“If he’s dead,” I said, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper, “then who was in that house? Who had a heart attack in his study? The medical examiner signed the certificate. I saw the body at the funeral home yesterday. I touched his hand. It was cold.”
“Silicon and wax, Mr. Mercer,” Agent Miller said without a trace of hesitation. “A hyper-realistic prosthetic matrix commissioned through an industrial supplier in Zurich, designed to mimic dermal elasticity and body temperature for precisely seventy-two hours before degrading. Your father has been running from the same syndicate for twenty years. Three days ago, they finally caught up to his digital footprint. They didn’t break into his study to kill him; they broke in to confirm whether he still possessed the master decryption drive containing every financial ledger, shell company, and alias the syndicate has used since nineteen ninety-eight.”
My hand tightened around the brass key the gravedigger had handed me. The metal felt ice-cold against my palm. “And the empty coffin?”
“The gravedigger is a retired federal marshal named Vance,” she explained, glancing toward the gate where a solitary delivery truck rattled past in the distance. “Your father hired him a decade ago with a simple directive: the moment Raymond Mercer’s name appeared on a local death certificate that wasn’t authorized by this division, Vance was to secure an empty burial plot, accept a sealed casket, and give you the key to this unit before you could return to an unsecured residence. If your father had actually died in a standard hospital bed, the system would have recorded it through normal channels. But the moment the syndicate fabricated a heart attack in his home to force your family into mourning, they set a trap. They wanted you at that house. They wanted to search you, your home, your phone, and your car for the drive.”
The reality of her words began to settle over me, heavy and suffocating. The people who had patted my shoulder at the graveside, the neighbors who had brought coffee, the distant cousins who had driven down from Philadelphia—any one of them could have been watching to see if I carried something in my coat pocket.
“If my father is still alive,” I said, looking directly into Agent Miller’s eyes, “where is he?”…
