“I did. I received the oddest message last night around nine thirty,” said Berg. “Thirty minutes later, I was headed to Annapolis. I assume you received a similar message?”

“Odd doesn’t even begin to describe having your dead mother send you on a treasure hunt,” said Devin. “How did she convince you to drive all night to be here?”

“She told me—well, her voice told me—that if I showed up at Cantler’s at one in the afternoon, you would explain everything,” said Berg. “She didn’t specify what everything meant.”

Devin suddenly felt guarded about the file and the phone in his backpack. He’d never met Karl Berg before his mother’s wake. For all he knew, Berg could be connected to the people who had tried to follow him this morning. But that would mean he’d somehow managed to track Devin to the marina, arrive unobserved, and preemptively grab a table in the hopes of Devin stopping for lunch. No. Berg was brought here by his mother for a reason.

“By everything, I think she meant her conspiracy theory,” said Devin. “And its connection to her death.”

“I’m all ears,” said Berg.

“I don’t know any more than I did when we last spoke,” said Devin, testing the waters.

Berg pushed his glasses back and squinted. “Seriously? She just put us together in a crab shack to see what might happen? Helen had to have told you something.”

“I think she intended for us to take a trip together,” said Devin. “She apparently has a Bat Cave. A secret apartment or something. My guess is it contains whatever research she’d conducted over the years.”

“And you know how to find it?” said Berg.

“I can access the location,” said Devin, leaving out the part about the file for now.

“I don’t know what to say, Devin. Your mom became obsessed with her idea,” said Berg. “I guess it really doesn’t surprise me to hear that she had acquired a safe house to work on this. She would have been paranoid about secrecy, convinced they were following her so they could finally erase the evidence and eliminate her.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Berg, dismissively. “It’s all a fantasy. She probably conducted long SDRs prior to arriving at her secret lair, re-creating the most intense parts of the work she’d done for the agency—years ago. Let me guess: She led you on some kind of decode-the-next-step journey to find the apartment?”

“It doesn’t matter how I ended up here,” said Devin.

“She did, didn’t she?”

“For good reason. I removed two GPS trackers from my car this morning before starting the first SDR.”

“Interesting,” said Berg, finally sounding genuinely intrigued.

“I also took pictures of the team that placed the trackers.”

“You made the surveillance team that quickly?” asked Berg. “Were they wearing black trench coats and pointing telephoto cameras at you?”