Dewey Gram - True Lies

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

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

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

Its just a practical joke. Theyre going to give them back.

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

When she finds out hes been lying to her all these years, shell say, Oh honey, I understand. Put your feet up and Ill bring you some cocoa and a newspaper.

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

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 didnt 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.

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 publishers 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

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 Khaleds 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 Khaleds 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 chateaus 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 Khaleds 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 Switzerlands 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 Harrys 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 manwhich is what Harry wasopened 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 Khaleds 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 guards boots faded, a faint chipping sound 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 Taskers 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.