Deep Lie Read online

  She shuffled listlessly through the cables and reports on her desk. She had already handed out the morning’s assignments to her researchers, and now she was faced with reading her own stack of material, sifting through it for a relevant fact on any one of hundreds of subjects, files, and cases. This, if the thriller writers only knew, was ninety percent of what intelligence was all about; reading, remembering, associating, analyzing, and occasionally, discovering. It was mornings like this that made her sometimes yearn for foreign duty, where there was, at least, the stimulus of outside contact. There was a rap on her open door.

  She looked up to see a man she barely knew, Martin, his name was, one of those people in the bowels of the Agency who did Godknew-what.

  “Morning, Mrs. Rule,” the man said. “I’ve got something you asked for here.” He held up a large brown envelope.

  “Come in and have a seat,” Rule said, grateful for any interruption. “What have you got?” ’

  Martin slid a photographic print from the envelope. “Satellite shot, three days ago, the Latvian coast.”

  What had she asked for in Latvia, for God’s sake? “Let’s have a look,” she said, gathering up her cables and reports and shoving them into a drawer, leaving her desk clear.

  Martin laid the photograph before her. “This is the south side of the city of Liepaja.”

  “Mmmm,” Rule said.

  Martin pointed. “This is sort of a tidal lake, except there’s not much tide in the Baltic. There’s an entrance to the sea just here.”

  Rule pointed to a widespread group of buildings at the lake’s edge. “This looks something like a college campus,” she said, running her eyes over the photograph. “Is that a dock with some small boats?” She indicated the water’s edge.

  “Right, it’s a little marina, sort of. Nothing but pleasure boats. Best guess on the adjoining area is its some sort of all-service sports complex.” Martin indicated various spots on the photograph. “Tennis courts, track, soccer field, pretty extensive. You’ve got a couple of dozen runners scattered around, too, and the nonathletic pedestrians are wearing both army and navy uniforms. We can actually read rank on some of them.”

  “Looks like a unit drilling,” Rule said, pointing to a group of men formed in ranks.

  “Nope, running,” Martin replied. “They’re all wearing sweat clothes.

  Rule nodded. “What’s here that I asked for?”

  Martin pointed to a car park next to one of the buildings. “Exotic car. A Mercedes, either a 380 or 500 SE sedan, silver metallic paint. The Soviets don’t use metallic paint on any of their cars, and apart from the German Embassy in Moscow and their various consulates, I’ll bet there aren’t three of the big Mercedes in the USSR Whoever’s driving it is important enough to turn down a Chaika or a Zil limo in favor of a foreign wagon. Never mind who has the juice to get one, who’d have the chutzpah to drive it around?”

  Rule stared at the car. “Pity you can’t see the license plates from overhead; that would tell us something. Listen, let’s ask NSA for some more angle on this place. I’d like to see some building entrances—we might even pick up a face—and I’d sure like to see the designation on this car’s plates. The Soviets tag everything with some sort of code—foreign diplomat, trade official, journalist, Central Committee—and the city of registration is on every plate, too.”

  Martin shrugged. “I’ve no idea when the next satellite pass will be over the area, and I don’t have the authority to ask for the shots. The DDI, Nixon, will have to do that.”

  “Right. I’ll handle the request, then. Thanks a lot, Martin, this is the first break I’ve had on this one. It may not go anywhere, but who knows? Can you leave this with me?”

  “Sure, but I’ll need a tight receipt to replace it in the file.”

  Rule wrote out a receipt, mentioning the file number and date of the photograph, and Martin went on his way. She dictated a memo to NSA for Alan Nixon’s signature and made a routine request to operations for any HUMINT, human intelligence, on the Liepaja site, and gave the tape to her secretary. “Do this now, will you, Jeff?” Some joker in personnel had given her a male secretary. He liked it even less than she did.

  “Don’t you want the weekly summaries first?” he whined, waving at what was already in his typewriter.

  “Now, Jeff, please, and if you screw around, I might miss a satellite pass, so move it, will you?”

  He sighed and whipped the paper from the machine.

  Rule went back to her desk and pored over the photograph. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a campus, and she had learned to listen to her hunches. There were too many buildings to just house athletes, given the extent of the visible training facilities. They were teaching something here. She stared hard at the group of running men. Athletes didn’t train in ranks, not even in the Soviet Union; training was too individually planned for that. This was a military unit of some sort; these men were training together for something, and it wasn’t the next Olympics. She found a loup in her desk, laid it flat on the photograph, and worked her way around it. There was not a sign of anything military; not a firing range, even. That was interesting; an athletics training camp would certainly have a firing range; shooting was an Olympic event.

  She ran the loup around the perimeter of the facility. There was a double fence, and she’d bet the area in between was mined. Who needed a double fence around a sports center? She looked at the boats and wished Will were here to tell her about them. They looked entirely pleasure-oriented to her. There were some dinghies drawn up on a beach, and from a scale imprinted on the photograph, she reckoned the largest boat in the marina to be about thirty-five feet long. She was puzzled that a long stretch of the water’s edge above the marina was edged with a what looked like a concrete curb. It reminded her of a lake’s edge in a park, but there,was no grass, just more of the same shale that made up the beach. She tried and failed to think of any good reason why anyone would want the water’s edge curbed.

