Louise Penny: Bury Your Dead

Perhaps, he thought, this was a mistake.

But the storm was what he needed, wanted. Something loud, dramatic, challenging. Something that could blot out all thought, white them out.

The two struggled up the street, walking in the middle of the deserted roads. Not even snow plows were out. It was futile to try to clear snow in the middle of a blizzard.

It felt as though the city was theirs, as though an evacuation notice had sounded and Gamache and Henri had slept through it. They were all alone.

Up Ste-Ursule they trekked, past the convent where Général Montcalm had died. To rue St-Louis, then through the arched gate. The storm, if possible, was even worse outside old Quebec City. With no walls to stop it, the wind gathered speed and snow and slammed into trees, parked cars, buildings, plastering itself against whatever it hit. Including the Chief Inspector.

He didn’t care. He felt the cold hard flakes hit his coat, his hat, his face. And he heard it pelting into him. It was almost deafening.

“I love storms,” Morin said. “Any kind of storm. Nothing like sitting in a screen porch in summer in the middle of a thunderstorm. But my favorite are blizzards, as long as I don’t have to drive. If everyone’s safe at home, then bring it on.”

“Do you ever go out in them?” Gamache asked.

“All the time, even if it’s just to stand there. I love it. Don’t know why, maybe it’s the drama. Then to come back in and have a hot chocolate in front of the fire. Doesn’t get any better.”

Gamache trudged forward, his head down, looking at his feet as he plowed his way slowly through the knee-high drifts. Excited, Henri leapt up and down in the trail made by Gamache.

They made slow progress but finally found themselves in the park. Lifting his head the Chief was briefly blinded by the snow, then squinting he could just make out the shapes of ghostly trees reeling against the wind.

The Plains of Abraham.

Gamache looked behind and noticed his boot prints had filled in, disappearing almost as quickly as he made them. He wasn’t lost, not yet, but he knew he could be if he went too far.

Henri abruptly stopped his dancing and stood still, then he started to growl and slunk behind Gamache’s legs.

This was a sure sign nothing was there.

“Let’s go,” said Gamache. He turned and came face-to-face with someone else. A tall figure in a dark parka also plastered with snow. His head was covered in a hood. He stood quietly a few feet from the Chief.

“Chief Inspector Gamache,” the figure spoke, his voice clear and English.

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t expected to find you here.”

“I hadn’t expected to find you either,” Gamache shouted, struggling to make himself heard above the howling wind.

“Were you looking?” the man asked.

Gamache paused. “Not until tomorrow. I was hoping to speak to you tomorrow.”

“I thought so.”

“Is that why you’re here now?”

There was no answer. The dark figure just stood there. Henri, emboldened, crept forward. “Henri,” Gamache snapped. “Viens ici.” And the dog trotted to his master’s side.

“The storm seemed fortuitous,” said the man. “It makes it easier, somehow.”

“We need to talk,” said Gamache.

“Why?”

“I need to talk. Please.”

Now it was the man’s turn to pause. Then he indicated a building, a round stone turret built on the knoll, like a very small fortress. The two men and one dog trudged up the slight hill to the building and trying the door Gamache was a bit surprised to find it unlocked, but once inside he knew why.

There was nothing to steal. It was simply an empty, round, stone hut.

The Chief flicked a switch, and an exposed light bulb overhead came on. Gamache watched as his companion lowered his hood.

“I didn’t expect to find anyone out in this storm.” Tom Hancock whacked his snow-caked hat against his leg. “I love walking in storms.”

Gamache raised his head and stared at the young minister. It was almost exactly what Agent Morin had said.

Looking round he noticed there were no seats but he indicated the floor and both men sat, making themselves comfortable against the thick stone walls.

They were silent for a moment. Inside, without a window, without an opening, they could have been anywhere, anytime. It could have been two hundred years earlier, and outside not a storm but a battle.

“I saw the video,” Tom Hancock said. His cheeks were brilliant red and his face wet with melted snow. Gamache suspected he looked the same only, perhaps, not quite so young and vital.

“So did I.”

“Terrible,” said Hancock. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It wasn’t quite as it looked, you know. I—” Gamache had to stop.

“You?”

“It made me look heroic and I wasn’t. It was my fault they died.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I made mistakes. I didn’t see the magnitude of what was happening until it was almost too late. And even then I made mistakes.”

“How so?”

Gamache looked at the young man. The minister. Who cared so much for hurt souls. He was a good listener, Gamache realized. It was a rare quality, a precious quality.

He took a deep breath. It smelled musky in there, as though the air wasn’t meant to be breathed, wasn’t meant to sustain life.

Then Gamache told this young minister everything. About the kidnapping and the long and patient plot. Hidden inside their own hubris, their certainty that advance technology would uncover any threat.

They’d been wrong.

Their attackers were clever. Adaptable.

“I’ve since discovered that security people call it an ‘asymmetrical approach,’ ” Gamache smiled. “Makes it sound geometric. Logical. And I guess in some ways it was. Too logical, certainly too simple for the likes of us. The plotters wanted to destroy the La Grande dam, and how would they do it? Not with a nuclear bomb, not with cleverly hidden devices. Not by infiltrating the security services or using telecommunications or anything that left a signature that could be found and traced. They did it by working where they knew we wouldn’t look.”

“And where was that?”

“In the past. They knew they could never compete with us when it came to modern technology, so they kept it simple. So simple it was invisible to us. They relied on our hubris, our certainty that state-of-the-art technology would protect us.”

The two men’s voices were low, like conspirators, or storytellers. It felt as it must have millennia ago, when people sat together across fires and told tales.

“What was their plan?”

“Two truck bombs. And two young men willing to drive them. Cree men.”

Tom Hancock, who had been bending forward toward the story and the storyteller, leaned slowly away. He felt his back against the cold stone wall. A wall built before the Cree knew of the disaster approaching. A disaster they would even assist, guiding the Europeans to the waterways. Helping them collect the pelts.

Too late, the Cree had realized they’d made a terrible mistake.

And now, hundreds of years later some of their descendents had agreed to drive huge trucks filled with explosives along a perfectly paved ribbon of road through a forest that had once been theirs. Toward a dam thirty stories high.

They would destroy it. And themselves. Their families. Their villages. The forests, the animals. The gods. All gone. They would unleash a torrent that would sweep it all away.

In the hopes that finally someone would hear their calls for help.

“That’s what they were told, anyway,” said the Chief, suddenly weary, wishing now he could sleep.

“What happened?” whispered Tom Hancock.