There were so many. So often metaphysically paranoid; so fragmented, so obscure.
Was the Halidon—Hollydawn—any different?
At this juncture, for Charles Whitehall it didn’t really matter. What mattered was his own survival and the survival of his plans. His aims would be accomplished by keeping Chatellerault at bay and infiltrating the structure of Chatellerault’s financial hierarchy.
And working with his first enemy, Barak Moore.
Working with both enemies.
Jamaica’s enemies.
James Ferguson fumbled for the light switch on the bedside lamp. His thrusts caused an. ashtray and a glass to collide, sending both crashing to the floor. Light was coming through the drawn curtains; he was conscious of it in spite of the terrible pain in his eyes and through his head, from temple to temple. Pain that caused flashes of darkness to envelop his inner eye. He looked at his watch as he shaded his face from the dim spill of the lamp. It was 6:15.
Oh, Christ! His head hurt so, tears welled in the far corners of his eyes. Shafts of pain—sharp, immobilizing—shot down into his neck and seemed to constrict his shoulders, even his arms. His stomach was in a state of tense, muscular suspension; if he thought about it, he knew he would be sick and vomit.
There was no pretense regarding the amount of alcohol he had consumed last night. McAuliff could not accuse him of play-acting now. He had gotten drunk. Very drunk. And with damn good reason.
He had been elated.
Arthur Craft had telephoned him in panic. In panic!
Craft the Younger had been caught. McAuliff had found the room where the taping was being done and beaten someone up, physically beaten him up! Craft had yelled over the telephone, demanding where McAuliff had gotten his name.
Not from him! Certainly not from Jimbo-mon. He had said nothing.
Craft had roared, swearing at the “goddamned nigger on the tape machine,” convinced the “black fucker” had confessed to McAuliff, adding that the bastard would never get near a courtroom. “If it came to that.”
If it came to that.
“You never saw me,” Craft the Younger had screamed. “We never talked! We didn’t meet! You get that absolutely clear, you shaky son of a bitch!”
“Of course … of course, Mr. Craft,” he had replied. “But then, sir … we did talk, didn’t we? This doesn’t have to change anything.”
He had been petrified, but he had said the words. Quietly, with no great emphasis. But his message had been clear.
Arthur Craft Junior was in an awkward position. Craft the Younger should not be yelling; he should be’polite. Perhaps even solicitous.
After all, they had talked.…
Craft understood. The understanding was first indicated by his silence, then confirmed by his next statement.
“We’ll be in touch.”
It had been so simple. And if Craft the Younger wanted it different, wanted things as they were not, Craft controlled an enormously wealthy foundation. Certainly he could find something for a very, very talented botanist.
When he hung up the telephone last night, James had felt a wave of calm come over him. The sort of quiet confidence in a laboratory, where his eye and mind were very sure indeed.
He would have to be cautious, but he could do it.
He had gotten drunk when he realized that.
And now his head and stomach were in pain. But he could stand them; they were bearable now. Things were going to be different.
He looked at his watch. His goddamn Timex. It was 6:25. A cheap watch but accurate.
Instead of a Timex there might be a Breitling chronometer in his future. And new, very expensive camera equipment. And a real bank balance.
And a new life.
If he was cautious.
The telephone rang on Peter Jensen’s side of the bed, but his wife heard it first.
“Peter … Peter! For heaven’s sake, the phone.”
“What? What, old girl?” Peter Jensen blinked his eyes; the room was dark, but there was daylight beyond the drawn curtains.
The telephone rang again. Short bursts of bell; the kind of rapid blasts hotel switchboards practice. Nimble fingers, irritated guests.
Peter Jensen reached over and switched on the light. The traveling clock read ten minutes to eight. Again the shrill bell, now steady.
“Damn!” sputtered Peter as he realized the instrument was beyond the lamp, requiring him to reach farther. “Yes, yes? Hello?”
“Mr. Peter Jensen, please?” said the unfamiliar male voice.
