“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?”