It is at this point in Camille’s assessment that Louis steps into the office.
The world abruptly shifts on its axis, the whole world; Jean Garnier’s bomb must have produced a similar effect. Pelletier does not turn a hair, but in a nanosecond the Other grows pale, he shrinks, he shrivels, if he carries on like this he will be no taller than Camille. He stammers a few words as he approaches Louis, the two men share a brusque man-hug. Louis smiles serenely, turns to Camille and jerks his thumb at the Other.
“We sat the entrance exam for the E.N.A. together,” he explains.
A little later, Camille will learn that Louis was first in his year, while the Other was at the back of the pack; it is the kind of inferiority complex even success cannot expunge. Louis gives the man a brusque nod. Go ahead, we’re all ears.
Alright, the counterterrorism squad has done its best, blah, blah, blah (he does not even glance at Pelletier; no time for losers), but we have to be “realistic”, the minister in person blah, blah, blah, strategic policy, critical juncture for the government, blah, blah, blah . . . Camille quickly loses interest, he does not even wait for the end.
“Yeah, O.K.” he mutters, and, without warning, turns on his heel, leaves the room, strides down the hall, opens a door . . . Initially taken aback, the others quickly follow only to crash into him; the four men stand in the doorway, frozen: Jean Garnier is not a pretty sight.
He has obviously gone fifteen rounds with trained interrogators.
Camille gropes for a word: stunned? senseless? punch-drunk? stupefied? All of the above, but also beaten to a bloody pulp; the bruises are a vivid purple, only his swollen face is visible, the injuries hidden by his clothes can be guessed.
Camille studies Jean and there is something definitely amiss.
What?
He cannot put his finger on it.
Perhaps it is the sinister half-smile. Hardly surprising: he has won: he demanded Verhœven, he has been granted Verhœven, he defeated the experts, but even so, that smile . . . Given the state he is in . . .
Camille slams the door behind him, steps over to Jean, sits down and lays his hands flat on the desk.
“Let’s not beat about the bush, Johnny Boy,” he says. “You’ve got a scoop for me, that’s what you told them, that’s how you persuaded them to bring me back. Well I’m here, I’m listening. You’ve got precisely seven seconds, one for every bomb, after that I leave this room, turn you over to my colleagues and go home to bed. One . . . two . . . three . . .”
He counts quickly.
“Four, five . . .”
He gets to his feet.
“Six . . .”
He takes a step back, preparing to leave.
“The bomb . . . the one in the school,” Jean says.
Nothing about his voice betrays the weariness that is written all over his face.
“It’s primed for this morning. Nine o’clock.”
Camille dismisses from his mind the terrifying hill they have to scale in the next four hours.
“Yeah, you already told us that, it’s hardly a revelation. I want something new, something hot off the press, otherwise I’m handing you back to the hit squad and . . .”
Jean cuts in.
“A kindergarten. I planted it in a kindergarten.”
Camille grips his desk, the world is spinning.
“Which one, you little shit? Which school?”
Jean shrugs. I’m not saying another word.
A panicked Camille tries to remember how old kids are at nursery school, two, three, four? He has no children himself. A kindergarten . . . This is insane. There are more than three hundred of them in Paris. Just trying to imagine the victims, he feels physically sick. How could anyone do such a thing? Jean stares at the floor. Obviously, nothing matters except him, his mother, his demands, the whole world can drop dead, a hundred dead children seems a small price to pay for a ticket to Australia . . . Camille could happily kill the man. He could also try to reason with him, but that would be futile. Jean is stubborn, tight-lipped. In their earlier interviews, Camille tried to intimidate him, play on his fear, appeal to his compassion, his pity, he handed him over to the thugs from counterterrorism, nothing has had the slightest effect.
“You know what I want,” Jean says. “It’s up to you. I get the impression you’re not ready to deal, I don’t know what more I can do . . .”
He shakes his head, apparently saddened.
