The Cry of the Halidon by Robert Ludlum Page B

he raised his cigarette to his lips, he knew that he was—for an indeterminate period of time. Time in a hell he could not stand; he was not free.
    The dual hands on his wristwatch converged. It was midnight. To goddamn hell with all of them! He
would
leave! He would call Alison and tell her he wanted to come over for a drink … ask her if she would let him. Hammond could wait all night in Soho. Where was it? The Owl of Saint George. Silly fucking name!
    To hell with him!
    The Rolls-Royce sped out of the fog from the direction of Newgate, its deep-throated engine racing, a powerful intrusion in the otherwise still street. It swung alongside the curb in front of McAuliff and stopped abruptly. The chauffeur got out of his seat, raced around the long hood of the car, and opened the rear door for Alex.
    It all happened so quickly that McAuliff threw away his cigarette and climbed in, bewildered; he had not adjusted to the swift change of plans. Julian Warfield sat in the far right corner of the huge rear seat, his tiny frame dwarfed by the vehicle’s expansive interior.
    “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting until the last minute, Mr. McAuliff. I was detained.”
    “Do you always do business with one eye on secrecy, the other on shock effect?” asked Alex, settling back in the seat, relieved to feel he could speak with confidence.
    Warfield replied by laughing his hard, old-man’s laugh. “Compared to Ross Perot, I’m a used-car salesman.”
    “You’re still damned unsettling.”
    “Would you care for a drink? Preston has a bar built in right there.” Warfield pointed to the felt back of the front seat. “Just pull on that strap.”
    “No, thank you. I may do a little drinking later, not now.”
Easy. Easy, McAuliff
, he thought to himself.
For Christ’s sake, don’t be obvious. Hammond can wait all night. Two minutes ago, you were going to let him do just that!
    The old man took an envelope from his jacket pocket. “I’ll give you the good news straight off. There’s no one weobjected to strenuously, subject to minor questions. On the contrary, we think you finalized your selections rather ingeniously.…”
    According to Warfield, the initial reaction at Dunstone to his list of first choices was negative. Not because of security—subject to those minor questions—nor quality. McAuliff had done his homework. But from a conceptual viewpoint. The idea of female members of a geological survey expedition was rejected out of hand, the central issue being that of less strength, not necessarily weakness. Any project entailing travel had, by tradition, a masculine identification; the intrusion of the female was a disquieting component. It could only lead to complications—any number of them.
    “So we crossed off two of your first choices, realizing that by eliminating the Wells woman, you would also lose her husband, Jensen.… Three out of the first five rejected; knew you’d be unhappy, but then, you
did
understand.… Later, it came to me. By George, you’d outthought the lot of us!”
    “I wasn’t concerned with any strategies, Warfield. I was putting together the best team I could.” McAuliff felt he had to interject the statement.
    “Perhaps not consciously, and qualitatively you have a splendid group. But the inclusion of the two ladies, one a wife and both superior in their fields, was a profound improvement.”
    “Why?”
    “It provides—they provide—a unique ingredient of innocence. A patina of scholarship, actually; an aspect we had overlooked. A dedicated team of men and women—on a grant from the Royal Society—so different somehow from an all-male survey expedition. Really, most remarkable.”
    “That wasn’t my intention. I hate to disabuse you.”
    “No disabusement whatsoever. The result is the same. Needlessly said, I pointed out this consideration to the others, and they agreed instantly.”
    “I have an idea that whatever you might ‘point out’ would be instantly agreed