On Target (20 page)

One minute later she realized she could not sleep. After what had happened in the past hour, who could sleep? Plus it was miserable in the smelly car.

“Six, can we open some windows?”

“Negative.”

“Negative? Why don’t you just say ‘no’?”

“No.”

She sat up in the seat, leaned a little closer to the man in the dark. “No, we can’t open the windows?”

“We can’t open the windows.”

“Why not? It’s so hot in here. There’s no way I can sleep in this heat.”

Six responded matter-of-factly, “Scorpions, camel spiders, pythons, poison—”

“Okay, okay! We’ll keep the windows up.”

Six said nothing.

“Why did you come back for me?”

“Dunno.”

“Yes, you do. You can talk to me.” Then she said, “
Please
talk to me. I’m scared, my heart is still racing, there is no way I can sleep like this. I just need to talk a few minutes. You don’t have to tell me anything top secret or whatever, but please help me out here.”

The man remained silent. She could barely see his silhouette in the darkness, and his silhouette did not move a muscle. Of the expression on his face, even whether or not his eyes were closed, Ellen had not a clue.

She was so certain the man had turned to a statue she was startled when he finally did respond.

“I came back for you because it’s my fault you are here.”

“Your fault? How? Why?”

“I came here to do a job. An important job. A good job, actually, one you would approve of.”

He said nothing else. He seemed to have chosen those few words he did say extremely carefully, laboring over every phrase. She encouraged him, “And?”

“And then you got in the way. I tried to get you out of the way the easiest way I could think of. It didn’t work.”

“Or it worked too well.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. Didn’t know you were ICC. I thought you were just some annoying busybody.”

She was grateful for the conversation, for feeling like she’d pried open a corner of the tough shell of this mysterious American to get a tiny glimpse of what was inside. She said, “That’s actually not a bad description for my job with the ICC.”

Ellen saw the silhouette change, movement in the whiskers of the beard on the side of his face, and she imagined him smiling. It was difficult to do.

“Anyway, I just wanted you on ice till we took off. Then the NSS got involved. They were going to kill you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“How do you know?”

“I know men like that. They’d be worried about their own necks more than anything. They’d realize how bad they’d messed up letting you get that close, and they’d do the one thing they knew how to do to make it better.”

With the stranger’s calm proclamation that she had narrowly avoided death, the weight of everything that had happened in the past three hours seemed to crush in on her all at once. Ellen put her head in her hands, felt her fingers tingle and shake. Her entire body went slack, tired, achy. She looked back up to the man in the dark.

“I . . . I just . . .” Ellen Walsh hesitated, but then she hurriedly spun around in the front seat, fought madly for the door handle of the sedan, wrapped her fingers around it and pulled it open while frantically pushing at the wrecked door with her other hand. She launched her upper torso out into the dark, thick brush, spewing vomit along the way as she did so. After several seconds the wave of nausea subsided, and she hacked and coughed and spat out into the flora of the streambed. A second wave of sickness attacked her, and she succumbed, vomiting again until she retched loudly into the night, her body continuing its convulsions though it had nothing left to expel. She spat again to clear her mouth, began crying openly, her head still hanging out of the car.

And behind her the stranger had not moved.

“I . . . I’m so sorry,” was all she could say. Her embarrassment only made her feel foolish.

“Don’t worry,” came a surprisingly soft voice from behind her.

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse.

Six said, “It happens to me all the time.”

It took her a full minute to get her body back inside the vehicle, to get the door closed, herself twisted into a reclining position on the front seat. Her tears and sobs had begun to subside. She wiped her face several more times, cognizant of the gaze of the quiet man in the dark, though she had no way of knowing for sure if his eyes were even open.

Finally, when she had recovered completely except for a few wet sniffs, she asked, “You think we’re going to get out of this okay?”

“Yeah, you’ll be safe and sound by this time tomorrow.”

