“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.