All the Devils Are Here
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #16
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781250145253
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «All the Devils Are Here». Краткое содержание книги:
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand's godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man's life.
When a strange key is found in Stephen's possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d'Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.
It sends them deep into the secrets Armand's godfather has kept for decades.
A gruesome discovery in Stephen's Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.
Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.
For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.
“So they turned a blind eye?” said Judith de la Granger. “Knowing what would happen? That thousands would be killed?”
“Not thinking anyone would make the connection back to them,” said Pinot. “And no one did. How many planes are taking off right now, with…”
“We have to stop it,” said Allida Lenoir.
“We don’t even know what ‘it’ is,” Judith said. “What’re they making?”
They stared at each other, but no one had the answer. At one time, Gamache had thought it had to do with the Allen wrench or the screws Stephen had lying around. But that couldn’t be right. They were not made of neodymium.
But something Stephen had was. Something magnetized those Canadian nickels.
“We need proof,” he said. “We can’t just tell aviation around the world to stop flying. We’d be dismissed as cranks. Oh, my God.”
“What is it?” Judith demanded, seeing the look of shock, of horror, on the Chief Inspector’s face.
“Something Dussault mentioned. The nuclear power plants coming online. Some already are.”
“Oh, fuck,” whispered Judith, sitting, collapsing, into a chair.
“Planes freeze,” said Allida. “But nuclear reactors superheat. And if there’s neodymium—”
Gamache, wide-eyed, was nodding. Seeing the map the newscasts had shown, of the new power plants around the world.
In Colorado. In Arizona. In Ontario and Manitoba. In the UK and France. China. On and on. Next-generation, safer. Safest, they were guaranteed. Brought online to reduce fossil fuel use. Their designs checked and rechecked. Until even the most ardent environmentalists gave their reluctant approval.
But the problem wasn’t the design. The catastrophe would be caused by the material. A near-miraculous rare earth element that promised to make everything more efficient.
Safer.
If one or more of those reactors goes…?
“We have to stop it,” said Allida.
“We have to find out what it is,” said Armand. “We need proof.”
“Can’t we just tell them it’s the neodymium?” demanded Pinot.
“Would you shut down power plants, ground planes, stop elevators in office buildings internationally based on us saying it’s neodymium?” asked Gamache. “Of course not. We need to know exactly what it is they’ve built into those things.”
“If Horowitz and Plessner had the proof, why didn’t they sound an alarm?” asked Judith. “Go to the authorities?”
“I think they suspected, but it took years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get the evidence,” said Gamache. “And it would have to be absolute, undeniable. Something the board members and the authorities, many of whom are in the pocket of GHS, couldn’t ignore.”
Out in the street they could hear sounds. Paris was stirring. The start of another working week. He checked his watch. It was 4:37 in the morning. Less than three hours now.
Gamache turned to Séverine Arbour. “I think you—”
But she wasn’t there. While they’d been focused on the computer, she’d disappeared into the shadows.
“Damn,” he said, standing up so quickly his chair fell over. “We have to find her.”
“Why?” asked Madame de la Granger. “You think she knows something?”
“She’s working with Claude Dussault,” said Gamache. “She’s been passing him information all day.”
“What?” demanded Judith, her face opening in horror.
“We’ll find her,” said Allida. “I know every inch of this building.”
“She can’t have gone far,” Gamache called after her. “I locked the door when we came in.”
Pinot took his arm and pulled him around. “You said Claude Dussault just now. Did you mean the head of the Paris police? That Dussault?”
“Oui.”
“Are you saying the head of the whole fucking police force is behind this?”
“The Prefect, yes. Do you know him?”
“Not well. I’ve met him socially, at the opera and fundraisers. We’ve done stories on him and his reorganization of the Préfecture after his predecessor died. He seems a good man, a decent man. Why would he be involved in this?”
“Money. Power,” said Gamache, staring at Pinot. “You understand those.”
Pinot’s shrewd face examined Gamache. “If you do find that evidence, what’ll you do with it?”
“You know.”
“You’ll hand it over to them, won’t you?”
“To save my son. Yes.”
“You know I can’t let you do that.”
Armand felt the weight of the gun in his pocket. “And you know you can’t stop me.”
“They’ll kill him anyway, Armand. And not just him. You. Me. Them.” Alain Pinot nodded toward the Chief Librarian, on her hands and knees now, looking under the tables, and the Chief Archivist appearing from, and disappearing into, dark aisles of books and maps and documents.
“And anyone else who’s touched this case,” said Armand. “Including my wife, daughter, son-in-law.”
“And the ‘accidents’ will continue.”
“Yes.”
“Damn,” came Allida’s voice from out of the darkness, followed milliseconds later by a thud, as Judith de la Granger went to stand up and knocked her head on the bottom of a table.
“What?” she called.
“The door connecting the archives to the museum is open. She must’ve gone out that way. She’s in the museum. But there’re guards there and the doors onto the quadrangle are locked. She still can’t leave.”
“But there are phones,” said Gamache. “She can call Dussault and tell him what we know.”
“Fuck,” said Madame de la Granger.
“I’ve never heard you swear before,” said Madame Lenoir. “You always said it was the refuge of a second-class mind.”
“I was wrong,” said Madame de la Granger.
“We have to get out of here,” said Pinot.
“Not yet,” said Gamache. “We have to find whatever proof Stephen and Plessner had.”
“Wait a minute,” said Judith, turning to Gamache. “You think it’s here? In the archives? We’re not just looking up references, you think the proof itself is hidden here.”
“Where would you hide a book?” Gamache asked her.
“In a library.”
“Where would you hide a document?” he asked.
“Here,” said Judith. “With other documents.”
“But this isn’t the only archive collection,” said Allida. “There’re different archives in buildings all over France. Why would you think Monsieur Horowitz would hide the proof here?”
“Because he’d want us to be able to find it, and this building is around the corner from our home. Reine-Marie knows it well. If he put it in any of the archives, it’d be this one.”
“That’s a big ‘if,’” said Judith.
Allida turned full circle, scanning the endless rows of files. “How do we even begin…”
“He’d have hidden them fairly recently,” said Armand. “Since they forged Daniel’s name. That’s in the last five weeks.”
Madame Lenoir took them over to the archivist’s desk. “The requests are logged here, but there’d be thousands from all over the world. You can’t possibly go through them all.”
“Can we search by name?”
“Of document?”
“Of the person requesting it.”
“Yes.” She showed him how.
Armand’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “He wouldn’t have used his own name, or Plessner’s. Still—” He put them in. “Worth a try.”
It came up empty.
“Who else’s would he use?” asked Pinot. “Yours?”