“Yes. What is it? This is Jensen.”
“Cable International, Mr. Jensen. A wire arrived for you several minutes ago. From London. Shall I read it? It’s marked urgent, sir.”
“No!” replied Peter quickly, firmly. “No, don’t do that. I’ve been expecting it; it’s rather long, I should think.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Just send it over right away, if you please. Can you do that? Courtleigh Manor. Room four-oh-one. It won’t be necessary to stop at the desk.”
“I understand, Mr. Jensen. Right away. There’ll be a charge for an unscheduled—”
“Of course, of course,” interrupted Peter. “Just send it over, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
Twenty-five minutes later, the messenger from Cable International arrived. Moments before, room service had wheeled in a breakfast of melon, tea, and scones. Peter Jensen opened the two-page cablegram and spread it over the linen cloth on his side of the table. There was a pencil in his hand.
Across from him, Ruth held up a page of paper, scanning it over the rim of her cup. She, too, had a pencil, at the side of the saucer.
“The company name is Parkhurst,” said Peter.
“Check,” said Ruth, putting down her tea. She placed the paper alongside, picked up the pencil, and made a mark on the page.
“The address is Sheffield by the Glen.” Peter looked over at her.
“Go ahead,” replied Ruth, making a second notation.
“The equipment to be inspected is microscopes.”
“Very well.” Ruth made a third mark on the left of the page, went back to her previous notes, and then darted her eyes to the bottom right. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Ruth Wells Jensen, paleontologist, proceeded to recite a series of numbers. Her husband started at the top of the body of the cablegram and began circling words with his pencil. Several times he asked his wife to repeat a number. As she did so, he counted from the previous circle and circled another word.
Three minutes later, they had finished the exercise. Peter Jensen swallowed some tea and reread the cablegram to himself. His wife spread jam on two scones and covered the teapot with the cozy.
“Warfield is flying over next week. He agrees. McAuliff has been reached.”
THREE
THE NORTH COAST
17
Hammond’s words kept coming back to McAuliff: You’ll find it quite acceptable to operate on different levels. Actually, it evolves rather naturally, even instinctively. You’ll discover that you tend to separate your concentrations.
The British Intelligence agent had been right. The survey was in its ninth day, and Alex found that for hours at a time he had no other thoughts but the immediate work at hand.
The equipment had been trucked from Boscobel Airfield straight through to Puerto Seco, on Discovery Bay. Alex, Sam Tucker, and Alison Booth flew into Ocho Rios ahead of the others and allowed themselves three days of luxury at the Sans Souci while McAuliff ostensibly hired a crew—two of the five of which had been agreed upon in an isolated farmhouse high in the hills of the Blue Mountains. Alex found—as he’d expected—that Sam and Alison got along extremely well. Neither was difficult to like; each possessed an easy humor, both were professionals. And there was no reason to conceal from Sam the fact that they were lovers. As Tucker phrased it: “I’d be shocked if you weren’t, Alexander.”
Sam?
??s approval was important to McAuliff. For at no time was Alison to be left alone when he was away. Under no circumstances. Ever.
Sam Tucker was the ideal protective escort. Far superior to himself, Alex realized. Tuck was the most resourceful man he had ever known, and just about the hardest. He had within him an aggressiveness that when called upon was savage. He was not a man to have as an enemy. In his care, Alison was as safe as a human being could be.
The fourth day had been the first day of the survey work. The team was housed halfway between Puerto Seco and Rio Bueno Harbour, in a pleasant beach motel called Bengal Court. Work began shortly after six in the morning. The initial objective of the survey was to plot the coastline definitively. Alex and Sam Tucker operated the equipment. Azimuths were shot along the shoreline, recorded by transit cameras. The angular-degree demarcations were correlated with the coastal charts provided by the Jamaican Institute. By and large, these charts were sectional and imperfect, acceptable for the details of road maps and small-craft navigation, but inadequate for geophysical purposes. To set up accurate perimeters, McAuliff employed sonic geodometers which bounced sound waves back and forth between instruments, giving what amounted to perfect bearings. Each contour, each elevation was recorded on both sonic graphs and transit cameras.
