It was such a brutal thing to say, and said so casually, that Gamache found himself reassessing this man. Perhaps it was just the unthinking utterance of a socially and emotionally inept person. Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe he genuinely loathed the man.

“Michael Rosenblatt’s genius is attaching himself to brilliant people,” said Delorme. “He’s a leech. And now he’s trying to take credit for the Supergun.”

“Credit?” asked Gamache. “Can such a word be applied to such a thing?”

“You might not like it,” said Delorme, “and I might not, but the Supergun is a remarkable achievement. That’s just a fact. What we don’t really know is what Gerald Bull planned to do with it. The problem is that it’s an ever-changing world. Friends become enemies, and the weapons you sold them are suddenly killing your own people.”

“Non,” said Gamache. “The problem is that these weapons are built in the first place and people like Gerald Bull have no allegiances.”

“There’ve been weapons since there’s been man,” said Delorme. “Neanderthals had them. It’s the nature of the beast. Whoever can make a better one wins. Where do you think weapons come from?”

They grow in a field, thought Gamache, though no one was suggesting hammering their swords into plowshares.

“We can’t predict the future,” said Delorme. “So we do our best to choose our allies.”

“And your weapons,” said Gamache. “You said ‘we.’ I thought you were a file clerk.”

“I’m sorry, I meant the collective ‘we.’”

“Of course, forgive me.”

But for just a moment, Sean Delorme no longer looked or sounded like a low-level office worker. He no longer seemed maladroit or ill at ease. An unexpected edge had appeared in this rather dull, almost comical, clerk.

There was an act going on here, Gamache was sure of it. Sean Delorme was alternately plodding and sly. A slightly muddled bureaucrat one moment, and in the next he was implying he was himself involved in the secretive world of arms dealing.

Was it more fantasy? Like Laurent playing soldier on the village green?

Was Sean Delorme playacting in a dangerous field? And then going home for dinner?

Armand Gamache looked at Sean Delorme and suddenly felt some concern that what had happened to Laurent, what happened to Gerald Bull, might happen to him. That reality would come calling. And once found, it would take his life. As it had taken theirs.

“You said almost everyone had stopped looking for the Supergun,” said Gamache.

“True.”

“Almost,” Gamache repeated. “Almost everyone. But some would have kept going?”

Who kept going when every reasonable person gave up, Gamache wondered, though he already knew the answer.

The unreasonable. That’s who. The fanatics.

“Who is still looking for the gun?” Gamache asked.

“This is all just theory, supposition.”

“Then theorize.”