"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.
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.