The Guide

by Peter Heller

  “Yes. And I know it by heart.”

  “Okay, good. We’re gone.”

  They walked up to the office like two fishers looking to replenish flies and tippet at the shop. Like the strategy they’d just tried below wasn’t working, maybe they’d buy a selection of foam hoppers or ants to use on top. Made themselves not run.

  Guests paid enough to stay that the lodge might have let them take any flies they wanted anytime, but the pros know that even the richest people on earth love to pick out and buy flies. To comb over the open-topped display cases that are partitioned into hundreds of two-inch-square compartments, each with its tumble of simulated bugs, some so tiny they have to be handled with tweezers. Everyone loves it. The artifice of creating a mimic from tufts of feather and fur, and fine copper wire, to lace and spangle them with glittering Mylar thread, weight them with brass beads, and to size them from nearly microscopic to the heft of a hapless mouse—the flies contain the ingenuity and craft of fine jewelry and the promise of hours, days, in pursuit of something even more beautiful: a connection to the beating heart of the living earth and maybe to one’s own mastery.

  So if fisherfolk are not actually fishing, they love nothing more than spending hours at the shop refilling their fly boxes. If the shop gave the flies away it would degrade them, make the selection less critical, the foam box that held them in their rows less precious. The lodge knew this and so charged an outrageous $4.99 per fly. Tied by women in Thailand.

  There was no one on the track as they walked up, no one in the parking lot, no one in the office as they pushed through the door. They heard a grinder winding in the big maintenance shed across the gravel parking lot, but that was it. Jack had covered the camera below so no one would know what had happened to Cody, and Jack doubted anyone had heard or noticed the shot, the yowls a mile downriver, down in the canyon and covered by the rush of numerous rapids. Once inside, he went straight for the phone behind the counter. Picked up the receiver, heard nothing, punched nine, the universal number for an outside line. Alison held up her phone with Vince’s number on the contact screen. Jack waited. Nothing. Then a click, a woman’s voice, “Can I help you?” She had an accent. Phew.

  “Yes,” Jack blurted. “Yes! Please connect with me with the following number—”

  “I’m sorry, please give me your PIN.”

  “PIN?”

  “Yes. This line is designated users only. Mr. Den, Mr. Jensen, and authorized PIN holders.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said, trying to contain himself, “we have an emergency. A critical emergency.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman repeated, “we are not authorized or equipped to handle emergencies. But if you give me your PIN I can connect you.”

  Jack said, “Excuse me, people are dying here.” He touched the back of his head where the blood had mostly stopped seeping through the bandanna.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. She sounded like she might be. But after all, people are dying everywhere.

  “Well, can I call nine-one-one? That’s all we need to do.” He was trying to contain himself.

  “You could, if you had the correct PIN.”

  “Where are you?” Jack said.

  “Ireland.”

  Jack hung up. “Guns,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going for Den. The fucker’s got a phone in his lair for sure. Then we’re going to shoot our way out of here.”

  Alison laughed. Maybe it was nerves. Release. She had just pretty much killed a man. “Now you’re talking like your uncle Lloyd,” she said. And she said it as if she did not disapprove.

  * * *

  •

  The gun safe was a closet. He knew it was not a true safe because Kelly had taken a key from a drawer when she’d stored his carbine. He slid out the desk drawer but there must have been a score of keys, all on color-coded tags and unlabeled. Unbelievable. The security at the lodge was a weird mix of paranoia and arrogance. The adjacent room that served as gift shop and fishing store had only one locked pine door in the far corner and he knew that his .30-.30 was behind it. The lock was a standard doorknob keyhole.

  The counter in the fly shop had a wide desk drawer under the register. Jack rummaged away a roll of stamps, Super Glue, an ancient Corgi miniature Land Rover, and grabbed a tiny but long screwdriver, the kind used on laptops and glasses frames. “Gotcha,” he said.

  He zipped open the waist pack and dug around, pulled out the key to the gates at Tomichi Creek, which he still had. It was attached to the marlin bottle opener. He squatted and inserted the screwdriver and the marlin’s spear of a bill into the keyhole and felt for the catch, pressed, and, using his knuckles, twisted the doorknob. Let out a breath and stood.