He sounded certain, and this helped her greatly. But she asked, “What about you?”

He shrugged. “I take it day by day.”

She let that go, did not know what it meant but sensed not to press. While she wiped her eyes she asked, “Are you married?”

“Yeah.”

Slowly she lowered her arm from her face, looked towards the silhouette in the backseat. “No, you’re not. You just lied to me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know, but you are not married.”

He nodded; this she saw clearly. “You’re right. Impressive.”

She sat up straighter, leaned a little closer. Her eyes brightened as if she were playing a game. “Kids?”

“No comment.” He had loosened up a little; he was using humor, but he was still very much on guard.

“I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t think so.”

He said nothing.

“Mom, dad?”

“Dad.” He answered back quickly, too quickly for her not to believe him.

“Where are you from?”

“Michigan, Detroit.”

“Really? Me, too! Originally, I mean, before my family immigrated to Canada. Where did you go to school?”

A long pause. An admission. “Okay, I’m not from Michigan.”

Ellen laughed, surprised herself by the loud noise she made in the tight, hot car, “Sucker! Neither am I.”

She saw him smile again as he shrugged. “You are pretty good.”

With a long sniff and a wider smile she said, “You have no idea.”

An early April morning on the Sahel begins hot and sunny, gets hotter and sunnier by the hour, with the screech of birds and insects prevalent and energetic in the dry season. In the sweltering sedan, under the thick brown and green brush of the gully, Gentry flicked a centipede from the tip of his nose, tried to fall back asleep, but could not.

He rubbed his eyes, wiped away dried sweat that had formed on his eyelashes and on his forehead during the night. He cracked his window. Instantly fresh air entered the interior, and he inhaled deeply. He’d actually managed a couple hours’ sleep, not consecutively, but his body was tuned by half a lifetime of catnapping to get maximum benefit from minimum rest.

In the low light of the morning under the canopy of brush enveloping the car, he tried to plot out his day. He did not have his sat phone, so he couldn’t report to Sierra One what had happened. Not that he would have been looking forward to that call. The landing in Darfur was a snafu that was really no one’s fault and could have been worked around with relative ease. But everything that had happened since? All the threats to the operation since touchdown in Al Fashir? Court knew good and well that it was all on him. A string of fuckups on his part had put him here, now, and had put the CIA’s Operation Nocturne Sapphire, of which he was a crucial part, in mortal jeopardy.

So now what, Gentry?
He looked over at the woman. He had not been this close to a female in a long time, with the exception of a venerable nurse or two in France and a veterinary assistant whose amateur needlework had unquestionably saved his life and the lives of those he went on to save the previous December.

This was different. She slept a few feet from him, calm and quiet now, and as near as he could tell from his limited experience with women, content. He’d heard her toss and turn for hours last night. A few times she’d called out in fright, waking Court in the process, but he had done nothing to help her.

He had no idea what to do. He’d had no training in providing comfort.

She was pretty. His age, with short, reddish-brown hair that lay strewn all over her face as she slept. He respected her being here, in a war zone, even if he did not hold attorneys or international organizations in particularly high regard. The ICC specifically seemed, to a man like Court, to be nothing but a banquet hall full of overeducated and underexperienced bitchers and whiners who had no real enforcement arm or mandate to do what they promised to do. To a man like Court, a one-man judge, jury, and executioner, the ICC seemed incredibly irrelevant out here in the real world.

But he couldn’t help but respect the woman. The way she had puffed her little chest out and declared herself an ICC investigator like that was fucking stupid, but it
was
undeniably ballsy. The girl was tough, even if she didn’t have the sense to restrain herself from talking too much.

He’d lied to her about killing the two NSS men, but he felt he did that for her own good. He could tell by her questioning him about it that she would not have been able to handle that piece of information at that moment, and he needed her to drive and to keep her wits about her. He
had
to kill them, he knew, because even with the turban wrapped around his face and the change of clothes, they would easily have been able to identify him as the crewman of the Ilyushin who spoke English and French and yelled at the woman. It was lucky for him Ellen Walsh hadn’t seen his shooting of them, and he saw no reason to burden her with this knowledge.

