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you mean, repeat it?”
    “The army is going to question us when we arrive. They said so. It’s why they ordered us to follow them.”
    “By us, you mean me, too?”
    “Yes.”
    Questioning by army interrogators was the last thing Marten wanted. It was impossible to know how much they knew of his connection to Father Willy or if they had known about the photographs all along and had been trying to trap him and anyone he might have shown the photos to or told about them. Brutal as they were, they were fighting a war and would do anything to get as much information as they could about what was going on and who was involved with arming the rebellion. Father Willy had been with the natives a long time and that made him a prime suspect in anything that might appear to be supporting the insurgency. The soldiers had seen Marten with him, and Marten had turned and run when they came after him. That in itself would make any question-and-answer session with them long and probably ugly, maybe even fatal.
    Abruptly he looked to Marita. “There’s no need for me to make things difficult for you. Why don’t you tell your driver to just pull over when we go around a bend in the road and let me off. They won’t see it happen, and that way I’m out of your hair and you won’t have to answer questions about me when they find out I wasn’t part of your group to begin with.”
    “They know how many of us there are, Mr. Marten. If there were to be one less we would have to explain it and they would want to know why and then there would be more trouble all around. Even if we did stop and you got out, where would you go? Into the rain forest? How long would you be prepared to stay there? This is an island, Mr. Marten, and not terribly hospitable, as you already know. Whatever your private circumstances are, I would think it best that you settle them sooner rather than later.”
    “You do,” Marten said flatly.
    “Yes, I do.”
    Marten looked off. He knew she was right and that the best thing he could do would be to face whoever interrogated him and hope he could bluff it through. The idea of calling the president, using the direct-dial twenty-four-hour-a-day number Harris had given him, or calling anyone else for that matter, was not an option. This was not the United States, not Britain, not Europe. Demands to make a phone call would, he knew, be met with laughter and more likely with physical punishment. Maybe worse. He turned back to her. “Alright. I’ll follow your suggestion.”
    “That being the case”—Marita grinned a little, and the impishness returned—“please tell me your story again, and precisely as you did before. That way we will all have everything comfortably in mind before you and we and the soldiers meet.”
    Marten smiled at her pluck. Here was a beautiful young doctor on some kind of mission of mercy or education or both in the middle of a poor-as-dirt jungle region who understood something of the underbelly of the world around her and could smile about it even as she determined how to deal with it. People like that didn’t come along very often.
    12:42 P.M.

8
    MALABO, CAPITAL OF EQUATORIAL GUINEA. 4:18 P.M.
    Conor White stood alone under the arch of a public building, and out of a light rain, watching the street at the end of the block. Now and again people passed by. Mostly they were native women and children, their men seemingly elsewhere. The whites, Americans, Europeans, South Africans—mostly people in the oil business or in one way or another connected to it—were absent altogether, either still conducting the day’s business or already gathered in the bar of the Hotel Malabo, where most of them spent their free time. To them, neither Malabo nor the entire island of Bioko, the old Spanish Fernanado Pó, nor even Rio Muni, the Equatorial Guinea mainland across the Bight of Biafra from Bioko, was a place for civilized man. If you weren’t in oil or somehow trying to profit from it, there was no