Hidden Empire Read online

  "Because we have to find the monkey that bit him, that's why," said the doctor.

  Ade looked at Chinma, and Chinma rolled his eyes. "I tried to tell him but he told me to shut up," said Chinma in Ayere.

  "What is he saying?" demanded the doctor. "Speak a language somebody understands."

  Ade answered him. "We take all the monkeys."

  "All the putty-face monkeys," said Chinma, trying to be accurate.

  "Took them? Where?"

  "A warehouse, other side of the tracks," said Ade.

  The doctor glared at Chinma. "Why didn't you make me—" But then he caught himself and grimaced. "Yes, I should have listened. I've turned into one of those adults."

  Five minutes later they were at the warehouse. The men were already loading the monkey cages into a panel truck but they hadn't left yet.

  The doctor told them to stop. "These monkeys cannot leave Ilorin," he said inYoruba.

  The foreman laughed at him, hooking his fingers through the wires of the cage. "We have the permits and unless you have an order from a judge and a policeman to back it up—"

  Then he screeched and snatched his hand back from the cage and brought one finger into his mouth to suck on it. "Damn monkey."

  Chinma looked into the cage. It wasn't the papa monkey, it was one of the mamas. Not the one that sneezed on him.

  The doctor leaned in close to the man. "You are now a dead man," he said, "unless those monkeys stay right here."

  The warehouse man looked puzzled but he had stopped laughing. "What do you mean?"

  "I have a man in my clinic with blood coming out of his eyes because that monkey bit him."

  Chinma thought of telling him it wasn't really the same monkey, but he decided not to.

  The warehouse man sat down on the ground and began to cry. "Ebola," he said. "Ebola."

  "It's not ebola," said the doctor. "It's something else. That's why the scientists have to look at these monkeys. Do you understand me? Maybe they'll find out things that will let them save your life."

  The warehouse man shouted at his coworker. "Get those cages out of the truck!"

  Chinma's brothers helped the man take the cages back into the warehouse.

  Now the doctor could squat down beside Chinma and talk to him. "In the cab of the truck your brother Ade told me that you do the monkey-catching. He said that you warned your brother that the monkey was a biter."

  Chinma nodded.

  "Did it bite you?"

  "No," said Chinma. "I was quick."

  "And the man in my clinic—"

  "Ire," said Chinma.

  "He did the same thing I did, yes? He wouldn't listen to your warning."

  "A monkey … spit on me," said Chinma. He couldn't think of the English word for sneeze. "Will I die?"

  "Are you feeling sick?"

  "No," said Chinma.

  "You saw how sick your brother was. If you had the same thing, you'd be even sicker, because your body is so much smaller."

  The scientists came, not as soon as Chinma hoped, but perhaps soon enough. Nor were they in a truck. They were in a helicopter, and the doctor waved them down into the parking lot. The chopper belonged to the World Health Organization and the scientists came out of it wearing suits that covered every inch of their bodies. They breathed through filtration masks and peered out through goggles. They looked like huge white insects.

  The monkey cages were loaded on the chopper and one of the scientists left with them. Then they all went back to the clinic.

  Ire was dead when they got there. And the nurse was lying on the floor, crying. "I'm sick," she said. "I caught it from him."

  Chinma and his brothers and the truck and the unbitten warehouse man were held in quarantine for twenty-four hours, but none of them showed any sign of illness. By the time they were pronounced healthy and turned loose, the warehouse man and the nurse and the doctor were all dead.

  Their bodies were flown out in helicopters and then the army came in and used flamethrowers to burn out the clinic. Then bulldozers knocked down the walls and gravel and earth were brought in to cover the ruins.

  Before he left, Chinma did have one chance to tell one of the scientists about the red-bellied guenons. He was one of the Nigerians; Chinma was too scared of the white scientists to talk to them.

  "Will you take me out to where they live?" the Nigerian scientist asked inYoruba.

