Lacoste called again.
Gamache’s eyes were open slightly, staring. His lips moved. They could barely hear what he was saying. Trying to say.
“Reine . . . Marie. Reine . . . Marie.”
“I’ll tell her,” Lacoste whispered into his ear and he closed his eyes.
“His heart’s stopped,” the medic called and leaned over Gamache, preparing for CPR. “He’s in cardiac arrest.”
Another medic arrived and kneeling down he grabbed the other’s arm.
“No wait. Get me a syringe.”
“No fucking way. His heart’s stopped, we need to start it.”
“For God’s sake do something,” Lacoste shouted.
The second medic rifled through the medical kit. Finding a syringe he plunged it into the Chief’s side and broke the plunger off.
There was no reaction. Gamache lay still, blood on his face and chest. Eyes closed.
The three stared down. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
Then, then. There was a slight sound. A small rasp.
They looked at each other.
Emile finally blinked. His eyes felt dry as though they’d been sandblasted and he took a deep breath.
He knew the rest of the story, of course, from calls to Reine-Marie and visits to the hospital. And the Radio- Canada news.
Four Surete officers killed, including the first by the side of the road, four others wounded. Eight terrorists dead, one captured. One critically wounded, not expected to survive. At first the news had reported the Chief Inspector among the dead. How that leaked out no one knew. How any of it leaked out no one knew.
Inspector Beauvoir had been badly hurt.
Emile had arrived that afternoon, driving straight from Quebec City to Hotel-Dieu hospital in Montreal. There he found Reine-Marie and Annie. Daniel was on a flight back from Paris.
They looked wrung out, nothing left.
“He’s alive,” Reine-Marie had said, hugging Emile, holding him.
“Thank God for that,” he’d said, then seen Annie’s expression. “What is it?”
“The doctors think he’s had a stroke.”
Emile had taken a deep breath. “Do they know how bad?”
Annie shook her head and Reine-Marie put her arm around her daughter. “He’s alive, that’s all that matters.”
“Have you seen him?”
Reine-Marie nodded, unable now to speak. Unable to tell anyone what she’d seen. The oxygen, the monitors, the blood and bruising. His eyes closed. Unconscious.
And the doctor saying they didn’t know the extent of the damage. He could be blind. Paralyzed. He could have another one. The next twenty-four hours would tell.
But it didn’t matter. She’d held his hand, smoothed it, whispered to him.
He was alive.
The doctor had also explained the chest wound. The bullet had broken a rib which had punctured the lung causing it to collapse and collapsing the second. Crushing the life out of him. The wound must have happened early on, the breathing becoming more and more difficult, more labored, until it became critical. Fatal.
“The medic caught it,” the doctor said. “In time.”
He hadn’t added “just,” but he knew it to be the case.
Now the only worry was the head wound.
And so they’d waited, in their own world of the third floor of Hotel-Dieu. An antiseptic world of hushed conversations, of soft fleet feet and stern faces.
Outside, the news flew around the continent, around the world.
A plot to blow up the La Grande dam.
It had been a decade in the planning. The progress so slow as to be invisible. The tools so primitive as to be dismissed.
Canadian and American government spokesmen refused to say how the plan was stopped, citing national security, but they did admit under close questioning that the shootout and deaths of four Surete officers had been part of it.
Chief Superintendent Francoeur was given, and took, credit for preventing a catastrophe.
Emile knew, as did anyone who’d had a glimpse inside the workings of major police departments, that what was being said was just a fraction of the truth.
And so, as the world chewed over these sensational findings, on the third floor of Hotel-Dieu they waited.
