The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel (37 page)

“This isn’t a magic act, you know, monsieur,” said Rosenblatt, as serious as Gamache had ever seen him.

“And you’re not the magician?”

The professor pursed his lips, contemplating. “Do you suspect me of something?”

“What’s in Highwater?”

Now the lips went taut and a stillness came over Rosenblatt. Gamache could almost smell the man’s mind working. It smelled a bit like apple.

Rosenblatt smiled, more with resignation than humor.

“You know about that?”

“Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme went there shortly after seeing the gun,” Gamache explained. “We tracked their cell phones.”

Rosenblatt shook his head. “File clerks.”

“Well?” Gamache asked.

“Highwater was the site of the first Supergun,” said Michael Rosenblatt. He watched Gamache as he spoke. “You’re not surprised.”

Gamache was quiet, waiting to see what Rosenblatt would say, or do, next.

“You went there, didn’t you?” said the scientist, once again fitting the pieces together. “You already knew. So why ask me?”

But his companion remained silent, and once again Rosenblatt put it together.

“It was a test? You wanted to find out if I’d tell you the truth. How did you even know I knew?”

“The redacted pages,” said Armand at last. “You read them but didn’t mention the plural. The censors took out everything, except one reference. Superguns. Everyone else who read those pages saw it. I couldn’t believe you didn’t too. So why wouldn’t you point it out? There was only one answer. Because you already knew, and hoped I hadn’t seen it.”

“Why wouldn’t I want you to know?”

“That’s a good question. Why didn’t you tell us this as soon as you saw the gun in the woods? Didn’t you think it might be important for us to know there’d once been another one, close by?”

Michael Rosenblatt took off his glasses and rubbed his face, then he replaced his glasses and looked at Gamache.

“I actually thought it didn’t matter, but hearing you say it like that, I can see how it might seem suspicious. Not many knew about the other part of Project Babylon,” said Michael Rosenblatt. “The two halves were called Baby Babylon and Big Babylon.”

“Two halves?” asked Gamache. “Of a whole?”

“No, better to call them two parts, but not of a whole. One led to the other. The first was Baby Babylon, the smaller of the two.”

“The one in Highwater.”

“Yes. It was conceived by Gerald Bull through his Space Research Corporation. Baby Babylon was a sort of open secret, like a lot of products in the arms market. Secret enough to be enticing, but out there enough to attract interest.”

“And it did,” said Gamache. “Didn’t it?” he asked when Rosenblatt didn’t answer.

“Of a sort. Baby Babylon was met with ridicule. It was called ‘Baby’ but it was so huge, so ungainly, unlike anything else out there, that it was dismissed as the product of a mind as unstable as the weapon. A fantasist. No credible engineer or physicist thought it could be built. And, if it was, it couldn’t possibly work. Only another unstable mind would commission it.”

“Saddam Hussein,” said Gamache.

“Yes. The fact Saddam was interested just confirmed everyone’s suspicion that the idea was crazy.”

He turned his mug of warm apple cider around in a lazy circle.

“They were wrong,” said Gamache.

“Oh, no. They were right. Baby Babylon didn’t work. It was top-heavy, couldn’t sustain trajectory. With something like that, firing a missile into low orbit and having it travel tens of thousands of miles, if you’re off by one one-thousandth of a degree at launch, you wipe out Paris instead of Moscow on impact. Or Baghdad.”

“Or Bethlehem.”

Rosenblatt didn’t respond to that.

“How did they know it didn’t work?” asked Gamache.

“They fired it.”

Gamache didn’t, or couldn’t, hide his surprise.

“Not into the air,” Rosenblatt hurriedly assured him.

“Then where?” asked Gamache.

“Into the ground.”

Now Gamache looked, and was, confused.

“When you were there, did you happen to notice railway tracks?” the professor asked. “Not the Canadian National ones, but smaller, narrower?”

“Yes. I followed them up the hill.”

“Good. That’s how Bull did it. As with everything else about Project Babylon, it was brilliant in its simplicity. They couldn’t possibly test the missile launcher by actually launching a missile, so they put it on a flatbed on rails at the bottom of a hill and fired it into the ground.”

“What good would that do?” asked Gamache.

