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She hit play, and Gamache watched as a piece of metal shot through a cantaloupe and slammed into a metal sheet.

“Here’s another one.”

It showed a grown man—he looked like a weight lifter—trying to separate two steel rods stuck together.

“Can you go back to the other video?” After rewatching it, he said, “A neodymium magnet did that?”

“Yes, and a small one.”

“Can it be used as a weapon?” It sure looked like that shard would pass through a human body.

“It doesn’t say. In an earlier search I didn’t find any reference to rare earth minerals as weapons, but they might’ve found a new use. Listen to this,” Séverine read, “a neodymium magnet can lift a thousand times its own weight.”

“But it also says here,” Gamache was reading off her phone, “that there’s a problem with neodymium.”

“More like a caveat. When heated or frozen, it breaks down. And if under stress, it can shatter.”

“So it’s unstable?”

“Not if it’s used properly.”

“And what would those uses be?” asked Gamache.

She scrolled down. “Microphones, loudspeakers, computer hard drives. All the things we already know.”

“You mentioned cutting-edge telecommunications earlier. That’s exactly the sort of investment Stephen would notice.”

Gamache leaned back in the comfortable chair, staring at the small screen. It didn’t make sense. Nothing they’d discovered was, as far as he could tell, unethical, never mind illegal.

So why the secrecy? What were they hiding?

From what they could tell, GHS was mining the rare earth element, then shipping the raw ore to refineries. And then?

He took off his glasses and narrowed his eyes. “Can you go back to that second video?”

She did, and this time played it all the way through. The strongman finally managed to separate the bars, after a struggle that clearly left him embarrassed.

“The nickels,” Gamache said.

“Pardon?” asked Madame Arbour.

His irises were moving, as though he was watching a film no one else could see.

Then he looked at his watch.

Eight ten. Almost time to make his way to Place de la Concorde and his meeting with Claude Dussault. He had one stop to make first.

But what to do with Séverine Arbour?

Take her with him, or leave her here in the Lutetia?

If she came with him and she turned out to be a spy planted in their midst, he’d be putting them all at risk. But if she wasn’t a spy and he left her in the bar, something awful might happen to her.

There was, Chief Inspector Gamache knew as he stood up, no decision to be made.

“Come with me, please.”

More than one set of eyes watched them leave bar Joséphine.