Chapter 17
Agent Yvette Nichol was at her desk outside Chief Inspector Tardiff’s office. Considering.
Her boss had just hung up from a call and was working on reports.
Going to the cabinet, Nichol chose a file, then put on her coat and knocked on the boss’s door.
“Oui?” Tardiff looked over her reading glasses at her assistant.
“I’m not really feeling all that well, patronne. Would you mind if I went home?”
“No, that’s fine. A cold?”
“Must be. Change of seasons. And I went for a walk last night without a coat.”
“Why?”
Oh, God, why?? “I didn’t realize it was that cold.” Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop talking, she begged herself. You sound like a fool. “Sinuses are now acting up. Giving me a migraine.”
“Absolutely, you need to go home.” Tardiff returned to her computer screen. “Don’t give it to me.”
“The migraine upsets my stomach.” Stop talking. You have the win. “Or maybe it’s food poisoning.”
By now Chief Inspector Tardiff’s expression had gone from sympathy to boredom to annoyance. Nichol finally stopped herself, before her boss hit disbelief.
“I’ll just take this file down to records and leave.”
Tardiff held out her hand. “Don’t bother. Give it to me and I’ll have someone else take it. What is it?”
Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck, fuck.
“Just something they asked for.”
Tardiff’s hand was still out. And now the Chief opened and closed her fingers in the signal to hurry up and bring it to her.
Nichol did.
“These are requisitions for printer paper.” Tardiff looked at her. “Why would records need them?”
“Did I say records? Désolée. Must be the meds I just took. Clouding my mind. I meant supply and services, for reimbursement.” Stop talking.
Fortunately, what she said was so mind-numbing, the head of Organized Crime for the S?reté stopped caring.
“Fine. Take them down and leave.” Then, as an afterthought: “Feel better.”
“Merci.” As she left Yvette attempted a dry cough. It at least sounded pathetic.
Armand’s head was tipped back, his arms out to catch Isabelle, should she fall.
He barely noticed his soaked slacks clinging to his legs, numbing them. His hands shook from the cold.
Still, he kept his arms out and strained to see her. The sack had been hung so far up, she had to climb from branch to branch, at times disappearing into the foliage before reappearing.
At one point a branch broke and fell. For an instant Gamache braced, thinking the woman would follow. She did not. He sidestepped the limb, never taking his eyes off Isabelle.
This was pretty much his nightmare, having to climb that high. He was endlessly grateful that while Isabelle had other fears, heights was not one.
“I’m there, patron.” He waited for more, his eyes peeled, his arms still out. Then he heard her say, “Mon Dieu.”
“What?” he called.
“I’m leaving it in the bag, but—”
“What is it?” Rarely had he heard such a plea in his own voice. Please God, please God, please God.
“You’re right. It’s a laptop. Either that or a pizza box.” She waited for his laugh, and after a long moment it drifted up to her. Not a robust guffaw, but a sort of relieved chuckle, almost a moan.
Months, months they’d been looking for it. They’d had the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups searched by the monks, multiple times.
They’d had The Mission, the homeless shelter where Charles had once lived and volunteered, turned upside down.
They’d searched Charles’s parents’ place. They’d searched the remote village of Blanc-Sablon in case Dom Philippe had hidden it there.
But it had been here all along.
Within minutes she was down again, the garbage bag clasped to her chest. “Are you going to open it?”
“Non.” Though every cell in his body wanted to rip the coverings off and look at their discovery. “This needs to be done properly. We need to get it back to—”
To where? The S?reté had been compromised. He still wasn’t sure of Chief Inspector Tardiff, despite what he’d said to Lacoste and Beauvoir the day before. And there were almost certainly other S?reté officers involved in the plot and not caught in the earlier arrests.
“—Three Pines.”
Once back in the float plane, the pilot put the small heater on full blast and slowly their shivering subsided. Armand’s legs and hands felt pins and needles. As the craft rose and fell in the air currents, Armand clutched Charles’s laptop to his chest.
He’d failed to keep the young biologist safe, he would not make the same mistake with this.
A few hours later, as Jean-Guy drove down the hill into Three Pines from the Montréal airport, he noticed Gamache’s vehicle just parking.
He also noticed a stranger’s car in front of the bistro.
Though it was not unheard of to have visitors to the village, it was unusual enough to be noted. And given what was happening, anything unusual was now cause for caution.
