Lioness

by Nell Brien

  “Reitholder, let her go.” Stephen N’toya looked at Gaston, on his knees, blood oozing from between the fingers clutching his right arm. Stephen took a breath, spoke through his teeth as if unwilling to let the words escape him. “Let her go, and you can take him with you.”

  “Kill him, kaffir. Save me the trouble.”

  Reitholder tightened his arm around Cat’s throat, dragging her backward. One of his arms was weak as if he’d been injured.

  Cat fought to keep her feet. Then a sudden eruption of gunfire deafened her. Bullets exploded among the trees—survivors firing as they tried to escape that way. She couldn’t let him drag her into the trees. She’d be finished.

  Now. She had to make a move.

  She jerked as if shot, then slumped heavily against the weak arm, every muscle loosened, making her body a dead weight.

  Reitholder grunted, struggled to maintain his hold on her sagging body. “Get up!” He tried to drag her upright. “You bitch! Get up!” For an instant, he released his hold to try for a better purchase.

  It was all she needed. Cat twisted from his grasp. She could hear Campbell’s voice shouting at her to get away. She aimed a kick at Reitholder’s genitals, felt the solid connection of her booted foot. He doubled, grunting in agony. She grabbed the Beretta from his hand.

  Aimed.

  Fired.

  A cloud of brain tissue erupted. The Afrikaner’s torso pitched forward.

  For an instant, savage joy swept through her. Joel…Joel. Her mind screamed his name. Then she opened her fingers, jerked her hand back and released the Beretta from her grasp as if tossing away something unclean.

  In the second before she tightened her finger on the trigger, her father’s face had melted into Reitholder’s, covering it like a death mask.

  Forty

  “That’s it, then.” Doug Jones threw down his pencil, leaned back, stretched and grinned at her. “We’ll knock ’em cold.”

  Cat swiveled in her chair, stared out into the coral trees on San Vicente Boulevard. Still November, yet some of the trees were already budding. Soon they would be covered in the flaming color for which they were famous, the red flowers massed on bare branches almost the exact shade of an elephant’s hide, no leaves to soften the contrast. She liked that.

  “Guitterrez just got back from Thailand,” she said. “He may have found something they’ll like better. But if they decide to go for Africa, I think they’ll go for Maasai Springs.”

  “I don’t know. What about these others?” Doug sorted rapidly through the original drawings covering her side of the ebony partner’s desk. “These are staggering. This place is a primo site.”

  Slides of the sketches were part of her upcoming video presentation, but copies had been made and bound into separate proposal folders, together with the photographs she had taken. The folders would be placed in front of each of the five men at today’s crucial meeting of the full Bluebonnet board.

  The preliminary presentation the day after she got back had been enough to buy her the time she needed for a formal proposal. From Nairobi, through the stopover in London, and from Heathrow to LAX, she’d worked nonstop, then gone straight from the airport to the office, showered, worked without sleep for another twenty hours pulling everything together.

  Only the work had kept her sane.

  Without it, all she could see was Reitholder’s body, blood still pumping from the severed arteries in the neck. She’d staggered over to a tree, sank to her knees. While she threw up, strong hands had steadied her, kept her from falling. Crazily, she’d thought it was Joel. Then she’d realized he was dead and it was Campbell holding her until the spasms were over.

  It was strange how she remembered the rest of that night with such clarity. The intermittent gunfire tapering off. Campbell watching the tusks burn. Moses directing the collection of the dead, his impassive face as Sambeke’s body was placed with the rest of Campbell’s men who died that night belied by the track of tears coursing through the dirt on his cheek. The occasional shot that meant one less prisoner. Tom’s hand squeezing her shoulder, his reassuring words about the death of Reitholder gentle in her ear, as if he’d thought a loud voice would shatter her equilibrium like glass.

