The Cry of the Halidon: A Novel Read online

  “There was no pressure one way or the other about you. Only a warning. And that was because of your recent husband’s sideline occupation, which, incidentally, apparently accounts for most of his money. I say money because it’s not considered income, I gather.”

  “It accounts for all of his money, and is not reported as income. And I don’t for a minute believe the Geophysics Department of the University of London would have access to such information. Much less the Royal Society.”

  “Then you’d be wrong. A lot of the money for this survey is a grant from the government funneled through the society and the university. When governments spend money, they’re concerned about personnel and payrolls.” McAuliff was pleasantly surprised at himself. He was responding as Hammond said he would: creating instant, logical replies. Build on part of the truth, keep it simple.… Those had been Hammond’s words.

  “We’ll let that dubious, American-oriented assessment pass,” said Alison, now reaching for his cigarettes. “Surely you’ll explain what happened upstairs.”

  The moment had come, thought Alex, wondering if he could carry it off the way Hammond said: Reduce any explanation to very few words, rooted in common sense and simplicity, and do not vary. He lighted her cigarette and spoke as casually as possible.

  “There’s a lot of political jockeying in Kingston. Most of it’s petty, but some of it gets rough. This survey has controversial overtones. Resentment of origin, jealousies, that sort of thing. You saw it at Customs. There are people who would kill to discredit us. I was given that goddamned scanner to use in case I thought something very unusual happened. I thought it had, and I was right.” Alex drank the remainder of his drink and watched the girl’s reaction. He did his best to convey only sincerity.

  “Our bags, you mean,” said Alison.

  “Yes. That note didn’t make sense, and the clerk at the desk said they got here just before we did. But they were picked up at Palisados over two hours ago.”

  “I see. And a geological survey would drive people to those extremes? That’s hard to swallow, Alex.”

  “Not if you think about it. Why are surveys made? What’s generally the purpose? Isn’t it usually because someone—some people—expect to build something?”

  “Not one like ours, no. It’s too spread out over too great an area. I’d say it’s patently, obviously academic. Anything else would—” Alison stopped as her eyes met McAuliff’s. “Good Lord! If it was anything else, it’s unbelievable!”

  “Perhaps there are those who do believe it. If they did, what do you think they’d do?” Alex signaled the waiter by holding up two fingers for refills. Alison Booth’s lips were parted in astonishment.

  “Millions and millions and millions,” she said quietly. “My God, they’d buy up everything in sight!”

  “Only if they were convinced they were right.”

  Alison forced him to look at her. When, at first, he refused, and glanced over at the waiter, who was dawdling, she put her hand on top of his and made him pay attention. “They are right, aren’t they, Alex?”

  “I wouldn’t have any proof of it. My contract’s with the University of London, with countersigned approvals from the Society and the Jamaican ministry. What they do with the results is their business.” It was pointless to issue a flat denial. He was a professional surveyor, not a clairvoyant.

  “I don’t believe you. You’ve been primed.”

  “Not primed. Told to be on guard, that’s all.”

  “Those … deadly little instruments aren’t given to people who’ve only been told to be on guard.”

  “That’s what I thought. But you know something? You and I are wrong, Alison. Scanners are in common use these days. Nothing out of the ordinary. Especially if you’re working outside home territory. Not a very nice comment on the state of trust, is it?”

  The waiter brought their drinks. He was humming and moving rhythmically to the beat of his own tune. Alison continued to stare at McAuliff. He wasn’t sure, but he began to think she believed him. When the waiter left, she leaned forward, anxious to speak.

  “And what are you supposed to do now? You found those awful things. What are you going to do about them?”

  “Nothing. Report them to the Ministry in the morning, that’s all.”

  “You mean you’re not going to take them out and step on them or something? You’re just going to leave them there?”

  It was not a pleasant prospect, thought Alex, but Hammond had been 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 funny 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 na
rcotics. 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 owners—to 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 invariably 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.

  “That’s it, Dr. McAuliff. Now, tell me honestly, would you have hired me had you known?”

  “No, I would not. I wonder why I didn’t know.”

  “It’s not the sort of information the university, or Emigration, or just about anyone else would have.”

  “Alison?” McAuliff tried to conceal the sudden fear he felt. “You did hear about this job from the university people, didn’t you?”

