Chapter 21 #2
“And make sure we’re not disturbed, please.” He held out a fifty-dollar bill.
“Ce n’est pas nécessaire, patron, mais merci.” The usher waved away the offering with a smile, handed Gamache a key, then closed the door. Armand gave the key to Lacoste, who locked the door.
Grabbing some chairs, they sat in a circle. The play could just be heard through the door.
“All right, Bert, what the hell did you mean that the attack had already started? How? Where? We need facts. Evidence. Not rumors. Not guesses.”
“What happens, Armand, when the water runs out?”
Armand sighed. “For God’s sake, we’ve been through that.”
“Have we?” Whitehead snapped, suddenly annoyed. “Think. Really think.”
“This isn’t a game, just tell us.”
“You have all the information you need, you’re just not focusing, not adding it up right.”
“Then add it up for me!” Gamache had reached the end of his very long tether. His anger was breaking free. It was something Beauvoir and Lacoste had rarely seen.
Just then Armand’s phone buzzed. In his frustration he almost tossed it across the room. But he glanced at it. A brief message from Agent Fontaine.
Shona Dorion still here at AQB.
“Damn,” Gamache muttered. Realizing he was perilously close to the edge, he took a deep breath and put the phone back in his pocket. Then changed his mind. He couldn’t let his annoyance get the better of him. “Pardon.”
Stepping away for a moment, he placed a call. This time she answered.
“I was about to write you,” said Shona. “You were wrong.”
There was no denying the satisfaction in her voice.
“I don’t care. You need to get out of AQB.” He didn’t tell her about the mob connection they’d discovered. That would almost certainly convince her to stay. “I’m not kidding.”
“Screw you. You’re not the boss of me. Do you want to know where you fucked up or not?”
Lyrics were sliding under the door between the library and the opera house.
Jeffrey made a virtue out of cowardice and fear,
He was the first to go on sick leave and the last to volunteer.
He was running from a fight when they attacked him from the rear.
And he never got out alive, non. He didn’t survive.
Isabelle’s brows drew together. It was eerily like her conversation earlier that day with Jeanne Caron, about Frederick Castonguay. Who made a virtue out of cowardice and fear. He never got out of that forest alive. Non. He didn’t survive.
Off to the side, Gamache was still on the phone.
“All right. Tell me but be quick about it.”
“Those numbers and symbols on the map? The ones you told me to ignore because you’d figured out they’re passwords?”
“Oui. And they are.”
He didn’t have time to listen to her gloat or to argue with her about AQB. If he had to, he’d issue a warrant for her arrest. It wouldn’t stand for long and he’d be sanctioned, of course. But it would get Shona out of Action Québec Bleu.
“Keep your knickers on,” she said, and was surprised by the phrase she hadn’t heard, or used, in years.
It was something her grandmother, who was from Jamaica, used to say to her.
It was, Shona knew, a term of endearment.
“They probably are passwords, but they’re something else too.
This Charles was clever. Far more clever than you realized. ”
Now Gamache was paying attention.
“I contacted some scientist friends, and they sent me to someone in Environment Canada. The numbers are isobars.”
“Quoi?”
“Isobars, you know? For weather? They measure high and low pressure systems. They predict storms. Allo?”
Gamache had lowered the phone and looked over at General Whitehead.
So when you fight, stay as calm as the ocean,
And watch what goes on behind your shoulder.
Remember war’s not a place for deep emotion,
And maybe you’ll get a little older.
“Leave AQB now,” he said, and didn’t bother waiting for her reply.
Clicking the phone off, he strode back to the group and stared down at Bert Whitehead.
“Why would a dead biologist write isobars on a map?”
Isobars? Beauvoir and Lacoste exchanged a glance. This was news to them.
“Isobars?” said Whitehead. “As in weather? I don’t know.”
“I think you do,” said Gamache, glaring at him. “You came all this way for a reason, Bert. Out with it.”
“I’ve said more than I probably should.”
“All you’ve done is repeat ‘What happens when the water runs out?’ Unless there’s some sort of supernatural interference, that will never happen here.”
“I agree.” The General rose to face Gamache. “That’s the point. Canada won’t.” He was staring at Gamache with such intensity, Armand felt in a few more seconds he might melt. “For God’s sake, Armand, I’m begging you. Don’t make me say it.”
Don’t make me commit treason.
The world stopped turning, gravity lost its grip. Time was suspended. Nothing existed except those two, staring at each other.
Armand opened his mouth. But instead of speaking, it stayed open. And his eyes widened.
In that instant all those pieces they’d collected over days, weeks, months, those shards of evidence and shreds of ideas, of guesses and fears, shifted.
Not so much fell into place, but like in a kaleidoscope, the angle changed.
And what had been a jumble of disparate, even contradictory, and often ridiculous pieces suddenly made sense.
The chaos resolved into a cohesive picture.
“You see,” said the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I can tell by your expression.”
There was, on Armand’s face, a look of utter horror.
“What happens when the water runs out?” General Whitehead continued. “What happens when a nation runs out of the one resource necessary for life?”
“They take it from those who have it,” said Armand, his voice barely audible. Saying what Whitehead could not. “It’s not Canada that’s running out.”
“No.”
“The United States is.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not Canada that will invade the US.”
“No.”
Civilizations come and go, don’t you know.
Dancing into oblivion, oblivion.
The birth and death of nations, of civilizations,
Can be viewed down the barrel of a gun.