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“I’m glad you didn’t. Please keep this between ourselves.” Gamache held the man’s eyes and the usher nodded.

“Absolument.”

“And make sure we’re not disturbed, please.” He held out a fifty-dollar bill.

“Ce n’est pas nécessaire, patron, mais merci.” The usher waved away the offering with a smile, handed Gamache a key, then closed the door. Armand gave the key to Lacoste, who locked the door.

Grabbing some chairs, they sat in a circle. The play could just be heard through the door.

“All right, Bert, what the hell did you mean that the attack had already started? How? Where? We need facts. Evidence. Not rumors. Not guesses.”

“What happens, Armand, when the water runs out?”

Armand sighed. “For God’s sake, we’ve been through that.”

“Have we?” Whitehead snapped, suddenly annoyed. “Think. Really think.”

“This isn’t a game, just tell us.”

“You have all the information you need, you’re just not focusing, not adding it up right.”

“Then add it up for me!” Gamache had reached the end of his very long tether. His anger was breaking free. It was something Beauvoir and Lacoste had rarely seen.

Just then Armand’s phone buzzed. In his frustration he almost tossed it across the room. But he glanced at it. A brief message from Agent Fontaine.

Shona Dorion still here at AQB.

“Damn,” Gamache muttered. Realizing he was perilously close to the edge, he took a deep breath and put the phone back in his pocket. Then changed his mind. He couldn’t let his annoyance get the better of him. “Pardon.”

Stepping away for a moment, he placed a call. This time she answered.

“I was about to write you,” said Shona. “You were wrong.”

There was no denying the satisfaction in her voice.

“I don’t care. You need to get out of AQB.” He didn’t tell her about the mob connection they’d discovered. That would almost certainly convince her to stay. “I’m not kidding.”

“Screw you. You’re not the boss of me. Do you want to know where you fucked up or not?”

Lyrics were sliding under the door between the library and the opera house.

Jeffrey made a virtue out of cowardice and fear,

He was the first to go on sick leave and the last to volunteer.

He was running from a fight when they attacked him from the rear.

And he never got out alive, non. He didn’t survive.

Isabelle’s brows drew together. It was eerily like her conversation earlier that day with Jeanne Caron, about Frederick Castonguay. Who made a virtue out of cowardice and fear. He never got out of that forest alive. Non. He didn’t survive.

Off to the side, Gamache was still on the phone.

“All right. Tell me but be quick about it.”

“Those numbers and symbols on the map? The ones you told me to ignore because you’d figured out they’re passwords?”

“Oui. And they are.”