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  67. 3:46 a.m.

Is this where the White Room is?

Is this where I was kept?

No.

It can’t be.

Then why was the name “Overseas Private Investment Corporation” running through my head on a loop?

Had I heard the name before? Maybe even subconsciously?

It had happened before. I would hear something Ingrid said to me during the night, and I would remember it the next day. Or in the case of my fight with Lassie, I attacked him in my dream, and he slashed me with his claws, and it became part of my dream.

My dream.

My nightmare.

It hits me.

“Holyyyyyyyyyyyyy shittttt.”

I wondered how I came up with his name. How had my subconscious decided to call him a name I never heard before?

Only in my dream I spelled it differently.

Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

OPIC.

The Eskimo boy from my dream.

Opik.

:16

I must have heard my mother or one of the others who kidnapped me mention the building. Of course they wouldn’t call it the Overseas Private Investment Corporation; no one would ever call it that. They would call it OPIC.

“Where are we taking him?”

“OPIC.”

It could have been as simple as that; the word entering my subconscious. Then when the little Eskimo boy popped up in my synthetic nightmare, that’s what I named him.

It didn’t matter how it happened. All that mattered is that it did.

The White Room is still in downtown Washington, DC.

I can only imagine my mom when she realized how fitting it was. How in Jennifer Nubers’ journal, she named their affair “S and Man.” Sure, the OPIC building was halfway down Manchester, closer to T Street than S Street, but it was too fitting.

Add in the fact my mother’s favorite song was “Enter Sandman,” plus the folklore tale, and with the CIA’s affinity for the word “project,” of course she would name it Project Sandman.

I look at the clock.

3:41 a.m.

I jump out of the chair and snag two premade sandwiches out of the fridge and throw them in a cooler with an ice pack. They won’t stay cold for twenty-four hours, but they should still be edible when I wake up. I add a couple bottled waters, then grab my dad’s car keys off the wall.

I’m a half-step from the garage when I turn around. I rip a piece of paper from my father’s legal pad and scribble a quick note.

A minute later, I have manually pushed up the garage door. I back the car out, pull down the garage door, and drive out of the cul-de-sac.