How the Light Gets In

THIRTY-FOUR

The phone woke Sylvain Francoeur and he grabbed the receiver before the second ring.

“What is it?” he said, instantly alert.

“Sir, it’s Charpentier here. There’s been a breach.”

Francoeur got up on one elbow and waved his wife to go back to sleep.

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m monitoring network activity, and someone’s accessed one of the restricted files.”

Francoeur turned on the light, put on his glasses, and looked at the clock on the bedside table. The bright red numbers said 5:43 A.M. He sat up.

“How serious?”

“I don’t know. It might not be anything. As instructed, I called Inspector Tessier and he told me to call you.”

“Good. Now explain what you saw.”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“Try.”

Charpentier was surprised that so much menace could be contained in such a small word. He tried. His best. “Well, the firewall’s not showing that an unauthorized connection’s been made, but…”

“But what?”

“It’s just that someone opened the file and I’m not sure who it was. It was within the network, so the person had access codes. It’s probably someone within the department, but we can’t be sure.”

“Are you telling me you don’t know if there has been a breach?”

“I’m saying there has, but we don’t know if it’s someone from the outside, or one of our own. Like a house alarm. At first it’s hard to tell if it’s an intruder or a raccoon.”

“A raccoon? You’re not seriously comparing the Sûreté’s state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar security system with a house alarm?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s only because it’s state-of-the-art that we found it at all. Most systems and programs would’ve missed it. But it’s so sensitive, sometimes we find things that don’t need to be found. That aren’t threats.”

“Like a raccoon?”

“Exactly,” said the agent, obviously regretting the analogy. It had worked with Tessier, but Chief Superintendent Francoeur was a whole other beast. “And if there is an intruder, we can’t yet tell if there’s a purpose, or if it’s just some hacker out to make trouble, or even someone who wandered in by mistake. We’re working on it.”

“By mistake?” They’d installed this system last year. Brought in the finest software designers and Internet architects to create something that couldn’t be breached. And now this agent was saying some idiot might have wandered in by mistake?

“It happens more often than people realize,” said Charpentier unhappily. “I don’t think it’s serious, but we’re treating it as though it is, just in case. And the file they’ve accessed doesn’t appear all that important.”

“Which file?” Francoeur asked.

“Something about the construction schedule for Autoroute 20.”

Francoeur stared at the curtains drawn in front of the bedroom window. There was a slight flutter as the cold air came into his home.

The file seemed so trivial, so far from anything that could threaten their plan, but Francoeur knew that file for what it was. For what it contained. And now someone was sniffing around.

“Check it out,” he said, “and call me back.”

“Yessir.”

“What is it?” asked Madame Francoeur, watching her husband head to the bathroom.

“Nothing, just a little trouble at work. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you getting up?”

“Might as well,” he said. “I’m awake now, and the alarm’ll go off soon anyway.”

But alarms were already going off for Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

“They’ve seen us,” said Jérôme. “I tripped the alarm here.”

“Where?” asked Gamache, pulling up a chair.

Jérôme showed him.

“Construction files?” asked Gamache, and turned to Thérèse. “Why would the Sûreté have any files on road construction, never mind ones that are secure?”

“No reason. It isn’t our jurisdiction. The roads, yes, but not repairing them. And it certainly wouldn’t be confidential.”

“They must be looking for us,” said Nichol. Her voice was calm. Just reporting facts.

“To be expected,” said Jérôme, his voice also calm.

On his monitor they saw files open and close. Appear and disappear.

“Stop typing,” said Nichol.

Jérôme lifted his hands off the keyboard and they hovered in midair.

Gamache stared at the monitor. He could almost see lines of code appear, grow, then contract.

“Have they found you?” Jérôme asked Nichol.

“No. I’m over in another file. It’s also about construction, but it’s old. Can’t be important.”

“Wait,” said Gamache, dragging his chair over to her monitor. “Show me.”

“Sir, it’s Charpentier again.”

“Oui,” said Francoeur. He’d showered and dressed and was about to head in. It was now just after six.

“It was nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain. I had a good look around. Ran all sorts of scans and couldn’t find any unauthorized access to our network. It happens fairly often, as I said. A ghost in the machine. I’m sorry to disturb you with this.”

“You did the right thing.” While relieved, Francoeur still didn’t relax. “Put more agents on to monitor.”

“Another shift starts at eight—”

“I mean now.” The voice was sharp, and Charpentier responded immediately.

“Yessir.”

Francoeur hung up, then punched in Tessier’s number.

“These are shift reports,” said Gamache. “From a company called Aqueduct. They’re thirty years old. Why’re you looking at them?”

