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As they strolled down aisles lined with pumpkins and leering jack-o’-lanterns, inhaling the scent of fresh produce and the musky undercurrent of incipient rot, Evelyn Tardiff, the head of the Sûreté’s Organized Crime division, told Joseph Moretti, the head of the Montréal mafia, everything she knew about her friend and colleague Armand Gamache. The head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec. The one she should have had killed.

Back at Sûreté headquarters, Agent Yvette Nichol sat at her desk just outside Chief Inspector Tardiff’s office and thought for a long moment. Then she typed a text over Signal, the encoded messenger.

Armand Gamache’s phone vibrated. Taking it out, he read the message.

“Is that Isabelle?” asked Jean-Guy. “Tell her I want the raspberry jelly doughnuts this time.”

Armand smiled. “Raspberry it is.”

“Oh, and a double double.”

“Goes without saying, but I will anyway.”

He typed out a reply, then went back to contemplating the map.

Moretti checked the message that had just come in on his phone.

“Anything important?” asked Chief Inspector Tardiff, studying him.

“Nothing for you to worry about, Evelyn,” he said.

But she was always worried now.

CHAPTER 4

The three of them sat in plastic garden chairs all in a row in the basement of St. Thomas’s Church and stared at the map.

Raspberry jelly squirted from Jean-Guy’s doughnut, and Armand absently handed him yet another napkin.

Isabelle went to the map and turned toward Armand. To help him out, she also mimed. It was intentionally helpful, and unintentionally funny.

“We know what these mean, patron.” She swept her right arm, with unnecessary exaggeration, over certain lakes, like a weather forecaster on MétéoMédia demonstrating an incoming storm system.

Gamache nodded, trying not to smile.

“The numbers are dates when Charles Langlois visited the lakes,” she continued, “but he also wrote down those approval numbers.”

“The ones given by Marcus Lauzon to foreign buyers.”

The former Deputy Prime Minister, as it turned out, wasn’t just a terrorist; he was also a climate criminal, allowing certain industries to exceed the pollution limit by thirty times.

Chief Inspector Gamache had taken great personal pleasure in watching Marcus Lauzon being led off in cuffs. As he’d stood in the crowd on Parliament Hill, Armand had unconsciously rubbed his wrists where the zip ties had bitten into his flesh as he’d knelt on the concrete floor of the water-treatment plant, waiting to be executed. On the word of this man. The former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. A man poised to become the nation’s next leader.

Armand could still feel the meaty hand of the hitman shoving his head forward. Then the muzzle of the gun pressed into the base of his skull.

He’d closed his eyes.

We wait. We wait.

As he waited, Armand repeated one thing over and over: Reine-Marie. Reine-Maire.

Reine—

Lauzon’s accomplice pulled the trigger.

Armand had survived thanks to an unlikely intervention, and lived to stand in the crowd watching as Lauzon was led away. The Chief Inspector had been offered special dispensation to arrest and escort the man himself, but he preferred to stand in the crowd, surrounded by the men and women whom the former Deputy Prime Minister had tried to kill in exchange for unlimited power.

Lauzon was far from the first politician whose reins of power were around the necks of their citizenry.