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“I told her.”

Now it was Nichol’s turn to stare, but Chief Inspector Gamache didn’t drop his eyes. He held hers until she finally found her voice.

“You told her? You blew my cover? You shit-head.”

“Agent Nichol—” Beauvoir began.

“This’s between Gamache and me, so fuck off.”

Gamache had his hand up and once again the room fell silent, though the air sizzled.

“Agent Nichol has a right to be angry,” he finally said. “And to express it, though you do not”—he stared at her—“have the right to disrespect your superiors.”

“Respect? You expect respect? You betrayed me. I trusted you to keep me safe.”

“You were, are, right to trust me.”

Slowly, slowly the mulish scowl on Yvette Nichol’s face disappeared, and she smiled. “My God, you sly dog—”

“Nichol…,” Beauvoir warned.

“You used me,” she said to Gamache. “You both used me. Chief Inspector Tardiff couldn’t risk communicating directly with you, so she made sure I overheard the conversation. She could have gone somewhere private to have it, but chose to speak to Moretti in her office, with the door open. Where I could overhear. She wanted me to. And she wanted me to tell you. Does this mean she’s working for us?”

“I think it does,” said Gamache, and saw Nichol light up. He also saw the look on Beauvoir and Lacoste’s faces. Who’d heard what he really said.

He thought she was working with them. Thought. But wasn’t sure.

At that moment Charles’s laptop came alive. Still wearing gloves, Lacoste hit a key at random and a box asking for a password appeared. No big surprise, but a disappointment. They’d hoped he’d disabled it.

“He must think we’d know it,” said Isabelle.

“Or that someone close to him would find it and be able to guess,” said Beauvoir.

“Or that we could guess,” said Gamache. He looked at Nichol and pointed to the chair in front of the laptop.

Isabelle and Jean-Guy were accomplished on computers, but few knew more about them than Yvette Nichol. While still a new agent, she’d been assigned, as punishment for insubordination, to the data center in the basement of Sûreté headquarters. It was meant to keep her out of trouble. But once there she’d filled the tedium by learning everything there was to know about how their network functioned. About dark sites. About cybersecurity and lack of security. About data retrieval.

Gamache had called on her services once before when in a crisis. And now he needed them again.

“Figure out the password.”

“You say that like it’s easy.” But no one was listening to her anymore.

While she did that, Gamache put in a call to the penitentiary warning them to be alert to any threat to Marcus Lauzon, but to be discreet about it. Then he joined Jean-Guy and Isabelle in the living room, where Reine-Marie had lit the fire.

“Tell us about your meeting with General Whitehead.”

“‘FEDS’ stands for Fire Event Detection Suite. It’s a new technology created by NASA after the megafires. It predicts where ash will go.”

“Why would that be important?” asked Lacoste. “It’s good to know, I agree, but still, it’s not much use, is it? I guess you could warn the cities and people, but you couldn’t stop it, could you?”

“I was confused too and asked General Whitehead. That’s when things got weird. He said that FEDS is predictive—”

“We got that,” said Lacoste.

“—and he asked what happens if someone can predict the future.”

“They’re put in the asylum?” asked Isabelle.