The Nature Of The Beast Part 46

He then picked up the desk set. Taking out the pens, he studied them, then rummaged through the box until he found the bookends. He turned one over, put it down and picked up the other. By now Lacoste and Beauvoir had joined the elderly scientist, watching as he toyed with the items.

"What are you-" Lacoste began but stopped, not wanting to break his concentration.

They watched as the professor manipulated the items, and then there was a small click. Rosenblatt frowned, then, picking up the two pens, he inserted them into holes at the base of the bookend.

After studying it for a moment, he held it out, as a bright child might who'd made something for Mother.

"Is it...?" Lacoste asked, taking it from him.

"The firing mechanism? I think so," said the professor, as astonished as everyone else. "Ingenious."

Gamache stared at the piece in Lacoste's hand while she turned it over and over and around. It looked nothing like a pen set and bookend now. Just as the pen set and bookend had looked nothing like a firing mechanism.

"How did you know?" asked Beauvoir, taking it from her and also turning it around and around, studying it.

"I didn't, I just tried. A prerequisite for being a physicist, I think. Good spatial reasoning. But the first clue was the pens, of course."

"The pens?" asked Beauvoir.

"They don't work," Rosenblatt pointed out. "No nibs. They wouldn't write."

Lacoste and Beauvoir looked at each other, then over at Gamache, who was staring at the firing mechanism in Beauvoir's hand. Then he dropped his eyes to the computer screen, where the poem had appeared.

In his line of sight, forming a tableau, were the firing mechanism, the Son My Ma.s.sacre, John Fleming's play on Beauvoir's desk, and the words on the computer: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

CHAPTER 31.

"The clock is ticking," Gamache said quietly as he and Rosenblatt took seats at the back of the bistro. "Isn't it?"

Around them, young waiters set the tables for the dinner service. Out the window, dying leaves shuffled in the wind and rain, and two chipmunks sat up on their haunches, alert.

Were they hearing it too? Gamache wondered. On the wind.

The tick, tick, ticking of time running out.

"Yes," said the old scientist. He raised a hand and caught the attention of a server. "Chocolat chaud, s'il vous plat."

"Have you considered a nice warm apple cider?" Olivier asked. "Please?"

"Sounds good, patron," said Gamache.

"And one for me too. Nonalcoholic. I'm still recovering from last night," he said to Armand once Olivier had left. "You know, I ordered a hot chocolate yesterday and they brought an apple cider."

Professor Rosenblatt extended his hands to the fire in the hearth, rubbing them together as though the warmth was water.

"That was quite a trick," said Gamache, when the cider arrived. He stirred the drink with the cinnamon stick, the warm apple and cinnamon scent mixing with the musky wood smoke. "Finding the firing mechanism."

"A trick?" Rosenblatt studied the man in front of him.

They'd left the Srete officers to continue their research, galvanized by the findings, and Gamache had brought the elderly scientist to the bistro. People were beginning to arrive for drinks before dinner, but their table was tucked nicely away and few would even notice they were there. To be certain of privacy, Gamache had asked Olivier not to seat anyone too close.

"This isn't a magic act, you know, monsieur," said Rosenblatt, as serious as Gamache had ever seen him.

"And you're not the magician?"

The professor pursed his lips, contemplating. "Do you suspect me of something?"

"What's in Highwater?"

Now the lips went taut and a stillness came over Rosenblatt. Gamache could almost smell the man's mind working. It smelled a bit like apple.

Rosenblatt smiled, more with resignation than humor.

"You know about that?"

"Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme went there shortly after seeing the gun," Gamache explained. "We tracked their cell phones."

Rosenblatt shook his head. "File clerks."

"Well?" Gamache asked.

"Highwater was the site of the first Supergun," said Michael Rosenblatt. He watched Gamache as he spoke. "You're not surprised."

Gamache was quiet, waiting to see what Rosenblatt would say, or do, next.

"You went there, didn't you?" said the scientist, once again fitting the pieces together. "You already knew. So why ask me?"

But his companion remained silent, and once again Rosenblatt put it together.

"It was a test? You wanted to find out if I'd tell you the truth. How did you even know I knew?"

"The redacted pages," said Armand at last. "You read them but didn't mention the plural. The censors took out everything, except one reference. Superguns. Everyone else who read those pages saw it. I couldn't believe you didn't too. So why wouldn't you point it out? There was only one answer. Because you already knew, and hoped I hadn't seen it."

"Why wouldn't I want you to know?"

"That's a good question. Why didn't you tell us this as soon as you saw the gun in the woods? Didn't you think it might be important for us to know there'd once been another one, close by?"

Michael Rosenblatt took off his gla.s.ses and rubbed his face, then he replaced his gla.s.ses and looked at Gamache.

"I actually thought it didn't matter, but hearing you say it like that, I can see how it might seem suspicious. Not many knew about the other part of Project Babylon," said Michael Rosenblatt. "The two halves were called Baby Babylon and Big Babylon."

