3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1)

3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) Page 6

by Nick Pirog

  3:10 a.m.

  :01

   

  “Rise and shine.”

  Lassie opens one eye. He has some gunk in the corner near his nose and I wipe it away with my thumb. He shakes his head, then rests it down on my chest.

  “Come on, buddy, we have stuff to do.”

  Meow.

  “Ten more minutes? We’ve been asleep for twenty-three hours.” Well, I had. I couldn’t speak for Lassie; though I was nearly certain he was curled up on my chest the entire time.

  I brush the cat off and stand up. The clock on the dresser screams that one minute of my day has already elapsed.

  I pick up my phone off the bedside table and read Ingrid’s text. She won’t be able to stop by. She just wrapped up a homicide-suicide investigation and needs to catch up on some sleep. But she will see me tomorrow for sure. Smiley face.

  Tomorrow is October 7th, Ingrid’s and my sixth-month anniversary.

  Though I saw her two days earlier, it feels like I haven’t seen her in weeks. I am toying with the idea of asking her to move in with me. I made her a key a couple months back—which is one of the few things accomplishable at three in the morning—and she uses it when she stops over once or twice a week.

  But two hours a week isn’t enough. I wanted her for all seven.

  I pad to the kitchen and pull out the bowl of cereal Isabel prepared for me. I peel off the Saran Wrap and pour in the measured glass of milk. Not only does Isabel cook and clean, she also finds small ways to save me time: my toothbrush laid out with toothpaste on it, the microwave preset for three minutes and thirty seconds (the exact time needed to heat her famous enchiladas), Lassie’s food bowl filled and covered in the refrigerator, headphones and running shoes laid out next to the door, the NASDAQ and DOW closing numbers written on a sticky note next to the computer. The seconds she buys me would mean nothing to the average person, but to me, each second is the Mona Lisa.

  I eat the cereal, a banana, and a peanut butter protein shake and watch four minutes of Game of Thrones. My dad turned me on to the series eight months earlier, and I was up to episode four of season two.

  At 3:07 a.m., I check my stocks on E-Trade. I dump a couple thousand shares of a floundering pharmaceutical company and pick up an equal amount of corn futures—which is a huge gamble but has big upside potential.

  There is a soft chime and I answer my father’s call on Skype.

  My father is as frumpy as ever. Big glasses sliding down his nose. Receding gray hair running as fast as possible away from a big shiny forehead. A white mock turtleneck, possibly the last in existence, holding up a sagging Adam’s apple.

  “Hey, Sonny boy,” he mutters.

  “Hey, Pops. How’s your back?”

  “Sore as shit. In fact, I think I’m gonna have to sit out of our game tonight.”

  My dad’s back had been acting up for the past couple weeks, and we’d been forced to play our weekly poker game online. He cleaned me out the previous Wednesday and I was looking forward to some payback.

  “Just pop a couple Advil, old man.”

  “That’s just it. The over-the-counter stuff doesn’t help and if I take the pills the doctor prescribed, I’m out in five minutes.”

  I can tell from my father’s grimace that he is truly in pain. I can’t help but feel partly responsible. My dad’s back was fine until a few years ago when he tried to carry me from his car to my third-story condo. Long story short, he slipped two disks and my neighbor called the cops thinking my dad was lugging around a dead body.

  “Go pop those pills, then we’ll chat for another minute or two.”

  He nods and disappears from the screen.

  A large brown head takes my father’s place. The head belongs to my dad’s one-hundred-and-sixty-pound English mastiff.

  “Hey Murdo—”

  Lassie is on my lap before I finish the second syllable. It’s been three weeks since the two have seen each other and big stupid Murdock doesn’t understand that Lassie isn’t actually on the table in my dad’s house. Murdock smashes the computer with his giant paw and the feed disappears. My dad calls my phone a moment later and tells me that Murdock shattered his laptop and that he’s going to bed.

  It is 3:09 a.m.

  I’d allocated the rest of my day to playing cards and contemplate what I want to do with my remaining fifty-one minutes. Wednesdays are the only day I don’t exercise and I ponder going for a quick run. I lift the curtain and stare out on the glistening asphalt. It’d been a wet October thus far in Alexandria and the asphalt shimmers under the streetlight. I gaze at the house across the street. It’s been over six months since I heard Jessie Kallomatix’s scream, the impetus that set in motion one man being framed for murder and another taking a bullet between the eyes.

  The latter, Jessie’s father, like most people who get shot in the face, died. The former, well, he returned to his day job, aka the leader of the free world.

  Nearly two months after Conner Sullivan was exonerated from Jessie’s murder, my phone rang. It was 3:33 a.m. It was President Sullivan. He couldn’t sleep and needed someone to talk to. I was the only person he knew for certain was awake. For ten minutes we made small talk about the weather, his beloved Redskins, and how long I let myself sit on the pot. A month later he called again. And two weeks after that he showed up on my doorstep with a six-pack of beer. He knew I played poker with my dad each Wednesday and wanted to know if he could crash our game.

  So my dad, me, the President, and Red (the head of the President’s Secret Service detail) played poker for forty-nine minutes.

  But I hadn’t heard from him in three months.

  Blasted Ukraine.

  I decide to watch fifteen more minutes of Game of Thrones, then go for a short walk with Lassie.

  I am set to hit the play button when an alert comes in that I have a new email.

  It is 3:10 a.m.

  [email protected] doesn’t get much action, mostly from Amazon or the online trading podcast I subscribe to, and I’ve only received a handful of emails while I was awake.

  The email is from AST. Advanced Surveillance and Tracking.  

  The email is only three words.

  We found her.

  I take a deep breath.

  They found my mother.

   

  :02

   

  The last memory I have of my mother is on my sixth birthday. I remember being excited because she missed the previous two. The moment I woke up, I searched the room for her, but it was only my dad standing over me.

  “Where’s mom?”

  “She’s . . .”

  This sentence always ended the same.

  “. . . working.”

  My mom had the most boring job in the world. Or at least, when I was little, I remember thinking a geologist was the most boring job in the world. But that was because I viewed her job — rocks — as competition. Why was sandstone more important than me? What did quartzite have that I didn’t? It wasn’t until I grew up, learned that my mother wasn’t spending those three-week to three-month long stretches looking for rocks, that I understood. She was looking for oil. Companies paid her a lot of money to do this, which allowed my dad to stay home, earn a modest living as a technical writer, and care after me.

  “. . . right there,” he’d finished.

  My mother came into the room holding a birthday cake. The cake was of Snoopy and it had a big blue number six candle on it.

  I can still see the look on my mother’s face. Her sharp and angular features — nearly the opposite of my father’s — were a billboard of her Czech heritage. She had piercing green eyes — little pieces of jade, she’d called them — that must be what mood rings were made of.  

  Today, they were somber.

  I wonder if she knew then that she was leaving. Leaving us.

  After I blew out the candles and ate nearly half the cake, my parents brought in my birthday
present. Or should I say, wheeled it in.

  A bright red Huffy.

  I couldn’t have been happier.

  “Dad, can you teach me now?”

  I just assumed my dad would teach me how to ride a bike. He was the one who spent twenty minutes a day reading history to me, or quizzing me on spelling, or making me practice my cursive or long division, then another twenty minutes teaching me how to throw a baseball, swing a golf club, do a handstand, cook an omelet, play gin rummy, and every other life lesson.

  “You know, your mom is the bike riding expert in this family. Maybe she’ll teach you.”

  My dad must have already known.

  If she hadn’t already sat him down and said, “Richard, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t handle seeing my son only awake for an hour a day. This isn’t what I signed up for. I’m leaving,” then he’d read it in those jade eyes of hers.

  “I do ride a mean bike,” my mother said with a smile.

  My mom spent the next thirty minutes teaching me how to ride a bike under the streetlights of the small cul-de-sac where my dad still lives today.

  I didn’t realize it then, but when my mother let go of the seat of my red Huffy, let me balance all on my own, it wasn’t just the bike she was letting go of.

  When I did a loop back around, it wasn’t my mother, but my father waiting for me.

  “Where’s mom?”

  “She had to take a call.”

  I would never see my mother again.

   

  ::::

   

  Over the years, I asked my dad about my mother from time to time, but nothing ever came of it.

  “She’s gone. Don’t waste your time thinking about her” is all he would ever say. And he was right, because if I did start thinking about her, I would be lost in a black hole, only to snap out of it and my day, my hour, would be gone. If I were normal, I could have spent hours, days, months, even years, pondering why my mother walked out on us. But I wasn’t normal. I had sixty minutes a day and I wasn’t going to let anyone dictate how I spent those minutes. So I built up a wall. A wall that would make The Wall seem meek by comparison. A wall my mother could never scale.

  Or so I thought.

  Five years ago, I was trading online. I was looking into buying some oil futures and I came across a stock.

  GGU.

  Whenever I asked my mother who she worked for, she would always say Global Geologist Unlimited. I did some routine background on them. The company was started in 1987.

  My mother walked out on us in 1984.

  After calling and emailing Global Geologist, I firmly established Sally Bins was never associated with them.

  Next, I contacted George Mason University, where my mother attended under her maiden name, Sally Petrikova, and received her degree in Earth Science.

  They had no record of her.

  My mother’s father was deceased, but her mother still lived in Czechoslovakia. There were two Deniza Petrikova’s. Neither had a daughter.

  That’s when I first contacted AST and began shelling out the five thousand a month for them to find Sally Bins.

  The first report, looking into both my father and mother’s financials, marriage, birth certificates, and credit reports, was jaw dropping.

  Sally Bins never existed.

   

  ::::

   

  My dad met my mother at a coffee shop. Apparently, this is cliché, though I wouldn’t know. The only women I’ve met were either on Match.com—NIGHTOWL3AM—or in Ingrid’s case, a homicide detective questioning me for murder.

  The coffee shop was called the Mighty Bean. The place was three miles from my dad’s apartment in Arlington, just on the west side of the Potomac. He would frequent the establishment, sitting in the corner, working on his latest project while sipping on cup after cup of the house brew. Being so close to DC, much of his work had to do with the alphabet soup of government agencies. 

  I imagine my father hasn’t changed much in the past forty years. I suppose he might have had a bit more hair, a little less forehead, and maybe even a collared shirt on, but I can’t imagine he would have made even a blip on the radar of the brunette sitting at the table nearby. And equally so, I imagine my father was so immersed in government jargon that he was unaware the woman next to him was staring at him quizzically.

  “What are you working so hard on?”

  According to my mother, my father didn’t react the first time, and she had to repeat the question.

  When he did look up, his large glasses fell down his nose and he squinted at her through dark eyes under heavy brows. Pushing his glasses back up, his eyes opened wide and he said, “Holy moly.”

  My mother was well aware of the power she held over the opposite sex and hadn’t worn an ounce of makeup since she was in her early teens. With her hair in a tight bun, a business suit designed to square off her naturally curvy frame, and glasses — equal in thickness to my father’s — magnifying those green eyes into two small planets, my mother was caught off-guard by my father’s candid reaction.

  Never having blushed a day in her life, my mother’s cheeks grew warm.

  “Well, holy moly to you too.”

  They spent the next six hours chatting.

  They were married three months later.

  And a year after that, I arrived.

  Babies sleep a lot, so neither of my parents were overly concerned when I was only awake for an hour that first night. In fact, for the first day, my parents were convinced they gave birth to the easiest baby on the planet. I slept until 3:00 a.m., woke up crying, my mother nursed me, I goo-ed and gaa-ed for a little while, and then boom, 4:00 a.m. hit, and I was out like a light. When my parents couldn’t get me to wake up the next morning, they rushed me to the emergency room.

  They ran a bunch of tests on me, and then at 3:00 a.m., I woke up with a loud cry and everyone celebrated. At least for an hour.

  I stayed at the hospital for the next four months until every test was run. I was fed intravenously during the day, then nursed by my mother for the hour I was awake. Finally, when I reached fourteen pounds and I was deemed as healthy as any baby in existence, save for my peculiar sleeping schedule, my parents took me home. They continued to feed me intravenously and my mother continued to nurse me each night for the hour I was awake. I can only imagine the stress and worry I caused them.

  They waited and waited, hoped and prayed, that one day I would wake up like a normal baby, but it never happened.

  My father took me to see twenty specialists in six different states and three different countries. No matter what time zone I was in, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and fell asleep at 4:00 a.m. After twelve years of tests and more tests, no one could ever determine why I was only awake for this specified time. What they did discover was that I had an excess of melatonin in my bloodstream. Melatonin is the hormone that regulates the body’s sleep-wake cycle. My pineal gland, found in the center of the brain and responsible for melatonin secretion and regulation, was three times the normal size.

  When I was fourteen, I had brain surgery and the gland was removed.

  Nothing changed.

  The condition was thusly named Henry Bins.

   

  ::::

   

  There is a file attached to the email and I click on it.

  A PDF downloads.

  It is the full report.

  I read the small blurb prepared by the co-founder of AST, Mike Lang.

   

  Mr. Bins,

  I am sorry to tell you that we matched the fingerprints you provided us to a Jane Doe pulled from the Potomac River on Monday, October 4th, 2014, in Alexandria, Virginia.

   

  I want to be sad, but I’m not. I hardly knew my mother. I had a basket full of dusty memories, and everything else I knew was secondhand from my father. But it was a subject he’d shied away from for the last thirty years. It’
d been ten years since I uttered the word “Mom” in his presence. I can’t remember exactly what I said, or asked, but I do remember my father shrugging. And that’s exactly what he’d done: he’d shrugged her off long ago. Just like she’d shrugged us off.

  For a quick moment, I feel a rush of—I don’t want to say justice, that’s a bit macabre—but more like a karmic subpoena. Maybe falling into the Potomac River and drowning was, if not deserved, then an unintended consequence of a decision made three decades earlier.

  I imagine her standing near one of the hundreds of guardrails, bridges, or platforms that escorted the river through DC, Virginia, and onward. Maybe a tear runs down her cheek as she thinks of all those lost years with her baby boy. Maybe her breath catches while she ponders what happened to him. Did he grow into a man? Did his one-hour-a-day constraint hold him back from living a normal life? From happiness? Was he still asleep in the same room where she’d last seen him?

  She jumps.

  The report lists the contact information for the morgue where my mother’s body is being held. Then Lang goes on to say our contract has been fulfilled, he sends his deepest regrets, and he will reimburse me a prorated amount for the month of October. Signed, Mike Lang.

  The next page is a screenshot of the fingerprint database. The print I lifted off a vase in my parent’s bedroom many years earlier is on the left. The print from the Jane Doe is on the right. There are a bunch of numbers and words, but the only ones that matter are near the bottom.

  Positive match.

  The next page takes me by surprise. AST must have deep connections to have obtained the autopsy report this quickly.

  I scan the document for cause of death, already penciling in the word “drowning” in my mind. Or maybe she jumped from a bridge and hit the water and broke her neck. Either way it will be judged an accidental death or a suicide.

  But it’s not.

  It’s a homicide.

  My mother didn’t kill herself.

  She was murdered.

   

  :03

   

  Meow.

  Lassie stares at me with his yellow eyes.

  “I’m not gonna call her.”

  Meow.

  “Yes, I know my mother was found in Alexandria and that my girlfriend works for the Alexandria Police Department.”

  Meow.

   “Yes, I know she’s a homicide detective, you moron.”

  Meow.

  “Yes, thank you for pointing out that homicide detectives investigate murders and that my mother was murdered. What did you do at your last home, just sit around and watch Law and Order?”

  Meow.

  “SVU?”

  Meow.

  “You love iced tea?”

  Meow.

  “Oh, Ice T.”

  Meow.

  “Dude, I told you, I’m not gonna call her. She’s sleeping. I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  I look at the clock.

  It’s 3:23 a.m.

  I’d spent the last seven minutes searching the internet for any information regarding my mother’s murder, but there was no mention of a woman’s body pulled from the Potomac River with a bullet hole in the back of her head. That being said, Alexandria is only a short fifteen minutes from Washington, DC, so if it wasn’t a politician with the hole in their head, then it wasn’t newsworthy.

  Meow.

