Chapter 1

Ring... Ring... Ring... “Hello?”

“Hi Mom! How’s it going?”

“Aha! My long-lost daughter returns. It’s been a full week! You never called, you never wrote, you never e-mailed. Three weeks away at college, and already you’re starting to forget your poor mother?”

“Ha! I love you too, Mom. It has been seven days since I called you last Friday, hasn’t it? This week has really flown by.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Everything is great! The Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins is everything I dreamed it would be, and last Friday I met a really wonderful boy at a mixer, and we’ve been spending quite a bit of time together. I’ve become very good friends with my roommate Susan and my other suitemates at Wolman, and I’ve even gotten used to the traffic on St. Paul and North Charles. I love my classes! The premed program has really turned into quite a challenge, and I love it. No one is teasing me anymore about studying too hard or calling me nicknames like The Brain. I just feel surrounded by really smart people, people with the same thirst for knowledge that I have. I feel like I’ve found a home.”

“Rebecca, are you trying to torture me? Tell me more about this boy you’re spending all this time with.”

“Oh. Well, we met just a week ago. He’s majoring in Applied Math, taking a lot of advanced classes. He spends a lot of time in Kreiger, that’s in the center of the campus by the upper quad. He’s a wonderfully gentle and talented person, super smart. He plays the guitar. We’ve talked a bit about teaming up with my violin and jamming together. He has a mixed East European ancestry, just like me. Let’s see, what else? Oh, he’s a fabulous chef, international hotel quality, no fooling. You should taste what he can do with a fresh salmon or chicken, something to die for. And he’s an alchemist with duck liver, turns it into pure gold. He’s been cooking me dinners in his apartment for most of this week. I’m up here now waiting for him. He’s out getting groceries.”

“What? You’re alone in his apartment? How did you get in?”

“Oh, he gave me a copy of his key a few days ago.”

“What!? Rebecca, this does not sound good. Is he an older man? And you haven’t even told me his name!”

“He and I are almost exactly the same age; we both turned 18 two months ago. His name is Robert.”

“Robert? Is he Jewish?”

“Well, no. Christian. But he does worship, just like me. We’ve talked about our faiths with each other. We’re actually very close to each other in spiritual beliefs...”

“Rebecca, my daughter... Wouldn’t you be better off waiting to meet some nice Jewish boy, someone like Seth?”

“Oh, Mom ... Seth was never interested in me. He was just looking for a female body to get sexy with while he was between girlfriends. My senior prom night was a disaster. I’ve never felt so embarrassed...”

“Rebecca, what I’m trying to say is that you have almost no experience with dating, and within a week of meeting some strange man, you’re living in his apartment! If this man is only 18, how come he’s not living on campus? Are his parents rich?”

“Mother, I am not living in his apartment! And Robert doesn’t have any parents. Both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was an infant.”

“Oh, I am sorry. But then I mean his adopted parents.”

“He was never adopted, I don’t think. Or if he was, it didn’t last. He’s opened up a little bit about this with me, but we probably have a whole lot more to talk about. He was bounced around in dozens of different foster homes growing up, spent the last two years in independent living before finally aging out of the system in July.”

“Yikes, worse and worse!”

“Mom, Robert is a wonderful human being and I really, really like him. It’s too bad Dad isn’t still alive; I’m sure they would have gotten along great... I’d love for you to meet him sometime. You’ll see how nice he is.”

“So I can listen to him play rock guitar?”

“Oh mother, please stop! And I never said rock guitar, though he does have a banjo and plays a little bluegrass. He’s mostly into Spanish guitar. Yesterday when I came here, he was in the middle of Sor’s Allegro from Sonata, Opus 22, just playing it from memory. For the next five minutes, I was in heaven.”

“Oh ... Well, that does sound nice ... But Rebecca, if he has no money, how does he have an apartment?”

“No money? I just said he has no parents. He has a job with the National Security Administration, and they’re paying him very well...”

“With the NSA? Are you kidding?”

“No. I was a bit doubtful myself, though I didn’t say anything. Robert noticed my skepticism and brought up his bank account for me on the web. The NSA is paying him over $4000 a month net, and he only has to be there one day a week during the school term. He drives down to D.C. and is gone all day on Saturdays. He’s been doing this for almost two years now. He has almost $50,000 saved. I saw it myself...”

“This doesn’t sound believable. What kind of a job could a teenager do for the NSA that they would pay him that kind of money?”

“I’m very curious about it too, but he is like a tomb when I ask him about it. He just says he shouldn’t talk about it. Robert’s very careful about security, saying he doesn’t even doodle about the work outside of the green-badge areas. Outside of Saturdays, the only work he does for the NSA is thinking and doing a lot of public-domain reading. The money isn’t the only payment, either. The NSA is also paying for a car lease and complete tuition and living expenses. And as you know, Johns Hopkins isn’t cheap. He can also buy any book he wants on their tab. It’s a deal any undergrad would dream about...”

“What in the world could he be doing?”

“I’ve snooped around a bit in his apartment. He has a ton of textbooks on wildly different topics. One shelf of books is on network security, encryption, and Internet packet protocols. Another shelf is on network routing theory. Another shelf is on pattern matching techniques and neural network learning. Another shelf is on quantum theory, covering everything from quantum computing to quantum entanglement to interferometer design. And then there’s the shelf of antenna books...”

“Antennas? You mean like my TV antenna?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I thought studying this stuff would be obsolete in this digital age, but he has textbooks on analog TV single-sideband transmission, all sorts of wave-launching horn design books, book after book on various antenna capabilities ... I don’t see how all this stuff could possibly be tied together. Whatever he’s working on though, I suspect he is a wunderkind at it for the NSA to give him such a sweet deal...”

“Rebecca, all joking and Jewish mother aside, can I give you some advice?”

“Sure, Mom. I’m listening.”

“Robert sounds like a good boyfriend for you, my dear scholar child. You do have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and it sounds like you might finally have found an equal. I’d like to meet your Robert sometime. But remember you’re both very young, with your whole adult lives in front of you. Go slowly, take your time. There’s no need to rush.”

“That’s really great advice, Mom. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree. Try to relax, Mom. I know what I’m doing. And Robert is just as shy about dating as I am. We are going very slowly. We’ve been meeting at dawn to go jogging together, and we’ve had some dinners together too. Yesterday was the first time we held hands. And if he doesn’t try to kiss me goodbye tonight after he walks me back to Wolman, I think I’m going to risk taking the lead. I know he’s attracted to me; I can see the hope in his eyes when we meet. Oh, we have a date this Sunday too, to go backpacking for the afternoon. We pick up I-83 a few blocks west of the campus and head north. The place called Prettyboy Reservoir and Gunpowder Falls State Park. Robert says it’s really nice ... Ah, I see his car pulling in outside. Do you want to say hello?”

“No, I don’t want to break into your time together, not yet. Soon, though. Take care, Rebecca. I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom. Bye!”

Chapter 2

Rebecca awoke slowly, feeling dizzy and miserable. Her head was spinning, she felt freezing cold, and her stomach was heaving. She blinked in bewilderment into the bright white light around her, trying to understand where she was while resisting an urge to vomit. She tried to make sense of her environment and failed. Her memory was an absolute blank as to how she got here. Where was she? As her mind began to clear, she realized she was lying flat on her back in a large, empty room without windows, entirely naked.