by Louise Penny
Neodymium.
And below that the letters XL.
He showed it to the others. “What does this mean?”
They crowded around.
“Neodymium is a rare earth element,” said Séverine Arbour.
“Extra large?” asked Daniel. “Oh, right, it’s—”
But a look from his father stopped him.
The message was from Xavier Loiselle. He’d managed to get into Carole Gossette’s files and find the water sample results.
“So he is on our side,” said Reine-Marie.
Though it looked like it, Armand wasn’t totally convinced. He’d used agents to infiltrate organizations, and part of the technique of a spy was to hand over legitimate information as proof they could be trusted.
What he did think was that this information, at least, was correct.
GHS Engineering had discovered neodymium in the abandoned mine.
“What’s it used for?” he asked Madame Arbour.
“Magnets.”
“Magnets?” repeated Jean-Guy. “Fridge magnets?”
The engineer stared at him.
“Yes,” said Madame Arbour. “People are being murdered in an epic battle for control of the fridge magnet empire. Look, magnets are used in all sorts of things, not just to stick hockey logos on your fridge.”
“A simple ‘no’…,” said Beauvoir.
Though it was true. He had several Montréal Canadiens up there.
“What else are they used for?” he asked.
“Computers, I think,” she said. “But there must be a lot of other things. I’m no expert.”
“We need to find out more about this neodymium,” said Armand.
“Shouldn’t be hard.” Séverine pulled out her phone.
“Non,” he said. “We need someplace more private.”
“Then I can go to the archives.”
Jean-Guy glanced at her. This was the second time she’d suggested that.
Why was she so determined to go there, and why was Gamache so determined she should not?
He thought he knew why.
If Madame Arbour was an infiltrator, she must not be there when they found out which board member sold their spot to Stephen.
They were close. So close. They couldn’t take any chances.
“No,” Gamache said to Madame Arbour. “I need you with me at the Lutetia, if you don’t mind.”
There was, as always, courtesy in his words, but their meaning was clear.
* * *
Allida Lenoir hung up the phone and turned to her wife. “Back to the mines.”
Far from a derogatory way to describe her work, the head archivist considered the miles and miles of files a gold mine. Filled with treasures, with adventure. The unknown waiting to be unearthed.
“I’m coming with you,” said Judith de la Granger.
As the Chief Librarian for France, Judith de la Granger knew, better than most, that the documents contained in the glorious old buildings were both fascinating and dangerous.
And this night had the makings of both.
Ten minutes later they were greeting Reine-Marie at the main gate.
“Hope you don’t mind my bringing Judith along,” said Madame Lenoir.
“God, no,” said Reine-Marie.
The Chief Librarian was legendary in Reine-Marie’s universe.
From an old aristocratic family, Judith de la Granger’s ancestors had owned, almost a millennium ago, the original château where the archives and museum now stood.
Slight, fine-boned, she radiated a fierce energy and intelligence. A lioness stuffed into a gerbil’s body.
“I hope you don’t mind my bringing my son-in-law,” said Reine-Marie, introducing Jean-Guy.
Reine-Marie explained that while he now worked in private industry in Paris, Jean-Guy had been a senior officer in homicide in the Sûreté du Québec.
As they made their way to the reading room, Reine-Marie followed Jean-Guy’s eyes out the window and saw what he was staring at.
A dark spot against the sunset. Like an astigmatism in the eye.
A drone.
* * *
The Banque Privée des Affaires, for security reasons since the recent terrorist attacks, did not encourage weekend visitors. And the guard was more than a little suspicious of a junior executive who urgently needed to get in at seven on a Sunday evening.
Even when, especially when, Daniel produced the JSPS card.
The guard looked at the card, then made a call.
“Can you come to the front desk please, patron. There’s someone here who has an ID in the name of Daniel Gamache. But he just gave me a card with someone else’s name. Yes, it is suspicious.”
“No—” Daniel began, then stopped when the guard put his hand up for him to be quiet.
A door opened and the supervisor came out. Not saying a word, he studied Daniel, then turned his attention to the card on the counter in front of the guard.
Picking it up, he looked at Daniel more closely, then, to the guard’s amazement, said, “Come with me.”
* * *
Séverine Arbour went over to the statue of Gustave Eiffel at the entrance to the Lutetia and was admiring this hero of France. A giant among engineers and innovators.
A man of vision, of courage, and of brute ambition.
While she studied the face of the great engineer, Gamache studied the faces of the hotel guests, to see if he recognized any from the annual reports. Reine-Marie had been right, of course. This was a rat’s nest.
At least one, probably more, of the people under that roof had been involved in the murder of Alexander Francis Plessner and the attack on Stephen.
They’d threatened, hounded, pursued, chased his family from their homes. All in an effort to make them go away.
And he wanted them to know it had not worked.
Far from going away, he’d come to them. For them.
“Madame Arbour?” he said, and together they walked down the long corridor, their footsteps echoing off the marble surfaces.