  “Where the heck did you learn that?” she said.

  “When I was coming up, Pop used to hide the Jim Beam in a closet.”

  “Right.”

  Well, at least they’d made a decent gun rack. The pegged slots held only four rifles: his .30-.30, two scoped hunting rifles, and an open-sighted AR-15. Perfect. He bet the lever-action Savage 99 was Cody’s—kept here for easy access—the Winchester Model 70 had been Ken’s, and the assault rifle Mr. Jensen’s. Swiftly he let his hand run over the upper shelf and he found his two boxes of ammo and three thirty-round magazines for the assault rifle. There was also a magazine pouch hanging on a peg. “Thank you, Kurt, you motherfucker,” he whispered.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.” He pulled out his lever-action carbine. “You know how to use this?”

  She twisted her lips. “I shot my first white tail in eastern Tennessee when I was nine.”

  “Figured.” He handed her the gun. “Here.” And the two boxes of ammo. “Take this, too.” He unhooked the Cordura shoulder pouch from its peg. “Put the ammo in this. Put this in there, too.” He pulled one of the sticks of dynamite from his waist pack. “You’ve got your lighter?”

  “Of course.”

  “This one’s for me,” he said, and he picked up the black AR-15. And Alison thought, He’s sure as shit’s not bewildered anymore. He’s frigging pissed. Me, too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They ran. Straight to the river. Avoided the parking lot by the front gate, the cart path that shot through the maintenance shed where they heard the grinder and someone working.

  They crossed the main track that wound down past his cabin and entered the pine woods and made their way through them, then half slid down the bank through the trees to the river. They stayed in the lodgepoles and angled above the fisherman’s bridge and the camera, working upstream. Before they got to Kreutzer’s big meadow they swung away from the stream until they were at the edge of the trees and looking across the tall grass of the hayfield at the side of the big log building. Jack wanted to approach the front door from the side. He’d seen the camera over the entrance portico and it was aimed to cover the wide flagstone circle. He thought that if he stayed against the wall he could slip in from the side of the building and behind it. How he was going to get in the heavy locked front door he wasn’t at all sure, but if he had to, a stick of dynamite would probably suffice.

  They were crouched in the deep shadow with nothing but a hundred and fifty yards of hip-high hay grass ahead of them.

  “Let me have your phone,” he said.

  She handed it to him and he stuck it in his pants pocket.

  “Remember how to crawl?” Jack said.

  “Some of my best years,” she said.

  They crawled. Elbow to knee. Stopped every twenty yards, breathed.

  “Whew,” he said.

  “Toddlers are beasts.”

  “No shit.”

  When they were twenty yards from the side of the house he told her to move very slowly to their right so that she could see the front door. “The camera�
�s covering the turnaround,” he said. “If you stay back and at a wide angle from the entrance you’ll be clear.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I come tearing out, shoot whoever’s behind me.”

  “Okay.” She tugged on his pant leg and he craned back. His face was grimed with sweat and blood and flecked with hayseeds. She said, “What’s the dynamite for?”

  “Mayhem.”

  Her sudden smile tipped whatever fear into action. He racked the charging handle of the AR and tapped the bolt release. Like going over the horizon of a big rapid, he thought. You commit, paddle forward toward your line, and the trepidation falls away. Usually.

  Here we go. He went. At a half crouch now to the propane tank twenty feet off the side of the lodge. Noted. Then to the log wall. He flattened himself and peered around the corner. There was the portico covering the front door. He could see the turnaround and the long drive through the grass. Checked his watch: 2:09. Respite. Should be. The stillest time of a summer day, when the downstream wind subsides and the upstream hasn’t begun to blow. Like slack tide. Cicada time. He could hear the rising buzz of the insects in lazy waves. A movement caught his eye and he saw the golf cart bouncing up the drive. Perfect. Shay coming probably to fetch the lunch trays. She jounced to a stop at the entrance, nodding to whatever tune in her earbuds, probably rap, and bailed out. She went straight for the door. Pressed her thumb to the scanner and shoved it in. He knew she would kick down a doorstop and she did. He moved. Flat along the wall, under the porte cochere and through the door. But. She was there. Down a short hall in the great main room where two long pine tables held the wreckage of lunch. Her back was to him. She was shoving in a heavy chair, about to turn, probably to fetch a steel busing tray. On his right was a side table holding a hammered bronze vase filled with ferns and black-eyed Susans. Over it a muted oil painting of a man casting from a canoe on a misty lake. And just past the table was a door. Also heavy, not a closet. He lunged for it, cracked it enough to slip through, and shut it carefully and found himself at the top of a flight of stairs.

