Page 41 of The Grey Wolf
“Was Monsieur Langlois a fanatic?”
“No, that implies a sort of crazy.” Madame Chalifoux shot a warning look to the others. “But he was dedicated. He understood that fresh water was soon going to become more and more scarce as the climate changed. We all understand that.”
Beauvoir didn’t. As a father, he was very worried what sort of world his children would inherit. The shifting food supply. Forest fires, disease, famines, catastrophic floods. The wars that scarcity provoked. Those were the effects of climate change that kept him awake at night.
Water, so abundant in Canada, wasn’t one of them.
“Margaux,” said a young woman, whose face was blotchy and streaked with tears.
“Yes, Debs?”
“There’s a video…”
It was a risk, but Gamache had calculated it. How much to tell the Chief Superintendent. How to tell her. Armand watched closely, trying to read Toussaint’s expression.
“A collaborator?” she said when he stopped. She’d skipped right over the part about the break-in at his home and landed on the most important point for her. “You really think that’s what the young man was trying to tell you?”
“Not trying, he did.”
“Who?”
Armand raised his brows in some amusement. “Don’t you think I’d have led with that, if I knew?”
But his expression was such that the head of the Sûreté stared at him. Unsure.
And that’s what Gamache wanted.
Madeleine Toussaint, the Chief Superintendent, was nobody’s fool. Which was, maddeningly, why he’d backed her to take over the top job. She was whip-smart, a good administrator, an inspired leader. Both rational and intuitive, she’d be able to spot a fraud. She’d be able to tell if he was lying.
It didn’t help that she knew him well. But he also knew her.
He needed her off-balance. He needed this perceptive leader to believe him when he said he didn’t know. But also to have a sneaking suspicion that he did.
He also needed her to think that was the only reason Langlois had needed to speak to him. Nothing else.
“And who is this collaborator supposedly collaborating with?”
“I don’t know.” That at least was the truth.
He secretly, privately feared the Sûreté collaborator was the woman sitting across from him now.
Beauvoir had heard that a video had been posted and gone viral, but this was the first time he’d seen it.
It surprised him how upsetting it was. He’d been there, after all. Had seen it in person. But this was a different angle. Much more intimate.
He watched as the SUV grazed Armand, twisting him slightly as it raced by. He hadn’t realized how close it came. Within centimeters…
So close that Armand’s shoe had been torn from his foot.
Langlois’s body landed with a thud. Not even a bounce. Just like a sack of sand. His shoes had also come off on impact and tumbled along the road, finally coming to rest.
Somehow the sight of empty shoes lying on the ground seemed almost worse than the body. It often happened in explosions, and sometimes when people were shot by an especially high-caliber gun. They were blown off their feet and out of their shoes.
Very few survived to put them back on.
When the video ended, there was silence. It had cut off before the part where Jean-Guy picked up Armand’s shoe and handed it back to him.
Jean-Guy finally broke the silence in the room. “Did any of you ever visit Charles’s apartment?”
