Sgfrisch

“It could be used as an excuse to declare a nationwide state of emergency. Prompt mass arrests. The shutting down of news organizations and social media. Controlling all information. Curfews. Shoot-to-kill orders. Effectively a dictatorship.” “A coup.”
― Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf

“The villa stood on the highest point of the cape, shielded from view by towering hedgerows and protected by security measures worthy of the Palais de l’Élysée. There were twelve bedrooms, sixteen bathrooms, eight assorted drawing rooms and parlors, two professional kitchens, a library and adjoining office suite, a wine cellar, a cinema, a discotheque, a game room, a hotel-sized spa and fitness center, a Turkish bath and sauna, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a red clay tennis court, a caretaker’s villa, a ten-car garage, and a man-made lake patrolled by a flotilla of snow-white mute swans. Upon its many walls hung a portion of the owner’s collection of fine art. Some of his best pictures, however, adorned his mansion in Highgate, which had been seized, along with its contents, by the British government. He had more than a hundred paintings stashed in the Geneva Freeport and a dozen more hidden aboard Anastasia, his eighty-five-meter superyacht. At present the vessel was moored in Golfe-Juan, which he could see from the window of his private study on the second floor. It was never the life Alexander Prokhorov could have imagined for himself when he was a boy in the Soviet Union, but he had come to believe it was the life he deserved. He had worked harder and been more resourceful, he assured himself, had seen opportunity where others saw only collapse and ruin. And he had become rich as a tsar in the process, a billionaire many times over. Had he cut corners and broken laws? Yes, of course. He had also resorted to violence on occasion. But so had many other men like him, men who had dared to stake their claim in the Wild East. He had nothing but contempt for those who were too”
― Daniel Silva, An Inside Job

“The only reason democracy works is that there’s a contract between elected and those electing. A consent to be governed. But that contract is fragile. That consent can be withdrawn. Sophisticated terrorists know this. They hit targets that can shatter that trust. And few things are more powerful, more symbolic, more important than water security.”
― Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf

“I was just thinking about Anne Lamarque.” She took the brush from between her teeth, smearing more paint in her hair and on her cheek, and used it to motion at the canvas. “She was punished for many things, including being happy. So I wanted to capture that. The power of it. Happiness as an act of defiance. A revolutionary act.”
― Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities