Path of the Tiger, стр. 21
‘I promised nothing, Aboubakar. I said that I would try to protect your interests. I did try, but I am only one member on a board of thirteen.’
Abou slammed his fist on the table that sat between them, his teeth gritted and the muscles in his neck bulging, the whites of his eyes bright white in the gloom.
‘Couldn’t you have tried harder?!’ he roared hoarsely.
Mira remained unmoved; Aboubakar may as well have been talking to a cardboard cutout.
‘The Board is already suspicious of me, and relentlessly pushing an agenda that is contrary to our overarching plans will do nothing but out me as a dissenter. The consequences would be beyond disastrous. You know this.’
Abou massaged his temples with trembling fingers as he stared blankly at the floor. His stubby fingers, moving in firm, rhythmic motions, were a panacea of helplessness, a kinetic embodiment of paralysing despair.
‘Then it is all gone.’ The bitter words emerged from between his lips like fat, writhing maggots bursting from a rotting corpse. ‘Everything that I have worked for, for the last sixty years … all gone. My cocoa plantations—’
‘And the surrounding rainforest, approximately fifty thousand acres of it,’ interrupted Mira. ‘Yes, all of this is about to become the property of the Zhong Lai Mineral Resource Corporation, one of the Huntsmen’s many subsidiaries.’
‘But the legal objections I filed with the government,’ Abou stammered, his voice tremulous with shock, ‘the human rights groups petitioning for the indigenous pygmies, the wildlife and environmental impact studies that indicated—’
Mira interrupted again, speaking in a somewhat weary tone; an almost mechanised, automated response.
‘We own your government, Aboubakar. It really doesn’t matter what the NGOs say, or how much they try to protest. We both know what the ultimate bottom line is.’
‘But, but you said, you said if, if I gave your personal mining company limited rights to a small portion of my land, that—’
‘You’re not listening,’ she hissed, cracks of emotion finally appearing on the porcelain death mask that was her countenance. ‘I said that I would try. Can you get that through your skull?! Try. And I didtry, I did everything I conceivably could. But what you have to understand is that the full capacity of the mineral wealth buried beneath those rainforests and your cocoa plantations is crucial to meeting the Huntsmen’s economic and manufacturing expansion goals over the next decade. Our factories in China need those minerals, every last ounce of them, and there is simply no getting around that. To meet the required growth targets, to boost manufacturing capacity, to expand into new markets and—’
Abou’s eyes blazed in the dark, catching the light cast from a UV lamp and taking on a preternatural glow as he growled out his anger.
‘Do you understand what this means?!’
‘I’m sorry that you’ve lost your—’
‘Not only for me, you selfish bitch!’ he bellowed gutturally. ‘Thousands of innocent people are going to lose their livelihoods! Families will be run off their ancestral lands and made destitute, every last wild animal in the area will be slaughtered, the ancient rain forest obliterated, and my employees, who you know are treated and paid better than any other plantation workers throughout the whole of West Africa—’
‘Some of them will be employed by Zhong Lai.’
‘A handful, nothing but a fucking handful out of hundreds!Don’t try to patronise me, don’t! “Some of them will be employed”, that’s absolute fucking bullshit! You’ll throw them all out so you can ship in your own workers from China! I’ve seen it all over Africa, don’t even bother trying to deny it! That is how this works, is it not?! God, you’re a bunch of vipers, a bunch of soulless fucking vipers!’
The brief cracks that had appeared in Mira’s countenance closed up and her expression of cool neutrality returned; Abou’s rage broke against her unflappable calm like torrential rain battering an unmoving cliff face.
‘Yes, that’s how it works.’
Abou curled his fists into tight, quivering balls.
‘And the handful of my people who will be employed by you can look forward to toiling like slaves, and this for a mere fraction of what I pay them, and after you vampires have sucked the land dry of its minerals, you’ll turf them out on their arses, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Aboubakar paused to dribble a string of dry, humourless chuckles from between his full lips before continuing.
‘Leaving them nothing but a poisoned, ruined desert of a landscape in which they can’t drink the water, can’t grow food, can’t even till the earth … In fact the only thing they can look forward to is contracting all manner of cancers and dying early, agonising deaths! Unless starvation gets them first, that is.’
‘That’s not my problem.’
‘We had a deal!’
‘I couldn’t honour it, and I’m sorry about that. There really was nothing I could do.’
Abou reached up and squeezed his fingers against his temples as he spoke, his words almost slurred, his tone soft … and defeated.
‘Obviously, I cannot uphold my end of the deal now,’ he murmured.
‘Even if you had been able to, my personal mining company has now been dissolved and absorbed into Zhong Lai. Your end of the deal couldn’t have happened anyway.’
‘What?!’
‘Listen, these are all very recent developments that I was pressured into by the board. I’m being closely watched, and all of my activity is being monitored. What’s more, I think that someone has tipped off one of Ma’s loyalist board members about my dealings with you and other neutral beastwalkers. I’m under investigation, Abou. So far they haven’t been able to conclusively prove that I’ve been liaising independently with non-Alliance beastwalkers, but the suspicion—’
Abou cackled haughtily, cutting her off.
‘Because we are all targets for your organisation,’ he snarled after his humourless laughter had faded out. ‘The only good beastwalker is a dead beastwalker, isn’t that your policy?’
‘Yes, officially, but as you know—’
‘You’re different, right?!’ he sneered. ‘You can see the value in working with