The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  If anyone recognized her on the train, she didn’t notice, and if anyone was following her, they were masters at blending in.

  The inside of Central Station was as white and polished-looking as the customs office she had just been questioned in, so white she left her sunglasses on as she rode the escalator up from the train platform.

  Through the press of early evening commuters, she saw Amy standing in the middle of the crowd. She was bouncing on her heels. Her flame-red hair was longer than it had been during Megan’s last L.A. visit, and she was wearing a floor-length woolen overcoat over jeans and a black V-neck sweater. When she spotted Megan, she sank her upper teeth into her lower lip and started shaking her head back and forth as she started forward through the crowd. It was obvious she was trying not to cry, and when Megan fell into her arms, she had to take up the same fight.

  For what felt like a long time, Amy held her in a tight embrace, even as they were bumped and jostled by oblivious passersby. Some primal part of her said that if she was being followed, she should keep them moving. But she needed this human contact. More important, she needed to make Amy flesh and blood again, so that the woman could become something more than Megan’s memory of her frantic screams after witnessing the bombing firsthand.

  “He’s OK, Megan,” Amy finally said, a tremor in her voice. “I know he’s going to be OK.”

  “You’re an angel to take me in like this,” Megan said. She pulled away and saw her vision had blurred. She wiped tears from her face as Amy steered her toward a nearby exit.

  “Are you kidding? I was going to call you myself but I didn’t know if you were planning to come.”

  “They have good trains here. Are we getting on another train?”

  “No. We’re getting a cab.”

  Outside, Amy curved an arm around Megan’s back as they headed for a line of idling red-and-white taxicabs. Megan stopped them just as Amy gestured to a driver who was sitting on the hood of his car.

  “Listen,” she started. “I need to tell you … they stopped me at the airport and questioned me and I told them I was planning on staying with you.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “That’s not what I … They’re probably following me, Amy. I’m not sure of it. But they were real nice … no, they were too nice, and they didn’t have a lot of questions. I didn’t mean to drag you into this.”

  “Drag me into it? I saw it, Megan. I saw it happen.”

  “I know. But I just need you to know that if you get in a car with me …”

  Amy responded to this warning by gesturing to the cab-driver who was still waiting on their approach. But once they were inside the cab, they both fell silent, as if the small bespectacled Chinese man behind the wheel might be an informant of some kind and they both held nuclear secrets in their purses.

  A low cloud cover turned the upper floors of the down-town skyscrapers into ghostly apparitions. In a break between buildings, she glimpsed the massive harbor. Across its steel gray waters was the compact Kowloon waterfront, the sight of which would have been unfamiliar to her just forty-eight hours earlier. She looked away before she could pick out the Nordham Hotel.

  Nightfall came quickly, its darkness hastened by the leaden skies. There was stadium glow up ahead amid the thicket of concrete high-rises, then the cab turned onto a gently sloping hillside street. To their left, evenly spaced apartment high-rises with terraced units commanded jetliner views of the skyscraper thicket at the base of the hill. Most of the buildings in Hong Kong seemed to reach for the heavens with such tenacity she wouldn’t have been surprised to see cracks and stretch marks along their corners.

  Megan was on the verge of asking how much a flight attendant earned these days, when Amy said, “Paul flew to London last night for work but I asked him if you could stay and he said it was fine. You can have whichever bed you want. Both rooms have great views.” There was a brief silence; then, for the second time, Amy appeared to read her mind. “And you can’t see it … you know, the Nordham. We’re too far north.”

  “Good.”

  The cab stopped in front of a twelve-story tower of salmon-colored concrete called the Park Royal. Behind it, the hillside was steep and lush with compact, densely packed trees. Once they were inside, Amy introduced her to the Indonesian housekeeper who was in the midst of preparing them a pungent-smelling meal.

  She dozed off for a few minutes in the shower, her head resting against the tile wall, the hot water washing away fifteen hours’ worth of recycled air. It was the first moment of pure pleasure she had felt in forty-eight hours, and it ended only when the smells from the kitchen made their way into the bathroom.

  The apartment was spacious but plain, with a small dining room where Megan and Amy sat across from each other at a round wooden table. Between the sparkling view of the harbor and Amy’s fast-paced tales of life in Hong Kong—“It’s like the best of Manhattan and San Francisco in one city,” she kept repeating—it was possible to believe, for a little while, that they were just two friends energized by an unexpected reunion in an exotic place far from home. The illusion might have held together if Amy had refrained from stabbing her salad like it was going to get away from her and if she had been able to chew each bite with a little more care.

  She must have sensed Megan studying her, because she was in the middle of a story when she fell silent and met Megan’s stare. Then she smiled sheepishly, set her fork on the edge of the plate, and rubbed her hands together a few times as she searched for her next words.

  “When you came to L.A. last time,” she said, “did I tell you about that hockey player I dated?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s too long a story, but, anyway … he could get kind of aggressive. Not violent, but just … aggressive. And it wasn’t really working but I had the sense he wanted to get serious. Anyway, I mentioned this to Cameron and he told me if I ever decided to break up with the guy he would come over and spend the night on my sofa with a baseball bat. I just laughed it off. Then a few weeks went by and I mentioned to him on a return that I was going to break things off. And I didn’t think much of it, but later that night—”

  “He showed up at your apartment with a baseball bat.”

