped her. Or maybe they were getting better at their work.

  7

  OSKARSSON looked with silent horror at what used to be his left hand. It was the first time he had been able to bring himself to do so. There was only a thumb left. There had been infection in the stumps and two operations in the weeks since he had lost the boat; now there were not even any knuckles left. When he had recovered enough from the initial loss of blood and the surgery, he had refused further pain killers. The pain seemed all he had left, the pain and the rage.

  The doctor gently wrapped the stump in cotton padding and tied a sling around Oskarsson’s neck. “There’s no more need for a dressing,” he said. “This is just to protect it from being knocked about until the healing is complete and the inflammation gone. I’d keep it in the sling until the soreness is gone. When you’re feeling better, we’ll see about getting you a prosthesis.”

  “Huh?” Oskarsson blurted.

  “An artificial hand, or partial hand, rather. It won’t give you much more than something to oppose the thumb, but it will improve the aesthetics.”

  Oskarsson stared blankly at the young man.

  The doctor held up his own left hand and waggled the thumb. “With the prosthesis, you’ll be able to make more use of the thumb, and the stump won’t look so … uh, it’ll look better.”

  Oskarsson stood up and hitched his trousers with his good hand. The clothes hung loosely on him; he had lost a lot of weight. “Thank you, doctor,” he said. “You’ve been very good to me here. I am grateful.”

  Gunnar was waiting for him in the hallway. In the parking lot a man took his picture with a flash camera, and another man tried to ask him questions, but he pushed past them and got into Gunnar’s Volvo. There had been a lot about the incident in the papers in the beginning, but he thought they might have forgotten by now. Submarines were news in Sweden these days, and Oskarsson was the only person who had been harmed by one, except for poor Ebbe. “I want to go to the grave,” he said to Gunnar.

  Gunnar sighed and nodded. He threaded through the streets to the east of Stockholm and stopped at a large, municipal cemetery. Oskarsson got out of the car and followed his son to a plot squeezed between two others. He stood and stared at the plain stone with its name and dates. “Is this the best you could do?” he asked.

  Gunnar bit his lip and looked away. “Papa, we don’t belong to a church in Stockholm. This is the way everyone is buried; please don’t make it sound as if we’ve neglected him in some way.”

  “I’m sorry, boy,” Oskarsson said.

  “Just remember that we miss him, too,” Gunnar said. “Please keep that in mind with Ilsa. She’s taken it well, but I’ll need your help with her.”

  “I’ll be out of her way,” Oskarsson said. “I want to get home soon, anyway.” He got back into the car.

  “Listen, Papa … we want you to come and live with us. While you were in the hospital we sold the flat and bought a place out in the archipelago. You’ll like it.”

  Oskarsson shook his head. “No, I know you’ll want to be alone; I don’t want to be a burden.”

  “Papa, I’ve brought your things up here and given up your room. There’s nothing for you down there any more.”

  Oskarsson felt suddenly uprooted and desolate. He had sold the house when his wife had died and moved into lodgings in the village. It had been strange at first, but he had had no one to keep house for him, and he had gotten used to it. Now, apparently, he was homeless.

  “Come for a while, Papa, you’ll love it out in the archipelago; we’re right on the water, and it’s beautiful. You’ll have your own room. Try it just for a while; then, if you want to get a place of your own, well, there’s the insurance money from the boat. I’ve opened an account for you at my bank.”

  Oskarsson said nothing. He leaned his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. Something had happened to him these last weeks. He had no will to resist Gunnar. He let himself be swept along, and gave himself to whatever was coming.

  The house was out past Gustavsberg, and Gunnar had been right; it was right on the water, and the place was beautiful. There were painters working in the living room, and Ilsa was supervising a man fitting cupboards in the kitchen. She looked nervous when she saw him. Ilsa had been a model in her youth, and even now, pushing forty, she held onto her fragile good looks. There were wrinkles here and there, Oskarsson could see, and she wore too much makeup, and her jeans were too tight, but she was still pretty. He allowed himself to be pecked on the cheek.

  “Hello, Papa,” she said.

  He didn’t like that, much, being called Papa by this woman he hardly knew. They had seen little of each other over the years.

  “Your room’s ready; come, I’ll show you.” She led the way upstairs and along a corridor, into a large corner room. It was comfortably furnished, more so than the rest of the house, he noticed. The furniture from their flat didn’t fill the place. His clothes were hung in the closet and folded neatly into a chest of drawers. On a dressing table, there was a small, gold cup.

  Ilsa picked it
up and handed it to him. “Ebbe won it rowing last year. It was his favorite thing.”

  Oskarsson felt the smooth metal and read the inscription.

  “We’ll leave you to let you get settled for a bit, Papa,” Gunnar said. “Maybe you’d like a nap.”

  “We’ll have some tea as soon as they’re done in the kitchen,” Ilsa said. “Come down whenever you like.”

  Oskarsson nodded. There was a rocking chair facing the window. He walked over to it and sat down facing the water, still holding Ebbe’s little cup. He might have arrived on a different planet. He had spent his life on a stretch of the south coast of Sweden among familiar people, places, and boats. Here, in this strange house, in this place, he was an alien. Even his son and daughter-in-law were strangers to him. He gazed out the window over the water, past the rocky islands, out to the Baltic. Here, only the water was familiar. The water and the rage. He held the little gold cup and rocked gently. The rage would never leave him, until he found some way to purge it. Tears spilled from his eyes and ran down his weathered face, now pale. It was the first time he had wept. He would never do it again.

  8

  RULE sat in her office and gazed disconsolately at the withering plants on the windowsill. Outside, in the Virginia countryside, a profusion of greenery mocked her efforts. She couldn’t remember the names of these plants, but she had been assured by Molly, a department secretary whose cubicle resembled the National Botanical Gardens, that, “Even you couldn’t kill these.”

  Wrong. She was convinced that her very pores exuded some invisible, toxic mist that choked any green thing unfortunate enough to fall within range. The original Black Thumb, she was. This ability to wither, it seemed to her, had begun to extend itself into her work, for the Majorov research had come to what, seemingly, was a dead end. She had raped the Agency’s computer banks, running tapes extending back to the formation of the CIA in the early fifties. Before that, there were only the OSS files from World War II. In the thirties, when Stalin was decimating the ranks of the Red Army and the Communist Party, only the State Department and the army had conducted anything like intelligence analysis; each had limited its efforts to its immediate concerns, and God knew where the records were. She had been unable to locate a single fact about Majorov other than what she had presented to EXCOM TWO, and if she had meant that as an appetizer, nobody was hungry. She had sent memos to her counterparts at the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency asking for any data, and there had been only silence.