The Cry of the Halidon: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  James had not been more than a few hundred yards away.

  Yet none but he had heard the terrible thing.

  Whitehall had another version of the madness. The black scholar had been walking along the shoreline, half sand, half forest, of Bengal Bay. It was an aimless morning constitutional; he had no destination other than the point, perhaps.

  About a mile east of the motel’s beach, he rested briefly on a large rock overlooking the water. He heard a noise from behind, and so he turned, expecting to see a bird or a mongoose fluttering or scampering in the woods.

  There was nothing.

  He turned back to the lapping water beneath him, when suddenly there was an explosion of sound—sustained, hollowlike, a dissonant cacophony of wind. And then it stopped.

  Whitehall had gripped the rock and stared into the forest. At nothing, aware only that he was afflicted with a terrible pain in his temples.

  But Charles was a scholar, and a scholar was a skeptic. He had concluded that, somewhere in the forest, an enormous unseen tree had collapsed from the natural weight of ages. In its death fall, the tons of ripping, scraping wood against wood within the huge trunk had caused the phenomenon.

  And none was convinced.

  As Whitehall told his story, McAuliff watched him. He did not think Charles believed it himself. Things not explicable had occurred, and they were all—if nothing else—scientists of the physical. The explainable. Perhaps they all took comfort in Whitehall’s theory of sonics. Alexander thought so; they could not dwell on it. There was work to do.

  Divided objectives.

  Alison thought she had found something, and with Floyd’s and Lawrence’s help she made a series of deep bores arcing the beaches and coral jetties. Her samplings showed that there were strata of soft lignite interspersed throughout the limestone beds on the ocean floor. Geologically it was easily explained: hundreds of thousands of years ago, volcanic disturbances swallowed whole landmasses of wood and pulp. Regardless of explanations, however, if there were plans to sink pilings for piers or even extended docks, the construction firms were going to have to add to their base supports.

  Alison’s concentrations were a relief to McAuliff. She was absorbed, and so complained less about his restrictions, and, more important, he was able to observe Floyd and Lawrence as they went about the business of watching over her. The two guerrillas were extremely thorough. And gracefully subtle. Whenever Alison wandered along the beach or up into the shore grass, one or both had her flanked or preceded or followed. They were like stalking panthers prepared to spring, yet they did not in their tracking call attention to themselves. They seemed to become natural appendages, always carrying something—binoculars, sampling boxes, clipboards, whatever was handy—to divert any zeroing in on their real function.

  And during the nights, McAuliff found a protective bonus he had neither asked for nor expected: Floyd and Lawrence alternated patrols around the lawns and in the corridors of the Bengal Court motel. Alex discovered this on the night of the eighth day, when he got up at four in the morning to get himself a plastic bucket of ice from the machine down the hall. He wanted ice water.

  As he turned the corner into the outside alcove where the machine was situated, he was suddenly aware of a figure behind the latticework that fronted the lawn. The figure had moved quickly; there had been no sound of footsteps.

  McAuliff rapidly scooped the cubes into the small bucket, closed the metal door, and walked back around the corner into the hallway. The instant he was out of sight, he silently placed the ice at his feet and pressed his back against the wall’s edge.

  There was movement.

  McAuliff whipped around the corner, with every intention of hurling himself at whoever came into view. His fists were clenched, his spring accurate; he lunged into the figure of Lawrence. It was too late to regain his footing.

  “Eh, mon!” cried the Jamaican softly as he recoiled and fell back under Alex’s weight. Both men rolled out of the alcove onto the lawn.

  “Christ!” whispered McAuliff, next to Lawrence on the ground. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Lawrence smiled in the darkness; he shook his hand, which had been pinned by Alex under his back. “You’re a big fella, mon! You pretty quick, too.”

  “I was pretty damn excited. What are you doing out here?”

  Lawrence explained briefly, apologetically. He and Floyd had made an arrangement with the night watchman, an old fisherman who prowled around at night with a shotgun neither guerrilla believed he knew how to use. Barak Moore had ordered them to stand evening patrols; they would have done so whether commanded to or not, said Lawrence.

