Sgfrisch

“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 message of the Gospels, he said, compelled Christians to show kindness and compassion to strangers, regardless of their religious faith or the color of their skin. Therefore, one could not possibly call oneself a Christian and behave with indifference toward the suffering of others. He reserved his harshest criticism, though, for the politicians of the far right who pursued power by stoking anti-immigrant resentment among their followers. Roundups and mass deportations, he declared, were not only inhumane, they were unchristian. Jesus would not have remained silent in the face of such cruelty, and neither would his Church.”
― Daniel Silva, An Inside Job

“If that had worked, they’d be in the transition phase now, that netherworld between complete chaos and utter control. The War Measures Act would have been declared and in place for a few months. Any protests would have been quashed, the protesters rounded up. Most Canadians would not only have accepted the draconian measures but welcomed them, as a bulwark against anarchy. They’d be getting used to living in, essentially, a police state. They’d happily trade freedom for safety. History had taught those in power that frightened people always did. Which made fear of an attack a far more effective weapon than any actual attack. And less messy.”
― Louise Penny, The Black Wolf

“And then, of course, there’s my usual après-work Belvedere martini at Wiltons. Three olives, Saharan dry, painfully cold.”
― Daniel Silva, An Inside Job