  “Fine.”

  I pick up the phone and dial.

  Ingrid picks up on the third ring.

  “Hi, honey.” The words come out like cold molasses.

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “It’s okay. How was your morning?”

  Ingrid called the first twenty minutes of my day the morning, the second twenty the afternoon, and the third the night.

  “I’ve had better.”

  I can almost feel her eyes open slightly.

  “Did something happen?”

  I’d never mentioned my mother to her and I spend the next four minutes bringing her up to speed: my mother walking out, searching up Global Geologist Unlimited, paying AST to find her, and her fingerprints matching the Jane Doe.

  I can hear the sheets of Ingrid’s bed rustle as she sits upright.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “It’s okay. I hardly knew her.” And everything I did know about her was a lie.

  “Still, she’s your mother.”

  I’m not ready to be sad and ignore her. “She was found in Alexandria. Did you hear about the case?”

  “No. With my own caseload and Robby, I haven’t had time to talk shop with anybody.”

  Ingrid’s last partner, Cal, was the aforementioned gentleman who had taken a bullet between the eyes, and her new partner, Robby, was a green second-year detective.

  Without my having to ask, Ingrid says, “Let me make some calls, and I’ll find out everything I can.”

  “You’re amazing.”

  “I know.”

  We hang up.

  It’s 3:31 a.m.

   

  ::::

   

  Lassie strains the full ten feet of his leash. I yank him back from the tree he wants to climb.

  “Dude, I don’t have time to patch you up tonight.”

  Lassie had a history of getting into fights with other mammals — fights he rarely won — leaving me spending the rest of my minutes cleaning his wounds from the raccoon he was chasing, pulling out the quills from the porcupine he snuck up on, or washing the stink off him from the skunk he was trying to copulate with.

  He retreats to the sidewalk and we continue east.

  I have a windbreaker and a beanie guarding me from the light sprinkle, but Lassie is half-soaked, his tan and black fur slick and shiny.

  We cross the street, Lassie darting toward a puddle and nearly submerging his entire body before I’m able to yank him back.

  Meow.

  “I’m no fun? Well, you’re no fun when I wake up with your stinky puddle body asleep on my chest.”

  I know how much Lassie loves a good puddle, and I usually get a kick out of him slapping at the water with his little paws, but I’m in a hurry.

  We cross three more blocks in a half-run.

  A minute later, we reach a small platform with metal guardrails.

  The Potomac River sweeps past. A quarter mile south, the river runs under a long stone bridge. Three cars zoom over the bridge in quick succession. I wonder if the car that transported my mother’s body passed over that bridge. Or did they park on it, pull her body from the trunk, and toss her overboard? Or just as easily, they could have killed her where I stood this very moment. Shot her in the back of the head, then pushed her over the guardrail. Or was she killed miles from here? Who knows how far the mighty Potomac carried her body? The autopsy report said she died twenty-four to forty-eight hours before she was found. She was found Monday morning. So that means she was murdered, executed, sometime over the weekend.

  Lassie and I walk north along the sidewalk. I instinctively stop above a huge drainage pipe that flows into the Potomac. The six-foot-high pipe is only visible if you lean over the railing and look backward toward the shore. A stream of water, which were millions of separate raindrops minutes earlier, flows into the mighty river.

  Six months ago, I spent twenty minutes hiding in the pipeline while a carload of gentlemen — the sort that would have done to me what someone did to my mother — searched for me. I wonder if my mother was as frightened before her death as I was then. Did she know she was being hunted? Was there a chase? I didn’t know much about my mother — it appeared as though I knew almost nothing — but I did remember those eyes of hers. You can’t fake the intensity or intelligence that lived there. My mother would not have been easy prey.

  The cell phone in my pocket buzzes.

  It’s Ingrid.

  I put the phone to my ear and head back toward home.

  It is 3:46 a.m.

    />
  ::::

   

  “Walker pulled the case.”

  Charley Walker was a fat blob, who was third cousin to somebody important, or else he would still be writing traffic tickets. At least that was according to Ingrid’s last rant. He had an affinity for stretching the truth and was known around the precinct as “Walker, Texas Liar.”

  “He wasn’t thrilled to chat at three in the morning, but I reminded him he had an upcoming IAB investigation into making illegal bets and that he should talk more quietly next time he put two hundred and fifty dollars on the Redskins to cover. That got him in the mood to talk.”

  I nod along, dragging Lassie behind me as I speed walk through the drizzle.

  “Thing is, he didn’t have the case for long. When he showed up on the scene, he was lead for thirty minutes before he got shoulder-tapped by some suit.”

  “The FBI?”

  “Nope, Homeland Security.”

  I stop walking, Lassie continuing until he is yanked backward by the leash.

  “The Department of Homeland Security?”

  “Yep. Suit told Walker to pack up and leave. Walker said he was back in bed thirty minutes later.”

  My brain is whirring. Lassie gazes backward at me. He’s sitting on his hind legs shivering.

  “Homeland Security,” I utter again.

  “I’ve worked with DHS a couple times and they are a tight-lipped bunch. They don’t play well with others. Luckily, I’ve been keeping a favor in my pocket from a guy whose son I helped wiggle out of a DUI, and I called it in.”

  For a moment, I think of the card I have in the drawer of my condo. Blank, save for the single word, anything, scribbled in black ink. And the three initials, CRS. The President of the United States gave me a Get Out of Jail Free card. One favor, for anything, redeemable at a moment’s notice.

  “So, I woke another guy up,” Ingrid continues. “I asked him about the woman pulled from the Potomac on Monday morning. He said he hadn’t heard about it. I leaned on him. Told him that his kid was still on probation and the Dean of UVA was a close family friend.”

  “Really? The Dean?”

  “No, but I looked it up online. Either way, he bought it and started talking. He called me back a couple minutes later on what I guess was an encrypted line. Told me how on Monday morning a Red Four came in.”

  “A Red Four?”

  “An interagency alert. Four being highest priority. Red being—”

  I know the word that is coming, but it still hurts.

  “—terrorist.”

   

  :04

   

  I hang up the phone.

  Lassie yanks on the leash.

  “Dude, gimme a second.”

  Meow.

  I ignore him.

  My brain has never felt so incapable. Like trying to run a marathon having never run a day in your life.

  A terrorist.

  My mother was a terrorist?

  I think back to 9/11. Waking up at 3:00 a.m., going through my routine, having no clue that eighteen hours earlier, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. Had it been any other week, my father would have texted me about the attacks, but he was on vacation in the Bahamas and without cell phone service. He would later tell me what a nightmare traveling back to the States had been the day following the worst terrorist attack in US history. He’d camped out at the Bahamian airport for three days, finally chartering a flight to Miami, then renting a car and driving home to Virginia.

  I found out about the attacks not through the news—I don’t have time for news—but when I logged into my E-Trade account. I’d lost nearly $200,000 the previous day as the stock market plummeted.

  I spent the rest of my day and the rest of each of my next four days watching the 9/11 saga unfold. I once asked Ingrid how much coverage of the attacks she’d watched and she said it was more than fifty hours that first week. Can you imagine that? Fifty of my days watching reruns of two towers collapsing. Now I’m not judging; it was compulsive and entertaining coverage causing me to sleep with my laptop on my chest. But after that fourth day, I washed my hands of it. I couldn’t give any more of my time to sadness and anger.

  But now.

  My mother was a terrorist.

  My mother was one of these assholes.

  Meow.

  Meow.

  Meow.

  “Dude, what?”

  Meow.

  I look down at my watch.

  It’s 3:57 a.m.

  I look at Lassie.

  “Run!”

  We take off in a sprint.

  I’m a quarter mile from my condo. The fastest mile I’ve run is right around seven minutes. I will have to run the tail end of a six-minute mile if I don’t want to sleep in the street.

  My feet pound against the pavement.

  I glance down at the phone.

  3:58 a.m.

  I turn onto my street, Lassie scampering parallel with me. I don’t have to look down to know his tiny teeth are gritted in concentration.

  We pass a coffee shop and a dry cleaner.

  I see my condo a block and a half away.

  I ponder calling Ingrid back and alerting her that I might not make it home, that she should drive down my street to look for a guy on a bus bench with a cat on his chest. I glance down at the phone.

  The numbers turn from :58 to :59.

  I still have time.

  I can make it.

  I have forty-five seconds to run a hundred yards, go up three flights of stairs, and unlock my door.

  Twenty seconds later, Lassie and I dart up the front entrance of the condo and into the stairwell. I start looking for places to lie down. The last thing I want is to end up in the hospital.

  Again.

  When the nurses at the local ER send you Christmas cards, you know something is wrong. Six concussions, what seems like a zillion stitches, two broken arms, a broken collarbone, two broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. And that was just in the last eight years.

  We hit the hallway.

  We’re gonna make it.

  The key is already in my hand.

  I put the key in the door and turn the handle.

   

  ::::

   

  It would have been better if the door hadn’t opened. If it had stayed closed, I would have crumpled to the carpeted floor of the hallway. But the door did open, and I fell forward into the condo, going down sideways onto the wood floor, which would account for the dull throb in my shoulder.

  At least, that’s how I recreated it in my mind.

  But I didn’t wake up on the wood. I woke up on the carpet in the living room, a pillow tucked under my head, a blanket pulled up to my shoulders, and a glass of water and three Advil sitting on the coffee table next to me.

  I throw back the three Advil and pick up the yellow legal pad sitting near the water glass.

   

  Hey Sleepyhead,

  I came to drop off some leftovers and I found you on the floor. I’m guessing after we hung up last night, you started thinking about your mom and time got away from you. Then you had to book it home and you didn’t make it in time. From the position of your body, I guess you conked out right as you pushed the door in.

   

  Sometimes I forget she’s a detective. I keep reading.

   

  I gave you a thorough examination, and everything appeared to be in working order. Your left shoulder was starting to swell, and I think it took the brunt of the fall. Get some ice on it when you wake up. (You’re lucky you didn’t break your nose. Well, I guess I’m lucky. I’m the one that would have to listen to you snore. Haahahaa.) I apologize if you have any rug burns on your back. I dragged you by your legs and your shirt kept riding up.

   

  I reach my arm behind my back and feel at the top of my hips where I do indeed have a big raspberry.

   

&n
bsp; As for your mom, I didn’t find out a whole lot more. I spent most of the day making calls, and no one is talking. I tried the morgue, but they said the body was moved to the federal freezer in McLean. When I tried calling them, they gave me the runaround. But I’ll keep at it. I have a B-I-G meeting bright and early, so I couldn’t stay over and play with you (sad face). Should be interesting. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

   

  Kisses,

  Grid

   

  P.S. Lassie got into the leftovers while I was dealing with you and he ate a bunch of Thai. Just want to warn you in case he’s super gassy (happy face).

   

  P.P.S.S. HAPPY SIX MONTH ANNIVERSARY!

   

  My smile fades with her words and the lightning in my shoulder returns. I look around for Lassie, thinking he will be asleep on the arm of the brown sofa, but he’s not. I push myself up with a grunt, holding my left arm to my sternum, and walk into the bedroom. Lassie is sleeping in the center of the king bed.

  The clock on the dresser reads 3:03 a.m.

  “Hey!”

  Lassie bats his eyes and wrinkles his nose.

  “Glad to see you were worried about me.”

  Meow.

  “I don’t know, maybe sleep on the floor next to me.”

  Meow.

  “Yes, I know you aren’t a dog.”

  Meow.

  “How would it not be fair to the bed?”

  Meow.

  “Dude, forget it.”

  I turn around and head for the kitchen. The Advil aren’t sitting well on my empty stomach and I stand in front of the open fridge chugging a smoothie and devouring a sandwich in four bites.

  Lassie looks up at me.

  I shake my head at him.

  “Dude, you don’t get any breakfast.”

  Meow.

  “Because you ate a shitload of Thai food that Ingrid brought for me.”

  Meow.

  “You’re telling me that if I smell your breath right now, I won’t smell curry?”

  I lean down and he runs away.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I ponder making an ice pack, but I don’t have time.

  I sit down to the computer.

  It is 3:06 a.m.

  I hit the Skype button to call my dad, then remember Murdock shattered his laptop. I find my cell phone where Ingrid has it charging in the kitchen and dial my father.

  He answers on the third ring.

  “Sonny boy.”

  “Hey, Pops.”

  “Listen, sorry about last night.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Is Murdock still in the doghouse?”

  “Naw, he feels bad. Don’t you, boy?”

  I can hear the dripping kisses through the phone.

  Lassie hears them as well and jumps up on my lap. He claws at the phone. I shake my head at him.

  After a couple more kisses, my dad asks, “So, how was your yesterday?”

  “Mom is dead.”

  “What?”

  I spend the next three minutes speed-talking. Once I finish, there is only silence. “Dad?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Did you know?”

  “No.”

  “But that would explain everything: her weird schedule, the extended trips, her walking out on us. Do you think it’s true? Do you think mom could have been a terrorist?”

  He is silent. I imagine him scanning nine years of marriage, looking for red flags.

  A silence follows.

  Three seconds become eight.

  Eight become eleven.

  Lassie glances up at me.

  My nostrils flare.

  “Lassie!” I push him off. “Dude, take that outside.”

  It smells like three-week-old curry.

  “What did Lassie do?” my dad asks.

  I transition into the end of my yesterday. My falling, Ingrid taking care of me, Lassie eating the leftovers and his insides turning rotten.

  “She’s a good one, that Ingrid. You keep hold of her.”

   I wonder if my father’s words have anything to do with my mother. Did he plan to hold onto her but couldn’t? And what about me? What if I found out Ingrid had secrets? Deep dark secrets. Would I be able to look past them?

  “I plan to,” I say, then quickly add, “You never answered my question. Do you think mom could have been a terrorist?”

  “No, your mom could not have been a terrorist.”

  The conviction in his voice surprises me.

  “And what makes you so sure of that. How would you know?”

  “Because your mother worked for the CIA.” He pauses. “She was a spy.”

   

   

   

  :05

   

  I wait for my father to start laughing. To tell me that he got me good. That he’s pulling my leg.

  But he’s not.

  “Mom was a spy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait, if you knew this, then why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I promised her I wouldn’t.”

  “So what? That was thirty years ago. You could have told me. You should have told me.”

  “Sorry, son, but there is no statute of limitations on a promise.”

  If there is one thing I have never questioned about my father, it is his integrity. But that he chose my mother over me pisses me off. I push the phone hard against the side of my face, a Samsung Galaxy sized impression on my cheek.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” I say, my voice heating. “This whole time I thought she left us because of me. If she worked for the CIA, then it’s different. Maybe she left because she had to go do, well, spy stuff, and not because her son was this sad little rent-a-kid.”

  “It doesn’t matter what her job was, geologist, spy, astronaut. She chose it over you. She still walked out on us. She should have chosen you.”

  I ease the pressure of the phone off my ear.

  That’s why he didn’t tell me. He wanted me to be upset. If he’d told me my mother worked for the CIA, I might have let her off the hook. Possibly even been proud of her. Yeah, my mom walked out on me, but she’s out there saving the world, so it’s okay.

  But my dad was right. It wasn’t okay.

  I change directions. “How did you find out? Did she tell you?”

  “You were two years old,” he says after a long second. “She’d just returned from a trip. I, of course, thought she was on assignment with Global Geologist somewhere in Northern Africa.”

  I ask, “Did she call you when she went away on these trips?”

  “You need to understand, this was the early eighties, and it wasn’t like people had cell phones. Her projects were always in some rural, hard-to-reach place. She would call whenever she could, which was about once a week. Usually just a quick hello. Give Henry a kiss for me. Can’t wait to see you.”

  The thought of my mother sending me a kiss over the phone thirty-odd years ago is a mental sour-patch kid. Sweet then sour.

  “Keep going,” I say.

  “She’d just gotten back. You were up, crawling around the place like a crazy man. She and I were on the couch. You somehow got into her purse and started pulling everything out. And I mean everything: wallet, lipstick, compact, change purse, hairbrush, passport.”

