The Cry of the Halidon (24 page)

“A spirit …” Alex began to repeat the phrase, then stopped. “Proof … proof of something real.”

“Yes,” replied Whitehall.

“Where is it?” asked McAuliff.

“The proof is in the meaning of another word,” said Barak Moore. “The meaning of the word ‘Halidon.’ ”

“What is it?”

“I do not know—”

“Goddamn!”
Sam Tucker exploded. Barak Moore held up his hand, silencing him.

“Piersall found it. It is to be delivered to the Colonel of the Maroon people. For him to take up into the mountains.”

McAuliff’s jaws were tense; he controlled himself as best he could. “We can’t deliver what we don’t have.”

“You will have it, mon.” Barak settled his gaze on Alexander. “A month ago Dr. Piersall brought me to his home in Carrick Foyle. He gave me my instructions. Should anything happen to him, I was to go to a place in the forests of his property. I have committed this place to memory, mon. There, deep under the ground, is an oilcloth packet. Inside the packet is a paper; on it is written the meaning of ‘Halidon.’ ”

The driver on the ride back to Kingston was the Jamaican who was obviously Barak Moore’s second-in-command, the man who had done the talking on the trip out to the airfield. His name was Floyd. Charles Whitehall sat in the front seat with him; Alex and Sam Tucker sat in back.

“If you need stories to say where you were,” said Floyd to all of them, “there was a long equipment meeting at a Ministry warehouse. On Crawford Street, near the docks. It can be verified.”

“Who were we meeting with?” asked Sam.

“A man named Latham. He is in charge—”

“Latham?”
broke in Alex, recalling all too vividly his telephone conversation with the Ministry man that afternoon. “He’s the one—”

“We know,” interrupted Floyd, grinning in the rearview mirror at McAuliff. “He’s one of us, mon.”

He let himself into the room as quietly as possible. It was nearly 3:30; Courtleigh Manor was quiet, the nocturnal games concluded. He closed the door silently and started across the soft carpet. A light was on in Alison’s room, the door open perhaps a foot. His own room was dark. Alison
had turned off all the lamps; they had been on when he left her five hours ago.

Why had she done that?

He approached the slightly open door, removing his jacket as he did so.

There was a click behind him. He turned. A second later, the bedside lamp was snapped on, flooding the room with its dim light, harsh only at the source.

Alison was sitting up in his bed. He could see that her right hand gripped the small deadly weapon “issued by the London police”; she was placing it at her side, obscuring it with the covers.

“Hello, Alex.”

“Hello.” It was an awkward moment.

“I stayed here because I thought your friend Tucker might call. I wouldn’t have heard the telephone.”

“I could think of better reasons.” He smiled and approached the bed. She picked up the cylinder and twisted it. There was the same click he had heard seconds ago. She placed the strange weapon on the night table.

“Also, I wanted to talk.”

“You sound ominous.” He sat down. “I wasn’t able to call you … everything happened so fast. Sam showed up; he just walked through the goddamn lobby doors and wondered why I was so upset … then, as he was registering, the call came from Latham. He was really in a hurry. I think I threw him with Ocho Rios tomorrow. There was a lot of equipment that hadn’t been shipped to Boscobel—”

“Your phone didn’t ring,” interrupted Alison quietly.

“What?”

“Mr. Latham didn’t ring through to your room.”

McAuliff was prepared; he had remembered a little thing. “Because I’d left word we were having dinner. They were sending a page to the dining room.”

“That’s very good, Alex.”

“What’s the matter with you? I told the clerk to call you and explain. We were in a hurry; Latham said we had to get
to the warehouse … down on Crawford Street, by the docks … before they closed the check-in books for the night.”

“That’s not very good. You can do better.”

McAuliff saw that Alison was deadly serious. And angry. “Why do you say that?”

“The front desk did not call me; there was no explaining
clerk
.” Alison pronounced the word “clerk” in the American fashion, exaggerating the difference from English speech. It was insulting. “An ‘assistant’ of Mr. Latham’s telephoned. He wasn’t very good, either. He didn’t know what to say when I asked to speak to Latham; he didn’t expect that. Did you know that Gerald Latham lives in the Barbican district of Kingston? He’s listed right in the telephone book.”

