clear: If a bug was found, let it remain intact and use it. It could be
invaluable. Before eliminating any such device, he was to report it and
await instructions. A fish store named Tallon’s, near Victoria Park.
“They’re paying me … paying us. I suppose they’ll want to quietly
investigate. What difference does it make? I don’t have any secrets.”
“And you won’t have,” Alison said softly but pointedly, removing her
hand from his.
McAuliff suddenly realized the preposterousness of his position. It was
at once ridiculous and sublime, funny and not fumny at all.
“May I change my mind and call someone now?” he asked.
Alison slowly-very slowly-began to smile her lovely smile. “No. I was
being unfair…. And I do believe you.
You’re the most maddeningly unconcerned man I’ve ever known. You are
either supremely innocent or superbly ulterior. I can’t accept the
latter; you were far too nervous upstairs.” She put her hand back on top
of his free one. With his other, he finished the second drink.
“May I ask why you weren’t? Nervous.”
“Yes. It’s time I told you. I owe you that…. I shan’t be returning
to England, Alex. Not for many years, if ever. I can’t. I spent
several months cooperating with Interpol. I’ve had experience with
those horrid little buggers. That’s what we called them. Buggers.”
McAuliff felt the stinging pain in his stomach again. It was fear, and
more than fear. Hammond had said British Intelligence doubted she would
return to England. Julian Warfield suggested that she might be of value
for abstract reasons having nothing to do with, her contributions to the
survey.
He was not sure how-or why-but Alison was being used.
Just as he was being used.
“How did that happen?” he asked with appropriate astonishment.
Alison touched on the highlights of her involvement. The marriage was
sour before the first anniversary. Succinctly put, Alison Booth came to
the conclusion very early that her husband had pursued and married her
for reasons having more to do with her professional -travels than for
anything else.
… it was as though he had been ordered to take me, use me, absorb
me….”
The strain came soon after they were married: Booth was inordinately
interested in her prospects. And, from seemingly nowhere, survey offers
came out of the blue, from little-known but well-paying firms, for
operations remarkably exotic.
among them, of course, Zaire, Turkey, Corsica. He joined me each time.
For days, weeks at a time. . .
The first confrontation with David Booth came about in Corsica. The
survey was a coastal-offshore expedition in the Capo Senetose area.
David arrived during the middle stages for his usual two- to three-week
stay, and during this period a series of strange telephone calls and
unexplained conferences took place, which seemed to disturb him beyond
his limited abilities to cope. Men flew into Ajaccia in small, fast
planes; others came by sea in trawlers and small oceangoing craft. David
would disappear for hours, then for days at a time. Alison’s fieldwork
was such that she returned nightly to the team’s seacoast hotel; her
husband could not conceal his behavior, nor the fact that his presence
in Corsica was not an act of devotion to her.
She forced the issue, enumerating the undeniable, and brutally labeling
David’s explanations what they were: amateurish lies. He had broken
down, wept, pleaded, and told his wife the truth.
In order to maintain a lifestyle David Booth was incapable of earning in
the marketplace, he had moved into international narcotics. He was
primarily a courier. His partnership in a small importing-exporting
business was ideal for the work. The firm had no real identity; indeed,
it was rather nondescript, catering-as befitted the ownersto a social
rather than a commercial clientele, dealing in art objects on the
decorating level. He was able to travel extensively without raising
official eyebrows. His introduction to the work of the contrabandists
was banal: gambling debts compounded by an excess of alcohol and
embarrassing female alliances. On the one hand, he had no choice; on
the other, he was well paid and had no moral compunctions.
But Alison did. The ideological surveys were legitimate, testimonials
to David’s employers’ abilities to ferret out unsuspecting
collaborators. David was given the names of survey teams in selected
Mediterranean sites and told to contact them, offering the services of
his very respected wife, adding further that he would confidentially
contribute to her salary if she was hired. A rich, devoted husband only
interested in keeping an active wife happy. The offers were ariably
accepted. And, by finding her “situations,” his travels were given a
twofold legitimacy. His courier activities had grown beyond the
dilettante horizons of his business.
Alison threatened to leave the Corsican job.
David was hysterical. He insisted he would be killed, and Alison as
well. He painted a picture of such widespread, powerful
corruption-without-conscience that Alison, fearing for both their lives,
relented. She agreed to finish the work in Corsica, but made it clear
their marriage was finished.
Nothing would alter that decision.
So she believed at the time.
But one late afternoon in the field-on the water, actually-Alison was
taking bore samples from the ocean floor several hundred yards offshore.
In the small cabin cruiser were two men. They were agents of Interpol.
They had been following her husband for a number of months. Interpol
was gathering massive documentation of criminal evidence. It was
closing in.
“Needless to say, they were prepared for his arrival. My room was as
private as yours was intended to be this evening. . . .”
The case they presented was strong and clear. Where her husband had
described a powerful network of corruption, the Interpol men told of
another world of pain and suffering and needless, horrible death.
“Oh, they were experts,” said Alison, her eyes remembering, her smile
compassionately sad. “They brought photographs, dozens of them.
Children in agony’, young men, girls destroyed. I shall never forget
those pictures. As they intended I would not……
Their appeal was the classic recruiting approach: Mrs. David Booth was
in a unique position; there was no one like her. She could do so much,
provide so much. And if she walked away in the manner she had described
to her husband-abruptly, without explanation-there was the very real
question of whether she would be allowed to do so.
My God, thought McAuliff as he listened, the more things change …. The
Interpol men might have been Hammond speaking in a room at the Savoy
Hotel.
The arrangements were made, schedules created, a reasonable period of
time specified for the “deterioration” of the marriage. She told a
relieved Booth that she would try to save their relationship, on the
condition that he never again speak to her of his outside activities.
For half a year Alison Gerrard Booth reported the activities of her
husband, identified photographs, planted dozens of tiny listening
devices in hotel rooms, automobiles, their own apartment. She did so
with the understanding that David Booth-whatever the eventual charges
against him would be protected from physical harm. To ‘the best of
Interpol’s ability.
Nothing was guaranteed.
“When did it all come to an end?” asked Alex.
Alison looked away, briefly, at the dark, ominous panorama of the Blue
Mountains, rising in blackness several miles to the north. “When I
listened to a very painful recording. Painful to hear; more painful
because I had made the recording possible.”
One morning after a lecture at the university, an Interpol man arrived
at her office in the Geology Department. In his briefcase he had a
cassette machine and a cartridge that was a duplicate of a conversation
recorded between her husband and a liaison from the Marquis de
Chatellerault, the man identified as the overlord of the narcotics
operation. Alison sat and listened to the voice of a broken man
drunkenly describing the collapse of his marriage to a woman he loved
very much. She heard him rage and weep, blaming himself for the
inadequate man that he was. He spoke of his refused entreaties for the
bed, her total rejection of him. And at the last, he made it clear
beyond doubt that he loathed using her; that if she ever found out, he
would kill himself. What he had done, almost too perfectly, was to
exonerate her from any knowledge whatsoever of Chatellerault’s
operation. He had done it superbly.
“Interpol reached a conclusion that was as painful as the recording.
David had somehow learned what I was doing.
He was sending a message. It was time to get out.”
A forty-eight-hour divorce in far-off Haiti was arranged.
Alison Booth was free.
And, of course, not free at all.
“Within a year, it will all close in on Chatellerault, on David … on
all of them. And somewhere, someone will put it together: Booth’s
wife.. .”
Alison reached for her drink and drank and tried to smile.
“That’s it?” said Alex, not sure it was all.