All the Devils Are Here(71)

When he’d gotten home with the provisions, he’d gone to take off his coat, only to remember at the last minute that he had something in his pocket.

“This’s for you,” he said, handing Reine-Marie the wax paper filled with pain au citron crumbs. “From Madame Faubourg.”

She took it with a smile.

He longed to talk with her. To just be with her, quietly. To sink into an armchair, with a cup of tea, and go over the events of their day since he’d last seen her. To hear about her day and tell her about his.

About the edited security video.

The mounting evidence that Stephen had discovered something about GHS and its funicular project in Luxembourg.

And then there were the records and photograph Commander Fontaine had produced, throwing suspicion on Stephen during the war.

But he only had time for a quick shower and change of clothes before the Dussaults arrived.

If anyone could get at the truth of those documents from the archives, it was Reine-Marie. Which was why he’d cut off discussion of her particular skill set. Better if the Prefect didn’t realize just how good Reine-Marie really was.

He hoped that Claude, his old friend, wasn’t involved. But if ever there was a time for caution, it was now.

For her part, Reine-Marie was equally anxious to tell Armand what she’d heard from Annie. And about the box hidden in their dresser drawer.

But first, she had to know if she was right.

Annie had gone to bed, and Honoré was tucked in and fast asleep.

Jean-Guy lingered in the doorway, looking at the boy sleeping so soundly.

Then his eyes drifted to the crib. With the mobile over it that he’d installed. Winged unicorns and stars and rainbows would dance over his daughter’s head, while it played Brahms’s Lullaby.

There was the comfortable chair in the corner, for Annie to nurse. And where Jean-Guy imagined holding their daughter and singing the songs his own mother had sung to him.

Les berceuses québécoises.

“It snows on the wood and on the river,” Jean-Guy sang softly to the empty crib. “A little one, just like you, we will deliver. It is a mystery.”

He left the bedroom door open a crack and returned to the living room. Imagining the soft snow that would soon be falling on the forests and the near-frozen rivers. Back home.

It is a mystery, he hummed.

What Annie had told him was deeply disturbing, though he tried not to overinterpret.

Instead, after checking out the window yet again and muttering, “Fucking flics,” he sat at his computer. There was a message from Isabelle Lacoste, back in Montréal.

They were cleaning up the blurry video, in hopes of making more sense of the emails he’d recorded.

She’d also sent the plans for the Luxembourg funicular to their contact at the école polytechnique, to see if anything was off.

Beauvoir couldn’t bring himself to believe that Carole Gossette was involved. Nor did he really believe that GHS was the culprit. It still looked to him like they were being set up.

But he was also beginning to realize that he might not know as much about GHS as he’d thought.

He started a search. Finally, after digging and digging and finding nothing beyond what he already knew about his company, he changed course and tried something else.

And there, in an article by Agence France-Presse, he found it.

Printed in an obscure American paramilitary magazine several years earlier was a small piece not on GHS Engineering, but on its president, Eugénie Roquebrune.

Accompanying the item was a studio photo of an elegant middle-aged woman. The telling detail about the woman wasn’t her intelligent eyes or her warm smile. It was her hair. It was gray, almost white.

Beauvoir was beginning to understand that this was the ultimate power move by a female executive in Paris.

It signaled she did not need to impress anyone. Eugénie Roquebrune could be, would be, herself.

The article said that she ran a corporation with engineering projects around the world. But the point of the article was that, because of global unrest, they’d just bought a boutique security and intelligence firm. Which was recruiting.

SecurForte.

His eyes widened. Wasn’t that the one George V used? And the one that cop mentioned?

Jean-Guy stared at the insignia on the screen. He recognized the design. He’d seen it on the uniform of the guard Loiselle.

The emblem was unmistakable because it was unusual. It was delicate, even pretty, and looked like a snowflake.

It wasn’t the sort of macho, aggressive insignia you’d expect with a private security contractor. Screaming eagles. Pouncing panthers. A death’s-head skull.

This was the logo equivalent of the CEO’s hair. The message being, SecurForte was too powerful to need to impress.

Besides, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who’d grown up in Québec winters, knew that a snowflake might look harmless, but it was a harbinger, a warning, of worse to come. The snowflake-like emblem of SecurForte was in fact quietly terrifying. Mostly because it wasn’t trying to terrify.

Was GHS using its security company to gain access to competitors’ files and projects?

What corporations, what hotels, restaurants, clubs, might it work for? What information could it collect, both professional and personal?

Is that what Stephen and Plessner had discovered? A vast network of industrial espionage? Even blackmail?