Page 93 of Mountain Security

“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me,” Yvette said.

“Please don’t be. I’m just not sure we’re going to get anything more from visiting … Arnaud Gaultier.” His brow creased. “Wait. I remember him. He’s the old man we met at the party.”

“Ah, yes. I’d almost forgotten, with all the excitement afterwards,” she said, smiling ruefully. “I don’t think we’re going to get much out of him, honestly. He’s a good man, and rich as Croesus.”

“Well, we might as well speak with him.”

“Okay. But then we’re going home, and this time I’ll cook dinner for all of you. As a thank you.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Alex said, getting behind the wheel of the SUV.

Gaultier turned out to live much further from town than the others, far up in the mountains of Argentière.

“I’m surprised he lives all the way up here.”

Yvette’s brow creased. “He’s lived up here for as long as I’ve known him. Pierre, Vivienne and I have been here several times for dinner. It’s a huge stone house … There. That’s the one.”

“Where?” Alex couldn’t see a house.

“Beyond that gate.”

Alex whistled.

“I wonder what this kind of property goes for in this area.”

“I can’t imagine Gaultier being concerned by that. He’s a strange old man, but he’s incredibly rich. He and his wife owned this place for decades. After his divorce last year, he kept it. I’m not sure where she went.”

“His file was rejected … last spring?” Alex scrunched his face, struggling to remember the details.

“Yes. I remember it well because it was the most absurd proposal the town had ever received. A resort complex with a casino and an enormous aquarium, right off the slopes. Absolutely crazy project, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The commission wasn’t impressed with the environmental due diligence.”

The front gate opened as their car approached.

“One of the guards probably saw us approach,” Yvette said. “Let’s head up to the house.”

“Impressive,” he said. He drove slowly, but even so, the car skidded a few times on the snow-covered driveway.

Finally, the house came into sight. If the other houses they’d visited today were impressive, this one was downright palatial. The kind of house that would make more sense in Versailles than it did in the outskirts of Chamonix.

Yvette shrugged, unimpressed.

He parked at the edge of a small roundabout with a fountain in the middle.

Yvette looked into the fountain, which was covered in snow.

“Strange,” she said. “Last time we were here, it was working, even though it was winter. He explained he was heating it.”

Alex shook his head.

The waste.

The sheer waste.

Yvette shivered. The temperature was dropping steadily. Alex stuck his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Let’s get this over with and go home,” he said testily.

32

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