The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,101

A reasonable assumption, he thinks, seeing as how his wrists are taped behind him and his ankles are taped together.

He asks, “Where are we going?”

“To a place,” the Voice says, “of serene quiet and exquisite pain.”

Boone gauges the angle and distance of the Voice, then jerks up out of the grasp at his elbows and throws his body as horizontally as he can get into the air, bends his knees, and then kicks out. He feels his feet make contact and hears the Voice grunt, “Ooof” before there’s the sound of something heavy hitting the dock. Then he hears the Voice scream, “My knee! My knee!”

Boone tucks his chin into his chest as they start beating him.

Gun butts, boots, and fists—but on the shoulders, the ribs, the legs, not in the head. They don’t want to kill him and they don’t want him to lose consciousness, so he lies there and focuses on the Voice’s whimpers.

“Get him in the van,” the Voice says eventually.

He hears a van door slide open and they lift him up and push him inside. The door closes.

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.

144

The psychology of the early hours of a kidnapping is amazingly consistent.

After the initial shock comes a short period of disbelief, followed by despair. Then the survival instinct kicks in and forces a sense of hope, predicated on the same question:

Is anyone looking for me?

Then the kidnapped person goes through a checklist of his or her day, all the mundane little details that make up an average life, the routines that define daily living, with a now crucial emphasis on habitual human contact.

Who will miss me?

And when?

At what point in the day will someone not see me and wonder why not? A spouse, certainly, a friend, a coworker, a boss, a subordinate. Or would it be the lady who sells you the morning cup of coffee, a parking lot attendant, a security guard, a receptionist?

For most people, in most jobs, there’s a long list of daily, routine human contacts whose concern would be triggered by the simple fact that you didn’t show up for work, or school, that you didn’t come home.

But for the person who works alone, with no routine schedule; who lives alone, without family; whose work takes him different places at different times, day or night, often secretly, there are no expectations, the failure of which would cause anxiety and launch a search.

These thoughts run through Boone’s mind as he lies on the floor of the van, this enforced examination of his life in relation to other lives.

Who’ll miss me? he asks himself.

What is the first point in time that I will be expected somewhere?

The Dawn Patrol.

Virtually every day since I was fifteen years old, he thinks, I’ve shown up on the Dawn Patrol. So normally, if I didn’t make it, someone would ask, “Where the hell is Boone?”

Except that’s over. My others-encouraged, self-imposed exile from the Dawn Patrol will make my no-show, not my presence, the expectation. They won’t know, they won’t care, they’ll just assume that I’m still on my long, strange trip.

So, what’s next?

The Gentlemen’s Hour.

The next phase of the daily surf clock, my new surf home.

I told Dan Nichols I’d see him at the Gentlemen’s Hour, but will he remember that? Will he care? Like, so what if I don’t show? He won’t trip to something being wrong, he’ll just think I’m busy doing something else, that’s all. And if the old boys talking story on the beach notice I’m not there, it’s a huge so what? A nothing.

Next.

Well, that would be The