  “Your mom’s passport picture was hilarious,” he says with a mini-laugh. “She looked stoned, eyes half open, hair a mess, and I loved teasing her about it. I flipped it open and stopped cold. At first, I thought she was so sick of me making fun of her picture that she got a new picture taken without telling me. But then I looked at the name. I still remember it to this day: Rebecca Hulgev.”

  I write the name down on the top of the legal pad and ask, “How did she explain that?”

  “She didn’t. She told me straight off that she worked for the CIA.”

  “And you believed her?”r />
  “I didn’t know what to believe. Then she showed me a small safe she had hidden in the basement. It was just like in the movies. Five different passports. A bunch of money from different countries. And a gun.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yep.”

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  “That’s it. She said she couldn’t tell me anything else. Made me promise never to tell anyone, not even you. She said she would tell you when the time was right.”

  “And you were okay with this?”

  “What was I going to do? It was her job.”

  “But she lied to you. All that time.”

  “I know. But, son, when you love someone, you look past that. When she was here, with us, she was Sally and she was great. When she walked out the door, she went to work. If she had to be somebody else, I was okay with that.”

  “Then she walked out on us. Chose Rebecca over Sally.”

  “Right. And that is unforgivable.”

  Unforgivable.

  I want to spend the next five hours talking to my dad, but I can’t. For one of the few times in years, I’m pissed off that I have Henry Bins.

  “I need to go but I’m gonna call you tomorrow, and you are gonna tell me everything you know about mom.”

  He agrees, though I have a feeling he just did.

  It is 3:23 a.m.

  I jump on the internet and type “Rebecca Hulgev.” There are a bunch of Hulgevs, a bunch of Rebeccas, but no Rebecca Hulgev.

  Lassie jumps back on my lap.

  I sniff.

  He smells fine.

  I scratch behind his ears while I think.

  My mother wasn’t a terrorist. She was a spy.

  She would have been in her mid-sixties now. She couldn’t possibly have still been a spy, could she?

  I imagine my mother’s dark brown hair laced with gray. The sharp angles of her face slightly more relaxed, crow’s feet adhering to the edges of her blistering green eyes. Surely, she was retired by now, living out her days on her pension, drinking piña coladas somewhere tropical.

  But she hadn’t.

  And now she was dead.

  My brain fills with question marks.

  How did my mother end up on the Department of Homeland Security’s radar? If she was a spy, why was she flagged a Red Four? What if my mother turned? What if she flipped sides? I wasn’t sure where she was from, but my mom wasn’t from the United States. She had an accent. Didn’t she? Eastern European? You can’t fake that. Or could you? Was she recruited into the CIA during the Cold War? Was she a sleeper agent this whole time? Was she Russian? Ukrainian?

  President Sullivan had mentioned the problems in the Ukraine. Could my mother’s death be related?

  I shake my head, trying to exit fantasyland and get back to reality.

  I look at the clock.

  3:37 a.m.

  Lassie looks up at me.

  I know the look.

  “Fine.”

  I go to the fridge and uncover his bowl of cat food and put it on the ground. I grab a premade Cobb salad and sit down to the computer.

  I ponder calling the federal morgue in McLean where, according to Ingrid, my mother’s body was moved. But if they gave her the runaround, then I have little chance.

  I imagine them asking me what her name was and my reply. Um, it could be Sally Bins, Rebecca Hulgev, or ten others.

  No, that wouldn’t work.

  I pull up the report sent by AST and reread it. For the first time, I notice that although it says my mother was killed twenty-four to forty-eight hours before she was found, the coroner lists a more specific time of death — 3:30 a.m., Saturday, October 2nd.

  I find it ironic that, of all the hours in the day, my mother was killed during the one I’m awake. I think back to what I was doing while a bullet was ripping through the back of my mother’s skull. Saturday wasn’t much different from any other day. Wake, eat, GOT, stocks, read, run. Nothing exciting.

  Except.

  When I left to go on my run, I opened the door and there was a package.

  This in itself wasn’t odd. I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon. But I rarely saw the packages. Isabel would open the packages for me and have whatever it was—clothes, dumbbells, yo-yo, cat sweater, or fish tank — assembled and ready for use.

  But Isabel didn’t come on Fridays or Saturdays. Those were her two days off. So if anything was delivered on either of those two days, I would have to put it together myself. Which is why I ordered stuff on Sundays, and with two-day shipping it always arrived before Friday.

  Odder yet, I didn’t remember ordering the DVD that was delivered.

  I just assumed my dad ordered it for me, which he’d done in the past. I repeatedly told him I could stream the movies online, but my dad was old school and he liked buying DVDs. When I asked him about the movie that came on Saturday, he said he didn’t buy it for me. His exact words were: That stupid alien movie? I would never buy you that crap.

  I figured he was joking.

  He pulled the same thing with Bridesmaids.

  It’s just a stupid chick flick. I would never send that to you.

  Liar.

  I was a bit backlogged on my viewing. I still had two and a half more seasons of Game of Thrones to watch before I could even think about watching anything else, and I still hadn’t watched the last two movies my father sent: The Shawshank Redemption and Midnight Express.

  Five days earlier, I’d added the “stupid alien movie” to the pile and forgotten about it.

  But what if he didn’t send it?

  What if someone else did?

  What if it came from my mother?

   

  ::::

   

  I thought of one more scenario in which my mother would have been flagged as a Red Four.

  Intel.

  She knew something. Or stole something.

  Had my mother stolen national security secrets and that’s why Homeland was involved?

  What did Ingrid call the DHS guy who had shown up at the scene?

  A suit.

  A man in black.

  I run to the pile of three DVDs stacked neatly on a bookshelf in the living room. Men in Black is at the bottom and I slip it out.

  I open the case and look for any writing. There is none. I set the DVD down on the computer then run to the trash can hoping to find the Amazon packaging, but the trash has been emptied.

  I imagine what could have been written on the inside of the brown cardboard.

  For the first time, I wonder if the coroner’s time of death was right on the money. How easy would it be to fake the Amazon packaging, especially for a lifelong spy, then leave the package on my doorstep?

  My mother was found less than six miles from my house. Could it be a coincidence? Or was it because she’d just left my condo?

  I sit back down to the computer and slip the DVD in.

  It is 3:49 a.m.

  I wait for the plans for a nuclear warhead to start streaming. Or a list of all the spies in Russia. Or a picture of the President with his pants down.

  What I don’t want to start playing is exactly what starts playing.

  The movie.

   

   

  :06

   

  For the first time in months, I wake up early.

  The clock reads 2:58 a.m.

  Two extra minutes.

  Time is currency to me and I start shopping. (I once tried to explain this to my father and I told him two extra minutes was the equivalent of him waking up and finding two thousand dollars cash on the bedside table. He would immediately start thinking of ways to spend it. It was no different with me.) Should I use the two minutes all at once or should I break it up? Take an extra minute shower? An extra thirty seconds on the pot? Do sixty sit-ups? Run a couple extra blocks?

  I think about asking Lassie for his feedback, but he’s stil
l out cold. Anyhow, he’ll probably want me to spend it rubbing his belly.

  I decide to spend the time on the phone with my dad. Getting two more minutes of insight into my mother.

  “You’re up early.”

  I glance up.

  Ingrid is standing in my doorway.

  Naked.

  My eyes soak up her perfect breasts, toned stomach, and the beautiful curvature of her buttocks.

  I know how I will spend my extra time.

  She jumps on the bed and we attack each other.

  Nine minutes later, we lie panting.

  “That was awesome,” I mutter.

  Eyes closed, she holds up her hand.

  We high five.

  Lassie appears from wherever he hid and licks Ingrid’s nipple.

  “Dude!”

  He gives two more licks, then jumps away before I can smack him.

  I spend a couple minutes in the bathroom then head to the kitchen. My dad has texted twice, and I text him back that I’m fine and Ingrid is over and I will call him tomorrow.

  He sends back a happy face.

  If only he knew.

  I uncover Lassie’s bowl and put it down. “Here you go, you little perv.”

  Meow.

  “Yeah, I probably would have done the same thing.”

  I microwave some lasagna Isabel made and run back into the bedroom.

  Ingrid has pushed herself up at the back of the bed. I hand her a plate of lasagna, a fork, and a glass of milk.

  “Guess what?” I say.

  She shoves a huge bite of lasagna in her mouth and shrugs.

  “My mom wasn’t a terrorist.”

  Her eyebrows rise.

  “She was a spy.”

  She coughs, reaches for the milk, and washes down the bite. “What are you talking about?”

  I give her the rundown.

  “I can’t believe your dad never told you.”

  “He didn’t want me to forgive her.”

  After a long second, she says, “I guess I can understand that.”

  I tell her about my theory that my mother stole or knew some CIA secrets and that’s why DHS was involved in her murder.

  “That would make sense.”

  I expand on my theory.

  “You think your mom sent you the movie?”

  “Who else would send it? It wasn’t my dad.”

  I look at her.

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t send it to you.”

  “Well, someone did and it just happened to be delivered the day my mother was murdered.” I tell her about the autopsy report and how my mother’s body was found less than six miles from my condo.

  “Walker told me where the body was found. But it doesn’t mean that’s where her body was tossed into the river. She could have been thrown into the Potomac fifty miles upstream.”

  “Well, it’s a big coincidence they found her so close to my place.”

  “True, but in the six years I’ve been doing this, there’s one thing I’ve learned: there are a lot more coincidences than people think.”

  I nod, but I’m not convinced.

  “What movie?” she asks after a lengthy pause.

  “Men in Black.”

  She smiles. She’s seen it. “And the DVD is actually the movie?”

  “So far.”

  Last night, I watched nine minutes of Men in Black before heading to bed. The opening scene was a black guy chasing a thief. The thief jumps off a ten-story building, revealing he isn’t human at all. He’s an alien. Then a white guy in a black suit comes in and makes the black cop stare at a red light which makes him forget everything he just saw.

  “What about the box the movie came in?” she asks.

  “Isabel threw it away.”

  She puffs her cheeks.

  “Yeah, I know. I keep thinking she wrote something on the inside.”

  She shrugs, as if to say, well you can’t do anything about it now, then says, “Let’s go. Movie time.”

  I grab the laptop and flip it open.

  “Do you have any popcorn?”

  I laugh and say, “I think I might.”

  The Redenbacher in my cabinet is a month past its expiration date and I yell to the bedroom, “It’s expired.”

  “Who cares?” she yells back. “I want popcorn!”

  I throw it in the microwave then move to the couch where Ingrid has disposed of her clothes. I gingerly fold them and place them on the coffee table. Her cell phone is half out of her purse and I snag it. Her home screen is a picture of me asleep with Lassie on my chest, and it always makes me laugh. Her phone flashes on. She has a missed text, and I quickly read the one sentence.

  I don’t hear the microwave buzzer until the third chime.

  I replace the phone, snag the popcorn, and climb into bed.

  Lassie snuggles up on my chest and Ingrid makes a little pile of popcorn on my belly that Lassie quickly devours.

  It is 3:19 a.m.

  “Okay, so run me through what’s happened so far.”

  I shake the text from thought and give her a minute long recap.

  We spend the next forty minutes watching the movie.

  At 3:59 a.m., I flip the laptop closed and Ingrid rests her head on my shoulder.

  I stroke her head and say, “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Sleepyhead.”

  “Oh, wait, you were gonna tell me about the meeting you had this morning.”

  I feel her head squirm in my arm. “Oh, it turned out not to be anything. Actually, it was canceled, and I got to sleep in.”

  I think back to the text on her phone.

  Thanks for coming this morning.

  But it wasn’t the words that were unsettling.

  It was the phone number.

  It was the same number I had written on my Get Out of Jail Free card.

  Ingrid’s meeting had been with the President of the United States.

   

  ::::

   

  I spend the next two days finishing off the movie and talking to my dad. He compiled a list of everything he knew about my mother: her upbringing, her parents, her schooling, the car she drove, her friends. Everything he tells me I either already know or was researched by AST and proved a falsity.

  As for the movie, it had its moments. What it didn’t have was a secret. In fact, I was starting to have serious doubts my mother was responsible for the DVD showing up on my doorstep.

  That is, until ten minutes ago, when I called Amazon’s twenty-four-hour customer service line. After giving the representative my shipping address and the date the movie was received, she was able to trace the purchase to a credit card listed under the name, get this, Jane Doe.   

  I’m still reeling from this revelation when the phone in my hand vibrates.

  It’s a text from Ingrid.  

  Didn’t hear from you yesterday. How did the movie end up? I’m guessing you didn’t find any clues.

  I don’t know how I want to respond. Or if I even want to respond. I’m still miffed she lied to me about her meeting with President Sullivan. The meeting itself didn’t overly concern me. After all, Ingrid had been in charge of the murder investigation in which Sullivan was the primary suspect. The sit-down could easily be a routine follow-up. But then why lie and say the meeting was canceled?

  From the text message, Thanks for coming this morning, it sounded as though Sullivan was the one to request the meeting. I’d come to like the guy, but liking someone and trusting them are two different stories. Ingrid and I had been dating for six months, but this translated to roughly sixty or seventy hours of face time. I wasn’t exactly sure where our relationship stood. How could I be certain I was meeting all her emotional and, let’s be honest, physical needs?

  I text back: MOVIE WAS OKAY. NO CLUES.

  BUMMER….GOT A NEW CASE...SERIAL KILLER….CALLS HIMSELF THE POPE...MIGHT NOT SEE YOU FOR A WHILE.
r />   OK.

  YOU ALRIGHT?

  YEP. JUST BUSY.

  OK. I’LL KEEP MY EAR TO THE GROUND ABOUT YOUR MOM.

  THANKS.

  DON’T GET SUCKED INTO MEN IN BLACK 2. NEVER SAW IT, BUT IT GOT TERRIBLE REVIEWS.

  I WON’T. SEE YOU LATER.

  I’m tempted to text her to tell President Sullivan hi for me, but I set the phone down before I do something stupid.

  It’s 3:37 a.m.

  “Let’s go!” I yell.

  Lassie jumps off the back of the couch. I reach for his leash, then think better of it. It’s been three days since he was outside. His nerves are just as shot as mine.

  One minute later and I’m sprinting down the side street, Lassie nipping at my heels.

  The only way not to think about Ingrid is to think about my mother. Still, it takes a mile until I rid Ingrid from my thoughts. I’m tempted to text her goodnight, to tell her I’m so glad she came into my life. That I don’t care if she lied to me about meeting the President. That I trust her. That I love her.

  I shake off the thought and tap Ingrid out and tap my mother in.

  Initially, I thought my mother recreated an Amazon package and left it on my doorstep, but that wasn’t the case. She’d ordered the package from Amazon, therefore, the packaging didn’t have any clues written inside, not unless the person who packed and shipped the DVD colluded with her. This meant the DVD wasn’t doctored either. So then why go through all the trouble of sending it?

  Unless the name of the movie itself meant something.

  Men in Black.

  CIA, right?

  That was obvious. But was there more to it? Did it have something to do with one of the actors?

  I’d done a quick background on both the lead actors, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but found nothing from either actor’s past that leapt out at me.

  I didn’t know much about pop culture. Was there a clue somewhere I just didn’t get? Was The Fresh Prince of Bel Air supposed to mean something to me? Maybe I didn’t have the worldly experience to connect the dots.

  I stop and look at my cell phone.

  It’s 3:48 a.m.

  I turn around and head back home.

  It’s 3:56 a.m. when I return to the condo.

  Lassie is nowhere to be found, but I have faith he’ll make his way home. I leave the door open for him. I drink water until my stomach hurts, then head to the bedroom. I don’t have time for a shower, but I don’t want to sleep in my sweaty clothes and strip down naked.

  Lying in bed, I reopen Ingrid and my text thread.

  I’m about to start typing, to tell her that I miss her and that I can’t wait to see her again, when it hits me.

  Her last text.

  DON’T GET SUCKED INTO MEN IN BLACK 2. NEVER SAW IT, BUT IT GOT TERRIBLE REVIEWS.

  That was it.

  Reviews.

  I jump out of bed and run to the computer.

  I log into Amazon and search Men in Black. There are 517 reviews. I scroll down to the bottom. The second to last review was written on October 2nd.