  And the delight of N’toya, her old friend Stephen, hustling Gaston, hands bound behind him, into an army helicopter idling on the great lawn of Erukenya. Morag’s white face. Her own icy calm. She saw everything about that night clearly. Except Reitholder’s face…

  Doug found the sketch he was looking for, one of many she’d done at the site, and held it up. “This meets every criterion we set up.” He studied it, elephants in the foreground, the cave mouth yawning above. “Except accessibility. And handled right, that will turn out to be a plus. We’ll bring the airstrip at, what’s the name of that little town? Kitale? Yeah. We’ll bring that airstrip up to a standard to take a fleet of small planes. Widen the road up the mountain. An exclusive, killingly expensive hotel. People love that. It’ll be good. Very good.”

  She didn’t turn to look at the drawings. She didn’t need to. The day she’d got back, John Rifken had dropped by the office while she was working, the sketches and photographs she’d had developed pinned up around her drafting table. He’d riffled through a pile of paper she’d set aside, glanced at some quick pencil studies of Campbell—asleep in the sun, hunkered down building a fire, drinking coffee while he looked out over savannah wreathed in the mystery of early-morning mist—and put them aside without comment. Then he’d picked up the photographs and drawings of the caves at Kitum.

  “You including this?” he’d asked.

  She’d taken the sketches out of his hand, replaced them in her portfolio. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I saw the site too late to get any data. No feasibility, no figures. Nothing to impress a consortium of land developers.”

  He retrieved the photographs. “So, today just keep their interest in Africa alive with Maasai Springs. Tomorrow, I’ll talk to people in Kenya, government people, start to get some figures together for you on this site. Include it in your formal proposal, you could kick Guitterrez’s ass. If it’s financially viable, I can promise you, the job’s yours.”

  Why look back? she’d thought. Her choice had been made at Erukenya.

  She’d nodded. “Okay.”

  “So, what do you think?” Doug was saying.

  “Think?”

  “Are you listening to me?” Doug asked patiently. As usual, his sandy hair stood up in spikes, twiddled by nervous fingers. He started the day slick as a seal, and by midmorning looked more like a porcupine. “What do you think about choppering in building material? At least until we improve the road enough to bring up supplies.”

  Cat thought of the baboon challenging Campbell, his outrage and her laughter. Francolin and cold tomatoes dripping on bare skin, Tusker beer in the middle of a burning day.

  She swung her chair around, planted her feet securely under her desk. “I think we’re going to have to be very careful not to destroy what we’re trying to showcase. Any building we do has to be well distanced from the caves. I’m going with a rammed earth system.”

  “Sure. We can look at that. Maybe the tribal people…what’s their name?”

  “The Nandi. It’s their tribal land.”

  “Yeah, Nandi. We’ll get them working on it. This African tongue-and-groove design in terrific.” Doug smacked a hand on one of the detail drawings. “So let’s go with it. When we get the go-ahead from Bluebonnet, first thing we ought to do is get permission to fell local lumber, have these Nandi people dress it in their traditional way so it can mature while the preliminary work is being done. Good PR. Their government will love us for providing jobs. Governments always love you when you do that. They’ll eat out of our hands.”

  He had not heard a word she’d said about rammed earth. She said, “Don’t kid yourself. They’re more likely to chew them off at the armpit.”

  “And we’ll
use local stone.”

  “Local stone doesn’t have any compressive strength. It’s too soft for bearing walls.”

  “Use it for facing, then. We can use local artisans.”

  “Doug, the Nandi are pastoralists. They don’t work stone.”

  “So, we’ll introduce a new skill.”

  Mave Chen’s head appeared around the door. “You’ve got half an hour to get over to Century City. You’d better get moving.”

  Doug got to his feet. “This presentation really shows what we can do, Cat. Lets them know nothing fundamental has changed at The Stanton Partnership. We’ve got two distinctly different treatments for two distinctly different sites. Compared to us, Guitterrez is a cookie cutter. He hasn’t got a chance.” He clapped his hands together. “Right. Let’s go get ’em.”

  At a nod from John Rifken, Charlotte Buller, his assistant for twenty years, went to the wall of glass overlooking Century City. She pressed a button. Heavy lined drapes swung together, closing out the sun and plunging the conference room into darkness. A large screen descended from the ceiling. Cat pressed a switch on the multimedia projector.