As Jean-Guy watched, he saw Isabelle reversing until her vehicle was touching the front fender of the stranger’s.
Getting out quickly, she stood tense, staring at it. Gamache was also out of the car, protecting something behind his body.
Isabelle’s hand was now on her hip holster. Ready.
The car appeared empty, though that didn’t mean it really was. As he got closer, Jean-Guy could see the dent on the door, the rust in the wheel well, the crack in the windshield. It was missing two hubcaps. This was an old model Honda Civic. A rust bucket.
It didn’t belong to anyone in the village. Even Ruth’s car was in better shape.
On hearing Jean-Guy’s familiar vehicle arriving, Gamache’s eyes flicked briefly over to him.
Then back again. Jean-Guy could now see what he was protecting.
It seemed to be a sack of garbage. But as he looked closer, Jean-Guy could see by its shape that it was either a laptop or a small pizza box.
Since Armand never ordered a small, that left only one option.
Holy shit, they did it. They found it.
He felt the slight nudge as his front fender touched the rear of the other vehicle. It was trapped.
“What the fuck are you doing?” came the unpleasantly familiar voice. “That’s my father’s car. If you’ve scratched it…”
Beauvoir and Lacoste turned quickly to the door of the bistro. Then back to Gamache, who was smiling.
“You remember Yvette Nichol. Agent Nichol is here to help.”
“That’ll be a first,” muttered Beauvoir.
They all had news, big news.
All were anxious to tell the others what they’d learned. But they knew that the lede was sitting on the desk in front of them in the study.
Armand and Isabelle had both grabbed quick showers and changed into warm, dry clothes. Isabelle borrowed some from Reine-Marie, who’d put on a pot of tea.
Now they were crowded into the small study, holding mugs and staring at the laptop.
They had to wait for it to charge up.
We wait. We wait.
Isabelle had lifted three sets of prints off the computer.
“The majority belong to Charles Langlois. These here are Jeanne Caron’s.”
“The third?” asked Gamache.
“Marcus Lauzon?” asked Jean-Guy. “Castonguay?”
“Tardiff?” asked Nichol.
“Non,” said Isabelle. “Whoever it is isn’t in the records.”
But someone else had touched Charles’s laptop. Someone without a record. Someone who had never been arrested.
No longer able to hold it in, Nichol blurted out, “Tardiff’s going to have Lauzon killed.”
That got their attention.
“Pardon?” said Lacoste, looking up from the keyboard.
“I heard her on the phone. That’s why I came here. She thinks I’m sick. I told her—”
“Lauzon,” said Gamache, refocusing the excited young agent.
“Chief Inspector Tardiff was talking to someone. I think it was Moretti, but I only heard her side of the conversation. It was on her personal phone, so I couldn’t listen in or trace it.
She argued a bit, saying it would be almost impossible, and if it succeeded, it could expose her, but finally she agreed. ”
“When?” asked Gamache.
“I don’t know. She didn’t say, only that it would take time, and Moretti must’ve said they don’t have it. What does this mean?”
“It means Marcus Lauzon has more to say,” said Lacoste. “And they know it. They need to shut him up.”
“Bringing him down here yesterday must’ve triggered something,” said Gamache.
“Wait a minute,” said Nichol. “You took the former Deputy Prime Minister out of supermax and brought him here?”
She stared at Gamache. She’d known that he was powerful, but she had no idea he wielded that much.
Ignoring her, Beauvoir said, “If Tardiff told Moretti about the visit, that means she really is working for him.”
“Not necessarily,” said Gamache. His mind was moving quickly over the options. “If I was in her place, I’d have told him too. The only way to prove loyalty is to provide important information. Accurate, verifiable information.”
Beauvoir looked less than convinced. “So what do we do? Let them kill Lauzon?”
Gamache was staring at Yvette Nichol. Silence descended.
“She knows,” he finally said.
“I know nothing,” said Nichol, coloring furiously.
“Not you. Evelyn Tardiff knows that you were placed in her department to watch her and report to me.”
“What?” demanded Nichol. “How?”
“I told her.”
Now it was Nichol’s turn to stare, but Chief Inspector Gamache didn’t drop his eyes. He held hers until she finally found her voice.
“You told her? You blew my cover? You shit-head.”
“Agent Nichol—” Beauvoir began.
“This’s between Gamache and me, so fuck off.”