At bar Joséphine, they found a table against the wall and ordered drinks.
While Madame Arbour took a long sip of her red wine, Armand simply swirled his scotch, then put it back on the table.
“Recognize anyone?” he asked.
She looked around at the other patrons. Well-heeled, well-dressed. Mostly white, mostly French. Mostly older. They looked like them.
“No.”
But Gamache did. Over there, in a quiet corner, was the former head of the UN Security Council. She now sat on the GHS Engineering board. Joining her was another member of that board.
And there in the center of the room, holding court, was the head of a media conglomerate who also sat on the GHS board.
Loud and laughing, corpulent and confident, the man commanded attention.
Gamache continued to study the room. He’d become, through practice and necessity, very good at faces. He recognized most of the members of the board from news reports over the years. And their photographs in the annual report.
He suspected some, if not most, would have no idea that anything untoward was going on. They’d been flown to Paris on private jets, put up in a luxury hotel, were being pampered in advance of an annual rubber-stamp board meeting.
But some would know what was really happening. The question was, which ones? And which one had Stephen approached with a sackful of money?
As he looked around, not trying to conceal his interest, a few caught his eye and paused. Returning the stare of the distinguished stranger before turning away.
Yes, some in that room definitely knew what was going on.
He just wished he was one of them.
“I’ve never been to this hotel,” Séverine Arbour was saying. “I’d have expected it to feel different. Not so inviting.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, isn’t this where the Nazi interrogations happened?” She fixed him with a hard gaze
. “Seems appropriate.”
He raised his brows. “You think you’re here for an interrogation?”
“Aren’t I? Not torture, you’re far too civilized for that. But you are trying to work out whose side I’m on, isn’t that right?”
Armand smiled and tilted his head slightly.
She was smart. Clever. He’d have to be even more careful than he’d thought.
“My job has made me suspicious,” he admitted. “But it’s also taught me not to prejudge. I am curious that by your own admission you began to suspect something months ago, but hadn’t yet found the results of the water test. Something this Xavier Loiselle found in minutes.”
“I wasn’t initially looking in that direction,” said Madame Arbour. “As I told you, at first I thought it was something to do with building the plant. Contractors dragging it out. It’s only recently that I realized the issue isn’t the plant, but the mine.”
Gamache nodded and opened his hands. “That explains it then.”
“Listen—” She dropped her voice. “Beauvoir came to me, remember? Practically dragged me from my home. Believe me, I’d much rather be in my living room drinking wine and watching reruns of Call My Agent. I’m an engineer, not”—she waved her hands and looked around—“whatever this is.”
“Then why did you agree to help?”
“Honestly? If I’d known it was this bad, I’d never have answered the door. I was curious. I thought GHS was involved in some scam, not”—she dropped her voice still further—“murder.”
She was certainly stressed. Afraid. Perhaps because she knew her people were also in bar Joséphine. Watching, listening. And she knew what they were capable of.
Or perhaps because she’d woken up in her nice bed, in a nice neighborhood of Paris, expecting a nice quiet Sunday, and had instead been swept up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, then down into the bowels of the George V. Swept into another world. One where people killed other people. For reasons as yet obscure.
And now, instead of letting her go with the others to the relative safety of the Archives nationales, he’d brought her here. Exposing her to the very people she’d been trying so hard to avoid.
All good reasons to be afraid. But was she afraid of them, or him?
“Well, I am used to this.” He didn’t bother to drop his voice. “It’s what I’ve done, all day, every day. For decades. You find problems and solve them, I also find problems and solve them. It’s what we both do best.”
“Yeah, well, your problems kill people.”
“So do yours, I expect.” His thoughtful eyes held hers. And then he did drop his voice. “You’re doing fine.”
She lowered her eyes to her wine and took a deep breath in. A deep breath out.
This was making less and less sense. And she wondered if she should tell him. Everything.
“Now,” he said, his voice at a normal level again. “Neodymium?”
She hesitated for a moment, clearly considering her options. If she got up and walked out, he couldn’t stop her.
But Madame Arbour was smart enough to know there were no options left. She had to see this through.
“All I have is my phone,” she said. “Should I look it up? Suppose they’ve hacked it? That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? And aren’t they listening now?” She looked around.
“Probably. Don’t worry about your phone. If it’s all we have, then we have to use it.”
“You want them to know, don’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I see no way around it. Time they felt our warm breath on the back of their necks.”
“If we’re that close to them,” she said, bringing out her phone, “aren’t they that close to us?”
“Yes, but they always were. What’s changed is our position, not theirs. And they know it. What do you have?”
He put his reading glasses on and leaned close.
She’d entered the name of the rare earth element into a specialized site for engineers. And up popped the information.
* * *
“Nothing,” said Jean-Guy, throwing himself onto the back of the chair and staring at the screen.
They’d divided up the members of the board and were searching the databases, looking for anything that could point them to the one Stephen might have approached.
“You?” he asked the others.
