My best chance, I decided, was to seek the refuge of the powerless—sleeping in the park. Above the city loomed the round peak of Mont-Royal, surrounded by dense woods. A taxi driver took me up to the Avenue des Pins, which bordered Mont-Royal Park on the south. I trotted up a winding road, into the woods; after a few hundred yards I ducked into lush foliage and traversed a series of narrow trails toward the summit. High up, near the top, the forest seemed to close around me. The path opened to a small clearing, framed by a stand of birch trees. I lay down under the tight canopy of trees, pulled my hotel bathrobe over me and slept peacefully, for the first time in nearly a week.

I’m sure I looked wretched when I awoke at dawn. I hadn’t bathed or shaved or brushed my teeth; my mouth felt mossy inside. But I figured my ragged appearance was useful cover: Bums are just bums; nobody pays them any attention. I relieved myself in the woods, scouted the area to make sure I was safe and then returned to my burrow and fell back asleep for another two hours. I awoke the second time feeling hungry and knowing that I needed to plan my next moves carefully: today would be more dangerous than last night.

My goal was to get to New York as quickly as I could, so that I could talk to Weiss and Sellinger and help them deal with the bomb Michel Bézy had dropped on the Mirror. Flying there seemed out of the question. Bézy’s men would be at the airports, perhaps aided by the Quebec police. Renting a car would also be risky, since I would have to produce identification. The best way out would be to take a bus south, to upstate New York; once I was safely in the United States, I could fly to La Guardia.

I studied the Quebec maps I had torn from the hotel guidebook. The most direct route to the United States was due south to Plattsburgh, New York, along Canada’s Route 15, which crosses the border just west of Lake Champlain and becomes I-87. That was the easiest way—but I suspected it was also the most dangerous. Bézy would assume that if I was running south, I would take that route. The next quickest way would be to travel southwest from Montreal along Route 20, which skirts the St. Lawrence River, and cut south at Cornwall—crossing into New York at Massena. A third alternative would be to continue along the St. Lawrence all the way to Kingston, and then head south to Watertown, New York. That route had the virtue of being indirect.