“Sorry I took so long,” said Carlos, when he arrived. “Seems to be a demonstration at the gendarmerie and it held me up. Is there another way back?”
“Yes, but it’s no faster,” Bruno said, taking off his kepi so he’d be less easy to recognize. “And I ought to take a look at the demo.”
The traffic was reduced to single file as they came off the side road, one of Sergeant Jules’s gendarmes controlling the flow. Already they could hear the bullhorns. When it was their turn to creep forward to the bend that opened onto the place de la Gendarmerie, the whole space seemed filled with tractors and farm equipment and a pungent smell of manure hung in the air. The Chasseurs Party had brought out some of the old HUNTERS ARE THE REAL GREENS banners from the last election. Bruno saw Alphonse from the local hippie commune with two of his goats in the back of his truck, Dominique standing beside her father waiting to take the bullhorn and the mayor in his tricolor sash talking to Philippe Delaron who was taking photos for Sud Ouest.
“What are they protesting about?” Carlos asked, grinning as Bruno explained. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Call Isabelle,” said Bruno. “Ask her to complain to the prefect that you can’t do your job because St. Denis is blocked by a protest against the local gendarmes arresting farmers. Make sure she tells the prefect that the mayor is leading the protest. Then ask her to call that gendarme general you met yesterday and complain to him.”
“Here, take the wheel,” said Carlos, pulling the Range Rover onto the side of the road and thumbing his cell phone as he walked around the front of the car to take the passenger’s seat.
J-J was already at the quarry, squatting outside the small blockhouse with the iron door where the explosives were kept. With him were Jeannot, the site foreman who had done twenty years in the army engineers, and a worried-looking man in a gray suit which carried traces of the yellow-gold limestone the quarry produced. The system of dead bolts and padlocks on the door seemed intact, but around the side of the low building lay a pile of broken bricks beneath a large hole.
“The explosives were secured according to the regulations,” the man in the suit was saying.
“You can have all the locks in the world, but they’re useless if they can crowbar their way through the bricks,” said J-J, ignoring the man in the suit to address his words to Bruno and Carlos.
“What did they get away with?” Bruno asked.
“There were sixteen sticks left in the case,” said Jeannot. “We only ever keep one case at a time in the store. The rest are at the secure depot at Perigueux.”
“Let’s hope it’s more secure than this place,” said J-J. “The stuff could have been taken anytime from six last night until Jeannot here opened the quarry at eight this morning. They were blasting yesterday and had a permit to continue blasting today. Forensics will be here soon, but I’m not confident of finding much here. They also used wire cutters on the fence that seals this place off from the road. I say ‘they’ but it could have been a single man. The dynamite wouldn’t weigh much and my grandma could break through those bricks with a good crowbar.”
“We reckon four sticks weigh a kilo,” said Jeannot. “It’s the usual stuff, ammonium dynamite, fifty percent strength, stabilized with gelatin and sawdust.”
“What about blasting caps?” Carlos asked.
“We use the electric-match type, and store them separately in the safe in the office. That wasn’t touched.”
“So either it was a thief who didn’t know what he was doing, or one who knew perfectly well where else he could get some blasting caps,” said Bruno.
“I’ve checked the employee list,” said J-J. “Everybody has worked here at least six years and there are no connections with any of the names on that list you sent me.”
“How often do you have dynamite stored here?” Bruno asked Jeannot.
“Every second or third week. But it depends. For the big blasts, we drill a ten-meter hole, ten centimeters wide, fill it with about a hundred pounds of ANFO and then tamp it down with six or so feet of gravel. But then we have to do secondary blasts where we use dynamite, and we also use dynamite where the rock formation is tricky. We blast, then we quarry until we have to blast again. As I say, it depends on the rock formation, but we usually do two or three days’ blasting at a time.”
“So anybody who knew the routine would have heard the blasting yesterday and could assume you’d be storing dynamite overnight?”
Jeannot nodded. “It’s the way most quarries operate these days, ever since the restrictions came in on storing explosives on site.”
“What’s that ANFO you mentioned?” J-J asked.
“Ammonium nitrate fuel oil,” said Jeannot. “It’s cheap and it does the job. But that’s stored at the depot and we only bring that in on blasting days.”
“I have a copy of all our licenses and permits,” said the man in the gray suit. “Everything is in order…”
“Except that you’ve lost enough dynamite to blow up a battleship,” said J-J.
Jeannot looked mournfully at the hole in his blockhouse. “I always said we needed concrete, but the company never got around to it.”
“That’s enough,” said the man in the gray suit.
Jeannot rolled his eyes at Bruno, then turned to J-J and asked, “I presume you’ll bring dogs in, give them a sniff?”
“Sometime later today,” said J-J, and led the way back down to the road and the cars, where he paused and looked at Carlos. “What do you think? Could this be your guys?”
“ETA prefers explosives to anything else and they’ve used dynamite before, stolen from quarries. But there’s no shortage of Semtex on the black market. Still, I think we’d better assume that it’s them. And if they’re here they’ll need a base.”
“If they’re using explosives, then they need to place them,” said Bruno. “Our ministers are coming in by helicopter direct to the chateau so they can’t mine a road. The chateau is under guard around the clock and there’ll be dogs. Where and how do they plant the stuff?”
“We’ll thrash it out at the evening conference,” said J-J, thumbing his way through messages on his cell phone. “By then I’ll have a preliminary forensic report on the quarry. In the meantime I have a bank robbery suspect in custody back in Perigueux… and what the hell’s going on in St. Denis? I’ve just gotten a message saying that traffic is backed up halfway to Perigueux, the gendarmerie’s asking for reinforcements and the prefect wants to know what’s going on.”
“Duroc,” said Bruno. “And the new magistrate. They make quite a combination. They arrested a popular local farmer and his wife for killing and cooking their own ducks, and the other farmers are demonstrating for their release.”
“ Merde. Shouldn’t you be there?”
Bruno sighed. “When the brigadier seconded me to the security team he said this takes priority.” He took the opportunity to check his own text messages. There was one from Pamela, saying “Happy birthday; see you tonight,” and another from Stephane that said, “St. Denis bloque. Tout le monde a la bataille.”
“I can report to Isabelle on the dynamite theft,” said Carlos. “We can do without you until this evening’s meeting. Come on, I’ll take you back.”
Once in the car, Bruno rang the mayor, to learn that St. Denis was at a standstill. Since it was the intersection for roads running both east-west and north-south that meant a large part of the departement ’s traffic was now stalled. Duroc’s van was surrounded by immobile tractors, so close that he couldn’t even open the doors. Maurice, Sophie and the magistrate were all still inside with Duroc, and children were clambering over the tractors to taunt him. Women gathered on the pavement were demanding Sophie’s release, and Father Sentout was with them. It was all, the mayor stressed, completely peaceful, extremely noisy and great fun.
Even if Duroc made it to the gendarmerie, its entrance was blocked by a large heap of steaming manure, the mayor gleefully reported. The pompiers had been called to use their fire hoses to wash it away, but their fire engines were also stuck and were adding to the traffic jam. Sergeant Jules, who understood the difference between duty and folly, had apparently taken one look at the gathering storm on his way to begin his shift and gone home to call in sick with a convenient migraine. And as luck would have it, a TV crew from TF1 had been making a program at Horst’s dig and was now filming the besieged gendarmerie, and its reporter was about to interview the mayor.
“Wonderful,” said Bruno. He wished that he’d been there to watch this mobilization of St. Denis. “For the
