Leila said nothing for a while. Then she spoke quietly, “What’s next is, I ask you what you’re going to do about it?”

I said, “We’ll get them back if we can. That’s what we’re going to do.”

Leila said, “Good. Do I need to come?”

Nazari’s eyes got wide.

I said, “You’ll come too late, Leila. It’s all going to happen right now.”

“I’m just wondering if you’ll finish the job, or if I’ll have to do it for you.”

“How do you mean?”

“You said you’ll get them back. I said, ‘good’, but that’s only half the job.”

I said, “What’s the other half?”

“To make sure that justice is done. That nothing remains to be corrected.”

Nazari spoke, “We’ll take care of that.”

“I hear you, but from what I can see, it’s no better there than over here. And over here there are no guarantees that justice gets done. You’ve got to make damn sure yourself.”

I said, “Roger that. We’ll take care of it.”

Leila said, “Good.” The call disconnected.

Sixty seconds later, a text message came through. It was a set of GPS map coordinates. Nazari tapped on the phone. She brought up a map, which zoomed out to reveal the whole of France. She tapped a couple more times, and then one final tap. The map zoomed in and went blank. I looked at her. She said, “It's processing.”

We watched the screen for around thirty seconds.

I said, “It’s slow.”

She said nothing. A few seconds later, the blank screen began to be filled in by the graphic lines and place names of a map. A few seconds after that, red pins began to populate the map, around a dozen of them. She said, “That’s it.”

“What is it?”

“The black hole.”

“I don’t see a black hole, just a bunch of pins in a map.”

Nazari futzed with the phone. She said, “The pins are where the cell phones went dead. I’m just trying to see if there’s a pattern.”

I said, “Do you recognize where that is?”

Nazari used her fingers to pinch and un-pinch, trying to get the map so that she could figure out where it was. She said, “It’s here.”

“What do you mean ‘here’?”

“Alencourt. The central point is an area near the river.” I heard a little involuntary ‘oh’. She said, “I know where that is.”

“Great. Where?”

She looked at me, surprise written all over her face. “The middle of the circle. I think it’s the mayor’s house.”

“It’s that precise?”

“No but it’s either his house or the Vaugeois. Only two properties in that area.”

I said, “Which would explain the attack on Gilles.”

She looked at me, “How so?”

“I’ll show you when we’re back at the house.”

Chapter Fifty-Six