These chores were dull, laborious, and sweat-provoking under the hot sun. The single relief was the constant presence of Alison, as much as she herself objected to it. Alex was adamant, however. He instructed Barak Moore’s two men to stay within a hundred feet of her at all times, and then commanded Alison not to stroll out of his sight.
It was an impossible demand, and McAuliff realized he could not prolong it more than a few days. Alison had work to do; minor over the coastal area, a great, deal once they started inland. But all beginnings were awkward under pressure; he could not separate this particular concentration that easily, nor did he wish to.
Very rapidly your own personal antennae will be activated automatically. Their function will be second nature, as it were. You will fall into a rhythm, actually. It is the connecting link between your divided objectives. You will recognize it and build a degree of confidence in the process.
Hammond.
But not during the first few days; there was no confidence to speak of. He did grant, however, that the fear was lessening … partially, imperceptibly. He thought this was due to the constant physical activity and the fact that he could require such men as Sam and Barak Moore’s “special forces” to take up posts around Alison. And at any given moment he could turn his head and there she was—on the beach, in a small boat—chipping rocks, instructing one of the crew in the manipulation of a drill bore.
But, again, were not all these his antennae? And was not the lessening of fear the beginnings of confidence? R. C. Hammond. Supercilious son of a bitch. Manipulator. Speaker of truths.
But not the whole truth.
The areas bordering Braco Beach were hazardous. Sheets of coral overlay extended hundreds of yards out into the surf. McAuliff and Sam Tucker crawled over the razor-sharp miniature hills of ocean polyps and set up their geodometers and cameras. Both men incurred scores of minor cuts, sore muscles, and sorer backs.
That was the third day, marked by the special relief of Alison’s somehow commandeering a fisherman’s flat-bottomed boat and, with her two “escorts,” bringing a picnic lunch of cold chicken out to the reef. It was a comfortable hour on the most uncomfortable picnic grounds imaginable.
The Jamaican revolutionary, Floyd, who had guided the boat into its precarious coral mooring succinctly observed that the beach was flatter and far less wet.
“But then they’d have to crawl all the way out here again,” Alison had replied, holding onto her wide-brimmed cloth sun hat.
“Mon, you have a good woman!” This observation came from Floyd’s companion, the huge, quiet Jamaican named Lawrence.
The five of them perched—there was no other description—on the highest ridges of the coral jetty, the spray cascading up from the base of the reef, creating faint rainbow prisms of color in its mist. Far out on the water two freighters were passing each other, one heading for the open sea, the second aiming for the bauxite docks east of Runaway Bay. A luxurious cabin cruiser rigged for deep-sea fishing sliced through the swells several hundred yards in front of them, the passengers pointing in astonishment at the strange sight of five humans picnicking on a reef.
McAuliff watched the others respond to the cruiser’s surprised riders. Sam Tucker stood up, gestured at the coral, and yelled, “Diamonds!”
Floyd and Lawrence, their black, muscular bodies bared to the waist, roared at Sam’s antics. Lawrence pried loose a coral stone and held it up, then chucked it to Tucker, who caught it and shouted again, “Twenty carats!”
Alison, her blue jeans and light field blouse drenched with the spray, joined in the foolish game. She elaborately accepted the coral stone, presented by Sam, and held it on top of her outstretched hand as though it were a jeweled ring of great value. A short burst of breeze whipped across the reef; Alison dropped the stone in an effort to hold her hat, whose brim had caught the wind. She was not successful; the hat glided off and disappeared over a small mound of coral. Before Alex could rise and go after it, Lawrence was on his feet, dashing surefootedly over the rocks and down toward the water. Within seconds he had the hat, now soaked, and effortlessly leaped back up from the water’s edge and handed it to Alison.
