“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.#p#分页标题#e#
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?