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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.
    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.
    “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