She began to stir a bit, licked her lips and rubbed her nose. For an instant he wanted to reach out and brush the hair away from her face. It was a powerful feeling. It reminded him of the feeling he got when he looked across the room at his bottle of pain tablets back in his room in Nice. He knew he shouldn’t reach out, but damn if he didn’t want to.

Unlike those days in Nice, and some of the days since Nice, he did not reach out for Ellen Walsh.

He’d talked too much last night. He remembered this suddenly, and it pissed him off. The conversation went on for an hour, easily. She’d managed to get more info about him, more true info about him, that is, than anyone else he’d been in contact with in a very long time. Ninety percent of the conversation was about her, her family, friends, experiences with the ICC in Holland, but the 10 percent of the time he was talking, or at least the 5 percent of the time that he was both talking
and
telling the truth, he’d said too much. He hadn’t given out one shred of operational intelligence, of this he was sure. But he’d admitted to having parents who divorced when he was young, and a brother who had died a few years back, and why he’d told her this he had no idea. He imagined she made one hell of a good investigator, drawing the truth out of those she interviewed, instilling in them a confidence that the two of them were just chatting while she was, in fact, sucking in each and every word, evaluating them, tossing out those that didn’t fit, and building with those remaining words an impression, a picture of the people she was talking to, an understanding of who they were.

And what they were trying to hide.

He had this uncomfortable and unshakable sense that this woman sleeping three feet from him in the hot car, separated only by the backrests of the front seats, had somehow peered deep inside of him and knew his history, his past, his demons that he’d even managed to hide from himself.

It was a sickening feeling, a feeling of exposure, of vulnerability. And yet, at the same time, it gave him an affinity for this woman, made him feel close to her somehow, gave him a sensation to which he was wholly unaccustomed.

Court looked at her a long time. He watched her chest move up and down with the slow breaths of slumber.

Then he turned away from her suddenly and sat up straight in the backseat.

Unfuck yourself, Court! Unfuck yourself this instant!
He screamed it at himself internally.
You are shit deep in Indian country. Get your damn head in the game!
Instantly he disliked this woman; she was a threat to him now, a weakness that could kill him.

He could flip a switch in his brain like that. It kept him alone, no question, but it also kept him alive.

Court climbed out of the car, no attempt to do it quietly so that Ellen would not wake. Her beauty rest was not his goddamned problem. He crawled out of the brush hiding the sedan, stood in the gully, then he ripped off the local tunic that he’d taken from the rickshaw driver the evening before, revealing his brown undershirt.

He pulled the gun he’d taken from the NSS commander the evening before, looked it over carefully in the morning light. It was a Bul Cherokee. He found it somewhat ironic that an Arabic-speaking secret policemen should be carrying an Israeli pistol, maybe more ironic that the gun had been used to kill him. It wasn’t in Court’s top-ten pistol choices, but it sure as shit had done the job on the two NSS goons last night.

He scrambled out of the gully, looked out to the road a quarter mile distant, past dry scrubland, windblown and sand-strewn. He saw no cars on the road. It ran flat and straight to the west, but to the east, back towards Al Fashir, the highway turned into a winding track and disappeared down a gentle slope.

The landscape wasn’t barren in the strictest sense. This wasn’t a Sahara-like desert of sand dunes; there were sporadic tufts of trees, acacia and baobab, and on-again, off-again grasses and shrubs as far as the eye could see atop the brown earthen crust, a surface that looked as hard as stone and somehow even less inviting.

He heard her climb out of the car below and behind him. It took her a minute to get her bearings and find him there on the crest of the gulley. Wordlessly she appeared next to him, closer than he would have liked, and followed his gaze out on the vast expanse to the east.