'Matatu checked the baits today, while I was fetching you from Salisbury.
You are in luck, signora. We have had another strike on one of the river baits. Matatu says it's a g. ood tom. He ate well last night. The impala bait has been hanging for a week, and even with the cool weather it has ripened nicely. if he feeds again tonight, then we'll sit up for him tomorrow evening.' 'Si,' Elsa nodded. 'That's good.' 'So tomorrow morning we can check the bait and shoot a few more impala, just in case we need them. Then after lunch we'll have an hour's lie-down and then we'll go into the hide around three o'clock tomorrow afternoon.' 'You check the bait. You shoot the impala,' Elsa told him. 'Tomorrow morning I have a meeting to attend.' She smiled at Shasa in the chair beside her. 'We have much to discuss.'
The discussion took up most of the morning. Garry had made the arrangements with deceptive simplicity. He had sent Isabella off in the Toyota with Sean to check the leopard baits, and had then ordered Isaac and his staff to set up three chairs and a folding table under a msasa tree at the edge of the glade, but well away from the camp itself.
Under the msasa tree, the three of them, Garry, Shasa and Elsa Pignatelli, were as secure from eavesdropping as at any spot on the planet. It was bizarre, Shasa thought, to be discussing such a terrifying subject in such tranquil and beautiful surroundings.
On the other hand, the negotiations did not follow the course that either Shasa or Garry had hoped for. Although Elsa Pignatelli had with her a handsome pigskin attache case, it remained locked and unopened while they delicately circled around the central issue.
Almost immediately it became obvious that Elsa had not yet made up her mind to proceed with the Cyndex enterprise. On the contrary, she was obviously having serious doubts and misgivings, and would need a great deal of persuasion.
'It is a hideous thing to let loose in the world,' she said at one point.
'My relief when NATO rescinded the original contract and ordered us to allow the existing stocks to degrade and to dismantle the plant was immense. I cannot imagine what possessed me even to consider equipping another plant, especially one over which I would have no direct control.' All that morning, Shasa and Garry worked to allay her fears. They tried to devise between them some arrangements that would satisfy her demands on control and the ultimate rules of engagement under which Cyndex could ever be used.
'If you were to begin manufacturing, any NATO expert who ever inspected the plant and analysed a sample of the gas would know immediately where the technology was obtained,' she pointed out. 'If that happened and it was traced back to Pignatelli...' She did not finish the sentence, but merely spread those long graceful hands in an expressive Italian gesture. Gradually, as the discussion continued, Elsa moved round in her chair to face Shasa. She began to direct all her remarks and questions to him alone.
It was subtly, almost subconsciously, that she excluded Garry from the exchanges. Beneath his bluff exterior Garry was an intuitive and sensitive negotiator. Before even they realized it, he had detected the currents that ran between these two. He recognized that, belonging to the same generation and the same caste, they shared values and understood a special code that he could not comprehend.
He sensed that Elsa Pignatelli wanted to be reassured not by him, but by the man to whom she was inexorably being drawn. Tactfully he withdrew into silence and watched them fall in love with each other without realizing what was happening to them.
The hum of the engine of the returning Toyota startled them. Shasa glanced at his watch with disbelief.
'Good gracious, it's lunchtime already, and we have settled nothing.'
'We have two weeks in which to talk,' Elsa pointed out, and rose to her feet. 'We can pick up again from here tomorrow morning.' As the three of them came back into the boma, Sean was already at the bar table mixing Pimm's No. i in a crystal jug. He prided himself on his personal recipe.
'Good news, signora,' he called. 'Can I wheedle you into a festive Pimm's?' She smiled a refusal. 'I'll have my usual Badoit water with a slice of lemon. Now, tell me the good news.' 'The leopard fed again last night. judging by the sign, he came in early, half an hour before sunset. So he's starting to get careless and bold, and he's huge. He's got paws on him like snow-shoes.' 'Thank you, Sean. You always find good cats for me, but never so soon. This is the first day of safari.' 'Take a nap after lunch, just to settle your nerves, and we'll go into the hide around three this afternoon.' Isaac offered Elsa her mineral water on a silver tray, and then distributed the tall glasses of Pimm's to the musical accompaniment of tinkling ice, and Sean gave them a toast.
'To a big old tom leopard death at the base of the tree.' The professional hunter's horror was the cat down from the tree and waiting wounded in the tall grass.
