The Kiribati Test

by Stacey Cochran

  I let her arm go, and she ran forward ten steps away from me. She swung around and looked at me like she couldn’t believe that I was there, that this was actually happening to her.

  “Tell me this is some sort of joke,” she said. “If this is your idea of being funny, of trying to get attention.”

  But her words fell flat. She stared at me in shock for a moment, and then she seemed to consider our options.

  “What can we do?” she said. “Can we go to the police or ship security?”

  “I don’t know if we can trust them.”

  “This is ridiculous. I’m only thirty-one years old. How can this be happening to me? How could you be so stupid?”

  “I didn’t take their money. Tonight, just a few minutes ago, I knew which slot machine would give me ten thousand Worldmarks. But I got up and left. I didn’t take their money.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “They told me which slot machine to play,” I said. “They gave me this timepiece. I knew what time to play. I only had to agree that I would deliver your research to them.”

  “And how did you expect to do that?” she said. “You know my pocket-held only responds to a DNA scan, my hands typing on the keyboard. How did you expect to get the information?”

  I stared at her, speechless.

  “Can you tell me that?” she said. “How did you expect to get the information?”

  She realized I wasn’t going to answer her.

  “It’s not enough to ruin your own life,” she said. “You’ve got to drag somebody else down with you. Jesus Christ, Roger. Jesus Christ.”

  It was then that I looked up and saw the three gunmen approaching us from the stern end of the jogging track. They wore polished black tuxedos, and all three carried handguns.

  “What?” Paula said, glancing over her shoulder.

  The men drew their guns.

  “Quick,” I said. “Inside!”

  The electronic door opened for us, and Paula and I raced into the cruise ship. I could hear piano music coming from up the hallway.

  “To the right!” I said.

  Behind us the electronic door opened, and the three men stepped inside. They pointed their guns at us, but we rounded a corner and started sprinting up the hallway.

  Paula was one step ahead of me, and she hit a stairwell to our left. We bounded down the steps. I didn’t look back, but the stairwell erupted with machinegun fire. Paula screamed.

  Wood paneling exploded all around us. I tried to keep my body between the gunmen and Paula. We hit an exit door and found ourselves in another hallway. There were cabins on both sides.

  “Which way?”

  “Go!” I shouted.

  We sprinted down the hallway. A man with a room service cart rounded a corner up ahead of us. Paula sprinted around it, but I grabbed the cart and overturned it.

  “Hey!” he said.

  I glanced back and saw the three gunmen. They were twenty-five meters behind us, but the hallway was straight. One aimed his gun at us and fired.

  The room service guy dove up the adjacent hallway. I heard plates clatter and explode. Paula screamed. I just kept shouting, “Run! Run damn it! Run!”

  The gunshots were loud.

  “To the left!” We ran through a doorway to our right and climbed a stairwell.

  “Back inside!” I said.

  We exited through another doorway and found ourselves out on the circuit. We were way up at the other end of the ship.

  “They fired on us,” Paula said.

  “Go!” I said. “That way!”

  We ran and rounded the curve at the back of the ship. The lighting was dark at the end, and I glanced back and did not see the three gunmen.

  “Which way?”

  “Here,” I said.

  We stepped over a chain and opened a door on which there was a sign that read Cruise Ship Employees Only. We bounded down a narrow stairwell and came out on a floor back behind the dining room kitchen. I could see an employee smoke deck through the doorway to our right, and several kitchen staff were back there in the dark, taking a break.

  I pointed towards the kitchen.

  Paula opened a swinging door, and we entered the back of the kitchen.

  “Hey, you’re not supposed to be in here,” a cook said.

  We ran out of the kitchen and found ourselves in the dining room.

  “I think we lost them,” she said.

  I raised my finger to my lips. Paula nodded.

  The dining room was empty. We made our way toward the front. We kept glancing back at the kitchen door, but apparently we had given the gunmen the slip.

  “Come on,” I said. “We may not be safe for long.”

  • •

  From the dining room, we made our way up three floors and toward the front of the ship. We found a deserted lobby area whose centerpiece was two glass-encased elevators; we continued forward and entered a deserted theater. Two darkened balconies lined either side of the auditorium. The stage was empty but lighted, and a sign by the door indicated that the last show for the night had been between nine and ten-thirty.

  It was twenty past eleven, and the lights around the auditorium were turned down low.

  “We can’t go back to our room tonight,” I said.

  “We’ve got to go to ship security.”

  “If we do that, we’ll both be dead within twenty-four hours.”

  We walked up into the balcony area on the left side of the auditorium. The lights were off.

  “You have your pocket-held?” I said.

  Paula removed the credit-card-sized computer for me to see. I removed my tuxedo jacket and draped it over a chair next to me. I untied my black bowtie and unbuttoned the top button at my collar.

  “Maybe we just sell it to them, Paula,” I said.

  “What’s to keep them from killing us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we give them my research, we become expendable.”

  “Or a liability.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “We’d be the only ones who know about this.”

  “What are our options?”