“The backward force,” said Rosenblatt. “They measured the degree of incline, the speed and distance traveled, and the depth and trajectory of the hole in the ground. It was so simple it was genius.”

“It doesn’t sound simple to me,” Gamache admitted. Rosenblatt had lost him at “degree of incline.” Gamache considered what he’d heard.

“Wouldn’t it make a lot of noise?” he asked. “So much for secrecy.”

“Yes,” agreed Rosenblatt. Gamache waited for more, but nothing more came.

“It didn’t work, you say?”

“They tried it a few times, apparently, but while the force could be corrected, they couldn’t solve the trajectory problem. Eventually they abandoned the site.”

That sounded like the end of the story, but Gamache knew it was really just the beginning. They weren’t even at the end now, thirty years later. But he had a feeling they were approaching it. Or it was approaching them.

“What happened next?” he asked.

“Project Babylon was closed down. Gerald Bull moved to Brussels and Guillaume Couture retired to his roses.”

“Except that Project Babylon wasn’t over,” said Gamache. “In fact, it got bigger. You say not many knew about the next phase?”

“That was the only thing that was disconcerting. Gerald Bull was guarded about the second weapon, Big Babylon. It was unlike him. He was a snake-oil salesman, a huckster. So when he was quiet about this second design, it got some people wondering.”

“If it was true,” said Gamache.

“If Gerald Bull was building an even more dangerous weapon, and playing an even more dangerous game. With even more dangerous people.”

“More dangerous than the Iraqis?”

Michael Rosenblatt didn’t answer that.

Gamache thought for a minute. “If Bull didn’t talk about it, how did people find out?”

“Most didn’t. And any information that did come out was patchy. A whispered word here and there. It’s a community filled with whispers. They add up to a sort of scream. Hard to separate the good intelligence from the noise.” He paused, thinking back. “They should’ve known.”

“CSIS? About the other half of Project Babylon?”

“Everything, they should’ve known it all. I think they did know. They just didn’t believe it. They dismissed Gerald Bull as a fool, a dilettante, especially after Baby Babylon failed.”

“So did you,” Gamache pointed out.

“But I didn’t have the entire intelligence apparatus at my disposal. I worked with the man, I knew he wasn’t capable of actually creating the machines he was marketing. What I didn’t appreciate was that Guillaume Couture was.”

Rosenblatt looked at Gamache.

“It honestly never occurred to anyone that Project Babylon wasn’t just a madman’s delusion. Especially after Baby Babylon failed. But he did it. He actually built it.” Rosenblatt shook his head and looked into his fragrant cider, stirring it with his cinnamon stick. “How did we miss it?”

“Did you miss it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If everyone thought Bull was such a buffoon, and his designs the product of a delusional mind, why was he killed?”

“To be sure,” said Rosenblatt. “To be on the safe side.”

“Murder puts you on the safe side?” Gamache asked.

“Sometimes, yes.” Rosenblatt stared at the former head of homicide. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought that.”

“And is this the ‘safe side’?” Gamache asked. “We’re half a kilometer from a weapon that could wipe out every major city down the East Coast, never mind Europe.”

Rosenblatt leaned closer to Gamache. “Like it or not, the death of Gerald Bull meant Project Babylon did not end up in the hands of the Iraqis. They’d have won the war. They’d have taken over the whole region. They’d have wiped out Israel and anyone else who stood up to them. In a dangerous world, Monsieur Gamache, this is the safe side.”

“If this is so safe,” said Gamache, “why are you so afraid?”

CHAPTER 32

Clara confided her suspicions to Myrna.

As she spoke she became more convinced. Sometimes, on saying things out loud, especially to Myrna, Clara could see how ludicrous they were.

But not this time. This time they jelled.

“What should I do?” asked Clara.

“You know what you have to do.”

“I hate it when you say that,” said Clara, sipping her white wine.

Across from her Myrna smiled, but it was fleeting, unable to penetrate beyond what Clara had just told her.

They hadn’t noticed the two men in the dark corner until one of them got up.

Clara nodded to Professor Rosenblatt as he walked by their table. He didn’t stop but continued to, and out, the door. Then they turned their attention to the person left behind.