  The day my mother was killed.

  And it was written by me.

   

   

  :07

   

  The last time I fell asleep in the chair at the kitchen table was four years earlier, the night before General Motors’ post-government bailout IPO. I was waffling back and forth, deciding whether or not I wanted to buy shares. At 3:58 a.m., I decided not to buy and stood up to go to bed, but then at the last second I changed my mind and rushed back to the computer. I was unable to get the purchase scheduled in time — five thousand shares — and I woke up twenty-three hours later with a QWERTY impression on my forehead.

  In regards to the stock, I lucked out. Though the IPO was the biggest in history, the stock fell thirty-five percent the first year and I would have lost my ass. That being said, I would have gladly taken the loss if it meant I made it to my bed that night, as I spent nearly the equivalent of that amount on a physical therapist and chiropractor who both charged me exorbitant amounts to make 3:00 a.m. house calls.

  I take three deep breaths and try to lift my head off the kitchen table. I can’t. Every muscle in my body is frozen solid. I try to wiggle my toes but I can’t even feel them.

  This is bad.

  I feel a light touch of my forehead and open my eyes.

  “Hey, buddy,” I whisper.

  Lassie gives my eyes a couple licks, then takes a step back. He is smiling ear to ear.

  “Looks like somebody got lucky.”

  Meow.

  “A fox? Or the cat was a fox?”

  Meow.

  “An actual fox. Wow, good for you. I didn’t even know that was possible.” I want to smile, to laugh, but even the slightest movement sends a bolt of lightning down my spine. I exhale deeply.

  Meow.

  “No, I’m not okay.”

  Meow.

  “Yes, the bed would have been more comfortable.”

  Meow.

  “I need my phone.”

  I can see my left arm on the table in front of me. Though I can’t feel my right arm, I think it is dangling by my side.

  I try to remember where I left my phone. Is it on the kitchen counter? The couch?

  Lassie jumps over my head. I feel scraping. A moment later, he comes back into view. He is pushing my phone toward my hand with his nose.

  It’s too soon to get excited. The phone hasn’t been charged in over a day. It had a full charge when I last used it, and it wasn’t like I made any calls or used any data in the last twenty-three hours. There was a chance it still had some juice left.

  I slowly start trying to move my fingers.

  Nothing happens for a long minute.

  Finally, I get my index finger to twitch. Three minutes later and all my fingers are slowly beginning to wake. Lassie nudges the phone under my hand. I hit the bottom button. It flashes on.

  Thank God.

  I hit the button on the side for voice command and ponder calling 911. I don’t. I bark, “Call Ingrid.”

  The phone rings.

  Goes straight to voicemail.

  “End call.”

  My phone beeps. I’ve never heard the sound before and I’m guessing it means the battery is almost dead.

  “Call Pops.”

  The phone rings.

  He picks up on the second ring.

  “Hey Sonny B—”

  “Listen,” I interrupt. “My battery is about to die. I need you to come over. Bring your back pills. Hurr—”

  The phone dies.

   

  ::::

   

  My dad lives twenty minutes away. Plus, he has a bad back himself, so I don’t even know if he can get out of bed. But it only takes fifteen minutes until I hear heavy clomping in the hallway, then a loud thud as my front door bangs open.

  I forgot I left the door cracked open for Lassie. Speaking of whom, he jumps off the table and runs to greet his bestie. I hear the two thumping around in the living room wrestling.

  If you Googled “Bromance,” a video of these two idiots might pop up.

  “Settle down, you morons.”

  They don’t.

  Ten seconds later, my dad enters.

  I don’t need to see him to know he’s biting his tongue. I try to imagine what he saw when he walked through the door, his only son sitting in a chair at the table, naked as the day he was born.

  Unable to squelch it any longer, he erupts in violent laughter. “Do I even want to ask, Son?”

  In the fifteen minutes since I called him, I’d made some headway and I’m able to lift my head slightly. I can see him wiping tears from his eyes out of my periphery.

  Murdock and Lassie tumble off the couch loudly, no doubt waking my downstairs neighbors from a pleasant slumber.

  “Be quiet, you two,” my dad yells.

  To their c
redit, they stop.

  I feel my dad’s hand on my shoulder. He is still chuckling, but he also knows what an ordeal it was the last time this happened to me. I easily could have done irrevocable harm to my spine and there could be nerve damage in my arms, hands, legs, and feet.

  Murdock appears next to my father and begins licking my face with his foot-long tongue.

  “Hey, you big lug.”

  Lassie is standing on his back, riding him.

  Meow.

  “Yes, like a horse,” I agree.

  “Move it,” my dad says, pushing the beast out of the way. “Now let’s get you to the couch.”

  I’d given this some thought and decided the best bet was for my dad to slide my chair to the couch, then roll me over the back.

  It isn’t easy, but by 3:27 a.m., I am on the sofa. My dad pulled some boxers on for me, which wasn’t the highpoint of my life, but he didn’t bat an eye.

  What a champ.

  “You want a couple of those pills?”

  It’s all I want, but I also want my wits about me for the next ten minutes.

  “Not yet,” I groan, the vibration of the words causing an aftershock in my neck. I change my mind. “Pills. Now.”

  He brings me some water and I wash down the two pills.

  “Can you feed Lassie and grab me a shake out of the fridge?”

  He does both.

  He sits down on the couch next to me and holds the shake while I drink.

  “So, you gonna tell me what happened?”

  “Grab the laptop.”

  He does.

  The screensaver, a picture of Ingrid, is on-screen, and I say, “Refresh it.”

  He is apprehensive.

  “It’s not porn, dad. I just happened to be naked.”

  “I don’t judge.”

  I spend the next minute telling him about Men in Black, how I think the woman who walked out on us thirty years ago sent it to me, and how I’m pretty sure she sent me a hidden message through a review written for the movie.

  “I don’t see the review,” he says.

  He shows me the screen. The pills have taken hold and the screen swims. I squint. The review is gone.

  “It was right there. It was written by me.” There is one from September 8th and another from October 7th, but the one from October 2nd is gone. “They erased it.”

  “Who?”

  I don’t know yet.

  “Check the printer,” I mumble.

  I remember printing the review. At least I think I did. My brain has stopped working. My eyes close.

  4:00 a.m. comes early.

   

  ::::

   

  I wake up in my bed.

  A page from my yellow legal pad is sitting on the bedside table, filled with my father’s neat all-caps. It is a rundown of everything he’d done, and had done to me, the past twenty-three hours.

  A chiropractor came by to adjust my spine. A massage therapist spent two hours kneading my destroyed muscles. Sara, a young woman I’d come to know through my several stays at the ER, stopped by to give me an IV. My dad picked up meatball subs from his favorite deli, and mine was in the fridge. He called his doc for some extra back pills, but he also picked up some Aleve just in case I didn’t want to spend my one hour hallucinating. He took Lassie and Murdock to the park and bought them hot dogs. And he fixed the drain in my shower.

  He left around midnight.

  I look over at Lassie.

  He is dead to the world. Playing with Murdock has wiped him out. He has some yellow junk on his whiskers, and I inspect it closer.

  Mustard, from the hotdog.

  I laugh.

  I push myself up, which hurts, but is ecstasy compared to the last time I attempted movement. I pick up my phone and text him.

  THANKS, POPS. YOU DA BEST.

  FEELING BETTER?

  YEAH, I CAN TURN MY HEAD TO THE SIDE WITHOUT CRYING.

  GOOD...MICROWAVE THE MB SUB FOR 43 SECS.

  ROGER THAT.

  IM BEAT...OFF TO BED…DIDN’T THINK YOU WOULD BE UP FOR POKER SO I HEADED HOME.

  I can’t believe it’s already been a week since I received the email from AST.

  I text back: THAT’S OKAY.

  IT’S A DATE.

  WHAT IS?

  THE REVIEW. THE ANNIVERSARY. I THINK IT’S A DATE.

  I notice a second piece of paper on the table. It is the review. I printed it after all. I read it earlier, but I can’t remember a single word. I reread it, my smile threatening to leap off my face.

  I text back: I THINK YOU’RE RIGHT.

  LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU FIND OUT. NIGHT.

  WILL DO...THANKS AGAIN…NIGHT.

  I push myself out of bed. My body is still a knotted mess. I hobble to the bathroom and send 400ccs of IV into the toilet.

  I microwave the sub, grab my laptop, and head back to the bed.

  It is 3:12 a.m.

  My phone has two more texts. Both are from Ingrid. She still hasn’t wrapped up her new case. She won’t be able to come over tonight. She misses me.

  I text that I miss her too.

  I take a giant bite of the delicious sub and reread the review once more:

   

  THIS MOVIE ROCKS!

   

  My wife and I saw this movie on our first date eight years ago. (It was love at first site.) We watch the movie every year on our anniversary, August 5th. Smith and Jones are amazing together and Heghil did a great job directing. My nine-year-old, April, loves the movie too. She gives it twelve stars.

   

  Published 10/2/2014 by Henry B.

   

  My dad thinks that August 5th and eight years ago is a date.

  I agree.

  I flip open the laptop and Google the date.

  The top result is from Wikipedia, and I start skimming. August 5, 2006 was a Saturday. George Bush, Jr. was President. The Orioles and the Dodgers played sixteen innings. SARS was back in the news.

  There are a couple of other highlights, but only one that interests me. Only one that makes sense. Two high-ranking Al-Qaeda operatives were killed in an explosion in northern Iraq.

  If my assumptions are correct, then my mother wanted me to read this exact sentence. But why? What did the death of two terrorists mean to me?

  I continue reading.

  The two men, Abdul Al-Rahmin and Hammad Sheik-Alzar, were rumored to have been in a basement in northern Iraq when there was an explosion. One of the bombs they were building detonated and the basement caved in on them.

  Two dead terrorists? Is this why my mom was flagged as a Red Four?

  There had to be something I was missing.

  I reread the Amazon review.

  Again.

  Again.

  Again.

  Then it hits me.

  There wasn’t one date, there were two.

  His nine-year-old. April. Twelve stars.

  April 9, 2012.

  I Google the date.

  Nothing related to terrorism in the least.

  I switch out the numbers.

  April 12, 2009.

  Skim the results.

  My brows furrow.

  Two Al-Qaedas killed in an explosion. This time in Afghanistan. Nearly the same fashion. Building a bomb. Cave-in.

  I go back and reread both snippets.

  Two explosions, two cave-ins. I could only imagine what condition the men’s bodies were in. They must have been torn to pieces. How did they even identify the victims?

  But, then, that was it. Someone didn’t want the bodies to be identifiable.

  I was still missing something.

  I reread the review.

  Love at first site.

  Not sight.

  Site.

  There had to be a link to a website.

  But there were millions of websites. How was I supposed to find the right one?

 
I Google “terrorist website.”

  There are thousands of hits.

  I scroll through ten pages.

  On the eleventh page, there is a match for both “terrorist” and “site.”

  But it isn’t a website.

  Men in Black didn’t have anything to do with the CIA.

  It wasn’t the men that mattered.

  It was the black.

  A black site.

  A CIA secret prison.

   

   

  :08

   

  I spend the next twenty minutes doing research on black sites. A black site is a clandestine facility operated by the CIA outside US jurisdiction to detain alleged unlawful enemy combatants.   

  Otherwise known as a secret prison.

  In 2006, President Bush acknowledged the existence of these secret prisons, more than twenty in both Iraq and Afghanistan, plus others in Poland, Romania, and several other countries. In the years following, many reports came out about the treatment and abuse of these prisoners, or what many people refer to as the t-word.

  Torture.

  I was all for a little waterboarding if it prevented another 9/11, but I couldn’t support anything beyond that. Lines need to be drawn.

  After all of these allegations, reports, and investigations were launched into what the United States calls its Extraordinary Rendition Program — which I admit, sounds better than underground torture facility — the shit hit the fan.

  On October 7, 2007, the CIA admitted to destroying videotape recordings of CIA interrogations of terrorist suspects. These tapes were alleged to document harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, hypothermia, electrocution, and even instances of dogs used to scare the sand out of these guys. But one can only assume far worse acts were performed on these men.

  In 2009, President Obama gave an executive order to shut down all black sites and have the prisoners moved to Guantanamo Bay.

  After beating out Obama for the presidency in 2012, Conner Sullivan continued this crusade against the unlawful treatment of detainees.

  But according to an article written just this February, more than twenty of the detainees held at these secret prisons were still missing. From what my mother sent me—the four terrorists who were allegedly killed but their bodies never recovered—I now guessed these men were four of the missing. Or were of a different assortment of prisoners who were presumed dead. And the limitations of abuse on a dead man are far less than those on a man whom someone might come looking for.

  That my mother was executed could mean only one thing.

  These prisons still existed.

  And my mother knew of their locations.

  I read the review one last time, then hobble out of the bed and into the kitchen.

  I pull the card from the drawer and dial.

  It is 3:46 a.m.

   I’m doubtful he’s awake, but he answers on the third ring.

  “I’m calling in my favor,” I tell the President.

   

  ::::

   

  Twenty-three hours and twenty-nine minutes later, I flip up the hood of my sweatshirt and hunker behind a large tree at the edge of the parking lot. Summer Park is asleep, the tennis and basketball courts dark and silent. I wonder how many people have hit tennis balls or shot hoops since the last time I was here? How many aces had scorched past their opponent? How many three-pointers had rattled the chain nets?

  Six months ago, the President and Red picked me up from this exact parking lot. Over the next hour, I led the three of us and Ingrid down a rabbit hole that ended with a man getting his head blown off and the President being cleared of Jessie Kallomatix’s murder.

  Which is why I know the President will show.

  He owes me.

  Big time.

  At 3:15 a.m., lights appear on the side street and thirty seconds later, a black town car eases into the lot. Another thirty seconds later, a black SUV follows suit.

  I wait for the man in the SUV to join the man in the town car. I step out from behind the tree and make my way toward the lone man outside the car.

  I nod.

  Red nods back.

  I extend my hand and we shake. “I still can’t believe you pulled that flush out on the river card.”

  “Nine of diamonds,” he says with a smirk. He’s a solid two hundred and fifty pounds and stands six-four. If he weren’t in the Secret Service, he could make a living playing one on TV. He slaps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, you could have folded.”

  “Fold three Kings? No way.”

  He nods his agreement.

  “Any problem getting out?” I ask.

   I wasn’t exactly sure how the President and Red routinely came and went from the most protected fifty-two acres in the United States, but they did. I once asked Sullivan if he used Lincoln’s Tunnel and he’d laughed and said, “Yep, and I used Biden’s skateboard.” On one phone conversation, he confided that if the public knew how easy it was to slip away from the White House undetected they would be astounded.  

  “Too easy,” he says, shaking his head and pulling open the back door.

  I lean down and peer inside.

  Two men are sitting across from one another in the spacious back seat. I shake hands with Sullivan who is wearing jeans and a gray Washington Redskins sweatshirt, looking more like an unemployed screenwriter than the leader of the free world.

  He introduces me to the man across from him.

  John LeHigh.

  The Director of the CIA.

   

  ::::

   

  “You better have a damn good reason for dragging me out here,” is what I expect the man in the suit and tie to bark, but he simply shakes my hand and says, “The President speaks highly of you.”

  John LeHigh is on the right side of sixty. His gray hair is cut short, almost to a whitewall, and the top has long ago been washed down the shower drain. His eyes mimic his navy blue tie. His face is fleshy, a result of the wine, spirit, or beer he’d consumed in the last few hours.

  “Yeah, well, don’t tell him that I voted for Obama,” I say, eliciting some loose chuckles from my audience. I add, “He speaks highly of you as well.”

  And he did. When I told the President what I was cashing in my card for, that I wanted a sit-down with the Director of the CIA, he only had good things to say about the top brass at the Central Intelligence Agency.

  LeHigh spent twenty-five years with the CIA as an analyst before becoming Deputy Director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center in 2003. Six years later, he was nominated as Homeland Security Advisor to the Obama administration, and in 2012 was nominated by President Sullivan to be Director of the CIA.

  LeHigh nods, but says nothing.

