“Do you want me to come with you?” Leo asked, his father unconscious in his arms.

“Stay here,” Archie said, looking back toward the front door. “Tell them what’s happened.”

“What has happened?” Leo asked.

Leo’s bare feet were wet with the blood they had walked through. His father was dying. Archie knew he was desperate for answers. But he didn’t have time to elaborate. Archie stepped into the elevator. “Karim killed Lisa Watson,” Archie told Leo. “The dead guy in the office was shot while he was shooting me. Gretchen killed everybody else.”

An arc of blood spatter looked like a letter C on the back wall of the elevator. Jack’s throat had been cut in here. There were two floor buttons inside the elevator. The top one had a 1 on it and the bottom one had a B on it. Archie pressed the B button.

Leo was rocking his father in his lap. But as the elevator doors started to close, he looked up. “Archie,” he said. “Keys!” He fumbled in his father’s pocket and managed to toss a set of keys to Archie just as the steel doors closed. Archie caught the keys and put them in his jacket pocket.

The elevator began to descend, and the sensation made Archie’s head swim.

“Going down,” said a woman’s crisp automated voice.

A red digital readout above the elevator doors showed a number 1 with a downward-facing arrow on either side of it. Archie kept his eyes on the readout. He waited for it to change, but the 1 stayed up despite the fact that he could feel the elevator moving. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t just moving between floors—the elevator had to pass through the house’s actual basement and then through dirt and shale to the subbasement. Any minute now, he told himself. Finally the digital readout disassembled and re-formed as the letter B. The elevator bounced slightly as it settled at the bottom of the shaft. Archie took a breath, stepped to the corner of the elevator just inside the doors, and raised his weapon.

“Lower level,” the woman’s voice announced pleasantly.

The doors opened.

Archie blocked the doors open with his foot and did a quick scan outside the elevator with his weapon. There was no sign of movement. He pivoted out of the elevator and backed against the wall, gun raised.

This was nothing like the tunnels Gretchen had led him through. It looked like an industrial-grade warehouse or some kind of secret government facility. The ceilings were low, but the room seemed to go on and on in every direction. Pallets were stacked almost to the ceiling in places, creating the illusion of walls. Panels of fluorescent lights radiated overhead along with what looked to be a state-of-the-art sprinkler system.