He dropped her off at the main hospital entrance. 'I will pick you up
here at three 'clock,' he told her and drove on into the centre of York.
From his university days Nicholas had kept a small flat in one of the
narrow alleys behind York Minster. The entire building was registered in
the name of a Cayman Island company, and the unlisted telephone there
did not route through an internal switchboard. No ownership could be
traced to him personally. Before he had met Rosalind the flat had played
an important part in his social life. But nowadays Nicholas only used it
for confidential and clandestine business. Both the Libyan and the Iraqi
expeditions had been planned and organized from here.
He hadn't used the flat for months, and it was cold and musty-smelling
and uninviting. He put a match to the gas fire in the grate and filled
the kettle. With a mug of steaming tea in front of him he placed a call
to a bank in Jersey, followed immediately by another to a bank in the
Cayman Islands.
'A wise rat has more than one exit from its burrow.'
This was a family maxim, passed down through the generations. He was
going to need funds for the expedition, and the lawyers had most of
those locked up already.
He gave the passwords and account numbers to each of the bank managers,
and instructed them to make certain transfers. It always amazed him how
easily matters could be rranged, as long as you had money.
He checked his watch. It was still early morning in Florida, but Alison
picked up the phone on the second ring. She was the blonde feminine
dynamo who ran Global Safaris, a company that arranged hunting and
fishing expeditions to remote areas around the world.
'Hello, Nick. We haven't heard from you in over a year. We thought you
didn't love us any more.'
'I have been out of it for a while,' he admitted. How do you tell people
that your wife and two little girls had died?
'Ethiopia?' She did not sound at all disconcerted by the request. 'When
did you want to go?'
'How about next week?'
'You have to be joking. We only work with one hunter there, Nassous
Roussos, and he is booked two years in advance.'
'Is there nobody else?' he insisted. 'I have to be in and out again
before the big rains.'
'What trophies are you after? she hedged. 'Mountain nyala? Menelik's
bushbuck?'
'I am planning a collecting trip for the museum, down the Abbay river.'
It was as much as he was prepared to tell her.
She hedged a little longer and then told him reluctantly, This is
without our recommendation, do you understand. There is only one hunter
who may take You on at such short notice, but I don't even know if he
has a camp on the Blue Nile. He is a Russian, and we have had mixed
reports about him. Some people say he is ex-KGB an was one of Mengistu's
bunch of thugs.'
Mengistu was the 'Black Stalin' who had deposed an then murdered the
old Emperor Haile Selassie, and in sixteen years of despotic Marxist
