Celine

by Peter Heller

  “I—I have it.” Gabriela’s voice shook. “Christ.”

  “Listen, Gabriela, we don’t have long. It’s a body.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a man beside it?”

  “Two…two men.” The girl was holding it together, barely. Good.

  “One looks familiar,” Celine said.

  “Yes. Oh, God. Younger, young, but. Vice pres—”

  “Makes sense. The other?”

  “I don’t know. Latin. A soldier. Wait…there’s something here—”

  “What? What is it?”

  “On the back, something written. It’s Pop’s hand. Hold on.” Slowly she made it out: “It says, Francisco Peña de la Cruz, La Moneda.”

  “La Moneda is the presidential palace. That would have been the day of the coup.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know, we’ll find out. Jesus. Right. Okay. Take your son now. Right now. Is he—”

  “He’s here, he’s here.” Gabriela’s voice sounded strong and clear again. A bit afraid, but excited, too. That’s my girl, Celine thought. This is one to ride the river with.

  “Okay, don’t pack a bag. This is just for a couple of days, I promise you. I want you to get in your car now and drive. Not to a friend or relative. Take the, the Thing. Park at a bus stop, take a city bus, then another, and change again. Leave the Thing at a random business to hold for a few days. Tell them it’s your husband’s fortieth birthday and you are going to pull a prank and surprise him, give them some money. Get to a suburb and—”

  “I get the idea. Got it.”

  “Okay, go. Call me in three days.”

  Had either Celine or Pete thought to hit the stopwatch function on their watches they would have learned that searching for information on Francisco Peña de la Cruz and nearly finding the fantasy hideaway of fairy tales took them exactly seven minutes. The New York Times reported that in the chaos of the coup, Peña de la Cruz, the minister of finance, had gone missing. The first prominent casualty in the ugly history of the Disappeared. Well, he had just been found again, murdered with the help of someone very familiar to all Americans. As for Lamont’s hideaway—how many ice mountains are there?

  They asked the question and the National Park Service’s EagleView satellite site told them. A handful. Not mountains but glaciers, glaciers hanging against mountains, and there were only a dozen that would be noticeable from outside the park, and only a handful from the east side. The east side it would have to be, because on the west were the remote lakes and woods of the Flathead National Forest, most of which was not accessible by road. They studied the east side of Glacier, above Babb, Montana, and there was a smattering of black lakes. They would have to be green, the color of Amana’s eyes. Many of the glacial lakes high up in the basins were shades of blue and green, but they were in the park. Poor Sitka. So outside the park it was, east side, and there were not too many lakes and ponds to count and there, there, was one called Goose and one called Duck, and they were green. Well, greenish. Sounds like a bird. And when they zoomed in, what was the most prominent peak? Chief Mountain. A great monadnock of a flattop, mesa-like, rugged and standing alone. Everything about it spoke of Paul Lamont. And it was almost on the Canadian border.

  Celine sniffed. It smelled too easy, but maybe not. It couldn’t all fit together that snugly. But: Sitka did say that he had told her his cabin was a day’s drive. North would make sense. The area was right. Also there were a few snags: The first was that the mountain itself was not of ice. In the winter, in the late fall and early spring it would be snowy and icy, but it had no permanent glaciers. Still. Celine’s antennae hummed, her nose wrinkled, her gut fluttered. There would be big glaciers visible from the lakes, and there was Chief Mountain near the border. She saw the lone wolf of a peak, the borderland rock pile, and knew. So they zoomed down close to Goose Lake and there were tiny clearings and a dozen structures on the east and south sides and four dirt tracks twisting down from the county road. Duck Lake had another handful of cabins and three more roads. That was problem number two: If one of these were the lake—and it would be just like Lamont to send a hunter on a wild “goose” chase—even if this was the spot, or spots, they could spend a day running between houses, and Lamont would have friends who would warn him. All the successful fugitives in recent history had local help, every one. They needed to know the exact cabin and they needed to go there, directly, in one shot.

