His voice was like slate-gray rocks grinding together, immense and powerful. A voice that commanded. And now and again, especially when he hit a hard k, the rocks clashed with an explosion of sparks that sent molten silver jetting down my spine.
When that happened, I squeezed my thighs together.
I’d been listening to his phone calls for a month.
I suspected he had a second phone. We don’t listen to just anyone’s calls and if he really only ever talked to his girlfriends, we wouldn’t be interested in him. But it was the only phone tap we had on him, so I sat there each day, back ramrod straight in my typist’s chair, and listened and pretended to everyone around me that it was just another boring transcription.
In reality, I listened to those long, rolling r’s and soft, vibrating m’s and my fingers skittered over the keyboard on autopilot. I was barely aware of what Elena or Svetlana or Natalia said—his girlfriends all blended into one mess of pouting, hurt Russian-ness as he seduced them, slept with them and rapidly spurned them.
I was only concerned with him. Luka.
I didn’t get to know anything about Luka Malakov. I didn’t even know what he’d done wrong to come to our attention, but clearly he was a criminal of some kind and a serious, big-time one. I told myself that meant he must be old. He was probably a white-haired, fat guy in his sixties, his nose red from too much vodka. I tried to burn that image into my mind to stop my fantasies.
It didn’t work.
In my fantasies, that gorgeous voice had a body and a face to go with it, all close-cropped, dark hair and Slavic cheekbones. He had gleaming white teeth that could bite softly at neck or nipple. A wide, powerful back and big arms so that he could pick me up and—
Ahem.
I hit the foot pedal to pause the recording and took off my headphones. It was Monday and I’d been at it for an hour straight, catching up on all his calls over the weekend. If I didn’t get some coffee, I was going to lose myself completely in dreams of bad guys who looked like movie stars.
The stupid thing is, I’m not even into bad guys. Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has been...normal. Respectful. When Harry took my virginity, under a tree on a warm summer evening, he asked if I was sure so many times that I eventually kissed him to shut him up. When I broke up with Greg to come to Virginia, it was polite and mature and utterly amicable—I think we even shook hands. I couldn’t imagine being with a guy who seemed to treat his women as disposable items, breaking up with them after just a few days or weeks.
I couldn’t imagine it but, when I listened to Luka’s calls, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about a bad man who’d...use me.
Roughly.
I needed to get out more.
That probably goes for most of my department, to be fair. No one who works here is completely normal. You have to have a little something wrong with you, to want to spy on people all day.
I was overdue a break, so I wandered through to the cafeteria and got myself a latte. Sitting there by myself, sipping my coffee, I could have been any insignificant cog in any big corporate machine. Cheap gray suit. Long hair the color of pecans. A body that isn’t slender enough to be slim, but that doesn’t have the big boobs and flaring hips men go for. Even my eyes are gray, and gray’s not really a color.
Trust me: if you saw me in the street, you’d look right past me.
There are no windows in our entire department, squirreled away as we are at the heart of the building. It’s easy to lose track of time and place. It was easy to forget that I was in Langley in the middle of the morning, with January snow on the ground outside. In a way, I liked that. Anything that helped me forget it was winter.
But it can be dangerous, losing your sense of where you are. Sometimes, I have to transcribe one of Luka’s calls 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 any more....
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.