Alison stopped; the silence was strained. Alex spoke softly as he made the statement. “He was home.”

“He was home,” replied Alison. “Don’t worry. He didn’t know who called him. I spoke to a woman first, and when he got on the phone I hung up.”

McAuliff inhaled a deep breath and reached into his shirt pocket for his pack of cigarettes. He wasn’t sure there was anything to say. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she said quietly. “I’ll write you out a proper letter of resignation in the morning. You’ll have to accept a promissory note for the airfare and whatever other expenses I’m liable for. I’ll need what money I have for a while. I’m sure I’ll find a situation.”

“You can’t do that.” McAuliff found himself saying the words with strength, in utter conviction. And he knew why. Alison was perfectly willing to leave the survey; she was going to leave it. If her motive—or motives—for coming to Jamaica were not what she had said they were, she would not do that. “For Christ’s sake, you can’t resign because I lied about a few hours! Damn it, Alison, I’m not accountable to you!”

“Oh, stop behaving like a pompous, wounded ass! You don’t do that very well, either. I will
not
go through the labyrinth again; I’m sick to death of it. No more, do you hear!” Suddenly her voice fell and she caught her
breath—and the fear was in her eyes. “I can’t stand it any longer.”

He stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“You elaborately described a long interview with the Jamaican police this afternoon. The station, the district, the officers … very detailed, Alex. I called them after I hung up on Latham. They’d never heard of you.”

H
e knew he had to go back to the beginning—to the very beginning of the insanity. He had to tell her the truth. There was relief in sharing it.

All of it. So it made sense, what sense there was to make.

He did.

And as he told the story, he found himself trying to understand all over again. He spoke slowly, in a monotone actually; it was the drone of a man speaking through the mists of confusion.

Of the strange message from Dunstone, Limited, that brought him to London from New York, and a man named Julian Warfield. Of a “financial analyst” at the Savoy Hotel whose plastic card identified him as “R. C. Hammond, British Intelligence.” The pressurized days of living in two worlds that denied their own realities—the covert training, the secret meetings, the vehicle transfers, the hiring of survey personnel under basically false pretenses. Of a panicked, weak James Ferguson, hired to spy on the survey by a man named “Arthur Craft the Younger,” who was not satisfied being one of the richest men in Jamaica. Of an arrogant Charles Whitehall, whose brilliance and scholarship could not lift him above a fanatic devotion to an outworn, outdated, dishonored concept. Of an arthritic little islander, whose French and African blood had strained its way into the Jamaican aristocracy and M.I.6 by way of Eton and Oxford.

Of Sam Tucker’s odd tale of the transformation of Walter Piersall, anthropologist, converted by “island fever” into a self-professed guardian of his tropic sanctuary.

And finally of a shaven-headed guerrilla revolutionary, named Barak Moore. And everyone’s search for an “unseen curia” called the Halidon.

Insanity. But all very, very real.

The sun sprayed its shafts of early light into the billowing gray clouds above the Blue Mountains. McAuliff sat in the frame of the balcony door; the wet scents of the Jamaican dawn came up from the moist grounds and down from the tall palms, cooling his nostrils and so his skin.

He was nearly finished now. They had talked—he had talked—for an hour and forty-five minutes. There remained only the Marquis de Chatellerault.

Alison was still in the bed, sitting up against the pillows. Her eyes were tired, but she did not take them off him.

He wondered what she would say—or do—when he mentioned Chatellerault. He was afraid.

“You’re tired; so am I. Why don’t I finish in the morning?”

“It is morning.”

“Later, then.”

“I don’t think so. I’d rather hear it all at once.”

“There isn’t much more.”

“Then I’d say you saved the best for last. Am I right?” She could not conceal the silent alarm she felt. She looked away from him, at the light coming through the balcony doors. It was brighter now, that strange admixture of pastel yellow and hot orange that is peculiar to the Jamaican dawn.

“You know it concerns you …”

“Of course I know it. I knew it last night.” She returned her eyes to him. “I didn’t want to admit it to myself … but I knew it. It was all too tidy.”

“Chatellerault,” he said softly. “He’s here.”

