The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  If Amy was right, if their intruder was on the balcony, Megan would be a backlit silhouette as soon as she stepped into the kitchen. The intruder would see her through the glass doors before she had a chance to draw a knife from the cutlery set on the counter, or a rolling pin from one of the drawers. She went rigid with terror. Entering the kitchen would be the same as dropping her legs off the side of a boat into dark water after having glimpsed a fin nearby.

  She went still. She told herself she was waiting for another sound, some indication of whether or not she had headed in the right direction. But she knew the truth. She was paralyzed by terror. Down the hall, Amy must have sensed this as well, because she whispered Megan’s name. Megan didn’t respond. More silence. More vain attempts to tell herself she was being a coward. Then, finally, the thing she had pretended to be waiting for. Another sound.

  A knock.

  At first, Megan thought their intruder was using some sort of tool to pry his way inside, a small hammer possibly. But there was no mistaking the polite cadence of it: four raps in a row, a pause, and then another four, slightly louder than the first set.

  “Who is it?” Megan called out.

  Amy’s hands went to her face at this question. Or maybe she dreaded the answer.

  “Megan …”

  The familiarity of the voice drew her into the dark kitchen, where she opened the double doors. The man who had just called out to her lay sprawled across shattered flowerpots and spills of wet soil. They were on the second floor, beneath a canopy of damp tree branches. The first-floor balcony was almost level with the hillside, and the intruder had stood on it to get a leg up. But he had stumbled during his final moves. He wore a baseball cap and a black waffle-print coat. Without a suit and tie, and with a day’s worth of stubble on his jaw, the most familiar thing about her cousin was the smell of scotch.

  “Howdy, cuz,” Lucas said.

  Behind her, Amy’s hands flew to her mouth and she turned and left the kitchen. Did she recognize Lucas? Or did she need a moment to contain herself now that she thought they were out of danger?

  “Get up,” Megan said.

  “Not sure if my ankle’s up to it.”

  “Only way to find out is to try.”

  He grimaced and groaned, as if she were his nagging wife and he a long-suffering, hardworking husband who just couldn’t catch a break. He grasped the edge of the railing with one hand and pulled himself to his feet. Once he was standing, she backed away from the kitchen door, as if he might strike out at her now that he was on his feet. She reached behind her and hit the wall switch, bathing the kitchen in harsh overhead light.

  “You look fine to me,” she said.

  “You’ve got two guys in a black sedan out front. This was the only way to get past them. They’re both Chinese so I think they’re local.”

  “The woman who questioned me at the airport was Chinese and she was FBI. What about you?”

  “I’m American, thank you.”

  “Who questioned you at the airport, Lucas?”

  “No one. Well, actually, today I’m not American, I’m …”

  He handed her a navy blue passport that looked similar to her own, but when she brought it closer to her face, she saw it was Canadian. Inside there was a photo of a man who looked exactly like Lucas, only his name was Frank Gilbert. “When you have a lot of foreign investments, it’s sometimes—”

  He was about to take a step through the double doors, when she lifted one hand and held it in front of his chest. The trick worked. He went stone still, and gave her a silent, pleading look.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “The way I talked to you before you left. I had no right—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  A series of emotions seemed to pass through his eyes, but she tried not to read too much into any one of them. She held her ground and didn’t lower her hand.

  “I can fix this,” he said quietly.

  The directness of his words, and his defeated tone of voice, both startled her. Was this an admission? Once the silence between them became unbearable, Megan broke it.

  “You’ve been trying to fix this since it happened,” she said. “You convinced me to go on TV and do an interview that would be used to incriminate him. You told me it would help if I talked to the FBI without a lawyer. Then you went on TV and made him sound guilty. And the whole time you were trying to fix it, right? Isn’t that what you were doing?”

  “I made a mistake,” he said, his eyes on the floor at her feet. “I’m sorry. Can I just … my ankle …” He grabbed one of the dinette chairs and started bending at the knees before he pulled the chair all the way under himself.

  Her instinct was to assail him with questions, but there was something in his voice that she had never heard there before: defeat. It was so rare and precious an emotion coming from her cousin, she didn’t want to do anything to disrupt it. It was like a fragile butterfly caught under an overturned glass. God forbid she should bump the edge of the table and knock the glass to one side.

  In the silence, there was a short chime from down the hall. Lucas lifted his head at the sound. “That’s him, isn’t it?” he asked. “It’s Cameron, isn’t it? You were texting him before you got on the plane, weren’t you? Why else would you come here?”

  “Have you been … did you tap my phone?” She was too terrified by this prospect to manage any anger. Her voice sounded as fragile and weak as she felt.

  “I was on your flight. All the way in the back.”

  “In economy? That means you bought your ticket before I did. Business class was all that was left by the time I bought mine. Were you trying to beat me here?”

  He fell silent for a few minutes. She let him sit in it. “I was watching your credit cards. You didn’t buy the ticket till this morning but you paid for overseas service on your cell last night. Or whatever night it was … I don’t even know what day it is. Anyway, when the charge showed up, that’s when I realized you were actually … Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? I mean, if the two of you don’t get hauled in by the authorities, then you—” He stopped himself, realizing what a slip he had just made.