  The smell hit him. Iodine.

  Memories reside happily in smells the way swallows inhabit old barns. When Jack and his friend Wynn were on any kind of wilderness excursion of more than a day, and sometimes even then, they brought a first-aid kit in a one-quart stuff sack that consisted of ibuprofen, a bottle of iodine, ten Band-Aids of assorted sizes, and a few yards of silver duct tape wrapped around a broken half pencil. They figured that any wound they couldn’t stanch with a piece of ripped T-shirt and a tight wrap of the tape…well, they were pretty much fucked. The iodine would disinfect it and ibuprofen would dull the edge of pain. And in a pinch they could use the iodine to purify water—five drops per quart—and the waterproof tape to patch a tear in a tent fly or down jacket. And they joked that if shit really got bad, they could sharpen the pencil with a clip knife and write a last will and testament. Never in his wildest dreams did Jack imagine that they might ever have to exercise that option. But they had used the iodine and the Band-Aids more than once to dress cuts, and he had always enjoyed inhaling the stringent sting of the tincture.

  Now the smell hit him like the blast of a hospital ward. He blotted out the memory of Wynn and tumbled down the stairs as swiftly and quietly as he could.

  At the bottom was a long hall lit with dim sconces and lined with doors like a hotel. Maybe where the resident workers slept—Shay, Cody, maybe Kurt, the mercs. The mercs. Where were the men in black? Taking a break, he guessed. By now, the afternoon treatment would be started. Guests and “donors” in their places, wherever that was. Everything humming smoothly. One or two of the men in black might be down below at the main lodge, just to be around in case he and Alison got feisty.

  Humming smoothly. All the guests here for ten days, of mostly not-fishing. One or two “treatments” a day. Kurt said they’re booked solid through October. The kids he saw were so clearly depleted. The dead girl, the boy very sick. How many rounds could they tolerate? How many guests? They would wring them out. So they had to have replacements. Somewhere nearby. And a constant supply. Of young people who had survived certain deadly diseases and had the right genes. And by the look of the children he had seen, they must have scouts in hospitals all over the world, Asia, Latin America, Europe. Jesus. And probably more than one of these centers. Den had luxury fishing lodges all over the world. Cody had mentioned a super-luxe lodge in Kamchatka. Last winter Jack had thought about guiding in New Zealand—it was their summer—and he had read a job ad, an essay, really, on a fishing website. It was “the most exclusive fishing lodge in Australia–New Zealand, at the head of Lake Wakatipu, offering ten-day excursions inclusive of half-days helicopter fishing, Michelin-starred farm-to-table food, and all spa services…seeking British or American fishing guides only.” Jack thought it was odd. But foreign guides would be out of their element, dazzled by the luxury and the landscape, easier to manipulate and with no backup family nearby. Ten-day stays with half-days fishing…God. Who knows? Later—if there was a later—he’d check if that lodge was run by a company called Seven.

  He needed to focus. He was here now. He stood at the head of the hall in the iodine reek and listened. Voices. Definitely. Muted but nearby. He took three steps forward and listened again. There. A clink, metal on metal. The first door on the right was not like the rest all the way down the hall. The others were standard size, stained pine, and had magnetic card locks as in a hotel. This one was wider, stouter, veneered in knotty cherry, with a wrought-iron lever handle. And a thumb lock pad.

  WTF, he thought. He remembered the blond-bearded operator in black leading the line of kids, opening the front door, calling back to a “Taggart” to keep it down. Occam’s razor, keep it simple. He leveled the AR-15 and knocked on the door. The voices ceased. All other sounds, too. Clearly an unexpected interruption, a rare hitch in protocol.

