He opened the door and saw the basement light was on. The acrid smell of shit hit him. He called for his father, but the basement didn’t answer. Down the steps he went. Slowly. Knowing something was wrong. Four steps from the bottom, he ducked his head and peered into the basement. He saw his father’s bare feet dangling in the air, pointing down at the cement floor as if he were flying away.

Another step.

It didn’t look like him. The rope had pulled his father’s features taut and turned them black. Gibson whispered his father’s name and sat heavily on the bottom step. He hadn’t cried until the police arrived and told him that he needed to come with them.

Why did you do it, Duke? You were innocent. What drove you down into the basement?

They pulled into Somerset in the late afternoon. An hour east of Pittsburgh, Somerset was a small blue-collar community of fewer than seven thousand residents. The town’s historical claim to fame, such as it was, was as a rebel hotbed during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. More recently, it had become connected to 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in nearby Shanksville. But it was Somerset’s proximity to the Breezewood gas station—a mere fifty miles east—that mattered now.

Hendricks circled the copper-domed courthouse in the center of town and pulled over to wait for Jenn, who was ten minutes behind them. Hendricks might not be the most pleasant of traveling companions, but he was one hell of a driver. They’d hit traffic at the Maryland Line, and Gibson had pulled up traffic on his phone to look for a way around.

“Put it away,” Hendricks had growled, steering them onto a wide-open Route 68 without so much as glancing at a map. The man was a human GPS.

End to end, it had been the smoothest ride Gibson could remember. Everyone believed himself to be a good driver, but Hendricks was the real deal. It was the effortless way the car flowed to a stop and accelerated so smoothly you hardly felt it. Somehow, Hendricks always had them in the lane that was moving, and it wasn’t luck; if a car tapped its brakes a quarter mile ahead, Hendricks anticipated how it would ripple back through traffic and adjusted his speed or changed lanes accordingly.

Jenn pulled up a few minutes later. Since Gibson couldn’t be certain how deep WR8TH had burrowed into Abe Consulting, he’d instituted a total electronic whiteout within ACG regarding their attempts to track their quarry—no e-mails, no texts, no Word documents. Michael Rilling was setting up a dedicated server for the operation that had no connection to ACG, but in the meantime everything went on legal pads and in handwritten memos, a weird adjustment for everyone except Hendricks, who seemed to prefer it.