"Two halves?" asked Gamache. "Of a whole?"

"No, better to call them two parts, but not of a whole. One led to the other. The first was Baby Babylon, the smaller of the two."

"The one in Highwater."

"Yes. It was conceived by Gerald Bull through his s.p.a.ce Research Corporation. Baby Babylon was a sort of open secret, like a lot of products in the arms market. Secret enough to be enticing, but out there enough to attract interest."

"And it did," said Gamache. "Didn't it?" he asked when Rosenblatt didn't answer.

"Of a sort. Baby Babylon was met with ridicule. It was called 'Baby' but it was so huge, so ungainly, unlike anything else out there, that it was dismissed as the product of a mind as unstable as the weapon. A fantasist. No credible engineer or physicist thought it could be built. And, if it was, it couldn't possibly work. Only another unstable mind would commission it."

"Saddam Hussein," said Gamache.

"Yes. The fact Saddam was interested just confirmed everyone's suspicion that the idea was crazy."

He turned his mug of warm apple cider around in a lazy circle.

"They were wrong," said Gamache.

"Oh, no. They were right. Baby Babylon didn't work. It was top-heavy, couldn't sustain trajectory. With something like that, firing a missile into low orbit and having it travel tens of thousands of miles, if you're off by one one-thousandth of a degree at launch, you wipe out Paris instead of Moscow on impact. Or Baghdad."

"Or Bethlehem."

Rosenblatt didn't respond to that.

"How did they know it didn't work?" asked Gamache.

"They fired it."

Gamache didn't, or couldn't, hide his surprise.

"Not into the air," Rosenblatt hurriedly a.s.sured him.

"Then where?" asked Gamache.

"Into the ground."

Now Gamache looked, and was, confused.

"When you were there, did you happen to notice railway tracks?" the professor asked. "Not the Canadian National ones, but smaller, narrower?"

"Yes. I followed them up the hill."

"Good. That's how Bull did it. As with everything else about Project Babylon, it was brilliant in its simplicity. They couldn't possibly test the missile launcher by actually launching a missile, so they put it on a flatbed on rails at the bottom of a hill and fired it into the ground."

"What good would that do?" asked Gamache.

"The backward force," said Rosenblatt. "They measured the degree of incline, the speed and distance traveled, and the depth and trajectory of the hole in the ground. It was so simple it was genius."

"It doesn't sound simple to me," Gamache admitted. Rosenblatt had lost him at "degree of incline." Gamache considered what he'd heard.

"Wouldn't it make a lot of noise?" he asked. "So much for secrecy."

"Yes," agreed Rosenblatt. Gamache waited for more, but nothing more came.

"It didn't work, you say?"

"They tried it a few times, apparently, but while the force could be corrected, they couldn't solve the trajectory problem. Eventually they abandoned the site."

That sounded like the end of the story, but Gamache knew it was really just the beginning. They weren't even at the end now, thirty years later. But he had a feeling they were approaching it. Or it was approaching them.

"What happened next?" he asked.

"Project Babylon was closed down. Gerald Bull moved to Brussels and Guillaume Couture retired to his roses."

"Except that Project Babylon wasn't over," said Gamache. "In fact, it got bigger. You say not many knew about the next phase?"

"That was the only thing that was disconcerting. Gerald Bull was guarded about the second weapon, Big Babylon. It was unlike him. He was a snake-oil salesman, a huckster. So when he was quiet about this second design, it got some people wondering."

"If it was true," said Gamache.

"If Gerald Bull was building an even more dangerous weapon, and playing an even more dangerous game. With even more dangerous people."

"More dangerous than the Iraqis?"

Michael Rosenblatt didn't answer that.

Gamache thought for a minute. "If Bull didn't talk about it, how did people find out?"

"Most didn't. And any information that did come out was patchy. A whispered word here and there. It's a community filled with whispers. They add up to a sort of scream. Hard to separate the good intelligence from the noise." He paused, thinking back. "They should've known."

"CSIS? About the other half of Project Babylon?"

"Everything, they should've known it all. I think they did know. They just didn't believe it. They dismissed Gerald Bull as a fool, a dilettante, especially after Baby Babylon failed."

"So did you," Gamache pointed out.

"But I didn't have the entire intelligence apparatus at my disposal. I worked with the man, I knew he wasn't capable of actually creating the machines he was marketing. What I didn't appreciate was that Guillaume Couture was."

Rosenblatt looked at Gamache.

"It honestly never occurred to anyone that Project Babylon wasn't just a madman's delusion. Especially after Baby Babylon failed. But he did it. He actually built it." Rosenblatt shook his head and looked into his fragrant cider, stirring it with his cinnamon stick. "How did we miss it?"

"Did you miss it?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"If everyone thought Bull was such a buffoon, and his designs the product of a delusional mind, why was he killed?"

"To be sure," said Rosenblatt. "To be on the safe side."