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“Workman was right. This is too easy.”
“You consider what happened easy?” asked Isabelle, still in pain from the beating. She watched Shona walking with her mentor down the street. The young journalist’s torment all too obvious.
“I’m sorry,” said Armand. “I didn’t mean that. But Workman was right. Shona also said it. We should never have been able to find this.” He held up the document, then looked at Isabelle. “And we should never have been able to escape. They wanted us to. Why let Captain Pinsent go? I was so relieved to be out, and with the proof, I never really thought about it.”
“They made a mistake, that’s all. Were overconfident.” Though even as he said it, Jean-Guy heard the desperation in his voice.
He was tired and sore and desperate to get back to Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. To lose himself in the glory days of Les Habs, and not worry about the present or the future.
But in his heart, he knew the truth. “We were wrong.”
“I think so. I think we were set up. I think they relied on my willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to distrust Marcus Lauzon. My desire to believe he’s the Black Wolf.”
“But if he’s not?” said Isabelle. When he didn’t answer, she said it out loud. “It’s the Prime Minister? It’s Woodford after all?”
Armand looked down at the document he held. The document he was always supposed to hold. And use.
To arrest, yet again, the wrong person.
He met their eyes. “I think so.”
The next day Inspectors Beauvoir and Lacoste accompanied Chief Inspector Gamache to Ottawa, to answer questions about the role Marcus Lauzon had played in the attempted coup.
And Armand did. He looked the members of Parliament and senators in the face and lied. Over and over.
A week later they flew to Washington, where Armand was an honorary pallbearer at the state funeral of General Albert Whitehead.
After the private reception with the family, Armand and Reine-Marie, along with Jean-Guy and Isabelle, sat in the dim bar in the basement of the Hay-Adams hotel.
“To a man who had the courage to feed the grey wolf,” said Armand.
They lifted their Shirley Temples, with two cherries.
The next day Chief Inspector Gamache appeared before the private House committee that had been struck to investigate what had happened and to uncover just how deep the corruption went.
Once again Chief Inspector Gamache was grilled.
Once again he lied. Over and over.
Explaining that, yes, Marcus Lauzon was behind the plot and that as far as they knew, the American President was blameless, though others high up in the administration must have been involved.
No, he didn’t know who. And neither did Prime Minister Woodford. And Lauzon wasn’t talking. He was in solitary.
Gamache chose not to tell the former Deputy Prime Minister that they now knew he’d been telling the truth. That he’d been, once again, wrongly arrested. By Gamache. Armand couldn’t risk it getting out. Woodford had to believe they’d fallen for it.
Instead, the head of homicide for the Sûreté chose to keep a person he knew was not guilty in a hellhole of a prison. In a hellhole of despair.
It was the only way to put the PM at ease, and the best way to see that Marcus Lauzon would one day die of old age, in bed, instead of bleeding out on some disinfected tile floor. Still, Armand had prevailed on two of the men he’d arrested for especially gruesome murders, who were also in the prison within a prison, to watch over Marcus Lauzon.
In exchange, the head of homicide had agreed to watch over the convicts’ families, especially their children.
With Lauzon as safe as possible, Gamache and his people rushed to gather evidence against the Prime Minister before it was buried too deep.
They moved at a near-panicked pace, while appearing as calm as the ocean. All the while looking over their shoulders. Knowing they were being watched.
But they were not moving fast enough. In frustration Gamache and his people saw each promising lead evaporate. Evidence was disappearing, being destroyed, just before they got to it. It was a race against time. A race Armand feared they were losing.
Armand and Reine-Marie flew to the UK, apparently to go to his reunion at Cambridge, but actually to quietly meet Sherry Caufield. Over tea and scones in a small shop in the Suffolk village of Eye, Armand asked the head of UK counterintelligence to do her own investigation, since she might find what they could not.
