THIRTY-THREE
Agent Nichol crawled under the desk, her hands and knees on the dusty floor. Picking up the cable, she guided it to the metal box.
“Ready?”
Up above, Thérèse Brunel looked at Armand Gamache. Armand Gamache looked at Jér?me Brunel. And Dr. Brunel did not hesitate.
“Ready,” he said.
“Are you sure this time?” came the petulant voice. “Maybe you want to think about it over a nice hot chocolate.”
“Just do it, for chrissake,” snapped Jér?me.
And she did. There was a click, then her head appeared from beneath the desk. “Done.”
She crawled out and took her seat beside Dr. Brunel. In front of them was equipment Jane Neal, the last teacher to sit at that desk, could not have imagined. Monitors, terminals, keyboards.
Once again Gamache gave Jér?me the access code, and he typed, and typed until there was just one more key to hit.
“There’s no going back after this, Armand.”
“I know. Do it.”
And Jér?me Brunel did. He hit enter.
And … nothing happened.
“This’s an old setup,” said Nichol, a little nervously. “It might take a moment.”
“I thought you said it would be ultra fast,” said Jér?me, a touch of panic creeping around the edges of his words. “It needs to be fast.”
“It will be.” Nichol was rapidly hitting keys on her terminal. Like clog dancing on the computer.
“It’s not working,” said Jér?me.
“Fuck,” said Nichol, pushing herself away from the desk. “Piece of crap.”
“You brought it,” said Jér?me.
“Yeah, and you refused to test it last night.”
“Stop,” said Gamache, holding up his hand. “Just think. Why isn’t it working?”
Ducking under the desk again, Nichol removed and reattached the satellite cable.
“Anything?” she called.
“Nothing,” Jér?me replied, and Nichol returned to her chair. They both stared at their screens.
“What could be the problem?” Gamache repeated.
“Tabarnac,” said Nichol, “it could be anything. This isn’t a potato peeler, you know.”
“Calm down and walk me through this.”
“All right.” She tossed her pen onto the desk. “It could be a bad connection. Some fault in the cable. A squirrel could’ve chewed through a wire—”
“The likely reasons,” said Gamache. He turned to Jér?me. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s probably the satellite dish. Everything else is working fine. If you want to play FreeCell, knock yourself out. The problem only occurs when we try to connect.”
Gamache nodded. “Do we need a new dish?”
He hoped, prayed, the answer was …
“No. I don’t think so,” said Jér?me. “I think it has snow on it.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Thérèse.
“He might be right,” Nichol conceded. “A blizzard could pack snow into the dish and screw up the reception.”
“But the snow we had yesterday wasn’t a blizzard,” said the Chief.
“True,” said Jér?me. “But there was a lot of it, and if Gilles tilted the dish almost straight up, it would be a perfect bowl, to catch what fell.”
Gamache shook his head. It would be poetic, that state-of-the-art technology could be paralyzed by snowflakes, if it wasn’t so serious.
“Call Gilles,” he said to Thérèse. “Have him meet me at the dish.”
He threw on his outdoor gear, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the darkness.
It was more difficult to find the path through the woods than he’d expected—it was dark and the trail had all but filled in with snow. He pointed his flashlight here and there, hoping he was at the right spot. Eventually he found what were now simply soft contours in an otherwise flat blanket of snow. The trail. He hoped. He plunged in.
Yet again he felt snow tumble down his boots and begin to soak his socks. He shoved his legs forward through the deep snow, the light he carried bouncing off trees and lumps that would be bushes in the spring.
He finally reached the sturdy old white pine, with the wooden rungs nailed into her trunk. He caught his breath, but only for a moment. Each minute counted now.
Being thieves in the night depended on the night. And it was slipping away. In just a few hours people would wake up. Go in to work. Sit at monitors. Turn them on. There’d be more eyes to see what they were doing.
The Chief looked up. The platform seemed to twirl away from him, lifting higher and higher into the tree. He looked down at the snow and steadied himself against the rough bark.
Turning the flashlight off, he stuck it in his pocket, and with one last deep breath he grabbed the first rung. Up, up he climbed. Quickly. Trying to outrun his thoughts. Faster, faster, before he lost his nerve and the fear he’d exhaled found him again in the cold, dark night.
He’d climbed this tree once before, a few years earlier. It had horrified him even then, and that had been on a sunny autumn day. Never would he have dreamed he’d have to go back up those rickety rungs, when they were covered in ice and snow. At night.
Grip, pull up, step up. Grab the next rung. Pull himself up.
But the fear had found him and was clawing at his back. At his brain.
Breathe, breathe, he commanded himself. And he gasped in a deep breath.
He didn’t dare stop. He didn’t dare look up. But finally he knew he had to. Surely he was almost there. He paused for a moment and tilted his head back.
The wooden platform was still a half dozen rungs away. He almost sobbed. He could feel himself growing light-headed, and the blood draining from his feet and hands.
“Keep going, keep going,” he whispered into the rough bark.
The sound of his own voice comforted him, and he reached for the next wooden slat, barely believing he was doing it. He began to hum to himself, the last song he’d heard. “The Huron Carol.”
He began to sing it, softly.
“Twas in the moon of wintertime,” he exhaled into the tree, “when all the birds had fled.”
The carol was more spoken than sung, but it calmed his frantic mind just enough.
“That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead.”
His hand banged against the old wooden platform, and without hesitation he scrambled through the hole and lay flat on his stomach, his cheek buried in the snow, his right arm around the tree trunk. His heavy breath propelled snowflakes away, in a tiny blizzard. He slowed his breathing, afraid of hyperventilating, then crept to his knees and crouched low as though something just over the edge might reach up and yank him over.
But Gamache knew the enemy wasn’t just over the edge. It was on the platform with him.