Free Deep Lie by Stuart Woods Page A

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 to 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. Scariett 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, mini subs 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. 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