A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(27)

Bullpens on each floor were all but empty, only skeleton crews remaining to answer calls and continue the most urgent of investigations.

Everyone else had been reassigned to the flooding.

Gamache went directly to homicide and met briefly with Jean-Guy.

On entering the office, he saw Beauvoir on the phone, looking energized, in his element. Though the younger man would no doubt fiercely deny it, Jean-Guy Beauvoir liked nothing better than an emergency.

He hung up and raised his brows. “Been to a spa?”

“Spa?”

“Mud bath.”

“Oh, that.” Gamache looked down at his caked coat and slacks. He’d forgotten that he was covered in muck. “More like mud wrestling.”

“Who won?”

“Not me.” He took off his heavy coat and hung it on the hook at the back of the door. “I’ll tell you about it later. Oh, there is one thing I’d like to leave here with you. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“His name’s Fred. He might like some water.”

He left the bedraggled dog and the befuddled man staring at each other and hurried upstairs.



* * *



The meeting in Chief Superintendent Toussaint’s office was well under way by the time Gamache arrived.

He’d made a quick trip to the bathroom and tried to clean up, but the facilities and time didn’t allow for much more than a good scrub of his hands and face.

He looked in the mirror and ran his hands through his hair.

Then shook his head and gave up. There were far more important things to focus on.

“Chief Inspector.”

Chief Superintendent Madeleine Toussaint greeted her predecessor. If she noticed his unusually disheveled appearance, she didn’t show it. “You know everyone here.”

She was confident enough to invite her predecessor to the meeting and savvy enough about the realpolitik of power to highlight Gamache’s diminished status by emphasizing his new rank.

There were senior representatives from the Corps of Military Engineers, from the RCMP, from Hydro-Québec. Environment Canada’s chief meteorologist was there, as was the Deputy Premier of Québec.

All men and women Gamache knew well.

“I see some of the crap thrown at you today on Twitter has stuck,” said the senior officer from the RCMP, gesturing at Gamache’s clothing.

Gamache smiled. “Fortunately, it won’t stain.”

“But it does smell,” said the Mountie, with a wry smile. “Helluva first day back on the job, Armand.”

“It is that.”

“We were going over the situation,” said Toussaint, bristling slightly at the obvious familiarity and warmth between Gamache and the RCMP officer.

She waved him to the huge ordnance map of the province, where the others had gathered.

It didn’t just show where the problems were now, but also the knock-on effects farther downriver. And Québec had a lot of rivers, a lot of water.

Gamache had bent over many such maps, from his time occupying this very office. Ones that showed criminal activity and natural disasters.

But he’d never seen anything quite like this.

There were so many markings the map was almost unrecognizable.

“I was just about to show this,” said the chief meteorologist. She nodded to a colleague who was sitting at a laptop. After a few taps, another map of Québec appeared, projected on the wall. “These are our predictions of what we think could happen in the next twenty-four hours.”

An animation began playing, but nothing Disney would recognize.

It showed a natural disaster of epic scope. As rivers flowed into each other. As ice jams piled up. As tributaries broke their banks.

Whole islands disappeared.

Populated islands, Gamache knew.

His eyes widened, and his stomach twisted. Cities and towns that had stood for centuries, along the St. Lawrence in particular, were engulfed.

And then it stopped. And the water receded. Leaving mud and rubble.

Below the animation was a timeline. All this took just a day.

There was silence in the room. And finally the chief meteorologist spoke.

“Would you like to see it again?”

“Non,” they said in unison.

Non. It wasn’t necessary. Everyone in that room would go to their graves with those images playing.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” said the meteorologist. “If the dams burst. Unlikely, but possible.”

Gamache wanted to ask the Hydro rep the only question that mattered at the moment.

Will they hold?

But he refrained, knowing this was Toussaint’s meeting. Not wanting to undermine her.

While the others looked to him, he turned to her. And slowly they all looked at the new Chief Superintendent.

“Will they hold?” the Mountie finally asked.

The Hydro-Québec rep gave a curt nod. Her face grim. “They’re holding for now. The thaw hasn’t reached that far north yet. And when it does, we can open the floodgates and relieve the pressure.”

Gamache turned to Toussaint, who was clearly thinking.

Ask, he thought. Ask.

“Will it work?” she asked.

“If the gates don’t jam, and if the ice pressure on the structure isn’t too great, yes.”