True Lies Read online

  TRUE

  Harry Tasker is Omega Sector’s top field agent assigned to nuclear containment. He loves his Glock.

  LIES

  Harry Tasker likes to walk along the beach at sunset and have warm affectionate chats with Middle Eastern terrorists.

  TRUE

  The Crimson Jihad have stolen four MIRV warheads from a former soviet republic.

  LIES

  It’s just a practical joke. They’re going to give them back.

  TRUE

  Helen Tasker has been married to Harry for fifteen years. She thinks he’s a computer salesman.

  LIES

  When she finds out he’s been lying to her all these years, she’ll say, ‘Oh honey, I understand. Put your feet up and I’ll bring you some cocoa and a newspaper.’

  TRUE LIES

  LIGHTSTORM ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS A JAMES CAMERON PRODUCTION A JAMES CAMERON FILM ARNOLD SCHWAZENEGGER TRUE LIES JAMIE LEE CURTIS TOM ARNOLD BILL PAXTON ART MALIK TIA CARRERE MUSIC BY BRAD FIEDEL EDITED BY MARK GOLDBLATT, A.C.E. AND CONRAD BUFF AND RICHARD A. HARRIS PRODUCTION DESIGNER PETER LAMONT DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY RUSSELL CARPENTER SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS DIGITAL DOMAIN EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS RAE SANCHINI ROBERT SHRIVER LAWRENCE KASANOFF SCREENPLAY BY JAMES CAMERON BASED UPON A SCREENPLAY BY CLAUDE ZIDI, SIMON MICHAEL AND DIDER KAMINKA PRODUCED BY JAMES CAMERON AND STEPHANIE AUSTIN DIRECTED BY JAMES CAMERON

  No Place Like Home

  After a hard day on the job, Harry Tasker looked forward to going home. It was tough work crashing a fortress-mansion in the Swiss alps... breaking into the super-computer of a money master who spread tentacles of evil around the globe... trying to resist going to bed with a dazzling beauty who clearly was ready, willing and able... and escaping in the glow of an explosion and a hail of bullets.

  But now Harry was heading home to his loving wife, who thought he was a decent if rather boring computer salesman... to his daughter, who worshipped him as her big, kindly bear of a dad... to the peace and quiet he craved after his job as Operative 0024 for the U.S. Omega Agency.

  Harry didn’t know it, but a new front was about to open up in his war against terror and for survival.

  The most dangerous front of all. The home front.

  True Lies

  True

  Lies

  A NOVEL BY

  Dewey Gram and

  Duane Dell ’Amico

  FROM THE SCREENPLAY BY

  James Cameron

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wright Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the USA by Signet, an imprint of Dutton Signet,

  adivision of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1994

  First published in Great Britain by Signet 1994

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright C Twentieth Century Fox, Inc., 1994

  AU rights reserved

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Afterword

  One

  All Harry Tasker could think about was his balls. Two dozen armed guards, floodlights, vicious Dobermans, and a state-of-the-art security system awaited him only eight feet away. But Harry had more pressing problems. His cojones were trying to migrate back up into his body. They had painfully squeezed themselves into a space the size and appearance of a big walnut. And that was because Harry floated eight feet under an ice-covered lake, cutting the metal -bars that shut him out of Jamal Khaled’s fortress chateau high in the Swiss Alps.

  On the bright side, his oxygen-arc cutting tool was beginning to create warm convection currents. He kicked his jet-fins, moving his frozen maracas closer to the heat. He grinned around his regulator. Aaaah. One bar came away and drifted gently to the bottom.

  The Alpine peaks were breathtaking in the light of a full moon; hard shadows accentuated their chiseled angularity, and glittering blankets of snow, chill and silent as the night sky, fanned down from them. The snow surrounded and gently penetrated the forested saddle in which Khaled’s chateau nestled.

  There was a party tonight, and the guards hated parties. They were trained to kill anyone trying to get in. But tonight they had to watch helplessly as dozens of cars poured into the motor court, and guests strolled casually, laughing even, through the chateau’s massive front doors.

  It made the guards nervous, and that made them mad. Their xenon searchlights swept the approaches with more than usual thoroughness; and if they blinded a few limo drivers, so what. They eyed the arriving guests with disconcerting coldness, and only halfheartedly rebuked the attack dogs when they barked and bared fangs at fur-coated men and diamond-encrusted women.

  The guests felt the chill, and were glad to get inside to the relative warmth of the head butler. He greeted them each courteously, discreetly passed their watermarked invitations under an ultraviolet light, then took their coats and handed them off to white-gloved security personnel, who politely but thoroughly searched them with hand-held metal detectors.

  Meanwhile on the east wall, a lone guard, warm and watchful inside his white exposure suit, scanned the icy lake. The lake approach was completely exposed, and the ice treacherously thin, but his platoon leader had mercilessly drilled every ounce of complacency out of his body. He knew that his beat passed over one of the few sizable breaks in the ramparts other than the main gate: the boat canal that connected Khaled’s private docks with the lake outside. It was a part of his beat he checked carefully and often. He went there now.