  “Yes?” A hesitant voice, female. Wary.

  Jack took a chance. “It’s Taggart. The door lock scanners are down. I have a private message for William Barron.”

  Pause. He could feel his heart beginning a fast trot. Then he saw the door lever drop, the door crack. He shoved it in. The woman stumbled back. She was short, bespectacled, with short black hair going gray. In a white coat. Name tag Liu, mouth forming an O of surprise or outrage. And now he lifted his eyes and looked past her to two dozen faces lifted, turned.

  A long room, softly lit. Thick carpet patterned like a tapestry, hinds in a wood. Pairs of what looked like dentist chairs upholstered in glove leather, each with a stainless box on a stand between them, clear tubes running from it to the person seated on either side. Adult, kid, alternating down the line, each to a pair. Red liquid in the tube running from the child, lemonade yellow from box to client. The machines all humming together. As Yumi Takagi had mentioned. But she had not mentioned the spaced floor lamps with amber mica shades stamped with Japanese maple leaves, or the piano concerto coming through hidden speakers. Or the spot reading lights extending from the backs of the clients’ chairs only, which half the clients used to read magazines and books. He saw Vogue and Outside and Yachting World. The kids wore khakis, red polo shirts with the company trout logo. Jack saw the narrow door to what must be a changing room. Nor had the Takagis fully described the discreet Velcro straps, same color as the leather, binding arms to the arms of the chairs, legs to the half-raised ottomans of the recliners. Everybody raised their heads when Jack burst in, but the kids did so as if half-asleep, eyes swimming. Two doctors evidently—the woman Liu, holding to the back of a padded chair, and a tall man standing, white coat, dark hair, athletic—interrupted in the act of timing a client’s pulse the old way, fingers on wrist, eyes to watch.

  That image, of everyone turning to look. A freeze frame he could go over: Sir Will startled with something like outrage—what?…him…that gigolo guide?…what the hell? The Takagis, first chairs on t
he right, not shocked, but profoundly sad, and as if they had expected him. A couple he had not seen before, the man, gray-haired with bushy eyebrows, a face that seemed familiar…It was! The senator from New Hampshire when Jack went to school there. Jack thought he’d lost the election last fall, maybe this was his consolation. The Youngens, eyes wide but smiling weirdly.

  In the suspended moment between the shock of surprise and the dread register of meaning, Jack pried Alison’s phone from his jeans, swiped to camera, and held his finger to the shutter release and panned, then stuffed the phone home. Where was the boy? Halfway down on the right, eyes closed, asleep or unconscious. Jack moved. He would grab him. But the tall, supremely confident doc dropped his patient’s wrist and called, “Who the hell are…You can’t come in here! Hey!” And he stepped into the middle of the room to block Jack’s path. Just on Jack’s right, past the Takagis, was a well-coiffed woman in gold scallop earrings drinking tea from a heavy hand-glazed mug. The big handsome doctor stepped out to block him and Jack said, “Excuse me,” and swiped up the mug and hit him so hard between the eyes he heard bone split and the blood spurted from the man’s nose and he staggered back and crashed over the cowering woman doctor. Jack didn’t wait. He turned to tear the tabs on the boy’s straps, but stopped himself. The boy was clearly barely hanging on. If he carried him, especially into a firefight, he could kill him. Better to wait for help. He caught the eye of the girl who seemed to be his sister two chairs over and said, “Ayuda. Yo voy. Salvando.” Her face was streaming tears and he thought she understood and he pivoted and flew out the door.

  He needed to call for help and he was sure Den had the only working phone and he was sure, too, that he knew where Den would be. He ran up the stairs. Any second one of the doctors would press some alarm. Or call on some intercom he hadn’t seen. At the top of the stairs he eased open the door into the foyer and looked through the crack, saw Shay stacking plates. Up, he was going up. He had been in a score of these fancy mountain houses. The first flight of stairs to the second story, he knew, would go up from the main room to a gallery. Right past Shay. He pushed through the door and ran. Past her. She whirled. Her shock.