A Great Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page A

manila file. It was enough to see the name.
    Michel Brébeuf.
    When she looked up again, there was anger, bordering on rage, on her face.
    â€œThis is madness, Armand.”

 
    CHAPTER 3
    Serge Leduc waited.
    He was prepared. All morning his iPhone had buzzed with text messages from colleagues, other professors at the academy, to say that the new commander was going to visit them.
    At eight in the morning they’d assumed it was a courtesy call. Armand Gamache was making the rounds to introduce himself and perhaps ask their opinions and advice.
    By nine o’clock a slight pall of doubt had descended, and the texts became more guarded.
    By eleven, the stream of information had become a trickle as fewer and fewer messages appeared in Professor Leduc’s inbox. And those that did were curt.
    Have you heard from Roland?
    Anyone know anything?
    I can hear him coming down the corridor.
    And finally, by noon, Leduc’s iPhone had fallen silent.
    He sat in his large office and looked at the books lining his walls. On weapons. On federal and provincial regulations. On common law and the Napoleonic Code. There were case histories and training manuals. The wall space not taken up with textbooks was allocated to his citations and an old etching of the parts of a musket.
    A small man in his mid-forties, but still powerfully built, Leduc had been moved to the academy after he’d been caught with drugs stolen from the Sûreté evidence locker.
    Leduc had nursed a slight suspicion that Chief Superintendent Francoeur had engineered the whole thing. Not that he wasn’t guilty. Leduc had been skimming from the mountain of seized drugs for years, selling them on to crime syndicates. What struck him as suspicious was that he’d suddenly been caught just as an opening for the number two position at the academy had come up.
    Francoeur had presented Inspector Leduc with a choice. Become second-in-command at the academy or be fired.
    Serge Leduc had navigated the realpolitik of the Sûreté by being a pragmatist. If this was what the Chief Superintendent wanted, then so be it. It was unhelpful and unhealthy to nurse a grudge or to fight the inevitable. Especially against Sylvain Francoeur. Leduc himself had been an enforcer long enough to know what being fired by Francoeur might mean.
    That had been almost a decade ago, and with his transfer a new era had dawned. Though not, perhaps, an Age of Enlightenment.
    On Francoeur’s orders, Serge Leduc had reshaped the academy. Picking and choosing the recruits. Changing the curriculum. Guiding, nurturing, and whipping the young men and women into shape. And the shape they took was that of Serge Leduc.
    Any recruit who resisted or even appeared about to question was marked for special treatment. Something guaranteed to create an attitude adjustment.
    The actual head of the academy had protested feebly but was just going through the motions. The Commander excelled at form without function. He was an impressive figurehead, a relic kept in place to calm worried mothers and fathers who naturally, though mistakenly, believed the primary danger to their children was physical.
    The Commander inspired confidence with his gray hair and straight back, in his dress uniform on entrance day when he smiled at the eager recruits, and on graduation when they smiled at him smugly, knowingly. The rest of the time he cowered in his office, afraid of the phone, afraid of the knock on the door, afraid of the night and afraid of the dawn.
    And now he was gone. And Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone. “Fired,” as it were, in an irony not lost on Leduc.
    And now Professor Leduc waited for the knock on the door.
    He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him.
    *   *   *
    Armand Gamache walked down the long corridor. They’d torn down the old academy, where he himself had trained, a few years earlier and relocated to the South Shore