Need to Know (22 page)

I search Matt's face, and I know he's right. Yury's here, restrained. The threat to my kids is off the street, finally. If I call the authorities right now, he'll be in prison for life. He's a Russian spy, one who directed a cell of deep-cover agents. He won't have the chance to get anywhere near my kids.

The gun feels suddenly heavy in my hand. “So what do we do now?” Do we call the police, even though Matt and I would both spend the rest of our lives behind bars?

Uncertainty flickers across his features. “Maybe if you just do what they asked, insert that flash drive…,” he suggests, a glimmer of hope on his face, and I feel like the floor has dropped from under me. This again? Is he really still stuck on this? Why is it so important to him?

“It won't protect them.”

“Yury said—”

“They'll ask for something else. They'll threaten the kids again.”

“You don't know that. And anyway, this would buy us time….”

My throat feels incredibly tight. All these conversations we've had about inserting the flash drive. He's desperate, almost. Why does he care so much, why does he want so badly for it to happen, unless
he's
really part of
them
?

“And then what?” I say. “Matt, this is a man who
targeted our kids
. He told you he'd kill Luke. You really want to just let someone like that go?”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, looks uncomfortable. And I can't take my eyes off him. In my mind I see him walking down those stairs, relaxed, about to chat with Yury.

I see him promising me he didn't tell the Russians anything about Marta and Trey. Lying to me. And I believed his lie. I believed it was the truth.

I feel like, for the first time, I'm seeing who he really is.

Something changes in his face, and I have that unsettling feeling again that he knows exactly what I'm thinking. “You really don't trust me,” he says.

I voice the thought at the forefront of my mind. “Okay, maybe you couldn't leave. But shouldn't you have done
something
?”

He twists his wedding band around his finger. “I tried to call you once….Your phone was off….” He's struggling to get the words out. “Yury found out what I did. He came back with Luke's backpack. Said if I tried anything else, next time…”

Luke's backpack. That's why it was missing. They were
that
close to my son. At his school, in his classroom. Reaching into his cubby, the place he stores his lunch. And their message couldn't be more clear: They can get to him, whenever and wherever they want. I look over at Yury, who's watching us with a smile.

I feel like I'm going to be sick. Of course Matt didn't do anything after that. How could he? Luke's life was in danger.

I force my mind to focus. It's not just the fact that he's here. It's everything. The lie about Marta and Trey. Suggesting
again
that I insert the flash drive.

“Nothing I say is going to make a difference, is it?” he asks.

“I don't know.” I hold his gaze, hold my ground. “I think you want very much for me to do what he asked. And I'm trying to understand why.”

“Why?”
He gives me a look of total disbelief. “Because I know these people. I know there's no way out.” He reaches out for me, then drops his hand. “And because I don't want anything to happen to our kids.”

We stand, staring at each other. He's the first one to break the silence. “If I was on their side, Viv, if I wanted it so badly, why didn't I do it to begin with?”

“What?” I say, but it's more to stall than anything, because there's a perfect clarity to his question.

“I gave you a flash drive. You inserted it. Why go through all this, if that's what I wanted? Why wouldn't I have just given it to you to begin with?”

I can't answer him. He's right. That doesn't make sense.

“Or why didn't I lie to you? Tell you the second flash drive was nothing, just another server reset?”

If he had, I would have done it. I would have inserted the drive.

“I'm on your side, Viv,” he says, softly. “I just don't know if you're on mine.”

My mind feels like a jumbled mess. I don't know what to think, what to do right now.

And then my phone starts to vibrate, deep in my pocket. I fumble for it and see the number. Luke's school.

He should be there by now, right? He must not have arrived. Oh God, what happened? I should have called my parents, checked in, made sure they got him on the bus, maybe even driven him there. Kept him safe. I hit the green button.

“Hello?” I say.

“Hi, Mom.”

It's Luke. I exhale a breath I didn't know I was holding, feel my world spin. And then a new torrent of panic crashes over me. Why's he calling from school? “Luke, honey, what's wrong?”