  “Who else, Lucas? Who else do we need to be afraid of?”

  “Shouldn’t you answer your phone?”

  She held her ground, and kept her mouth shut. Let him believe it was Cameron. Let her be the one with the upper hand for once. He believed Cameron could still be alive, and if he was as involved in all of this as she thought he was, that information was of value to her.

  “You have to take me with you,” he said.

  She wasn’t prepared for this request, or for the pleading tone in his voice. If this was an act, she had never seen him pull it before.

  “I can fix this, but you have to take me with you.”

  Was he about to cry? Or was it the scotch and the exhaustion of a long flight that frayed the edges of his words and put a lump in his throat? For a brief second, her own heart fluttered with excitement, and she could feel—she couldn’t see it but she could feel it—some kind of resolution to all of this. After a few seconds of silence, she tried to envision the three of them—she, her cousin, and her brother—standing before the news cameras, offering up a clear explanation of this giant misunderstanding, and then returning home to the mild irritant of a few days’ worth of continued media scrutiny.

  “You have to give me more than that, Lucas.”

  “The call was from Cameron,” he said. “The call you asked about, the one I got while I was showing you the office—it was from Cameron.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Tell her everything or I will. I have proof. …’ Then he hung up.”

  She waited for him to continue, to say something that would blot out the sound of her pulse beating in her ears, but he was silent and still, staring into space with his hands clasped on the table in front of him. When the silence became unbearable, she said, “Proof of what?”

 
; “Set up the meeting and I’ll tell you the rest on the way.”

  “Or I’ll go outside and have a talk with our friends in the black sedan.”

  “You do that, and I’ll tell them who you’re here to see and neither one of us will see daylight for a week, at least. Besides, I can get us past them.”

  “I think I can figure out how to jump a fence on my own.”

  “Yeah? Can you figure out the rest on your own?”

  “What do you need to see Cameron for?”

  “He can tell me if I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Look, I told you I made a mistake. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”

  “I’m not arguing with you there, Lucas. I’m starting to feel none of us would be here if you hadn’t made a mistake. The question is, what was your mistake?”

  “And I’m telling you. Only he can answer that.”

  She thought about blowing the meeting altogether, telling him right there that it wasn’t Cameron she was planning to meet. But he had promised to share information on the way, so she would lose her shot at finding out something, anything more than this oblique crap he was using to manipulate her.

  “Get your phone,” he repeated.

  In the guest bedroom, she found Amy sitting on the side of her rumpled bed. Her eyes were wide and her hands were clasped between her knees, but Megan’s cell phone was sitting untouched on the nightstand, still plugged into the charger. Amy got to her feet when Megan entered, and that’s when Megan saw the balled-up tissues in her fists. She had been crying.

  “I’m sorry. …” she whispered. For a second, Megan thought she had heard everything, but then Amy continued, in a trembling voice. “When I heard him say your name, I thought it was him, you know? I thought it was Cameron and when I saw it wasn’t, I just kinda …”

  Megan pulled Amy into a tight embrace and allowed the woman to cry against her shoulder. But comforting Amy wasn’t her priority. She was choosing her next words with as much care as she could muster in under a minute.

  When she had decided on what she was going to say, Megan tightened her grip on Amy’s back to get her attention, then she began to whisper into her ear. “If you don’t hear from me in two hours, go to the men in that car outside and tell them Lucas Reynolds broke into this apartment and made me leave with him. Tell them you overheard Lucas say that Cameron called him on the day of the bombing and threatened to expose a bad business deal he was involved in. Can you do that, Amy?”

  Megan pulled back so she could see Amy’s face. Her watery eyes were saucer-wide and her lips were parting and closing like those of a fish, but no words were coming out.

  “Megan!” It was Lucas.

  “I’m getting dressed!” she shouted back.

  “Is it the truth?” Amy whispered.

  Megan nodded. A bad business deal? She was filling in the blank, but the blank wasn’t very large, and the threat itself spoke volumes on its own.

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes,” Amy whispered, but she pulled out of Megan’s embrace as she answered and crossed to the window. Megan yanked a pair of jeans and a sweater from her carry-on and pulled them on, all without taking a breath. Then she added the baseball cap she had worn on her way in from the airport.

  “Is he?” Amy asked. “Is he making you leave with him?”

  Megan took a deep breath and considered the question. No, he wasn’t holding a knife to her throat, but the best term she could come up with for what he was doing was emotional blackmail. And even that seemed too mild, too touchy-feely to describe the game he was playing with her. “Yes. He is.”

  “OK.” But her voice sounded numb, vacant. And Megan realized she was staring out the windows not just because it allowed her to detach from the situation but because the men in the sedan outside were now her protection against a threat Megan had allowed into the apartment.

  “Two hours from when we leave,” Megan said.

  “Got it, Megan.”

  The hard edge in Amy’s voice froze Megan in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Amy. I knew before I left L.A. that something—”

  “All night,” Amy said to the window. “All night, on my sofa, with a baseball bat, just like he promised. He slept with that thing on his chest like it was a teddy bear.”