  A heavy grating of steel bars closed off the canal entrance, locked down by thin blue ice. The bars, as the guard knew, ran all the way to the bottom. He scanned the ice and grating carefully.

  Most other nights he would have immediately unslung his FN FAL rifle and barked an alert into his walkie-talkie, an alert that would have resulted in Harry Tasker looking like Switzerland’s most famous cheese. But tonight there was just enough ambient moonlight, and just enough snow on the translucent ice to block out the dim glow of Harry’s torch.

  The guard looked out over the lake and moved on.

  Harry turned off his torch and let it fall. A hole in the grating big enough for a large man—which is what Harry was—opened into the darkness of the canal.

  Harry pulled himself through. His powerful legs scissored, propelling him rapidly forward.

  A bright-eyed Doberman rounded the corner of Khaled’s boathouse, leading his master on the end of a choker chain. The guard looked out over the floodlit dock that jutted into the canal. All clear; all quiet. They walked away, and as the dull thud of the guard’s boots faded, a faint chipping sou
nd issued from the shadows under the dock.

  A piece of ice broke quietly free, lifted upward an inch or two and slid back. Then another. Harry Tasker’s hooded head slowly lifted from the dark water and looked around in every direction. He slipped his regulator and goggles off and smiled. He was inside.

  Harry unslung a waterproof pack, and then his tank, which he let drop. Then he froze, silent, as a water snake, with only his eyes showing above the surface. Another guard walked by at the edge of the canal.

  The guard’s eyes swept the dock, but did not penetrate the shadows beneath. He walked on, around the boathouse and out of sight.

  Harry kicked off his fins, took a final look around, and swiftly pulled himself up a frozen ladder onto the dock. He moved like a ninja into the shadows of the boathouse.

  Opening his pack, he pulled out a walkie-talkie and thumbed the transmit button.

  “Honey, I’m home,” he said.

  “Roger that,” said Gib.

  Albert “Gib” Gibson was a real mensch. Unless you were a nuclear terrorist, or one of his ex-wives. A twenty-year man with the Omega Sector, his total dedication to the agency’s mission was now chipping away at his third marriage. Both the terrorists and his spouses wished he’d spend more time at home.

  Gib didn’t look much like the super spies in movies, and certainly didn’t act like one, but he had been Harry Tasker’s mission coordinator and closest friend for over a decade. Harry owed Gib his life many times over. Harry knew that a couple of inches behind Gib’s comfortable beer gut was a rock-hard wall of muscle; and that behind the puckish face and irreverent humor was the iciest and fastest thinking mind in Omega Sector.

  Just then, Gib sat hunched in a surveillance van parked on a winding mountain road a half mile away and overlooking the floodlit chateau. Putting a hand over his headset’s microphone, he called out the open door of the van.

  “Hey, Fize! Get your butt in here. Harry’s inside.”

  Fast Faisil, cyberjock extraordinaire, stood outside carefully peeing his sweetheart’s name into a snow-bank. Ever security conscious, he was disguising his handwriting by using his left hand. He was twenty-five, Iranian-American, and the most talented hacker Omega Sector ever recruited. Harry always demanded, and got, the best.

  Finishing his sentimental homage, Faisil zipped up and jumped back in the van. Placing his eye against the eyepiece of a huge telephoto nightvision scope, he scanned the grounds of the chateau, the eerie green image coming to rest on Khaled’s boathouse.

  Concealed in the shadows of the boathouse, Harry tore off his neoprene hood and shucked his drysuit. Underneath, he wore black tux pants, a silk cummerbund and bowtie, and a formal shirt with pearl studs. The frogman had suddenly turned into a handsome playboy prince.

  From his waterproof bag, he pulled a tiny plug, like a hearing aid, and shoved it deep in his ear canal: a subvocal transceiver. Harry had only to mumble quietly and the transceiver picked up his words from the vibrations inside his head. And not even a dance partner could hear the incoming.

  “Switching to subvocal,” Harry said quietly. “Gib, you copy?”

  The answer came back: “It’s Talkradio. You’re on the air.”

  Harry slipped into his shoulder harness—his .45 auto Glock-22 holstered on one side, a transmitter pack for the earpiece slung on the other. He pulled a formal dinner jacket from the pack and slipped it on, concealing the rig.

  Then a final touch. He reached in the bag and withdrew a tiny vial of cologne. Harry usually wore a scent with a citrus or sandalwood base—Armani or Atkinson’s. But in cold weather he knew a musky vanilla base played better with the ladies, adding back that intimate languor, the sensuality and warmth that the chill sucked away. Tonight the label on the vial read “Obsession.”

  Harry slapped some on his big square jaw, ran his hands through his hair, straightened his tie, then strode confidently into the floodlights, crossing quickly to the rear of the main house.

  With each step, his mind lit brighter; his body warmed and loosened, letting its power flow. Genetics, a fierce will, and endless training had made Harry’s body something extraordinary. He just did it. Things that no one else could do. Neither his body nor his mind had ever failed him. And so as he walked forward into the middle of Khaled’s lethal security apparatus, he found himself grinning like an animal.

  It was party time.

