How the Light Gets In

He’d only just glimpsed it. And, thought Jérôme, maybe he got it wrong. In his panic, he must have gotten it wrong.

“Our only hope is to find out what Francoeur’s doing and stop it. And to do that we have to get you reconnected to the Internet,” Gamache said. “And not dial-up. It needs to be high-speed.”

“Yes,” said Thérèse, exasperated. “We know that. But how? There is no high-speed here.”

“We create our own transmission tower.”

Thérèse Brunel sat back and stared. “Have you hit your head, Armand? We can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well, beside the fact it would take months and require all sorts of expertise, don’t you think someone would notice we were building a tower?”

“Ahh, they’d notice that, but I didn’t say ‘build,’ I said ‘create.’” Gamache got up and walked to the kitchen window. He pointed, past the village green, past the three huge pine trees, past the homes covered in snow. And up the hill.

“What’re we looking at?” Jérôme asked. “The hill over the village? We could put a tower on it, but again, that would take expertise.”

“And time,” said Thérèse.

“But the tower’s already there,” said Gamache, and they looked again. Finally Thérèse turned to him, astonished.

“You mean the trees,” she said.

“C’est ça,” said Gamache. “They make a natural tower. Jérôme?”

Gamache turned to the rotund man, wedged between the armchair and the window. His back to them. Staring up and out of the village.

“It might work,” he said, uncertainly. “But we’d need someone to put a satellite dish on a tree.”

They walked back to the breakfast table.

“There must be people who work with trees around here—what’re they called?” Thérèse’s city mind stumbled over itself. “Lumberjacks or something? We could get one of them to climb up with a dish. And from that height I bet we could find a transmission tower using line-of-sight. And from there we connect with a satellite.”

“But where do we find a satellite dish?” Jérôme asked. “It can’t be a regular one. It needs to be some satellite dish that can’t be traced.”

“Let’s say we do get online,” said Thérèse, her mind racing ahead, “we’d have another problem. We can’t use the Sûreté log-ins to get into the system, Francoeur would be looking for those. So how do we get back in?”

Gamache placed a piece of notepaper on the wooden table.

“What is it?” Thérèse asked.

But Jérôme knew. “It’s an access code. But using what network?”

Gamache turned the paper over.

“La Bibliothèque nationale,” said Thérèse, recognizing the logo. “The national archives of Québec. Reine-Marie works there, doesn’t she?”

“Oui. I did my research on the Ouellet Quints yesterday at the Bibliothèque nationale and I remembered Reine-Marie saying that the archive network goes all over the province, into the smallest library and into the massive archives at the universities. It’s connected to every publicly funded library.”

“It also goes into the Sûreté archives,” said Thérèse. “The files of all the old cases.”

“It’s our way in,” said Jérôme, his eyes glued to the bit of paper and the logo. “Is it Reine-Marie’s? A code belonging to Reine-Marie Gamache would trip an alarm.”

He knew he was looking for reasons this wouldn’t work, because he knew what was waiting on the other side of that electronic door. Prowling. Pacing. Looking for him. Waiting for him to do something stupid. Like go back in.

“I thought of that,” said Gamache, his voice reassuring. “It belongs to someone else. She’s one of the supervisors, so no one will question if that code is logged on.”

“I think it might work.” Thérèse’s voice was low, afraid to tempt the Fates.

Gamache pushed himself out of the chair. “I’m off to see Ruth Zardo, then I need to head in to Montréal. Can you speak with Clara Morrow and see if she knows anyone who puts up satellite dishes?”

“Armand,” said Thérèse at the door, as he collected his car keys and put on his coat and gloves. “You must know that you might’ve solved two ends of the problem. The satellite connection and the access codes, but how do we get from one to the other? The whole middle part is missing. We’ll need cables and computers and someone to connect it all.”