  “Pete?” Celine said. “How can we know? This might not even be the right county.”

  Pete hummed. He enjoyed the tactical problem.

  “We need a dog,” he said.

  “A dog, Pete?”

  “How do you hunt grouse?”

  “I have no earthly idea how one hunts grouse. Did you hunt grouse, Pete? In Maine? In your Norman Rockwell youth?”

  “Ey-yuh,” Pete said.

  “Should have known. Well?”

  “A pointer is best, some use a flusher. You get the dog started in the right direction. You have an idea of the best meadow, the ridge, you’ve been watching all fall. So you get the dog started, you jump-start him, so to speak, you push him into a clearing and—he takes you right to Mr. Grouse. Points right at him or flushes him out.”

  “Tanner! Woof! I have been thinking along the same lines, you know.”

  He knew. Pete’s lower cheek tightened. It was barely visible. He tipped up his chin.

  Neither of them was sleepy. They were amped. They had paid for the night but they had their house on their back so they loaded up, found a few inches of burned coffee in the Perpetual Pot in the motel office and poured it into their Mama and Papa Grizzly travel cups, and drove. They had been wrong from the start: Tanner knew where Lamont was, had known all along, that was clear. The hunter’s bosses could not help but know since the beginning. After all, these were no fools, it would be a lethal mistake to think so. And as long as Lamont was a good boy and stayed dead, well—no harm, no foul. They wouldn’t take him off the board and risk triggering the release of the photo or photos. Because Lamont would have been canny enough to set that up. It was all falling into place. But if they jumped, if Pete and Celine drove directly to Lamont’s woods, that would be a different story. The shadow squad would have no choice but to beat them there and get Lamont out of the picture, one way or another. So. Jump-start the dog, follow him to the bird. Simple. Maybe.

  They drove. Celine at the wheel and Pete with the GPS tracker screen plugged into the cigarette lighter and resting in his lap. And with Tanner’s own tracker attached to the frame of their truck. Celine, Pete noticed, was wide awake, more awake than she’d been in the last two years. Her breathing was clear and easy and she drove fast, with the focused confidence of a rally driver. A marvel to behold. They pushed the truck up through Bozeman to Helena where they pulled over at the parking lot of the municipal airport. And here came the blue pulse of their pursuer. Here came the dog running after. They were sure he would overtake them, bound past. But just in case, they would sleep in shifts, Celine with the Glock at her right hand, Pete with the twelve-gauge racked on the bench seat. The timing would have to be perfect or someone, probably Lamont, might die.

  Tanner passed them on Interstate 15 at 5:14 a.m. Celine was on watch and she shook awake a snoring Pete. They could see their breath as Pete lowered the pop top and there was new snow dusting the mountains and high passes above town. The lawns and roofs of Helena were covered in a hard frost. They wanted to be close but not too close. If they got on Tanner too early, he might just stop and confront them. A fight would not lead them to Lamont. But if they were too far behind, Tanner might have time to get to Lamont and remove him, one way or another. It was dicey.

  After they dropped the top of the camper, and before they climbed into the front seat, Pete said, “We know we’ve got his tracker on the frame. No reason to lose it, is there?”

  “Better not. We need to keep pushing him.”

  “Ey-yuh,” Pete said.
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  They ate eggs and bacon at the No Sweat Café downtown, joining the dawn patrol of construction workers and loggers, and Celine ate with relish and they barely spoke. Pete chewed his lip and said, “Did it ever occur to you that if we get that close, Tanner could take us?”

  “Pete, that’s so maudlin.”

  “Seriously. His M.O. seems to be Ambush.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t feel particularly at risk. I said it before: The agency, or whoever it is, wouldn’t risk the murder of two elderly investigators. Heavens. Too many loose ends, certainly. He will try to put us off one more time, and then he will go after Lamont.”

  Pete nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.

