The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  15

  Fifteen minutes. That’s how long they had before the man’s corpse reached the end of the line, before someone sounded an alarm. Majed tried not to imagine the horror of the blood-soaked cabin pulling up in front of a crowd of waiting tourists, but his effort at resistance only made the image burn brighter. As he dragged the girl deeper into the brush, he counted the odds that were actually in their favor.

  The southwestern shore of the island was undeveloped, with no access roads large enough for vehicles and only a few trails, trails he had hiked during his free time in Hong Kong, awaiting the arrival of the Swan. If there was going to be a pursuit, it would have to be on foot. The dense brush would provide good cover from airborne eyes, but it wasn’t so thick that they couldn’t use their own hands to claw through it.

  These were good things. They bought them time. (It had taken him almost three hours to get up the side of the mountain from where he’d hidden the Zodiac. But he hadn’t been running for his life, just trying to avoid detection by the occasional hiker.)

  There had been only one shooter. Unless, of course, the second one had fallen back after Majed took his fateful shot. If that had been the case, they would have been fired on by now. But the only sounds around them were the branches snapping under their feet, the gurgling stream that marked their downhill path, and the girl’s pained grunts. If Megan Reynolds was in shock, it did not prevent her feet from moving.

  Just one shooter. He would bet their lives on it. He was betting their lives on it. More important, the shooter had given no indication he suspected someone might be watching him. All morning Majed remained in his surveillance position in the nearby hills, watching through binoculars as the technician made her regular foot patrol every thirty minutes. But then, right after Megan arrived in Tung Chung, the foot patrols stopped, and Majed realized the flare gun he had brought as a precaution—it was the closest thing to a weapon he could find aboard the Zodiac—was about to be of unexpected use to him.

  Someone had fed the shooter information about Megan’s destination. And his gut told him it had something to do with her companion. If the man hadn’t been shot dead, Majed might have been furious with her. He might have fled the minute he saw them together.

  But who was he to claim betrayal? How many times over the past forty-eight hours had he offered the woman behind him a chance to see her brother again? He had made it sound so easy, this reunion she surely craved with all her being. Did she expect he would want something from her in exchange? Lucas, the name Cameron had whispered in those last seconds before the first explosion ripped through the Nordham Hotel, the name Majed had used like a whip to drive himself forward these past few days.

  Lucas was the key to some sort of answer, and some kind of answer was what he needed. Not the entire story, but some small kernel of buried truth he could give to the Al-Farhan family if they ever discovered he was still alive. Majed could live as a fugitive from American intelligence and even the world media, but only if he managed to get back inside the Kingdom. Once home, he wouldn’t be able to avoid his powerful former employers. If they discovered he was alive, he would have to offer up something that would appeal to their egos and demonstrate his loyalty, and he would have to do it in a way that did not condemn Ali for not following through on their orders to kill him.

  “Wait,” Megan called to him.

  He looked back. She was stumbling off to one side, her back to him as she held her hands out on either side of her for balance. She was heading toward a nine-foot-high wall of chipped granite dappled with ferns, but her head was bowed, as if she were looking for a lost earring among the rocks.

  When she hit her knees, he turned his back to her. After what she had just been through, she had the right to vomit in privacy. He waited for the sounds to stop, then he said, “Down here … the stream … There is water. To wash your face …”

  “What’s on my face?” she asked. “Is there—”

  “No. No blood. Just to make you feel better perhaps.”

  There was silence from behind him, so he turned. She was still on her knees. Her hands covered most of her face except for her gasping mouth and her clenched teeth. She was sobbing. It seemed like a violation to touch her, but he approached, slowly. After what felt like an eternity, once her back stopped shaking, he broke the silence between them. “Who was he?”

  “My cousin,” she managed. “His name’s Lucas. Lucas Reynolds.”

  He closed his eyes and bowed his head and took in as deep a breath as he could without making a sound. It was a challenge, given that he wanted to cry out and gnash his teeth and kick the nearest hard surface. He had assumed she was too lost in her own grief to notice this small, soundless reaction from him, but when he opened his eyes, he saw her staring right at him with bloodshot eyes.

  “Why did you bring him?” he asked.

  “I didn’t bring him. He followed me.” He was startled by how penetrating her stare was, given her disheveled condition. Her hair was a loose tangle studded with leaves and her nose was still running as a result of her crying fit. Where was her cap? She had lost it along the way, a tantalizing bread crumb for the people who would follow.

  “He betrayed you,” Majed said. “The shooter was there because of him.”

  “He took my phone. I thought he was texting you the whole time, but he could have told someone else where we were going.” She shook her head as if to rid herself of her next thought. “Who are you?”

  “You have not seen me on the news? Perhaps they are not showing me anymore. Where I have been, there were no televisions.”

  “You’re all over CNN. But even they don’t know who you are. Not yet anyway.”

  “The last thing your brother said before the bomb went off was the name of your cousin—”

  “Lucas?”

  “Yes. Lucas.”

  “That’s why you told me not to trust him?”