“I was following a trail. A name popped up in another file and I followed it here.”

“What name?” Gamache asked.

“Pierre Arnot.”

“Show me.” Gamache leaned in and Nichol scrolled down. Gamache put on his glasses and scanned the pages. There were lots of names. It appeared to be work schedules and soil reports and things called loads. “I don’t see it.”

“Neither did I,” admitted Nichol. “But it’s associated with this file.”

“Maybe it’s another Pierre Arnot,” said Jérôme from his desk. “It’s not an uncommon name.”

Gamache hummed to show he’d heard, but his attention was taken by the file. There was no actual mention of any Arnot.

“How could his name be attached to this file, but not appear in it?” Gamache asked.

“It could be hidden,” said Nichol. “Or an outside reference. Like your name might be attached to a file on balding, or licorice pipes.”

Gamache glanced at Jérôme, who’d given a snort.

Still, he understood. Arnot’s name didn’t need to appear in the file to be somehow associated with it. Somewhere down the line, there was a connection.

“Keep going,” said the Chief, and got up.

“Charpentier’s very good at what he does,” Tessier reassured Francoeur over the phone. He too was dressed and ready for work. As he’d put on his socks he’d realized that when he took them off that night, everything would have changed. His world. The world. Certainly Québec. “If he says it’s nothing, then that’s what it was.”

“No.” The Chief Superintendent wanted to be convinced, to be reassured. But he wasn’t. “There’s something wrong. Call Lambert. Get her in.”

“Yessir.” Tessier hung up and dialed Chief Inspector Lambert, the head of Cyber Crimes.

Gamache stirred the embers with a fresh log, making more room, then he shoved it in and put the cast-iron cap back on.

“Agent Nichol,” he said after a few moments. “Can you look up that company?”

“What company?”

“Aqueduct.” He walked across to her. “Where you followed Pierre Arnot.”

“But he never showed up. It must’ve been another Arnot or a coincidental contact. Something not very significant.”

“Maybe, but please find out what you can about Aqueduct.” He was leaning over her, one hand on the desk, the other on the back of her chair.

She huffed, and the screen she was looking at flew away. A few clicks later and images of old Roman bridges and water systems leapt onto the monitor. Aqueducts.

“Satisfied?” she demanded.

“Scroll down,” he said, and he studied the list of references to “Aqueduct.”

There was a company that studied sustainability. There was a band by that name.

They went through a few pages, but the information became less and less relevant.

“Can I go back now?” asked Nichol, weary of amateurs.

Gamache stared at the screen, still feeling uneasy. But he nodded.

The full shift was called in and every desk and monitor in the Cyber Crimes division had an agent at it.

“But, ma’am,” Charpentier was appealing to his boss, “it was a ghost. I’ve seen thousands of them—so have you. I took a good look, just to be sure. Ran all the security scans. Nothing.”

Lambert turned from her shift commander to the Chief Superintendent.

Unlike Charpentier, Chief Inspector Lambert knew how critical the next few hours would be. The firewalls, the defenses, the software programs she herself had helped design needed to be impenetrable. And they were.

But Francoeur’s concern had transferred itself to her. And now she wondered.

“I’ll make sure myself, sir,” she said to Francoeur. He held her eyes, staring at her for so long, and so intently, that both Tessier and Charpentier exchanged glances.

Finally Francoeur nodded.

“I want your people to not just guard, do you understand? I want them to go looking.”

“For what?” Charpentier asked, exasperated.

“For intruders,” snapped Francoeur. “I want you to hunt down whoever might be out there. If there’s someone trying to get in, I want you to find them, whether they’re a raccoon or a ghost or an army of the undead. Got it?”

“Got it, sir,” said Charpentier.

Gamache reappeared at Nichol’s elbow.

“I made a mistake,” he said right into her ear.

“How?” She didn’t look at him but continued to concentrate on what she was doing.

“You said it yourself, the file was old. That means Aqueduct was an old company. It might not exist anymore. Can you find it in archives?”

“But if it doesn’t exist how can it matter?” asked Nichol. “Old file, old company, old news.”

“Old sins have long shadows,” said Gamache. “And this is an old sin.”

“More fucking quotes,” mumbled Nichol under her breath. “What does it even mean?”

“It means, what started small three decades ago might have grown,” said the Chief, not looking at Agent Nichol, but reading her screen. “Into something…”

He looked at Nichol’s face, so flat, so repressed.

“… big,” he finally said. But the word that had actually come to mind was “monstrous.”

“We’ve found the shadow.” Gamache turned back to the screen. “Now it’s time to find the sin.”