  He propped the tracker screen in his lap and they drove north, through Wolf Creek and Choteau. They crossed the Sun River and the Teton and drove along the east flank of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The season had turned: The swaths of aspen on the shoulders of the mountains were yellow and in the windless hours of the morning single leaves spun straight to the ground. They drove with their windows half open, relishing the smells of autumn. They entered the Blackfeet Reservation and turned west at Browning and followed the South Fork of Cut Bank Creek upstream. The sharp rock peaks of Glacier National Park loomed to the west, their flanks swathed in new snow. Something about these first touches of winter: The high ledges were limned in ice, the gullies etched, the hanging glaciers dazzled. Reefs of cloud stood off to the west behind the peaks, but the sky above them was lens clear. Celine drove with a lead foot and they got to Babb by late morning, twenty minutes behind Tanner.

  Babb, Montana, is a café, a gas station, and half a dozen low houses along Route 89. They passed the airport, which was a grass strip covered in grazing cattle, and they passed a liquor store and a few hunters’ pickups with four-wheelers in the beds. They did not stop. Pete was calling the turns and cross-referencing with the topo maps in their gazetteer. Just past the town, Tanner turned east on a dirt road and they passed a mud-green lake on their right, they could see it through the trees—Duck Lake—and they continued on. They drove for a mile. The road forked, and they passed another, smaller lake—Goose. Tanner drove along the east side of it and—forked right again. Drove right past it.

  “I’ll be damned,” murmured Pete.

  Now there was only one way to go, one two-mile-long drive to one cabin on the south edge of a much smaller lake. They did not speak. The road got rough, and then it turned into a four-wheel track, just worn tire ruts on grass and weeds. It ran through pine woods, big spruce. A rougher trail, choked with brush and barely wide enough for a truck, forked to the north and Tanner had turned off there and followed a drainage a quarter-mile and stopped. Good. What you’d expect. A half mile farther and three large boulders blocked the track. Whoever lived up here didn’t need a No Trespassing sign, there was no way through.

  “I make it out to be about a mile and half more,” Pete said, looking at the map. Celine chewed her lip.

  “I guess it’s time to use the hunting vests. We don’t want to get shot by Mr. Lamont. If that’s him.” She nodded at the boulders. “Something about the whole setup tells me it is.”

  “I don’t think hunting season starts for a few weeks. Big game, that is. Are we going to take the shotgun?”

  “You are,” Celine said. “I just don’t feel comfortable with anything but a high-powered rifle.”

  “Are we going to load them?”

  Celine stared at her husband with the incredulity she sometimes felt sharing her life with a man who grew up in Maine. It wasn’t that he was simple—well, yes, he was. Brilliant and simple.

  “What good is a gun if you don’t load it, Pete? Heavens.”

  They got dressed fast—bright orange hunting vests and hats. Pete wore the neon baseball cap; Celine insisted on wearing the goofy Elmer Fudd thing with the earflaps. “Goofier I look, the better,” she said, admiring herself in her powder compact. She put on a small belt pack with a pint water bottle, handed one to Pete who shook his head. They slid the guns out of their Cordura cases and Celine levered the action and thumbed the bullets down into the rotating magazine of the Savage 99. She pressed the top bullet back into the mag and slid one more into the chamber. Nobody used lever-action hunting rifles anymore, but she liked it—the feel, and the nod to the past. The safety was on the tang and she thumbed it back. Locked and loaded. Pete, who had grown up with shotguns, fed five shells of double-ought buckshot into the side-loading magazine of the Winchester Marine, pumped the action once, thumbed one more shell into the gate, and pushed the safety button on the trigger guard over to On. Ready. The day had warmed enough that they didn’t need gloves. They shut the camper door but didn’t lock it. They glanced at each other once, in the way only an old couple can who is about to embark on something risky but important.

  “You feel okay?” Pete said.

  Celine gave him a thumbs-up. “I feel really good today. Will you remind me later to pick up that little skull just next to the tire there? Must be a rabbit or something, I’d like to use it in a piece.”

  Pete nodded and they started walking slowly up the track.