  “Yes, but I was hoping we could speak with him. Or perhaps …” Or perhaps? What had he been hoping for? He felt like he had chased a name across the open sea, and now he felt foolish and naked.

  “I spoke with him,” Megan said. There was a hard edge to her voice. It would be difficult for him to accept her anger now that he had been thrown off course. During his time in America, he had become accustomed to the easy sarcasm of Western women. But he was not used to being challenged by them. Not like this.

  “Where is my brother?”

  “I know how to get to him.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Was she trying to draw it out of him, this childish, trembling rage? Could she sense it and was she trying to use it to her advantage in some way?

  “Do you know why your brother said your cousin’s name to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell me. Now.”

  She furrowed her brow and squinted at him. Even amid her own grief, she seemed startled by his directness, and the growing anger behind it. He had to get some kind of control over it.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “My job was to bring your brother to see my employer,” he began.

  He told her of the events leading up to the bombing, if only because the details, though painful, allowed him to slide out from under the weight of his anger toward her. At the level of intellect, he was aware he had been raised with attitudes toward women that most of the world found distasteful. More important, he realized at an early age he loved the world far too much to let his attitudes harden into beliefs.

  But had this realization ever been put to the test? There had been many girls during his time in America. But each one had been submissive to a fault, and utterly enamored with the concept of being dominated by a true Arab. None of them had confronted him the way Megan Reynolds had in the course of just four words. Or perhaps they had and he had dispatched of them quickly, instinctively, without an awareness of his real reason for doing so.

  He described for her the Symphony of Lights
, and how Cameron had emerged from the hotel earlier than planned. He walked her back through the lobby as Cameron was forced to negotiate for a new key after his wallet was stolen. Then he took her into Cameron’s hotel room, to the crooked, recently opened air-conditioning vent, and the packages of drugs stashed inside. He told her how he dropped the package down the laundry chute and dragged Cameron through the lobby as soon as possible.

  By the time he had brought them to the front steps of the Nordham and those final seconds before the explosion, Megan was sitting on a rock, her knees drawn to her chest, her round eyes as wide and sympathetic-looking as they had been during the television interview when she had extolled her brother’s bravery. He stopped his story at the moment he took Cameron in his arms and carried him away from the flames. The details of their escape from Hong Kong would have given away too much information about his employer. And he had given her quite enough.

  But by the time he finished, her expression made her appear mildly puzzled, as if he had just provided her with a strange riddle, and not a tale of his own bravery and self-sacrifice. There was that squint again. He couldn’t decide if it was condescending or the result of genuine confusion.

  “What?” he finally asked her.

  “You said … you’ve been away from TV for a few days.”

  “Not since I saw myself on it. Yes. Why?”

  She lowered her gaze to the wet earth between her sneakers. She chewed her lower lip. Her chest was rising and falling with deep breaths. Perhaps she was having some sort of post-traumatic episode, as they called it in the West. Some sort of struggle was taking place inside her and she was trying to hide it from him.

  “You realize …” she said, but her words left her as soon as she started to speak.

  “What?” he asked.

  There was enough anger in his tone to bring her eyes to his. She stared directly into them for a few seconds, then she managed to recover her voice. “They found traces of a bomb, but the bomb wasn’t very big. It was really the boiler that did the most damage. See … the two explosions you described, the first one was the bomb, and the second one was the boiler for the hotel.”

  “Yes …”

  “The bomb was in the bottom of the laundry chute.”

  He heard the breath go out of him but he couldn’t feel his lungs at all. Suddenly, he was staring at the granite wall behind her, but his vision was blurring. Some instinct told him to turn away from her, to hide from her—from the trees, from the sky, from Allah, if that was possible—all evidence of the wound that had just been torn open inside of him. With no direction in mind, he began to stumble downhill. She called his name, softly, hesitantly, and then again, but all he could do was lift one hand as if he were waving good-bye without a backward glance. Perhaps she thought he was abandoning her; he heard twigs crunch, a sign that she had jumped to her feet.

  He sank down to the earth. To steady himself, he placed his hands on the ground on either side of him. Frigid water spurted through the fingers of his right hand. He was sitting halfway in the stream. But he didn’t get up. He didn’t care about the cold stain creeping down his right leg. He had a vague awareness that his satellite phone was in his front pants pocket. It was safe. It was dry. No need to move. No need to do anything to hasten the flood of feeling inside of him, a blend of horror and defeat for which he did not have a name.

  How much does heroin weigh? How much does cocaine weigh? Why did Allah never call upon me to know such things before that moment? Once again, he felt the strange heft to the laundry bag he had dropped down the chute. But of course, it felt heavier in his memory. The real question was, how much did sixty lives weigh? Was he to weigh them in pounds of flesh or drifts of ash?

  16

  Why had she told him?

  Was it stupid of her? Should she have kept her mouth shut until he had shown her the way to Cameron?

