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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

“My mother has returned to the states by now and she calls Ewen to see if he knows anything about ‘Project Sandman,’ but he hasn’t heard anything. She waits for the chips to fall, waits for President Sullivan to stumble on this flash drive and to have her arrested, but nothing happens. She continues her work, then according to the then Director of the CIA, she is interrogating — torturing — a suspect in 2007 when she freaks out. She is never heard from again.

“Conner Sullivan is elected President of the United States in 2012. By now, my mom is sick of being on the run. She wants to come clean, but she has Jennifer’s murder hanging over her head. She gets wind somehow that Sullivan and I are buddy-buddy, that he’s been to my house a couple times. The only reason my mother can imagine the President befriending her son is to share with him what is on the flash drive. She hears from someone — I don’t know who fits here — that President Sullivan found the flash drive and gave it to me. Maybe because it was my mom, Sullivan thinks I should be the one to decide her fate.

“My mother somehow learns that Ingrid and I are scheduled to take a trip to Alaska. It would be easy to find out for someone with her skills, and all she had to do was put a flag on my credit card. She realizes it is the perfect chance to interrogate me. We get on the plane, they knock out Ingrid and Lassie, and toss them in the car. They fly me to Michigan or wherever the Sleep Control Program has been moved to and proceed to give me the worst fucking twenty-three day nightmare in the history of the known universe.” I take a deep breath. “I can’t tell her where the flash drive is because I don’t have the flash drive, and she sends a team of goons to our condo to rip it apart.”

Meow.

I look down at Lassie.

“Yes, and to steal Lassie’s jingle balls.”

I continue, “I’m found the next morning in some dude’s tomato garden and I’m debriefed. The President finds out I’m looking for a flash drive he gave me. He didn’t give me anything, he never found any flash drive in his father’s possessions, but he does remember something, maybe something his father told him about a murder of a young woman in 1985. Maybe his father told him that my mother was the one who killed this girl. It’s the only thing he can possibly imagine that connects the three of us. So Sullivan calls the Virginia Police Commissioner to get Ingrid’s captain to have her look into Jennifer Nubers’s murder. He knows if she reinvestigates it and finds a link to my mother, I will be the first to know.”

Everyone stares at me.