“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 Jérôme 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. Jérôme 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 Sûreté 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.”