Karen Cleveland: Need to Know

“Call me tomorrow, okay?” he says.

“You got it,” I reply. He turns, and as soon as I see his back, heading away, I focus my attention on the screen. I double-click the icon and a red-bordered inset appears, displaying the contents of Yury’s laptop, a mirror image that I can comb through. I only have minutes until I need to leave. But it’s long enough for a peek.

The background is dark blue, dotted with bubbles of different sizes, in different shades of blue. There are icons lined up in four neat rows on one side, half of them folders. The file names are all in Cyrillic, characters that I recognize but can’t read—at least not well. I took a beginning Russian class years ago; then Luke arrived and I never went back. I know some basic phrases, recognize some words, but that’s about it. For the rest I rely on linguists or translation software.

I open a few of the folders, then the text documents inside them. Page after page of dense Cyrillic text. I feel a wave of disappointment, one I know is nonsensical. It’s not like a Russian guy sitting on his computer in Moscow is going to be typing in English, keeping records in English, List of Deep-Cover Operatives in the United States. I know that what I’m looking for is encrypted. I’m just hoping to see some sort of clue, some sort of protected file, something with obvious encryption.

High-level penetrations over the years have told us that the identities of the sleepers are known only to the handlers, that the names are stored electronically, locally. Not in Moscow, because the SVR—Russia’s powerful external intelligence service—fears moles within its own organization. Fears them so much that they’d rather risk losing sleepers than keep the names in Russia. And we know that if anything should happen to a handler, the ringleader would access the electronic files and contact Moscow for a decryption key, one part of a multilayer encryption protocol. We have the code from Moscow. We’ve just never had anything to decrypt.

The program’s airtight. We can’t break in. We don’t even know its true purpose, if there is one. It might just be passive collection, or it might be something more sinister. But since we know the head of the program reports to Putin himself, I tend to think it’s the latter—and that’s what keeps me up at night.

I keep scanning, my eyes drifting over each file, even though I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for. And then I see a Cyrillic word I recognize. друзья. Friends. The last icon in the last row, a manila folder. I double-click and the folder opens into a list of five JPEG images, nothing more. My heart rate begins to accelerate. Five. There are five sleepers assigned to each handler; we know that from multiple sources. And there’s the title. Friends.

I click open the first image. It’s a headshot of a nondescript middle-aged man in round eyeglasses. A tingle of excitement runs through me. The sleepers are well assimilated. Invisible members of society, really. This could certainly be one of them.

Logic tells me not to get too excited; all our intelligence says the files on the sleepers are encrypted. But my gut tells me this is something big.

I open the second. A woman, orange hair, bright blue eyes, wide smile. Another headshot, another potential sleeper. I stare at her. There’s a thought I’m trying to ignore, but can’t. These are just pictures. Nothing about their identities, nothing the ringleader could use to contact them.

But still. Friends. Pictures. So maybe Yury’s not the elusive handler I was hoping to uncover, the one the Agency devoted resources to finding. But could he be a recruiter? And these five people: They must be important. Targets, maybe?

I double-click the third image and a face appears on my screen. A headshot, close-up. So familiar, so expected—and yet not, because it’s here, where it doesn’t belong. I blink at it, once, twice, my mind struggling to bridge what I’m seeing with what I’m seeing, what it means. Then I swear that time stops. Icy fingers close around my heart and squeeze, and all I can hear is the whoosh of blood in my ears.

I’m staring into the face of my husband.

Footsteps are coming closer. I hear them, even through the pounding in my ears. The haze in my mind crystallizes, in an instant, into a single command. Hide it . I guide the cursor to the X in the corner of the picture and click, and Matt’s face disappears, just like that.

I turn toward the sound, the open wall of my cubicle. It’s Peter, approaching. Did he see? I glance back at the screen. No pictures, just the folder, open, five lines of text. Did I close it in time?

A niggling voice in my head asks me why it matters. Why I felt the need to hide it. This is Matt. My husband. Shouldn’t I be running to security, asking why the Russians have a picture of him in their possession? There’s a wave of nausea starting to churn deep in my stomach.

“Meeting?” Peter says. One eyebrow is raised above his thick-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s standing in front of me, loafers and pressed khakis, a button-down that’s buttoned a touch too close to the top. Peter’s the senior analyst on the account, a holdover from the Soviet era, and my mentor for the past eight years. There’s no one more knowledgeable about Russian counterintelligence. Quiet and reserved, it’s impossible not to respect the guy.

And right now there’s nothing strange in his expression. Just the question. Am I coming to the morning meeting? I don’t think he saw.

“Can’t,” I say, and my voice sounds unnaturally high-pitched. I try to lower it, try to keep the tremor out of it. “Ella’s sick. I need to pick her up.”

He nods, more of a tilt of his head than anything. His expression looks even, unfazed. “Hope she feels better,” he says, and turns to walk away, over to the conference room, the glass-walled cube that’s better suited for a tech start-up than CIA headquarters. I watch him long enough to see that he doesn’t look back.

I swivel back to my computer, to the screen that’s now blank. My legs have gone weak, my breath coming quick. Matt’s face. On Yury’s computer. And my first instinct: Hide it . Why?

I hear my other teammates ambling toward the conference room. Mine is the closest cubicle to it, the one everyone walks past to get there. It’s usually quiet down here, the farthest reaches of the sea of cubicles, unless people are heading to the conference room or to the Restricted Access room just beyond it—the place where analysts can lock themselves away, view the most sensitive of sensitive files, the ones with information so valuable, so hard to obtain, that the Russians surely would track down and kill the source if they knew we had it.

I take a shaky breath, then another. I turn as their footsteps come closer. Marta’s first. Trey and Helen, side by side, a quiet conversation. Rafael and then Bert, our branch chief, who does little more than edit papers. Peter’s the real boss and everyone knows it.

We’re the sleeper team, the seven of us. An odd bunch, really, because we have so little in common with the other teams in the Counterintelligence Center, Russia Division. They have more information than they know what to do with; we have virtually nothing.

“You coming?” Marta asks, pausing at my cubicle, laying a hand on one of the high walls. The scent of peppermint and mouthwash wafts over when she speaks. There are bags under her eyes, a thick layer of concealer. One too many last night, by the look of things. Marta’s a former ops officer, likes whiskey and reliving her glory days in the field in equal measure; she once taught me how to pick a lock with a credit card and a bobby pin I found at the bottom of my work bag, one that keeps Ella’s hair in a bun for ballet class.