“You said to call if I saw him again.”

“Who?” I say, an automatic response, but even as the word comes out of my mouth, I know.

“The man. The man who talked to me at school.”

No. This is not possible. “When did you see him, Luke?”

“Just now. He's outside. By the fence.”

This can't be. I glance at Yury, who's listening to all of this, a smile still on his face. “Luke—are you sure it's him?”

“Yeah. He talked to me again.”

I can barely force out the next words. “What did he say?”

He lowers his voice, and I hear the tremor in it. “He said to tell you time is running out. What does that mean, Mom?”

Full-blown panic takes hold. I look at Matt, and I know he heard the conversation. There's a flash of anger on his face that looks almost animal, and in that instant he's my husband again, the man who'd do anything to protect us, to keep our family safe.

“Go,” I say to him, covering the mouthpiece with my hand. He glances at Yury, then back at me, looks uncertain. “I'll be fine. Go take care of Luke.” He'd never let anyone hurt the kids; of that I'm sure. We exchange a look, then he grabs the phone from me.

“Luke, you stay where you are,” he says. “Don't move, buddy. I'll be right there. Dad's coming to get you.”

The door closes behind Matt, then there's silence. I'm trembling, fear and anger and desperation churning inside me. This won't end with Yury in prison. Whoever's at Luke's school right now just made that clear. Someone else already knows. Someone else is a threat.

Calling the authorities won't protect my kids.

Will anything?

Yury's watching me with an amused expression. I bend down to his level, look him in the eye. “Who is threatening my son?” I say in a way that sounds frightening, even to me. How could I have been so wrong? If there's one thing I've had drilled into me, in my job, it's never to make assumptions. And yet didn't I do exactly that? Heard there was a man, someone with an accent, and assumed it was Yury.

An accent. That's what Luke said, right? Wasn't that why I thought it was Yury? I struggle to think back to the conversation, remember Luke's exact words.
He had a weird voice
. God, I don't even know for sure it was a Russian accent.

Is it the person that Yury said was on the inside? No one I know of with access to Athena has an accent. Could it be someone higher up in management, someone in IT?

Or could it be another Russian agent?

“Who is threatening my son?” I say again. He says nothing, just mocks me with his eyes. And then instinct takes over. I bring the grip of the gun down hard against his forehead, as big a shock to him as to me. I've never hit anyone in my life. “I will kill you,” I say, and I mean it. If it would protect my kids, I'd kill him in a heartbeat.

He sneers at me, squinting, a welt already forming on his forehead. The force of the blow, the way his neck snapped back with it, has left the opening of his shirt askew around his neck. The pendant on the gold chain has slipped out from under his shirt, catches the light. It's some sort of gaudy cross. “Why not?” he says. “You don't have anything to lose.”

Rage simmers inside me. “Who?” I jam the gun into his temple. Whoever it is, he'll probably be gone by the time Matt arrives. How on earth will we find him?

“Could be any number of people. I have so many friends I can call on.” Yury smirks. He's toying with me. I turn away from him, so he can't see my face, can't see the desperation, the terror that I'm feeling.

So many friends
. There's a thought swirling around in my mind, slowly forming into something distinct. Whoever Yury has on the inside knows Matt's identity. And shouldn't they be hiding his identity from everyone, if the cell's really so compartmented?

And what about all the agents at my wedding? All gathered in one place, at one time. Maybe it's not as compartmented as we think. Maybe our understanding of the program is flawed. Maybe…

Dmitri the Dangle
. His name suddenly fills my mind, crowds out all else. Dmitri the Dangle, the walk-in who claimed there were dozens of sleeper cells in the U.S. The man we thought was a double agent, someone the Russians sent to us bearing false information. But he was right, wasn't he? If there were that many agents at my wedding, he was right.

He was telling the truth
.

I rack my brain, trying to remember what else he said. What other claims didn't fit with what we knew, so we ignored them, chalked them up to being false leads?

He said the sleepers' names were stored on the handlers themselves. On their bodies, at all times.