They all drank the toast, and immediately afterwards Shasa and Elsa fell into a quiet but intent conversation that excluded the younger Courtneys.
Garry seized on the opportunity to take his elder brother's arm and gently lead him out of earshot.
'How are you feeling, Sean?' he asked.
'Fine. Never better.' Sean was puzzled by this uncustomary brotherly concern.
'You don't look fine to me.' Garry shook his head. 'In fact it is fairly obvious that you are sickening for a go of malaria, and those ribs-' 'What sort of crap is this?' Sean was getting annoyed. 'There's nothing wrong with my ribs that a couple of codeine won't fix.'
39e iyou won't be able to hunt with Signora Pignatelli this evening.' 'The hell I won't. I've set up this cat, and he's a beaut--2 'You will stay in your tent this evening with a bottle Of chloroquine tablets beside your bed and, if anybody asks, you have a temperature of a hundred and four in the shade.' 'Listen, Big Shot, you've screwed up my elephant already. You're not going to do the same with my leopard.' 'Pater will hunt with the client,' Garry said firmly. 'You are staying in camp.' 'Pater?' Sean stared at him for a moment before he started to grin. 'The randy old dog! Pater has the hots for the widow, has he?' 'Why do you always make it sound so vulgar?' Garry asked mildly. 'We are trying to do business with Signora Pignatelli, and Pater needs to develop the relationship to a point of mutual trust. That's all there is to it.' 'And when those two geriatric nymphos mess up the leopard, old S)ean will be the one who has to go in to clean up.) 'You told me that Signora Pignatelli never misses, and Pater is as good a hunter as you any day. Besides which, you aren't frightened of a wounded leopard, not the fearless Sean Courtney - surely not?' Sean scowled at the jibe, and then bit back his response. 'I'll go set it up for them,' he agreed, and then smiled. 'To answer your question - no, Garry, I'm not frightened of a wounded leopard, or of anything else. Bear that in mind, old son.'
Shasa lay stretched out on his camp-bed with a book. The safari camp was one of the few places in his existence where he had the opportunity to read for pleasure rather than for business or political necessity. He was reading Alan Moorehead's Blue Nile for the fourth time and savouring every word of it, when Garry popped his head into the tent.
'We have a little problem, Pater. Scan's having a go of malaria.' Shasa sat up and dropped the book with alarm. 'How bad?' He knew that Sean never took malarial suppressants such as Paludrine or Maloprim. Sean preferred to build up his immunity to the disease and only treated symptoms. Shasa, knew also that there had recently appeared along the Zambezi a new strain of 'P Falciparum' that was resistant to the usual drugs, and which had a dangerous tendency to mutate into the cerebral and pernicious form. 'I should go to him.' 'Don't worry. It's responding to chloroquine already, and he's asleep. So you shouldn't disturb him.' Shasa looked relieved, and Garry went on smoothly: 'But somebody will have to hunt with Signora Pignatefli this evening, and you have more experience than I do.'
The hide was in the lower branches of a wild ebony tree, only ten feet above ground-level. Sean had raised it, not to protect the hunter, for a leopard could climb and be in the tree. with him before he drew breath, but rather to provide a wider field of view across the narrow stream to the bait- tree.
Sean had chosen the bait-tree with infinite care, and Shasa nodded approval as he surveyed it. Most important, it was above the prevailing easterly evening breeze, so the hunter's scent would be wafted away. Also it was surrounded by dense shoulder-high riverine bush that would give the leopard confidence in his approach.
The main trunk leant out over the riverbed at a slight angle to give the cat an easy climb to the horizontal branch twenty feet above the ground from which the carcass of the impala antelope was suspended by a short length of chain. The foliage of the ebony tree was dense and green.
That would also give the leopard confidence to climb. However, the horizontal branch was open, with a window of blue sky beyond it which would silhouette the leopard as he stretched out and reached down to pull the stinking bait up to him.
The hide was exactly sixty-five yards from the bait-tree. Sean had measured it with a builder's tape, while earlier that afternoon Elsa Pignatelli had sighted and fired her rifle at the marked range behind the main camp. Shasa had set up the target at precisely sixty-five yards, and she had put three shots into the bull's-eye, forming a perfect clover-leaf pattern with the three bullet-holes slightly overlapping each other.
The hide was built of mopane poles and thatch, and was a comfortable little tree-house. Inside were two camp-chairs facing the firing-apertures in the thatch wall. Matatu and the Samburu tracker laid out blankets and
