“Okay, but that doesn’t explain the connection to me.”

Ewen helps me along. “Six months ago, I reached out to Elena to let her know I was diagnosed with stage four cancer.”

“Which of course, you weren’t.”

“Nope, fit as a fiddle,” he says with a smile.

“I also told her that I had a conversation with the President recently and I asked him about the flash drive. How he said it was impossible to keep anything private as the most powerful man in the known world and that he’d given the flash drive to someone — someone he felt deserved it more than he did.”

“Me,” I scoff.

“Right.”

“Why go through all this trouble?”

He takes a deep breath. “Your mom figured I’d be dead in six months and my copy of her confession would die with me. That left you with the only remaining copy. If she could get that, there would be no stopping her from making a deal with the CIA, the Feds, and all the other agencies, in trade for all the destroyed MK-Ultra files. Trust me, the CIA would jump at the chance to get their hands on these files, and your mother would be granted absolute impunity.”

“So she kidnaps me. Tortures me. Uses Compound-23 on me in hopes I will break.”

“But you don’t know anything about a flash drive because President Sullivan never gave you one.”

“No shit,” I say, my face flushing, realizing I am a pawn in this guy’s sick game.

“I knew when she let you go, that you would come to me for answers. Then you came to see me, and I told you just enough that hopefully you would make the connection.”

“But I never would have made the connection unless I started digging into Jennifer Nubers’ mur—”

He smiles. “One last favor for a dying man.”

“What did you tell the President? How did you get him to call the Virginia Police Commissioner? How did you get the case assigned to Ingrid?”

“Easy. I’ve known Conner for thirty years. He calls me Uncle Sidney. I told him there was an old case in DC, how the mother was an old friend of mine, and how she reached out to me and asked if I could pull some strings and have someone reinvestigate her daughter’s murder. I told him that it couldn’t be a detective from DC. Then I name-dropped Ingrid who, I knew from various sources, you were living with.”

“So you put this whole thing in motion. Why?”

“I have dedicated my entire life to one thing.”

It takes me a moment, then I say, “Behavior modification.”

“Precisely.”

I glare at him.

“I needed you to come here,” he says. “I needed you to think you would be coming to meet your mother.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew then you would come alone.”

His words are a cold breeze down my spine.