The Cry of the Halidon (36 page)

Peter reacted as though he’d been jolted unnecessarily. “I thought we had that area covered. Completely. It was passive.”

“On the island, perhaps. Sufficient for our purposes. Not in London. Obviously.” Warfield paused and took a deep breath, pursing his narrow, wrinkled lips. “Naturally, we’ll take steps immediately to intercede, but it may have gone too far. Ultimately, we can control the Service … if we must, right out of the Foreign Office. What bothers me now is the current activity.”

Peter Jensen looked out over the veranda railing. The afternoon sun was breaking through the clouds. The rain had stopped.

“Then we have two adversaries. This Halidon—whatever in blazes it is. And British Intelligence.”

“Precisely. What is of paramount importance, however, is to keep the two separate. Do you see?”

Jensen returned his gaze to the old man. “Of course. Assuming they haven’t already joined forces.”

“They have not.”

“You’re sure of that, Julian?”

“Yes. Don’t forget, we first learned of this Halidon through M.I. Five personnel—specialist level. Dunstone’s payrolls are diverse. If contact had been made, we’d know it.”

Again Jensen looked out at the waters of the bay, his expression pensive and questioning. “Why?
Why?
The man was offered two million dollars.… There is nothing,
nothing
in his dossier that would give an inkling of this. McAuliff is suspicious of
all
governmental interferences … quite rabid on the subject, actually. It was one of the reasons I proposed him.”

“Yes,” said Warfield noncommittally. “McAuliff was your idea, Peter.… Don’t mistake me, I am not holding you responsible, I concurred with your choice.… Describe what happened last night. This morning.”

Jensen did so, ending with the description of the fishing boat veering off into open water and the removal of the medical equipment from the motel room. “If it was an M.I. Six operation, it was crude, Julian. Intelligence has too many facilities available to be reduced to motels and fishing boats. If we only knew what happened.”

“We do. At least, I think we do,” replied Warfield. “Late last night the house of a dead white man, an anthropologist named Piersall, was broken into, ten, twelve miles from the coast. There was a skirmish. Two men were killed that we know of; others could have been wounded. They officially called it a robbery, which, of course, it wasn’t really. Not in the sense of larceny.”

“I know the name Piersall—”

“You should. He was the university radical who filed that insane letter of intent with the Department of Territories.”

“Of course! He was going to purchase half of the Cock Pit! That was months ago. He was a lunatic.” Jensen lighted
his pipe; he gripped the bowl as he did so, he did not merely hold it. “So there is a third intruder,” he said, his words drifting off quietly, nervously.

“Or one of the first two, Peter.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“You ruled out M.I. Six. It could be the Halidon.”

Jensen stared at Warfield. “If so, it would mean McAuliff is working with both camps. And if Intelligence has not made contact, it’s because McAuliff has not permitted it.”

“A very complicated young man.” The old financier placed his glass down carefully on a tiled table next to his chair. He turned slightly to look through the veranda doors; the voice of Ruth Jensen could be heard chatting with the Jamaican maid inside the house. Warfield looked back at Peter. He pointed his thin, bony finger to a brown leather case on a white wicker table across the porch. “That is for you, Peter. Please get it.”

Jensen rose from his chair, walked to the table, and stood by the case. It was smaller than the attaché variety. And thicker. Its two hasps were secure by combination locks. “What are the numbers?”

“The left lock is three zeros. The right, three fives. You may alter the combinations as you wish.” Peter bent down and began manipulating the tiny vertical dials. Warfield continued. “Tomorrow you will start into the interior. Learn everything you can. Find out who comes to see him, for certainly he will have visitors. And the minute you establish the fact that he is in actual contact, and with whom, send out Ruth on some medical pretext with the information.… Then, Peter, you must kill him. McAuliff is a keystone. His death will panic both camps, and we shall know all we need to know.”

Jensen lifted the top of the leather case. Inside, recessed in the green felt, was a brand-new Luger pistol. Its steel glistened, except for a dull space below the trigger housing where the serial number had been removed. Below the weapon was a five-inch cylinder, one end grooved.

A silencer.

