TWENTY-ONE

They headed north for another ten minutes. Her attempts to engage the quiet man in conversation were either deftly deflected or outright ignored. On the open road, outside of the city, they picked up speed. The man finally directed her to pull over and to run the car down a gentle draw by the side of the road. She asked about wild animals, and he admitted he had no idea, but he promised she'd be safe. It wasn't that she trusted him-she still didn't know exactly which side this man was on-but she knew she didn't have any other options at the moment. She would do what he said.

The low draw led them to a gully that ran towards a rocky, dry streambed. During the rainy season, in another couple of months, it would be suicide to hide in this ditch. The rills cutting into the scrubland all around would send hundreds of thousands of gallons of runoff down here just minutes after a concentrated rain shower. But right now it seemed safe enough. Thatched brush rose several feet high on either side of the dusty gully. The tops of some of the bushes had interwoven, creating a tight canopy above. It was only six feet high or so, but Court directed her to push the car into the brush and turn off the engine.

The hot metal clicked and clanged when she did so.

"Check the glove box. Any water?" He asked. She opened it and found only a plastic bag of lemon candies. Court climbed out, dug through the bushes, and checked the trunk but found nothing there either.

"We'll be okay tonight. We'll get some water in the morning."

"What do we do now?" She looked back towards the man; he was invisible in the dark now. She heard him reposition himself, lift his legs up onto the little backseat.

"Try to get some sleep."

"What do I call you?"

"I'm the only other person here. If you are talking, I will pretty much assume you are talking to me."

"Touche," she said, though she did not like smart-asses. She did her best to make herself comfortable in the front seat. She swung her body around so that her back was to the passenger door. It had been smashed on the outside by the rickshaw, but the inner frame was intact. She did this to try to get face-to-face with the man in the back who was prone with his back on the driver's side.

"I'm Ellen, if you had forgotten."

"Yep."

A long pause. "You're not going to talk to me?"

"We both need to rest. We're not going to drive out of here tomorrow. Too dangerous. We'll go up to the road on foot and try to flag down a friendly vehicle."

"How do we know if it's friendly before we flag it down?"

She heard more than saw him shrug his shoulders. "No idea, to tell you the truth," he said, and again, she could tell he was trying to end the conversation.

"Are you really a crewman for Rosoboronexport?"

No answer.

"Some sort of mercenary?"

No answer.

"A spy?"

"Go to sleep, Ellen."

She let out a frustrated sigh. "Just give me a name. Make it up if you want to, but give me something I can call you."

"Call me Six," he said after several seconds.

"Dear Lord," she replied. "Does that mean there are five more out there just like you?"

"Go to sleep, Ellen," he said again, and this time she endeavored to leave him alone.


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."

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