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.”