“You’ve never asked this of me, Julian. Never … You mustn’t.”

Jensen turned and stared at Warfield.

“I am not asking, Peter. I am demanding. Dunstone, Limited, has given you everything. And now it needs you in a way it has not needed you before. You must, you see.”

T
hey began at the midpoint of the western perimeter, two and a half miles south of Weston Favel, on the edge of the Cock Pit range. They made base camp on the bank of a narrow offshoot of the Martha Brae. All but the runners, Marcus and Justice Hedrik, were stunned by the seemingly impenetrable walls of jungle that surrounded them.

Strange, contradictory forests that were filled with the west verdance of tropic growth and the cold massive-ness of sky-reaching black and green associated with northern climates. Dense macca-fat palms stood next to silk-cotton, or ceiba, trees that soared out of sight, their tops obscured by the midgrowth. Mountain cabbage and bull thatch, orchid and moss, fungi and eucalyptus battled for their individual rights to coexist in the Oz-like jungle primeval.

The ground was covered with ensnaring spreads of fern and pteridophyte, soft, wet and treacherous. Pools of swamp-like mud were hidden in the thick, crowded sprays of underbrush. Sudden hills rose out of nowhere, remembrances of Oligocene upheavals, never to be settled back into the cradle of the earth.

The sounds of the screeching bat and parrot and tanager intruded on the forest’s undertones; jungle rats and the mongoose could be heard intermittently in their unseen games of death. Every now and then there was the scream of a wild pig, pursuing or in panic.

And far in the distance, in the clearing of the riverbank, were the mountains, preceded by sudden stretches of
untamed grassland. Strangely gray with streaks of deep green and blue and yellow—rain and hot sunlight in an unceasing interchange.

All this fifteen minutes by air from the gaudy strips of Montego.

Unbelievable.

McAuliff had made contact with the north-coast contacts of British Intelligence. There were five, and he had reached each one.

They had given him another reason to consign R. C. Hammond to the despised realm of the manipulator. For the Intelligence people were of small comfort. They stated perfunctorily their relief at his reporting, accepted his explanations of routine geographic chores that kept him occupied, and assured him—with more sound than conviction—that they were at his beck and call.

One man, the M.I.6 contact from Port Maria, drove down the coast to Bengal Court to meet with Alex. He was a portly black merchant who limited his identification to the single name of Garvey. He insisted on a late-night rendezvous in the tiny bar of the motel, where he was known as a liquor distributor.

It did not take McAuliff long to realize that Garvey, ostensibly there to assure him of total cooperation and safety, was actually interrogating him for a report that would be sent back to London. Garvey had the stench and look of a practiced informer about him. The stench was actual: the man suffered from body odor, which could not be concealed by liberal applications of bay rum. The look was in his eyes—ferretlike, and a touch bloodshot. Garvey was a man who sought out opportunities and enjoyed the fruits thereof.

His questions were precise, McAuliff’s answers apparently not satisfactory. And all questions led to the one question, the only one that mattered: Any progress concerning the Halidon?

Anything?

Unknown observers, strangers in the distance … a signal, a sign—no matter how remote or subtle?

Anything?

“Absolutely nothing” was a hard reply for Garvey to accept.

What about the men in the green Chevrolet who had followed him in Kingston? Tallon had traced them to the anthropologist Walter Piersall. Piersall had been a white agitator … common knowledge. Piersall had telephoned McAuliff … the Courtleigh switchboard cooperated with M.I.6. What did Piersall want?

Alex claimed he did not—could not—-know, as Piersall had never reached him. An agitator, white
or
black, was an unpredictable bearer of unpredictable news. Predictably, this agitator had had an accident. It might be presumed—from what little McAuliff had been told by Tallon and others—that Piersall had been closing in on Dunstone, Limited; without a name, of course. If so, he, McAuliff, was a logical person to reach. But this was conjecture; there was no way to confirm it as fact.

What had happened to the late-arriving Samuel Tucker? Where had he been?

Drinking and whoring in Montego Bay. Alex was sorry he had caused so much trouble about Sam; he should have known better. Sam Tucker was an incorrigible wanderer, albeit the best soil analyst in the business.

