“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.
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.