Henri, who barely ever made a sound, emitted a low growl.
“Hope this is worth it,” said the voice. Female. Petulant. Young.
Thérèse Brunel turned to Gamache.
“You didn’t,” she whispered.
“I had to, Thérèse.”
“You could’ve just stuck a gun in our mouths,” she said. “Would have been less painful.”
She grabbed the Chief’s arm, yanked him a few paces away from the truck, and whispered urgently into his face. “You do know she’s one of the people we suspect of working with Francoeur, of leaking the video of the raid? She was in the perfect position to do that. She had the access, the ability and the personality to do it.” Thérèse shot a look at the figure creating a dark hole against the cheerful Christmas lights. “She’s almost certainly working with Francoeur. What’ve you done, Armand?”
“It was a risk I had to take,” he insisted. “If she’s working with Francoeur we’re sunk, but we would’ve been anyway. She might be one of the few who could leak the video, but she’s also one of the few who can get us back online.”
The two senior S?reté officers glared at each other.
“You know that, Thérèse,” said Gamache urgently. “I had no choice.”
“You had a choice, Armand,” Thérèse hissed. “For one thing, you could have consulted me. Us.”
“You haven’t worked with her, I have,” said Gamache.
“And you have such insight into people? Is that it, Armand? Is that why Jean-Guy’s where he is? Is that why your department deserted you? Is that why we’re hiding here and our only hope is one of your own former agents, and you don’t even know if she’s loyal or not?”
Silence met those words. Silence and a long, long exhale of what looked like steam.
“Excuse me,” he said at last, and walked past Thérèse Brunel to the road.
“Can I help?” Jér?me asked a little awkwardly. He’d heard what Thérèse had said. He suspected this young woman had too.
“Go inside, Jér?me,” said Gamache. “I’ll look after this.”
“She didn’t mean it, you know.”
“She meant it,” said Gamache. “And she was right.”
When the Brunels had gone inside, he turned to the newcomer.
“You heard that?”
“I did. Fucking paranoid.”
“Do not use that language with me, Agent Nichol. You’ll be respectful of me, and the Brunels.”
“So that’s who that is,” she said, peering into the night. “Superintendent Brunel. I couldn’t tell. Heady company. She doesn’t like me.”
“She doesn’t trust you.”
“And you, sir?”
“I asked you down here, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but you had no choice.”
It was too dark to see her face, but Gamache was sure there was a sneer there. And he wondered just how big a mistake he might have made.
TWENTY-FOUR
The next morning all four of them worked to install the equipment Agent Yvette Nichol had brought with her from Montréal. They carried it up the hill, from Emilie’s home to the old schoolhouse.
Olivier had given Gamache the key, but had asked no questions. And Gamache had offered no explanations. When he’d unlocked the door a puff of stale air met him, as though the one-room schoolhouse had been holding its breath for years. It was dusty and still smelled of chalk and textbooks. It was bitterly cold inside. A black potbellied woodstove sat in the middle of the floor, and the walls were lined with maps and charts. Math, science, spelling. A large blackboard above the teacher’s desk dominated the front of the room.
Most of the students’ desks had gone, but a couple of tables sat against the wall.
Gamache surveyed it and nodded. It would do.
Gilles showed up and helped them carry the cables and terminals and monitors and keyboards.
“Pretty old stuff,” he commented. “Are you sure it still works?”
“It works,” snapped Nichol, and studied the grizzled man. “I know you. We met when I was here last time. You talk to trees.”
“He talks to trees?” Thérèse muttered to Gamache as she passed, carrying a box of supplies. “Two for two, Chief Inspector. Who’s next? Hannibal Lecter?”
Within the hour all the equipment had been moved from Emilie’s home to the old schoolhouse. Agent Nichol had proved more helpful than anyone, especially Gamache, could have hoped. Which only increased his discomfort. She only questioned his orders once.
“Really?” She’d turned to him when the Chief Inspector had told her what they needed to do. “That’s your plan?”
“Do you have a better one, Agent Nichol?”
