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It all happened in less time than it took to gasp. For a veteran of combat like Whitehead there was no escaping what this meant. The combination of the look on the President’s face and the familiar sound behind him made the conclusion inescapable.

He isn’t alone in his alarm. Chief Petty Officer Flores is also alerted. He begins to come around the dining table just as the General reaches for his chair to use as a weapon, but there’s no time. The valet behind him shoots.

The force of the bullets lifts Whitehead off his feet. Then he drops. Shot in the chest. President O’Rourke pushes back in her chair, in shock.

Flores, reacting quickly, leaps forward and tackles the first valet. Disarming him. He turns and sees the other valet in the pantry, armed and aiming. And firing.

“He misses?” said Shona. “How can he miss?”

Gamache has again frozen the video.

“He doesn’t miss,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “He hits his target.”

“But he missed the President and even missed Flores. He got the other guy, the one who shot the General. Weren’t they in this together?”

“That’s who he meant to kill,” said Gamache, his face grim. The video advances.

The valet now turns his weapon on Flores, but the Chief Petty Officer has grabbed the gun off the floor and gets off a round. The valet falls.

Flores looks over and sees the President is uninjured, then scrambles to the General, bending over him.

At that moment, the guards arrive. Thinking Flores is the assassin, they’re about to shoot when President O’Rourke moves quickly, shielding him with her body.

The three of them watched for another minute before Armand again paused the video.

Then, without a word, he went back, and they watched over and over, the valet aiming and firing. And hitting Whitehead.

What do you make of this? Sherry Caufield had written. It was now clear what “this” was. Not the entire video, but that instant.

“Does it seem to you, patron…”

“That the shooter wasn’t aiming at the President,” said Gamache.

“His target was General Whitehead.” Isabelle Lacoste turned to Gamache. “Why?”

Gamache thought for a moment, but there was only one possible reason. As disconcerting as it was.

“Because they couldn’t allow him to speak to the President.”

Isabelle’s face opened in sudden realization. “To tell her what we talked about at the Haskell Opera House. Jesus.”

“I think so. Every conversation would be recorded. There’d be a record of what he told her, but also what he asked her. About the plan.”

“But how would they know? We just met him last night. And it was just us.”

While Gamache wrote back to Sherry Caufield in London—Whitehead was the target. What do you know?—Isabelle stared behind him at an old oil painting on the wall. It showed skaters on the Rideau Canal. They were in Victorian garb. The rosy-cheeked women in long flowing dresses and fur muffs, the men in heavy coats and hats. All were smiling, enjoying a day out.

She wished she could crawl into the painting and leave all this behind. Instead, she turned back to Gamache.

“What Nichol found. The link. That was what General Whitehead wanted to tell us last night.”

“But he needed his President’s permission. I think so.”

Bert obviously realized the danger this document posed and wanted to warn them. But too late.

“The valet killed his own co-conspirator,” said Shona. “Wouldn’t you have thought he’d kill the President first?”

“If they wanted to kill President O’Rourke, she’d be dead,” said Gamache.