live. I’m sitting at my desk in the afternoon but it’s like
I’m right there in Moscow at 2am, sitting just on the
other side of a wall from him, as if I could push open a
door and step through.
I was still sitting there, twisting a lock of hair around
and around my fingers to make a spring, when Roberta
sat down opposite me with an espresso. “Twenty
minutes for a latte?”
Shit. Had it been that long? The coffee was lukewarm
through the paper cup. I must have zoned out again. I
do that, sometimes. “Sorry.”
She laughed gently. “Relax, Arianna. You’ve earned a
break. I just worry about you, sitting out here all alone.”
She hesitated. “Are you okay?”
Roberta is my boss. Given that we support staff are all a
bunch of introverted, moody shut-ins, she also has to be
part schoolteacher and part mom. Some of us would
forget to go home if we weren’t reminded. She’s in her
fifties, I think, though it’s difficult to tell.
She’s the person who recruited me, at college. I’d done
some project on dialects in former Soviet states and she
showed up, all mysterious smile and sharp suit, and
asked if I wanted to make a difference. I’d thought, at
first, that she worked for a charity.
I’d said I did want to make a difference. I still do.
I shrugged. “I’d just like to...do something. I feel like
I’m stuck in a loop, here.”
Roberta smiled sympathetically. “What we do here is
vital. I know it doesn’t always feel like it, but it is.” She
put her hand on mine. “Give it another year and we can
look at maybe moving you into some field work.” She
paused. “This is really bothering you, isn’t it?”
I squirmed. She’d been so good to me; I didn’t like to
keep hassling her. I knew she thought she was keeping
me safe, but I felt like I was dying one day at a time,
buried down here. And she’d used to be a field agent
herself, back in the day. Didn’t she understand?
Or was it that she understood too well, and knew I
wasn’t cut out for it?
Roberta leaned closer. “How are the nightmares?”
Everybody knows that they screen candidates
thoroughly, here. And yes, they wired me up to a lie
detector when I joined and they’ve done it a few times
since. But just because they check to make sure we’re
trustworthy doesn’t mean we’re normal. Over in data
analysis, they couldn’t function without all the Asperger’s
sufferers spotting patterns. And where I work, in
languages, I think at least half of us are on a pill for
something or other.
And then there’s me. I’m broken in a much more
jagged, hard-edged way, and have been for three years.
“They’re still there,” I said simply, and tried hard not to
think about—
Falling. The crunch as we hit. Snow settling on the
window. The sound of my own screams—
Under the table, I dug my fingernails into my palm. That
helps bring me back, sometimes.
Roberta was frowning at me. “I can schedule you for
another round of counseling….”
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
And smiled as if it was.
* * *
There’s the Central Intelligence Agency. Within that,
there’s the National Clandestine Service—when Roberta
first told me that’s where she worked, I snorted coffee
out of my nose. But that really is what’s called.
Within the National Clandestine Service, there’s the
Special Activities Division. And that—I’m going to come
right out and say it—is where the cool stuff happens.
The field ops. The excitement. That’s where Nancy, my
best friend and roommate, works.
Buried away at the bottom of the CIA tree diagram are
the support staff—people like Roberta and me. “We’re
the roots,” Roberta told me when she recruited me. “We
hold the tree up.”
Well, maybe. But being a root means being buried away
underground, away from the sunlight.
Everything is compartmentalized, which is a fancy way
of saying that we aren’t told what’s going on. I listen to
Luka’s calls and try to guess where he is, closing my
eyes and listening for clues: the hum of a vacuum
cleaner outside of a hotel room door, the traffic outside
his limo.
Once, he and Natalia had phone sex. Shalava, he’d told
her, which means, roughly, “dirty slut.” When you get
here, I will push you up against the door and rip your
dress and bra off. Then I will lick your breasts until you
can’t take it anymore....
I replayed that call fifty-seven times. The computer red-
flagged it and Roberta came over to my desk,
concerned. “Is there a problem?” she’d asked.
“Something you can’t translate?”
“Nope,” I’d said, flushing beet-red. “Just wanted to be
sure.”
That was the closest I got to sex. I hadn’t had a
boyfriend since the accident. At home, in bed, I’d
sometimes jill off with the help of a vibrator, thinking
about movie stars and lifeguards and the guy at the
coffee shop. All the people I was supposed to think
about.
And when none of that worked, I thought about Luka.
Dark, dark fantasies about a man who took without
asking permission. Hidden under the covers, with the
lights off, I’d twist the sheets into sweaty hillocks in my
fists and thrash and grind and bite my lip to stop from
crying out and waking Nancy. Then, afterwards, I’d
want to die with shame at the things I’d been imagining.
Wasn’t I supposed to want sex on a white-sands beach
with a guy who respected me? Not...this.
And then things got completely out of control.
Then I started dreaming about him.
Lying and Kissing Chapter 2
I’M RUNNING through a frozen forest, running to stay
warm. It’s beyond cold, the air so clear that everything
looks ultra-sharp. Every last little bit of heat seems to
have bled out into space and what’s left is a deadly
wasteland.
If I stay here, I’ll die.
I’m in bare feet and a long white dress, the hem of it
soaked through. Freezing snow is up to my ankles. I
stagger and slip but I can’t stop. Because behind me is
—
I can feel him watching me. Huge and dressed all in
black, almost filling the path behind me. He radiates
heat—I can feel it licking at the back of my neck,
melting the snow I’ve kicked up in my wake. His warmth
feels so good….
But I know that he’ll be my downfall. So I run even
harder.
And suddenly, he’s in front of me, so close that I can’t
pull up in time. I slam into his chest and it’s like sun-
warm rock against my breasts, almost too hot to touch.
I try to push myself away, but his arms have closed
around me, trapping me there.
I look up into his eyes: frozen blue orbs that pin me
there and make me melt inside. His eyes say, you want
this.
And I scream no I don’t so loudly it almost drowns out
the throb in my groin.
The ground collapses and we’re falling, falling. Down
into the earth and into a world of darkness and hard
metal, sparks and fire. I land on my back and he’s
immediately on top of me, his lips pressing to mine. At
the first kiss, I feel the heat sluicing down through me,
burning its way through the ice that’s gradually filled me
in the three years since the accident.
I open my mouth to take a shuddering breath and his