Lying and Kissing(2)

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.#p#分页标题#e#

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.