  “When do you sleep?”

  “Sleep good, mon,” replied Lawrence. “We take turns alla time.”

  Alex returned to his room. Alison sat up in bed when he closed the door.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked apprehensively.

  “Better than I expected. We’ve got our own miniature army. We’re fine.”

  On the afternoon of the ninth day, McAuliff and Tucker reached the Martha Brae River. The geodometer charts and transit photographs were sealed hermetically and stored in the cool vaults of the equipment truck. Peter Jensen gave his summary of the coastal ore and mineral deposits; his wife, Ruth, had found traces of plant fossils embedded in the coral, but her findings were of little value, and James Ferguson, covering double duty in soil and flora, presented his unstartling analyses. Only Alison’s discovery of the lignite strata was unexpected.

  All reports were to be driven into Ocho Rios for duplication. McAuliff said he would do this himself; it had been a difficult nine days, and the tenth was a day off. Those who wanted to go into Ochee could come with him; the others could go to Montego or laze around the Bengal Court beach, as they preferred. The survey would resume on the morning of the eleventh day.

  They made their respective plans on the riverbank, with the inevitable picnic lunches put up by the motel. Only Charles Whitehall, who had done little but lie around the beach, knew precisely what he wanted to do, and he could not state it publicly. He spoke to Alex alone.

  “I really must see Piersall’s papers. Quite honestly, McAuliff, it’s been driving me crazy.”

  “We wait for Moore. We agreed to that.”

  “When? For heaven’s sake, when will he show up? It will be ten days tomorrow; he said ten days.”

  “There were no guarantees. I’m as anxious as you. There’s an oilcloth packet buried somewhere on his property, remember?”

  “I haven’t forgotten for an instant.”

  Separation of concentrations; divided objectives.

  Hammond.

  Charles Whitehall was as concerned academically as he was conspiratorially. Perhaps more so, thought Alex. The black scholar’s curiosity was rooted in a lifetime of research.

  The Jensens remained at Bengal Court. Ferguson requested an advance from McAuliff and hired a taxi to drive him into Montego Bay. McAuliff, Sam Tucker, and Alison Booth drove the truck to Ocho Rios. Charles Whitehall followed in an old station wagon with Floyd and Lawrence; the guerrillas insisted that the arrangements be thus.

  Barak Moore lay in the tall grass, binoculars to his eyes. It was sundown; rays of orange and yellow lights filtered through the green trees above him and bounced off the white stone of Walter Piersall’s house, four hundred yards away. Through the grass he saw the figures of the Trelawny Parish police circling the house, checking the windows and the doors; they would leave at least one man on watch. As usual.

  The police had finished the day’s investigation, the longest investigation, thought Barak, in the history of the parish. They had been at it nearly two weeks. Teams of civilians had come up from Kingston: men in pressed clothes, which meant they were more than police.

  They would find nothing, of that Barak Moore was certain.

  If Walter Piersall had accurately described his caches.

  And Barak could not wait any longer. It wou
ld be a simple matter to retrieve the oilcloth packet—he was within a hundred and fifty yards of it at the moment—but it was not that simple. He needed Charles Whitehall’s total cooperation—more than Whitehall realized—and that meant he had to get inside Piersall’s house and bring out the rest of Piersall’s legacy. The anthropologist’s papers.

  The papers. They were cemented in the wall of an old, unused cistern in Piersall’s basement.

  Walter Piersall had carefully removed several cistern blocks, dug recesses in the earth beyond, and replaced the stones. It was in one of these recesses that he had buried his studies of the Halidon.

  Charles Whitehall would not help unless he saw those papers. Barak needed Charley-mon’s help.

  The Trelawny police got into their vehicles; a single uniformed guard waved as the patrol cars started down the road.

  He, Barak, the people’s revolutionary, had to work with Whitehall, the political criminal. Their own war—perhaps a civil war—would come later, as it had in so many developing lands.

  First, there was the white man. And his money and his companies and his unending thirst for the sweat of the black man. That was first, very much first, mon!

