The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  “It’s from Cameron. He’s in Hong Kong. He’s—”

  Her mother batted the phone away with one hand. Even though there wasn’t much strength in her mother’s swipe, Megan was so shocked by the move itself she almost lost her footing. “No, no, no, no,” her mother groaned. “Your brother’s dead.”

  Her tone was matter-of-fact; there was disappointment in it, but not despair. The woman wasn’t conscious enough to manage despair.

  She isn’t here, Megan said to herself. She’s out of it. You can’t be mad at her. This isn’t her. But her mother’s words still felt like a punch in the gut, and she found herself backing away from the bed as if its inhabitant was a danger to her.

  If it hadn’t been for the glint of the television’s reflection on the face of her cousin’s watch, she might have missed him altogether. He was standing in the half-open bedroom door.

  I tried, she told herself as she stared down at her mother’s body, sprawled in a tangle of silk sheets and sweaty comforter. I tried. But you didn’t. You wrote him off.

  “Is everything all right?” Lucas asked.

  Instead of answering, she brushed past him.

  “Where are you going, Megan?”

  His reticence frightened her. That, combined with the lazy pace at which he followed her, suggested he had heard everything she had said, and that he was sidelined, looking for a foothold, studying her closely to see how he should make his next move.

  She was almost to the front door when he said, “The Mercedes isn’t yours, by the way.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Well, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me wh—”

  “I think I can handle this on my own, Lucas.”

  “Really?” he asked. “That’s quite a breakthrough for you, isn’t it?”

  “I did just fine without you for a long time.”

  “Is that so? It looked like you were doing whatever the hell you wanted because you knew I would be here the minute you screwed up.”

  “Well, I’m done with your help now.”

  “Good,” he said with a smile, then he glanced back in the direction of the master suite. “Is she done too?”

  “Are you actually threatening me? Is that actually what you’re doing? You’re threatening me?” The level of incredulity in her tone shocked both of them silent.

  “I’m just trying to help you think clearly.”

  “There’s only one thing you can do to help me, Lucas. Tell me who called you yesterday after lunch. Tell me who said something to you that scared the living shit out of you.”

  “Just slow down, Megan,” he said, one hand raised as if he could stop her from advancing on him.

  “Tell me whose number you erased from your phone. And don’t tell me I’m mistaken, or I’m not seeing things clearly. Hannah saw you on the phone. The phone was in your hand when I met you on the sidewalk. And then you hightailed it out of there like your house was on fire.”

  “You’re coming after me because I’m the only one here. This is Psych 101, Megan. Of course I’m doing it all wrong because as usual I’m the only one who’s doing anything.”

  “Then stop, Lucas. Stop paying for my mother to pump herself full of whatever drug she wants. Stop lying every time I ask you a question. Stop implying Cameron is a terrorist on national television. And then, once you do that, we’ll see how things look. And if all the buildings around us don’t fall down, and if there’s still food on the table for us to eat, well, then maybe, just maybe, your sorry ass can retire.”

  She slammed the door behind her. As she passed the Mercedes she tugged the keys for it from her pocket and hurled them at the rear windshield. Once she hit the darkness of the winding street that lead to the gatehouse, she dialed Hannah’s number on her phone, hoping the sound of her voice wouldn’t betray that she had never been more frightened in her entire life.

  There were no reporters waiting for her outside the Tom Bradley Terminal at LAX, just a multicultural crush of travelers spilling in and out of the sliding glass doors.

  Inside, the ticket counters traveled the length of the terminal, perpendicular to the entrance. Indian families trailed luggage carts piled high with tattered suitcases. Long lines of Asian travelers snaked out across the bruised linoleum floors. And at the El Al ticket counter, blazer-clad security personnel had just informed everyone to back away from the counter, but the bored looks on the faces of the delayed travelers suggested this was a routine part of the airline’s notoriously strict security procedures.

  How many times had she heard Cameron extol the excitement, the energy, of the scene before her? What a sparkle he would get in his eyes as he described the “transpacific push,” those dizzying hours between nine and midnight when multiple Asian-bound wide-body jets took to the air within minutes of one another. Whereas so many other people, including herself, looked at the scene before her as menacing, her brother drew a strange kind of strength from it. It was magic to him. The mere suggestion that he would have done anything to introduce danger here, or anyplace like it, was an outrage.

  Her initial plan had been to get a good night’s sleep, then hop a commuter flight to LAX in the morning. But she knew that was too risky. Even if the lawyer was right and the FBI wasn’t tailing her, she didn’t want her name showing up in any airline’s computer system until the last possible second. Who knew what would be waiting for her on the other side? But if she could just get there …

  After driving to L.A., armed with her passport, laptop, and a few changes of clothes, she’d managed three hours of sleep at a Holiday Inn Express before the alarm on her cell phone woke her. Before the sun came up she went online and purchased the last available ticket on a 9 a.m. departure. Business class, nonrefundable—it was the only thing left on the flight. She now had sixty bucks to her name.