I look at Yury. My mind is churning, fitting together the pieces of a puzzle I didn't even know existed. Names stored on handlers' bodies at all times. And what we've always believed to be true, based on all our other intelligence: names stored electronically. Something clicks in my mind.

Could it be? I pull my eyes away, up to his face, and my breath catches. It is. I see it in his face, the realization that I
know
. There's a helplessness there, the same kind I've been feeling for weeks now. He's bound to the chair, can't hide it, can't protect it. The smirk's gone now.

I take a step toward him, then another, until I'm standing over him, and he has no choice but to stare up at me, exposed and vulnerable. I can see the fear grow in his eyes. I take hold of the pendant, look at it, the contours of the golden cross, the size of it. Turn it over, see four tiny screws.

I clasp my fist around it. I look him in the eye as I pull down with one swift, forceful yank. His neck jerks forward, then back again as the chain snaps, cascades down around my hand.

“This is it, isn't it?” I say, and before I can say another word, I hear a click behind me, a gun being cocked.

I go completely still. Someone entered, and I didn't hear. We didn't lock the door behind Matt, did we?

Yury's craning his neck around me to face the door. His eyes are glued on something, someone, whoever just entered. There's recognition on his face. A slow smile creeping to his lips. And it sends panic shooting through me. I'm going to die. I'm going to die here, right here, right now.

I'm frozen in place, waiting for the shot. I can't bring myself to turn around, to see the person who's going to kill me.

Yury's smile is even bigger now. I see his teeth, crooked on one side, yellowed. He opens his mouth to speak. “Hello, Peter. It's good to see you.”

PETER.

I hear the name, but it doesn't seem real. It can't be, can it? I turn around, slowly. Pleated pants, loafers, glasses—and a revolver pointed right at me. Peter. Instinctively I drop my pistol, raise my hands, back away from him.

Omar said there was a mole in CIC, someone who worked with me. Yury said they had someone with access to Athena. I should have connected the dots.

But Peter?
Peter?

“Vivian, I think you know Peter?” Yury says, and starts laughing, a crazy, manic laugh. He's enjoying this.

My eyes are still on Peter. He lowers the gun to his side, his arm at an awkward angle, like he doesn't quite know what to do with it.

“Those search results you took, Vivian?” Yury says. “I told you they didn't matter. Because our friend Peter here has another copy. Don't you, Peter?”

“How could you?” I whisper, ignoring Yury, my focus entirely on Peter.

He blinks at me, says nothing.

“I have to say, your timing is wonderful,” Yury goes on. “I was just talking about you.”

Peter's eyes don't leave mine. I'm not sure he heard what Yury said. “When you didn't show up this morning, Vivian, I had a feeling you might be here,” Peter says.

Peter's the mole. He's been working for the Russians, helping them blackmail me. “How could you?” I say again.

He pushes his glasses up with the index finger of his free hand, opens his mouth to speak, shuts it again. Clears his throat. “Katherine.”

Katherine
. Of course Katherine. Katherine's the only thing that mattered to Peter more than his job, his country. He pulls his glasses off, uses the back of his other hand—the one with the gun—to swipe his eyes. The gun flails, the barrel pointing in all directions. I'm not sure he even remembers he's holding it. And his finger's still on the trigger.

“That clinical trial…,” he says, putting his glasses back on, adjusting them on the bridge of his nose. “She didn't get in.”

Didn't get in?
I stare at him, need him to continue. In the chair behind me, Yury is silent.

“She had a couple of months to live, at most. There's no way to describe what that's like, hearing that news….” His voice wobbles. He shakes his head, clears his throat. “One day she was fine. We had the rest of our lives to look forward to. And the next day, that news.
Two more months
.”

I feel a pang of sympathy for him, one that very quickly dissipates. This isn't Peter, my mentor, my friend. This is someone standing in front of me with a gun, ready to kill me.

He blinks, refocuses on me. “Then someone showed up at my door. One of them.” He nods at Yury. His voice stays flat. “Promised to get us the drugs from the trial, if I'd work for them.”

