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