  "Are you sure?" said Chinma. "They were living right where the sick white-face monkeys were."

  "I won't let any of them bite me," said the scientist.

  So instead of going home with his brothers, Chinma went back out to the stand of trees. He only got lost once when he missed the turn from the highway; once they were on dirt roads his memory of the route was perfect.

  The scientist looked up into the trees and swore softly. "They never live in populations this size," he said. "The largest troop we ever found was thirty."

  "I don't think they're sick."

  "Oh, these guenons might have the same thing that killed your brother, Chinma," said the scientist. "Only to them it's like a cold, they just cough and sneeze and then they're fine. When the putty-faces caught it, though, it affected them worse. Made them really sick and lethargic and weak. But they'll probably live, too."

  "And when Ire got bit … "

  "It got past all the body's natural defenses. Straight into the blood. Fatal in six hours."

  "I wish I'd never caught a monkey in my life," said Chinma.

  "It's not your fault," said the scientist.

  "I never thought it was my fault," said Chinma. "But if I hadn't been such a good monkey-catcher, Ire wouldn't be dead now. And that would have been better. The money we made wasn't worth Ire being dead. I'm going to bury all my money with him."

  "You can bury it if you want," said the scientist. "But you can't bury it with him. His body will never be returned to you. You understand? You saw them knocking down the clinic, didn't you?"

  "Are they going to come out and knock down these trees and kill these monkeys?"

  "I hope not," said the scientist. "But they do have to come out here and determine whether the disease originated with the red-bellied guenons. It would be a shame to have to destroy the largest free troop ever found of an endangered species."

  "Will they wear those suits?"

  "Of course," said the scientist. "We're extremely careful when we know there's a new disease involved. No one knows what it might do."

  Chinma refused to let the scientist take him all the way to the village—he knew that if he arrived in the scientist's truck, all his brothers and sisters would hate him and the big ones might beat him because he thought he was better than everyone else. They would say he thought he was a scientist now and taunt him, or say he let the scientist do bad things to him so he was filthy now.

  So the scientist dropped him off on the highway a half-mile from the dirt road leading to the village. Before he drove away, the scientist gave him a notebook and a pencil and told him to take notes, because that's what scientists did. And after he had copied all the pictures from his cheap little digital camera to his laptop, the scientist gave Chinma the cheap little digital camera he had been using. "It runs on batteries and you have to have a computer to get the pictures out of it," said the scientist. "Do you have a computer?"

  Chinma didn't know anyone with a computer, but he wanted the camera, so he nodded and the scientist smiled and gave it to him. Then he drove away.

  Chinma hid the notebook in a bush before he got to the village, and he kept the camera in the deepest pocket of his pants. He would never show it to anyone or they would take it away from him.

  Back at the village, Father made the obvious decision. "No more monkeys," he said. He glared at Chinma.

  For once, somebody spoke up for him. "Chinma warned Ire," said Ade. "It wasn't his fault the monkey was sick."

  "I know," said Father.

  Chinma took the box where he kept all his money and
handed it to Father. "To make up for the monkeys we'll never catch now."

  "No," said Father. "You earned this."

  Several times over the next few days, Chinma smelled something that triggered a sneezing fit. Not just one sneeze, but many in a row. "Get out of the kitchen," said Father's second wife. "Nobody wants you sneezing on the food."

  "I think it was the pepper that made me sneeze," said Chinma.

  "Well, I have pepper in the kitchen, so get out," she said again.

  But Chinma had what he wanted—one of the plastic bags that the women washed and reused again and again in the kitchen. Chinma went back to the notebook and pencil and put them in the plastic bag and left them hidden because if he started writing in a notebook they would say he thought he was a scientist now and they'd beat him and steal the notebook. Later I'll come back and get it. Later I'll take notes and be a scientist.

  It wasn't until the fifth day that Chinma began to get really sick, with a fever and vomiting. And by that time, three of the other children were having occasional sneezing fits, too. So was Father.

