Most of the cars looked empty, and there were no lines at the ticket booths. Lucas was about to set foot on the escalator when he realized Megan had frozen in place.
For a few seconds, they just stared at each other. It was a cold, blustery day that threatened fog, and the ocean wind ruffled the flaps of his jacket. Thank God she had worn the baseball cap; otherwise she would be too busy keeping her hair out of her face to stay focused on anything Lucas might tell her.
“The charter flight, Lucas.”
Lucas glanced in both directions and took a few steps away from the escalator.
“I didn’t know anything about it until Holder called me.”
“Zach Holder?”
Lucas nodded, but he was staring at some distant spot over her right shoulder. “After Cameron worked the charter, Holder called me to ask me all sorts of questions about him. What kind of man he was. What his political affiliations were. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I mean … I knew something had happened on the flight but I wasn’t about to ask because I didn’t want to know. But I panicked. I thought Cameron saw something he shouldn’t have. I thought Holder was asking me if he could be trusted to keep silent. So I told Holder the only thing Cameron would need to keep his mouth shut was a good long talk with his cousin. That’s all. I was trying to contain the situation.”
“Did it work?”
“It didn’t matter. I had it backwards.”
“How so?”
“When I started defending Cameron, Holder laughed it off. It turned out he wanted to offer Cameron a job. A new job. One that required discretion. And loyalty. As much loyalty as Holder thought I had to him.”
“Holder wanted Cameron to manage his investments?” Of course she didn’t think that was the case; she was only baiting him.
“Discretion, Megan.”
“What? Like a spy?” She tried to keep her skepticism from poisoning her voice with sarcasm. “He wanted Cameron to spy for him? On who? The Al-Farhans?”
Lucas turned for the escalator without another word. After he purchased their tickets, they passed through some barricades and joined a line of about ten people. The station had no walls, just a flat concrete roof and an endless procession of cable cars passing through it like dangling slabs of meat. When it came time for them to board, Lucas actually extended one arm for her to go first, a subtle display of chivalry. Too bad it was solely for the benefit of the people behind them in line. He had answered some of her more important questions, so she decided not to claw out his eyes.
The interior of the car was frigid thanks to the vents underneath the benches on either side, and some sort of upbeat song was playing at a low volume through speakers she couldn’t see, children’s voices chirping what sounded like the Chinese counterpart to “It’s a Small World.” When the car lurched forward and began a steady, swaying ascent, Megan seized the handle next to her as if they had taken off at seventy miles per hour. Lucas punched another text message into her phone, probably to alert their host that they had left the station.
“Why would Holder need someone to spy on the Al-Farhans?” Megan asked.
“Let me put it to you this way,” Lucas said. “A very powerful prince takes you aside one day and shows you he has the largest gold mine in the world under his backyard. And he doesn’t need all of it for himself so he’ll let you mine it for a reasonable percentage. And on top of that, he’ll give you a bunch of mules to help you haul it all away. But there’s just one condition. Every now and then, when you least expect it, all those mules he provided? They get to fuck you in the ass.”
He seemed intensely proud of this metaphor, until he saw the expression on her face and his grimace wilted. They were ascending over the light blue waters of the lagoon. Behind them the expanse of the airport had come into view; it looked like its own separate island. As they rose into the air, the massive jet taking off far below seemed to be moving at a sluggish speed.
“So the Al-Farhans are the mules, I take it.”
“How would you like doing business with someone who demanded that you take one of your passenger planes out of circulation to fly five—I repeat, five people—halfway across the world on a plane that seats almost three hundred and costs a small fortune to fuel?
“Look, here’s the truth, Megan. I don’t have a fucking clue what happened on that flight. What I know is, Holder asked me a shitload of questions about Cameron afterward. But what I’ve known for years now is that Holder has done almost everything he can to get out from under Yousef Al-Farhan and his family. Holder’s main man in Saudi Arabia is Prince Shatha and for years he’s been begging the prince to set him up with a different family. But the Al-Farhans are Shatha’s favorite royal ass-lickers, so it’s a no go.
“Last year, Holder got so desperate he tried to go even higher up. He went to the Hutton Group, OK? Have you heard of the Hutton Group? They’re one of the largest private equity firms in the entire world. He’s on the board, along with two former presidents. He begged them to petition the House of Saud for a different sponsor and they told him to suck it up. The situation over there is too volatile, and what’s a multimillion-dollar plane ride for a few friends now and then anyway?”
He gave her a moment to process this. The car reached the massive tower perched on the edge of the island’s rocky slope. The perilous drop to the lagoon far below was suddenly replaced by rocky green scrub that was only about fifty feet below the car, instead of several hundred.
“My father said one of the Al-Farhans requested both of the flight attendants who had been in that print ad. Cameron assumed they were interested in the woman, but he was wrong, wasn’t he? One of the men on the flight was interested in him, and Holder found out about it, and that’s why he called you. Maybe he didn’t want a spy. Maybe he just wanted blackmail material on one of the Al-Farhans.”
Lucas didn’t refute this.
“Did he say yes?” Megan asked.
“Who? Cameron?”
“Did he agree to work for Holder?”
“I don’t know, Megan.”
“You honestly expect me to believe that Cameron would do something like this?”
“No, I don’t, Megan. I expect you to believe me when I say I told Holder that there couldn’t be a worse man for the job. I told him Cameron was a hair’s breadth short of being a fire-breathing liberal, that he looked at every issue through the lens of his hysterical identity politics, and that he was morally opposed to everything that ever made Holder any money, except for Peninsula Airlines. That is what I said. I couldn’t have done more to nip this thing in the bud, short of losing one of my biggest clients.”
