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  Chapter Eight

  The call came in at four in the morning. Cindy Sneed was ready to meet with Sapphire, but it had to be now, and it had to be at Seventeen Seventeen Seventeenth Street, which turned out to be an old abandoned warehouse near an old abandoned railroad bridge at the edge of the old abandoned pier. Sapphire had a little trouble finding the place and arrived more than ten minutes past the time Cindy Sneed specified. Sneed was extremely annoyed by this. As a federal agent, she expected to be obeyed to the letter, especially by someone of such lesser significance as a reporter. She was tapping her toes on some cobblestones behind the building when Sapphire finally appeared.

  "You're late." Cindy snapped.

  "No excuses," Sapphire responded quietly, and with that, she had Agent Sneed mollified. Sapphire looked around and couldn't see much. It was still dark, but she'd been able to confirm her sense that this was a place of complete solitude. Agent Sneed must be very afraid.

  "This is all completely off the record," Sneed said. "No recording. No transcribing. No names, dates or places are to be mentioned, not now and not ever."

  "Understood," Sapphire nodded. Even if the Agent were to conduct a thorough inspection, she'd be unlikely to discover the mechanism Sapphire was using to capture the entire encounter. She had her ways, and one of her ways was a particular gadget inventor operating out of San Francisco, who'd come up with devices that law enforcement officers would happily kill to discover.

  "How much do you know?" Sneed asked her.

  Sapphire examined the smallish redheaded agent. She wondered how well Sneed was trained. Talking to reporters was not a good sign. Was she even a competent agent? Could she be trusted. or even believed? Sapphire sized up Sneed as a relatively recent dispatch to the field, an office-worker mainly, paper-pusher most likely, out of her depth on assignment out here. Sneed, for her part, knew all about Sapphire, and thought that therefore she had the advantage.

  "I know about the girl," Sapphire said. "I know that you have her locked up in a room, that you tried to get Argus Kirkham to see her, and that he refused."

  "Oh, he saw her all right," Sneed replied. "He wanted his brother with him, wouldn't go there without him, which didn't make sense to any of us, but whatever. We got him his brother. Everything was kosher by then, till we got to the side room. He looked through the glass. Know what he said?"

  "No, what?"

  "It's Sapphire. That's what he said."

  "What?"

  "He said it was you. That the girl was you."

  "That's not what he said," Sapphire blurted out.

  "I was there," Sneed insisted, "I know what he said."

  Sapphire was confused. This was not at all what Alex had told her. She searched in her mind for his words, something about Argus simply refusing to go in, just because some girl had popped up with his name, or was it? She was certain that Alex had said nothing about the girl being her, whatever that meant.

  "Actually, what he said was, 'it's supposed to be Sapphire," the agent continued. "Those were his exact words. It's supposed to be Sapphire. Do you have any idea what he meant?"

  "You've got me," Sapphire stammered. She wanted to tell Sneed what Alex had told her, but she knew she was bound by her oath. It would get Alex in trouble, even put him in danger. Why hadn't he mentioned this detail? Hadn't he heard it?

  "About the girl," Sapphire managed to say.

  "What about her?" asked Sneed.

  "What else can you tell me? I heard that she was on fire or something like that."

  "I should ask where you got your information," Sneed replied, "but I won't. I can guess, but it's not that important. Maybe you talked to Argus. Maybe you talked to his brother. I don't care. Don't even tell me."

  Sapphire gulped. She had to play stupid for now, let Agent Sneed think what she would.

  "Yes the girl is on fire, in a way," Cindy said. "Put it this way. Nothing and no one can get anywhere near her, really. We've got practically nothing. At first she was cooperative. She let them lead her away from the scene. She got into the ambulance all on her own, got out and went with the guards to her room, even said a few words. She said she didn't have any name. Someone joked that maybe they should call her Nameless and she said, yes, call me that. She repeated that she was a message for Argus Kirkham."

  "Had a message," Sapphire corrected.

  "No," Agent Sneed corrected her back. "She said she IS a message for Argus Kirkham. Exact words? I am a message for Argus Kirkham."

