The Cry of the Halidon (30 page)

He poured the whiskey into a hotel glass, threw in two ice cubes, and turned around. “To answer you before you ask, I had no idea tonight would turn out the way it did.”

“Would you have gone had you known?”

“Of course not.… But it’s over. We have what we need now.”

“This?” Alison touched the archive case.

“Yes.”

“From what you’ve told me … on the word of a dying primitive. Told to him by a dead fanatic.”

“I think those descriptions are a little harsh.” McAuliff went to the chair by the bed and sat down facing her. “But I won’t defend either one yet. I’ll wait. I’ll find out what’s in here, do what they say I should do, and see what happens.”

“You sound positively confident, and I can’t imagine why. You’ve been shot at. A bullet came within five inches of killing you. Now you sit here calmly and tell me you’ll simply bide your time and see what happens? Alex, for God’s sake, what are you
doing
?”

McAuliff smiled and swallowed a good deal of whiskey. “What I never thought was possible,” he said slowly, abruptly serious. “I mean that.… And I’ve just seen a boy grow up into a man. In one hour. The act cost a terrible price, but it happened … and I’m not sure I can understand it, but I saw it. That transformation had something to do with belief. We haven’t got it. We act out of fear or greed or both … all of us. He doesn’t. He does what he does, becomes what he becomes, because he believes.… And, strangely enough, so does Charley Whitehall.”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

McAuliff lowered his glass and looked at her. “I have an idea we’re about to turn this war over to the people who should be fighting it.”

Charles Whitehall exhaled slowly, extinguished the acetylene flame, and removed his goggles. He put the torch down on the long narrow table and took off the asbestos gloves. He noted with satisfaction that his every movement was controlled; he was like a confident surgeon, no motion wasted, his mind ahead of his every muscle.

He rose from the stool and stretched. He turned to see that the door of the small room was still bolted. A foolish thing to do, he thought; he had bolted the door. He was alone.

He had driven over back roads nearly forty miles away from Carrick Foyle to the border of St. Anne’s. He had left the police car in a field and walked the last mile into the town.

Ten years ago St. Anne’s was a meeting place for those of the Movement between Falmouth and Ocho Rios. The “nigger rich,” they had called themselves, with good-sized fields in Drax Hall, Chalky Hill, and Davis Town. Men of property and certain wealth, which they had forced from the earth and were not about to turn over to the Commonwealth sycophants in Kingston. Whitehall remembered names, as he remembered most things—a necessary discipline—and within fifteen minutes after he reached St. Anne’s, he
was picked up by a man in a new Pontiac, who cried at seeing him.

When his needs were made known, he was driven to the house of another man in Drax Hall, whose hobby was machinery. The introductions were brief; this second man embraced him, held on to him for such a length of time—silently—that Charles found it necessary to disengage him.

He was taken to a toolshed at the side of the house, where everything he had requested was laid out on the long narrow table that butted the wall, a sink at midpoint. Besides the overhead light, there was a goosenecked lamp, whose bright illumination could be directed at a small area. Charles was amused to see that along with these requirements was a bowl of fresh fruit and a huge pewter tankard filled with ice.

A messiah had returned.

And now the archive case was open. He stared down at the severed end, the metal edges still glowing with dying orange, then yellow—lingering—soon to be black again. Inside he could see the brown folds of a document roll—the usual encasement for folded papers, each sheet against the imperceptibly moist surface of the enveloping shield.

In the earth a living vault. Precise for a thousand years.

Walter Piersall had buried a rock for many ages in the event his own overlooked it. He was a professional.

As a physician might with a difficult birth, Charles reached in and pulled the priceless child from its womb. He unraveled the document and began reading.

Acquaba
.

The tribe of Acquaba
.

Walter Piersall had gone back into the Jamaican archives and found the brief allusion in the records pertaining to the Maroon Wars.

