All the Devils Are Here(130)
He had to get out of there.
He crawled forward to the doorway. The guard had stationed herself at the top of the marble stairs, and now he could see others.
Including one he recognized.
Xavier Loiselle. Cradling his assault rifle. And scanning the area.
For him.
Gamache peered into the room next door. It contained large exhibition boards with mariners’ maps. Extraordinary hand-drawn charts of the known world six hundred years earlier. The positions of land, and water, and dragons.
He heard boots on stairs. A small army on the march. Coming his way.
He had to act now, or never.
Bringing up a search engine on his phone, he put in S?reté, factory raid. When the vile video on YouTube appeared, he made sure the volume was on high.
Pressing play, he slid his phone along the polished floor, into the next room, and silently blessed winters in his tiny Québec village, shivering on the frozen lake as neighbors tried to teach him the subtle art of curling.
His phone, with one percent battery left, slid to the far end of the room and came to rest under a display case as the sound of shouts and gunfire filled the empty map room.
It reverberated off the marble walls and floors. Echoing, magnifying the sound of a terrible battle being fought amid the sea creatures and dragons, the Sirens and the demons.
The SecurForte guards converged on the room. Assault weapons raised, they entered in combat formation.
He didn’t wait to see what happened next. Taking off in the opposite direction, Gamache raced down the stairs, chased by the familiar gunfire. The familiar explosions licked at his heels. The familiar orders given. His orders. The hot breath on his neck was his own. His voice on the recording. Commanding his people forward. Deeper into the factory.
And then the familiar screams of agony. As his own agents were cut down. Like wraiths, they pursued Gamache. As they had, every day, for years.
He flung himself against the metal panic bar of the side door and flew out into the sunshine.
*
“Cease fire,” the leader commanded. “There’s no one here. It’s a recording. Bring it to me.”
Loiselle, on his belly, retrieved the phone. As he handed it over, he saw a man sprinting down the side of the chateau.
“There he is,” shouted Loiselle and, using the butt of his rifle, he broke the glass and started shooting.
Gamache didn’t swerve. Didn’t look back. He just kept running, even as the bullets struck the columns and walls and ground around him.
“Fuck, Loiselle, get him,” shouted his commander.
Gamache was at the huge wrought iron gates. Loiselle sighted him, but it was too late. Gamache had pushed through and, stumbling, he disappeared down rue des Archives.
“Well, you fucked that up,” said the commander, glaring at his foot soldier. “But at least we know where he’s headed. Better get there, and do it right this time.”
“Yessir.”
Loiselle looked down at the video, still playing on the phone in the commander’s hand.
He watched the familiar images, of Chief Inspector Gamache dragging his second-in-command across the factory floor to safety. After quickly staunching Beauvoir’s abdominal wound, Gamache bent and kissed him on the forehead, whispering to the man he feared was dying, “I love you.”
Then the phone died.
Who would rescue him, Xavier Loiselle wondered, if he was badly wounded?
None of them, he knew as he looked around.
Who, he wondered, would whisper to him in his final moments, I love you?
CHAPTER 41
You okay, man?” the taxi driver asked, glancing in his rearview mirror.
His passenger was twisted in his seat, staring out the back window and trying to catch his breath.
“Fine, fine,” said Gamache, in a sort of gasp, as he turned to the driver. “As fast as you can.”
It was 7:19. They’d threatened to kill Daniel at 7:30. Gamache had little doubt they meant it.
Of course, they’d kill them both once they got what they needed.
He clutched the dossier to him and deliberately slowed his breathing.
Hyperventilating and passing out rarely made things better.
Deep breath in. Hold. Long slow breath out.
They were in the narrow streets, clogged with Paris’s Monday morning rush hour. They had to get across the Seine, over ?le de la Cité, from the Third Arrondissement to the Seventh. From the Marais, all the way over to the far side of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
They were, he could see by the driver’s satnav, twelve minutes away. At this rate, it would be too late.
“I’ll give you all the money I have if you get me there before seven thirty.”
“Rush hour,” said the driver, then glanced down at the hand thrust between the seats clutching a fistful of euro notes.
The driver leaned on the horn and sped up.
Armand sat back and reached for his phone to call Reine-Marie, then remembered where it was.
“May I use your phone?”
“What? No. I need it for directions. You want to get there or not?”
Gamache tossed a hundred-euro note at the driver and said, “You have a second one. Give it to me.”
He was moments away from pulling the gun out of his coat pocket when the driver handed him his personal phone. “Okay, man, calm down.”