From their terminals scattered down the long tables of the reading room, he heard mumbled, “Non. Nothing yet.”
And more tapping.
“I’m going to look up the dates from Stephen’s notes,” said Jean-Guy. “Maybe there’s something there.”
“What notes?” Allida Lenoir was sitting across from him and glanced at the piece of paper. “Agence France-Presse stories?”
Beauvoir smiled. “Non. AFP are the initials of the dead man. Alexander Francis Plessner.”
“Are you sure?” said the head archivist.
“Pretty sure, but if you want to try Agence France-Presse, be my guest.”
A few minutes later Madame Lenoir sighed. “Nothing. I put the dates into the wire service site and nothing unusual came up. A protest in Washington. European Union in turmoil. And the usual series of tragedies. Refugees fleeing brutal regimes and being turned back. A plane crash in the Urals. A bridge collapse in Spain. Shootings in two American cities.”
“No mention of GHS?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“No stories out of Patagonia or Luxembourg?”
“No.”
“Let me see that.”
Madame de la Granger had wandered over, and without waiting for him to give it to her, she snatched the scrap from his hand.
Bet she could catch a fly with chopsticks, thought Jean-Guy.
He got up and walked over to his mother-in-law. “Anything?”
“Not yet. No scandals to do with the board members,” said Reine-Marie. “No bankruptcies. No obvious need for money. No sudden big purchases. But I haven’t finished yet. You?”
But she already knew the answer. Then a thought occurred to her.
“Are there any board members with the initials AFP?” she asked, reaching for the report.
They began putting the names into the searches. Sure enough Annette Poppy, a former British Foreign Secretary, turned out to be Annette Forrester Poppy.
Jean-Guy looked at his watch. It was ten past seven.
“I know this man,” came the voice of the Chief Librarian over Jean-Guy’s shoulder.
Madame de la Granger was pointing to a member of the GHS Engineering board. “He’s the son of an old family friend. We were at the Sorbonne together.”
She moved her finger so they could read his name. Alain Pinot.
Alain Flaubert Pinot.
They stared at the photo of the middle-aged man. Thinning hair and fleshy face.
“His father owned newspapers,” said Madame de la Granger. “He asked if I’d tutor his son. As a favor, I agreed. What a waste of time.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Reine-Marie.
“Because Alain Pinot was as dumb as they come,” said the Chief Librarian. “If stupid was sand, he’d be half the Sahara.”
They looked at her.
“What? It’s true. This guy’s father knew I was into research. He hoped I could teach the kid how to track down information. Prepare him for a job at the newspapers. But all he was interested in was partying. And yet…”
They waited, as Madame de la Granger cast her mind back.
“I quite liked him. He was a couple of years younger than me, spoiled, entitled, thick but harmless. He had a poor brain but a good heart.” She looked again at the photo. “Just before he flunked out of the Sorbonne, his father had him transferred to another university, and I lost track of him.”
“Where to?” asked Beauvoir.
“I have no idea. Far away from the distractions of Paris is all I know.”
“Université de Montréal?” said Reine-Marie, looki
ng at Jean-Guy. She entered Alain Flaubert Pinot’s name into the archive database, and up came his biography. “Yes. Says here he studied in Montréal. But not at UdeM. McGill.”
Reine-Marie and Jean-Guy stared at each other.
An unruly young man sent far from home to study? It seemed more than likely his father would contact a friend in Montréal to watch over his idiot son.
Was Stephen Horowitz that family friend? Was this the connection?
They called up more information on this A. F. Pinot.
Married with three children.
Father died of cancer fifteen years ago.
Son took over the company and, against the wishes of his board, immediately expanded into cable, telecom, tech companies.
He’d bought low, after the tech bubble burst, and turned hundreds of millions into billions.
“Jesus, maybe the guy’s an idiot savant,” said Madame de la Granger. “Though I saw no evidence of the savant part.”
“There,” said Allida Lenoir, pointing to her screen. “Six years ago. Pinot’s company bought a controlling interest in—”
“Agence France-Presse,” said Reine-Marie, triumphant. “That must be it.”
Jean-Guy was shaking his head. “We still don’t have a connection between this guy and Stephen. We don’t know whether AFP in his notes means Alain Pinot, or Agence France-Presse, or Plessner, or someone else.”
“Something’s missing,” said Madame de la Granger. “Some link.”
“I’m going to write Mrs. McGillicuddy,” said Reine-Marie, “and find out if Stephen knew the Pinot family, and especially Alain Pinot.”
The four of them sat in individual pools of light, their fingers tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards, like the soft patter of feet, sneaking up on a killer.
* * *
Daniel stared at the screen, jotted some notes. Then he looked up another file. And made more notes.
He’d been at it for almost an hour, exploring avenues and dead ends. Eliminating possibilities, narrowing options. He’d started by trying to track down the numbered companies, with limited success.
Then he went into the sell and buy orders, the ones stored for execution Monday morning. There were thousands. Listed not by investor, but by investment.