  The girl laughed and raised her lovely eyebrows in mock protest. “Oh, Lord, it’s tell-all time!… No, I admit to having a jump; it gave me time to compile that very impressive portfolio for you.”

  “How did you learn of it?”

  “Interpol. They’d been looking for months. They called me about ten or twelve days before the interview.”

  McAuliff did not have to indulge in any rapid calculations. Ten or twelve days before the interview would place the date within reasonable approximation of the afternoon he had met with Julian Warfield in Belgrave Square.

  And later with a man named Hammond from British Intelligence.

  The stinging pain returned to McAuliff’s stomach. Only it was sharper now, more defined. But he couldn’t dwell on it. Across the dark-shadowed patio, a man was approaching. He was walking to their table unsteadily. He was drunk, thought Alex.

  “Well, for God’s sake, there you are! We wondered where the hell you were! We’re all in the bar inside. Whitehall’s an absolute riot on the piano! A bloody black Noël Coward! Oh, by the way, I trust your luggage got here. I saw you were having problems, so I scribbled a note for the bastards to send it along. If they could read my whiskey slant.”

  Young James Ferguson dropped into an empty chair and smiled alcoholically at Alison. He then turned and looked at McAuliff, his smile fading as he was met by Alex’s stare.

  “That was very kind of you,” said McAuliff quietly.

  And then Alexander saw it in Ferguson’s eyes. The focused consciousness behind the supposedly glazed eyes.

  James Ferguson was nowhere near as drunk as he pretended to be.

  9

  They expected to stay up most of the night. It was their silent, hostile answer to the “horrid little buggers.” They joined the others in the bar and, as a good captain should, McAuliff was seen talking to the maître d’; all knew the evening was being paid for by their director.

  Charles Whitehall lived up to Ferguson’s judgment. His talent was professional; his island patter songs—filled with Caribbean idiom and Jamaican wit—were funny, brittle, cold, and episodically hot. His voice had the clear, high-pitched thrust of a Kingston balladeer; only his eyes remained remote. He was entertaining and amusing, but he wa
s neither entertained nor amused himself, thought Alex.

  He was performing.

  And finally, after nearly two hours, he wearied of the chore, accepted the cheers of the half-drunken room, and wandered to the table. After receiving individual shakes, claps, and hugs from Ferguson, the Jensens, Alison Booth, and Alex, he opted for a chair next to McAuliff. Ferguson had been sitting there—encouraged by Alex—but the young botanist was only too happy to move. Unsteadily.

  “That was remarkable!” said Alison, leaning across McAuliff, reaching for Whitehall’s hand. Alex watched as the Jamaican responded; the dark Caribbean hand—fingernails manicured, gold ring glistening—curled delicately over Alison’s as another woman’s might. And then, in contradiction, Whitehall raised her wrist and kissed her fingers.

  A waiter brought over a bottle of white wine for Whitehall’s inspection. He read the label in the nightclub light, looked up at the smiling attendant, and nodded. He turned back to McAuliff; Alison was now chatting with Ruth Jensen across the table. “I should like to speak with you privately,” said the Jamaican casually. “Meet me in my room, say, twenty minutes after I leave.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  Whitehall leveled his dark eyes at McAuliff and spoke softly but sharply. “No, it cannot.”

  James Ferguson suddenly lurched up from his chair at the end of the table and raised his glass to Whitehall. He waved and gripped the edge with his free hand; he was the picture of a very drunk young man. “Here’s to Charles the First of Kingston! The bloody black Sir Noël! You’re simply fanatic, Charles!”

  There was an embarrassing instant of silence as the word “black” was absorbed. The waiter hurriedly poured Whitehall’s wine; it was no moment for sampling.

  “Thank you,” said Whitehall politely. “I take that as a high compliment, indeed … Jimbo-mon.”

  “Jimbo-mon!” shouted Ferguson with delight. “I love it! You shall call me Jimbo-mon! And now, I should like—” Ferguson’s words were cut short, replaced by an agonizing grimace on his pale young face. It was suddenly abundantly clear that his alcoholic capacity had been reached. He set his glass down with wavering precision, staggered backward and, in slow motion of his own, collapsed to the floor.