“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.”
TWENTY-TWO
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.
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
