you to crawl under, a handler foolish enough to sponsor you, a country brazen enough to allow you inside its borders.
“Zack is going to hunt you down. He will stop you, and he will kill you. You may still have a pulse for a bit, Mr. Gentry, but as of this very moment . . . your life is ended!”
Carmichael did not say anything else. Neither did Court. He liked getting the last word . . . but at this moment it seemed as if the last words on the subject had been spoken. No clever quip could blunt the impact of Carmichael’s rant. This man was not threatening anything that he did not have the power to put into motion.
After an extremely long pause, the man from Langley spoke quietly. It sounded to Court as if he were hanging up the phone as he did so.
“That is all.”
FORTY-SIX
Tuesday was Ellen Walsh’s first day back in her tiny office in The Hague since leaving for the Sudan five weeks earlier. Her supervisors in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court had offered a week for her to tend to herself upon her return from Africa, but the thirty-five-year-old Canadian had only taken a day to go to a local dermatologist to look at her sunburned face, and a GP to give her a prescription for migraines she’d been having since the truck explosion on the road to Dirra.
When she appeared through the elevator doors to her office, her coworkers were shocked to see her. Snippets of her adventure had made it out. The international media had covered the attack of the Speranza Internazionale convoy and the murder by the Janjaweed militia of world-famous Mario Bianchi and two of his local staff. There was no mention in the reports that other Westerners had been in the convoy, but Ellen herself had spoken to the administrative heads in the Office of the Prosecutor, and the story had filtered its way downstairs like water poured through cracks in the flooring. From there, administrative assistants of the top brass told friends and friends of friends who worked throughout the building. Her brutal sunburn and a sad and distant look in her eyes lent credence to the rumors, and Ellen knew it would not be long before she would be forced to send out an e-mail thanking everyone for their concern, and simultaneously asking everyone to please respect her privacy and understand that she just wasn’t quite yet up to talking about what she had witnessed in Darfur.
On her computer in front of her were two reports, neither finished. One was an incident report upon which she was to put in writing as much as she could remember about her discovery of the Russian Rosoboronexport aircraft in Darfur and the men on board, along with any names, corroborating witnesses, et cetera, et cetera. She had only opened the template and put in information regarding her initial plan to enter Darfur with false credentials. Even this part of the document was difficult for her to write. So much had happened since her time in Khartoum, skulking around other NGO offices looking for her way into Darfur, that it seemed to be relegated to the portion of her brain reserved for distant memory.
The other was her report about the murder of two wounded and defenseless gunmen by an American John Doe who had flown into Al Fashir with the Russian aircraft. She’d all but finished this report. She could not get it out of her mind, but she was not sure if she was writing it in an attempt to purge her thoughts of the atrocity, or if she would, indeed, file the report and open an investigation into this man. She was torn by her official obligation and her feelings towards this stranger. He had helped her and convinced her he was not evil, but she was concerned that he was an individual teetering on the edge, a man who needed to be stopped before more atrocities were committed.
And what to make of the news that the president of the Sudan had been kidnapped during a massive battle with rebels on the east coast of the country? Could Six have had some involvement with that? The timing was right, but Six did not seem like a man who could control a force of Sudanese rebels.
He could barely control himself.
Her desk phone rang. “Ellen, there is someone calling himself ‘Six’ on the phone for