An Old Manila Folder

Alex stood up, coughing to clear the dust from his throat and wiping his eyes. As the dust finishes settling, his coughing has pretty much stopped and he looks around the fallen boxes. "Shit." He could already hear the reprimanding he would receive. "Really? I send you up there to clean and you make a bigger mess instead? You'll be cleaning for a week at this rate." Alex scowled to himself and started picking the boxes back up, restacking them out of they way and looking at what spilled. As he picks up the contents from the spilled box, a manila folder with his mom's name on the tab catches his eye. More specifically, the Russian word underneath her name. "Mission".

Alex only learned Russian because his mother demanded it. Well other kids were outside playing kickball, Alex was in his living room learning his mother's language one vocab word at a time. He never used it in his day to day, except for when his mother refused to speak English when she was really upset, so he knew he was rusty. But as he opened the folder, he was able to understand enough.

The first piece of paper was titled with the word, "Target". What followed was paragraph after paragraph of his father, only about a third of which Alex could translate. "High security access....several underground projects....high priority for a...a spy!?" Alex knew his father was a humble but high ranking military officer. But this was implying that an agency, a Russian agency wanted someone to spy on his father. This was something out of a movie, not real life! He quickly looked at the next page and gasped. This one featured a photo of his mother, shoulders up. If he thought she could look cold now, this photo showed how she could really be. Her eyes stared directly into the camera, her mouth looked like it had never even flinched in the direction of a smile.

Alex quickly started reading whatever he could translate. "Code Name: Rasputin. Cover Name: Natasha Volkov...holy shit. Gather information...seduce for long term assignment...she's...she really is a spy..." At the bottom of the page, he translates the final sentence: "Activation Phrase: The sleeping bear awakens, listens, and sleeps."