“I still don’t understand,” she muttered, but Gamache suspected that wasn’t true. Agent Yvette Nichol knew a great deal about old sins. And long shadows.

“This’ll take a few minutes,” she said.

Gamache joined Superintendent Brunel, who was standing by the window looking at her husband, clearly longing to watch over his shoulder.

“How’s Jérôme doing?”

“Fine, I suppose,” she said. “I think tripping that alarm shook him. It came earlier than he expected. But he recovered.”

Gamache looked at the two people seated at their desks. It was almost seven thirty in the morning. Six hours since they’d begun.

He walked over to Jérôme. “Would you like to stretch your legs?”

Dr. Brunel didn’t answer at once. He stared at the screen, his eyes following a line of code.

“Merci, Armand. In a few minutes,” Jérôme said, his voice distant, distracted.

“Got it,” said Nichol. “Les Services Aqueduct,” she read, and Gamache and Thérèse leaned over her shoulder to look. “You were right. It’s an old company. Looks like it went bankrupt.”

“What did it do?”

“Engineering mostly, I think,” she said.

“Roads?” asked Thérèse, thinking of the alarm Jérôme had tripped. The road construction schedule.

There was a pause while Nichol searched some more. “No. Looks like it’s sewage systems, mostly in outlying areas. This was in the days when there was government money to clean up the waste dumped into rivers.”

“Treatment plants,” said Gamache.

“That sort of thing,” said Nichol, concentrating on the screen. “But see here,” she pointed to a report. “Change of government. Contracts dried up, and the company went under. End of story.”

“Wait,” said Jérôme sharply, from the next desk. “Stop what you’re doing.”

Gamache and Thérèse froze, as though their own movement would somehow betray them. Then Gamache stepped over to Jérôme.

“What is it?”

“They’re out looking,” he said. “Not just guarding the files, but now they’re looking for us.”

“Did we trip another alarm?” Thérèse asked.

“Not that I know of,” said Jérôme, and glanced over at Nichol, who checked her equipment and shook her head.

Dr. Brunel turned back to his monitor and stared. His pudgy hands were raised over his keyboard, ready to leap into action if need be. “They’re using a new program, one I haven’t seen before.”

No one moved.

Gamache stared at the screen and half expected to see a specter crawl out from the corner of the monitor. Picking up pieces of text, files, documents, and looking beneath. For them.

He held his breath, not daring to move. In case. He knew it was irrational, but he didn’t want to risk it.

“They won’t find us,” said Nichol, and Gamache admired her bravado. She’d spoken in a whisper and Gamache was glad of it. Bravado was one thing, but silence and stillness were the first rules of hiding. And he was under no illusions. That’s what they were doing.

Gilles seemed to sense it too. He tipped his chair forward quietly and put his feet on the ground, but stayed where he was, guarding the door, as though their pursuers would come through there.

“Do they know we’ve hacked them?” asked Thérèse.

Jérôme didn’t answer her.

“Jérôme,” Thérèse repeated. She too had lowered her voice to an urgent hiss. “Answer me.”

“I’m sure they’ve seen our signature.”

“What does that mean?” asked Gamache.

“It means they probably know something’s up,” said Nichol. “The encryption will hold.” But for the first time she sounded unsure, like she was talking to herself. Convincing herself.

And now Gamache understood. The hunter and his hounds were sniffing around. They’d picked up a scent, and now were trying to decide what they’d found. If anything.

“Whoever’s on the other end isn’t some hack,” said Jérôme. “This isn’t some impatient kid, this’s a seasoned investigator.”

“What do we do now?” asked Thérèse Brunel.

“Well, we can’t just sit here,” said Jérôme. He turned to Nichol. “Do you really think your encryption is hiding us?”

She opened her mouth but he cut her off. He’d had too much experience with arrogant young residents during grand rounds at the hospital not to recognize someone who would rather eat a juicy lie than an unpalatable truth.

“For real,” he cautioned, and held her pasty gaze.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But we might as well believe it.”

Jérôme laughed and got up. He turned to his wife. “Then the answer to your question is that the encryption held and we’re just fine.”

“She didn’t say that,” said Thérèse, following him to the coffeepot on the woodstove.

“No,” he admitted, pouring himself a cup. “But she’s right. We might as well believe it. It changes nothing. And for what it’s worth, I think they haven’t a clue what we’re about, even if they know we’re here. We’re safe.”

Gamache stood behind Nichol’s chair. “You must be tired. Why don’t you take a break too? Splash some water on your face.”

When she didn’t respond, he looked at her more closely.

Her eyes were wide.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh, merde,” she said under her breath. “Oh, merde.”

“What?” Gamache looked at the monitor. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS filled the screen.

“They found us.”