  “Well, we don’t know if we go to ship security that they’ll turn us over. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I don’t like the idea, but it is one option.”

  “We can’t go back to our room,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “And there’s nothing there that we need.”

  “Our clothes, our luggage.”

  “We don’t need it,” I said. “It’s not worth dying over.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “But at some point we’re going to have to get off this ship. At some point, we’ll need IDs. They’re certain to be checking for us at departure, even if we lay low until we get to the shuttle station in the morning.”

  “Even if we stowaway until we get back to the station orbiting Earth,” I said. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to get off this cruise ship without being spotted. They check everyone at security.”

  “We should just go to ship security.”

  “But if we could get off,” I said, “once this cruise ship makes it back to Earth, we could go to Iovon. Security around the facility is tight.”

  “Yes,” Paula said.

  “They would protect us. It’s your company.”

  Paula nodded.

  “The problem is getting off of the ship. That’s what I can’t see us getting around. At least if we go to ship security, they may give us some protection.”

  “And they may turn us over to Agent Banks,” I added.

  Paula looked into my eyes. I grabbed the pen from my shirt pocket and started writing on a cocktail napkin.

  I said, “What happens if we sell it?”

  “They get what they want.”

  “The heat will be off us,” I said. “Right now we’re carrying the pearl. And everybody wants it.”

  She looked at what I’d written: You are really,
really good, baby.

  She grabbed the pen and scrawled: Get rid of bug--How?

  I grabbed a fresh napkin and wrote one word: Umit.

  • •

  Paula and I stayed in the balcony until three o’clock. I held her close and wrapped her in my tuxedo jacket. I’m not sure how much either of us actually slept, but I woke to a familiar voice.

  “Mr. Winston,” the headwaiter said. “Mr. Winston.”

  His hand was on my shoulder. I opened my eyes. It took me a moment to recognize him and where we were.

  “Is everything alright, Mr. Winston?”

  Both Paula and I looked at him. I raised my index finger to my lips, then grabbed the pen and wrote: My neck is bugged.

  He leaned over the table, looked at what I’d written, and nodded. Paula grabbed the pen: We have to get rid of the bug.

  Silently, he waved for us to stand up, to come with him.

  “What time do we reach the shuttle harbor?” I asked.

  “Seven-thirty in the morning,” he said. “The first shuttles begin ferrying passengers down to the Moon at eight.”

  “One shuttle every thirty minutes,” Paula said, “if I read the itinerary correctly.”

  “Correct,” he said.

  I looked into his eyes. “What is your name?” I said.

  He paused a beat, then said, “Umit. My name is Umit.”

  “I’m Roger,” I said. “This is my wife Paula.”

  “What does it mean?” Paula said.

  “My name?” Umit said.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes glanced from hers to mine, to hers again.

  “It means hope.”

  • •

  Umit led us through a secret passageway back behind the stage, where a spiral stairwell wound down deep into the ship.

  When we reached her room, Umit’s friend opened her door only a crack, looked out at us with sleepy eyes, then opened the door wider and said, “What are you doing here at this time of the morning?”

  “We’re in trouble,” he said. “Can we come in?”

  She glanced at Paula and I, then waved us inside.

  “Come inside,” she said. “Hurry.”

  We entered her room, and she eased the door shut behind us.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she said. “What is the matter?”

  “There’s been a murder,” Umit said. He looked at me. “Tell her.”

  “My name is Roger Winston,” I said. “This is my wife. We have reason to believe that people want us dead. We need to get off this ship without being spotted.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Security scans everyone coming on or going off of the ship. You’ll be spotted.”

  Paula thrust an index finger firmly to her lips, but the lady already understood the situation. She grabbed a handheld scanner, turned me around and waved it over my neck, pinpointing the location where Banks had planted the bug.

  I saw surgical tools atop an overbed table across the room. She waved for me to sit down on the edge of the bed.

  Her eyes shot across the room at Umit.

  “My life is in danger, too,” he said.

  • •

  By the time the Galactic Princess docked at Lunar Harbor Terminal 12, I was no longer bugged, and Paula and I looked like two different people. Rita’s facility with disguises was incredible, and the two people known as Paula and Roger Winston left her room forty years older as Pamela and Ralph Wilson. I had literally grayed overnight.

  Equally remarkable were the IDs Rita produced for us. Umit notified a porter to remove and retag our bags in our room. The bags were ferried down to the lunar surface and onward to Ralph and Pamela Wilson’s room at the Disney LunaWorld Resort.

  Paula had a walker.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” the security man said. He glanced at my ID, inserted it into the console, waited for the computer to confirm, then handed the ID back. “Please remove any jewelry or watches and pass them through the scanner.”

  I did so, and then stepped through the metal detector. No alarms sounded. I picked up my personals on the other side; they’d passed through the scanner without incident. Behind me, Paula had to pass her walker through a scanner. She hobbled through the metal detector so well that even I thought she was seventy-one years old.

  She received her walker at the other end, and we both stepped through the tunnel interlocking the cruise ship and the ferry that would carry us down to the Moon’s surface. Paula and I joined the two hundred others who were on the second ferry.

