The deficit had grown past two hundred thousand dollars.

It was the kind of hole a man does not climb out of.

And Sebastian, the real Sebastian, who worked in the technical side of the same firm, had found it.

Not through any grand investigation, but the way these things are usually found, through the dull diligence of a routine audit, a set of numbers that did not reconcile, a discrepancy that would not go away when he looked closer.

He had pulled the thread, and it had led to his own brother.