Page 196 of The Grey Wolf
“Petrie. The Mountie?” Armand’s mind was racing. He had to stall, had to give Beauvoir and Lagacé time to shut down the plant. “Not Diane’s brother.”
“No. But you worked that out too.” Lavigne nodded to one of his people, who came forward and reached out to pat Gamache down.
Armand’s arm lashed out, hitting the man squarely in the face and dropping him. Then he lunged for Lavigne, but was tackled before he got there. He twisted at the last minute, desperate not to fall on the container in his pocket and burst it open. As he hit the ground, he was lifted up again by a boot to his side.
He gasped in pain and lay still.
“On your knees,” Lavigne barked. “Get on your fucking knees.”
Gamache braced for another blow and moved his elbow into his side, to protect what was in his pocket.
Time, time. He needed time. Even seconds would count. He stayed limp.
“What do we do?”
“For God’s sake, figure out how to shut down the plant.”
“I told you, I can’t. But I think I got the security cameras up.”
As Beauvoir looked at the bank of monitors, they sprang to life, the images rotating from camera to camera. No sign of Gamache.
“There must be a work-around. Something. Here.” He offered her the gun he’d taken from the “guard.” “Use it when the time comes.”
But she held up her hands. “I’m not going to take it. I won’t use a gun.”
He’d noticed the white rose pin on her sweatshirt and knew what it meant. It was a symbol of the fourteen young women who’d been murdered at Montréal’s École Polytechnique. The engineering school. The gunman had killed them because they were women. Because they dared believe they belonged in a “man’s profession.” Dared believe they were equal to men.
He’d murdered them for daring.
Canada’s strict gun laws came out of that femicide. And now he was handing a gun to a young female engineer, a grad of the École, and asking her to use it.
“You must.”
“I won’t.”
He placed it on the console. “You will when the time comes.”
“Where’re you going?”
He was heading for the door, to find Gamache, to get to Pump Two, but before he reached it, there was a pounding on the door. The attackers were already there. There was no way out now.
Beauvoir backed up.
Manon’s eyes were wide. “The shit.”
“There’s more than one.”
“No, no, no. Five years ago there was a major spill of waste into Lac-Saint-Louis, one of the sources of drinking water. It was a mess, an environmental—”
“What? Are you kidding me? Are we chatting now?”
His eyes went from Manon to the monitors. Still no Gamache.
“No, no. Listen. Since then they’ve installed emergency measures”—she was talking quickly, her words running into each other—“to prevent a repeat. But also, unique to this plant, if the other measures failed and a spill of wastewater was about to happen—”
“It would shut down the plant?”
“Automatically.”