  When Megan said she had no bags to check, the ticket agent gave her a strange look. It didn’t matter. Megan knew the real hurdle would be security, and she had to exert effort to maintain steady, deep breaths as she waited in line. Never in a million years did she believe she would ever feel this kind of anxiety passing through an airport. Unlike so many of her Berkeley friends, she had never traveled with drugs, had barely even used them—pot made her paranoid and a girl in her freshman class had jumped out of a window on acid and broken both her arms. But as she shuffled forward in line, the injustice of her situation filled her with fortifying anger, an anger that gave her the strength to still her hand as she handed her passport to the first TSA agent.

  She was waved through. Then, in a daze, her pulse racing, she was placing her bags on the conveyor belt. Or someone who looked like her was doing it, and she was watching it happen from several feet above her own body.

  Then, to the disbelief of her very bones, she was walking away from the checkpoint and into the narrow, crowded terminal. Only now that she was through security could she admit to herself that she never thought she would get this far.

  At her gate, the door to the Jetway wasn’t open yet, but the other passengers had already started to line up. She couldn’t remember the last time she had flown on a 747. The sheer number of people waiting to board astonished her. There were two separate lines: one for economy and one for first class and business class. She had to remind herself she belonged in the latter.

  Keeping her distance from the crowd, she pulled out her cell phone.

  I am about to board. My flight lands at 3 pm but I might be stopped at the airport. Please tell me where I should meet you when I get there.

  She didn’t expect a response and went to pocket the phone when it buzzed in her hand.

  I love you, Megan.

  Just let yourself believe it’s him, she told herself. Just buy into it. Maybe it’s what you need to get to the other side of the world. But her fingers had started to work before she could stop them.

  What was the name of our cat when we were kids?

  After fifteen seconds, she was ready to pocket her phon
e and give up the fantasy. No response was a response. And they had just made the first boarding call for first- and business-class passengers.

  Please help me Megan.

  Was the person on the other end confirming that they weren’t Cameron? Was this plea their way of saying they couldn’t answer this question?

  Who are you?

  Less than fifteen seconds this time.

  Your brother is alive. I know where he is.

  She wanted to sink down into one of the chairs in the gate area and hold her head in her hands. But the chairs were mostly full, and the door to the Jetway was open and passengers were filing through it. After all of her anxiety about not being allowed through security, her instinct now was to bolt, to get the hell out of there, and find a real bed to collapse into. But she did none of those things.

  Instead, she wrote back. If you talk to him, tell him I love him. Tell him I’m coming.

  Thirty minutes later, when the flight attendants asked the passengers to turn off all electronic devices and prepare for departure, there was still no response from the stranger who had just convinced her to travel to the other side of the world.

  12

  Hong Kong

  This time the room was white, so white she felt like squinting. The agent sitting across from her was Asian but her English was perfect. Her name was Anna Hu. Maybe her Chinese ancestry had made her a prime candidate for the team of agents the FBI had sent to help the locals, but Megan wasn’t in the mood to inquire.

  Two customs officials had pulled her out of line before she got anywhere close to the front, and the FBI had been waiting for her halfway down a long, white-walled corridor that snaked through the warren of customs offices buried deep in Chek Lap Kok International Airport.

  Only one agent went in the room with her. Was this a good thing?

  To her own surprise, she had managed to sleep for most of the flight. Her seat had reclined almost 180 degrees, and she had allowed herself a few glasses of Merlot with the in-flight meal. But the long rest had washed the adrenaline from her system. Gone was the manic edge that gave her the confidence to flee the country in the first place.

  But something was different about this interrogation, about the woman across from her and the feel of the air between them. It wasn’t that the agent’s approach to her was any more aggressive or amicable than that of Fredericks or Loehmann back in sunny San Diego. (Hong Kong, from what she had been able to see of it so far, was certainly not sunny. The fog had been so thick when they landed, she could barely see the airport terminals.) Megan realized it was her attitude that had changed, not theirs. Because while she felt drowsy and disoriented and pretty much like a teenager who had been busted taking the family car without a license, a busted teenager was all she felt like—not a criminal or a terrorist sympathizer.

  It hadn’t been very long since her last encounter with the FBI, but her fearful respect for its trappings and authority had already started to erode. She knew this had been brought on by something more specific than the overall span of the last forty-eight hours.

  Lucas was lying to her, and the shock of that fact had needed a good few hours of sleep to really sink into her bones. As cutting as his last words had been, as much as she would have disputed them in the moment, she had relied on him for most of her life, in spirit, if not always in practice. But now that had been taken away, and to her surprise, she didn’t feel anxiety. She felt free, free to lie, if that’s what it took to get into the country.

  A few hours after takeoff, she erased the text messages from her strange host. It wasn’t the most covert move in the book, but it was more deceptive than anything else she had done over the last forty-eight hours. And it felt like a beginning.

  “You do understand,” the agent said, “that at this point, the chances of any more bodies being discovered in the hotel are slim to none.”

  “The chance of this happening at all was slim to none, right? I mean, when was the last time there was a terrorist attack in Hong Kong?” Anna Hu glared at her. “I’m just saying, it wasn’t exactly like my brother was working in Iraq and here we are …”

  “You seem very tired.”