  “And offered to sleep on my couch!” Amy cried. When she got her laughter under control, she said, “I let him. Is that shitty of me? Maybe I should have let him off the hook, but I showed him to the couch instead. I mean, I wasn’t really afraid the guy was going to come back and do anything but … part of me was, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “That’s a good story.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Tell her, Megan thought. She deserves to know why you’re really here. But Amy might insist on coming along and that would complicate things. Instead, Megan would leave Amy a letter telling her where she had gone. That was the safe thing to do anyway and it might make Amy feel a little less wounded when she realized Megan had left the apartment without telling her.

  “You know how much he worships you, right?” Amy said. “He was telling me just a little while ago about how you were the one that went out into the world, and really made something of yourself.” Megan laughed but Amy was undeterred. “No, seriously. I mean I know he was being too hard on himself but he feels like he got the job at Peninsula because of your cousin and you actually went out into the world and figured out how to help people. How to make a living helping people—those were his words.”

  “Yeah, well, I kind of hit a bump in the road.”

  “We can’t fly all the time. So you’re human. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, Amy.”

  Megan reached across the table and clasped Amy’s right hand. Then she got to her feet and crossed to the window. A black sedan was parked at the curb several yards from the entrance of the building, two shadows in the front seats. So they knew she hadn’t lied about where she was planning to stay. Maybe that would soothe their nerves a little bit. But if the car was still there in
the morning, she would have to become familiar with the hillside behind the building.

  Are you crazy? The voice that spoke to her didn’t sound like her own. You’re going to meet a total stranger who claims to be involved in all of this. You think leaving Amy a letter is going to keep you safe? You better pray that whoever is in that black car follows you the whole damn time.

  After a few minutes, she recognized the voice her thoughts had taken on. It was the voice of her brother.

  13

  She couldn’t sleep, a small wonder considering her body thought it was two in the afternoon. In the kitchen she found a pad and paper, and at the guest bedroom’s tiny desk she began to make a list.

  Lucas

  Charter flight

  Saudis—Al-Farhan family (?)

  Man on security tape (Saudi??)

  For a while, she stared at her own handwriting. Could the man on the security tape be the one who had sent her all of those text messages? That was insane. He was under a greater degree of suspicion than her brother. Showing up for a meeting in Hong Kong, the scene of his alleged atrocity, would have been suicidal. Maybe if the next text message told her to hop a flight to Dubai she would consider him a suspect, but for now, the identity of her host remained a mystery.

  But was it too farfetched to believe the man on the tape might be a member of the Al-Farhan family, someone Cameron might have met working the charter flight? If that was the case, why hadn’t the man been identified by the press? The Al-Farhans were wealthy royals. They lived large. People interested in keeping a low profile didn’t depart LAX in a chartered Boeing 777. Surely they had been pored over by the media, and if one of their own had been captured on a security camera, exiting a hotel just minutes before a bomb blast, CNN would have had a field day with it by now.

  Chewing over the identity of the man on the tape was a tempting idea; she could have done it until the sun came up. But the longer she studied the list, the less she could ignore that she had deliberately left off one name. Not because she didn’t think it belonged there but because the thought of writing the letters filled her hand with the dead weight of fear.

  A deep breath later, she managed to put pen to paper.

  Zach Holder

  They had met once, briefly, over the course of a handshake. He made a surprise appearance at Lucas’s thirty-seventh birthday party, a royal event that took over all three oceanfront terraces of one of the best seafood restaurants in Cathedral Beach. Among the guests were several retired TV stars who’d left L.A. late in life so they could finally come out of the closet as Republicans.

  When word spread that Holder had entered the building, Megan prepared herself for a daffy, eccentric Richard Branson type—who else would be mad enough to start his own airline during a time of war and soaring oil prices?—but Holder was a rigid military clone stuffed into a designer suit, a study in masculine contradictions: close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair offset by a turquoise paisley tie, a deep voice that could order you to do anything if you didn’t get distracted by the diamond stud in his right ear.

  This was the same face that stared out at her from the screen of her laptop after she typed his name into Google. Most of the hits she got were scathing indictments from the left-wing blogosphere. In their eyes, Holder was another fat-cat American millionaire whose massive investments in Saudi Arabia enabled a brutal regime of civil-rights-destroying, terrorist-enabling petro-dictators. And they had the pictures to prove it: Holder had been snapped at various events throughout the world on the arm of Prince Shatha, a wiry, bespectacled Saudi royal. Holder was also on the board of directors for the Hutton Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, and the valve through which most Saudi investments had to pass before reaching American bank accounts.

  An exhaustive and largely critical profile of Holder on Salon.com outlined the man’s relationship with the House of Saud, a relationship that stretched all the way back to the early 1980s, when Holder was a chief officer at a private defense contractor that provided security for the Saudi oil fields. All that came to an end when local sentiment toward American workers turned fatal, but Holder had refused to pull up stakes from the land of black gold. Instead, he just took his dealings partially underground.

