“Especially if you’re tanking the US dollar with your conspiracy,” said Berg. “I think we’re looking at the soft occupation of several former Eastern Bloc states. Hungary. Belarus. Kazakhstan. More will follow.”

“We can’t be the only ones seeing this pattern,” said Devin.

“Probably not, but without the specific knowledge of a widespread sleeper network corrupting the shit out of our technology, why would anyone suspect this is a foreign state effort? This isn’t like a normal cyberattack they can trace. This is an attack from within. A ‘mistake’ made by an employee who’s held a security clearance for years. Who has no suspicious bank activity or sketchy contacts. The company investigates the hardware or software related to the accident and fires the employee—who could not care less. They’re a Russian sleeper agent, after all. Story over. Rinse and repeat with a different company. As long as you don’t get greedy and drop every plane, rocket, and satellite out of the sky at once, nobody will figure it out. My guess is that if we ever get to the bottom of this whole conspiracy, we’ll find that every layer supports their long game. Slowly but surely expanding Russian influence in Eastern Europe.”

“And weakening the US,” said Devin.

“By weakening the US,” said Berg. “They can’t expand their influence without fracturing NATO, driving wedges between Western powers, and rendering the United States less relevant in Europe’s eyes. This is a very long game. One they won’t give up easily. Look what they did to your mother.”

Berg’s last sentence hit him hard. His mother had been right all along, and everyone had treated her as though she were insane. Devin included.

But she’d given them no reason to think otherwise! How the fuck were they supposed to guess she was fighting a one-person war against Russia? They weren’t. For a good reason. Helen Gray had chosen to shield her family from this nightmare, by making the most difficult decision imaginable. By giving up her family for something she believed would save countless lives. From what he’d read in her library, she hadn’t drawn the same end-game conclusion as Karl Berg.

Devin’s mother had gone to her grave suspecting that hundreds of sleeper agents had penetrated American society, far more than the 109 born of the seventy-three suspicious couples she had identified. She had been well aware of her limitations. That she could only back trace public figures’ family histories to determine if they fit the profile of sleepers dropped off in America during the seventies. That the sleepers working behind the scenes at big tech companies or in lower-level government positions would remain hidden from her.