What had he allowed himself to be pulled into? How culpable was he? Would he be able to prove he didn’t know what they had planned? Would that matter? He had hacked a public library . . . how would a creative district attorney spin breaking into a government building? Not to mention the cash payments he’d received. All of a sudden that seemed pretty damning too.

He considered his options. Call the police now. Probably what most people would do, but he wasn’t quite ready to go back to jail. He could call Lombard. Tell the vice president what his old political ally and chief of security were up to. Yeah, Gibson thought to himself, Lombard will shield me while he rains down vengeance on everyone else involved.

When Jenn and Hendricks were gone, Gibson waited ten minutes and walked up the road to the house. The gravel driveway under his feet sounded like a rock band warming up for a show. The next house was a football field away, but that did little to settle his nerves.

The front door was locked, as was the back. He tried all the windows, but they were all firmly latched too. Gibson frowned. He went back around to the front and used his car keys to cut a slit in the plastic sheeting covering the broken window. He reached through and unlatched the frame and slid it open.

The house was a sty. At first he thought Jenn and Hendricks had trashed the place, but this was the work of years, not hours. He didn’t want to risk turning on the lights, but he had a flashlight app on his phone that he used to survey an ocean of trash, broken furniture, and empty cardboard boxes. A stack of at least forty umbrellas. A shattered accordion. An unmounted deer’s head stared blankly up at the ceiling.

The kitchen was diseased; there was no other word for it. The smell. Jesus, someone lived here. Gibson couldn’t even bring himself to cross the threshold to the kitchen and decided he’d save it for last. The only clean area was a spare bedroom that had been converted into a gym. There was a bench press, rusty barbells, and a chin-up bar. Several crooked full-length mirrors hung side by side to create a vanity wall. Against another wall stood stacks and stacks of fitness magazines: Muscle & Fitness, Muscular Development, Natural Muscle, Planet Muscle . . .

Gibson hunted for anything personal, something with a name that would confirm what he already knew in the pit of his stomach. He thought maybe the fitness magazines, but they had all been bought off a newsstand. A photograph would do, but nothing hung on the walls, and it didn’t feel like a framed-picture kind of home. There was nothing helpful in the bedroom. Gibson waded back to the front door and found a mountain of unopened mail.