Agent Out of Time

The black sedan roared along the desert road doing 100mph easy. The driver had no time to swerve to miss the tack strip bumper laid out on the road, before he was on top of it. The car swerved off the road and flipped over in a ditch.

Shock at the experience of the crash had all four men within the car acting dazed. The upside down car door was opened and a man was hauled out into the sunlight. His cry of protest was abruptly ended by a sharp crack to his head. The process of removing the occupants of the car continued much the same finishing with a weakly protesting Ivan.

It was hot. In fact it was so hot that it felt like fire upon their skin. The four men became roughly conscious all around the same moment. It was a moment of complete disorientation for all them, as they twisted their necks about trying to figure out what was going on. The scene immediately became clear to them. They were in the desert buried up to their necks in the sand and it was hot!

The sun beating off their faces had already burned a deep red into their pale skinned features. They couldn't move at all except for their heads. It was a thing of panic to realize yourself in such a predicament.

Then they saw me leaning back against a rock in the shade of a rocky spire. They didn't know me from Adam, but I knew them. I knew all about them.

I tossed the water canteen out at them but it came up short of the nearest one of them by several feet. They began to scream and curse at me in Russian, but it soon turned into begging. I got up reluctant to leave my sparse shade, as the temperature was well over 100 degrees. I walked up to the canteen and bent down to scoop it up. I took a long drink from it letting excess water spill down my front. They cursed me even louder than before. I pulled back from the drink then and capped the canteen off. I rattled it to show that there was still water sloshing inside of it.

"I'll give a drink of water to the first one of you, who can tell me the destination point of the crate sent to Siberia earlier this week."

There was dead silence, as they blinked up at me, all of their expressions suddenly watchful and cautious. They may not want to admit it, but they were all scared. They knew what they'd done and here they were defenseless with someone, who was interested in the subject of their crime. Such men as them are rarely, if ever, brought to true justice and they didn't like knowing that their time had come. Their only defense was silence at the moment.