“Set it up in Emilie Longpré’s living room. That way it’s convenient.”
“For you, yes,” explained Gamache. “But the less distance the cables have to run, the better. You know that.”
She reluctantly admitted he had a point.
He hadn’t told her the other reason. If they were found out, if their signal was traced, if Francoeur and Tessier and others appeared on the brow of the hill, he wanted the target to be the abandoned schoolhouse. Not a home in the middle of Three Pines. The schoolhouse wasn’t far removed, but perhaps enough.
If they were successful, it would be decided, he suspected, by moments and millimeters.
“You do know this probably won’t work,” said Nichol, as she crawled under the old teacher’s desk.
The school had been decommissioned years earlier. No longer could the children of Three Pines walk to school and go home for lunch. Now they were bused to Saint-Rémi every day. Such was progress.
Once the equipment was in place, Gilles left them. Through the dirty schoolhouse window Gamache watched the red-bearded woodsman carry his snowshoes up the hill out of the village, in search of the hunting blind. It had been a long time since Gilles, or Gamache, had seen it, and Gamache hoped and prayed it was still there.
A clanking of metal on metal caught his attention and he turned to face the room. Superintendent Brunel was feeding old newspapers and kindling into the woodstove, trying to get it going. Right now the schoolhouse felt like a freezer.
While Agent Nichol and Jér?me Brunel worked to connect the equipment, Chief Inspector Gamache walked over to one of the maps of Québec tacked to a wall. He smiled. Someone had placed a tiny dot south of Montréal. Just north of Vermont. Beside the winding Rivière Bella Bella. Written there, in a small perfect hand, was one word. Home.
It was the only map in existence that showed the village of Three Pines.
Superintendent Brunel was now feeding quartered logs into the woodstove. Gamache could hear the crackle and pop of the long-dry wood and he could smell the slight sweet scent of the smoke. Soon, if Thérèse Brunel tended it, the stove would be radiating heat and they could remove their coats and hats and mitts. But not just yet. The winter had taken hold of the old building and wouldn’t be easily evicted.
Gamache walked over to Thérèse.
“Can I help?”
She shoved another log in and poked it as embers flew up.
“You all right?” he asked.
She took her eyes off the stove and glared across the room. Jér?me was sitting at the desk, organizing a bank of monitors and keyboards and slim metal boxes. Agent Nichol’s bottom could be seen under the desk, as she made connections.
Her eyes flashed back to Gamache.
“No, I’m not all right. This is crazy, Armand,” Thérèse said under her breath. “Even if she doesn’t work for Francoeur, she’s unstable. You know that. She lies, she manipulates. She used to work for you and you fired her.”
“I transferred her, to that basement.”
“You should have fired her.”
“For what? Being arrogant and rude? There’d barely be any S?reté agents left if that was a dismissible offense. Yes, she’s a piece of work, but look at her.”
They both looked over. All they could see was her bottom, in the air, like a terrier burying a bone.
“Well, maybe not the best moment to make a judgment,” said Gamache with a smile, but Thérèse saw nothing amusing. “I put her in the basement, monitoring communications, because I wanted her to learn how to listen.”
“And did it work?”
“Not perfectly,” he admitted. “But something else happened.” He looked over at Agent Nichol again. Now she was seated, cross-legged, under the desk, carefully dissecting a mass of cables. Disheveled, unkempt, in clothes that didn’t quite fit. The sweater was pilled and too tight, the jeans a bad cut for her body, her hair had a slightly greasy look. But her focus was intense.
“In the hours and hours of sitting there listening, Agent Nichol discovered a knack for communication,” Gamache continued. “Not verbal, but electronic. She spent hours and hours refining techniques for gathering information.”
“Spying.” Thérèse refined what he meant. “Hacking. You do know you’re making an argument for her collaborating with Francoeur.”
“Oui,” he said. “We’ll see. The Cyber Crimes division suspected her, you know.”
“What happened?”
“They rejected her for being unstable. I don’t believe Francoeur would work with someone he couldn’t control.”