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Speeding her Jeep down I-87, her mind tried to sort through the only part of her childhood she had memory of: after the car crash, after the coma, starting twelve years ago. But nothing. There was not even a wisp of memory that might lead her to believe she had met the stranger in her past. So if she did not know him from the past she could remember, did she know him from the past she couldn’t remember?
    She eased her foot off the gas pedal as she approached her parents’ house. The colonial-style house, her home, emerged as she rounded the final curve of the road toward the gate. Her parents’ house could actually be considered a small compound. It was surrounded by a twelve-foot tall, imposing, black iron fence, around which Mom had insisted on planting elm trees, even when their head of security strongly opposed. There was too great an opportunity for a perpetrator to hide between dense foliage. Next to the gate, there was the two-bedroom cottage, housing security specialists hired by her father. They guarded the grounds twenty-four-seven. She had been inside the cottage many times when she was younger and had always been fascinated by the top-notch surveillance and communication equipment. Until she started working for the Secret Service, she hadn’t truly appreciated the sophistication and seriousness of the security measures her father had arranged for just the three of them. Many times she had asked her parents why they needed such thorough security. All her parents had said was that her father had been a high-level diplomat before he had gone into private practice with the law firm in the city. It was standard protocol to provide former high-ranking diplomats with that kind of security even after they left the diplomatic corp.
    After Skyla left for college, the security detail at her home was relaxed. Now, instead of two teams of five specialists guarding the house around the clock, there was only one team. She had tried to use her clearance from the Secret Service and TSCAA to find out what sort of diplomatic missions her father had done in the past, but with no success. Even with her clearance level, just three notches below the Joint Chief of Staff, she couldn’t get any details of her father’s past diplomatic record except the general description and ranking, which matched what her parents had told her. Well, it was neither here nor there. Now she just wanted to be with Mom and Dad and regroup from the unsettling feeling of dread she hadn’t been able to shake off since inside the vault.
    Passing the security guards, she waved at a decent-looking young man with a crew cut. He looked like he had just left the Army. The security specialists guarding the house changed every three months. The arrangement was almost like the presidential protection details.
    After another quarter-mile of winding up the driveway, Skyla killed the engine and stepped out of her Jeep. Her parents were already waiting for her by the front doorstep. She looked up at her dad and felt a warm tug at her heart. For a man in his seventies, her father was damn attractive and still in excellent physical shape, tall and lean with thick silver-gray hair. He had been a swimmer since high school, and he still kept up his swimming routine. Her mom, in contrast, was petite in size but had a full, voluptuous figure that would have made any Playboy Bunny envious. Her mom was also a good twenty years younger than her father. Skyla was told that on one of her father’s diplomatic missions in the Balkan states during the Cold War, he had fallen in love with her mother, the daughter of a military general. Their elopement had almost caused an international incident between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
    Running up the steps, she gave her mom and dad tight hugs. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Daddy.”
    “Skyla.” Her mother hugged her back with strength and warmth, the way she used to hug and hold Skyla whenever Skyla screamed from her faceless