was killed.”
Alison Booth gasped. Her eyes riveted on Alex; her hand reached out for
his arm. He covered it gently. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
The doctor looked at Alison but did not comment on her reaction. He
turned back to McAuliff. “Barak told me.
There may be a problem; we do not know yet. The survey is being
watched. Floyd was part of it, and the police will find out. You will
be questioned, of course. Naturally, you know absolutely nothing; wear
long sleeves for a while-a few days, until the wound can be covered with
a large plaster.
To replace Floyd now with one of our men could be a selfinduced trap.”
Reluctantly, Alex nodded. “I see,” he said softly. “But I need another
man. Lawrence can’t do triple duty.”
“May I make a suggestion?” asked the doctor with a thin smile and a
knowing look in his eyes.
“What’s that?”
“Use British Intelligence. You really should not ignore them.”
“Get some sleep, Sam. Lawrence, you do the same,” said Alex to the two
men on the terrace. The doctor had left; his assistant remained with
Barak Moore. Alison had gone into McAuliff s room and shut the door.
“Nothing will happen tonight, except possibly the police … to ask me
questions about a crewman I haven’t seen since early afternoon.”
“You know what to say, mon?” Lawrence asked the question with authority,
as if he would provide the answer.
“The doctor explained; Barak told him.”
“You must be angry, mon! Floyd alla time a no-good thief from Ochee.
Now you know: supplies stolen. You drum-drum angry, mon!”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” said Alex sadly.
“Do as he says, lad,” countered Sam Tucker. “He knows what he’s talking
about…. I’ll nap out here. Hate the goddamn bed, anyway.”
“It isn’t necessary, Sam.”
“Has it occurred to you, boy, that the police may just come here without
announcing themselves? I’d hate like hell for them to get the rooms
mixed up.”
“Oh, Lord McAuliff spoke with weariness. It was the exhaustion of
inadequacy, the pressure of continually being made aware of it. “I
didn’t think of that.”
“Neither did the goddamn doctor,” replied Sam.
Lawrence and I have, which is why we’ll stand turns.”
“Then I’ll join you.”
“You do enough tonight, mon,” said Lawrence firmly.
“You have been hurt. Maybe policemen do not come so quick. Floyd carry
no papers. Early morning Sam Tuck and me take Barak away.”
“The doctor said he was to stay where he is.”
“The doctor is a kling-kling, mon! Two, three hours Barak will sleep.
If he is not dead, we take him to Braco Beach. The ocean is still
before sunrise; a flat-bottom is very gentle, mon. We take him away.”
“He makes sense again, Alex.” Tucker gave his approval without regret.
“Our medical friend notwithstanding, it’s a question of alternatives.
And we both know most wounded men can travel gentle if you give ’em a
couple of hours.”
“What’ll we do if the police come tonight? And search?”
Lawrence answered, again with authority. “I tell Tuck, mon. The person
in that room has Indie Fever. The bad smell helps us. Falmouth police
plenty scared of Indie Fever.”
“So is everybody else,” added Sam, chuckling.
“You’re inventive,” said McAuliff. And he meant it.
“Indie Fever” was the polite term for a particularly nasty offshoot of
elephantiasis, infrequent but nevertheless very much a reality, usually
found in the hill country. It could swell a man’s testicles many times
their size and render him impotent as well as a figure of grotesque
ridicule.
“You go get sleep now, McAuliff, mon … please.”
“Yes. Yes, I will. See you in a few hours.” Alex looked at Lawrence
for a moment before turning to go inside. It was amazing. Floyd was
dead, Barak barely alive, and the grinning, previously carefree
youngster who had seemed so naive and playful in comparison to his
obvious superiors was no longer the innocent. He had, in a matter of
hours, become the leader of his faction, lord of his pack. A hard
authority had been swiftly developed, although he still felt the need to
qualify that authority.
Get sleep now … please.
In a day or two the “please” would be omitted. The command would be
all.
So forever the office made the man.
Sam Tucker smiled at McAuliff in the bright Jamaican moonlight. He
seemed to be reading Alex’s thoughts. Or was Sam remembering McAuliff’s
first independent survey? Tucker had been there. It had been in the
Aleutians, in springtime, and a man had died because Alex had not been
firm enough in his disciplining the team regarding the probing of ice
fissures. Alexander Tarquin McAuliff had matured quickly that
springtime in the Aleutians.
“See you later, Sam.”
Inside the room, Alison lay in bed, the table lamp on. By her side was
the archive case he had carried out of Carrick Foyle. She was outwardly
calm, but there was no mistaking the intensity beneath the surface.
McAuliff removed his shirt, threw it on a chair, and crossed to the dial
on the wall that regulated the overhead fan. He turned it up; the four
blades suspended from the ceiling accelerated, the whir matching the
sound of distant surf outside. He walked to the bureau, where the
bucket of ice had melted halfway. Cubes were bunched together in the
water, enough for drinks.
“Would you like a Scotch?” he asked without looking at her.
“No thank you,” she replied in her soft British accent.
Soft, but laced-as all British speech was laced-with that core of
understated, superior rationality.
“I would.”
“I should think so.”
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