  Paula and I found a quiet seat next to a window, and we said very little to one another as we waited for departure.

  She whispered, “You should win an Academy Award, Mr. Wilson.”

  I smiled and leaned to kiss her on the cheek.

  From our window seat, we could see the Moon. The Lunar Harbor Shuttle Station was in orbit sixty miles above the surface, and a pre-recorded voice played over the ferry’s speakers: “The Disney LunaWorld Resort is the largest glass-enclosed resort ever built. At over three thousand acres, the fully functional theme park includes fourteen hotels, three lakes, eighteen miles of jogging trails, a wave park, a miniature rain forest, twenty-seven restaurants, an eighteen-hole golf course, and hundreds of other amenities, making Disney’s LunaWorld Resort like no other resort on the Moon. It is even visible ten miles from the surface, so keep an eye out. We’ll be arriving shortly.”

  • •

  The shuttle flight took thirty minutes to the Moon’s surface, and everyone filed off of the ferry and walked up an air-sealed tunnel into the shuttle port terminal.

  We weighed one-sixth our normal bodyweight, and people giggled and acted like it was an amusement park ride.

  Agent Banks stood inside the terminal. He was with a large crowd of people waiting for passengers to come up the tunnel from the ferry. Standing closest to him were the three gunmen who had tried to kill Paula and me.

  I glanced at Paula, but she was dutifully using her walker to make her way up the tunnel. We really did look like an old couple. Agent Banks looked right at me and nodded.

  I kept walking, and his gaze moved on to the people behind me. The gunmen searched the crowd with him, and we continued into the concourse. There were shops and cafés, newsstands and restaurants. Paula and I walked without saying a word. I saw a sign marked ground transportation to resort hotels.

  “This way,” I said to Paula.

  “They didn’t recognize us,” she said.

  “No.”

  I glanced back once and saw Banks’ red hat craning to see all the people still coming up the tunnel. Paula and I stepped on a conveyor belt and were transported away, out of sight of Banks and the gunmen.

  • •

  We took the monorail to our hotel. A twenty-fourth floor suite awaited Ralph and Pamela Wilson at the Disney Rainforest Hotel, courtesy of Rita and Umit. Giant trees towered inside the LunaWorld dome. There were lush green plants, waterfalls, tiki torches, and a swinging rope bridge stretched from the entrance pavilion to the hotel lobby.

  Music played from speakers, a medley of jungle sounds, monkey screeches and tribal drums and chants. A man dressed in safari garb carried an orangutan, with which he entertained kids in the hotel lobby. Had I not weighed thirty pounds, it would have been hard to tell that I was on the Moon at all.

  A line of two dozen people waited at check-in. Paula and I joined them.

  A bellman helped us to our room. He opened the door for us, turned on the lights, and crossed the suite. He pulled the shades onto our room’s balcony. Our luggage was on the bed.

  Paula stepped away from her walker.

  “Honey, your walker,” I said.

  “Oh.” She grabbed it and shuffled through the suite. There was a grand piano in one corner of the living room area.

  I stepped out onto the balcony and gazed over the entire three thousand acres inside the LunaWorld Dome. I could see lakes and roller coasters, tram-rides and trees. I c
ould see the monorail in the distance gliding along through the treetops, and high overhead, I could see the dome and the stars beyond. A macaw landed on the balcony railing, cocked its head looking at me, and then swooped down toward the treetops.

  • •

  Umit had given us the address of his associate. The man’s name was Krönard, Ernst Krönard, and his bookshop was at 1225 Whisper Terrace.

  After the bellman left, I placed the do not disturb sign on the door, coded the lock, and began to peel out of my disguise. Paula removed her gray-haired wig and looked at me from the foot of the bed.

  “Well, we have a decision to make,” I said.

  “We do.”

  I unzipped the front of my suitcase and removed the timepiece Agent Banks had given me the night before. The mainline countdown was at 35:12.45. Somewhere within the resort, there was a casino that contained a slot machine that was going to payout twenty-three million Worldmarks in thirty-five hours.

  I had one half of the puzzle; I knew the time.

  “We could scout out this machine.”

  “We need to secure travel back to Earth,” Paula said. “That’s priority. Umit gave us Krönard’s name and address. He’ll help us get a private shuttle back to Earth.”

  I said, “We’re not safe until we’re back on Earth.”

  “So, we see Krönard.”

  “I’ll look up the address,” I said, “1225 Whisper Terrace; see how we get there from here.”

  • •

  Whisper Terrace was on Moon Lake in the northwest section of LunaWorld. By monorail, it was seven miles from the Rainforest Hotel. We passed through the old district, the Galaxy Theme Park, Heinlein Beach, up into the foothills of the Clarke Mountains, and then into the north quadrant along Moon Lake. All the while, we kept looking to see if we were being followed.

  The lake’s surface shined like a mirror, and we saw the small brick buildings of Whisper Terrace come into perspective. Paula and I exited at the monorail terminal and walked down to street level.