Chapter 5
Can you tell me more?
Vivienne LaPierre understandably wanted to know why she was being asked to accompany a senior S?reté officer, a stranger, to a remote lake.
They were communicating over secure text, but still Armand hesitated. He was so accustomed to keeping secrets, especially this one, that it took a force of will to let it out. Even to one of their best friends.
Dr. LaPierre was an environmental biologist, the head of the department at the Université de Montréal. A full professor and leader in the field, Dr. LaPierre was one of the first scientists to warn about the changes in algae levels in remote lakes.
She was brutally mocked for it. Who cared about algae? It was green and slimy. Not exactly a great “poster child” for an impending environmental disaster.
But she persisted. It took her decades to get it through their thick heads that algae was the DEW Line, the early warning. The canary in the mine.
But more worrisome, besides the sudden thickness of human skulls, was why algae was disappearing. Dr. LaPierre had finally convinced regulators to turn their attention to acid rain.
That was decades ago. She’d since focused her study on the Arctic and the changes, no longer subtle, she’d detected there. But the icebreaker research ship wasn’t scheduled to sail for a few weeks, and so Armand found her at home this Saturday morning enjoying a late breakfast with her husband.
After she’d replied to his text, there was a silence so long that she wondered if the connection had been lost.
Armand? she typed.
When his reply finally did come, she stared at it, uncomprehending. So this, she thought, is what a thick skull feels like. It was not pleasant.
His words seemed to be knocking against her head, for admittance. Had the message come from anyone other than Armand, she’d have hit the red end icon and blocked the lunatic.
Vivienne? he typed, after a disconcertingly long pause.
He could imagine her sitting at the kitchen table, beside her husband.
They were his and Reine-Marie’s best friends.
The Gamaches had followed the ups and downs of her career as she’d fought the system from her tiny office without a view.
Such had been the respect given to anyone who studied the environment when offices at the university were assigned decades ago.
But now biologists were the superheroes. The ones who could see what others would not. Who understood that even the smallest change in the ecosystem could be catastrophic.
They were also the ones who could prevent the catastrophe. Biologists led the way, and Vivienne LaPierre was at the sharp end of that stick.
But even she struggled to absorb what Armand had written.
Go over your text pls. Are there any typos? Did you mean to write “thirty times”? Maybe it’s “thirty percent.”
Which would, she knew, be bad enough. That whole tar sands fiasco was a case in point, the government allowing it to pollute well beyond acceptable or admitted levels.
It was unconscionable. But now to allow mines and pulp mills and oil refineries and other processing plants across the country to exceed the pollution limits, already weak, by thirty times would be a disaster. Criminal.
Unforgivable.
No typos.
“Merde,” she muttered and reread what Armand had written.
Marcus Lauzon was not just behind the poisoning plot.
Part of his plan involved agreeing to sell controlling interest in primary industries to Americans, and allowing certain industries to exceed pollution limits by thirty times.
The young biologist who was murdered was investigating.
He visited one lake in particular, several times.
We need to know why. There’s something up there.
We need someone we can trust. We need you.
Dr. Vivienne LaPierre typed her reply, then told her husband she would not be home for dinner. Or probably breakfast. And that the avocados were becoming overripe and should be eaten.
Reine-Marie stared at the map, and Armand stared at her staring.
And waited.
They were very alike in many ways and quite different in others, which made for a strong partnership. Each filled in the other’s gaps. Each saw what the other missed.
He hoped and prayed that was true now.
Finally, she turned around. “Where did you find this?”
He’d realized soon after his return from the hospital that he could read Reine-Marie’s lips better than anyone else’s. No doubt because he knew them best.
“It was hidden in the monastery among a collection of old documents. Jean-Guy found it.”
“How did you know it was there?”
“We didn’t. We were looking for something, anything, that could tell us where the Abbot had gone. The biologist’s map was a surprise.”
“But this has nothing to do with the plot to poison the drinking water. There’s something else. Something important in the map itself.”
It was a shame, and then some, that they could not ask either the Abbot or the biologist. Young Langlois had been mowed down by a vehicle, which narrowly missed Armand.
Armand tilted his head back and stared at the mottled acoustic tiles of the basement ceiling. Above them was the church itself. They were almost directly under the spot where Dom Philippe, the Abbot, had been murdered.
Not in the cathedral, like Thomas à Becket, but close enough.
Some malady. Dom Philippe had scrawled that quote from T.
S. Eliot on the back of a scrap of paper and left it in this little village church for Armand to find, knowing he’d connect the quote to the person who had left it, and make the connection with the Abbot’s monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.
When the dignified old Abbot had sat upstairs in the pew by the soldier boys and written those two simple words from Murder in the Cathedral, he could not have known that just a few days later he himself would be murdered. In the church.
“Agreed. Both Dom Philippe and Charles Langlois wanted us to find it. And they both wanted to make sure no one else found this map. But what does it contain? We’ve stared at it, studied it. Nothing. Isabelle is flying to the lake today. I asked Vivienne to go with her.”
“LaPierre?”
“Oui.”
Reine-Marie, though surprised, considered. Then nodded. “Smart. We can trust her.”
Armand smiled. Reine-Marie’d said “we.” He liked that.
“Did she agree?”
“She did. They’ll arrive early this afternoon.”
They stared at the wall, and silence fell once again over the room, though the shriek persisted in Armand’s head.
Then Reine-Marie stepped closer to the wall and peered at the very bottom of the map, where it ran out. She turned back to Armand.
