The Nature Of The Beast Part 15

She almost laughed, but didn't. "That's why I'm calling you. We don't know. And this is no ordinary missile launcher. As I said, it's ma.s.sive."

"Well, yes, they are," he said. "Are you sure that's what it is? Maybe it's some farm tool, or logging equipment."

"I can send you a few pictures of it."

"If you'd like." His interest was waning.

He gave her his secure email and she knew when they'd arrived by the whispered "Merde" down the phone line.

There was silence as he examined them.

"Is that a person standing next to it?" Langelier asked, when he'd regained polite speech.

"Oui."

"Tabernac," he swore. "Are you sure?"

"I took the photograph myself this afternoon. It is a missile launcher, non? Not a milking machine?"

"Oui." He sounded distracted, lost in thought. "I don't know what to tell you, Chief Inspector. It's not like anything I've seen before. Frankly, while it's huge, it looks like an antique, something that might've been used in the Second World War."

"Could it be from then? Maybe something put there for defense and abandoned?"

"We don't just leave weapons scattered about in the woods," he said. "And the defenses were out to sea, not pointing inland. Does it work?"

"We don't know that either. That's why I'm calling you. We need help a.s.sessing this."

"Are there missiles with it?" he asked. "Is the weapon armed?"

"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 s.p.a.cious 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 Montreal. The local Srete 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 Srete Academy has them for three years. That means these two, and everyone in their cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s of them, he thought, opening the window and feeling the cool breeze. Several cla.s.ses of them. Scattered throughout the Srete. 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 Beliveau 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.

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

He called home and spoke to Annie. They discussed buying a home, someplace with a backyard, close to schools and a park. And then they just chatted about their day. He lay on the familiar bed in the B and B and knew she was lying on their bed, her feet up.

He could hear sleep in her voice and, reluctantly, he wished her bonne nuit, and hung up.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

His hand lingered on the receiver, and he thought about Laurent. And the Lepages. And what it must be like to have a child and then lose that child.

Putting on his dressing gown, he went downstairs and plugged his laptop into the phone lines.

He was still there when the lights went out at the bistro. He was still there when Olivier and Gabri arrived back. He was still there when every other home in Three Pines went dark, and every other person was asleep.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir was there, his face bathed in the light from his laptop, until he found what he was looking for. Only then did he lean back, stiff and weary, to stare at the name his search had run to ground.

He placed a phone call, left a message, and then climbed the stairs and crawled under the eiderdown. And slept. Curled around the little stuffed lion he took with him whenever he knew he'd be away from home.

A time of war, and a time of peace.

"Bed and Breakfast," the singsong voice answered the phone.

"Bonjour. My name's Rosenblatt. Michael Rosenblatt."

"Is it about a reservation?"

"No, you called me. Something about missiles."

Rosenblatt heard laughter down the line.

"I'm sorry," said the man. "You must have the wrong number. This is a bed and breakfast. No missiles here. Not even a missus."

That much Michael Rosenblatt had figured out.

"Desole," he said. "I must've taken the number down wrong."

He hung up and checked the number, shook his head and went back to preparing his breakfast. The call that morning from his former department at McGill University had been garbled. Something about a message left at the department the night before, and old missiles.

When the phone rang half an hour later, he picked it up and heard an unfamiliar voice.

"Is this Professor Rosenblatt?" the man asked in English with a Quebecois accent.

"Yes."

"My name's Jean-Guy Beauvoir. I'm an inspector with the Srete du Quebec. McGill University gave me your home number. I hope you don't mind."

"The Srete?" he asked.

"Yes." Beauvoir decided not to tell him he was with homicide. The professor already sounded rattled. And elderly. He didn't want another death on his hands.

"Are you the one who left the message at McGill?" Rosenblatt asked. "I tried to call you back but the man who answered said it was a bed and breakfast."

Beauvoir apologized.

He sounds nice, Rosenblatt thought. Disarming.

But the professor emeritus knew what that meant. The most dangerous people he knew were disarming. He immediately put up his defenses.

"My cell phone won't work where I am," Inspector Beauvoir said. "So I had to leave the main number. I'm at a B and B, investigating a crime. We've come across something in the woods. Something we can't explain."

"Really?" Rosenblatt felt his curiosity swarming over his defenses. "What?"

"It seems to be a big gun."

His curiosity skidded to a halt.

"I don't deal with guns," said Rosenblatt. "My field is, was, physics."

"Yes, I know. I read your paper on climate change and trajectory."

The professor leaned forward at his kitchen table.

"Really."

Beauvoir chose not to tell him that "stared at" might have been a better description than "read." Still, his Internet search the night before had yielded Rosenblatt's name, and this article, and Beauvoir had understood enough to know that this was a man who specialized in great big guns.

And he had one.

"I doubt I can help you," said Professor Rosenblatt. "That paper was written twenty years ago. I'm retired. If it's a gun you've found, you might want to get in touch with a gun club."

He heard soft laughter down the line.

"I'm afraid I haven't described it well," Beauvoir said. "I don't have the vocabulary, especially in English. Or in French, for that matter. I'm not talking about a shotgun or a handgun. This seems like a sort of missile launcher, but of a design I've never seen before. It's in the middle of the forest, in the Eastern Townships."

Professor Rosenblatt leaned back, as though shoved. "In the Townships?"

"Oui. It was hidden under camouflage netting and overgrown. It seems to be old," Beauvoir went on. "Probably been there for decades. Professor?"

The silence down the line made Jean-Guy Beauvoir wonder if it had gone dead. Or Rosenblatt had.

"I'm still here. Go on."