“In the meantime,” he says, “if you’re going to need me, you’ll need to let me get some sleep.”
The handcuffs make it impossible for him to rest his head on his arms, so he bends down, lays his cheek on the desk and closes his eyes.
Immediately, his breathing slows.
He is asleep.
5.25 a.m.
Civil servants, engineers and specialists have been dragged from their beds, vehicles have been dispatched to collect them with outriders to clear the road, offices have been opened, computer systems booted up, all available data is being gathered. No matter how fast they work, everything takes time, it takes ages.
Over the past six months, work has been carried out on almost every nursery school in the capital, the Public Services Department has to make the most of school holidays to do repairs. Any road works carried out in the neighbouring streets or in car parks adjoining the schools needs to be factored in. The most difficult thing is to work out is the scale of the repairs: they need to focus on the jobs that took several days to complete and involved digging a trench large enough for Garnier to bury something the size of a mortar shell. One school was completely rewired, another had the toilet block replaced, they pore over blueprints, question engineers who frantically confer: would it be enough to plant a bomb or not? The pressure is hellish. One of the engineers breaks down.
“You can’t ask that of me!”
He is worried sick, overwhelmed by the responsibility; someone drives him home and fetches his deputy. There are fifteen of them from a range of professions: road engineering, plumbing, excavation, roofing . . . Could you plant a bomb here? Here?
For the moment, they have not found any school, nor any road near a school where trenches were dug in the past eight months.
If you include all the possible hiding places for a mortar shell – sewers, cellars, basements, car parks – it quickly become a needle in a haystack.
“This school you mentioned, Jean, we can’t find it . . .”
Jean looks up at the wall clock.
“You’ll find it. It’s just a matter of time.”
He is not wrong.
Because fifteen minutes later, on the other side of Paris, in one of the decentralised offices of the Préfecture de police, someone picks up a telephone and angrily pounds his fist on the desk until it is finally answered:
“We’ve got it, we’ve found it.”
As soon as the information reaches him, Camille races to the interview room, throws open the door, hurls himself at the suspect, grabbing him by the shoulders. A terrified Garnier tries to shield his face, but he is still handcuffed to the table.
“École Charles-Frécourt?” Camille roars. “Is that the one, Jean? Frécourt in the fourteenth arrondissement?”
Experts continue combing through their files, but the school on the rue Philibert-Beaulieu is the only possibility. Everything tallies. Three months ago, a sinkhole appears in the playground, a flustered headmistress calls the council, they call in surveyors and they in turn call in contractors, parents panic when they see a pit like a meteor crater, safety barriers are hurriedly erected, inspectors determine that the subsidence was caused by a leaking pipe that has weakened the substructure, the following weekend the schoolyard is dug up. In fact, it takes almost a week to shore up the damage, the children spend their playtime hanging off the safety barriers, twenty metres from the workers, as rapt as if it were a T.V. show.
Jean Garnier does not answer, he glares a Camille, then looks away.
5.40 a.m.
This time, there are no precautions, there is no time. As for the residents and the journalists, everything will be explained after the event. The most important thing is to get in there, find the bomb, defuse it; people check their watches as they race for the school. The police have cordoned off a section of the rue Philibert-Beaulieu, fire fighters pull up right behind and lastly the hard-hat workers. The bomb disposal experts from Securité civile are already scanning the playground using ground-penetrating radar.
Basin has laid out the blueprints of the building on the ground, he barks orders while talking to Camille over the phone.
Things don’t look as he had expected.
To Camille, this doubt is like a sucker punch.
“What do you mean by that?” he asks.
6.20 a.m.
“They’ve dug up the playground,” Camille tells the juge, “but it was obvious as soon as they got there that it couldn’t be the right school. The trench was too narrow for Garnier to have climbed down and planted the shell without anyone noticing.”
A fact Jean has now confirmed.
“You didn’t give me any time . . . I would have told you.”
There are times when Camille wants to kill him.