  And off in Lagos, where the Nigerian scientist lived and worked, he also had sneezing fits, and so did his closest colleagues.

  "Flu," said the scientist.

  "Flu," said his colleagues.

  But when the scientist ran a fever so hot that it made the nurse who discovered it run screaming for a doctor, they stopped saying "flu" and the men in suits from the World Health Organization came back. If the scientist had not been so sick, he would have told them about Chinma and even where his village was, because Chinma had told all about his home as they rode together in the car to see the red-bellied guenons.

  Instead, like Ire before him, the scientist lay on his bed, racked with fever, blood seeping out of his eyes and then from his ears and nose and finally from random breaks in the skin all over his body. His brain was bleeding, too, so even if he could have talked, he would have had nothing to say; he didn't remember anything except the pain and the fear. And then he felt nothing at all.

  Here is the amazing thing: Chinma did not die.

  Father died. Many of the other children died. The two wives ahead of Mother died. But Mother and Chinma and Ade lived, and so did a scattering of others in the village.

  But when it was over, instead of 3,000 speakers of Ayere in the world, there were only 1,500.

  And the neighboring villages were full of people having sneezing fits. So were the streets of Ilorin and Lagos. And because it took days before people infected through their lungs had any symptom worse than the sneezing fits, there was plenty of time for such people to get on buses and ride to other cities, or get on planes and fly to other countries.

  It was a lucky thing that at first it was a disease of poor and uneducated villagers, and of the shopkeepers in Lagos where the Nigerian scientist had sneezed before he died. None of them were the kind of rich and educated people who flew across the Atlantic or north across the Sahara. So far, at least, the airborne epidemic was confined to West Africa.

  But it was consistently killing between thirty and fifty percent of the people who caught the infection. And all you had to do to catch the thing was be within ten feet of someone who sneezed the virus into the air.

  FAVORITISM

  In the past, "stimulating the economy" has meant pork. Meaningless projects that did no more than pump money out of Washington and burden future generations with debt—and for what? There's nothing to show for it.

  We're not doing it that way this time. We're going to do work that matters. The stimulus money will go only to projects that will pay for themselves many times over. Future generations will forget that we were stimulating the economy—but they'll remember what we built.

  Colonel Bartholomew Coleman liked the city of Kiev. He liked it so much that he walked everywhere he could, so he could enjoy walking among the people, and seeing the shops and houses and parks at street level, and taking odd routes through buildings so he couldn't easily be followed by car.

  If he were a spy, he thought, this was just how he would move through the city. Instead, he was the opposite of a spy. He was going to a meeting with his counterpart in the Ukrainian military, which was precisely what he was supposed to be doing, only they had to meet like spies because otherwise they were sure to be overheard by the Russians, who could be assumed to have listening and watching systems or paid informants in every government office in the city.

  They would have met at the post office at Independence Square, or at the Khreschatyk Metro station, but everyone met there and the crowds were too big to make it possible to spot observers.

  So instead Cole walked along Volodymyrska Street, took a winding, pointless route along Zolotovoritska, Reytarska, and Strilestska, only to cut back down Yaroslaviv Val to the Golden Gate, right by the Metro station that had brought him here. As far as he could tell, no one was following him. Of course, they wouldn't need to if they had followed Colonel Bohdanovich.

  Bohdanovich was a good man, one of the best thinkers and strategists in the Ukrainian army, but he was far too young to have had any combat experience. He'd done observer duty here and there, so he had seen combat, but he hadn't actually fought. To Cole, that meant Bohdanovich didn't have the edginess that made a man truly watchful. Not until you'd had people shooting at you and lived through it did you acquire the habit of looking around you as if your life depended on it.