  Barak’s thoughts had caused him to stare blindly into the binoculars. The guard was nowhere in sight now. Moore scanned the area, refocusing the Zeiss Ikon lenses as he covered the sides and the sloping back lawn of Piersall’s house. It was a comfortable white man’s home, thought Barak.

  It was on top of a hill, the entrance road a long climb from George’s Valley to the west and the Martha Brae to the east. Mango trees, palms, hibiscus, and orchids lined the entrance and surrounded the one-and-a-half-storied white stone structure. The house was long, most of the wide spacious rooms on the first floor. There was black iron grillwork everywhere, across the windows and over the door entrances. The only glass was in the second-floor bedrooms; all the windows had teak shutters.

  The rear of High Hill, as the house was called, was the most striking. To the east of the old pasture of high grass, where Barak lay, the gently sloping back lawn had been carved out of the forests and the fields, seeded with a Caribbean fescue that was as smooth as a golf course; the rocks, painted a shiny white, gave the appearance of white-caps in a green sea.

  In the center of the area was a medium-sized pool, installed by Piersall, with blue and white tiles that reflected the sun as sharply as the blue-green water in it. Around the pool and spreading out over the grass were tables and chairs—white wrought iron—delicate in appearance, sturdy in design.

  The guard came into view again, and Moore caught his breath, as much in astonishment as in anger. The guard was playing with a dog, a vicious-looking Doberman. There had been no dogs before. It was a bad thing, thought Barak … yet, perhaps, not so bad. The presence of the dog probably meant that this policeman would stay alone at his post longer than the normal time span. It was a police custom to leave dogs with men for two reasons: because the district they patrolled was dangerous, or because the men would remain for a relatively long time at their watches. Dogs served several purposes: they were alarms, they protected, and they helped pass the hours.

  The guard threw a stick; the Doberman raced beyond the pool, nearly crashing into a wrought-iron table, and snatched it up in his mouth. Before the dog could bring it back the policeman threw another stick, bewildering the Doberman, who dropped the first retrieval and went after the second.

  He is a stupid man, thought Barak, watching the laughing guard. He did not know animals, and a man who did not know animals was a man who could be trapped.

  He would be trapped tonight.

  18

  It was a clear night. The Jamaican moon—three-quarters of it—shone brightly between the high banks of the river. They had poled a stolen bamboo raft down the rushing waters of the Martha Brae until they had reached the point of shortest distance to the house in Carrick Foyle. They maneuvered the raft into a pitch-black recess and pulled it out of the water, hiding it under cascading umbrellas of full-leaved mangroves and maiden palms.

  They were the raiding party: Barak, Alex, Floyd, and Whitehall. Sam Tucker and Lawrence had stayed at Bengal Court to protect Alison.

  They crept up the slope through the dense, ensnaring foliage. The slope was steep, the traveling slow and painfully difficult. The distance to the High Hill property was no more than a mile—perhaps a mile and a quarter—but it took the four of them nearly an hour to reach it. Charles Whitehall thought the route was foolish. If there was one guard and one dog, why not drive to the road below the winding, half-mile entrance and simply walk up to the outer gates?

  Barak’s reasoning held more sophistication than Whitehall would have conceded to the Trelawny police. Moore thought it possible that the parish authorities had set up electronic tripwires along the entrance drive. Barak knew that such instruments had been in use in Montego Bay, Kingston, and Port Antonio hotels for months. They could not take the chance of setting one off.

  Breathing heavily, they stood at the southern border of Piersall’s sloping lawn and looked up at the house called High Hill. The moon’s illumination on the white stone made the house stand out like an alabaster monument, still, peaceful, graceful, and solid. Light spilled out of the teak shutters in two areas of the house: the downstairs back room opening onto the lawn and the center bedroom on the second floor. All else was in darkness.

  Except the underwater spotlights in the pool. A slight breeze caused ripples on the water; the bluish light danced from underneath.

  “We must draw him out,” said Barak. “Him and the dog, mon.”

  “Why? What’s the point?” asked McAuliff, the sweat from the climb rolling down into his eyes. “He’s one, we’re four.”

