But not the right man.
“How long have you been here?” Gamache asked the head guard.
“Six months.”
“And you?” He turned to the other guard, who looked surprised by the question.
“Four months, sir. I was one of your students at the S?reté academy, but I flunked out. Got a job here.”
“Come with me,” Gamache said to the younger guard. “Walk me out.”
“You’re leaving?” asked the head guard.
Gamache looked back. “Go to your warden. Tell him I was here. Tell him I know.”
“Know what?”
“He’ll understand. And if you don’t understand what I’m saying, if you’re not in on it”—Gamache examined the head guard—“then my advice is to get up to the warden’s office fast and arrest him.”
The head guard stared at Gamache, uncomprehending.
“Go,” Gamache shouted, and the head guard turned and left.
“Not you.” Gamache grabbed the younger guard by the arm. “Lock him in here”—he gestured to the prisoner—“and come with me.”
The young guard did as he was told, and followed Gamache as he strode back down the corridor.
“What’s happening, sir?” the guard asked, working to keep up with the Chief Inspector.
“You’ve been here four months, the head guard for six. The other guards?”
“Most of us have come in the last six months.”
“So Captain Monette might not be in on it,” said Gamache quietly. Thinking as he walked rapidly toward the front gate.
At the final door, Gamache turned to the young guard, who now looked anxious.
“Strange things are about to happen, son. If Monette’s in on it, or if he can’t arrest the warden, you’ll be given orders that won’t seem right, and won’t be.”
“What should I do?”
“Guard that man they say is Arnot. Keep him alive.”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Speak with authority, carry yourself as though you know what you’re doing. And don’t do anything you know in your heart to be wrong.”
The young man straightened up.
“What’s your name?”
“Cohen, sir. Adam Cohen.”
“Well, Monsieur Cohen, this is an unexpected day for all of us. Why did you fail out of the S?reté academy? What happened?”
“I flunked my science exams.” He paused. “Twice.”
Gamache smiled reassuringly. “Fortunately, you won’t be asked to do science today. Just use your judgment. No matter what orders are issued, you must only do what you know to be right. You understand?”
The boy nodded, his eyes wide.
“When this is over, I’ll be back to talk to you about the S?reté and the academy.”
“Yessir.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Gamache.
“Yessir.”
But neither of them totally believed it.
At the door there was a moment’s anxiety when Chief Inspector Gamache handed the slip over and waited for his gun. But finally the Glock was handed back and Gamache walked quickly to his car. No more could be learned here.
Pierre Arnot was almost certainly dead. Killed six months ago, so that that man could take his place. Arnot couldn’t talk, because he was dead. His replacement couldn’t talk because he knew nothing. And any guard who would recognize Arnot had been transferred out.
Arnot’s disappearance told the Chief a great deal. It said that Pierre Arnot was once at the center of whatever was happening, but was no longer necessary.
Someone else had taken over. And Gamache knew who that was.
He got in the car and checked emails. There was a message from the zoo.
Georges Renard, now the Premier of Québec, had studied civil engineering at the école Polytechnique in the 1970s. His first job was with Les Services Aqueduct in the far north of Québec.
There it was. The link between Aqueduct and Renard. But why had Arnot’s name been connected to Aqueduct?
Gamache read on. Renard’s first job had been in La Grande, on the biggest engineering project in the world at that time. The construction of the massive hydroelectric dam.
And there it was. The link between Pierre Arnot and Georges Renard. As young men they’d worked in the same area. One policing the Cree reserve, the other building the dam that would destroy the reserve.
Is that where they’d first met? Is it possible this plan had started then? Was it forty years in gestation? A year ago a plot to bring down that same hydroelectric dam had almost succeeded. But Gamache had stopped it. It had taken him and Beauvoir and so many others into that factory.
And now the pieces were beginning to come together. How the bombers had known exactly where to hit the huge dam. It had always bothered the Chief Inspector that those young men, with their trucks filled with explosives, were able to get so far, and find the one soft spot in a monolithic structure.
This was how.