“That’s why you have to find Ellie,” Bear whispered.
Accustomed as he was to a bare mattress, the sheets hung around him like a straitjacket. He kicked them off, twisting this way and that, unable to get comfortable. He switched off the bedside lamp. The sudden darkness, viscous and bitter, rose up, enveloping him like a black ocean. It filled his lungs, choking him. Gibson flailed wildly. Knocked the lamp off the table. He sprawled out of bed after it, clawing at the floor until his hand closed on the lamp. He turned it on and clutched it to him, shaking and hyperventilating. In time, he got up and switched on every light in the room, each one restoring a part of his calm. He went and splashed water on his face. When he came back to the bedroom, his father was sitting on the bed. Duke did not look pleased.
“Look what they’ve done to you.”
Gibson looked away.
“You really can’t think of anything worth fighting for?” Duke asked. “You’re really going to lie down for them? That’s what he wants, you know.”
“Who?”
“The man who put you in that cell. Does he get a pass? What about our plans? Or was that just all talk?”
“I have to find Ellie. Anyway, he’s CIA.”
“And you’re a decorated Marine who helped get bin Laden. Will you just be a footnote in his career? A name he can’t quite remember after you crawl off to die. That sit well with you?”
“No,” Gibson admitted.
“Then make him remember you.”
When Duke had gone, Gibson lay on the floor beside the bed. It felt more comfortable to him than a mattress. Bear came and flopped down on the bed. She peered over the side at him.
“Ellie needs you.”
“You don’t know that,” Gibson said.
“I do. She does. You can’t let anything stop you. You have to find her. You found me. Remember?”
“Bear, I found you too late.”
Bear smiled down at him. “Then hurry.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gibson woke to an empty house. Not even seven a.m., but Toby and Sana had long since left for the diner. Gibson had once asked Sana how she could work those hours. She told him it wasn’t work if you loved it. He’d known exactly what she’d meant.
His body made a tired plea for more sleep, but Gibson ignored it and popped right up from the floor. He could rest after he found Ellie.
He took another shower for the simple pleasure of hot water. He dressed in the same clothes as the night before. Laundry wasn’t at the top of his list this morning. Clean clothes right out of the dryer would be luxurious, but he needed to earn it.
He felt surprisingly normal; maybe a shower and a good meal with a friend had been all it took to reset. He hadn’t seen Duke or Bear yet this morning, and he took that as an encouraging sign that he was putting his ordeal behind him. Full of optimism, he went downstairs, where he found Duke reading the newspaper. So maybe he wasn’t ready for a clean bill of health quite yet. Over the newspaper, his father watched Gibson plug in his laptop.
“I’m not going after Washburn,” Gibson said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do you understand why?”
“Hey, it’s your life, kid.”
Gibson hadn’t expected his father to give up so easily.
“It’s a little humbling actually,” Duke said.
Here it came. “What is?”
“I was chief of staff for a US senator. I could talk a socialist into lowering taxes on the wealthy and an evangelical into voting against school prayer. Now I can’t even out-argue a child. I must be slipping in my old age.”
“You wouldn’t do the same if it was me?” Gibson asked.
“Like I said, it’s your life. I’m just a dead man who the world still thinks was a suicidal loser. What do I know?”
Gibson decided not to bite. He’d been subjected to this guilt trip for the last eighteen months. Instead, he pointed to the newspaper spread out on the table. “Mind if I . . .”
“Oh, by all means, don’t let me get in your way.” Duke took his newspaper into another room.
To Gibson’s relief, his laptop booted right up despite eighteen months on a shelf. He hacked a neighbor’s Wi-Fi and logged into his e-mail, looking for anything from Nicole. He found plenty, but it all predated the fire. Before the fire, a steady stream of correspondence flowed between them. Then nothing. Total radio silence. It was too depressing to contemplate, so out of morbid curiosity, he Googled himself.
In his absence, theories about Gibson’s involvement with the death of Vice President Benjamin Lombard had proliferated. AmericanJudas.com—a popular conspiracy website that had been the first to post evidence placing Gibson in Atlanta—continued to lead the charge. It painted Gibson, a disaffected former Marine, as a high-tech Lee Harvey Oswald who’d had an irrational obsession with Benjamin Lombard for more than a decade. But to hear American Judas tell it, Gibson was only a hapless pawn—the triggerman—in a tangled conspiracy to alter a presidential election.
It was so wildly off the mark that Gibson could only shake his head. The truth was both much simpler and far worse. There was no mention of Niobe, West Virginia, or Charles Merrick, but the arson and subsequent disappearance of Nicole and Ellie Vaughn had been exhaustively detailed. Further proof that something nefarious had happened in Atlanta.
A raft of sightings in the last year placed Gibson everywhere from Las Vegas playing high-stakes Pai Gow to eating Oreos on a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia. Great, he thought, they’d turned him into Bigfoot. God, he hoped Ellie didn’t see this garbage until she was old enough to understand it. Gibson closed the browser tab; it was time to get to work.
Computers had been a sanctuary for Gibson ever since he’d been a boy. They’d always made sense to him on an intuitive level, and hacking had originally been an abstract intellectual exercise—breaking into networks merely a puzzle to solve. Disappearing into work that he could control while his life descended into chaos had kept him sane. He imagined it was like that for anyone who was good at something.