  Then again, Bohdanovich knew the city and, unlike Cole, he could usually tell Russian operatives from Ukrainian civilians. Again, a matter of experience. Cole's training and experience had been in Middle Eastern theaters of war, unless you counted some serious combat in the District of Columbia and field operations in the mountains of Washington State during the brief Progressive Rebellion three years before. None of that prepared him to know anything about how Russian spies handled themselves in a country that they believed ought still to be part of the Russian Empire.

  A sad empire it was these days. He had walked the streets of Moscow only the week before, and was constantly struck by the glumness of it all. Grim-faced shopkeepers gave perfunctory service to despairing customers, or so it seemed. Pedestrians all seemed to dread whatever destination they were heading for.

  In Kiev, by contrast, there was a sense of eagerness. Though Russia itself began here, and Ukraine had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire long before the Communists took over, this was a new country and it felt like it.

  Was there such a thing as a national character? Cole believed there was, and Cessy Malich encouraged him. "When people band together in communities," she said, "they can't help but influence each other. In a happy community, individual sadnesses are soothed by the surrounding elan; in a sad one, individual triumph or relief is quickly dragged down to match the surrounding despair."

  Nowhere was this clearer than here on the streets of Kiev. The city's buildings were generally as shoddy-built and decayed and polluted and ugly as in the rest of the former Communist countries, and it's not as if there were any great wealth to create architectural showplaces. But the people were bright-spirited. Flowers bloomed wherever they could be planted. Bright signs and displays demanded attention to shop windows. People nodded to one another, greeted one another, smiled.

  It was contagious. Cole found himself smiling back at them. Initiating smiles of his own.

  He spotted Bohdanovich standing on the corner of Lysenka and Prorizna, and to Cole's disgust the man was in uniform. Why not wear a nice flag while he was at it?

  Cole walked up to him and started to greet him in Russian—there was no way Cole could learn all the distinctions between the Ukrainian and Russian languages just for this brief assignment—but Bohdanovich smiled in a vague way and cocked his head and then interrupted Cole.

  "Ah, yes, the coffee shop on the corner of Franka and Yaroslav. Notice that I'm pointing the wrong way, so please start out in the direction I'm pointing and then take your time about meeting me there." Then Bohdanovich smi
led again and turned away.

  Okay, so the guy wasn't an idiot after all. He was just a friendly officer that a stupid American tourist asked for directions. Only if there happened to be a Russian observer who recognized Cole and knew that he and Bohdanovich already knew each other would there be a problem, and if the Russians were already that on top of things, they might as well just invite them to the meeting.

  In the coffee shop, Bohdanovich had already ordered borscht and coffee, and he waved Cole over to his table. They sat cornerwise against the wall, so they both had a view of the big window facing the street and so nobody could come up behind them.

  "You're paying," said Bohdanovich in English.

  "Happy to," said Cole.

  "But you notice I still ordered cheap."

  "The American taxpayer thanks you."

  Then they got down to business, speaking softly in English.

  Bohdanovich spilled salt across a small area of the table and drew a rough map of Ukraine on it, and they shared whatever information they had about Russian army bases and how quickly they could mobilize and get into Ukraine and after about twenty minutes of this they were both chuckling ruefully.

  "So you're saying," said Bohdanovich, "that the best place for us to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion is in Slovakia."

  "Unless you want to try to blow all the bridges on the Dnieper, and how long would that hold them up? A day?"

  Bohdanovich sighed. "At last I understand the hopeless bravery of the Polish army, defending against the Germans when there was no barrier to stop the blitzkrieg."

  "All you have to do is hold on to the west, in the more mountainous country. Keep the army intact. Let the Russians occupy everything without resistance, bombing nothing, leaving the whole infrastructure intact. Then use small special ops groups you left behind to make their supply lines impossible while you counterattack in a place of your choosing."

  "So many tanks."

  "Tanks need gas. Make sure they can't find any between the Dnieper and the Russian border. Blow up every tanker truck that tries to make it through. Learn the lessons of Iraq."