The attack came back to him. Something about his father. His heart sank, and he felt very foolish and very alone. The rope around his neck made it hard to look around, but he took the biggest breath he could muster and took stock of his surroundings.

He was in a basement. The half windows were set high up on the pale-yellow walls. It was night out. Watercolors of birds hung along the walls: hummingbirds, woodpeckers, and cardinals. An easel was set up in the corner. Some kind of painter’s studio? A set of carpeted stairs led up, but up to where?

A man stepped into view. Gibson shuddered. In his confusion, he thought the man had followed him up from his unconscious. One of those benthic predators that lurks in the black depths of the ocean. But it was only a man. At least on the surface. Average height. Slight build. A pale, unremarkable face apart from a recently broken nose that was swollen and red. He was the sort of man who might check you into a hotel or sit beside you in a doctor’s waiting room. At least that’s what the man wanted you to see. But at the edges of the man, the camouflage began to fray.

The eyes were what gave him away. The eyes were the jaundiced yellow of a diurnal owl and motionless like the dead surface of the moon. Sunk deep in their sockets, they fixed on Gibson, seeming to see everything and nothing. He’d met some scary men in jail and even scarier men in the Marines, but this man, if he was a man at all, scared him more than any of those. This man was death come for him.

But perhaps more unsettling still were his clothes. The man was dressed like him. Not sort of like him. Not similar colors and styles, but the exact same shirt, jeans, and shoes. They looked like a couple of twins who shopped together. That meant the man had been in the clothing store with him, had followed behind him, had seen him shopping, and had picked out the same outfit. It told Gibson that his abduction had been exactingly planned. Whatever lay ahead, it was nothing good, and whatever he might think to try, this man would have already anticipated it.

“Pay attention now. Are you paying attention? We don’t have much time,” the man said in a mild and polite tone. It was the voice of a surgeon dumbing down a complex procedure for an irritating patient. They regarded each other silently, and then, without ceremony or warning, the man kicked the stool from under Gibson’s feet. It made a keening whine across the wood floor and clattered into a far wall.