Georges Renard had put up the great La Grande hydroelectric dam. He could bring it down. With Pierre Arnot’s help.
Arnot’s part was simple and painfully easy. Recruiters, for terrorist cells and police forces and armies, relied on this simple truth: if you got people young enough, they could be made to do just about anything.
And that was what Arnot did. He’d left the Cree reserve years earlier and had risen to Chief Superintendent of the S?reté du Québec. But he still had influence in the north. He was respected. His voice heard and often heeded.
Arnot put key officers in place on the reserve. Their task was to find, and if necessary create, the angriest, most disenfranchised native kids. To nurture that hatred. Reinforce it. Reward it.
Kids who didn’t buy into it, or threatened to expose them, had “accidents.” Committed “suicide.” Disappeared into the bush forever.
Two abused and desperate children, nurtured into violent, glue-sniffing young men, were chosen. They were the angriest. The emptiest.
They were given two trucks loaded with explosives and told where to hit the dam. They would die, but they would die heroes, they were told. Celebrities. Songs would be written. Their brave stories told and retold. They would become legend. Myth.
Renard had provided the information on where to hit the dam. Where it was vulnerable. Information only someone who’d actually worked on the dam would know.
That had been the first plan, but Gamache had stopped it. Barely. And lost many young officers doing it. Had almost lost Jean-Guy.
Perhaps he had lost Jean-Guy, Gamache thought.
They were almost at the very top of the bridge now. The massive steel girders rose on either side of him. The boy in the next car had fallen asleep, his blond hair pressed against the window. His head lolling. In the front seat, Gamache could see Dad driving and Mom holding a large wrapped gift on her lap.
Yes, he’d stopped the dam from being brought down, but he’d failed to get at the rot. The dark core was still there and spreading. Recovering from the setback, it had grown darker and stronger.
Arnot had gone to prison and his second in command had taken over. In Sylvain Francoeur, Georges Renard had found his true muse. A man so like him they were two halves of a whole. And when put together, the results were catastrophic.
The target had shifted but not the goal.
What made the Champlain Bridge such a perfect target was finally very simple.
It was a federal bridge.
And when it came down, with a shattering loss of life, the government of Canada would be blamed for years of mismanagement, neglect, substandard materials, corruption.
All documented by the provincial Ministry of Transportation.
Audrey Villeneuve’s department.
Footage of the dreadful event would run day and night on screens around the world. Photos of the parents, the children, the families who perished would stare out from newspapers and magazines.
Gamache’s eyes swept the vehicles around him, and rested, again, on the boy in the car beside him. He was awake now. Staring out. Eyes glazed with boredom. Then he noticed his breath on the cold window. The boy brought his finger up, and wrote.
ynnaD, Gamache read.
His name was Danny.
This boy had the same name as his own son. Daniel.
If death came right now, would it be swift? Would Danny know?
Yes, their photographs would be on endless rotation on the news. Their names etched on monuments. Martyrs in the cause.
And the people responsible for the bridge, the Canadian government, would be villainized, demonized.
Je me souviens, Gamache read on the slushy license plate of the car ahead. The motto of Québec. I remember. They would never, ever forget the day the Champlain Bridge fell.
This was never about money, except as a means to corrupt. To buy silence and complicity.
This was about power. Political power. Georges Renard was not satisfied with being the Premier of a province. He wanted to be the father of a new country. He’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
And to do that all he needed to do was to manufacture rage, then direct it at the federal government. He’d convince the population that the reason the bridge had come down was that Canada had willfully used substandard material. That the federal government did not care for the citizens of Québec.
And his words would carry great weight, not because he was himself a Québec separatist, but because he wasn’t. Georges Renard was a lifelong Federalist. He’d built a political career as a supporter of Québec staying in Canada. How much stronger the argument for separation would be when coming from a man who’d never espoused it, until this hideous event.
By the New Year Québec would have declared its independence. The day the Champlain Bridge fell would be their Bastille Day. And the victims would pass into legend.
*
“Where’re they going?” Jér?me whispered.