Lying and Kissing (6 page)

Operating on autopilot, I grabbed my violin case and opened the door. I’d taken two steps out into the hallway before I remembered the bodyguard on the stairs. He turned at the sound of the door opening and his jaw dropped. He reached under his jacket—maybe for a radio, maybe for a gun.

But then I heard Luka emerge behind me, and whatever nod or gesture he made to his bodyguard made the man step back immediately and clear a path for me. I didn’t turn around. I just hurried down the stairs, violin banging against my hip, threw the front door wide and headed straight for the cherry-red SUV. Adam was already inside and waiting and I could see the concern in his eyes. But he faked a fatherly smile and opened the door for me. I quickly climbed inside.

We roared away and the last image I had of the house, in the rear view mirror, was Luka in the doorway, thoughtfully watching me go.

***

There was a debriefing, back at Langley. Roberta did a lot of yelling about my “crazy stunt,” although I knew most of it was out of concern. Adam backed me up. “The bug’s in place,” he said. “We pulled it off.” He smiled at me.

We.
I liked that. I felt as if I was part of his team. In with the cool kids, even if it was only temporary. You have no idea how good that feels, when you were never cool at school.

We didn’t talk about what happened in the bedroom, as such. I wasn’t sure how much they were able to put together, from the few words we’d said plus some rustling and panting. Thank God there were no cameras in the bedroom. Both Roberta and Adam asked if I was okay and I said yes, which was both true and not true at all.

I was still trying to process the whole thing. One minute, I remembered it as being terrifying, the next it was the hottest sexual experience of my life, actual sex included. I thought about it from one angle and I’d been an innocent, out of my depth, desperately trying to come up with an excuse for being in his room. I thought about it another way and I was desperate in a whole different way.
I’m not scared of you,
I’d claimed. But I was scared of him. I was just so turned on by him that it was overcoming my fear.

I’d complained that I was stuck in a rut- that nothing changed in the sterile, airless world I inhabited. Then, suddenly, I’d been way out in a void, dangling by a hair-thin rope over a precipice. The way I’d reacted to him was deeply disturbing, completely alien to me and yet in some weird way familiar. As if he was a dangerous drug I’d tried for the first time and found to be perfect for me. Perfect, and addictive.

The one reassuring thing was that it was over. My first op had been a success...just. And I might have pissed off Roberta, but I’d impressed Adam. Maybe he’d give me another shot.

And, whether he did or not, my future lay a long way from Luka Malakov. Aside from listening to his phone calls, I’d never hear of him again.

The next morning, I wasn’t granted a late start just because the debriefing had finished in the early hours. I dragged myself in, eyelids only held open by coffee, and tried to avoid Roberta. I figured she’d be mad that I’d ignored her order and ran upstairs, and also that I’d gone against her wishes and volunteered for the op in the first place.

I started transcribing calls. Some banker, complaining to his friend about his wife. Then Luka, talking about another one of his women. That got my interest, but I was still half asleep as my fingers rattled over the keys, only vaguely aware of what I was typing.

Then, suddenly, I sat bolt upright in my chair.

The woman Luka was talking about was me.

“She was the one in the string quartet,” Luka was saying.

Another voice. “The short one?”

“No. The pretty one.”

The pretty one?!

“You think she was up to something?” asked the other voice. I recognized it, this time. Luka’s head bodyguard, the guy with the scar on his face.

“I think she’s an innocent,” said Luka. “But I want to know how innocent. Do a check on her.”

“What if she’s not so innocent?”

“Then I want to fuck her.”

“What if she
is
innocent?”

I could hear the smile in Luka’s voice. “Then I want to fuck her even more.”

The call ended. I sat there staring at the screen, feeling as if I’d just had five espressos.

He.

Wanted.

To.

Fuck.

Me.

And in a few minutes, the head bodyguard was going to call Karen. And Karen would give him my false name. And he’d discover that Arianna Ross didn’t exist.

If I didn’t want to blow the whole operation, I had to act
now.

***

I rushed into Adam’s office and told him that Arianna Ross was about to have her background checked. About two seconds after I’d finished speaking, I realized what he was going to ask next.

“Okay,” he said. “Can I see the transcript?”

There followed the most toe-curlingly embarrassing minutes of my life, as Adam brought up the conversation on his screen and read what Luka had said. To his credit, he didn’t comment. He just nodded a few times and then pressed a button on his desk phone. “Get me Solomon,” he said.

A moment later, Solomon walked in. His tattoos, long black hair and the fact he was dressed in a black vest and jeans was strangely reassuring. For the CIA to make that many concessions to its dress code, he must be packing some serious tech credentials.

“This is Arianna
Scott,”
said Adam. “She needs her face transferred to a blank,
now,
with the name Arianna
Ross.”

“Five minutes,” said Solomon in a British accent, and walked out.

“Really?” I asked. “Five minutes?”

“He’s being modest,” said Adam. “More like two.”

Blanks are one of the CIA’s best-kept secrets.

