“You brought it,” said Jérôme.
“Yeah, and you refused to test it last night.”
“Stop,” said Gamache, holding up his hand. “Just think. Why isn’t it working?”
Ducking under the desk again, Nichol removed and reattached the satellite cable.
“Anything?” she called.
“Nothing,” Jérôme replied, and Nichol returned to her chair. They both stared at their screens.
“What could be the problem?” Gamache repeated.
“Tabarnac,” said Nichol, “it could be anything. This isn’t a potato peeler, you know.”
“Calm down and walk me through this.”
“All right.” She tossed her pen onto the desk. “It could be a bad connection. Some fault in the cable. A squirrel could’ve chewed through a wire—”
“The likely reasons,” said Gamache. He turned to Jérôme. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s probably the satellite dish. Everything else is working fine. If you want to play FreeCell, knock yourself out. The problem only occurs when we try to connect.”
Gamache nodded. “Do we need a new dish?”
He hoped, prayed, the answer was …
“No. I don’t think so,” said Jérôme. “I think it has snow on it.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Thérèse.
“He might be right,” Nichol conceded. “A blizzard could pack snow into the dish and screw up the reception.”
“But the snow we had yesterday wasn’t a blizzard,” said the Chief.
“True,” said Jérôme. “But there was a lot of it, and if Gilles tilted the dish almost straight up, it would be a perfect bowl, to catch what fell.”
Gamache shook his head. It would be poetic, that state-of-the-art technology could be paralyzed by snowflakes, if it wasn’t so serious.
“Call Gilles,” he said to Thérèse. “Have him meet me at the dish.”
He threw on his outdoor gear, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the darkness.
It was more difficult to find the path through the woods than he’d expected—it was dark and the trail had all but filled in with snow. He pointed his flashlight here and there, hoping he was at the right spot. Eventually he found what were now simply soft contours in an otherwise flat blanket of snow. The trail. He hoped. He plunged in.
Yet again he felt snow tumble down his boots and begin to soak his socks. He shoved his legs forward through the deep snow, the light he carried bouncing off trees and lumps that would be bushes in the spring.
He finally reached the sturdy old white pine, with the wooden rungs nailed into her trunk. He caught his breath, but only for a moment. Each minute counted now.
Being thieves in the night depended on the night. And it was slipping away. In just a few hours people would wake up. Go in to work. Sit at monitors. Turn them on. There’d be more eyes to see what they were doing.
The Chief looked up. The platform seemed to twirl away from him, lifting higher and higher into the tree. He looked down at the snow and steadied himself against the rough bark.
Turning the flashlight off, he stuck it in his pocket, and with one last deep breath he grabbed the first rung. Up, up he climbed. Quickly. Trying to outrun his thoughts. Faster, faster, before he lost his nerve and the fear he’d exhaled found him again in the cold, dark night.
He’d climbed this tree once before, a few years earlier. It had horrified him even then, and that had been on a sunny autumn day. Never would he have dreamed he’d have to go back up those rickety rungs, when they were covered in ice and snow. At night.
Grip, pull up, step up. Grab the next rung. Pull himself up.
But the fear had found him and was clawing at his back. At his brain.
Breathe, breathe, he commanded himself. And he gasped in a deep breath.
He didn’t dare stop. He didn’t dare look up. But finally he knew he had to. Surely he was almost there. He paused for a moment and tilted his head back.
The wooden platform was still a half dozen rungs away. He almost sobbed. He could feel himself growing light-headed, and the blood draining from his feet and hands.
“Keep going, keep going,” he whispered into the rough bark.
The sound of his own voice comforted him, and he reached for the next wooden slat, barely believing he was doing it. He began to hum to himself, the last song he’d heard. “The Huron Carol.”
He began to sing it, softly.
“Twas in the moon of wintertime,” he exhaled into the tree, “when all the birds had fled.”