The juge is now insistent that mother and son be allowed to meet, and Camille no longer has any reason to refuse.
Rosie seems even more tense than she did earlier. Gaunt, emaciated. Her face a mask of utter dread. Camille takes a moment to study this woman, to ask himself the same question for the umpteenth time. What connection is there between the death of Jean’s girlfriends and this wave of explosions?
What is the secret that binds mother and son?
The only way to find out is to bring them face to face. But though there are only three hours until the bomb goes off, Camille cannot reconcile himself to the idea. It is like standing on the brink of a bottomless pit and being forced to dive. Despite his better judgement, he takes the plunge.
“Your son is threatening to blow up a kindergarten, Madame Garnier! Do you have any idea what I’m saying?”
He explains. Even if they discover where the bomb is planted, they do not have enough time to make it safe.
Silence.
“But we would still have time to evacuate, do you understand? Otherwise, the bomb will go off with dozens of kids inside the school . . .”
Rosie nods. She understands.
“We need to know the location of the school, and we need to know right now!”
She is on the brink of tears, but she chokes them back, takes a deep breath. They have come to a closed door.
“He’s in there?” she asks.
Camille opens the door. As soon as he sees his mother, Jean bows his head. The officers standing guard step aside. Camille takes Rosie’s elbow and leads her to the chair when she sits down heavily. Behind the one-way mirror and the monitors relaying the scene, thirty people hold their breath.
Rosie looks at her son. He stares at the wall above her head. Slowly, Rosie reaches forwards, her hands sliding across the table in search of Jean’s, two pale, lifeless creatures crawling across the cold polished steel that finally stop when Rosie, prostrate, can reach no further. Her face is pressed against the table, her arms extended in front of her, their hands are about twenty centimetres apart. It is almost unbearable, perhaps because of the silence and the time ticking away.
Rosie is sobbing, it is the only sound to be heard.
Jean is still stiff as a board, his face ashen, he does not move a muscle, does not look at his mother, he looks as though he has been lobotomised except for an involuntary quiver of the kind one sometimes sees in dogs, without knowing whether it is instinct or illness. The shudder that runs through Jean’s whole body is mesmerising. Camille stares as two fat tears slide down Rosie’s cheeks, sole witnesses to some intense emotion, some desperate loneliness.
Rosie lies across the table, Jean sits bolt-upright, the scene could play out for hours, days.
Camille is tempted to check his watch, but he cannot shake the idea that something extraordinary is happening here.
Because the expression on Rosie’s face is not one of sadness. She squeezes her eyes shut, but not like a woman in pain. Is it the shock of seeing Jean again? Is it finding herself written into this story with him, with no way out? As he looks at her face, Camille has the strange impression he can see the child she once was.
Then, suddenly, it dawns on him.
This is not a look of sadness, or fear, or even of relief; it is a smile of victory.
Now Rosie lifts her head, her arms still stretched out before her, she makes no attempt to wipe away her tears, she stares at her son who continues to stare at the wall behind her head and she says, gently:
“I know you wouldn’t abandon me.”
Her voice is low, muffled.
“You can do it, I know you can . . .”
As soon as he realises that it is a trap, Camille hurls himself at her.
“I love you, you know that.”
Camille is already on her, gripping her shoulders, but she clutches the table. She screams.
“You’re all I’ve got, Jean, you can’t leave me!”
Camille pulls with all his strength, but what makes his blood run cold is Rosie Garnier’s laugh, the feverish, manic laugh of a madwoman.
“I knew you’d come for me, Jean! I knew it!”
There is a general panic.
Louis is the first to emerge from the observation room. He bursts into the interview room followed by three other officers, together they seize Rosie, yet still she clings on, screaming “Don’t leave me, Jean!” When they manage to relax her grip from the table, she clutches the chair, “You can’t abandon me!”, in vain they try to pull her away, her breathing is ragged with sobs, “They can’t hurt us, Jean”, and, when she refuses to let go, they are forced to drag her across the floor. She grabs the doorframe, they have to pry her fingers open, one by one, while her screams rise to a shriek. It is a pitiful spectacle.
