the Nuck ambush: the DuPlessis memory — the beef joined to the blood-ledger

The scene's one deep political knot: at the sight of the Nucks, Gately remembers "the babbling little football-head Québecer he'd killed by gagging a man with a bad cold" — M. Guillaume DuPlessis, the Gaspé A.F.R. patron whose accidental suffocation in Gately's botched burglary (016) the Separatists took as an assassination (097) and whose death set the whole late-book plot in motion. The private beef and the geopolitical blood-ledger touch here: the American ex-burglar who unknowingly killed a Canadian V.I.P. is now bleeding in the street facing avenging Nucks. Gately's flinch — "This line of thinking is intolerable" — is the citizen colliding, unaware, with the machine his own hands once jammed. The book's smallest crime and its largest political consequence are the same act.