  Amy turned away from the window, and Megan was so relieved by the absence of any anger or recrimination in the woman’s expression that her eyes watered. “You do what you need to do, and you get back here safe.”

  Megan considered rushing to the woman and throwing her arms around her. But Amy had returned her attention to the car parked down the street, so Megan unplugged the cell phone and hurried down the hallway to the kitchen, reading the text message as she went.

  Are you there?

  Standing under the kitchen’s harsh overhead light, she typed in a response while Lucas studied her. I’m here. She kept her eyes on the phone’s display as she waited for a response. She was still blinking back tears. When Lucas saw this, he reached for her free hand. The second his fingers grazed her skin, she drew her hand up as if he had bitten it.

  For a few seconds, they just stared at each other. He looked dumbfounded. That was the only word she could think of to describe his expression. Despite what he had admitted to, he seemed astonished that she had rejected his offer of comfort. Or was he just embarrassed? Had his gesture been pure reflex? Would she ever be able to reconcile this wounded little boy before her with the man who had played games with her brother’s life?

  The phone chirped.

  She read the response out loud. “Take the Airport Express train from Central Station to Tung Chung. Once you get off at Tung Chung, send me a message.” She lowered the phone. “That’s near the airport, right?”

  “Yeah, the airport’s out there, but Tung Chung is tiny. There’s a hotel or two, I think, and a shopping mall. The rest of Lantau Island is pretty undeveloped, except for a few small villages. There’s a small harbor so maybe if he’s on a boat … Anyway, just tell him we’re coming and we’ll figure out the rest.”

  She wrote back, On my way.

  Once she lowered the phone, Lucas got to his feet. “It’s the tram,” he said. “I bet that’s what it is. There’s an aerial tram system that takes people from Tung Chung to this tourist village on top of the island called Ngong Ping. There’s a monastery and a giant statue of Buddha up there, but I bet it’s too crowded for him to want to meet us there, even on a weekday. But the tram goes a long way over a whole lot of nothing. It’s the perfect way for him to see if we’re being followed.”

  “And he’s figured this out because he works for the CIA now?”

  Lucas ignored the question and went to move past her. With her free hand, she reached out and grabbed his shoulder. “Before we get to Tung Chung, you’re going to tell me what happened on that charter flight. If you don’t, I’ll call him and tell him to run like hell.”

  Lucas gave her a glassy-eyed stare. Then he nodded slightly and she let go of his shoulder. Before she could take a step, he grabbed her left shoulder with one hand and pinned her against the kitchen counter. With the other he yanked the cell phone from her grip. It wasn’t the force of this move that shocked her but the speed of it. He hadn’t thought twice about violating her physical space. And now, as he pocketed her cell phone, his eyes blazed with anger.

  “Let’s not do that, just to see what happens.”

  She had no idea what expression was on her face. Whatever it was, it didn’t put a dent in her cousin’s cold, controlled fury. Would he have been gentler with her if she had allowed him to hold her hand a few moments ago?

  “You ready?” he asked her.

  She nodded, wondering how it was that her cousin had gone from pleading to be included on this jaunt to organizing it with brute force. Because she had allowed him to, of course. Because it didn’t matter that he had her phone. She didn’t need it to make good on her threat. The truth was, if he didn’t tell her someth
ing good by the time they reached Tung Chung, she wouldn’t bother telling him they were on their way to meet a total stranger. She would leave it out altogether … just to see what happens.

  14

  It would have been safer to take a taxi, but they had been told to take the Airport Express, so that’s what they did. They rode in silence, like an angry married couple. There was only one moment of communication between them, when he pointed to his own cheek, causing her to check her reflection in the window and wipe away some dirt she had missed on her first pass. His escape route had taken them through brush on their stomachs, before depositing them in an alleyway behind an apartment building downhill from the Park Royal, where they had spent five minutes trying to put themselves back together.

  As soon as the train pulled into Tung Chung station, Lucas pulled her cell phone out of his coat pocket and began typing. The other passengers got to their feet, and they followed suit.

  “I was right about the tram,” Lucas said. “He even told us to get a private car.”

  Not us, she thought. Me. He’s not expecting you at all. They entered a large courtyard shadowed by a cluster of bone-white apartment high-rises. Off to their left was the glass-walled entrance to a bustling, three-story shopping mall.

  Something erupted a few feet in front of her; she cried out and jumped back. Lucas grabbed her by the shoulder and drew her close. It was a series of hidden waterspouts, and they had all gone off at the same moment. If she had been less distracted, she would have noticed that the pavement a few feet in front of her was soaked. She would have avoided it, just like the other tourists, who were shooting her funny looks.

  Up ahead was an escalator leading to a platform that contained a row of ticket booths beneath a massive sign that read, NGONG PING 360. The back of the platform was taken up by a base station, and it was devouring and disgorging tiny, dangling cable cars that looked like they could hold only about ten people each. They traveled for a short distance between giant steel towers before entering a small concrete station, where they made a sharp left turn and started ascending over a large coastal lagoon. High above, atop the mountainous slope of Lantau Island, a massive concrete and steel tower supported the cables that allowed the cars to ascend and descend at an almost forty-five-degree angle, hundreds of feet above the water.