“Really?” she asked, trying not to smile. It was what she’d just been thinking about him. A scholarly man who pursued murderers. “I guess we’re not all what we seem.”

“He does seem to know his stuff, though. He identified the weapon immediately. He said it was a Supergun.”

“A Supergun?”

He’d wondered if she’d laugh. Sitting in the warm and cheerful bistro, with fresh warm bread and parsnip and apple soup in front of them, the very word sounded ridiculous. “Supergun.” Like something out of a comic book.

But Reine-Marie didn’t laugh. Instead she remembered, as he did every hour of every day, Laurent. Alive. And Laurent, dead. Because of the thing in the woods. No matter its name, there was nothing remotely funny about it.

“It was built by a man named Gerald Bull,” said Armand.

“But what’s it doing here?” she asked. “Did Professor Rosenblatt know?”

Armand shook his head, then gestured out the window. “Maybe they can tell us.”

Reine-Marie looked out and saw Lacoste and Beauvoir walking across the dirt road, to the path into the woods. And with them were two strangers. A man and a woman.

“Who are they?” asked Reine-Marie.

“At a guess, I’d say National Defence, or maybe CSIS.”

“Or maybe more academics,” suggested Reine-Marie.

*   *   *

Once again, Jean-Guy Beauvoir attached the huge plug to the huge receptacle and heard the clunk as the huge floodlights came on.

He kept his eyes on the CSIS agents and wasn’t disappointed.

They’d gone from standing shoulder to shoulder, holding their briefcases like commuters at a train station, to looking like two people who’d lost their minds.

Their eyes flew wide open, their mouths dropped, their heads in unison slowly, slowly tilted back. And they stared up. Up. Had it been raining they would have drowned.

“Holy shit,” was all Sean Delorme could say. “Holy shit.”

“It’s real,” said Mary Fraser. “He did it. He actually built it.” She turned to Isabelle Lacoste, who was standing beside her. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s Gerald Bull’s Supergun.”

“How did you know?”

“Michael Rosenblatt told us.”

“Professor Rosenblatt?” asked Sean Delorme, recovering enough to stop saying “holy shit.”

“Yes.”

“How did he know?” said Delorme.

“He’s seen it,” said Beauvoir. “He’s here.”

“Of course he is,” said Mary Fraser.

“I asked him to come,” said Beauvoir.

“Ahhhh,” said Mary Fraser, turning away. Her eyes dragged back to the giant gun. But she wasn’t looking at the weapon. The CSIS file clerk was staring at the etching.

“Unbelievable,” she said under her breath.

“The stories were true then,” said Delorme, turning to his colleague.

Mary Fraser took a few tentative steps forward and leaned into the image.

“That’s writing,” she said, pointing to, but not touching, the etching. “Arabic.”

“Hebrew,” corrected Lacoste.

“Do you know what it says?” Delorme asked Lacoste.

“By the waters of Babylon,” said Isabelle.