Karen Cleveland: Need to Know

“The Maldives?” Matt says, and I feel the hint of a smile creep to my lips. He always does this, finds a way to make me smile when I need it most. I glance at the photograph of the two of us on the corner of my desk, my favorite from our wedding day, almost a decade ago. Both of us so happy, so young . We always talked about going somewhere exotic for our ten-year anniversary. It’s certainly not in the cards anymore. But it’s fun to dream. Fun and depressing at the same time.

“Bora Bora,” I say.

“I could live with that.” He hesitates, and in the gap I hear Caleb again. More vowel sounds. Aah-aah-aah . In my head, I’m calculating the months Chase has already been making consonant sounds. I know I shouldn’t—all the doctors say I shouldn’t—but I am.

“Bora Bora ?” I hear from behind me, faux-incredulous. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and turn. It’s Omar, my FBI counterpart, an amused expression on his face. “That one might be hard to justify, even for the Agency.” He breaks into a grin. Infectious as ever, it brings one to my own face, as well.

“What are you doing here?” I say, my hand still covering the mouthpiece. I can hear Caleb babbling in my ear. O ’s this time. Ooh-ooh-ooh .

“Had a meeting with Peter.” He takes a step closer, perches on the edge of my desk. I can see the outline of his holster at his hip, through his T-shirt. “The timing may or may not have been a coincidence.” He glances at my screen and the grin fades ever so slightly. “It was today, right? Ten A.M.?”

I look at my screen, dark, the cursor still in the shape of a timer. “It was today.” The babbling in my ear has gone quiet. I roll my chair so that I’m turned, just a touch, away from Omar and remove my hand from the mouthpiece. “Honey, I have to go. Omar’s here.”

“Tell him I said hi,” Matt says.

“Will do.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I set the phone down on its base and turn back to Omar, who’s still sitting on my desk, denim-clad legs outstretched, feet crossed at the ankles. “Matt says hi,” I tell him.

“Aaah, so he’s the Bora Bora connection. Planning a vacation?” The grin’s back, full force.

“In theory,” I say with a half-hearted laugh. It sounds pathetic enough that I can feel color rise to my cheeks.

He looks at me for a moment longer, then thankfully down at his wrist. “All right, it’s ten-ten.” He uncrosses his ankles, crosses them the opposite way. Then leans forward, the excitement on his face unmistakable. “What have you got for me?”

Omar’s been doing this longer than I have. A decade, at least. He’s looking for the actual sleepers in the U.S., and I’m trying to uncover those running the cell. Neither of us has had any success. How he’s still so enthusiastic never fails to amaze me.

“Nothing yet. I haven’t even taken a look.” I nod at the screen, the program that’s still loading, then glance at the black-and-white photograph tacked to my cubicle wall, beside the kids’ drawings. Yury Yakov. Fleshy face, hard expression. A few more clicks and I’ll be inside his computer. I’ll be able to see what he sees, navigate around the way he does, pore through his files. And hopefully prove that he’s a Russian spy.

“Who are you and what have you done with my friend Vivian?” Omar asks with a smile.

He’s right. If it wasn’t for the line at Starbucks, I’d have logged in to the program at ten A.M. on the dot. I’d have had a few minutes to look around, at least. I shrug and gesture at the screen. “I’m trying.” Then I nod toward the phone. “But in any case, it’s going to have to wait. Ella’s sick. I need to go pick her up.”

He exhales dramatically. “Kids. Always the worst timing.”

Movement on the screen draws my attention, and I roll my chair closer. Athena’s finally loading. There are red banners on all sides, a slew of words, each signifying a different control, a different compartment. The longer the string of text, the more classified. This one’s pretty darn long.

I click past one screen, then another. Each click is an acknowledgment. Yes, I know I’m accessing compartmented information. Yes, I know I can’t disclose it or I’ll go to jail for a very long time. Yes, yes, yes. Just get me to the information already.

“This is it,” Omar says. I remember he’s there and glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s looking away purposefully, studiously avoiding the screen, giving me privacy. “I feel it.”

“I hope so,” I murmur. And I do. But I’m nervous. This methodology is a gamble. A big one. I built a profile for suspected handlers: educational institution, studies and degrees, banking centers, travel within Russia and abroad. Came up with an algorithm, identified five individuals who best fit the pattern. Likely candidates.

The first four turned out to be false leads, and now the program’s on the chopping block. Everything rests on Yury. Number five. The computer that was the hardest to break into, the one I had the most confidence in to begin with.

“And if it’s not,” Omar says, “you did something that no one else has been able to do. You got close.”

Targeting the handlers is a new approach. For years, the Bureau’s been trying to identify the sleepers themselves, but they’re so well assimilated it’s next to impossible. The cell is designed so that sleepers don’t have contact with anyone but their handler, and even that is minimal. And the Agency’s been focused on the ringleaders, the guys who oversee the handlers, the ones in Moscow with direct ties to the SVR, Russian intelligence.

“Close doesn’t count,” I say quietly. “You know that better than anyone.”

Around the time I started on the account, Omar was a hard-charging new agent. He’d proposed a new initiative, inviting entrenched sleepers to “come in from the cold” and turn themselves in, in exchange for amnesty. His reasoning? There had to be at least a few sleepers who wanted to turn their covers into reality, and we might be able to learn enough from the turned sleepers to penetrate the network as a whole.

The plan was rolled out quietly, and within a week we had a walk-in, a man named Dmitri. Said he was a midlevel handler, told us information about the program that corroborated what we knew—handlers like himself were responsible for five sleepers each; he reported to a ringleader who was responsible for five handlers. A completely self-contained cell. That got our attention, for sure. Then came the outrageous claims, the information that was inconsistent with everything we knew to be true, and then he disappeared. Dmitri the Dangle, we called him after that.

That was the end of the program. The thought of publicly admitting there were sleepers in the U.S., of admitting our inability to find them, was already barely palatable to Bureau seniors. Between that and the potential for Russian manipulation—dangling double agents with false leads—Omar’s plan was roundly criticized, then rejected. We’ll be inundated with other Dmitris, they said. And with that, Omar’s once-promising career trajectory stalled. He fell into obscurity, plugging away, day after day, at a thankless, frustrating, impossible task.

The screen changes, and a little icon with Yury’s name appears. I always get a thrill out of this, seeing my targets’ names here, knowing we have a window into their digital lives, the information they think is private. As if on cue, Omar stands up. He knows about our efforts to target Yury. He’s one of a handful of Bureau agents read into the program—and its biggest cheerleader, the person who believes in the algorithm, and in me, more than anyone else. But still, he can’t access it directly.