He didn’t think he’d given himself away but was immediately aware when the pictures stopped. A silence so thick dropped over the house that it pulsed in his ears. He held his breath, senses straining. It was like two submarines playing cat and mouse in the murky depths—each listening for the other, deathly afraid to give away its position.

Minutes passed. Gibson heard those ghostlike footsteps retreat toward the front of the house. The door opened and then closed quietly. Then nothing.

He exhaled but didn’t move. He waited there in the closet for what seemed a lifetime. Afraid that whoever it was might double back or, worse, that they hadn’t left at all and were trying to bluff him out of the closet. He listened until his temples throbbed, but the house was dead.

Gibson slipped out of the closet. For half a second, he panicked as the deer’s head played games with the shadows and took the shape of a man. He let out a little cry and shut his mouth in embarrassment.

Pull yourself together, boy.

He sank down onto a couch and rubbed his calves, cramped from squatting in the closet. He switched on his flashlight app and looked around. The couch was clearly where Kirby Tate spent most of his time. Gibson was sitting in the only bare patch, but otherwise it was stacked with dirty dishes, empty junk-food containers, and pornographic magazines. Hundreds of them. He hadn’t even known they still made dirty magazines.

He chuckled silently to himself but stopped as a thought occurred to him. You know who would know? A guy with no Internet would know. There was no satellite dish in the yard. No satellite dish meant no TV and, more importantly, no access to the Internet.

Was he supposed to believe that the person responsible for hacking ACG had no Internet? He searched the house again. This time looking for anything that he would expect to find in the home of someone who was computer savvy. He found nothing. No tools. No books. No workspace. No storage media. Nothing but trash, porn, and gym equipment. If Kirby Tate was a hacker, then he was the only one Gibson had ever come across who could live without twenty-four-hour access to high-speed Internet.

You spent enough time working with computers, and the Internet became a second home. A refuge. A place to share ideas, trade snippets of code, and meet people who shared your interest in the extralegal applications of programming. Could such a person live without the Internet? He supposed it was possible. Yes, a voice countered, but was it probable? He was more certain than ever that whatever Jenn and Hendricks were planning at Grafton Storage, they had the wrong guy for it. Whatever was on Kirby Tate’s laptop, it couldn’t have gotten there without someone’s help.

So who was helping him? Did Tate have a partner?