Armand was either staring after the scientist or into space. He seemed to make up his mind. Getting up, he walked to the bar, and placed a phone call, turning his back to the room as he spoke. Then he returned to the table, wedged snug into the corner.

Clara got up, followed by Myrna, and slipped into seats on either side of him.

“I think I’ve found something interesting,” said Clara. “But I’m not sure.”

“She’s sure,” said Myrna.

“Tell me,” said Armand, turning his full and considerable attention to her.

*   *   *

“Take a seat.” Isabelle Lacoste indicated the conference table in the Incident Room. Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme joined Inspector Beauvoir, who was already there.

“Project Babylon wasn’t one missile launcher,” said Beauvoir without preamble. “It was two. Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

Gamache had called them from the bistro after Professor Rosenblatt confirmed there were two guns, christened with the unlikely names Baby Babylon and Big Babylon.

Mary Fraser was perfectly contained, in her drab way. Isabelle Lacoste had the impression that the middle-aged woman should have a ball of knitting in her lap like some benign presence, there to calm and soothe infants who were acting out.

“Is it?” asked Mary Fraser.

Isabelle Lacoste leaned slightly forward and, lowering her voice, she said, “Highwater.”

It was like throwing a boulder into a small pond. Everything changed.

“But Baby Babylon didn’t work—” said Mary Fraser.

“Mary,” Sean Delorme interrupted.

“They already know, Sean.”

Now it was his turn to stare at his colleague. “You knew they’d found out about Highwater and you didn’t tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“That’s not possible,” he said, examining her.

“This isn’t the time to discuss it.”

Her words mirrored their exchange when they’d first arrived in Three Pines. Their little tiff over driving. Then it had been almost endearing, now it was chilling. And by the look on Sean Delorme’s face, he felt it too. With one more quick glance at his partner, he turned back to the Sûreté investigators.

“Have you been there?”

“Up the hill, following the tracks?” said Beauvoir.

Delorme shifted in his chair, took a breath, and nodded.

Mary Fraser, however, sat absolutely still, composed. Frozen.

“We knew about the one in Highwater, but not the other,” she admitted.

“You went there,” said Lacoste.

“Yes. To confirm that the pieces were still there and hadn’t also been made to work. But I admit, Big Babylon came as a genuine shock.”

Neither Lacoste nor Beauvoir were swallowing this whole. There was very little “genuine” about these two.

“Why didn’t you tell us about Highwater?” said Lacoste.

“That a giant gun had been built, with our knowledge, on the border with the U.S. thirty-five years ago?” asked Mary Fraser. “Not exactly dinner table conversation.”

“This isn’t a dinner table,” Lacoste snapped. “This is a murder investigation. Multiple murders, and you had valuable information.”

“We had nothing,” said Mary Fraser. “How does it help find your killer to know about a long-abandoned and failed experiment?”

Jean-Guy reached into the evidence box and brought out the pen set and the bookends and placed them on the table in front of him, then, without a word, Isabelle Lacoste picked them up, manipulating them.

The CSIS agents watched with mild curiosity that became astonishment as they realized what she was doing.

After the final piece clicked into place, she put it on the table in front of Mary Fraser. It was Sean Delorme who picked it up and examined it.

“The firing mechanism?” he finally asked.

“
Oui
,” said Lacoste. “In case you didn’t know, that”—she thrust her finger toward the assembled piece—“is a pretty good representation of a homicide investigation. All sorts of apparently unrelated and unimportant pieces come together to form something lethal. But we can’t solve a case if people are keeping information from us.”

“Like a big goddamned gun on the top of a hill,” said Beauvoir. “The baby brother of the one in the woods.”

Mary Fraser took this in but seemed unmoved, and Lacoste suspected it was because to her secrets were as valuable as information. She was not designed to give up either.

“Where did you find it?” He held it up.

When Lacoste didn’t answer, he looked back down at the thing in his hand. “Well, wherever it was, I’m glad you did. This could’ve been big trouble.”

“Big trouble,” Beauvoir repeated. “Maybe that’s why it’s called Big Babylon.”

“You think this is funny?” Mary Fraser asked in exactly the same clipped tone his teacher had used when he’d hit Gaston Devereau in the nose with a baseball. All that was missing was the “young man?”

“Do you know what the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was called?” she asked, confirming Beauvoir’s image of her.