eaning 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 of 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.”
He 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 MI-6 by way of Eton
and Oxford.
Of Swn Tucker’s odd tale of the transformation of Walter Piersall,
anthropologist, converted by “island fever” into a self-professed
guardian of his tropic sanctuary.
OIL And finally of a shaven-headed guerrilla revolutionary, named Barak
Moore. And everyone’s search for an “unseen curia 11 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 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?”