“Have you seen this?”
The Archambault penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines was not where even hardened criminals wanted to serve out their sentences.
It formed a sort of doughnut, with the outer layer being medium security, with some maximum security prisoners mixed in. That was bad enough, but what was really scary was what was in the jam in the middle.
It was a prison within a prison and was considered “supermax,” which always sounded to Jean-Guy like a McDonald’s meal option. One that would, over time, kill you.
The men in supermax would not take so long.
And if, like the jelly still staining his sweater, any of them squeezed out, escaped, they were all fucked.
Jean-Guy was headed there to speak to the man behind what would have been the mass murder of tens of thousands.
It should have, would have, taken Jean-Guy just over two hours to reach Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines from Three Pines, if not for the traffic through Montréal and then the cop who’d pulled him over on the autoroute.
“I’m on SQ business,” said Jean-Guy, showing him his ID.
“You were still going one forty in a hundred-kilometer-an-hour zone, sir. Is there an emergency I don’t know about?”
“Do we run everything by you first?” demanded Beauvoir, making note of the agent’s name. “Let me go.”
“I can escort you. Where are you going?”
While he bristled at being questioned by such a junior officer, Jean-Guy did admit an escort would be much faster.
“Archambault.”
“The prison? Great. I hear Lauzon’s there.”
“Oui. I’m going to speak to him.”
“Really, can I come? Those fuckers,” said the SQ officer.
“Agreed.”
“Treating him like a criminal.” The officer leaned closer and lowered his voice. “They want us to believe the bullshit about the water.”
“What bullshit?” Beauvoir was trying to grasp what he was hearing. The young man leaning into his window looked intelligent and yet …
“The poisoning plot. It’s not real. They think we’re stupid. Look it up. It never happened.”
Beauvoir could feel the blood rush to his face and was just about to blast this ignorant young man when he hesitated. Some instinct told him to go another route.
“Why do you say that?”
The officer looked at Beauvoir as though at a child. Jean-Guy clenched his fists but said nothing.
“Because it’s true. There’s proof. Photographs of them staging it.
They’re brainwashing us into thinking poison was about to be put in the drinking water.
Do you know what the government is putting in the drinking water?
Drugs to tranquilize us. So that we don’t care, don’t question.
Bad enough that they put tracking devices in vaccines, but we can at least avoid that.
We can’t stop drinking water. Lauzon was about to expose them, so they had to do something. He’s lucky to be alive.”
At this point, the young SQ agent was lucky to be alive. Or at least conscious.
Once again Inspector Beauvoir swallowed what he really wanted to say, and instead asked, “How do you know all this?”
“It’s all over the internet. Look it up, sir. And don’t get me started on Gamache. Did you know he abandoned the rest of us and saved himself and his family, then faked an injury so no one would suspect him?”
That finally crossed the line.
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what shit you’re reading, but you need to stop. Use your head, use your intelligence.”
But he could see his words had just bounced off this officer.
Beauvoir took his ID back, and, declining the offer of an escort, drove off.
A line formed between Jean-Guy’s brows. It would be there for the rest of his life.
“What are you seeing?” Armand asked.
“This line,” said Reine-Marie. “Your young biologist must’ve drawn it.”
“Yes, we did see it,” said Armand. He was slightly disappointed. He’d hoped she’d noticed something they hadn’t. “I’ve ordered a map of New England, to see where he might have gone.”
“It’s funny, I have the opposite impression.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought it was the other way around.”
“Go on.”
“Well, look there.” She pointed to a mark along the perforated line.
Armand’s face opened in surprise. What she’d seen, and he’d missed, looked like a circumflex, though it was over a printed letter that should not have the little cap. It was actually a very small arrow. Pointing up.
Armand stood back and drew his brows together. Was it possible they were wrong? Was the movement Charles had drawn not south after all, not from Québec into Vermont, but the other way around?
Was something moving, or going to move, north, into Canada from the States?
Was something headed their way?
“Dr. LaPierre?”
“Vivienne, s’il vous pla?t.”
“Isabelle Lacoste. Thank you for doing this, and at such short notice.” They were at the Port de Montréal, standing on a quay. “I’m not sure if you remember, but we’ve met before.”
“I do remember.” The image of the young, grim officer in slow march behind Armand, who was leading the cortège with the coffins of his agents, would stay with Vivienne forever. “Armand speaks highly of you.”
“And you,” said Isabelle as they made their way toward the float plane. “There aren’t many he’d trust with this information.”
“Such as it is.” Vivienne tossed her satchel into the hold of the small craft. She’d brought testing equipment, a tent, a sleeping bag, some tools, some food. She’d considered bringing water, despite the fact they’d be camping on the shores of a lake. She’d seen enough pollution to be wary.
Still, this time she left it behind in favor of thermal underwear.
“He didn’t tell me much.”
“He told you as much as any of us knows,” said Isabelle.
Also a habituée of making camp, Isabelle had brought her own kit, which included not just the usual but also flares and a fishing pole. You never knew when you could get stranded. The Canadian wilderness forgave little. And always punished stupidity.
The pilot double-checked the destination, not totally believing they wanted to go to such a remote location.
Once in the air, the two women stared out the windows at the vast expanse of forest and lakes and rivers that stretched on for hours.
“Dear God,” whispered Lacoste. It was beautiful. Majestic.
Though as they headed farther north, she was reminded of flying over the wildfire-ravaged forests, with mile after mile of charcoal stumps. Some still smoldering months later.
Finally, they began their descent.