  Had it been her intention to devastate him like this? Was there a small, frightened part of her that wanted to punish him for staying composed as she fell apart? Megan was standing only a few feet from him now, but he was someplace far away. The look on his face was the first true thousand-yard stare she had ever seen.

  She wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault. She wanted to offer up some sort of platitude, but her motives for doing so were entirely selfish. And rash. She didn’t know this man at all. How could she make any kind of statement about his intentions?

  After what felt like an eternity of silence, she realized that what she was seeing before her spoke volumes, and she needed to pay attention to it: his stunned silence, his vacant expression, his unwillingness to scoot just two feet to his left and remove himself from the stream’s smooth flow. That’s why you told him, she said to herself. To see how he would react. If the man before her had found a way to brush off this piece of news, she might have run screaming for the hills. But it was clear that, despite his quick moves in the cable-car station, he did not kill easily. The man before her had a conscience, and it was currently being torn to bits. If she could help him put it back together—or maybe just one sizable piece of it—she could trust him.

  “Thank you for … what you did up there.”

  She had meant to thank him for saving her life, but as she had approached the last three words, a twist in her gut threatened to silence her. At the very least, the ruined man before had provided her with a brief but potent distraction from how close she had been to death.

  Her voice seemed to rouse him from his fugue state, but he didn’t look at her. Like a dog, he got to his feet and shook his right leg, an absurd attempt to dry himself since his jeans were soaked through on the right side. But now that he was standing, he didn’t move. Megan didn’t know if she could handle another silence as long as the one she had just endured.

  The distant rotary chop of a helicopter startled them both. Majed turned and looked past her, through the canopy of thin branches overhead. Was he about to snarl? Was the angry tilt to his thick, black eyebrows a sign that he was about to give up? And what would surrender mean for him? Would he take off into the trees without her, or would he stumble toward the helicopters with his arms raised high over his head?

  “It’s not your fault. …” Saying these words felt like a defeat. But they earned her his attention back.

  “It was a small bomb, correct?” he said, his voice something just above a growl. “Your brother’s room was on the twentieth floor, and the rooms were mostly empty. If it had gone off up there, who knows how few …” His eyes closed and his lower lip quivered, and she had the insane urge to run to him and enfold him in her arms. But she didn’t want to comfort him as much as she wanted to contain him. Or, at the very least, put him back together again.

  The helicopter didn’t sound like it was approaching. It seemed to be hovering at the same distance. She wondered if it was making a sweep of the cables. If that was the case, it was traveling a path perpendicular to the one they had used to escape.

  “I know who planted it.”

  His eyes locked on hers with a sudden intensity that made his thousand-yard stare seem like a distant memory; she rocked back on her heels from the force of it.

  “Your cousin?”

  “Someone else,” she answered. “Take me to my brother and I’ll tell you.”

  “You are asking for a deal?”

  “You used Cameron to get me here. I shouldn’t have to make a deal.”

  “Maybe the deal should be the other way around. Maybe you tell me now and then we go.”

  “What are you going to do once I give you the name?”

  He studied her for several seconds, as if he were gauging whether or not she would be able to handle his response. Despite the fact that he wasn’t bending to her will, he seemed back inside of his skin once again.

  “This person is very powerful,” she said. “And very rich. Cameron has information about him that could be very damaging. My cousin knew this, and my cousin warned this person. That’s why they planted
the bomb. This person either wanted to kill Cameron, or they wanted to make him look like a terrorist to discredit him. Cameron needs to be allowed to release this information. He needs—”

  “I don’t want this person damaged,” Majed hissed.

  There was no need for him to make the threat any more explicit. But was he capable of carrying out this threat? He was, after all, the same man who had literally collapsed upon hearing that he had inadvertently killed sixty people.

  “Fine,” she said. “But if he’s damaged, he might be easier to get to.”

  Without a word of warning, Majed started forward again, as if they had never stopped. His pace was steady, but it wasn’t quick enough to suggest he was trying to get away from her. So she followed him through the brush, alongside the stream that had soaked half of his pants, and farther down the rocky slope.

  Thirty minutes later, they were still making their descent. The silence between them had left her alone with her blaze of thoughts and she didn’t feel like spending any more time there.

  “Your boss,” she said. “Is his last name Al-Farhan?”

  No answer.

  “Is he gay?”

  No answer.

  “OK. Can you tell me why he’s keeping my brother? Is it because of the security camera footage? Or is he trying to keep their relationship a secret?”

  “Your brother is injured,” he finally said. “He was unconscious when I left.”

  Left where, she wanted to ask, but then she realized she had just been given the first concrete piece of information about Cameron’s well-being since the bombing.

  “How badly was he injured?”

  “They have medicine.”

  “How badly was he injured?”

  “Their plan was to keep him medicated until they could get him to a doctor. If he’s lucky, he’s still unconscious.”

  “Lucky?”

  From the sound of her voice, he realized she had stopped following him. He turned and looked up the slope to where she stood, stone still, her hands on her hips, her nostrils flaring. His expression was a fixed mask. In light of the emotions that rocketed through him moments earlier, he appeared positively serene.