“We haven’t found anything, but we’re looking. So far it seems to be just the launcher itself. Do you have someone you can send?”
There was a sigh down the line and she could almost imagine him scratching his head.
“Honestly, our current ballistics and heavy weaponry specialists all deal with modern weapons. ICBMs. Sophisticated systems. This looks like a dinosaur.”
Lacoste looked at the photograph on her screen. He was right. It was the literal truth. It looked like they’d unearthed some behemoth.
But why was it hidden? And who in the world had built it? What was it for?
And why was Laurent murdered to keep it secret?
“Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” he said.
“This is, of course, confidential,” she said.
“I understand. I’ll do what I can.”
She thanked him and hung up. She hadn’t told him about the other thing. The etching on the base.
She steadied herself, wishing it wasn’t quite so dark and quiet and solitary in the old railway station, then she put up another photo and looked at the winged monster. Even in a picture, even at a distance, it was striking. And what it struck was terror.
She stared at it and wondered why she hadn’t told the Commander of CFB Valcartier about the monster with the seven serpent heads. Perhaps because she remembered the boy running into the bistro. With the tale of the huge gun.
As Gamache had said, had Laurent left it at that, they might, just might, have believed him. But then he took it that next, impossible, step too far. Into the unbelievable.
Lacoste knew that General Langelier almost certainly did not fully appreciate the size of the weapon. No picture could capture it, even with the agent there for scale. She suspected he thought she was exaggerating. And she suspected the winged monster would not have helped her credibility.
Isabelle Lacoste stared at the etching. It was, she had to admit, unbelievable.
* * *
Jean-Guy Beauvoir finished unpacking his satchel, hanging shirts and slacks in the closet of the B and B, folding garments in the pine dresser, and putting toiletries in the spacious en suite.
He’d made arrangements with Gabri for Lacoste and him to stay at the B and B for as long as necessary. Gabri had put him in the room he normally had with the large bed and crisp linens and warm duvet. The wide-plank pine floors and oriental throw rugs.
He pulled the curtain back and saw the light in the window of the old train station.
The Incident Room had been sorted out. The evidence sent to the lab in Montréal. The local Sûreté detachment had agreed to provide protection for the huge gun, though no one had been very taken with the quality of agent they’d sent.
“Fresh out of the academy,” Isabelle Lacoste had remarked. “They’ll learn.”
“Perhaps.”
“We were like that once.”
“We were never like that,” Beauvoir had said. “It’s not hard to do the math, Isabelle. The Sûreté Academy has them for three years. That means these two, and everyone in their class, were recruited at the height of the corruption.”
“You think they’re corrupt?”
“I think they were looking for different qualities in recruits at that time,” he’d said.
And now there’s a whole class of them, he thought, opening the window and feeling the cool breeze. Several classes of them. Scattered throughout the Sûreté. Scattered through the forest.
That monstrosity was being guarded by, at best, incompetents and, at worst, agents chosen because they could be easily corrupted.
He picked up the Bible he’d found in the bookcase of his room, and flipping through it he found Ecclesiastes. He was curious about the lyrics of that Pete Seeger song.
Out the window he saw lights on at the Gamache home and imagined them sitting by the fireplace, reading.
To everything there is a season, he read.
And across the village green, at Clara’s place, there was a single light.
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
He saw the three tall spires of the pines swaying slightly in the autumn breeze. He saw two dark figures leave the bistro.
One was tall, stooped. The other had a cane and was cradling something to her chest.
The two walked slowly across the village green, past the bench, past the pond, past the trees.
As he watched, Jean-Guy saw Monsieur Béliveau accompany Ruth up to her front door. But then the grocer did something almost unheard of. He went inside.
It was getting late, but Beauvoir wasn’t tired.