  “Moore is right,” answered Charles Whitehall. “If there are electronic devices outside, then certainly he has the equivalent within.”

  “He would have a police radio, at any rate, mon,” interjected Floyd. “I know those doors; by the time we broke one down, he would have time—easy to reach others.”

  “It’s a half hour from Falmouth; the police are in Falmouth,” pressed Alex. “We’d be in and out by then.”

  “Not so, mon,” argued Barak. “It will take us a while to select and pry loose the cistern stones. We’ll dig up the oilcloth packet first. Come!”

  Barak Moore led them around the edge of wooded property, to the opposite side, into the old grazing field. He shielded the glass of his flashlight with his fingers and raced to a cluster of breadfruit trees at the northern end of the rock-strewn pasture. He crouched at the trunk of the farthest tree; the others did the same. Barak spoke—whispered.

  “Talk quietly. These hill winds carry voices. The packet is buried in the earth forty-four paces to the right of the fourth large rock on a northwest diagonal from this tree.”

  “He was a man who knew Jamaica,” said Whitehall softly.

  “How do you mean?” McAuliff saw the grim smile on the scholar’s face in the moonlight.

  “The Arawak symbols for a warrior’s death march were in units of four, always to the right of the setting sun.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” said Alex.

  “Like your American Indians,” replied Whitehall, “the Arawaks were not comforted by the white man.”

  “Neither were the Africans, Charley-mon.” Barak locked eyes with Whitehall in the moonlight. “Sometimes I think you forget that.” He addressed McAuliff and Floyd. “Follow me. In a line.”

  They ran in crouched positions through the tall grass behind the black revolutionary, each man slapping a large prominent rock as he came upon it. One, two, three, four.

  At the fourth rock, roughly a hundred and fifty yards from the base of the breadfruit tree, they knelt around the stone. Barak cupped his flashlight and shone it on the top. There was a chiseled marking, barely visible. Whitehall bent over it.

  “Your Dr. Piersall had a progressive imagination; progressive in the historical sense. He’s ju
mped from Arawak to Coromantee. See?” Whitehall traced his index finger over the marking under the beam of the flashlight and continued softly. “This twisted crescent is an Ashanti moon the Coromantees used to leave a trail for members of the tribe perhaps two or three days behind in a hunt. The chips on the convex side of the crescent determine the direction: one—to the left; two—to the right. Their replacement on the rim shows the angle. Here: two chips, dead center; therefore, directly to the right of the stone facing the base of the crescent.” Whitehall gestured with his right hand northeast.

  “As Piersall instructed.” Barak nodded his head: he did not bother to conceal his pique at Charley-mon’s explanation. Yet there was respect in that pique, thought McAuliff, as he watched Moore begin pacing off the forty-four steps.

  Piersall had disguised the spot chosen for burial. There was a thicket of mollusk ferns spreading out in a free-form spray within the paced-off area of the grass. They had been rerooted expertly; it was illogical to assume any sort of digging had taken place there in years.

  Floyd took a knapsack shovel from his belt, unfolded the stem, and began removing the earth. Charles Whitehall bent down on his knees and joined the revolutionary, clawing at the dirt with his bare hands.

  The rectangular box was deep in the ground. Had not the instructions been so precise, the digging might have stopped before reaching it. The depth was over three feet. Whitehall suspected it was exactly four feet when deposited. The Arawak unit of four.

  The instant Floyd’s small shovel struck the metal casing, Whitehall lashed his right hand down, snatched the box out of the earth, and fingered the edges, trying to pry it apart. It was not possible, and Whitehall realized it within seconds. He had used this type of receptacle perhaps a thousand times: It was a hermetically sealed archive case whose soft, rubberized edges created a vacuum within. It had two locks, one at each end, with separate keys; once the keys were inserted and turned, air was allowed in, and after a period of minutes the box could be forced open. It was the sort of repository used in the most heavily endowed libraries to house old manuscripts, manuscripts that were studied by scholars no more than once every five years or so and thus preserved with great care. The name “archive case” was well suited for documents in archives for a millennium.