  “So you want to tell us why we’re here?” Sullivan asks, running his hand through his famous presidential salt and pepper waves.

  I didn’t tell Sullivan anything last night, only that I was cashing in my favor, that I needed ten minutes with Director LeHigh. And I needed those ten minutes face-to-face.

  “My mom,” I say.

  Both men glare at me.

  “Elena Janev.”

  After I’d hung up with the President, I’d sent Ingrid a text. I needed her to lean on her contact at DHS one more time. I needed my mom’s name. Her real name.

  Maybe Ingrid felt bad about having not come over for nearly a week. No matter, when I woke up twenty minutes ago, my mother’s name had been waiting for me.

  Both men stare at me blankly. If my mother’s name means anything to either of them, they don’t show it.

  “She worked for the CIA,” I say.

  The President cuts his eyes at LeHigh, but the Director is impossible to read.

  A statue.

  “You didn’t know her?” I prod.

  “No,” he says with a soft shake of his head.

  To expec
t Director Lehigh to know all the people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency is to expect the CEO of Coca-Cola to know Jim who stocks the local Coca-Cola machines in Telluride, Colorado. But my mother wasn’t a paper-pusher at Langley. She was a Red Four.

  Big difference.

  “Thousands of people work at the CIA,” interjects President Sullivan.

  “And how many of those people were murdered ten days ago?”

  The President straightens. “What are you talking about?”

  “A woman’s body was pulled from the Potomac River last Monday. She was shot in the back of the head. The woman’s name was Elena Janev. She was my mother.”

  “How do you know about this?” asks the Director, with a hint of annoyance.

  “I’ve been paying a surveillance firm to look for my mother for the past five years. I received an email Wednesday morning that the prints of a Jane Doe pulled from the Potomac matched the fingerprints I sent them.”

  This was a big leap to knowing my mother’s real name and that she worked at the CIA, but LeHigh doesn’t ask how I made the connection.

  “I’m sorry,” offers Sullivan.

  I nod. “I didn’t know her very well. She left when I was six.”

  “Still.”

  I know. She was my mother.

  I stare at the Director. I wonder if he is always so tight-lipped. Is this a trait he was born with or one cultivated over three decades of espionage?

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” he says. “But I’m confused where I come in.”

  “The Department of Homeland Security flagged her as a Red Four.”

  This doesn’t mean anything to the President, but with everything on his plate, he can’t be expected to know every code from every agency that reported to him. But LeHigh had been Homeland Security Advisor to President Obama and he knew damn well what it meant.

  “What’s a Red Four?” asks Sullivan.

  We both watch LeHigh. After a moment, he replies, “A Red Four is a high priority terrorist.”

  “Wait, I thought you said your mom worked for the CIA.”

  “She did.”

  “Then why was she flagged as a Red Four?”

  He stares at me and then it dawns on him. “Right. That’s what you want to know. That’s why you asked to meet with the Director.”

  We both turn and stare at the Director.

  “I’m not sure how you stumbled on all of this information, and whoever leaked it will probably not have a job come tomorrow,” says LeHigh, “but it still means nothing to me. I don’t know, nor have I ever known any Elena Janev.”

  These might be the words he says, but his eyes say something different. His eyes are telling me that I am sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. That I am barking up a tree that I shouldn’t be. There isn’t a squirrel in this tree. There’s a Bengal tiger.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” asks Sullivan.

  “The police got shoulder-tapped by DHS.”

  “How did you kno—” He pauses. “Ingrid.”

  I nod.

  The text the President sent Ingrid flashes across my mind.

  I shake it off.

  “I have some contacts at Homeland,” chimes the Director. “I can look into it for you if you like.”

  He smiles smugly.

  He knows my mother and he knows why she was killed.

  I ask, “Do the words “black site” mean anything to either of you?”

  LeHigh can’t hold his eyebrows down.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” asks Sullivan.

  “You know all those black sites Obama shut down?”

  The President nods.

  “What if I told you that they weren’t all shut down?”

  “That’s absurd,” barks LeHigh.

  I pull a folded piece of paper out of my sweatshirt pocket and hand it to the President. It is the Huffington Post article from February detailing the more than twenty detainees still missing.

  The President pulls a pair of glasses from within a small compartment between the seats. The glasses have two small reading lights on the sides, illuminating the printed text.

  “Twenty detainees were never transferred to Guantanamo Bay,” I say. “Twenty detainees are still locked away somewhere. And those are only the detainees on record.”

  “What do you mean on record?” the President asks, looking up from the article.

  “On August 5th, 2006, two high-ranking Al-Qaeda operatives were killed when a bomb they were building detonated in a basement. The same exact scenario played out on April 9th, 2012. All four of these men’s bodies were eviscerated beyond identification.”

  “And what, you think someone faked these explosions and the men are being held somewhere illegally?”

  “Not someone, the CIA. And not being held, being tortured.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” the Director says, shaking his head. “I don’t know what conspiracy theory website you went to or what kind of crazy dreams you had last night, or what you think your mother was, but these black sites do not exist. Obama made an executive order to close every one of these facilities, and that’s what we did. Do I think it was the right decision? Fuck no, it wasn’t. We are at war with these terrorists. They don’t play by the rules, but we have to. It’s like playing soccer without a goalie. It’s only a matter of time before one of their shots goes in the net. But it isn’t a goal; it’s two thousand dead Americans.

  “But when an executive order comes down, it is followed. Fifty-two black sites were closed within six days, the detainees moved to Guantanamo Bay or to other similar facilities. The article you read about the twenty terrorists that are missing is bullshit. They are all accounted for, every last one. Did you ever think that some of them cooperated with us? That they work for us in some capacity? That they were given new identities and released? That some escaped and we don’t want to alarm the public? That some killed themselves?

  “Everybody wants to know everything these days, right up until they don’t. We live in a time of transparency, a time when secrets aren’t allowed. But guess what? When information falls into the wrong hands, people die.”

  I swallow his last words: when information falls into the wrong hands, people die.

  Like my mother.

  But it wasn’t that the Director just as much admitted my mother was killed for this very reason. He wanted me to know that if I continued pressing, I was going to wind up at the bottom of the Potomac as well.

  Unfortunately for the Director, I’m on a strict schedule and I don’t have time for threats.

  “My mother was killed because she knew the locations of these black sites,” I say, leaning forward. “I’m not sure how she got her hands on the intel—if she stole it, or if she was personally involved in their operation—but she did. Maybe she threatened to go public, maybe she was trying to force the CIA’s hand into actually closing them like they were ordered to do. Maybe she saw things, unthinkable acts that shouldn’t be done to mice, let alone human beings, and she couldn’t sleep at night.”

  “Are you accusing the CIA of killing your mother?” asks the President.

  My mother passed along one more piece of information in her review. I didn’t catch it until the last time I read it, right before I called the President. The third sentence: Smith and Jones are amazing together and Heghil did a great job directing.

  I thought to search up Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but for some reason I didn’t think to search up the director.

  Turns out the movie was directed by a guy named Barry Sonnenfeld. Not by anyone named Heghil.

  Then why put that name?

  It took me awhile. Well, three minutes. But, then again, I had just done an internet search on the CIA. 

  Heghil is an anagram of LeHigh.

  “I’m not accusing the CIA,” I say, then point at the director. “Him. He killed my mother.”

   

>   ::::

   

  The President and I watch the SUV speed away.

  “What are you thinking?” screams Sullivan. “Accusing the Director of the CIA of murdering your mother. Are you insane?”

  LeHigh didn’t so much as blink when I accused him of killing my mother. He simply looked at the President as if to say, “You stole me away from my bottle of wine for this?” and proceeded to open the door and leave.

  I wish I could say his reaction helped dissolve any residual doubts I had about his innocence, but it didn’t. It made me question his guilt. And in line with the President’s last three words, question my sanity.

  “Tell me you have proof and you aren’t just shooting from the hip here. I went to high school with LeHigh’s son. I’ve known the man for more than half of my life, which is why I personally appointed him as the Director of the CIA two years ago.”

  “I have proof,” I say with little conviction.

  “What?”

  I don’t dare tell the President that my proof is a review written for Men in Black. He would give Red an executive order to clobber me in the face with one of his giant ham hands.

  “Trust me,” is all that I can say.

  “Get out,” he says.

  I want to object, but I have nothing to say.

  “We’re even,” he says.

  I nod and pull open the door. I’m not sure why I do it, maybe because I think this is the last time I’ll ever speak to him, maybe because I want to stay in the fight even though I can’t lift my arms above my waist. I get out, then turn and lean down on the door and say, “Do me a favor and stay away from Ingrid.”

  He leans backward.

  “Yeah, I know all about your little meeting the other day.”

  He shakes his head softly from side to side, and I know for the second time in one night I have taken a giant leap of faith and landed in a giant stinking pile of shit.

  “Oh, you do?” He pauses. “Then you know we were meeting to discuss a little ceremony I planned for you, to give you a key to the city. You know, for helping me out and all.”

  I gulp loud enough that a bird flies from a nearby tree.

  “But you can forget all about that,” he says, then pulls the door shut.

  :09

   

  “I can’t believe you thought I would cheat on you with the President.”

  Even over the phone, I can see the disappointment in her face. “Yeah, I know. Stupid.”

  “If I was going to cheat on you, it would be with that hunky senator from Mississippi.” She whistles a catcall.

  I know she’s trying to bring some levity to the situation, that this is her way of saying that she accepts my apology, but the smile she’s trying to elicit never comes. I don’t feel deserving of her or her kindness.

  I’ve spent the last ten minutes telling Ingrid every last detail. The review, figuring out the clues, the black site, calling the President and demanding a face-to-face with the Director, then my ambush and falling into a vat of shit.

  “I should have told you about the meeting,” she says.

  “No, you shouldn’t have. It was supposed to be a surprise. I shouldn’t have been snooping in your phone.”

  “Yeah, creepy.” She says the word in a high-pitched twang.

  “Okay, I get it. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have time to be sorry. Just trust me a little bit more, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So, no key to the city ceremony?”

  “I think not.”

  “That’s okay. Who wants a key to DC anyways? And what are you going to do at 3:00 a.m? Go to the all-night diner?”

  “I’m not sure that’s how a key to the city works.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t really talk much about the actual perks, just that he wanted to give you one and have a little ceremony for you at the White House.”

  “Would have been cool,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a key to my city.”

  I laugh.

  “What are the perks?”

  She explains the perks. They are mouthwatering.

  “Alright, I have to get back to looking at this house with binoculars, and you need to get to bed,” she announces.

  I look down at my phone.

  It’s 3:56 a.m.

  This is the first time Ingrid and I have spoken in over a week, and it feels so good to hear her voice. I don’t want to hang up. Ever.

  “Hopefully, this thing wraps up in the next couple of days and we can have our key ceremony,” she says.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Goodnight, Sleepyhead.”

  “Goodnight.”

  I open the door and step inside. I have everything to be upset about. I made a fool out of myself in front of two of the most powerful men in the free world. I accused one man of killing my mother, which seems more and more ridiculous each second that passes, and accused another of putting the moves on my girlfriend.

  But I can’t help but smile.

   

  ::::

   

  “Dude!”

  Lassie is clawing at my face.

  “Dude, what’s wrong?”

  I push myself up. Lassie is wailing.

  “Are you sick?”

  I flip on the light and look at him. His hair is matted; he looks like he’s been sweating for twenty hours. His yellow eyes are rimmed in red.

  “Shit.”

  I jump up.

  “What is it? Your stomach?”

  I feel his stomach. He winces.

  “What did you eat?”

  I jump out of bed and run into the kitchen. After getting off the phone with Ingrid last night, I’d come inside, scooped Lassie off the back of the couch, and we’d gone to bed. I’d rubbed his belly for a long minute before I’d fallen asleep. He’d been fine.

  I look for anything that he might have gotten into. Could he have gotten into some Windex? Isabel kept all her cleaning supplies in a closet, but it was closed. But then again, that’s not to say he couldn’t have gotten into something earlier. He was unsupervised for twenty-three hours a day; anything could have happened. He could have jumped off the couch and landed wrong. Smacked his belly on something and now he was bleeding internally.

  I’d taken Lassie to the emergency vet once before after he was slashed by a raccoon, and luckily, the twenty-four-hour vet was only a mile and a half away.

  I run back into the bedroom, grab a backpack out of the closet, and snatch Lassie off the bed. “It’s gonna be alright. We’re gonna get you fixed.”

  I’m having déjà vu.

  I snag the Vespa keys off the key ring, sprint down the stairs, and find the small scooter parked between two cars on the street.

  I gingerly put Lassie in the backpack.

  “Ten minutes. Hold on, buddy.”

  I put on the backpack and zoom onto the side street.

  Two blocks later, the backpack starts thrashing wildly.

  I pull the Vespa over to the side of the road. The backpack feels like there is a miniature bucking bronco trying to free itself. I unzip the backpack and Lassie stops.

  He is panting wildly.

  “It’s gonna be okay. Just another couple of minutes.”

  Meow.

  “What?”

  Meow.

  “You aren’t sick?”

  Meow.

  “You were faking it? Why would yo—”

  Meow.

  “You needed to get me out of the house? Why?”

  Meow.

  “Two men came in?”

  Meow.

  “Seriously?”

  Lassie explains how he was sleeping last night when the front door opened. He thought it was Ingrid or my dad, but it wasn’t. It was two men he didn’t recognize. He went up to them, but they swatted him away. Lassie hid for the next twenty minutes until the men left.

  “They bugged my condo,”
I say to myself, more than to Lassie. “Holy shit, they bugged my fucking condo.”

  I should be pissed, but I’m not. I’m relieved. Because the only logical assumption I can make is that my house was bugged by the CIA. And if so, then Director LeHigh is to blame. And innocent men didn’t bug houses.

  He was spooked.

  That means I was on the right track.

  Everything my mother sent me was true.

  Meow.

  I straighten.

  “Really?”

  Meow.

  “Which car?”

  Meow.

  Someone is following us.

  I put Lassie back into the backpack and start back onto the road. If my house was bugged, then whoever did it had either video or audio, or both, of my thinking Lassie was sick. And now they were following me.

  Five minutes later, I pull up to the emergency vet.

  It is 3:13 a.m.

  I sign in on the iPad near the receptionist. There are two people ahead of me. I take a seat on one of the plastic chairs. There is a fiftyish man with a white Pomeranian. It barks at me.

  I pull out Lassie and put him on my lap. He is playing the part of sickly cat well.

  I pull out my cell phone.

  I have two missed text messages from Ingrid.

  Ingrid’s first text is: I MISS U. The second one is: COULD YOUR MOM HAVE SENT YOU ANYTHING ELSE?

  I send back: LASSIE IS SICK. AT THE VET. GONNA FORGET ABOUT MY MOM JUST LIKE SHE FORGOT ABOUT ME.

  The phone vibrates almost instantly.

  OK. I SUPPORT YOU EITHER WAY. HOPE LASSIE IS OKAY.

  HE WILL BE. TALK TO YOU TOMORROW.

  She sends: XOXO

  But the cyber hugs and kisses aren’t my main concern, it’s what she said about my mother. Sending me something else.

  What if my mother sent me something before the DVD? She had to know there was a bounty on her head. That her time was limited. Did she try to get something to me before, but I was too wrapped up in my regimen to notice?

  I try to think if Isabel ever opened any packages that I didn’t order myself. Would my mother have stuck with Amazon? She had to send the message anonymously, or it never would have made it. Even the review she posted was taken down right after I checked it.

  Which means.

  They knew I checked it.

  Did they already bug my computer? Were they just waiting for my mother to get in contact with me this whole time? What other ways might she have tried to get in contact with me?

  No, she did it out of desperation. I visualize her writing the review on her phone as she hid from her pursuers. It was a last minute Hail Mary. There had to be one more clue somewhere in the review. Something about the locations. Some sort of proof.

  I remember the review word for word and recite it under my breath.

  My wife and I saw this movie on our first date eight years ago. It was love at first site. We watch the movie every year on our anniversary, August 5th. Smith and Jones are amazing together and Heghil did a great job directing. My nine-year-old, April, loves the movie too. She gives it twelve stars.

