The Crowded Grave

mother.”
    “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I was depressed and lonely. It was Gigi I wanted to see as much as you.” She gave a half smile, but her eyes were fond. “Brigadier permitting, shall we have dinner tonight?”
    “Of course,” he said. His heart gave a lurch. “Home or restaurant?”
    “Home, with Gigi,” she said. “But it’ll have to be quick. This chaos here will get worse all day and later tonight, and probably stay that way until the deal is signed and the ministers have gone.”
    If she thought this was chaos, wait until the brigadier announced the move to the backup plan tomorrow morning, Bruno said to himself. A voice was calling for Isabelle from down the hall. It sounded like the brigadier. She headed along the corridor, trying not to limp and aware of his eyes followingher, at one point putting out her cane as if about to stumble. Bruno forced himself to turn away, thinking she’d hate him to see her like this.
    Suddenly there came an explosion and the sound of breaking glass and car horns. Isabelle tottered and half fell against the wall as confused shouting came from the stairway. Bruno ran to her, but she pushed him away, telling him to find out what was happening. He leaped down the stairs to the front entrance to find the door blocked by a knot of gendarmes and black-garbed security men. They were looking across the château’s park and its railings to the hotel parking lot across the road, where a plume of black smoke rose from a fireball in which Bruno could see the skeleton of Carlos’s Range Rover.
    “Get the fire extinguishers,” Bruno shouted, grabbing the only one he could see. “Somebody call an ambulance and the
pompiers
.”
    He forced his way through the throng of confused men and down the steps and ran up the long drive to the main gates of the château. He heard steps pounding behind him and saw Carlos, the only other man who seemed to have found an extinguisher, and they ran on together. The sentry box at the open gates was unmanned, its two guards tumbling from the hotel, each carrying a small hand-sized fire extinguisher in one hand and holding a soaked washcloth against his face with the other. As Bruno approached the searing heat from the burning vehicle, he understood their precaution even as he wondered how they were hoping to use the extinguishers with only one hand.
    “Was anyone inside?” Bruno shouted.
    One of the guards gestured wildly. Behind the neighboring cars, its windshield cracked by the explosion, the innkeeperhad covered a heap on the ground with an overcoat and was reaching to turn on the tap of a garden hose. The water sputtered and then spurted out, and he pointed it at the overcoat and then lifted the coat to play it on the smoldering form beneath. The form moved, turned over and tried to get to its feet as Carlos turned his extinguisher on the car that sheltered the innkeeper and the charred security guard. The chorus of a dozen car horns played on.
    Suddenly a throng of people seemed to be around them, foam erupting over the wreck of Carlos’s vehicle, the security guard who had been covered by an overcoat retching but evidently alive as he was helped to his feet.
    Bruno looked at Carlos, arms on his hips and his back hunched, staring grimly at the glowing shell of his car, the emptied fire extinguisher between his feet.
    “That was meant for you,” Bruno said.
    “I know. Lucky we had one of those remote starters.”
    Isabelle had now arrived on the scene.
    “They know who you are and where you are,” she said to Carlos. “You must be almost as good a target as the two ministers.”
    “Maybe just an easier one,” Carlos said, as an ambulance siren whined in the distance.
    “Nobody leaves,” Isabelle said.
    She was leaning on her cane, panting. Bruno tried to imagine the willpower that had brought her here so quickly from the château. The brigadier came running up.
    “All the security teams, the hotel staff, any guests, anybody who could have set that bomb—I want them all double-checked,” he said. “Where’s that damn security chief when I need him? Bruno, please call J-J and tell him I need a forensics team and an explosives expert. I want a media blackout onthis. If there are any inquiries, we’re to say a car simply caught fire with an electrical fault. I want no reference to Carlos or to the summit. And I want this wreck and any other damaged vehicles removed from the parking lot. I want it all