  They trod in sun and shadow. In and out of it. Slowly. The patches of sunlight were nearly hot, the shade cold. They crunched over old pine needles and they could no longer see their breaths. It felt good to walk. Celine thought the scoped rifle was heavy but she insisted on carrying it. The track was not much more than a path through mostly pines, a game trail, but it was smooth enough.

  They had walked about fifteen minutes when they heard a clattering in the woods off to their right. They both turned and a bull elk broke across the trail not twenty feet off. Huge rack. Startled. All three of them. Pete jerked and stepped back, Celine spun to the side and the air split. Crack and boom together and the trunk of the big fir tree beside her splintered. She dropped. Reached out her free hand and pulled Pete down into brown grass and sweet sage. Jesus. They hit the ground. That was no warning, that was a kill shot. Meant to be. She was breathing hard. Stay, she commanded.

  She went to one knee and brought up the gun and her left forearm slipped instinctively into the leather sling and twisted it taut; her left hand gripped the checkered forearm, and her right thumb punched the safety as her eye came to the scope. The figure was moving fast, running in closer for a finishing shot, a single shooter. She found him with her open left eye and swung. He would have underestimated the elderly lady in the Elmer Fudd hat. He shouldn’t have. With complete calm Celine tracked and led the green blur like a loping deer, and fired. He dropped. Without thought she levered the action again, letting the spent brass fly into the dirt, and stood.

  “Stay!” she commanded Pete. She moved. When she had to, she could move pretty fast. It taxed her lungs but she could do it. Something about adrenaline cleared the airways. She untwisted her arm from the sling and went. Fast into the dark of the trees where there was no trail and it didn’t take long. He was maybe only a hundred feet away. He was sprawled on a duff of pine needles, splayed, his hand scrabbling back for his rifle and a bloom of blood on his right shoulder.

  “Don’t!” she commanded simply. One word. He didn’t. “Where’s your backup piece?” He shook his head.

  Tanner did not look the same. His ice gray eyes held fear.

  “No backup?” Shook his head, watched her, cornered and bleeding.

  “You underestimate me.” No response, his head very still, watching her. “Big mistake.”

  She stepped forward so that she was above him but not close enough that he could make a grab. She had the rifle pointed straight at his gut. Her finger was on the trigger. “Safety’s off,” she said. “If you’re lying and you have a backup and go for it, you’re a dead man.” He nodded. She could see through the pines to the east a swampy clearing, a perfect place for moose. Probably where the elk had been when he startled it. “Where’s the sat phone?” He blinked.

  “You don’t need the oxygen,” he croaked, his eyes s
taying on her face.

  “I need it sometimes.”

  “Where’d you—”

  “Learn to shoot like that? Clearly your research was incomplete.”

  “Jesus.” His voice sounded like a draft wind coming through dry twigs.

  “The phone?” she repeated. He motioned his chin down to his hip. His eyes were wary and scared.

  “Okay,” she said. “First thing, you take this stupid hat and make a compress. Then take my beautiful silk scarf and here—” Still covering him, with one hand she deftly tugged free her red scarf and doubled and looped it and tossed it to him. “Put your arm through, yes, and pull it tight. A half hitch. There.” He did.

  “So sad,” she said. “That’s Armani.”

  He stared at her, wary, his eyes like a hundred miles of Arctic ice, but something moved in them. A question.

  “No, I am not going to finish you. I meant to. I missed, thank God. You have a kid at home, don’t you?”

  He nodded, barely. “One I bet. I bet it’s a little girl.” Suspicious nod. “Well, you better go back to her. We wouldn’t want another little girl to grow up without a father.”

  He stared at her.

  “Bill?” He blinked hard. “You’re going to call in your support now. There’s a clearing through there, you saw it, I bet it’s where you parked your truck. Big enough for a chopper. Call it in. You’ll be in the ER quicker that way than if we called the volunteer ambulance. By the look of Babb that could take a while.”

  He hesitated, nodded once.

  “You can get to the clearing, right?”