  The mist-wreathed image of Maasai Springs sprang to life, illuminating the room.

  “This is the site as it now appears,” Cat said. And in an ideal world, how it should be left, she thought. The image changed. “These aerials were flown six weeks ago, and you can see the natural boundaries of the project. This will be the last major building on the Mara, so the government reserves the right of architectural review. This is what I propose.”

  The rest of the slide presentation for Maasai Springs took just over fifteen minutes. She concluded with a shot of a sunset over the Mara, flat-topped thorn trees, a black silhouette of a single giraffe against the crimson-streaked sky. Hokey, but effective. She clicked the button on the projector. The room went dark.

  The next slide would be of the elephant caves of Kitum. Campbell’s place of renewal. The gift he had given her because he loved her. In some deep part of her being, she’d known that even then, with the words unspoken. But when he’d finally told her how he felt, it was too late.

  Her fingers were still. She felt paralyzed. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t press the button on the remote that would bring the elephant caves of Kitum into the conference room in Century City.

  The moment lengthened. “Hey, if there’s a glitch, I’ll take another bourbon and branch while you get it fixed,” a voice said.

  “Cat, is there something wrong with that machine?” John Rifken asked.

  “No. Nothing’s wrong. The presentation is complete. Charlotte,” Cat said, “will you open the drapes, please?”

  Daylight flowed in. Doug, in the chair next to her, leaned forward, confusion plain on his face. Cat raised a hand. She left her seat, walked to John Rifken halfway down the conference table, bent to murmur in his ear. “I can’t continue with Kitum, John. I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” Rifken ground the words between his teeth. He turned to look at her, his one gray eye glittering. “It’s already in the folder. I’ve talked it up. Do you intend to make a fool of me in front of these people?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  John shoved back his chair and stood. “Charlotte, let’s have another round of drinks here. Gentlemen, just tell Charlotte what you want while I—”

  “Does the sun ever shine there, honey?” Lorne Tollet asked.

  Cat looked at him, a small skinny man with the pasty complexion of someone who rarely sees the light of day. She was hard put to conceal her dislike. He looked as if he’d sway if she breathed on him, but from the moment she and Doug had come into the room, he had been overly solicitous, jumping up to help her as if she might be too weak to hold a pencil without assistance. One of Guitterrez’s supporters.

  “Seems an awful lot of rain in those photographs.” Tollet shook his head.

  Charlotte set a glass of bourbon, light on the branch, on the table in front of Rifken. He hesitated, looked at Cat, then sat down in his chair.

  “The rains come twice a year,” she said. “The rain is intermittent even then, and I saw Maasai Springs during one of those periods. However, you can see that neither the beauty of the site, nor the pools, are in any way diminished during the rainy season, which of course is not limited to Maasai Springs.” She touched John’s shoulder, then walked back to her own place. She picked up her copy of the document she had placed in front of each man. “You will see I have covered the annual rainfall and average daily hours of sunshine in the area. Page seven.”

  “American capital is being withdrawn from Kenya. I got the figures here,” Tollet said.

  Before the presentation, he’d droned on about the crash of the Texas real estate market—he wasn’t getting his balls caught in that wringer again, pardon me, honey. He’d watched to see her reaction, as if the word balls had never been spoken in mixed company before, and seemed disappointed when she didn’t have a reaction.

  Cat glanced at John Rifken scowling into his drink. When this meeting was over, there was going to be one hell of a reckoning.

  Rifken came to a decision and looked up. “I spoke with Mr. Joseph N’gonga, the minister of tourism, just last week.”

  Cat started to breathe again. He was going to try to sell them on Maasai Springs. John was a businessman. He was backing her because he had no choice. Not if he wanted to show Guitterrez, and the rest of this board, who held the power.

  “I was assured that the government will do all it can to facilitate this project. The country desperately needs long-term commitment of foreign capital. They’re prepared to make us a very sweet deal.”

