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When he stopped, he brought out her phone, removed the SIM card, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Why did you do that?” she asked as he handed her phone back. “This’s useless without the SIM.”
“Is it?” he asked. “What about the tracking app?”
He could have neutralized that, too, but didn’t want to alert whoever was monitoring the phone that Arbour had been discovered.
She tried to rally. “What tracking? Has someone tampered with my phone?”
He raised his brows and stared at her.
She paled. “It’s not what it seems.”
“Really? Because it seems you’ve been passing information to the very people who’ve murdered their way across Paris. The very people we’ve been desperate to avoid. You’ve given them information that led to my son being picked up, beaten, and now held at gunpoint.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t mean—” Now she looked both panicked and confused.
“Tell me now, what do you know about GHS? What’ve you been hiding?”
“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”
“You’re lying.”
He took a step toward her and she cringed.
And Armand Gamache, a good, decent man, understood how good, decent people could resort to torture. If time was too short and the stakes too high.
Because he wanted to do that now. To do whatever was necessary to get the information out of her and save Daniel.
He was so shocked by this realization, so horrified by his temptation, that he took a step away. And clutched his hands behind his back, in case …
“Tell me what you know. Now.”
Séverine Arbour was looking at him, clearly terrified.
She thinks I’m going to beat the information out of her.
And yet, despite her terror, there was resolve. She would not talk. Not easily.
What could be so important that she’d endure torture rather than talk?
“Come with me,” he said and, taking her by the arm, they returned to the others.
“I’m sorry,” said Pinot. “There’s nothing.”
“We can’t find anything connecting any of these dates and stories,” said Judith de la Granger.
Pulling up a chair, Gamache sat down and scanned the pages, going from one date to the next to the …
Then he sat back, as though softly shoved. His mouth had dropped open slightly.
“What is it?” asked Madame de la Granger. She’d seen that look before when researchers finally found what they’d spent decades searching for. Usually some apparently trivial line in an obscure text that illuminated everything.
She leaned closer to read the story that had so struck the Chief Inspector.
It was about a plane crash in Ukraine a year and a half ago. She remembered reading about it. The passenger plane had hit the center of a town. Three hundred and thirty killed.
But Gamache was onto the next date and the next series of stories.