Gamache had his hand up and once again the room fell silent, though the air sizzled.
“Agent Nichol has a right to be angry,” he finally said. “And to express it, though you do not”—he stared at her—“have the right to disrespect your superiors.”
“Respect? You expect respect? You betrayed me. I trusted you to keep me safe.”
“You were, are, right to trust me.”
Slowly, slowly the mulish scowl on Yvette Nichol’s face disappeared, and she smiled. “My God, you sly dog—”
“Nichol…,” Beauvoir warned.
“You used me,” she said to Gamache. “You both used me. Chief Inspector Tardiff couldn’t risk communicating directly with you, so she made sure I overheard the conversation.
She could have gone somewhere private to have it, but chose to speak to Moretti in her office, with the door open.
Where I could overhear. She wanted me to.
And she wanted me to tell you. Does this mean she’s working for us? ”
“I think it does,” said Gamache, and saw Nichol light up. He also saw the look on Beauvoir and Lacoste’s faces. Who’d heard what he really said.
He thought she was working with them. Thought. But wasn’t sure.
At that moment Charles’s laptop came alive. Still wearing gloves, Lacoste hit a key at random and a box asking for a password appeared. No big surprise, but a disappointment. They’d hoped he’d disabled it.
“He must think we’d know it,” said Isabelle.
“Or that someone close to him would find it and be able to guess,” said Beauvoir.
“Or that we could guess,” said Gamache. He looked at Nichol and pointed to the chair in front of the laptop.
Isabelle and Jean-Guy were accomplished on computers, but few knew more about them than Yvette Nichol.
While still a new agent, she’d been assigned, as punishment for insubordination, to the data center in the basement of S?reté headquarters.
It was meant to keep her out of trouble.
But once there she’d filled the tedium by learning everything there was to know about how their network functioned.
About dark sites. About cybersecurity and lack of security. About data retrieval.
Gamache had called on her services once before when in a crisis. And now he needed them again.
“Figure out the password.”
“You say that like it’s easy.” But no one was listening to her anymore.
While she did that, Gamache put in a call to the penitentiary warning them to be alert to any threat to Marcus Lauzon, but to be discreet about it. Then he joined Jean-Guy and Isabelle in the living room, where Reine-Marie had lit the fire.
“Tell us about your meeting with General Whitehead.”
“‘FEDS’ stands for Fire Event Detection Suite. It’s a new technology created by NASA after the megafires. It predicts where ash will go.”
“Why would that be important?” asked Lacoste. “It’s good to know, I agree, but still, it’s not much use, is it? I guess you could warn the cities and people, but you couldn’t stop it, could you?”
“I was confused too and asked General Whitehead. That’s when things got weird. He said that FEDS is predictive—”
“We got that,” said Lacoste.
“—and he asked what happens if someone can predict the future.”
“They’re put in the asylum?” asked Isabelle.
“Maybe. But he said if they really can predict it, they can control it.”
“Not necessarily,” said Lacoste. “Even if you knew for certain what was going to happen, some big event, could you change it? You can’t stop an earthquake or even a fire.”
“You might not be able to change it, but you might be able to change your own actions,” said Gamache.
“If you knew a stock was going to go way up, you’d buy it.
If you knew the winning lottery numbers, you’d get that ticket.
If you knew a train was going to derail, you wouldn’t get on it. You’d try to warn people.”
“Okay, point taken,” said Isabelle. “But how does knowing where smoke from a forest fire is going to go change what you’d do? You couldn’t change the jet stream, could you?”
Now she looked worried. What horrific new technology had been created that could change the course of the atmosphere itself?
Gamache shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He seemed to be saying that a lot lately. Was admitting ignorance really the beginning of wisdom, or prelude to disaster?
“General Whitehead seemed to think that somehow FEDS was an incredibly powerful tool,” said Beauvoir. “But I can’t see how. Useful, maybe, but powerful?”
“There must be more,” said Gamache. “He must’ve told you more.”
“He did. He said he was afraid of what happens when this”—he picked up his glass of water—“runs out. What?”
Gamache was staring at the glass, his mouth partly open, though he did not seem to be breathing.
“Water.” Now he looked at them, his two most trusted colleagues. “What happens when water runs out? That’s what he said?”
Beauvoir nodded. “What is it?”
“Nothing good,” said Armand. “That’s the answer.”