On January 2, 1739, a descendant of the Coromanteen tribal chieftains, one Acquaba, led his followers into the mountains. The tribe of Acquaba would not be a party to the Cudjoe treaty with the British, insofar as said treaty called upon the Africans to recapture slaves for the white garrisons
.…

There was the name of an obscure army officer who had supplied the information to His Majesty’s Recorder in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital.

Middlejohn, Robt. Maj. W.I. Reg. 641
.

What made the name of “Middlejohn, Robt.” significant was Piersall’s discovery of the following.

His Majesty’s Recorder. Spanish Town. February 9, 1739.
[Docm’ts. recalled. Middlejohn. W. I. Reg. 641.]

And …

His Majesty’s Recorder. Spanish Town. April 20, 1739.
[Docm’ts. recalled. R. M. W. I. Reg. 641.]

Robert Middlejohn. Major. West Indian Regiment 641, in the Year of Our Lord 1739, had been significant to someone.

Who?

Why?

It took Walter Piersall weeks at the Institute to find the next clue. A second name.

But not in the eighteenth century; instead, 144 years later, in the year 1883.

Fowler, Jeremy. Clerk. Foreign Service
.

One Jeremy Fowler had removed several documents from the archives in the new capital of Kingston on the
instructions of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office, June 7, 1883. Victoria Regina
.

The colonial documents in question were labeled simply “Middlejohn papers.” 1739.

Walter Piersall speculated. Was it possible that the Middlejohn papers continued to speak of the Tribe of Acquaba, as the first document had done? Was the retention of that first document in the archives an oversight? An omission committed by one Jeremy Fowler on June 7, 1883?

Piersall had flown to London and used his academic credentials to gain access to the Foreign Office’s West Indian records. Since he was dealing in matters of research over a hundred years old, F.O. had no objections. The archivists were most helpful.

And there were no transferred documents from Kingston in the year 1883.

Jeremy Fowler, clerk of the Foreign Service, had stolen the Middlejohn papers!

If there was a related answer, Walter Piersall now had two specifics to go on: the name Fowler and the year 1883 in the colony of Jamaica.

Since he was in London, he traced the descendants of Jeremy Fowler. It was not a difficult task.

The Fowlers—sons and uncles—were proprietors of their own brokerage house on the London Exchange. The patriarch was Gordon Fowler, Esquire, great-great-grandson of Jeremy Fowler, clerk, Foreign Service, colony of Jamaica.

Walter Piersall interviewed old Fowler on the premise that he was researching the last two decades of Victoria’s rule in Jamaica; the Fowler name was prominent. Flattered, the old gentleman gave him access to all papers, albums, and documents relative to Jeremy Fowler.

These materials told a not unfamiliar story of the times, a young man of “middle breeding” entering the Colonial Service, spending a number of years in a distant outpost, only to return to England far richer than when he left.

Sufficiently rich to be able to buy heavily into the Exchange during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A propitious time; the source of the current Fowler wealth.

One part of the answer.

Jeremy Fowler had made his connection in the Colonial Service.

Walter Piersall had returned to Jamaica to look for the second part.

He studied, day by day, week by week, the recorded history of Jamaica for the year 1883. It was laborious.

And then he found it. May 25, 1883.

A disappearance that was not given much attention insofar as small groups of Englishmen—hunting parties—were constantly getting lost in the Blue Mountains and tropic jungles, usually to be found by scouting parties of blacks led by other Englishmen.

As this lone man had been found.

Her Majesty’s Recorder, Jeremy Fowler
.

Not a clerk, but the official Crown Recorder.

Which was why his absence justified the space in the papers. The Crown Recorder was not insignificant. Not landed gentry, of course, but a person of substance.

The ancient newspaper accounts were short, imprecise, and strange.

A Mr. Fowler had last been observed in his government office on the evening of May 25, a Saturday. He did not return on Monday and was not seen for the rest of the workweek. Nor had his quarters been slept in.

Six days later, Mr. Fowler turned up in the garrison of Fleetcourse, south of the impenetrable Cock Pit, escorted by several Maroon “Negroes.” He had gone on horseback … alone … for a Sunday ride. His horse had bolted him; he had gotten lost and wandered for days until found by the Maroons.