The perspiring Garvey was bewildered, frustrated by his confusion. There was too much activity for McAuliff to remain so insulated.

Alex reminded the liaison in short, coarse words that there was far too much survey activity—logistical, employment, above all government paperwork—for him not to be insulated. What the hell did Garvey think he had been doing?

The interview lasted until 1:30 in the morning. Before leaving, the M.I.6 contact reached into his filthy briefcase and withdrew a metallic object the size of a pen-and-pencil
case, with its approximate thickness. It was a miniaturized radio-signal transmitter, set to a specific frequency. There were three thick, tiny glass lights across the top of the small panel. The first, explained Garvey, was a white light that indicated sufficient power for sending when turned on—not unlike the illuminated filigree of a strobe light. The second, a red light, informed the operator that his signal was being transmitted. The third, a green light, confirmed the reception of the signal by a corresponding device within a radius of twenty-five miles. There would be two simple codes, one for normal conditions, one for emergency. Code One was to be transmitted twice daily, once every twelve hours. Code Two, when aid was needed.

The receiving set, said Garvey, was capable of defining the signal within a diameter of one thousand yards by means of an attached radarscope with terrain coordinates. Nothing was left to chance. Unbelievable.

The incredible assumption, therefore, was that the Intelligence men would never be more than twenty-five miles away, and Hammond’s “guaranteed” safety factor was the even more ridiculous assumption that the jungle distance could be traversed and the exact location pinpointed within a time period that precluded danger.

R. C. Hammond was a winner, thought McAuliff.

“Is this everything?” McAuliff asked the sweating Garvey. “This goddamn metal box is our protection?”

“There are additional precautions,” Garvey replied enigmatically. “I told you, nothing is left to chance—”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you are protected. I am not authorized to speak further. As a matter of fact, mon, I do not
know
anything further. I am, like you, merely an employee. I do what I am told to do, say what I am told to say.… And now I have said enough. I have an uncomfortable drive back to Port Maria.”

The man named Garvey rose from the table, picked up his tattered briefcase, and waddled toward the door of the dimly lit room. Before leaving, however, he could not help himself.
He stopped at the bar, where one of the motel’s managers was standing, and solicited an order of liquor.

McAuliff shook his thoughts loose as he heard the voices of Ruth and Peter Jensen behind him. He was sitting on a dried mudflat above the riverbank; the Jensens were talking as they walked across the clearing from their bivouac tent. It amazed Alex—
they
amazed him. They walked so casually, so normally, over the chopped Cock Pit ground cover; one might think they had entered Regent’s Park for a stroll.

“Majestic place in its way, rather,” said Peter, removing the ever-present pipe from between his teeth.

“It is the odd combination of color and substance, don’t you think, Alex?” Ruth had her arm linked through her husband’s. A noonday walk down the Strand. “One is so very sensuous, the other so massive and intricate.”

“You make the terms sound contradictory, darling. They’re not, you know.” Peter chuckled as his wife feigned minor exasperation.

“He has an incorrigibly pornographic mind, Alex. Pay no attention. Still, he’s right. It is majestic. And positively
dense
. Where’s Alison?”

“With Ferguson and Sam. They’re testing the water.”

“Jimbo-mon’s going to use up all of his film, I dare say,” muttered Peter as he helped his wife to sit down next to McAuliff. “That new camera he brought back from Montego has consumed him.”

“Frightfully expensive, I should think.” Ruth smoothed the unsmoothable cloth of her bivouac slacks, like a woman not used to being without a skirt. Or a woman who was nervous. “For a boy who’s always saying he’s bone-stony, quite an extravagance.”

“He didn’t buy it; he borrowed it,” said Alex. “From a friend he knew last year in Port Antonio.”

“That’s right, I forgot.” Peter relit his pipe as he spoke. “You were all here last year, weren’t you?”

“Not all, Peter. Just Sam and me; we worked for Kaiser.
And Ferguson. He was with the Craft Foundation. No one else.”

“Well, Charles is Jamaican,” intruded Ruth nervously. “Surely he flies back and forth. Heaven knows, he must be rich enough.”