The incident had taken less than ten seconds.
“You keep the hat on the head, Mis Aleesawn. Them sun very hot; roast skin like cooked chicken, mon.”
“Thank you, Lawrence,” said Alison gratefully, securing the wet hat over her head. “You run across this reef as though it were a golf green!”
“Lawrence is a fine caddy, Mis Alison,” said Floyd smiling, still sitting. “At the Negril Golf Club he is a favorite, is that not so, Lawrence?”
Lawrence grinned and glanced at McAuliff knowingly. “Eh, mon. At Negril they alla time ask for me. I cheat good, mon. Alla time I move them golf balls out of bad places to the smooth grass. I think everybody know. Alla time ask for Lawrence.”
Sam Tucker chuckled as he sat down again. “Alla time big goddamn tips, I’d say.”
“Plenty good tips, mon,” agreed Lawrence.
“And probably something more,” added McAuliff, looking at Floyd and remembering the exclusive reputation of the Negril Golf Club. “Alla time plenty of information.”
“Yes, mon.” Floyd smiled conspiratorially. “It is as they say: the rich Westmorelanders talk a great deal during their games of golf.”
Alex fell silent. It seemed strange, the whole scene. Here they were, the five of them, eating cold chicken on a coral reef three hundred yards from shore, playing children’s games with passing cabin cruisers and joking casually about the surreptitious gathering of information on a golf course.
Two black revolutionaries—recruits from a band of hill country guerrillas. A late-middle-aged “soldier of fortune.” (Sam Tucker would object to the cliché, but if it was ever applicable, he was the applicant.) A strikingly handsome … lovely English divorcée whose background just happened to include undercover work for an international police organization. And one forty-four-year-old ex-infantry man who six weeks ago flew to London thinking he was going to negotiate a geological survey contract.
The five of them. Each knowing that he was not what he appeared to be; each doing what he was doing … she was doing … because there were no alternatives. Not really.
It wasn’t strange; it was insane. And it struck McAuliff once again that he was the least qualified among these people, under these circumstances. Yet because of the circumstances—having nothing to do with qualifications—he was their leader.
Insanity.
By the seventh day, working long hours with few breaks, Alex and Sam had charted the coastline as far as Burwood, five miles from the mouth of the Martha Brae, their western perimeter. The Jensens a
nd James Ferguson kept a leisurely parallel pace, setting up tables with microscopes, burners, vials, scales, and chemicals as they went about their work. None found anything exceptional, nor did they expect to in the coastal regions. The areas had been studied fairly extensively for industrial and resort purposes; there was nothing of consequence not previously recorded. And since Ferguson’s botanical analyses were closely allied with Sam Tucker’s soil evaluations, Ferguson volunteered to make the soil tests, freeing Tucker to finish the topographies with Alex.
These were the geophysical concerns. There was something else, and none could explain it. It was first reported by the Jensens.
A sound. Only a sound. A low wail or cry that seemed to follow them throughout an entire afternoon.
When they first heard it, it came from the underbrush beyond the dunes. They thought that perhaps it was an animal in pain. Or a small child in some horrible anguish, an agony that went beyond a child’s tears. In a very real sense, it was terrifying.
So the Jensens raced beyond the dunes into the underbrush, thrashing at the tangled foliage to find the source of the dreadful, frightening cry.
They had found nothing.
The animal, or the child, or whatever it was, had fled.
Shortly thereafter—late in the same afternoon—James Ferguson came running down to the beach, his face an expression of bewildered panic. He had been tracing a giant mollusk fern to its root source; the trek had taken him up into a rocky precipice above the shore. He had been in the center of the overhanging vines and macca-fats when a vibration—at first a vibration—caused his whole body to tremble. There followed a wild, piercing screech, both high-pitched and full, that pained his ears beyond—he said—endurance.
He had gripped the vines to keep from plummeting off the precipice.
Terrified, he had scrambled down hysterically to firmer ground and raced back to the others.