Chapter 35 #2
Then Jean-Guy reached out and pulled the larger, older man forward. And held him, tight. So that their chests pressed against each other and Armand could feel Jean-Guy’s heart. Beating in rhythm with his own.
Then the two comrades slowly made their way across the village green, pausing to look at the three tall pines. The code that told them they were safe. They were home.
And then they joined their wives in bed. And slept soundly for the first time in months.
“No, I mean how did you know there was more going on after the poisoning plot,” pressed Workman. “Everyone thought that was the end of it.”
“We have a problem,” said Lacoste, and everyone at the table turned to her.
“What?” said Chief Inspector Tardiff. “Again?”
“Still?” said Nichol.
“Non, non, désolée. That was the message the Chief Inspector sent Jean-Guy and me.” She turned to Armand.
“You’d gone back over Charles Langlois’s two notebooks and realized we had them in the wrong order.
The one we thought was second, that held his conclusions and the key to the poisoning, was actually the first.”
“The stepping stone to the real plot,” said Beauvoir. “Only we couldn’t figure out what it was, just that something else, something bigger, was going to happen.”
“So we had to dig deeper,” said Lacoste. “Go back over what Charles left behind. Go back to the map and pore over the notebooks.”
“And we had to find the laptop,” said Jean-Guy.
“So you knew something was up,” said Workman. “How did you figure out what?”
“Yvette here realized the numbers and symbols Charles had written on the lake were passwords,” said Isabelle. “They took us to .family and eventually to War Plan Red.”
Yvette. She called me Yvette. Not Nichol. Yvette. She looked around and realized she was part of the circle.
Workman shook his head. “Hard to believe War Plan Red actually exists.”
“Agreed,” said Gamache. “After the shock of the First World War, the US decided it needed plans, defenses, should it happen again. So it created various plans. Each with a different color. They were collectively called the Rainbow Plans.”
“War Plan Black for war with Germany,” said Nichol. “War Plan Grey for Central America. War Plan Orange for war with Japan. There were others.”
“Marcus Lauzon, as Deputy PM, had access to the classified files,” said Evelyn Tardiff. “He knew that WPR had been resurrected as military exercises. Updated constantly, but never, as General Whitehead said, meant to be put into action. But Lauzon saw the potential.”
“He saw how fragile water security was becoming,” said Reine-Marie.
“And how desperate the Americans might become,” agreed Isabelle. “All they needed was a shove in the right direction.”
“Toward Canada,” said Jean-Guy.
He was shocked by how easy it had been to turn Canada into an enemy. There were still millions who considered the megafires a deliberate assault. Once that perception was planted, it was almost impossible to refute. The Ministry of Truth at work.
Jean-Guy had just read Nineteen Eighty-Four, after first finishing Animal Farm.
Now he was reading the biography of Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. A hockey legend who had nothing to do with any of this.
“But how do we know that this thing”—Workman tapped the file—“is real? Maybe it was planted. It all seems too easy.”
“Robert Ferguson has admitted it’s real,” said Isabelle. “Besides, everything in it was proven true.”
“War Plan Red. Sounds ridiculous,” said Nichol, shaking her head. “And we all thought you were nuts.”
Armand had dropped his eyes to the document. He’d been silent through this. Partly remembering the steps to get there. Mostly remembering the missteps.
“I really thought it was Woodford,” said Lacoste. “That makes the most sense.”
“That’s what Lauzon said to me. That only Woodford had the power and contacts to organize all this,” said Jean-Guy. “I have to admit it’s one of the things that convinced me I’d been wrong about Lauzon. And then, when he saved us in the caves—”
“If he’s behind all this, why would he save you?” Workman interrupted.
“He needed you alive,” Beauvoir said to Evelyn Tardiff. “To tell us what you knew about Joe Moretti and Mirabel. He needed us to go to the wrong airport.”
“It was Lauzon who told us about the caves and got us to go there, remember,” said Nichol. “He wanted us to save you.” She took Evelyn’s hand. “And really, thank God he did.”
“What is it?” Jean-Guy asked. He’d noticed that Armand was still staring at the document.
Now the Chief raised his eyes. Though he said nothing, Jean-Guy could read that look.
Oh, merde, he thought. We have a problem.
As they left the café, Armand paused on the terrace and looked at the spot where Charles Langlois, the young biologist, had been mown down and died, as Armand held his bloody hand.
This was where it all began. And Armand knew now, it wasn’t over yet.
“What is it, patron?” asked Beauvoir.
“Workman was right. This is too easy.”
“You consider what happened easy?” asked Isabelle, still in pain from the beating. She watched Shona walking with her mentor down the street. The young journalist’s torment all too obvious.
“I’m sorry,” said Armand. “I didn’t mean that.
But Workman was right. Shona also said it.
We should never have been able to find this.
” He held up the document, then looked at Isabelle.
“And we should never have been able to escape. They wanted us to. Why let Captain Pinsent go? I was so relieved to be out, and with the proof, I never really thought about it.”
