What had made him go on like that? Pride? The need to tout the importance of his profession? A little of both, perhaps. Even his bosses had reprimanded him after the program. Behind the steering wheel, Hugues now smooths back his graying hair, nervous. “Monsieur Létourneau, what I said was ridiculous.”
“That’s an understatement, Hugues. You make a mistake, people are unhappy. I make a mistake, people die.”
“Listen—”
“It’s been a year since I came back to Quebec and I still can’t find work. Post-traumatic stress it seems. Funny, I have a feeling the condition doesn’t affect road traffic reporters.”
“Look, I’ll apologize on the air if you want.”
“No, no, Hugues. I think that for you to truly understand what an asshole you were, you’ll have to live through what I lived through.”
Perplexed, Hugues can think of nothing to say.
After a long silence, the ex-controller says in a neutral voice, “I’ve planted a bomb in downtown Montreal.”
Hugues blinks, then raises his voice in anger: “Okay, listen, I understand that you’re upset, but that’s no reason to make such a sick joke! Even if I know you’re lying, I’ll have to alert the police, it’ll be a shitstorm downtown and—”
“Look to the east.”
“What?”
“Look to the east, Hugues. You won’t be sorry.”
Disconcerted, Hugues turns his head toward an empty lot that stretches out for a good kilometer.
“You’re looking? Perfect. Five, four, three...” Létourneau whispers.
“But what are you—”
“...two, one, zero.”
For a few seconds, Hugues sees nothing. Then he makes out the plumes of smoke rising several kilometers to the east; a small cloud, pitch black and ominous. Quickly, his exasperation is overtaken by a fear that crawls right up his throat. He turns his pale face toward the cell phone, as if he can see the man on the other end of the line. “What have you done?! What the—”
“Calm down, Hugues, that wasn’t the bomb I was telling you about. This one was much smaller, planted in an abandoned building. I set it off from a distance, so I couldn’t see if there were any people nearby, but I’d be surprised if there were.”
Hugues moistens his lips, his eyes still fixed on the phone. “I don’t believe you.”
“Listen to your two-way.”
Hugues stares at the black box. After a few seconds of silence, an anxious voice comes on: “Alert, explosion on Rue Jean-Grou, at Pointe-aux-Trembles. Police are sending a team over right now. There appears to be no victims, but we are awaiting confirmation.”
“Do I have your attention now, Hugues?” asks Létourneau.
Hugues squints at the smoke in the distance, breathing faster. His second cell phone rings again. He ignores it.
“Hugues, do I have your attention?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. Get back on the road. Head downtown. If you take another direction, I’ll know and I’ll set off the bomb.”
His hands trembling, Hugues shifts up a gear and accelerates toward Rue Sherbrooke. Dry-mouthed, he manages to ask: “You... you’ve become a terrorist?”
The ex-controller lets out a laugh, at once bitter and amused. “Come on, Hugues. On the Internet, anyone can learn to make a bomb.”
“So, what do you want?”
“I’ve planted a bomb on a street downtown and it’ll do much more damage than the one you just saw, especially in the middle of rush hour. It’s programmed to go off automatically, but I can set it off whenever I want. So if you call the police, if I see a few too many cops or squad guys hanging around downtown, I set it off. Ditto if I hear you make any hints about a bomb or try to warn people on the air. Is that clear?”
“Why are you warning me?”
“I told you, I want you to live through what I lived through. For you to understand that your so-called stress is nothing compared to what I—”
“You’re insane!”
“Call the psychiatrist I’ve been seeing for the past six months and tell him he botched his diagnosis,” responds Létourneau.
“Your plan makes no sense! You’re the one who’ll set off the bomb. I won’t feel what you felt. I won’t be responsible.”
“If you manage to find it in time.”
“What?”
“You’re the most popular traffic reporter in the city, Hugues, make the most of it. But to be clear, I won’t have you announcing on the air that there’s a bomb on this or that street, no, no. That’d be too simple, too amateurish. And it’d just create panic. You’ve got to behave like a professional... manage the stress, understand? So, if you find where it’s hidden, you’ll say on the air that the street is backed up, or under construction, it doesn’t matter, whatever you want, and you’ll tell people to take a different route, like you normally do. If you can do that, you’ll prove that you can manage the same kind of stress I had to deal with, and I’ll deactivate the bomb.”
Hugues stays silent for a moment, astounded. He keeps driving on Sherbrooke, then crosses Papineau, now heavily jammed, approaching downtown. “You’re insane!” he blurts out again.
“You’re repeating yourself, Hugues. I know, it goes along with your job, but still...”
“How am I supposed to guess where your fucking bomb is?”
“It’s a year ago today since the accident, Hugues. I want the story to play out all over again, same time, same place, but through—”
“The same place? But it was in New York!” Hugues shrieks.
“Oh, please, Hugues, you’ve never heard of symbolism?”
“Wh... what?”
“By the way, don’t worry. I synchronized the timer with your station’s clock, so we all have the same time down to the second. And I know you give four traffic updates per hour: at three minutes past the hour, then eighteen, thirty-three, and forty-eight. It’s 3:44, you’ve got four minutes before your next update.”
“I won’t find shit in four minutes!”
“In that case, pray the bomb won’t go off before the next one, at 4:03.”
Hugues feels his body shaking. “You’re screwing with me! You’re just trying to scare me to death!”
“After what you’ve seen over at Pointe-aux-Trembles, do you really want to take that risk?”
The reporter massages his forehead as he crosses Rue Saint-Denis.
“Stay downtown, don’t drive anywhere else until it’s all over,” Létourneau says. “If you go too far in another direction, I’ll know.”
“You... you installed a tracking device under my vehicle, is that it?” Hugues asks with a quiver in his voice.
“Very good, Hugues. And if you try to remove it: boom! I’ll call you later.”
“Wait—”
But the lunatic hangs up. For a few seconds, Hugues hardly notices the heavy traffic around him. This is a bad joke, he thinks. It has to be. Yet the voice that comes on the radio quickly shatters this illusion.
“Confirmation: a device has exploded on Rue Jean-Grou. One wounded. Police on-site. The area will be closed off for the rest of the day.”
Hugues starts to turn his head when a ringing invades his eardrums; it takes him a moment to realize it’s his console signal, alerting him that he’ll go on the air in less than two minutes. The cars inching forward along Sherbrooke come back into his peripheral vision, just as one of his cell phones rings.
“Tr... traffic, bonjour.”
“Hugues! It’s Paul! Hey, it’s not looking good on Papineau Bridge, lemme tell you.”
Hugues’s hand flutters as he takes his pad and jots down the notes from this regular who’s been calling him for ten years, not really seeing what he’s writing.