Jean is still staring straight ahead.
He has not moved a muscle; it is impossible to know how he feels.
7.00 a.m.
Farida is a lovely woman, but she is very disorganised, everyone is fond of her, but honestly . . . She does a bit of work here, a bit of work there, drops everything and wanders off, you never know what she is up to. Usually, she starts work at 7.00 a.m., and on that point, she cannot be faulted: she is always punctual. But rather than concentrating on the classrooms as she has been told a thousand times, she starts by polishing the coffee machine, she dusts the headmistress’s office, mops the floors in the staff-room and the corridor, then tackles the windows, moving from one job to another according to a logic no-one understands. The result is that, as staff and pupils arrive, she is all of a flutter, running round all over the place, but she is incorrigible; the next day, she will be just the same. She has been read the riot act a dozen times, but there is nothing to be done, this is just the way she is. The head teacher, Madame Garrivier, is frustrated. A week ago, she put Farida on notice: she phoned the local council and asked for her to be reassigned. Not one to hold grudges, Farida said that she understood why she had been reassigned to the gym, something she doesn’t like, the camphor and eucalyptus smell of Deep Heat, the tiled showers . . . She does not know it yet, but even if the head teacher had not put in the request, Farida would have been reassigned to the shower block since, a few hours from now, there will be no cleaning to be done, since there will be no school. It will have vanished into thin air. Knowing this, it feels somehow pathetic to watch Farida polishing the little desks, the little sink where the toddlers wash their hands, the toilets that look as though they were built for the seven dwarves; given that it will soon be dust and rubble.
The 140 mm mortar shelled is buried less than a metre below the hallway the classrooms open onto. It is in a cellar that no-one ever visits since it is useless as storage, the roof is too low, but mostly it is prone to floodi
ng, everything that can be done has been tried, but year in, year out it is frequently knee-deep in water. Ten years ago, when studying for his electrician’s diploma, Jean did a placement at a company that did repair work on this school, he went down into this cellar many times. The company has long since folded, and Jean never became a certified electrician, having switched to studying electrical engineering, but he remembered this school. Because of the water, he had to create a plinth on which to set the mortar shell from breeze blocks and waterlogged hunks of timber that had been there for years. This was no bad thing, since it means the bomb is almost level with the floor of the corridor and the blast will meet with little resistance. The children file into the school at 8.15 a.m. Madame Garrivier is a stickler for punctuality. The bomb is set to go off at nine o’clock.
7.15 a.m.
They will have to resort to extreme measures, what other choice do they have? In the privacy of the president’s office, (surrounded by three ministers, the Chief of the Defence Staff and senior officials from the Securité civile, the police, etc.), veiled discussions were held in veiled terms, proposing gruesome ways to extort the truth from Jean Garnier.
As usual, there was talk of psychotropic drugs and truth serums, the stuff of dime-store novels, all of it quickly debunked by the experts: the way that subjects react is too unpredictable, their answers are often a jumble of truth and fiction, and in the time required to corroborate their statement, the bombs would probably explode.
Before they have finished explaining their theories, the president interrupts with a wave of his hand. He is a pragmatist; he would not balk at using unethical techniques, but it is too late for that.
“Time is on his side, Monsieur le président,” someone tells him, “Threatening to set a bomb off every day, then surrendering to the police after the first explosion, was a very clever idea. Obviously, given the constraints, law enforcement agencies have done everything they . . .”
The president cuts the man off.
“Of course, of course . . .”
No-one knows what he really thinks, but they will find out before very long, because the carnage wreaked by this wave of terror will affect not only the schools and shops where Garnier has buried the bombs, but also the corridors of power. It is rare for an event of such magnitude not to cause collateral damage with an administration.
Rosy and John Page 6
