The Gentlemen's Hour

143

Petra sits on her living-room floor with her laptop set between her splayed legs, a mug of tea at her right hand, and does what she knows best how to do.

Organize.

Entering data from Nicole’s blackmail material, she cross-references every entry until the program starts to create a spider diagram of names, companies, properties, inspectors, geologists, politicians, City Council members, judges, and prominent citizens.

The software program assigns a discrete color to each linear connection, and within a couple of hours the screen is a dense, motley web—a Jackson Pollock canvas of corruption, with Bill Blasingame and Paradise Homes at its center.

She pushes a command button and the Web starts to create webs of its own, spinning out, as it were, multiple webs within webs. Switching imagery, she feels as if she’s looking through a high-resolution microscope, watching a cancer spread at hyperspeed.

The intercom buzzer startles her.

Who could be here so late at night?

“Boone?” she says into the speaker.

“Yeah.”

She buzzes him in.