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.