“They made a mistake, that’s all. Were overconfident.” Though even as he said it, Jean-Guy heard the desperation in his voice.
He was tired and sore and desperate to get back to Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. To lose himself in the glory days of Les Habs, and not worry about the present or the future.
But in his heart, he knew the truth. “We were wrong.”
“I think so. I think we were set up. I think they relied on my willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to distrust Marcus Lauzon. My desire to believe he’s the Black Wolf.”
“But if he’s not?” said Isabelle. When he didn’t answer, she said it out loud. “It’s the Prime Minister? It’s Woodford after all?”
Armand looked down at the document he held. The document he was always supposed to hold. And use.
To arrest, yet again, the wrong person.
He met their eyes. “I think so.”
The next day Inspectors Beauvoir and Lacoste accompanied Chief Inspector Gamache to Ottawa, to answer questions about the role Marcus Lauzon had played in the attempted coup.
And Armand did. He looked the members of Parliament and senators in the face and lied. Over and over.
A week later they flew to Washington, where Armand was an honorary pallbearer at the state funeral of General Albert Whitehead.
After the private reception with the family, Armand and Reine-Marie, along with Jean-Guy and Isabelle, sat in the dim bar in the basement of the Hay-Adams hotel.
“To a man who had the courage to feed the grey wolf,” said Armand.
They lifted their Shirley Temples, with two cherries.
The next day Chief Inspector Gamache appeared before the private House committee that had been struck to investigate what had happened and to uncover just how deep the corruption went.
Once again Chief Inspector Gamache was grilled.
Once again he lied. Over and over.
Explaining that, yes, Marcus Lauzon was behind the plot and that as far as they knew, the American President was blameless, though others high up in the administration must have been involved.
No, he didn’t know who. And neither did Prime Minister Woodford. And Lauzon wasn’t talking. He was in solitary.
Gamache chose not to tell the former Deputy Prime Minister that they now knew he’d been telling the truth. That he’d been, once again, wrongly arrested. By Gamache. Armand couldn’t risk it getting out. Woodford had to believe they’d fallen for it.
Instead, the head of homicide for the S?reté chose to keep a person he knew was not guilty in a hellhole of a prison. In a hellhole of despair.
It was the only way to put the PM at ease, and the best way to see that Marcus Lauzon would one day die of old age, in bed, instead of bleeding out on some disinfected tile floor.
Still, Armand had prevailed on two of the men he’d arrested for especially gruesome murders, who were also in the prison within a prison, to watch over Marcus Lauzon.
In exchange, the head of homicide had agreed to watch over the convicts’ families, especially their children.
With Lauzon as safe as possible, Gamache and his people rushed to gather evidence against the Prime Minister before it was buried too deep.
They moved at a near-panicked pace, while appearing as calm as the ocean. All the while looking over their shoulders. Knowing they were being watched.
But they were not moving fast enough. In frustration Gamache and his people saw each promising lead evaporate. Evidence was disappearing, being destroyed, just before they got to it. It was a race against time. A race Armand feared they were losing.
Armand and Reine-Marie flew to the UK, apparently to go to his reunion at Cambridge, but actually to quietly meet Sherry Caufield.
Over tea and scones in a small shop in the Suffolk village of Eye, Armand asked the head of UK counterintelligence to do her own investigation, since she might find what they could not.
Turned out, Caufield had never believed the official story and was relieved to know that Gamache didn’t either. Unasked, unobserved, she’d already started digging deeper.
“Lauzon could never have put all that together,” she said. “You’re doing that wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” said Reine-Marie.
“You put the clotted cream on the scone first, then the strawberry jam. Not the other way around.”
Caufield seemed as incensed about the scone issue as the plot to provoke mass murder and a regional war.
“Désolée,” said Reine-Marie and, turning to Armand, she grimaced.
“Lauzon’s slimy, but more interested in immediate gains. He has no patience. This plot took patience and a master tactician with all the necessary contacts and access. You’re doing that wrong.”
“I’m sorry?” said Armand.
“You put the milk in first, then pour the tea.” The head of British Intelligence huffed, indignant.
“If she calls us colonials, I’m leaving,” muttered Reine-Marie. Though, choosing her battles, she put the clotted cream onto her next scone first.
And in his next cup of tea, Armand poured the milk first.
“So it is Woodford.” He realized as he said it that up until that moment, he’d clung onto a thread of hope that Marcus Lauzon was, in fact, guilty.
“It is.” Sherry Caufield leaned forward and dropped her voice. “You need to stop him, Armand. If he gets control of North America, we’ll all be fucked.”
They’d hoped that the danger was past. But they were wrong. While the forests were not deliberately set on fire, the internet was. Conspiracy theories were gaining ground, fueling wilder and wilder claims. More fear, more fuel, more converts.
Clearly the truth was not effective, so Chief Inspector Gamache did the only thing possible. He lied. And lied. And dug and dug. And lied some more when interviewed, when asked. And hoped the lies would buy them time.