a few, who communicated it to their out-tribal counterparts.
The symbol, the sound, the word... was 'Halidon.'
Its meaning.
It took him nearly a month of sleepless days and nights, using logarithmic charts of phonetics, hieroglyphs, and African symbols of daily survival.
When he was finished, he was satisfied. He had broken the ancient code.
It was too dangerous to include it in this summary. For in the event of his death - or murder - this summary might fall into the wrong hands. Therefore, there was a second archive case containing the secret.
The second without the first was meaningless.
Instructions were left with one man. To be acted upon in the event he was no longer capable of doing so himself.
Charles Whitehall turned over the last page. His face and neck were drenched with sweat. Yet it was cool in the shack. Two partially opened windows in the south wall let in the breezes from the hills of Drax Hall, but they could not put out the nervous fires of his anxiety.
Truths had been learned. A greater, overwhelming truth was yet to be revealed.
That it would be now, he was certain.
The scholar and the patriot were one again.
The Praetorian of Jamaica would enlist the Halidon.
Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
James Ferguson was exhilarated. It was the feeling he had when momentous things happened in the lens of a microscope and he knew he was the first observer - or, at least, the first witness who recognized a casual effect for what it was.
Like the baracoa fibre.
He was capable of great imagination when studying the shapes and densities of microscopic particles. A giant manipulating a hundred million infinitesimal subjects.
It was a form of total control.
He had control now. Over a man who did not know what it was like to have to protest too loudly over the inconsequential because no one paid attention; to be forever down to his last few quid in the bank because none paid him the value of his work.
All that was changing. He could think about a great many things that were preposterous fantasies only yesterday: his own laboratories with the most expensive equipment - electronic, computerized, databanked; throwing away the little budget pads that told him whom he had last borrowed from.
A Maserati. He would buy a Maserati. Arthur Craft had one, why shouldn't he?
Arthur Craft was paying for it.
Ferguson looked at his watch - his goddamned inexpensive Timex - and signalled the bartender to total his bill.
When the bartender did not come over in thirty seconds, Ferguson reached for the tab in front of him and turned it over. It was simple enough to add: a dollar and fifty cents, twice.
James Ferguson then did what he had never done in his life. He took out a five-dollar bill, crumpled it up in his hand, got off the bar stool, and threw the wadded bill towards the cash register several yards in front of him. The bill bounced off the bottles on the lighted shelf and arced to the floor.
He started for the entrance.
There was machismo in his gesture; that was the word, that was the feeling.
In twenty minutes, he would meet the emissary from Craft the Younger. Down off Harbour Street, near Parish Wharf, on Pier Number Six. The man would be obsequious - he had no choice - and give him an envelope containing one thousand dollars.
One thousand dollars.
In a single envelope; not saved in bits and pieces over months of budgeting, nor with the tentacles of Inland Revenue or debtors-past reaching out to cut it in half. It was his to do with as he pleased. To squander, to throw away on silly things, to pay a girl to get undressed and undress him and do things to him that were fantasies... only yesterday.
He had borrowed - taken a salary advance, actually - from McAuliff. Two hundred dollars. There was no reason to repay it. Not now. He would simply tell McAuliff... 'Alex'; from now on it would be 'Alex,' or perhaps 'Lex' - very informal, very sure... to deduct the silly money from his paycheque. All at once, it he felt like it. It was inconsequential; it didn't really matter.
And it certainly didn't, thought Ferguson.
Every month Arthur Craft would give him an envelope. The agreed-upon amount was a thousand dollars in each envelope, but that was subject to change. Related to the increased cost of living, as it were. Increased as his appetites and comforts increased.
Just the beginning.
Ferguson crossed St James Square and proceeded towards the waterfront. It was