  "What does that even mean?" Sapphire said, thinking out loud.

  "We were hoping that he would tell us," Sneed replied. "Kirkham's idea is that it's a joke. She must have got my name from a phone book, he said."

  "A girl that age would never have seen a phone book, or even heard of one," Sapphire commented.

  "Exactly," said Sneed. "Kirkham is not being helpful."

  "What do the doctors say about her?"

  "I was just getting to that," Sneed snapped. "Like I said, at first she was being cooperative, but then when they told her they wanted to run a few tests, she demanded to see Kirkham, and when they told her that would take some time, she said she was done until then. She sat down on the bed in the hospital room and just sat there, staring out of the window. She's been exactly like that for more than a week now, not moving, not eating, not drinking, not using the bathroom, nothing, not even a word. The doctors who tried to get near her, well, let's say they got burned. More than that. Their instruments melted. Anything mechanical in that room either blew up or burned out. They had to remove every single thing, except the bed and a chair. One doctor who got close lost the use of his hand. It went numb. A nurse who tried to touch her was knocked off her feet as if she'd received an electrical shock. Well, after that, let's just say precautions were taken."

  "So they know nothing about her?"

  "Not a thing," Sneed confirmed. "No medical readings at all. They've got nothing about her heart rate, her blood pressure, her temperature, even her weight is only a guess."

  "And Argus said she's supposed to be me? What do you think it means?"

  "We found some pictures of you at her age, or what we think is her age, around ten. There are some definite similarities, but it's no perfect match. She wears her hair short, like you did, and still do, I see. She is rather tall for that age, four eleven or so, and somewhere around a hundred pounds, they estimate. She's a bit browner than you, and her eyes are also much darker than yours. The nose isn't right either. No, she isn't quite you, but Kirkham never said that she was, only that she was supposed to be you."

  "Didn't you ask what he meant?"

  "Of course. He said it was the best way he could describe it. Oh, and he also said he didn't believe in her, whatever that means. Exact words? I don't believe in her."

  "I don't get it," Sapphire shook her head.

  "Why do you think we're talking to you?"

  "Because you know Meyer?" Sapphire guessed. "And because you think I can get more from Argus than you can?"

  "First one wrong, second one right," Sneed said. "I know you might think I brought you out here at this time and place because I'm sneaking out secrets unofficially. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We're here to avoid the rest of the media, that's all. They're watching us closely. They know we are keeping something from them. Hell, it's obvious! We've got the placed bricked off with the army, for Christ's sake! We've brought you in under the highest authority. We don't know how much time we have got. That thing out there - that hole, that whatever it is - is changing, it's growing, and we cannot know what to expect. Then there's the girl. We think she's the key. You're here because we need you to get through to Kirkham."

  Sapphire nodded thoughtfully and was quiet for several moments. The story was turning and turning around in her mind. She had more questions and was trying to find them.

  "What do you mean that it's changing and growing?"

  "I can tell you this much," Agent Sneed lowered her voice. "The
girl is not the only thing that's come out of the hole, and whenever a thing has come out, something else has gone in. Two days ago a little brown bird came fluttering up from the pit. Within moments, a raven came soaring down from the sky, chasing the bird. That raven, it vanished. Like that, it was gone. I saw it myself. I was there."

  "A raven?"

  "Yes, a raven. Or would you call it a crow? A big black bird."

  "Yes, I know what a raven is, but they're not raptors. It doesn't make sense." Sapphire wearily replied. "Never mind," she added. "I was just thinking out loud."

  "You have a habit of doing that," Sneed informed her. "You might want to watch it. Be careful what you say around here. We're counting on your discretion, and it could go heavily against you. Consider that to be advice as much as warning."

  "Got it," Sapphire said.

  "Now we'll be in touch," Sneed seemed to snicker, and as she turned and stalked off Sapphire realized the agency already knew about her meeting with Alex, and she also decided that they already knew about her friend in San Francisco as well. She would have to assume that her every move was being monitored now. She was beginning to feel like that little brown bird, when she would rather be hunter than hunted.