  Jeff came in with the memo. “You want me to take this to Mr. Nixon?”

  “No, I’ll do it,” she said, taking the paper from him. “You get back to the summaries.” She hoofed down the hallway to Nixon’s bigger, plusher office. The door was closed, and his secretary was filing her nails. “Anybody in there with him?” Rule asked.

  “No, but he said he didn’t want to be disturbed,” the young woman said. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Just between me and you, I think he’s reading the new Len Deighton. Tell you what, I’ll go to the john, and you just barge in.”

  Rule laughed, waited for the girl to disappear, rapped once on the door and opened it before Nixon could reply. His feet were on the desk, and he nearly spilled himself from the chair, taking care to drop the book in the process.

  “Jesus, Kate, you scared me half to death.”

  “Sorry, Alan, I did knock.”

  He shuffled some papers on his desk. “What is it?” he asked testily.

  “Just need your signature on a memo to NSA for some satellite shots.”

  “Shots of what?”

  “I asked everybody for a sweep on exotic cars in the Soviet Union; one turned up in a satshot of the Latvian coast. Interesting place. Seems to be some sort of sports training facility, but it smells funny to me. There’s a big Mercedes in the parking lot, too, and it’s not the sort of place the German ambassador would be visiting. I’d like some angle to see if we can read the plate.” She put the memo in front of him.

  Nixon regarded it with distaste. “Kate, do you know what a satellite run costs?”

  She did, and she knew he didn’t. “Well, they’re not going to bill us for it, Alan, it’ll come out of their budget. Come on,” she cajoled, “it’ll give the layabouts over there something to do.”

  “This is that—what’s his name? Finsov?”

  “Firsov, aka Majorov. I sent you the sheet on him. I’ve also made a request to ops for HUMINT, but I’m not optimistic. The last couple
of years, I seem to have had more and more trouble getting information collected at ground level. Sometimes I think Senator Carr and his committee are right—the agency’s putting too many bucks into hardware and not enough into training your good, old-fashioned spies.”

  “This Majorov is one of your intuition numbers, isn’t it, Kate? Every now and then you get a wild hair up … ah, in your ear, and you go shooting off on a tangent.”

  “This is no tangent, Alan.” She felt herself blushing. “Well, not exactly. This guy was deputy director in charge of the First Chief Directorate. He’s within my province.”

  ”‘Was’ is the operative word, Kate. He’s not there any more. Probably out in the Gulag somewhere, paying for his sins.”

  Rule shrugged. “Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Anyway, it can’t hurt to know where he is. From the little I know about him, I’d prefer it if he were in the Gulag. He’s a little too swift for my taste. I like plodders, and he sure ain’t one of those. I can promise you, wherever he is, he’s up to no good.”

  “Oh, all right,” Nixon sighed, reaching for a pen, “but I’m probably just going to get a snotty memo back about allocation of resources. You know how those guys are.” He signed the paper.

  Rule snatched it up and started for the door. “Thanks, Alan, I’ll get this right off.”

  “Kate!” He stopped her in her tracks.

  “Don’t come back to me for any more high tech requests on this think unless you can come up with something of substance, you hear? Sniff around, if it doesn’t interfere with your other work, but I’m not going to start pissing away resources with nothing but your … intuition to back me up. Last time I went with that I got strung up by my … thumbs, you’ll remember.”

  “Sure, Alan, I promise,” she said, then fled the office with her cheeks burning. She had spent six weeks a year earlier chasing down a Soviet GRU man who, it turned out, had died of a coronary at his desk two years before. Nixon trotted that out whenever he wanted her leash kept short. This one wasn’t like that, though, she thought. This was a live one, she knew it. Nixon had stopped himself short of saying ‘woman’s’ intuition, but that was what he had been thinking. It was one of the things she had to put up with.

  9

  HELDER filed into a small theater with some fifty other men and took a seat in the front row. In the two weeks since his arrival, it was the first time he had attended any training with others. He looked about him at the others, and there was a sameness he had not encountered before. In any Soviet military unit one could expect to see evidence of the multiethnic makeup of the Union of Soviet Republics, with its fifteen states and dozens of ethnic types and languages. He knew that the majority of many army units, in particular, did not even speak Russian and had to be commanded through a limited number of basic commands. But here everyone spoke not just Russian, but English and/or Swedish, and in appearance, the group looked quite uniformly Scandinavian or, at least, North European.