It was illogical. In those years, Walter Piersall knew, men did not ride alone into such territories. And if one did, a man who was sufficiently intelligent to be Her Majesty’s Recorder would certainly know enough to take a left angle from the sun and reach the south coast in a matter of hours, at best a day.

And one week later Jeremy Fowler stole the Middlejohn papers from the archives. The documents concerning a sect led by a Coromanteen chieftain named Acquaba … that had disappeared into the mountains 144 years before.

And six months later he left the Foreign—Colonial—Service and returned to England a very, very wealthy man.

He had discovered the Tribe of Acquaba.

It was the only logical answer. And if that were so, there was a second, logical speculation: Was the Tribe of Acquaba … the Halidon?

Piersall was convinced it was. He needed only current proof.

Proof that there was substance to the whispers of the incredibly wealthy sect high in the Cock Pit mountains. An isolated community that sent its members out into the world, into Kingston, to exert influence.

Piersall tested five men in the Kingston government, all
in positions of trust, all with obscure backgrounds. Did any of them belong to the Halidon?

He went to each, telling each that he alone was the recipient of his startling information:
the Tribe of Acquaba
.

The Halidon
.

Three of the five were fascinated but bewildered. They did not understand.

Two of the five disappeared.

Disappeared in the sense of being removed from Kingston. Piersall was told one man had retired suddenly to an island in the Martinique chain. The other was transferred out of Jamaica to a remote post.

Piersall had his current proof.

The Halidon was the Tribe of the Acquaba.

It existed.

If he needed further confirmation, final proof, the growing harassment against him was it. The harassment now included the selected rifling and theft of his files and untraceable university inquiries into his current academic studies. Someone beyond the Kingston government was concentrating on him. The acts were not those of concerned bureaucrats.

The Tribe of Acquaba … Halidon.

What was left was to reach the leaders. A staggeringly difficult thing to do. For throughout the Cock Pit there were scores of insulated sects who kept to themselves; most of them poverty-stricken, scraping an existence off the land. The Halidon would not proclaim its self-sufficiency; which one was it?

The anthropologist returned once again to the volumes of African minutiae, specifically seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Coromanteen. The key had to be there.

Piersall had found the key; he had not footnoted its source.

Each tribe, each offshoot of a tribe, had a
single sound applicable to it only. A whistle, a slap, a word. This symbol was known only within the highest tribal councils, understood by only a few, who communicated it to their out-tribal counterparts
.

The symbol, the sound, the word … was ‘Halidon.’

Its meaning.

It took him nearly a month of sleepless days and nights, using logarithmic charts of phonetics, hieroglyphs, and African symbols of daily survival.

When he was finished, he was satisfied. He had broken the ancient code.

It was too dangerous to include it in this summary. For in the event of his death—or murder—this summary might fall into the wrong hands. Therefore, there was a second archive case containing the secret.

The second without the first was meaningless.

Instructions were left with one man. To be acted upon in the event he was no longer capable of doing so himself.

Charles Whitehall turned over the last page. His face and neck were drenched with sweat. Yet it was cool in the shack. Two partially opened windows in the south wall let in the breezes from the hills of Drax Hall, but they could not put out the nervous fires of his anxiety.

Truths had been learned. A greater, overwhelming truth was yet to be revealed.

That it would be now, he was certain.

The scholar and the patriot were one again.

The Praetorian of Jamaica would enlist the Halidon.

J
ames Ferguson, at the fashionable bar in Montego Bay, was exhilarated. It was the feeling he had when momentous things happened in the lens of a microscope and he knew he was the first observer—or, at least, the first witness who recognized a causal effect for what it was.

Like the baracoa fiber.

He was capable of great imagination when studying the shapes and densities of microscopic particles. A giant manipulating a hundred million infinitesimal subjects. It was a form of control.

He had control now. Over a man who did not know what it was like to have to protest too loudly over the inconsequential because no one paid attention; to be forever down to his last few quid in the bank because none paid him the value of his work.