Wild Meat by Nero Newton Read Free Book Online Page B

the camp. Apparently someone gave them a call.”
    “No way! I had my man at the Interior Ministry call over to Public Health and explain that this information was not for public consumption. Especially not foreign consumption.”
    “Maybe someone at Public Health doesn’t like us very much. But it’s a done deal now. The word’s out.”
    Hugh had closed his planner and buried his the phone in his luggage, resolving not to answer any more calls while he was in the islands.
    After arriving back in Equateur last night, he’d scarcely glanced at the memos in his inbox, and still had no idea that the date for the PR photo shoot had already passed. The only message he recalled now was about a woman who had apparently forged his signature on a letter, then tried to use it to gain access to one of the camps. If that call had come from the very camp he was headed for now, then it could have been her he’d just spotted. In spite of the layer of mud that covered most of her body, and the filthy, mud-drenched hat that sagged over her head, he’d seen some light skin in places. Clearly not a local.
    If yesterday’s gate crasher was American, as she had claimed, her appearance at the camp was probably eco-driven. Sanderson Tropical Timber was the only U.S.-owned logging company for a thousand-mile radius. A couple of years back, the greenies in the States had ganged up and tried to give Sanderson the same kind of lumps that the French and Italian companies in Africa were getting. They’d nearly succeeded.
    To thwart that attempt, the company had thrown major resources into the green-image campaign, and Hugh had been cornered into being its front man. His tall, athletic stature and oddly handsome features had put an attractive face on the company. He had played the role wonderfully, but had also hated every minute. Hated it so much that he’d begun spending hours a day trying to imagine some way to leave his brother’s company without going broke.
    The embarrassing fact was that he didn’t have much in the way of assets. He had never been good at holding onto his salary and dividends, and his debts were mounting perilously. He was beginning to worry about that situation for the first time in his life. If he could just round up a few million more – not even ten million – he could leave Sanderson Tropical Timber and never look back. He was forty years old, and it was time to free himself.
    In the meantime , if Mud Woman up there on the pass had come up with anything that could stink up the company’s image all over again, William and the rest of the crowd in New York would look to Hugh for damage control. They might even call for a mini repeat of the first phase of the green campaign.
    That was a hellish thought. It would mean continuing to pose as the kind of person he’d despised since college, people with a religious devotion to crickets and buzzards and endangered swamp grass. People who dressed up in green makeup and leafy costumes for demonstrations, who held phony pagan ceremonies on campus or in front of downtown office buildings, pretending they were Iroquois healers, or Druid priests, or whatever daffy shit caught their fancy at the moment. It reminded him of a nightmare he’d had the previous year. In the dream, his father had been alive again, forcing him to marry the queen of the tree-worshipers in some kind of New Age ceremony on the steps of a Mayan pyramid.
     
    * * *
     
    It was late afternoon when he arrived in the logging camp. Like the previous day’s visitor, he correctly guessed that the trailer at the edge of the clearing was where he could find someone in charge. Next to the trailer he saw a black Land Rover, identical to his own, and figured it must belong to the photographer.
    But there were no tents, nothing that looked like a makeshift clinic or a place where food might be distributed.
    The foreman emerged from the trailer and introduced himself, and Hugh asked, “Where is