  Five sentences.

  I repeat it twice more, but I have squeezed the words dry. They have nothing left to give.

  Was that it? Did I get the review right? I think so.

  But I feel like I’m missing something.

  The title of the review.

  I think back.

  There was a title? Right?

  It takes a long minute.

  This Movie Rocks!

  How did it take me this long?

  Rocks.

  The guys who bugged my house easily could have bugged my cell phone, and I don’t want to use it to search up anything on the internet. I stand up and grab the iPad off the stand just in front of the receptionist. I exit the vet homepage and search Global Geologist Unlimited.

  The company’s web page is the first hit, but this isn’t what I want. My mother wouldn’t be able to manipulate the code of their website.

  But Wikipedia on the other hand.

  I load the Wiki page for GGU.

  I’ve visited the page before and scroll down to the bottom where they list the locations and coordinates of their drill sites.

  There are twenty-five entries.

  Last time I’d checked, there were twenty-four.

  There is a small number next to the twenty-fifth entry — the reference number.

  I scroll to the bottom and read the reference: “SB.”

  Sally Bins.

  It had to be.

  I look down at Lassie and say, “Greenland?”

  I’m not all that good with geography, but I’m pretty sure Greenland is up near the Arctic, east of Canada. It would be uninhabitable conditions, though if you were hiding a secret prison this might be a perfect spot.

  “Mr. Bins, that iPad is for signing in only.”

  I ignore her.

  If you are the CIA and you have a secret underground prison where you keep and torture enemy combatants, well, I can’t think of a better place.

  What I don’t understand is this: if the location were Romania, then there was a possibility I could do something. Stir things up. Make some noise. Since I was at the vet, I was thinking in terms of a puppy. Imagine if there were a puppy lost somewhere in Romania and I knew the puppy’s coordinates. I had enough money that I could probably get the puppy found and flown home in twenty-four hours. But if said puppy was lost in Greenland, well, three million dollars might not bring the puppy’s bones back.

  And if this was all happening in Greenland, what did my mom expect me to do with the information, and why was the Department of Homeland Security involved?

  I scroll back up to the locations.

  I read the coordinates of the Greenland drill site: 38.94445718138941 N, 77.70492553710938 W.

  My eyebrows scrunch together.

  Greenland was almost into the Arctic. It was much higher than forty degrees north of the equator.

  My heart rate quickens.

  I search and find a GPS coordinate website and cut and paste in the coordinates.

  Not Greenland.

  Virginia.

   

   

  :10

   

  My dad opens the door. He is wearing boxers and a white T-shirt. His eyes are half open.

  “What are you do—”

  I push past him.

  It’s 3:41 a.m.

  Murdock rushes forward and starts pawing at the backpack. He can hear or smell Lassie inside. My dad tries to pull him away, but he is too strong. He springs forward, knocks me down, snatches the backpack and begins tearing at it. Seconds later, Lassie wiggles his way through the hole in the fabric.

  Prison break complete.

  Murdock bathes Lassie in kisses, then the two disappear through a sliding glass door that leads to my father’s neatly kept backyard.

  “Say goodbye to all your flowers.”

  “I said goodbye to those a long time ago.”

  For the first time, I realize it’s been over nine years since I stepped foot in the house where I grew up.

  For many years, my dad would drive to see me fifty-two Wednesdays a year, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays. Sure, my one hour was precious, but I still should have made the pilgrimage back before now.

  “What are you doing here, Son?” my dad says, pulling the door closed. “And what’s with the car parked across the street?”

  Lassie and I left the vet without being seen by the doctor. Back on the scooter, I’d headed home, zoomed past my condo, taken a hard right, and then merged onto the northbound freeway. Within five minutes, a black car caught up with us. Throwing all pretense to the wind, it stayed close on my tail as I exited ten miles later, then weaved through the neighborhood tentacles before pulling up to the house where I spent the better part of twenty-seven years.

  “The guys in the car a
re CIA. They are following me. And I’m here because they bugged my house.”

  His eyebrows rise.

  “They what?”

  I tell him.

  “Why would they do that?”

  I tell him about the clues, the meeting with the President and Director LeHigh. “He killed her, Dad. He so much as admitted it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because mom knew of a secret black site here in the States.”

  “They were torturing terrorists here?”

  “Yep. Can you imagine what would happen if that ever leaked?”

  “They would probably shut down the CIA for good.”

  “Exactly. Which is why they couldn’t allow that information to get out. And why mom was found with a bullet hole in the back of her head.”

  This is too much for my dad, and he takes a seat on the couch in his living room.

  I look down at my cell phone.

  3:44 a.m.

  I have sixteen minutes.

  I have a lot to accomplish in sixteen minutes.

  “You still have that GPS?”

  My father had a brief stint with an activity called geocaching. People would hide things all over the US, then post their coordinates on a national website, then people would try to track these things down and win whatever prize was inside or simply add a notch to their geocaching belt.

  My father hunted down a couple of these caches, even getting a five-dollar bill out of one of them. But my dad was the ultimate hobby slut, and within a couple months he moved on to his newest phase, air-controlled helicopters or water-coloring or whatever.

  “I think so. Somewhere in the basement. Why? You’re not thinking about going to this place, are you?”

  “It’s here in Virginia.”

  “Langley?”

  “No, about thirty miles west of CIA headquarters. Out in the boonies.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No, you’re gonna stay right here.”

  I tell him my plan.

  I’m guessing his reaction wouldn’t have been much different if I told him I wanted to go base jumping. He pushes his glasses up his nose and asks, “Are you sure about this?”

  I nod.

  “Okay, then,” he says. “Let’s go get that GPS.”

  I follow him downstairs.

  Though you wouldn’t know it from the tidy first and second floors of my father’s 2,200-square-foot suburban home, my father is a hoarder.

  Mostly it’s where his hobbies go to die.

  A third of the way down the stairs he pulls a chain, and a solitary bulb illuminates the beginnings of the hobby cemetery.

  “I forgot about the kites,” I say, shaking my head.

  We continue down. We reach the bottom and my dad pulls on another chain.

  There are huge piles of parts, accessories, and other various implements of his many distractions, between which my father has somehow carved a foot-wide walkway.

  “That whole ship inside the glass thing never really panned out.”

  “It’s on the backburner.” He pauses. “For now.”

  Right.

  “You don’t use that Nordic Track anymore?” AKA, the slim-down phase.

  “Oh, every once in a while.”

  “That thing has not been used since I left here nine years ago.”

  “Once my back is better, I’m gonna use that thing every day.”

  I laugh.

  We snake through the pottery phase, the piano phase, the inventor phase, and the magic phase.

  “That ‘cut-the-girl-in-half box’ was a really good purchase.”

  “I was going to perform at birthday parties.”

  “Just find me the GPS, Copperfield.”

  He pushes a couple boxes out of the way, takes a quick peek inside one, and says, “Here we go.”

  He pulls out the small black device and hands it to me. It’s twice the size of the ones that you can buy today, but considering it was only used a handful of times, I’m optimistic it works.

  I hit the power button, but nothing happens.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got batteries around here somewhere.”

  He moves past me and heads back toward the inventor phase.

  I’m near the far wall. In the corner I notice a blue tarp. I was thinking I could use the tarp to help me elude the guys across the street. Drape it over their windshield and make a run for it. I lift a corner of the tarp and see three small black boxes. They are arranged too neatly to be my father’s.

  I pull one of the boxes out and flip open the top.

  “Found ‘em.”

  I turn.

  Whatever is in those boxes will have to wait for another day.

  A minute later, I’m back upstairs with the coordinates programmed into the GPS.

  It is 3:50 a.m.

   

  ::::

   

  My room is how I left it. Half boyhood memorabilia, half grown-up CPA. Only having an hour a day means that you are forced to prioritize. Even when it came to cartoons, sports stars, bands, girls, I was forced to pick. And not one of each. One, period. Cartoons were too juvenile, sports were too long, and girls were out of my reach. But music was easy. I could listen to a couple songs a day, and I could have the music on in the background while I traded stocks, did push-ups, or daydreamed about girls.

  I chose Prince.

  He was mysterious, odd, and about as different as it got. Maybe I felt in some way he would understand what it was like to be me. To be and have Henry Bins. But mostly, I loved him because he could sing his ass off.

  Intermixed with the Prince posters were a mass of whiteboards. When I first started trading stocks in the early 2000s, I remember telling my dad that I needed a bunch of whiteboards. Then each day for ten minutes, I would wake up, check stocks and graph them. Of course, all this information was available on the internet, but I liked drawing them out myself—it made me feel more connected to whatever I might be buying. Not just a mere spectator, but an active participant in the stocks’ triumphs and failures. And in those first five years, I lost a lot of money, my father even having to take out a second mortgage on the house to invest in his son playing Wall Street. But eventually, I picked the right stocks. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe because my time was so constrained I was forced at times to simply go by my gut, but I always felt it was something about holding that red dry erase marker, graphing the company’s past, present, and future, that led to my eventual success.

  Three years after my dad took out the second mortgage, I paid off both the first and second mortgages, and I told him that if I ever caught him hovering over a government manual again, I would break both his arms. So I can be blamed for my father’s licentious hobbying. I enabled him. But there was no amount of money that could repay what that great man did for me. For every hour that I was awake, he put eight hours into planning out every minute of my day so I would turn into the man I am.

  But Prince and walking down memory lane isn’t what brought me upstairs to my neatly kept room. It was a shoe box hidden in the back of my closet.

  I sit on the queen bed, the brown and green striped comforter pulled taut, and lift the lid. I smile and remember the day my dad handed me the shoebox twenty years earlier.

  “Every kid should have one of these,” he’d said smiling. “A shoebox full of fireworks.”

   

  ::::

   

  “Lassie! Murdock! Pay attention!”

  I look down at my cell phone.

  3:53 a.m.

  Seven minutes.

  I wipe off one of the whiteboards with my forearm, the steep rise in Oracle coloring my arm pink, and pick up one of the aged markers resting in the tray at the bottom.

  My father is sitting with his legs draped off the bed. Murdock is standing next to him. Lassie is sitting on Murdock’s back. But Lassie isn’t watching me; he is chewing on Murdock’s ear. And Murdock is chewing on
Lassie’s tail.

  “Guys!”

  They both snap to attention.

  “We only have one shot at this.”

  “This is our house.” I draw on the whiteboard. “And this is the car across the street.”

  Meow.

  “Where are you? You are here in the house.”

  Meow.

  “Draw you? Fine, here.” I draw a cat face with whiskers.

  Meow.

  “Murdock? Gaaa. Fine.” I draw a little stick figure dog. “And here you are, dad, and this is me.”

  Meow.

  “Why am I so big? Because I’m in charge, you stupid cat.”

  I exhale.

  “Okay, once I open the garage, Lassie, you and Murdock run here.” I draw a line from the house to the car. I make two X’s. “Box them in. They won’t move if they think they’ll hit you. Can you do that? Lassie?”

  Meow.

  “Good. Murdock?”

  Murdock lets out a huge fart.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  I draw another line. “Dad, this is you.”

  “Got it.”

  I look down.

  3:55 a.m.

  “Alright. Garage opens in two minutes.”

   

  ::::

   

  I push the button for the garage.

  When it is halfway open, Lassie and Murdock both scamper underneath. When it is fully open, Lassie is five feet behind the car and Murdock five feet in front.

  I light the longest fuse on the fireworks — though I’ll be surprised if fireworks bought during the first Gulf War will still work — and close the lid on the shoebox. Then I place it on the skateboard I found in my closet and give it a roll with my foot. The skateboard glides down the driveway, into the street, and underneath the black sedan. I hit the button and the door begins to close.

  There is a door on the side of the garage, and I run out and peek around the side of the house.

  The windows are heavily tinted on the car and I can’t see the men’s faces. The passenger side door opens, and a man steps out. I expect him to look under the car, but it appears they were too distracted by the one-hundred-and-sixty-pound dog now sitting on their bumper.

  The man approaches Murdock.

  “Get off the car!”

  Murdock doesn’t budge.

  The man walks up to Murdock and shoves him. Murdock remains passive. Zen. He isn’t going anywhere.

  A screaming echoes from beneath the car. That would be the fountain I lit. The Howler.

  The man turns and drops to the ground.

  The entire shoebox is aflame. A half second later, Armageddon erupts. A second and third Howler begin screaming. Twenty bottle rockets zip out in twenty different directions. Black Cats pop off in one hundred round successions. Spinners shoot out and begin zipping all over the street in neon sparks. Smoke bombs begin hissing out their colored clouds.

  It’s a light show Prince would be proud of.

  My dad dashes from the front of the house. He is wearing the clothes I wore earlier as well as a motorcycle helmet. If the two men looked closely, they might realize he isn’t me. But they are a bit preoccupied celebrating July 4th with their new pets.

  My dad jumps on the scooter parked on the street, hits the engine, and takes off. He gets a ten second head start before the man dives back into the passenger seat and the black sedan revs its engine and Murdock gallops away.

  I dart back into the garage and jump into my father’s Lincoln.

  It is 3:58 a.m.

  I hit the garage door opener, check if the coast is clear, and then zip out of the neighborhood. I take a left, then a right, then another left, then pull over on the side of the street.

  I have less than a minute.

  I jump out, grab the tarp I took from the basement, and throw it over the car. I only have three-quarters of the car covered when the alarm on the watch I borrowed from my dad goes off and I crawl under the tarp and dive into the back seat.

   

   

   

  :11

   

  I half expect to wake up in an underground dungeon, chained to a wall, rats having eaten off both my big toes.

  But it appears the CIA took the bait.

  I directed my dad to drive just fast enough so they would be able to see him and to lead them out of the neighborhood. I didn’t want to risk them losing sight of him, then doubling back and searching the neighborhood, then seeing a car with a blue tarp over it and growing suspicious enough to check its plates. Whereby they come back to a Richard Bins, and then I’m in a dungeon with my toes eaten off.

  Whether the CIA boys followed my father to a motel ten miles south, it didn’t matter. They would still find him.

  He had my cell phone.

  They would have traced the GPS to the Motel 6 just on the outskirts of Alexandria and settled in for another night of watching.

  I’d thought about keeping my dad’s cell phone, but I didn’t want to underestimate the CIA. They might figure out my dad was simply a diversion and trace my father’s cell phone thinking I might have it. No, it was better to be off the grid.

  Plus, I doubted how long my dad would be able to play possum. He needed to buy me a full twenty-four hours before he could return. But an hour from now, I would be sixty miles away and he could safely return home.

  As for Lassie and Murdock, I can only imagine what the two unsupervised teenagers were up to the last twenty-three hours. Murdock would do just about anything Lassie asked him or dared him to do. I am tempted to go see if my father’s house is still standing. If after the two snuck back into the house through the sliding glass door, they burned the place to the ground. Or if they’d eaten all my dad’s pickles.

  But I don’t have time.

  I jump out of the back seat, rip the blue tarp off the Lincoln and toss it to the ground. Then I hop in the driver’s seat and speed out of the neighborhood.

  There is a quarter tank of gas, plenty to get me where I’m going.

  I pull out the GPS and turn it on.

  My destination is one hour and seventeen minutes away.

  I merge onto the highway and drive five miles over the speed limit. It’s going to take me two days to get there, but I’m hoping to cover considerable ground today, so I will have as much of my hour tomorrow to locate the black site and take pictures with my father’s expensive Nikon.

  Pictures I will then show to President Sullivan and say, “Told you so.”

  Possibly with my tongue out.

  The Lincoln eats forty miles of the interstate before the GPS directs me to get off on the next exit.

  It is 3:35 a.m.

  There is a large gas station — a truck depot — and I pull into the lot. I dash in, use the restroom, then grab two bottles of water, a premade sandwich, three protein bars, some Peanut M&M’s, and a large bag of beef jerky.

  The cashier asks, “Where you headed?”

  It is the same question he asked the guy in front of me and the same question he will ask the guy behind me.

  “Taking a load to Ohio.”

  He nods and hands me my change.