“So you did it,” I say.

He shrugs, a hopeless shrug. There's shame in his gesture. At least there's that. “I knew it was wrong. Of course I did. But he was offering the most valuable thing in the world to me. Time. Time with the one person who meant everything to me. How can you put a price on that? How can you say no to that?”

He's pleading, like he needs me to understand, to forgive him. And in a way, I do. As much as I hate to admit it, I do. They hit him where he was most vulnerable. They did the same to me, didn't they?

“I never told Katherine. She wouldn't have let me do it. I told her that they let her into the trial after all. I vowed that when it was all over, I'd come clean. I'd tell security exactly what I'd told the Russians. I'd right every wrong I'd committed.”

A rush of something surges through me. Hope? It's over now, isn't it? Katherine's gone. “The drugs worked, for a while.” Yury's listening with rapt attention, like he's hearing all this for the first time, too. “Then he gave me the flash drive. Told me to load it on to the computer in the Restricted Access room.” Peter pushes the glasses up on his nose. “I refused. Telling them about Marta's drinking, or Trey's boyfriend, that's one thing. But giving them access to our systems…to the identities of covert agents, Russians who are working for us…there's no way I could do that.”

Peter's jaw clenches tight. “He threatened to cut off her drugs. And then he did it. She died four weeks later.”

My mouth opens and a rush of air escapes. My heart goes out to him once more, imagining the agony of those weeks, knowing what his decision cost them both. And then a newfound surge of hatred for these people. These monsters.

“They think I won't say anything,” Peter goes on. “They think there's no way I'd go to the authorities now, because I'd guarantee myself a place in prison for the rest of my life. What they don't realize is that my life isn't really worth living anymore.”

Yury looks like he's been hit. Stunned, speechless.

Peter ignores him. There are tears in his eyes. “I didn't want to go on, but I had to. I had to fix what I'd done.” His voice quivers. “Especially what I'd done to you.”

“To me?” I breathe.

“I told them we were almost into Yury's laptop. My guess is that's when they loaded Matt's picture on, for you to find.”

It makes sense. That would explain why the files weren't encrypted. Why it was photographs, nothing more. It was a setup.

They knew exactly how I'd act. That I wouldn't turn Matt in. That they'd be able to manipulate me. They knew it, even when I didn't.

“I'm responsible for getting you into this,” Peter says quietly.

I should say something, but I don't know what, can't find the words. This is too much to process right now.

And then I see Peter's eyes focus on something behind me. A mask of fear settles over his face.

“Drop the gun,” I hear. Matt's voice.

I turn, and there he is, standing at the edge of the living room. Beyond him, I can see that the door leading from the kitchen to the patio is ajar. He snuck in through the back. A pistol is in his hand, by his side. His gaze is locked on Peter.

There's a dull pounding in my head, like none of this can really be happening, none of it makes sense. He shouldn't be here. He should be at school, picking up our son, keeping him safe. “Where's Luke?” I ask. “Why are you back already?”

He doesn't look at me. I'm not sure he even heard me.

“Matt, where's Luke?”

“I called your parents. They're getting him.”

How did he know my parents were at the house? And why didn't he go himself? None of this is right. “Why?” I manage to ask.

“They're closer. They'd get there faster.” He holds my gaze, his expression soothing. “They were glad to help. And I couldn't leave you here alone. Go on, Peter. Continue.”

But Peter is silent. His hands are clasped in front of him, the revolver on the floor at his feet. I look over at Yury, who's taking it all in. The fear I'd seen just moments ago is gone, replaced with the smug look that terrifies me, even though I'm too confused to understand exactly why.

Matt speaks again.
“Continue.”
His voice is brittle.

“Yury's right, Vivian. I downloaded the search results before the systems reset. I'm the reason they're blackmailing you.” Peter's expression hardens. “But he's wrong about something. I didn't keep a copy.” He reaches into his front pocket, and Matt raises his gun.

“Matt, stop,” I say. I can hear the panic in my voice.