  At the front of the theater, before a blank wall, was a table on which lay a number of small weapons, some of which he had never seen before. Hanging on the arm of each seat was a pair of industrial earmuffs, the sort worn by both civilian and military ground personnel around jet airplanes. As soon as they were settled, Majorov strode into the room, dressed in military-style coveralls and followed by a man carrying two metal ammunition boxes. Majorov walked to the center of the theater and stood in front of the table holding the weapons.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, smiling slightly. “We have now completed the acquisition of your small arms, and I would like to introduce you to them. In general, our operation will be conducted in three waves: the infiltrators, the shock troops, and the conventional troops.” Majorov picked up two small automatic pistols and held them up to be seen. “Those of you who will lead infiltrator teams will be given sidearms only, for obvious reasons. Just as obvious, these arms must not excite undue interest should you or any of your team fall into opposition hands; therefore, you will be armed with either the well-known Walther PPK, which is, of course, very similar to our standard-issue Makarov—or should I say, vice-versa?” There was a low chuckle from the group, who knew that the Soviet Makarov was a direct copy of the Walther PP. Majorov continued, “. .. or the Beretta Model 84 double-action pistol, both firing the nine millimeter short cartridge. All the weapons issued will appear used, but I assure you that each pistol has been dismantled and inspected and, when necessary renovated. Most of you will have already fired these weapons at one time or another, so I will not waste your time with gratuitous information about them.”

  Majorov replaced the pistols on the table and picked up another pistol, unfamiliar to Helder. “Now we come to the weapons to be carried by the shock teams, where we are unconcerned with weapons being identified. This, gentlemen, is the SIG-Sauer model P226 self-loading pistol, manufactured by the Swiss arms company, Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft, jointly with the West German firm of J.P. Sauer and Son. This pistol was developed by SIG for the competition for a new sidearm for the U.S. Armed Forces and Coast Guard. The Americans were too stupid to adopt it. It is, in my very well informed opinion, the finest automatic pistol available. The P226 fires the nine millimeter parabellum cartridge, loaded from a magazine containing fifteen rounds.” There was a murmur of approval from the audience.

  Majorov returned the pistol to the table and picked up a short, boxy weapon in one hand and a thick black cylinder in the other. “And now for the more interesting of your new weapons, gentlemen.” He began screwing the cylinder onto the short muzzle of the weapon. “This is the Ingram Model 10 submachine gun, also known as the Mac 10, of which I am sure you have heard. We have procured some two thousand of these superb weapons by especially devious means. This weapon has a number of advantages. Although amazingly compact, like, say, the Israeli Uzi, it fires a forty-five caliber cartridge, with all the resultant improvement in impact, from a thirty-round magazine at a rate of eleven hundred and forty-five rounds per minute. The cylinder, here, is not a conventional silencer, but a suppressor, which is designed to let the bullet reach its full velocity, thereby eliminating the usual thump from a silencer. All the opposition hears is the crack of the bullet becoming supersonic as it passes, which makes it impossible to tell from what position you are firing. I think you will agree that this is a distinct advantage in the sort of operation for which we are training. This weapon is to be carried by teams operating in open countryside, where noise and muzzle flash would give away our positions, and Sergeant Petrov here, “he nodded toward the man who had followed him into the room, “will be demonstrating it later and instructing you in its use. I think you will like it.”

  Majorov replaced the submachine gun and picked up another weapon, like nothing Helder had ever seen. There was a buzz of comment among the audience; apparently, no one else had seen one, either. It seemed to be a flat metal box, about three feet long, two inches wide at one end and six at the other. It would not have resembled a weapon at all had it not been for a trigger guard and pistol grip in the middle and a combination sight/carrying handle on top. Majorov cradled the thing in his arms and began to speak. “Now for the new weapon to be carried by teams operating in urban areas. In 1982, the American armed forces initiated something called the Close Assault Weapons System program, aimed at developing a new kind of combat shotgun. A number of weapons manufacturers expressed an interest in the project, and the West German firm of Heckler and Koch, whose work you all know well, developed a prototype, one of which, along with a complete set of drawings, ah, happened to come our way. For two years, now, a special team at Soviet State Ordnance has been developing and improving the idea, until we now have in limited production nothing less than a highly refined, highly reliable submachine shotgun.” There was something like a gasp from the audience as Majorov held up the weapon.

  Majorov continued. “We have also developed a range of highly effective ammunition, including a special antipersonnel buckshot, a
CS gas cartridge, and a solid projectile that will defeat thirty millimeters (one and a quarter inches) of armor at a hundread and fifty meters.” Another gasp from the audience. Majorov picked up a thick clip and shoved it into the stock of the weapon, behind the pistol grip. “It will fire, from a twenty-four round clip, either single shot or on full automatic at a rate of five hundred rounds per minute. At a range of forty meters, shot will spread to approximately nine hundred millimeters (three feet), so in one second the firer can place eighty pellets into an area no more than one meter square, and at that range, each pellet will have a residual energy approximately fifty percent greater than that of a 7.65 millimeter pistol round. We estimate further that, in a confined area, say a city street, six men with two clips each would decimate a company of conventional infantry in less than ten seconds.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then the audience burst into applause, and the troops were on their feet.

  While they were still applauding, Majorov nodded to the weapons sergeant, who went to a panel and flipped a switch. The blank wall behind Majorov slid upwards to reveal a well-lit, fifty-meter firing range. The applause abruptly stopped. Helder, who had been drawn to his feet by the spontaneous action of the others, sank back into his seat, his stomach twitching. The other men immediately followed suit. Forty meters down the range, a dozen human figures were slung from the ceiling by ropes under their arms. For a moment Helder had thought they were merely unconscious, but something about their attitudes of hanging told him they were dead, and he was immediately thankful for that.