Need to Know

Vivian is a counterintelligence analyst at the CIA, tasked with identifying and tracking Russian "sleeper agents" hidden within the United States. She has four children, one of whom suffers from severe heart disease; her husband, Matt, is a software engineer who works from home and handles school runs, cooking, and medical appointments. To outsiders, theirs is a family with a well-practiced division of labor—tense but still holding together. Just as she closes in on a Russian contact with her algorithm and gains access to the other's computer, she sees photographs of five agents in a file named "Friends," and one of them is Matt. Under questioning, Matt admits that before he met Vivian he had been groomed as a long-term sleeper agent, and that their marriage of more than a decade and their four children rest on an undisclosed lie. Yet he insists he loves his wife and promises to cut ties with his employer, and Vivian chooses to believe him. Thereafter—a box full of bullets in the bedroom on the night of the incident, unfamiliar vehicles and surveillance that recur, and the possibility of a mole inside the agency—Vivian struggles repeatedly among duty, marriage, and her children's safety. With every step she yields, the other side demands a greater price; with every time she trusts, the information she holds becomes more dangerous. A CIA analyst fights back with professional training and a mother's instinct, and must ultimately answer: within the bounds of what she needs to know, whom can she truly trust?