  “Get it in writing,” Tollet said.

  “I did, Lorne. Page thirty-six.”

  “The figures are okay. More than okay,” Bubba Nelligan said. Bubba had once played tight end for the Texas Aggies and looked as if he still could. “But my daddy always said, hell with the figures, go with the gut. My gut tells me Africa is bad news. Who the hell’s going to want to stay at some hotel in the middle of a country with an AIDS epidemic?”

  “AIDS is a reality of life everywhere,” Cat said. “The government of Kenya would welcome regular health checks of all employees.”

  “I bet they would, on our payroll. Bubba here goes by his gut. My daddy believed in his accountant, and so do I.” Brett Hardinge struck a wooden match on the sole of a lavishly tooled boot and held it to his cigar. He rolled the cigar around in his mouth to thoroughly moisten the end, speaking between puffs. “I’m gonna take a real good look at this proposal. Real good. We don’t want to buy into problems we can’t solve. I like your design, Cat. Nothing personal, you’re a talented little gal.”

  Cat wondered what his reaction would be if the little gal responded to that remark as she wanted to. She stared at him without smiling. Another supporter of Guitterrez.

  “We gotta face the political instability,” Greg Hayakawa said. “One rich, connected tourist gets his head blown off before we sell out to investors, and we’re in the hotel business. Bluebonnet’s not geared up for running hotels.”

  “Figures are not everything, John,” Hardinge said. “Greg’s right. Those elephants are gonna draw poachers. Stands to reason. Someone’s gonna get killed, sooner or later.”

  Cat smiled to herself. He still held the wooden match in his hand. Charlotte, an ardent reformed smoker, always managed to forget ashtrays.

  “What I think is, John here has got his head up his ass, pardon me, honey,” Tollet said.

  The discussion dragged on. A power struggle in Bluebonnet, Cat thought, little to do with the project at hand. They must have gone over all this before Joel left for Nairobi—terrorism and poaching, AIDS and the constantly changing business climate, how much they could rely on the government of Kenya. The sides were clearly drawn up. Tollet and Nelligan. Hardinge and Hayakawa wavering. John Rifken pushing for Maasai Springs.

  Outside, windows were beginning to glow in the high-rise
buildings in Century City, and the hills were dotted with lights.

  Greg Hayakawa looked at his watch. “I got a plane to catch.” He flipped through his folder. “What about the rest of this?”

  Doug leaned forward. “Cat—”

  She put a hand on his arm. Expensive cigar smoke wreathed the air. Around the table, the men looked at her expectantly, John scowling from beneath his eyebrows, one manicured finger tapping the black patch over his eye. “Cat?”

  He was giving her another chance. Doug put the projector remote on the table in front of her.

  She put her hand over it. “I studied another site. You will find the details outlined. Kitum is on Mount Elgon, on the border with Uganda, a country struggling even more acutely with the problems discussed this afternoon. With that in mind, I have to conclude that Maasai Springs is the site that most clearly meets the criteria set up prior to Joel Stanton’s visit to Kenya, and my own follow-up. It is, therefore, the only recommendation that I can make.” She leaned back.

  “You’ve just handed this job to Guitterrez on a silver platter,” Doug Jones said in her ear.

  The minute the goodbyes had been said, the handshakes over, John exploded. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s personal—”

  “Don’t give me that schoolgirl bullshit. This is business. If you don’t want to chop cotton, girlie, get out of my cotton patch. You were paid for that study. I bought your talent and you fucked up. Now, what the hell happened?”

  She turned to Doug, sitting at the conference table, staring into a glass. “Doug, will you excuse us? We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “I’ll go back to the office—”

  “Let’s make it in the morning, Doug. Okay?”

  “Sure.” He gathered his papers together, murmured a good-night to Rifken, closed the door softly behind him as if closing it on a funeral.

  John walked to the bar, poured a couple of fingers of Chivas into a glass, then filled it with ice. “Here. You’re gonna need this.” He refilled his own glass, dropped in one ice cube. “Okay. I’m waiting.”