When I woke up, I was at a hospital in Lansing. I’d awoken in hospitals plenty of times in my life — concussions, stitches, a dislocated shoulder, a ruptured ear drum — yet I couldn’t help from screaming.

I thought I was still in the White Room.

The last thing I remembered before waking up was my mom asking me about the flash drive, then a man in blue scrubs holding a syringe filled with pink liquid. I expected that I was headed for another twenty-three day nightmare, that I was headed for another round of torture — sorry, enhanced interrogation — until I cracked and told them what they wanted to know.

Apparently, my mother believed me, or maybe she felt a touch of mercy for her son, perhaps a twinge of regret at having used her own flesh and blood to experiment on when he was just an infant. Maybe having caused his condition, his one-hour-a-day existence, she might finally show some compassion.

More likely, she knew that if she let me go, then I would start searching for this flash drive and lead her directly to it.

So, she let me go.

Dumped me in some guy’s tomato garden.

Luckily, Ingrid, my father, and Lassie were in the hospital room when I awoke, but even then, it had taken ten minutes to get my heart rate below 180.

The next days passed in a blur.

After it came out what happened to me, that I was abducted by one of the CIA’s most illustrious torture specialists, who also was one of the most wanted fugitives in the world, everyone wanted to speak with me.

Ingrid interceded on my behalf, and I spent three hours — three days — in front of a video camera being questioned by her, the new Director of the CIA, and Red, the head of the President’s Secret Service detail.

The new Director of the CIA was especially interested in what my mom had referred to as the CIA’s Sleep Control Program.

If it existed, he’d never heard of it, nor had any of his colleagues.

I detailed the White Room, but there wasn’t much to go on. Because I was found in Michigan, that’s where the CIA was focusing its search, though the White Room could have existed anywhere within a four-hour flight time of Michigan, an area of roughly two thousand square miles.

Once the video cameras were off and the Director of the CIA had left, I confided to Ingrid and Red that my mother wasn’t just searching for a flash drive; she was searching for a flash drive given to me by the President of the United States. Red, who had known Conner Sullivan since college, confirmed the President hadn’t given me any flash drive. And in a short conversation with Sullivan himself, he said the same.