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"The next plane leaves in—"
"The next plane leaves when I say it does. It has to leave before we turn this woman loose. Do you understand?"
"Of course," said the light-haired gunman. "But can't you just email it?"
"I'm going to try that as soon as you're in the air and gone," said Dr. Wangerin. "We don't know how closely they monitor what we send on the internet, though. So as soon as I start transmitting, they might arrest us all and take our computers."
The woman spoke up. "They will shoot the boy immediately."
The three white men looked at her.
"Please take him and me out of the country with you or we are both dead."
Dr. Wangerin started to explain to her. "We can't take Nigerians to America without visas, it would be—"
The light-haired gunman interrupted him. "I think these pictures will make a clear case that this boy needs immediate political asylum. It's within my authority to bring him in to a military base. Dr. Bekaba is another matter. As a Nigerian government spy, we can't take her. But if we consider her this boy's guardian, we can't leave without her."
"She was going to turn him in," said Dr. Wangerin acidly.
"The boy is right," she said. "If I stay here, I'm dead. I will not harm the boy."
Dr. Wangerin rolled his eyes. "Do you think I'm stupid? If you had a way to do it, you'd kill him right now."
"I would not," she said. "I'm a scientist!"
"You're a spy working for a bunch of thugs."
"We're all spies, if they tell us to be spies," Dr. Bekaba said. "Or else they kill our families. I'm not a spy by choice."
Chinma could understand English much better than he spoke it, and he had gotten the idea that they were going to take him out of Nigeria.
"Can I have my notebook?" he asked.
"Is this evidence?" asked Dr. Wangerin, holding it up.
"I write everything."
Dr. Wangerin turned to the dark-haired gunman. "Then get this scanned and I'll send it as a PDF first, before the pictures."
"I write in my language," said Chinma.
Dr. Wangerin looked at him for a long moment. "What language is that?"
"Ayere," said Chinma.
Dr. Wangerin turned to the woman. "Do you speak Ayere?"
She shook her head. "Nobody speaks Ayere. Just a few thousand people in a half-dozen villages north of here."
"All dead," said Chinma.
Dr. Wangerin looked at him, then glanced back at the pictures. "The Ayere-speakers—that's where the nictovirus first appeared, wasn't it?"
Chinma had figured out that nictovirus was the English word for monkey sickness. "I get sick first," said Chinma. "Monkey spit on me." But he knew spit wasn't the right word. So he pretended to sneeze.
Immediately the others recoiled from him as if he had just set off a flamethrower.
"No, no, not sick!" said Chinma. "I show you monkey! Monkey do this." And he faked another sneeze, but not so realistically this time.