  Back in the car, I zoom out of the truck stop. A half mile later, I enter the town of McLean, home to Langley. CIA headquarters.

  I wonder how much time the goons sitting outside my father’s hotel room spent at the sprawling campus. Is that where they were trained, where they cultivated their espionage skills, where they were taught how to deal with enemy combatants? Did anything in the thick manuals they’d read or the hours of hands-on training they’d endured instruct them how to deal with an English mastiff sitting on the hood of their car?

  I take a left and continue in the opposite direction. I spend the next twenty minutes on a one-lane highway shoving processed food into my gullet, swigging down the water, and staring at the three-quarter moon brightening the rolling hills and greenery that litter t
he beautiful Virginia countryside.

  I glance at the passenger seat. I picture Ingrid sitting there, her head craned to the side, her blue eyes gazing upward into the night sky.

  I so badly want her to be in the seat next to me.

  I haven’t spoken with her since Lassie and I were at the vet. Did she wrap up her case? Is she worried about me? Is she staring at the moon at this exact second as well? Or is she fast asleep, Henry Bins the furthest thing from her mind?

  Granted I was only awake for an hour a day, but it seemed like only a couple minutes could go by before something reminded me of her and she did a cannonball into my thoughts.

  But how often did she think about me? Once an hour? Once every five? Her day was so diluted by time that even if I popped into her head a dozen times, it still couldn’t match the percentage of time I was thinking of her. But is it even fair to think like that?

  The alarm on my dad’s watch breaks my reverie.

  I don’t have time to search for a good hiding spot. I pull the car over on the side of the road, flip off the lights, and crawl into the back.

  I look at the GPS.

  Six miles to go.

   

  ::::

   

  A green Prius drives along the road under the afternoon sun. The car passes the white Lincoln, then slows, then begins to reverse. The driver wonders what such a nice car is doing abandoned on the lonely country road. Where is the owner? Did something happen? Car trouble? Something worse?

  The car parks in front of the Lincoln and a man steps out. Not a woman. A woman wouldn’t stop and get out of her car in the middle of nowhere. At least a smart one. Prius is forty. Upper middle class. Successful. Church going. Out for a drive. Nowhere pressing to be.

  He walks up to the Lincoln. Checks the front tire. Gazes into the front seat. Sees a bunch of discarded wrappers on the passenger seat. Sees the man in the back seat.

  Your average guy might head back to his car, but Prius isn’t your average guy. He recycles, he holds the door open for people, he buys fifteen boxes of Girl Scout cookies every year. He assumes the man in the back seat is taking a nap. That he got tired and pulled over to catch a couple winks. But why go through the trouble of getting into the back seat? Unless the man spent the night in the car. Which would be odd, but surely not unprecedented. But it was odd to still be asleep at four in the afternoon. Surely the guy should be up and continuing his journey.

  Prius gives a little rap on the window. Best to see if the man is okay. But the man is nonresponsive. Prius knocks harder. Still no movement.

  That’s when the cell phone comes out.

  It takes the sheriff ten minutes to show up.

  This is where it gets strange.

  The sheriff pulls a hose from his car and inserts it in to the muffler of the Lincoln. The car starts to fill with red Jell-O.

  The Jell-O, which isn’t your average Jell-O, dissolves the car and everything around it. Except me.

  Now it’s the sheriff, Prius, and then me in this red cocoon.

  Then another man joins. Then a woman. Soon I am surrounded by men, women, children, dogs, even a couple horses. And then everyone starts eating the Jell-O. They are devouring it, getting closer and closer to me in the middle.

  The six foot radius of red is soon just two feet, then two inches. They are about to be out of Jell-O and then they are going to start eating me.

  That’s when I wake up.

  I jolt upright and peer out the back window. The car hasn’t moved. I shake off the dream, which may have gotten slightly unrealistic at the end, but easily could have happened. Someone could have stopped. Could have peeked in the back seat. Could have called the cops. Sure, the road was off the beaten path, but over the course of the past twenty-three hours, a hundred cars sped past the Lincoln. Maybe a dozen gave the car a single thought, half dozen even contemplating where the owner of the automobile might be. And one even considered stopping. But lucky for me, that one continued on his merry way.

  I jump out, do my business on the side of the road, and then hop into the driver’s seat. I put the car in drive and chug the remaining water bottle, eat half a bag of beef jerky, and then finish off a second pack of Peanut M&M’s.

  I cover five miles in five minutes.

  At 3:06 a.m., the GPS tells me to take a right onto a dirt road.

  I keep the Lincoln around forty miles per hour up and over a large rolling hill, down the backside, then up his brother. Two more hills. I take a left. Drive for a quarter mile and the road stops. There is a gate. Private Property.

  NO TRESPASSING.

  There is a good chance that by driving this far up the road, I have already tripped an alarm. That if I hop over the gate and continue forth, that some commandos are going to jump out of the brush and tackle me. Or put a bullet in me. Or worse.

  My only hope is my mother.

  That she wouldn’t send her son on a death mission.

  I grab my dad’s Nikon and a flashlight.

  Two minutes later, I am over the gate and running up the dirt hill.

  It is 3:14 a.m.

   

  ::::

   

  The GPS tells me I am one thousand feet from my destination. But the road is gone. I am surrounded by thick brush. If there is a trail that leads to the black site, I can’t find it. I take five steps into the thick woods, the disrupted fallen branches, leaves, and rubble cutting loudly through the still night air.

  I imagine the two men from the first article I read, Abdul Al-Rahmin and Hammad Sheik-Alzar, being led through these same trees. How long did it take the CIA to sneak the men to this location? How hard was it to get two presumed dead men out of Iraq and to the Virginia backcountry? How many people were involved? Was the process compartmentalized so the group that got them onto the airplane in Iraq didn’t know where they would end up? Or was it a small group that saw it through to the end? Were the men who snatched Abdul and Hammad the same men that led them to their fate through these trees? Did they know what would happen to them when their little hike ended? That they would be subjected to horrific acts? That they might never again see the light of day?

  I push forward.

  Slowly I follow the arrow on the GPS, moving stealthily through the trees, until I am standing on the exact two-foot radius that marks the coordinates.

  I’d looked at pictures of black sites on the internet and there were various kinds. Some looked like small houses, others looking more industrial, and even others looking like government offices.

  But there is no black site here.

  Only trees.

  Did my mother send me on a wild goose chase? Where did she get the coordinates from? Was her source reliable?

  I look down at the watch.

  It is 3:22 a.m.

  I need to leave myself time to hike back to the car and then drive back to the highway. I figure I need a solid twenty minutes, and set the alarm to go off at 3:40 a.m.

  I scan the flashlight in every direction, but there is no small building, cabin, or outpost hidden within the veil of trees.

  “Fuck.”

  The word echoes through the cold air, but I’m no longer worried that someone might hear. There is no one to hear. Probably no one within miles.

  But then why the NO TRESPASSING sign?

  These woods belong to someone.

  I return to the exact spot of the coordinates and notice that unlike its immediate surroundings, the two-foot area is flat. I clear the fallen leaves from the ground, then fall to my knees. I move an inch of dirt and hit a hard surface. Squatting, I pick up the flashlight and shine it downward.

  Plywood.

  It takes me a long minute to uncover the four-foot section of plywood and lift it, revealing a bronze plate. The plate is the width of a doorway and three feet high. There is a giant padlock locking the plate to its cement foundation.

  Bingo.

  I pull my dad’s ca
mera from around my neck and snap three pictures in quick succession. But the plate alone isn’t enough proof. If I show the President a picture of an underground door in the middle of the Virginia woods, he might shrug and say, “So you found some nutjob’s bomb shelter. Big whoop.”

  I kick at the rotund lock with my foot and am surprised when the locking arm slips from the sheath.

  I toss the lock to the side.

  From the amount of leaves that had fallen, it’d been months, probably years, since the tomb was uncovered. Whatever lay beneath the bronze plate, be it a doomsday bunker, black site, or otherwise, is empty.

  But then again, if it were a black site and the location was compromised, aka my mother, then it would only make sense the CIA shut it down. But what I didn’t understand is why they didn’t erase all evidence of its existence. But again, I was getting ahead of myself. I could easily lift the steel plate and reveal a concrete slab.

  I lift the steel plate with a grunt and shove it backward.

  No concrete.

  Just stairs leading down into a dark abyss.

  I look at my watch.

  3:28 a.m.

  I take two quick photos then start down.

   

  ::::

   

  Six stairs. Ten. Twelve.

  I splay the flashlight in every direction. The concrete chamber is triple the size of my father’s basement, maybe a thousand square feet.

  But unlike my father’s, this chamber is void of nearly anything. The flashlight illuminates the chamber in a soft glow. I walk toward a set of three pop-up banquet tables and five folding chairs.

  I imagine Abdul sitting in one of the folding chairs, a bag over his head, his arms and legs tied to the chair, the other chairs occupied by men who only cared about one thing: preventing the next 9/11 and willing to go to great lengths to do so.

  I snap several pictures, then continue along the perimeter.

  In the far corner there is a smaller table. A metal tub directly behind it, knocked on its side. Five dry, brittle rags littered about. A droplet of water drips from a water spigot in the wall.

  The waterboarding station.

  I imagine Abdul on his back, the rag over his head, a CIA man pouring a jug of water over his face as he coughs and sputters and prays to Allah for strength.

  I snap three shots.

  I check my watch.

  I’ve been down here nine minutes already.

  Directly above the table are two chains hanging from thick bolts in the concrete ceiling eight feet above. I push one of the heavy steel manacles and watch as it sweeps back and forth, crashing into its twin restraint, their echo ringing through the chamber. To strap someone up like that you have to hate them. There is no other way. I thought back to that day when the towers fell down. I hated that it happened. I even hated those men who did it. But it was a generalized hate. Of course, all of those guys died in the respective crashes, but what if they survived? Would I have been okay with the CIA chaining them up and doing only God knows what to them?

  I didn’t know.

  I run the flashlight over the dark stains on the concrete.

  “There’s no drain.”

  I snap my head, my last breath caught somewhere in my throat.

  I shine the flashlight on a man striding toward me.

  “When we built this place, they said they wouldn’t be able to put in any plumbing in the floors, which means no drain. So when the prisoners bleed — and they do bleed, trust me on that — the blood just has to dry.”

  “You’re sick,” I say.

  Director LeHigh shrugs.

  “I prefer results-driven.”

  “You killed my mother,” I say.

  “I didn’t pull the trigger, but yes, I had your mother killed.”

  “Who was it?”

  He shrugs. “It could have been any number of our more advanced operatives.”

  “Assassins?”

  “Call them what you like.”

  For the first time I notice the bulge on LeHigh’s hip. I scan the room. He is standing in the middle, directly in my path to the stairs.

  I pull up the camera and take a couple pictures of him. If I had my phone, I could have bluffed that I was uploading them online, but I would be surprised if there is cell service.

  I flip off the flashlight, sending the two of us into icy blackness.

  Thirty seconds of silence go by. I wait for LeHigh to turn on a flashlight of his own.

  He doesn’t.

  I take three silent steps to my right.

  He says, “The chains were your mother’s idea.”

  I wonder if he can hear me gulp.

  “That’s right. Your mother helped build this place. Hell, it’s named after her. Mother’s Bunker.” He pauses. “I suppose you would need a little background to understand. Your mother was born in Macedonia, where Mother Teresa is, was, from. Your mother was so nice to the prisoners, well, when she wasn’t waterboarding them or electrocuting them or pulling out their fingernails, and one day someone called her Mother Teresa and it stuck.”

  I know that he is goading me, trying to get me to give away my location. And I almost break. I almost scream, “My mother did not torture these men, she couldn’t have! The warm, loving woman I knew would never harm a soul!” But I hold back. If I learned anything the previous two weeks, it was that I didn’t know a single thing about my mother.

  “Your mother was the one who trained me. But then again, she trained just about everyone,” states LeHigh. He is still at the center of the room, now to my almost immediate left.

  I take three quick steps toward where I think the entrance is located.

  “Your mother wrote the book on torture. Literally, she wrote a book, The Pain Game. There are only a handful of surviving copies, but for a while, at least during the Reagan administration, it was mandatory reading for all recruits. Did you know the Honduran government paid your mother nearly a hundred thousand dollars to train them how to torture their prisoners? A hundred thousand dollars. And this was 1986. That’s how good your mother was.”

  The Director’s voice is moving toward the entrance. He knows what I’m up to and wants to head me off.

  If I’m gonna get out of here alive, I have to do something, and now.

  I try to think like him. He thinks that I will make a break for the entrance. And that was Plan A. But LeHigh is twice my size and he has a gun. And I have no doubt he knows exactly how many steps away from the entrance he is at all times. And what’s to say that he didn’t pull the door shut and lock it behind him or that there aren’t three agents waiting just outside the entrance?

  My only hope is to get the gun away from him.

  The camera is no use to me at this point, and I set it on the ground. I’m not far from the pop-up tables and the folding chairs. I put the flashlight in the waist of my pants and move slowly, my hands outstretched. I take two steps. My foot hits the chair. The scraping is soft, but in the chamber it is a full New York Symphony.

  “What are you doing over there?” barks the Director.

  He is fifteen feet from the entrance.

  I pick up the chair by the legs and I throw it in his general direction.

  It clangs to the ground.

  “Temper, temper, Mr. Bins,” he says, obviously unfazed by my assault.

  I pick up another chair and toss it wildly in his direction, then a third, then I turn and run back toward the chains. I pull the flashlight from my waist and flip it on just long enough to get my bearings and to see if any of my chairs connected with LeHigh. They didn’t. The Director is on his feet, gun in hand, his arm coming up from his hip.

  I flip the flashlight off, grab the chains, and swing them hard against the ceiling. They make two hollow thuds, then come together in a series of violent chimes.

  Under the umbrella of echoes I make an improvised play, then I find the far wall. I follow it for a hundred silent feet u
ntil I come to the corner nearest the entrance.

  My chest is heaving, and I pull my shirt up over my mouth to mask my breathing.

  I know LeHigh is close, less than twenty feet from me.

  I don’t imagine that after thirty years as a spy he is easily rattled, but his breathing is heavier than mine.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can both walk out of here,” he says, his voice swirling as he whips his head from side to side. “I just need you to sign some paperwork stating that you will never talk about this place, and then we can go our separate ways.”

  Bullshit.

  I take one more breath.

  Any second.

  Another breath.

  Any second.

  The alarm on the watch goes off.

  Only it isn’t on my wrist.

  After I smashed the chains together, I’d slid the watch across the ground toward the tables and chairs.

  I can hear the Director move his feet, turning toward the sound.

  I’m already on the move.

  I flip the flashlight on.

  The Director is turning back around but it’s too late. I smash the flashlight against the side of his head. He turns his head just enough to avoid the full impact, but I still land a solid blow, one that ripples through the room.

  LeHigh somehow gets an arm out and sends me reeling to the ground. My knee hits the concrete and explodes in pain, but it is the furthest thing from my mind. All I care about is the gun. Did he drop it? I don’t remember hearing it clatter to the ground. My plan was to hit his right arm with the flashlight, hopefully sending the gun flying, but I changed strategy at the last minute, hoping to knock him out cold with one blow to his head.

  I push myself up.

  The flashlight is somehow still working, sending a beam across the floor ten feet from my right. Within its golden grip, it holds a black gun.

  I dive for it.

  As my hand grasps the butt, a large shoe presses down on my fingers. And I feel the other shoe moving toward my face.

  And then the lights go out.

  :12

   

  “Henry.”

  I open my eyes.

  “Henry.”

  The Director is standing over me, his face brightened by the flashlight close by. Blood is smeared on what little hair he has left on his head.  

  “Who did you tell?”

  “No one.” As I say the words, I realize I am lying on a table.

  “Don’t lie to me. Your mother told you where it is.” A damp rag is placed over my eyes, nose, and mouth. “Who else knows?”

  “About this place? Just me,” I sputter, but the water is already being poured over my face.

  It doesn’t seem like it would be that terrifying. To have a towel over your face and water poured over it, but it is. You feel like you’re drowning. That you can’t get air. That each breath will be your last.