  After digging through reams of paperwork, the author of the piece had discovered that Ayuatech, a local construction company responsible for major developments in Saudi Arabia’s newly developed “economic cities” was actually owned by Zach Holder. Never mind that the company insisted on maintaining a local administrative staff of Saudi employees, presided over by a man named Yousef Al-Farhan, who had absolutely zero managerial or construction experience; this was just calculated deception, according to the article’s dogged author. Furthermore, the evidence suggested the House of Saud was fully aware that an American businessman was taking in the multimillion-dollar development contracts they were handing out with fervor during the latest surge in oil prices. Perhaps Holder’s good friend Prince Shatha had even set up the deal.

  Al-Farhan. There was the other name she had been looking for, and she had come across it without first adding the words to her search. She was no journalist, but she knew Lucas certainly hadn’t referred to any member of the Al-Farhan family as being a manager in Holder’s outfit. He had called them partners. He had stressed that Holder had to keep them happy.

  She kept reading. There were also numerous articles and mentions of Holder’s recently formed private-security contractor, which critics claimed was vying to be the next Blackwater. An official statement on the slick, overproduced website for Broman Hyde—there was even theme music, a cross between the National Anthem and something Cameron might have danced the night away to at a West Hollywood nightclub—extolled the company’s efforts to combat the growing threat from Islamofascists along the Thai-Malay border by training local law enforcement in IED detection and disarmament.

  It was the first time Megan had heard of a terrorist threat in Thailand. Had she just missed this story or were the folks at Broman Hyde exaggerating the threat? How far was Thailand from Hong Kong? The first itinerary Cameron had worked with Peninsula had been the Bangkok flight.

  So what? she asked herself. Her head was spinning; she wanted to believe it was the result of exhaustion but she knew that was a load of crap. Maybe she was going too far, but Zach Holder’s name had come up in almost all of her conversations about Cameron since the bombing; she was going to have to face this stuff at some point.

  But was this what facing it entailed? Letting her overtaxed mind spin a conspiracy theory out of every little detail in Holder’s biography? She wasn’t facing anything, she realized. She was trying to arm herself with information before her meeting, and it was a pointless task. All she really knew was that her cousin was lying to her, and beyond that, she had a solid suspicion, but a suspicion nonetheless, that something had happened to Cameron on Zach Holder’s charter flight for the Al-Farhans. Maybe this was enough to bring her to Hong Kong, but it wasn’t enough to give her any kind of advantage over a stranger who claimed to know where her brother was and what her cousin had done to send him there.

  The only thing that would make this meeting safer was a gun. Too bad she had never handled one in her entire life.

  Even though dawn’s first pale light was pressing at the high cloud cover over the harbor, she returned to bed and curled into the fetal position. Her cell phone had been plugged into its charger all night. So far no problems with the transfer of service she had ordered after she got to L.A. To be sure, after dinner she called her cell from the phone in the apartment. No problem.

  One minute she was seeing Cameron, standing in the galley of the plane she had just spent a day inside of, preparing a cup of tea for a passenger. Then she and Cameron were sitting across from each other in two airplane seats that suddenly faced each other. She realized the cup of tea he had been preparing was for her, but when she reached for it, it wasn’t there. The plane no longer had a roof and when
she looked up she saw a canopy of tree branches. They were parked inside some sort of forest where the trees looked like larger versions of the ones that covered the hillside behind the apartment building. Cameron was about to speak, but he was interrupted by a loud crash.

  She sat up in bed. The clock read 7:30 a.m. It was light outside. If she hadn’t heard the sudden sound of footsteps from the next room, followed by a door opening, she would have dismissed the crash as a product of her dream.

  In the hallway, she found Amy standing in the door to her bedroom, one eye still sealed shut by sleep as she pulled her robe around her. For a few electric seconds, they blinked at each other. Waiting. Waiting for … There was another sound, nowhere near as loud. But unmistakable. Someone, or something, was jostling the debris created by the first crash.

  It’s my secret admirer, she thought. And her heart started hammering, and her hand went to the center of her chest before losing its way and ending up pressed to her stomach, as if there were a child there to protect. She raised her hand at Amy. Stay right there. I’ll handle this.

  Amy furrowed her brow but she didn’t move an inch. More jostling. In a fierce whisper, Amy said, “There’s a balcony in back, off the kitchen. There’s flowerpots and stuff … It’s coming from there, I think. It sounds like it’s—”

  “Stay here,” Megan whispered back. “If you don’t hear from me in thirty seconds, call the police.”

  “Megan,” she hissed.

  “I think I know who it is.” It’s a complete and total stranger who might have lured me into some kind of trap. Stay strong, girlfriend. “Thirty seconds. Hell, you can just go out on the front porch and yell. There were two guys on stakeout there last night. They’re probably still there.”

  “You think it’s one of them?”

  “Breaking in? I don’t think so.”

  Megan started down the hallway. At the far end, she could see half of the living room and the front door to the apartment. The plain gray sofa and the framed prints of Hong Kong harbor scenes were washed in the milky, vague light of early morning. The kitchen was the first door on the left, on the side of the apartment shielded from the rising sunlight by the slope of the hill.