Being a spy used to be easy. You could walk into an embassy or a trade convention in the 1970s or even the 1980s and say you were Alice Smith when you were really Betty Jones. As long as your passport looked real, no one could tell the difference. We only had to think about fooling the enemy face-to-face.

Then Facebook happened.

Now, Alice Smith doesn’t just have to have a fake passport. She has to have an entire fake life, with a Facebook profile dating back years, school friends posting on her wall and ten thousand tweets conveying her every thought. And that’s impossible.

Unless you’re us.

Blanks
are fake people. We have hundreds of them. They have birthdays and school friends and career histories. They have photos on their timelines and Twitter feeds showing them laughing in bars and falling off horses.

These are the people who unexpectedly friend you on Facebook and you never know why. They’re the ones who don’t message you, and never really interact except to like your funny cat pictures.

A blank’s photos are posed by actors. Now, hundreds of shots of my face, taken when I first joined the CIA, were being seamlessly edited into those photos, replacing the actress’s.

Maybe you’ve seen this happen. Maybe you’ve noticed a woman on your Friends list and frowned and thought,
Didn’t she used to be called Jessica? And weren’t her eyes green, before?
But you don’t know her all that well so you shake your head and put it down to your imagination.

No more than three minutes after Solomon had left, Adam turned his computer screen to me and said, “Google yourself.”

I sat down and typed my name on the keyboard. Google told me that I had a Facebook profile and a Twitter account. I had an email address with emails from friends arranging parties and nights out. I had Pinterest boards filled with book covers and recipes.
This is more real than my real life
I thought, a little sadly.

If Luka’s head bodyguard checked up on me now, he’d be convinced I was real...and “innocent.”

Adam sat back in his chair. “Now we need to decide what to do,” he said.

I blinked. “Do?” Hadn’t we just solved the problem?

Adam looked at me appraisingly. “He still wants to fuck you.”

I stiffened, partially from hearing a superior drop the f-bomb, partially from the reminder. “Maybe he was just kidding around,” I said, flushing.

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s got plenty of women.”

“And yet he called for a background check on you. He’s interested
in you.
” Adam stared at me. “That gives us an angle.”

I can be a little slow to catch on, sometimes. I didn’t see where he was going. Then it hit me like a freight train in the face. “You don’t mean...you want me to
see
him?!”

Adam leaned forward. “I want you to be his girlfriend. Meet him. Seduce him. Get him to confide in you.”

“I can’t do
that!”
I jumped to my feet. My heart felt as if it was going to smash its way out through my ribs. “I can’t—”
His girlfriend. Luka’s girlfriend.
Kissing him and, inevitably...
Jesus!
“He’s only here for a few days.”

“Yes. You’ll have to go to Moscow.”

I just stared at him.
He can’t possibly be serious.

But Adam just sat there, watching me calmly, seeing how I’d respond. I stood there staring at him, panting. I don’t know what disturbed me more: the fear of what he was asking me to do, or the fact that there was a deep, dark part of me that actually wanted to do it.

“I’d have to sleep with him?” I said, half to myself.

Adam nodded. “I’m pretty sure that’d be on the cards, yeah.”

I swayed, almost staggering.
This is not happening. I am not discussing my sex life with my boss’s boss’s boss.
I stared at him. How could he ask me to do this? Luka was a monster. God knows how many people he’d hurt or killed, between prison and his mafia days and now his arms business. And I’d have to smile at him and then close my eyes and open my lips for his kiss….

If I did this, if I had sex with a guy because it was my job, did that make me a prostitute?

Or—my chest tightened—if I wanted to be with him but couldn’t, because of what he was, did this make it okay? Was this just the excuse I needed?

Obviously, this was insane. Obviously I had to say no. But I remembered how he’d made me feel. Not just the all-consuming lust, but that sense that I was waking up after three years asleep, that he was
real
and was making me real again.
I’d give anything for another taste of that.

I’d been staring at Adam’s desk as I thought. Now I lifted my eyes to his face. “What if he finds out? What if my cover’s blown?”

“Then he’ll kill you,” said Adam simply.

It felt like freezing water was sluicing up my spine. But, at the same time, I felt the ghost of Luka’s hand on my chest, pinning me to the wall. His other hand, exploring me. A flame sprang into life at my core, black as night yet furnace-hot. I could barely breathe.

I was terrified and yet turned on. And some indescribable third feeling, a mixture of the two.

“How long?” I asked. “How long would I be with him?”

“Until we find out how big this deal is,” said Adam. “We don’t have jurisdiction to arrest him ourselves. But, once we have evidence, we can pressure the Russians to act.”

My legs felt as if they were going to give out, so I flopped down into the chair again. I couldn’t meet Adam’s eyes anymore, the twisting heat inside me out of control. God, did Adam know how I felt?! It must be written all over my face. Certainly, he must have figured out what happened in Luka’s bedroom.

“Arianna,” he said softly. “This is one of the hardest things an agent can be asked to do. I don’t do it lightly. But Malakov is a difficult man for us to get close to. He doesn’t trust anyone...except maybe you.”

I nodded.

“If you say no,” Adam said, “I swear to you, it won’t affect your standing or whether I send you on future field ops. You have a choice.”