Lying and Kissing(12)

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.#p#分页标题#e#



 



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.#p#分页标题#e#

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.