Chapter Five
"So what was the message?" Sapphire got to the point. She was already worrying about time. It had taken her more than a day and a half just to get here and now, and she was due to report to Meyer at six. That would be nine in Guyana, she reminded herself, and eight in the morning in Qatar where he was. Logistics were always rattling around in her mind. She would need gas and she had seen a station some twenty miles back. She would make it. The diner was not too appealing food-wise. She would wait for that too. She thought she might well have the whole of part one all wrapped up, depending on what Alex could tell her.
"Nobody knows," he replied. Sapphire thought she didn't hear that correctly.
"What did you say?"
"Nobody knows what the message is yet," he repeated.
"But didn't you say that you went to see her with Argus? And she said she had a message for Argus and what? She didn't tell him? Why not?"
"He wouldn't go in," Alex said, calculating in his mind a deduction from whatever he might be getting from her. He'd already known it wouldn't go over too well, but what could he do? It was the truth, after all. He took a deep breath and went on.
"Of course when Argus called me I agreed to go with him. It was out of the blue. We don't talk too much. Fact is, we hardly ever see each other anymore. I'm over in Flagstaff when I'm not on the road, and anyway, his wife and I don't get along very well. She hates me, you know, because I'm divorced and not with my kids. It's a really big deal with her. Staying together for the children and all. As if it was entirely my choice. Anyway ..."
'She doesn't even want to hear about that', he chided himself. 'Stick to the story, okay?'
"I went. We met up at a place where we both used to go, by the docks. Maybe you know it? It's a sort of floating restaurant slash casino boat called Jimmy's. It's an item of interest itself. Whenever it's time to go gambling they let off the ropes and go sailing about twenty feet off the shore. That way it's legal and all. For dinner and dancing they pull her back in, tie her up. Do you know it?"
Sapphire shook her head. It wasn't of interest to her. She'd been traveling so long that all things American only seemed quaint to her now, their little corruptions and bigotries paled compared to the professional rackets in charge in most countries. Here the payoffs were sheltered, if barely, cover provided by obscure regulations. Elsewhere it was all strictly cash and you knew who to pay and how much.
"It's the same people who own the Sea Dragons," Alex went on, but he realized her attention was drifting. 'Same old Sapphire', he said to himself, 'focus or die.' In their long-ago friendship it was always a chore to keep Sapphire on the same page for a while. She wasn't an ADD kid, as they called it back then, just impatient. He wondered how it squared with her life as a reporter. How did she ever keep still long enough to do a proper job of it? No wonder she was always in the middle of action. Wars and such didn't require a whole lot of sitting around, he imagined, but how would he know? Maybe they did. Maybe there were aspects of Sapphire he couldn't conceive of.
"Anyway," Alex realized he kept saying that word. He was the one who wasn't staying on track. "We met up at Jimmy's and he started to tell me what it was all about. You see, on the phone he didn't say, only that he needed a big favor and hated to ask but would I come over and see him? He was under a lot of pressure, he said. It was the FBI, he told me, and he motioned his head towards a couple of guys at a table nearby."
"They're on me like maggots on trash," he tried to make a joke of it.
"What did you do?" I asked him. "You realize I had no idea at the time. When he told me it was all about the sinkhole, I tried to joke back and asked him if he'd done it and that's when he started to tell me about the girl."
"He didn't get far. Actually, all he said was, 'there's this girl', and that's when the agents came over and told us to get up and come out with them. I wasn't going to say no. I could tell that Argus was pretty upset. We followed these goons to the quay where they made sure that no one could hear us. Agent Phipps did the talking. He's this really huge guy. You'll know him when you see him. Biggest guy I ever saw, that's for sure. The other one, Hawkins, just stood there looking serious. That one is only our size, I mean Argus' and mine. He's a little bit shorter than you I would say."
'Why am I babbling all of a sudden?' Alex inquired of himself. The longer he spent out there with Sapphire alone, the more nervous he felt he became. He wanted this meeting to end, to say their goodbyes and get back to himself, to go home and forget all about it. His part was done, or almost, he wanted to think.
"Phipps is the one who told me the story I told you about Nameless. He said she was in this glass room and we were going there, pronto. He actually used the word 'pronto'. So we did. I was expecting some kind of obvious black limo to come pick us up, but instead the agents just had an old pickup. We had to squeeze in the back seat. Nobody said a word on the way over. It was weird. When we got to the hospital, Phipps led us up to a little room that looked into the room where she was. It was like one of those interrogation scenes like you see in the cop shows, right down to the two-way glass and all that. There she was. Sitting on the bed staring out of the window, just like they said that she would be. We had only a side view of her."
Glancing up at Sapphire, Alex felt a sudden strange jolt. She had turned slightly away and he had the same angle on her as he'd had of the girl in the room. 'Not now', he said to himself, and pushed the thought away as he tried to keep himself focused.
"So that's her," Phipps was saying. "Do you recognize her?"
Argus shook his head. Of course not. Why should he? You see, the feds had the idea that somehow the girl had known Argus somehow. They'd poured over his past. They'd been questioning him quite intensely. I hadn't even thought about that. They didn't believe a word that he said.
"You can go in anytime," Phipps commanded, but Argus didn't want to. It occurred to me this is why they'd used Phipps instead of somebody else, because of his size and his aura of power. People would just naturally do what he said. They didn't know my brother, though. He was struggling, but he was stubborn as ever.
"What if I don't?" he asked and from the way that Phipps sighed I realized it wasn't the first time. Argus had been resisting from the start.
"You going to arrest me?" he asked.
"Of course not," the officer said. "It's entirely your choice. I don't understand it, but there you go."
"It's none of my business," Argus said. "Some random girl pops up out of nowhere and mentions my name, and now this? She probably picked it out of a phone book or something."
"Phone book?" Phipps scoffed. Such things don't exist anymore, as you know. "Look," he went on. "We know as little as you claim to know. Help us out, why don't you? Help us all out."
"No," Argus said. "I don't want to."