“Oh,
God
,” she whispered.

“He can’t touch you. Believe me.”

“He followed me. Oh my God …”

McAuliff got up and crossed to the bed. He sat on the edge and gently stroked her hair. “If I thought he could harm you, I would never have told you. I’d simply have him … removed.”
Oh, Christ
, thought Alex. How easily
the new words came. Would he soon be using
killed
, or
eliminated
?

“Right from the very start, it was all programmed. I was programmed.” She stared at the balcony, allowing his hand to caress the side of her face, as if oblivious to it. “I should have realized; they don’t let you go that easily.”

“Who?”

“All of them, my darling,” she answered, taking his hand, holding it to her lips. “Whatever names you want to give them, it’s not important. The letters, the numbers, the official-sounding nonsense … I was warned, I can’t say I wasn’t.”

“How?” He pulled her hand down, forcing her to look at him. “How were you warned? Who warned you?”

“In Paris one night. Barely three months ago. I’d finished the last of my interviews at the … underground carnival, we called it.”

“Interpol?”

“Yes. I met a chap and his wife. In a waiting room, actually. It’s not supposed to happen; isolation is terribly important, but someone got their rooms mixed up. They were English. We agreed to have a late supper together. He was a Porsche automobile dealer from Macclesfield. He and his wife were at the end of their tethers. He’d been recruited because his dealership—the cars, you see—were being used to transport stolen stock certificates from European exchanges. Every time he thought he was finished, they found reasons for him to continue—more often than not, without telling him. It was almost three years; he was about out of his mind. They were going to leave England. Go to Buenos Aires.”

“He could always say no. They couldn’t force him.”

“Don’t be naive, darling. Every name you learn is another hook, each new method of operation you report is an additional notch in your expertise.” Alison laughed sadly. “You’ve traveled to the land of the informer. You’ve got a stigma all your own.”

“I’ll tell you again: Chatellerault can’t touch you.”

She paused before acknowledging his words, his anxiety.
“This may sound strange to you, Alex. I mean, I’m not a brave person—no brimfuls of courage for me—but I have no great fear of him. The appalling thing, the fear, is
them
. They wouldn’t let me go. No matter the promises, the agreements, the guarantees. They couldn’t resist. A file somewhere, or a computer, was activated and came up with his name; automatically mine appeared in a data bank. That was it: factor X plus factor Y, subtotal—your life is not your own. It never stops. You live with the fear all over again.”

Alex took her by the shoulders. “There’s no law, Alison. We can pack; we can leave.”

“My darling, my darling … You
can’t
. Don’t you see? Not that way. It’s what’s behind you: the agreements, the countless files filled with words, your words … you can’t deny them. You cross borders, you need papers; you work, you need references. You drive a car or take a plane or put money in a bank … They have all the weapons. You can’t hide. Not from them.”

McAuliff let go of her and stood up. He picked up the smooth, shiny cylinder of gas from the bedside table and looked at the printing and the inked date of issue. He walked aimlessly to the balcony doors and instinctively breathed deeply; there was the faint, very faint, aroma of vanilla with the slightest trace of a spice.

Bay rum and vanilla.

Jamaica.

“You’re wrong, Alison. We don’t have to hide. For a lot of reasons, we have to finish what we’ve started; you’re right about that. But you’re wrong about the conclusion. It does stop. It will stop.” He turned back to her. “Take my word for it.”

“I’d like to. I really would. I don’t see how.”

“An old infantry game. Do unto others before they can do unto you. The Hammonds and the Interpols of this world use us because we’re afraid. We know what they can do to what we think are our well-ordered lives. That’s legitimate; they’re bastards. And they’ll admit it. But have you ever thought about the magnitude of disaster we can cause
them?
That’s also legitimate, because we can be bastards, too.
We’ll play this out—with armed guards on all our flanks. And when we’re finished, we’ll
be
finished. With them.”

Charles Whitehall sat in the chair, the tiny glass of Pernod on the table beside him. It was six o’clock in the morning; he had not been to bed. There was no point in trying to sleep; sleep would not come.

Two days on the island and the sores of a decade ago were disturbed. He had not expected it; he had expected to control everything. Not
be
controlled.