  “I am. I’ve been on a plane for fourteen hours.”

  “But you flew business class.”

  “It’s all that was left. And before that, I was pretty much having one of the worst days of my life. So it kind of adds up, you know?”

  “So I’m to understand that you have not been contacted by your brother?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Have you been contacted by anyone associated with him?”

  “Associated with him? You mean his friends?”

  “Yes, Miss Reynolds. I mean his friends, specifically friends of his in this part of the world.”

  “No. I have not.” The first lie. Actually, the second lie if you considered her assertion that she had never feared for her brother’s life when he was working. “Well, wait, a flight attendant he works with—Amy Smetherman. I spoke with her right after the bombing.”

  “Where were you planning to stay while you’re here?”

  “With her.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “I tried calling, but I couldn’t get through.” Lie number three. On the off chance that she would have been able to get through customs unscathed, she hadn’t wanted to involve anyone else in her clandestine meeting with her anonymous host: so much for that now. She would have to find some way to make it up to Amy—like finding Cameron alive.

  “So you just hopped on a plane?”

  “I spent the last cash I have on the first ticket I could get because this was the last place my brother was seen alive. Hopped on a plane isn’t exactly the term I would use for it. But maybe you have a different concept of leisure travel than I do.”

  A small line appeared at the right corner of the agent’s pert mouth, and she folded her hands on the table in front of her. “I apologize if my choice of words seemed insensitive, Miss Reynolds.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.” But there was nothing in her tone to indicate gratitude.

  “Well,” Anna Hu finally said, her eyes on the table between them as if she expected to find file folders she could sift through. “The most I can ask of you is that you stay in touch while you’re here. Agent Bittman and I will give you our cards before you leave, and if you wouldn’t mind checking in by phone at least twice a day, we would appreciate it.”

  “OK.”

  The most she could ask of her? That was rich. They were the FBI, for Christ’s sake, and they were working in cooperation with the local authorities. They could probably hold her in this room for another twenty-four hours if they so chose, but they were letting her go with a wink and a smile and a business card. And a round of questions so brief and cursory it made her time in the San Diego field office seem like an inquisition.

  “And I should probably mention,” Hu said, “apparently there are a lot of other family members in town. I believe a group of them is going to meet this evening at the Novotel Citygate. It’s right here by the airport.”

  “Like a support group?”

  “I believe so. Yes.”

  “Well, thank you, but considering most of them have been led to believe my brother killed their family members, I don’t think I’d be very welcome.”

  Anna Hu just stared at her. For a few seconds, it seemed as if she would ignore the jab, but then she cocked her head to one side and furrowed her brow. “What do you believe, Miss Reynolds?”

  It was an opportunity she wasn’t ready to take, the opportunity to cast suspicion on Lucas. But it was too soon. The person who had pretended to be her brother—she was tempted to call him her secret admirer but these words sent a chill through her—had claimed to have damning information about Lucas’s role in all of this, and she wanted to hear it before she mentioned her cousin’s name to the FBI. But there was something she could say, some words with just enough truth to them that she could
deliver them with conviction.

  “I believe that I’m the only member of my family who has the courage to come to Hong Kong right now. And I wish that wasn’t the case.”

  Anna Hu nodded and managed a sympathetic frown. At first, Megan thought the woman was reaching for her hand. But then she saw the business card stuck under her middle three fingers. She was sliding it across the table toward Megan as if they had just concluded a discussion of Megan’s real estate needs.

  In another fifteen minutes, she had been expedited through customs and released into the anonymity of baggage claim.

  Were they this polite to everyone they had just placed under surveillance?

  Amy Smetherman didn’t ask Megan why she hadn’t called sooner. She didn’t even ask her why she had come at all. Instead, she reacted to Megan’s arrival in Hong Kong as if it had been inevitable and heartwarming at the same time. She even offered to come all the way out to the airport to get her, an offer that Megan declined. She was still too rattled by the text message that had been waiting for her once the FBI released her—Be ready to meet tomorrow morning—and she wanted some time to compose herself before Amy laid eyes on her.

  Despite the fact that just the idea of waiting another fourteen hours for some kind of answer from this stranger seemed like torture, she had responded in the affirmative. Fine. Whatever you say. Now that her anonymous host had stopped pretending to be Cameron, he was giving her orders, and she didn’t like it.

  Maybe tomorrow, if her strange new friend wasn’t more forthcoming, she would leave out the fact that she was probably being tailed by agents from the FBI or the Hong Kong Security Bureau or the CIA for all she knew.

  Amy gave her directions to the Airport Express train and promised to meet her at Central Station. How many people in Hong Kong watched CNN? Had her interview been given a lot of play here? Just in case it had, she stopped at a gift shop before she left the airport and picked up a hunter green baseball cap and a cheap pair of sunglasses. In one of the women’s rooms near baggage claim, she added her new accessories, taking care to thread her ponytail through the back of the baseball cap.