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.#p#分页标题#e#
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.