  The water stops.

  The rag comes off.

  I am gasping for air.

  The flashlight is cascading off the back wall, sending light up and into the corners of the bunker. I bat the water out of my eyes and squint upward.

  Another round of water. A long minute of terror.

  “Who did you tell about the other black site?”

  “Other black site? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please.” I’m begging. I don’t want another round of water. I’ll do anything to never have to endure that again. “These were the only coordinates she gave me. I swear. Please, you have to believe me.”

  “You know what? Those are the exact words your mother’s last prisoner said to her. Kept repeating them, over and over again. You have to believe me,” he mocks. “I’ll admit, he wasn’t more than a kid, maybe fifteen, but his brother blew up nine people. Your mother knew this kid knew where his brother and his crew were making these bombs. And she was going to get the intel out of him come hell or high water.”

  My right arm is pulled upward. There is a snap. Left arm. Snap. The table beneath me is kicked away and all one hundred and fifty pounds of me is suspended by my wrists.

  My wrists scream for the three seconds it takes me to find my feet.

  “Five days. Five days of this and the kid still wouldn’t crack. I remember telling her that the kid didn’t know, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept at it. Pulled the kid’s fingernails, electrocuted the shit out of him. Sleep deprivation, and of course, something you know about very well, sleep amplification.”

  “What are you saying?” I blurt.

  “How do you think you turned out like you did? Why you are only awake for an hour a day? You don’t really think it’s some medical disorder, do you? No, it’s classical conditioning.”

  “Are you saying that my mom did this stuff to me when I was a kid? And that’s why I’m the way I am?”

  He punches me in the stomach.

  “You were her first test subject.”

  I vomit. Whether it is from the blow to my solar plexus or from what LeHigh has just told me, I can’t be sure.

  “The kid never broke. Even after being only awake for an hour a day for over a month, he stuck to his story. But then his heart gave out. Four days later, we bring in another kid. He knows where the bombs are being made. But he also knows the brother — the one your mother killed — didn’t know anything. Knows he hadn’t seen his brother in years. Just like he’d said over and over again.”

  I can’t think. My brain is imploding.

  “Your mother was never the same,” he says. “She got spooked.”

  He punches me in the face, my head whipped to the side so violently, I see the Little Dipper.  

  “She said she was going to go to Obama, tell him that we were still operating illegal black sites. That we had one right under his nose in Virginia. That for the last seven years a group of highly trained CIA operatives were faking the deaths of enemy combatants and sneaking them into the US”

  Another punch in the stomach.

  “You don’t blow the whistle on your own,” he says. “She knew what would happen, so she ran. But we couldn’t risk her opening her mouth. So we shut this place down. It took us fifteen months to set up a new facility, to get the Vatican up and running.”

  “Did you say Vatican?” I mutter with what strength I have left.

  He nods.

  “Let me guess, if they call my mom Mother Teresa, that makes you—”

  “The Pope.”

  I think back to Ingrid’s text message.

  JUST GOT A NEW CASE...A SERIAL KILLER...CALLS HIMSELF THE POPE.

  I run everything that happened the last two weeks over in my head.

  How could I have been so blind?

  But I do see a sliver of hope.

  I’m not dead yet.

  “How do you even know my mom knows about this place?” I ask.

  “One of the other members of our team. We think your mother got to him. That he told her where the Vatican was located before we could, well, quiet him.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know. And if she did, she didn’t tell me.”

  He stares at me.

  “You’re telling the truth.”

  I nod.

  “Holy shit, she didn’t tell you.”

  I shake my head.

  “Where is it?”

  He glares at me.

  “Is Abdul Al-Rahmin there?”

  “Look at you, doing your homework. No, sadly Abdul didn’t make the transfer.”

  “Dead.”

  He nods.

  “But ten of his friends are there. And the intel they supplied helped us infiltrate three Al-Qaeda training camps and put a stop to a possible bombing in downtown Minneapolis.”

  “Is the Vatican underground, like this one?”

  He looks around. Pulls the gun from his hip. I wonder if he’s going to tell me before or after he pulls the trigger.

  “Sure is.”

 
He wants to tell me. Wants to tell someone.

  “Here in Virginia?”

  He shakes his head. “Nope, our friends to the west.”

  “West Virginia?” I say loudly.

  He nods.

  I expect them to come crashing through the door. They don’t. They need more specifics.

  I rack my brain. Underground. West Virginia.

  “Let me guess, an abandoned coal mine?”

  He smiles.

  “Walton, West Virginia. Bought the mine outright. Transfer the prisoners in the back of a covered beat-up truck. No one even bats an eye. And if they did, we could just set off a couple sticks of dynamite and blow the thing to bits.”

  I let out an exhale.

  “Okay, you guys can come in now,” I yell.

  He looks confused.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I nod at a corner of the bunker, the tiny video camera in the faint shadows of the flashlight’s outer beam. The one I saw while I was being waterboarded.

  “You’re on TV, you fucking idiot.”

  Three seconds later, there is a clamoring of footsteps.

  I don’t need to see the group rushing forward to know that one of them is the President. And another is Ingrid.

  The room fills with bright light.

  “Drop the gun! Hands up!” someone yells.

  LeHigh does both.

  “Henry, oh my God.” Ingrid pulls my wrists from the manacles and I crumple to the ground. “I wanted to come in sooner, but they wouldn’t let me,” she pleads. Tears are streaming down her cheeks in floods. “They wouldn’t go until he gave up the second site.”

  Someone helps me to my feet. It’s the President. “I’m so sorry about this,” he says. “I never thought it would go this far. You did a great service to your country today. And I will never forget it.”

  “What time it is?” I whisper.

  “3:57 a.m.,” Ingrid says, rubbing my back.

  I’m still dazed.

  I look over my shoulder. Three men in black camouflage have their guns trained on Director LeHigh. I nod at them. “Hey, guys. What’s up?”

  I’m delirious.

  The President turns to LeHigh. “When I appointed you Director of the CIA, I told you there would be zero tolerance for any of this off-the-books bullshit, and then I find out that you have a black site up and running in my own backyard.”

  “You have no idea what it takes to protect this country,” LeHigh scoffs. “You have no idea what we’re up against. You sit there in your little office signing orders that will end up killing innocent Americans. You might as well put the bullets in their heads yourself. ”

  The Director continues his rambling, but all I can do is stare at Ingrid.

  I thought I could never feel what I felt the day I realized my mom was never coming back.

  That betrayal.

  “You have to lie down, Henry.”

  I can’t hear her words.

  I would rather be waterboarded again than feel what I feel this second.

  A tear falls from each of my eyes just before they close.

   

   

   

  :13

   

  The phone buzzes.

  “It’s her again,” I tell Lassie.

  Meow.

  “No, I’m not going to answer it.”

  Meow.

  “I don’t care if you miss her.”

  Meow.

  “Okay, I don’t care if I miss her. Dude, she lied to me. And she got me chained up.”

  Meow.

  “Dude, have you not seen my wrists?” I turn my wrists toward him. They are still a ghastly purple and black. “And she let me get waterboarded.”

  Meow.

  “Big deal? Yeah, it is a big deal. Come here, I’m gonna show you what it feels like.”

  I grab him before he can get away and carry him over to the sink. I turn on the faucet and flip him over. I put his head under the water for five seconds then pull him out.

  He is smiling.

  Meow.

  “Fun?”

  Meow.

  He wants me to do it again.

  I put his head back under.

  He makes me do it three more times.

  I dry him off and give him a kiss on the head. “You are so weird.”

  The phone buzzes again.

  And again.

  It’s been almost a week since I was, well, tortured. Both Ingrid and the President had called me nonstop. Ingrid had tried to come by twice, but I changed the locks.

  The doorbell rings.

  I limp toward the door, my right knee screaming each step, and say, “Go away.”

  The doorbell rings again.

  “Go away.”

  I hear rustling in the lock. She is trying her key.

  “Not gonna work.”

  Two seconds later, the door opens.

  “What the—”

  It’s Red and the President. Red puts his key pick back in his pocket and says, “Sorry.”

  “You aren’t returning my calls,” barks Sullivan, once again clad in jeans and a Redskins hoodie.

  “I don’t really want to hear what you have to say.”

  “Well, I have to tell you some things. They don’t make what I did okay, but they might help you understand why they had to be done.”

  Lassie runs up to the President and rubs against his leg.

  “Don’t,” I say running up and grabbing him.

  Meow.

  “Because he’s the one who got me waterboarded.”

  Meow.

  “No, he can’t do it to you right now.” I put him down. “Go sit on the bed.”

  He does.

  “You talk to your cat?” the President says with a raised eyebrows.

  I ignore him. “You have five minutes.”

  I look down at my phone.

  3:16 a.m.

  The President clears his throat. “Remember when I came to play poker?”

  I nod.

  “Well a couple days before that, Red broke into your apartment with his little gadget there.”

  “Why?”

  “Standard safety check,” Red chimes. “He is the President of the United States.”

  “Right.”

  “Routine stuff we do everywhere the President visits.”

  “Like what?”

  “Check for bugs, guns, surveillance.”

  “Right, I don’t have any of that stuff.”

  “Wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Your house was bugged?”

  “I know, a couple weeks ago.”

  “No,” the President says, shaking his head. “We’re talking months ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” says Red. “But they weren’t your average Radio Shack job. These were top of the line. Spook stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “We ran the prints on them, hoping this would give us some information, and well, they came back belonging to a person of interest.”

  I sigh. “My mother.”

  “Elena Janev,” he says with a nod. “Apparently, she kept an eye on you over the years.”

  For some reason my mom bugging my house makes me almost smile.

  “Turns out the CIA put a kill order out on your mom six years ago.”

  I nod. “LeHigh put it out on her. He had her killed.”

  Red and the President look at each other.

  “Not exactly,” says Sullivan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll get to that.” He takes a deep breath. “After we ran the prints and found out who your mother was, Red did some more investigating. He came across your emails to Advanced Surveillance and Tracking.”

  “So you knew I was looking for her?”

  “Right. And like you said, you weren’t the only one. A year ago, President Obama came to me. He said that he stumbled on
something that slipped through the cracks while he was still in office. It was a letter. A letter from your mother that cataloged the CIA’s still operational Extraordinary Rendition Program. There was a black site being run right under our noses, right here in Virginia. If this went public, I could have been impeached, never mind running for reelection. A torture site on American soil? The Democrats would ride me out of office in less than a week.”

  “Why didn’t you confront LeHigh about it?”

  “In the letter, your mom said there was more than one. I knew that if I blew the whistle on him, the second site would never be found.”

  I nod.

  “So when we found out that your mother was this very woman, well, we had to act. It didn’t come together overnight. It took months of planning. I had to bring in people from a number of different agencies, Homeland Security, CIA…”

  “Ingrid,” I say.

  I think back to the meeting the President had with Ingrid. The meeting she lied to me about. The meeting the President lied to me about.

  “We planted a body,” he says, side-stepping Ingrid. “A woman who met your mother’s overall description who died of a brain aneurism a couple days earlier. Red here had the unfortunate task of putting a bullet in the back of the woman’s head.”

  I look at Red. He balks. Looks away. Not proud of what he’d done.

  I can’t blame him.

  “Then he threw her in the Potomac. Then we just let things play out. I had my guy at Homeland Security flag your mother a Red Four, take over the case, and make a false match to your mother’s fingerprints. Of course, AST got wind of the match and they sent you an email.”

  “And from there, I became your little puppet.”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “Whose idea was it to use Amazon?”

  The President cocks his head at Red.

  “It seemed about as innocuous a way to pass information and just cryptic enough to seem reasonable.”

  “Men in Black?”

  The President smiles. “My idea.”

  I want to slug him.

  “And then, let me guess, you call in Ingrid. You need somebody close to me to give me a couple nudges in the right direction.”

  I think back to the text Ingrid sent: DONT WATCH MEN IN BLACK 2, IT GOT TERRIBLE REVIEWS.

  Had she not sent that text, I never would have thought to check the reviews on Amazon. Never in a million years.

  “And your man at Homeland Security. How did you know Ingrid would call him?”

  “That was our litmus test to see if our little charade would work. When Ingrid called her contact at Homeland and he told her about the Red Four flag, that’s when we knew the information leaked to the right people. Then I met with Ingrid the next morning and we fed her everything she needed to know.”

  “A key to the city?” I ask.

  “It was all I could think of.”

  And of course, after he told me why he met with Ingrid, he called her and made sure their stories aligned. And then she’d lied to me again.

  I wonder if the President can see the steam rising from my scalp.

  “How did you know I would follow your cookie crumbs?”

  “I didn’t. But you did.”

  “How did you know I was going to make the connection between this movie rocks and Global Geologist Unlimited?”

  “Your correspondence with Advanced Surveillance. In your initial email you mention GGU frequently.” He adds, “This isn’t something we put together overnight.”

  “Tell me about Ingrid.”

  “She didn’t want to be involved. But I asked her to do it for her country.”

  This doesn’t quench the betrayal that has burned in my chest for going on a week.

  “She followed LeHigh for over a week.”

  I’d figured that out already. The moment LeHigh said that they called him the Pope, it hit me.

  “What about the two guys who bugged my house?”

  “Those were LeHigh’s guys.”

  “And the meeting with LeHigh in the car?”

  “Sorry about that. I was playing my part. Just like you played yours.”

  “You didn’t get waterboarded.”

  “Again, I’m sorry it came to that,” he says, which appears genuine. He adds, “And by the way, I know damn well what a Red Four is.”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that.”

  He smirks.

  I ask, “When did you guys set up the video cameras?”

  “Six weeks ago.” He nods at Red.

  “You did a nice job making it look like no one had been there for years.”

  Red says, “Yeah, I spent about three hours arranging the leaves just so.”

  “A true artist.”

  He laughs. He’s not the one I’m pissed at.

  “How did you know the Director would show up?” I ask Sullivan.

  “They didn’t just bug your house.”

  “I didn’t have my phone on me.”

  He shakes his head.

  I point at myself.

  “Me? They bugged me?”

  “Check the bottom of your foot,” says Red.

  I sit down on the chair. I pull off my sock and lift up my foot. On the arch is a small translucent circle the size of a pencil eraser.

  “This is a tracking device?”

  “Latest and greatest.”

  I peel it off and toss it in the trash.

  “So what now?”

  “Well, we can’t exactly prosecute LeHigh in open court. I don’t want the public to know that for the past seven years we’ve been torturing enemy combatants on American soil.”

  “So, what, he just gets to go free?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Vatican.”

  “Let me guess, there was a cave-in.”

  He nods.

  “And LeHigh was there?”

  Again he nods.

  “What about all the prisoners?”

  “We couldn’t risk them talking.”

  “So you killed them?”

  “To everyone else they were already dead.”

  “You are no better than LeHigh.”

  “Say what you want about LeHigh, but the man got results. He saved us from at least two separate attacks while I was in office, and those black sites were probably the reason. But in this new era of diplomacy, there are lines that can’t be crossed. If the public found out about the black sites, the CIA would have been condemned, possibly shut down, and we need them. They are the front lines in our war on terror.”

  “And you would never be reelected.”

  “There is that too,” he says with his prize winning smile.

  “And Ingrid?”

  “Just so you know, she refused to help, even when I asked her to do it for her country. She said she wouldn’t lie to the man she loved.”

  The breath is pulled out of me.

  Loved?

  “The only reason she did it is because I told her that if she did, I would give you this.”

  The President pulls a red folder from the back of his pants and hands it to me.

  “This is your mother’s file.”

  I stare at the folder in my hand.

  “Before you open that, I have to warn you there are things in that file that you can’t unsee.”

  He and Red open the door and leave.

  I stare at the folder.

  I think back to what the Director said, to what I’d been thinking about nonstop for the last week. How do you think you turned out like you did? Why you are only awake for an hour a day? You don’t really think it’s some medical disorder, do you? No, it’s classical conditioning. You were her first test subject.”

  And not only that.

  If the woman they pulled from the Potomac wasn’t my mother.

  Then she is still alive.

  GRAY MATTER

  Chapter 1

&nb
sp;

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