Karen Cleveland - Need to Know

Dmitri the Dangle. Suddenly he’s all I can think about. He’d said there were dozens of sleeper cells in the U.S. He told us so much that didn’t make sense, that made us sure he was a dangle. That the handlers carried the identities of the sleepers on themselves, at all times, when we knew they were stored electronically. The decryption code that didn’t match the one we had from other sources. And the outrageous claims. That sleepers had infiltrated the government, were slowly working their way to the top. That there were dozens of cells buried here in the States, when we thought there were no more than a few.

That one wasn’t so outrageous after all, was it? And then another realization strikes me.

“You’re a spy,” I say quietly. I’d been so focused on the lie, on the fact that he wasn’t who he said he was, that I hadn’t fully comprehended the obvious.

“I don’t want to be. I want nothing more than to actually be Matt Miller from Seattle. To be free from their grip.”

There’s a heavy feeling in my chest, like I can barely catch my breath.

“But I’m trapped.” He looks so sincere, so pitiful. Of course he’s trapped. It’s not like he can just quit. They have too much invested in him.

Chase is squirming on my lap, struggling to break away. I set him down on the floor, and he gets on all fours and starts to crawl away, happy little shrieks trailing behind him.

“You lied to me.”

“I didn’t have a choice. You, of all people, should understand—”

“Don’t you dare, ” I say, because I know where he’s headed.

I picture us, so long ago, the little table in the corner of the coffee shop, oversize mugs in front of us. “What do you do for work?” he asked.

“I just finished up grad school,” I said, hoping that would suffice, knowing it wouldn’t.

“Do you have a job lined up?”

I nodded. Took a sip of coffee. Stalled.

“Doing what?” he pressed.

I looked down at my mug, the little puffs of steam that were rising from it. “Consulting. A small firm,” I said, the lie tasting bitter. But he was a stranger, and I wasn’t about to tell a stranger I had been hired by the CIA. “How about you?” I said, and thankfully the conversation turned to software engineering.

“It’s not the same at all,” I say now. “You’ve had ten years. Ten years .”

“I know,” he says, contrite.

Now Caleb’s squirming, too. Squirming and smiling at me, no doubt wondering why I won’t smile back. He stretches his arms out toward me, and Matt holds him up and out over the table at the same time I reach for him. He settles into my lap, calm.

“Do you do that kind of thing? Pretend to be someone’s relative?” I ask. I don’t know why it matters. Why that, of all things, is what I want to know.

He shakes his head. “They wouldn’t want me taking a risk like that.”

Of course they wouldn’t. He’s more valuable than that, isn’t he? Because he’s married to me. And I work for the CIA.

God, the Russians really scored big with him. They must be thrilled. How lucky is that, a deep-cover spy married to a CIA counterintelligence analyst?

And then a jolt of cold runs through me like electricity.

I picture the two of us, in my apartment a few weeks after we’d met. Sitting across from each other at the folding table in the corner of the studio, pizza on paper plates in front of us. “I haven’t been completely honest with you,” I said, wringing my hands, worried how he’d react to my admission of untruthfulness but relieved to be clearing the air, putting myself in a position where I wouldn’t have to lie to this man ever again. “I work for the CIA.” I remember his face clearly, unchanged at first, like the news didn’t surprise him. Then something flickered in his eyes, and I thought the information just took a moment too long to register.

But it didn’t, did it? He knew all along.

My chest is tight. I close my eyes, and I see myself in the grad school auditorium, the presentation from the CIA recruiter. The realization that this is what I could do with my life, a way to make a difference in the world, to serve my country, to make my family proud. Time flashes forward, past the application process, the background investigation, the battery of evaluations. To the day, a year later, after I’d all but given up, when I got the letter in the mail, generic government return address. Plain white paper, no letterhead. Just a start date, salary, directions. And the office to which I’d been assigned: the Counterintelligence Center.

That was two weeks before I moved to Washington. And met Matt.

My breath is coming fast now. In my head I’m back in that coffee shop, sitting in that corner, reliving our first conversation, the one where we discovered how similar we were. He didn’t just play along, create a persona as he went. He was the first to say he was raised Catholic, that his mom was a teacher, that he had a golden retriever. He said it because he already knew it about me.

I raise a hand to my mouth and am vaguely aware it’s shaking.

The Russians weren’t lucky. They were thorough. Everything was intentional, planned. It wasn’t serendipitous at all.

I was his target.

Matt leans forward again, the creases deeper, the eyes wider. I’m convinced he can read my thoughts, that he knows the truth that just dawned on me. “I swear everything I feel for you and the kids is real. I swear to God, Viv.”

I’ve taken classes in detecting deception, and I’m vaguely aware of the fact that he’s showing none of the signs. He’s telling the truth.

But then, wouldn’t he have received the same training? More of it, probably. Wouldn’t he know how to convincingly lie?

Hasn’t he been doing it for twenty-two years?

Caleb’s chewing on my finger, tiny sharp teeth digging into my skin. The pain is strangely welcome, and I don’t stop it, because it’s the only thing that feels real right now.

“The day we met…,” I say. And I can’t continue. I can’t make myself finish the thought, ask what I want to ask, what I already know deep down. It’s too much.

He takes a moment to respond. “I’d been watching you all morning. When I saw you with that box, I walked in front of you.” He looks guilty when he says it. At least he looks guilty.

I think of how many times I’ve told the story of our first meeting. How many times he’s told it. How we’ve each laughed in all the right places, jumped in with our own perspectives.

It was all a lie.

“You were my target,” he says, and my breath catches in my throat. The fact that he’d say it—that’s proof he’s being honest. It has to be proof. But that’s the wife in me speaking, isn’t it? The counterintelligence analyst in me says he’s telling me what I already know. The oldest trick in the book, a way to try to make himself seem more truthful than he really is.

“But then I fell in love with you,” he says. “I fell deeply, deeply in love with you.”

He looks sincere. And of course he loves me. You don’t spend a decade married to someone you don’t love. I shake my head. I don’t know what to believe anymore. And the thought that he might actually not love me is more than I can wrap my head around.

“At first I couldn’t get over how lucky I was. It wasn’t until much later I realized how awful it is, that our relationship is built on a lie. One that I can’t share, because if I do, everything will come crashing—”

He stops abruptly and focuses his attention on a spot behind me. I turn and see Luke standing silent in the doorway. I wonder how long he’s been there. What he’s heard. He looks from Matt to me, his eyes serious, reminding me so much of his father’s.