  Harry walked into the crowded kitchen like he owned it. The cooks and waiters scurried out of his way, too busy to notice or care who he was. He was a ship, and they the water sliding off his bow. Harry finger-tasted a dish as he sailed through, admonishing an assistant chef in excellent French: “This needs more garlic.” He pushed through the right-hand swinging door and entered the main room.

  The party was in full swing. Harry blended smoothly into the crowd. Foreign dignitaries, businessmen, and minor Mideast nobility mingled with stodgy bankers and playboy arms dealers attended by entire harems. He could smell the high-octane mixture of new oil money and old European wealth.

  Harry strolled amiably among the glittering women and cigar-smoking men, casually snagging a glass of champagne and a canape from the ubiquitous waiters. He nodded to people like he knew them, even greeted a passing sheik in fluent Arabic.

  People in his wake looked at each other with raised eyebrows. “Do we know him?” Then they shrugged and went on with their conversations. If they couldn’t place him, he couldn’t be important.

  So Harry glided on through the crowd, scanning over heads. He was looking for someone special, and soon he spotted him.

  “Thar she blows. Daddy Petrobucks,” he mumbled to Gib.

  In the center of the room, fat, manic Jamel Khaled greeted his guests, chattering like a bird and popping canapes from a tray held by a long-suffering waiter anchored at his right hand.

  “Thank God I’m rich! Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom!” crowed Khaled. He laughed delightedly at his own wit, his plump red lips shining with grease. Everyone around him laughed, too, because a rich man’s joke is always funny.

  Harry moved on, smiling sweetly at a banker’s wife, planning to keep a watch on Khaled out of the corner of his eye. But that was not to be, for a woman walked up to the fat man and greeted him, and Harry found his head turning as if against his will.

  She was breathtakingly beautiful, somehow managing to be both lithe and voluptuous at the same time. Something Khaled said made her throw back her head and laugh, and it was the rich, full-chested laugh of an unfettered spirit. Harry’s heart began beating faster than it had all night. The woman tossed her black hair and leaned close to Khaled’s ear. She and Khaled excused themselves and walked off, absorbed in serious conversation. Harry moved closer, curious now, continuing to stare at her.

  It was then that the woman glanced up, catching his eyes. Harry smiled. Her frank gaze held steady a moment, returning his interest, and then his smile. Then the crowd shifted, cutting off their view of each other.

  “Mmmmm,” said Harry.

  “Harry,” came the voice in his ear, “You dog. Are you getting a blow job? Nuclear terrorists, remember?”

  “Woof. You shoulda seen the warheads on this babe. I’m heading upstairs.”

  Harry mounted the grand staircase to the second floor, then meandered through a sprinkling of guests admiring a collection of antiquities on the second-floor balcony. Harry glanced around, making sure he was unobserved. He slipped through a door into the corridor of the mansion’s private west wing.

  Jamel Khaled’s library was empty, dark, but not silent. A lock pick was clicking and clacking around in the keyhole of the door. With a final satisfying click, the door swung open and Harry entered, quickly and silently closing it behind him. He walked over to the French windows, opened one, and walked onto the terrace. Above him, a third-floor balcony jutted from the chateau’s wall.

  Harry leapt onto the rail at the side of the terrace and climbed up the outside wall of the chateau. Iron fingers hooked
the masonry’s deep bed joints. Feet pushed off against a second-floor cornice. Harry vaulted over the balcony’s balustrade and landed in a soft crouch.

  Out came the slide pick, and seconds later Harry stepped through another French window into Jamel Khaled’s private study.

  “I’m in Porky’s office.”

  “Go for it, buddy.”

  Beautiful antiques and priceless paintings glinted in the moonlight slanting through the windows. Etruscan vases, Greek busts, a Vermeer, a van Gogh still life. Harry didn’t give a shit. He went straight to the giant desk and sat down at the computer, booting it up. The hard disk and fan whined up to speed as Harry pulled a flat box the size of a paperback from his jacket pocket and connected it to the modem port.

  “Modem in place. Transmitting... now.”

  Harry pushed a button and a green light on the modem began its intelligent blinking as it sucked out Khaled’s data and pumped it away.

  * * *

  In the van, Gib watched eagerly as Faisil punched keys with blurring speed. A monitor scrolled rapidly, crammed from edge to edge with characters.

  Faisil spoke into his own headset: “Affirmatory. We are in.”

  Faisil’s fingers never seemed to pause. The data shifted and lurched, reconfiguring inside a familiar Windows environment. A password dialogue box superimposed itself.

  “These files are iced and encrypted, guys.” Faisil liked that. “This is going to take me a few minutes.”

  Gib got on the line with Harry: “Faisil’s the man now, buddy. Get your tail out of there.”

  Getting out of the chateau without alerting the guards was as important as getting in unobserved. So after climbing back down to the library, Harry was extra careful cracking the door into the hall, and very slow sticking out his tiny mirror. He tilted it this way and that, flipped it over, looked the other way, then stepped into the hallway and closed the door quietly behind him. He strode off down the hall, breathing a small sigh of relief—just as a guard rounded the corner ten feet away.