Lassie and I left the vet without being seen by the doctor. Back on the scooter, I’d headed home, zoomed past my condo, taken a hard right, and then merged onto the northbound freeway. Within five minutes, a black car caught up with us. Throwing all pretense to the wind, it stayed close on my tail as I exited ten miles later, then weaved through the neighborhood tentacles before pulling up to the house where I spent the better part of twenty-seven years.

“The guys in the car are CIA. They are following me. And I’m here because they bugged my house.”

His eyebrows rise.

“They what?”

I tell him.

“Why would they do that?”

I tell him about the clues, the meeting with the President and Director LeHigh. “He killed her, Dad. He so much as admitted it.”

“Why?”

“Because mom knew of a secret black site here in the States.”

“They were torturing terrorists here?”

“Yep. Can you imagine what would happen if that ever leaked?”

“They would probably shut down the CIA for good.”

“Exactly. Which is why they couldn’t allow that information to get out. And why mom was found with a bullet hole in the back of her head.”

This is too much for my dad, and he takes a seat on the couch in his living room.

I look down at my cell phone.

3:44 a.m.

I have sixteen minutes.

I have a lot to accomplish in sixteen minutes.

“You still have that GPS?”

My father had a brief stint with an activity called geocaching. People would hide things all over the US, then post their coordinates on a national website, then people would try to track these things down and win whatever prize was inside or simply add a notch to their geocaching belt.

My father hunted down a couple of these caches, even getting a five-dollar bill out of one of them. But my dad was the ultimate hobby slut, and within a couple months he moved on to his newest phase, air-controlled helicopters or water-coloring or whatever.

“I think so. Somewhere in the basement. Why? You’re not thinking about going to this place, are you?”

“It’s here in Virginia.”

“Langley?”

“No, about thirty miles west of CIA headquarters. Out in the boonies.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“No, you’re gonna stay right here.”

I tell him my plan.

I’m guessing his reaction wouldn’t have been much different if I told him I wanted to go base jumping. He pushes his glasses up his nose and asks, “Are you sure about this?”

I nod.

“Okay, then,” he says. “Let’s go get that GPS.”

I follow him downstairs.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the tidy first and second floors of my father’s 2,200-square-foot suburban home, my father is a hoarder.

Mostly it’s where his hobbies go to die.