“It's okay,” Peter says. He's already pulled something out of his pocket, something small. “It's just this.” He holds out a flash drive, dangling from a silver key ring. I stare at it, watch it sway back and forth, suspended in the air, and wait for him to explain. There has to be an explanation. I trust him. He's been my mentor for years.

“It's the pictures you found, minus Matt's. That's all I kept.” He extends the flash drive out to me. “There's no evidence you've ever seen them. Nothing they can use to blackmail you.”

Peter takes a step closer to me, the drive still suspended from one hand. “Do what you want with this, and with the identity of the fifth sleeper.” He casts a quick glance at Matt. “I trust you'll make the right decision, Vivian, whatever that is. But they're not going to manipulate you the way they did me.”

I pull my eyes from him to the drive. Then I reach for it, take it from him. Matt's watching me, his expression unreadable. Peter's words keep ringing in my head.
I trust you'll make the right decision, Vivian, whatever that is
.

I look down at the gun in Matt's hand. My mind flashes back to the shoe box in our closet, to finding the empty space where it had once been hidden. And then realization hits.

“You had a gun this whole time.” The words come out before I can process them, filter them.

“What?”

“Why didn't you shoot Yury? Why did you stay?”

“Jesus, Viv, are you serious?”

“You said you weren't sure if you could take him. But you had a
gun
.”

“I'm not a killer.” He looks incredulous. “And what good would it have done?”

“He threatened our son. He brought you Luke's
backpack
.”

I watch the emotion on his face morph into hurt. “My God, Vivian, what's it going to take for you to trust me?”

I can't answer that. We stare at each other, unblinking, and I see his jaw tighten, his nostrils flare, just the smallest bit.

A sound pulls my attention away. Yury is chuckling. “This is better than the movies,” he says with a laugh.
He believes Matt's on his side
. The revelation hits me like a slap, leaves me feeling like the wind's been knocked out of me.

And then Yury's smile vanishes, just like that. His face becomes like stone. “The boy dies tomorrow,” he says, his eyes burning into mine. The words draw all the air out of the room, they're so unexpected, so
terrible
. “If you don't do this, Luke dies tomorrow.”

There's no doubt in my mind that he means it. Suddenly it's just me and him, this man who intends to kill my child. I'm paralyzed, can't tear my eyes away from his face.

“And then another one after that. Ella, maybe.” There's a look in his eyes now that makes my stomach turn. “Although she's growing into quite a pretty girl. I might save her for last. Start with the twins, let her get a little older first…”

My vision's blurring, all the strength in my body gone. I manage to turn toward Matt, the only person who could possibly understand the depth of my terror right now. I open my mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a strangled, anguished plea.

Something changes in his face. A look of resolve settles over it, and inexplicably, I know what's coming. I watch Matt lift his gun.

And then there's a shot.

MY EARS RING;
everything is muffled, fuzzy. The blast reverberates in my head. I blink, try to focus. This isn't real. This can't be real. Matt drops the gun. His hands fly up in front of him, like he doesn't know what to do with them. There's a look on his face I've never seen before. Revulsion and disbelief, like he had no idea he was capable of what he just did. He takes a gasping breath, then another.

Yury's slumped in his chair, head lowered. Blood darkens the center of his shirt, creeping, staining it at the edges, even as I watch.

Reality hits me a moment later. Matt just killed someone. My husband just took someone's life. A monster's life, but a
life
just the same.

“You need to leave,” I hear. Peter's voice. I can barely hear him through the ringing in my ears, the hammering of my heart. “The Bureau's been on my tail. They'll be in here any minute.”

The FBI. Here. Oh my God.

“You need to leave,” Peter says again, this time with more urgency. He reaches down, picks up Matt's gun.

I need to leave. But I can't move.

And then there's a sound behind me, pounding. A loud blow, then another, and then the door bursts open. Figures in dark tactical gear enter, crouched low, rifles raised and aimed. They're shouting.
“FBI! Hands in the air!”

I raise my arms high above me. I see the vests, the large block letters. The barrels of the rifles, pointing at Peter, at me.