“Sure.” Peter put the car in gear, and we cruised around the block. The fenced perimeter yielded a couple of additional entrances, but while these lacked security guards, the steel gates were the sort that could only be opened with a keycard. We considered parking the car and walking in, but it seemed unlikely that we’d make it very far into the building unnoticed given the signs of security we’d seen so far.

We’d nearly completed our circuit and were passing the front entrance when I noticed something. “Peter-wait. What does that sign say?” He slowed the car and followed my gaze with his own.

“You can’t read that sign?”

“I know there’s a sign and that it has words on it.”

“You can’t read that sign and you’ve been driving? When was the last time you had your eyes checked?”

“I had them checked.”

“In the last decade?”

“Sure.”

“You’re lying, aren’t you?” I tried to look like I wasn’t, but it was becoming all too clear that my lying skills were subpar. “Listen,” he said,“I’ll tell you what the sign says, but there’s no way that you’re driving again until you get glasses.”

“Fine.” This wasn’t really a lie; I figured that I could renegotiate the driving clause later.

Peter read the notice aloud:

SPECIAL SHAREHOLDER MEETING

VOTE ON PROPOSED SALE OF COMPANY

SATURDAY, MARCH 18TH

TEN A.M.

“Well, that’s convenient,” he said.

“Among other things.” Mostly it was just incredibly fast. How had they had been able to pull the deal together in a week? Especially with everything that had been going on? “Perry must have called a special session of the board of directors and muscled the buyout proposal through. Now they’re putting it to a final vote.”

“That was quick work.”

“Ridiculously quick. Jake mentioned that Perry was eager to keep moving this forward-he didn’t even skip a beat after Gallagher kicked the bucket-if anything, he accelerated the schedule.”

“Why the rush?”

“I don’t know. We-the firm-like to turn things around quickly, but this is unprecedented. Less than a week from an initial proposal to a shareholder vote? Jake must have been killing himself the last few days to get it done. At least, when he wasn’t trying to kill other people.”

“What’s in it for Jake, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, frustrated.

“Are you sure he’s not in on it somehow?”

“I’m not sure of anything at this point.”

“Does all of this mean that Jake will be here tomorrow?”

“He should be,” I said. “Now that Gallagher’s not available, Perry would want someone on hand to answer questions, maybe even to present the deal to the shareholders in the first place.”

“I’d like to have a little talk with him.”

“Me, too. Does your little talk involve pepper spray and jumping up and down on his face while wearing cleats?” I was a firm believer in holding a grudge. It was going to be a long time before I got over Jake treating me like a mechanical duck in his personal shooting gallery, not to mention assuming that I’d be too dense to realize it was him.

“I was thinking more along the line of a baseball bat and his knees.”

“That could work.”

B eating up Jake would have to wait until the next day. I’d read somewhere that the ability to delay gratification is a sign of maturity, and Peter and I were nothing if not mature.

We had been prepared to be unable to gain access to Thunderbolt’s premises, so our plan was to find the local hangouts frequented by Thunderbolt’s employees. There we intended to casually engage happy-hour patrons in discussion of Thunderbolt, Perry, the proposed buyout, and even Tiger Defense in a last-ditch attempt to track down Man of the People and to uncover any possible clues as to what, precisely, was so dirty about this deal.

As plans went, we recognized that it was fairly lame and that its odds of success were relatively low. It also relied on social skills that neither I nor Peter really had, but we hadn’t been able to come up with more attractive alternatives. I was becoming resigned to the ways in which being on the wrong side of the law, however unjustly, limited one’s ability to pursue justice effectively.

We still had a few hours to kill between the end of the workday and the beginning of our pub crawl, so we drove off in search of yet another pay phone and more Internet access. While State College had offered nothing but copy shops and Internet cafés, here the pickings were slim. We finally located a public library and pulled into its parking lot. The library’s architect appeared to be from the same school as the architect responsible for Thunderbolt’s plant, but the building compensated for its ugliness with a line of computer terminals inside and a pay phone in the back corridor near the restrooms.

I called Luisa first to see if there had been any new developments.

“Did you get the fax?” she asked. “Did any of the stories mean anything to you?”

I’d scanned the list she’d sent in the car, and nothing had struck me as particularly relevant. I told her as much, feeling apologetic because the list had clearly represented a lot of television watching and Luisa was unabashed in her conviction that television was directly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.

“You mean we watched all of those vile blowhards on Fox News for nothing?”

“But you got to see Anderson Cooper, too. He’s not a vile blowhard.”

She harrumphed her reply.

“What’s going on with Hilary? Has she found the guy in the suede jacket?”

“Last I heard, she was watching Jake and Annabel having a cozy-looking lunch and was pissed that she was skipping her own lunch to do so. But there was no sign of the man following Jake, and I doubt that Hilary would have missed him if he was there. She has a good eye for attractive mysterious strangers.”

I told Luisa about Jake’s e-mail, and she was appropriately incensed about his attempt to play the innocent. Then she gave me a new number to call for my next check-in. “The IT department here hooked me up with a temporary mobile phone. This number should be safe for a day or two.”

Peter was waiting, so I thanked Luisa and ended our call, assuring her that we’d get in touch later that evening. I left him loading quarters into the phone and went to one of the computer terminals to check my new e-mail account in the vain hope that Man of the People had reconsidered. But all of the e-mails that had accumulated since that morning were spam.

I closed out of e-mail and took a moment to scan the latest headlines on the Web. I seemed to be in luck, as a major earthquake had struck Kazakhstan just a couple of hours ago, completely eclipsing me as a story. It seemed wrong that an earthquake was working in my favor, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I made a mental note to donate to a relief fund as soon as I regained access to my bank account.

I stood up and stretched, still cramped from the long car ride. Across the room, I could see down the back corridor and Peter’s profile as he spoke on the phone. A fresh wave of gratitude washed over me. This couldn’t have been a convenient time for him to ditch work and go on the lam with his wayward fiancée. Peter glanced up and, catching my eye, gestured to indicate he needed a few more minutes before tipping the brim of his trucker’s cap in my direction. I hoped he wasn’t getting too attached to this new accessory. Gratitude aside, there was no way I was going to let him keep wearing something that silly-looking after all this was over.

I returned to my chair in front of the computer. My conversation with Luisa had made me wonder if perhaps I’d accidentally missed something important on her list of stories. I might as well use the downtime to take another look.