“But you didn’t lose him as a client, did you?”
Lucas exhaled through clenched teeth and got to his feet. It seemed like he trying to get a better view; the car was almost entirely Plexiglas, except for a single band of metal at bench level.
They had left behind all signs of civilization, save for the monumental concrete towers that supported the cables. They were in the middle of the island, and the low cloud cover obscured any possible view of the ocean. When she looked down, she saw two tiny figures moving along a hiking trail that cut through the rocky, green landscape below as it mirrored the path of the cables high overhead. Aside from the trail, the rest of the island’s undulating surface appeared vast and uninhabited, interrupted by the occasional boulder peeking out of low, dense foliage.
“What are we supposed to do?” she asked. “Just ride this thing till the end?”
Lucas pulled her cell phone from his pocket. He shook his head; there was no response to his last text. The way he gripped the handle above the door made him look like a New York subway rider who was late for a business meeting because he had missed his stop by about ten thousand miles.
Cameron a spy? The notion was absurd. It had taken her less than a day to disprove the “no-man’s-land” tale. If her brother had been spying for the last few months, surely he would have become a bette
r liar than that. Maybe that’s the problem, she thought. Maybe he didn’t lie well enough. Maybe …
“So what was your mistake?” she asked. “‘Tell her everything or I will.’ What were you supposed to tell? What did Cameron know?”
“I told you, as soon as we—”
“It’s not him.” Lucas stared at her as if she had slapped him. “It’s not him, Lucas. Whoever it is, they told me they know where he is. But it’s not Cameron.”
For a few seconds, as his upper lip curled into something close to a snarl and his eyes went so wide she thought they might bulge out of his head, she expected him to strike her. No man had ever become physically violent with her, and while she had always assumed she would be the type to fight back, she wasn’t interested in putting her assumption to the test.
“You fucking cunt,” he whispered. “You lying, conniving little cunt. Tricking me like this—I should just leave you both to the fucking dogs. I should just let them tear you to shreds.” His words would have cut her, if his voice hadn’t sounded so miserable, so pathetic. So terrified. Just over her cousin’s right shoulder she saw a station of some sort, perched atop a sudden, sharp rise in the landscape. The building had no walls, just a giant concrete roof supported by a spiderweb of thick steel beams. At first she thought it might be the end of the line until she saw cars entering and leaving the other side of it, from a different angle than the one they entered from. They were about to change direction.
“What dogs, Lucas?”
“I don’t fucking believe this,” he whispered.
“What did you do, Lucas? What did you do after Cameron threatened you?”
But Lucas was staring at the floor of the car, whispering a stream of curses, trying to get his breath back. Focus, she told herself. Don’t buy into this theatrical bullshit. So he’s scared of who the person might really be. So he knows someone else might be looking for … Just focus!
“Lucas, tell me what you—”
“I called Holder!” Lucas shouted. “I called Holder and I warned him. I told him Cameron had something on him and he had to do something.”
Her own reaction to this terrible revelation shocked her. She stood. She didn’t struggle for breath, or bend forward at the waist. She got to her feet so that she was staring her cousin—who had been reduced in manner and tone of voice to something close to a seventh grader—right in the eye. A clear, beguiling voice in her head told her to keep her mouth shut. Not to ask any questions. Not to prod at the surface of this curt, seemingly simple confession. Could she do it? Could she just let them arrive at their destination without pausing to absorb the implications of what Lucas had just shouted at her?
Her own voice answered on her behalf, in words she neither analyzed or planned. “That whole morning, at my mother’s house, at the FBI, you knew what was happening—”
“No,” he muttered. “I didn’t know what he was doing. I just knew that I had called him and—”
“You knew it was connected. Why did you make me give that interview? Why did you get me to talk to the FBI if you knew the whole—” It wasn’t her cousin’s silence that delivered her answer, it was the pained expression on his face as he stared at the metal floor between them. He was irritated, it seemed. Irritated that it was taking her a few minutes to absorb the full implications of his betrayal. “You were trying to make him look guilty. You made me give that interview so the whole world would know his own family hadn’t heard from him. You used me to make him look guilty.”
Her cousin had no response to this, and it was his silence that drove her back to the bench, that pressed her breath from her chest. Zach Holder. The name was now seared across her mind. Not just a name and not just a man, but a force with a small army at his command, and it was her own cousin who had unleashed this force on her brother, on her, on all of them. And why? Because he didn’t want to risk losing a client. How many hours had she wasted trying to convince herself that her cousin was a better person than this? How many justifications had she come up with for accepting his help, rather than facing the uncertainty of the future?
Tell her everything or I will. She could hear her brother saying these words, but she could feel the emotions beneath them as well. Show her who you really are, and set her free.
“Look at me, Megan.”
She complied, but when her cousin saw the look in her eyes, he winced, cleared his throat and his jaw quivered with the threat of tears.
“You have to find a way to …” He screwed his eyes shut and cleared his throat, again in an effort to get his words back. Was his brain cycling through every rationalization, every excuse, or was he trying to wrap his mind around some deeper truth, some truth that might carry just the faintest hint of self-awareness? “You have to trust that I did this to protect you, and your mother and …”
“No, Lucas. No. I need to accept that you are the man I’ve always been afraid you were.”
“I will fix this. I’m your family.”
“You are not part of any family that I need or want.”
Lucas nodded and turned his attention to the floor; he was going numb and she knew this should frighten her but she had no room for the feeling. The steady hum of the cables overhead and the tinny voices of children singing in Chinese filled the silence between them. Suddenly, there was a sound like a basketball hitting a backboard and when Megan looked up she saw her cousin’s right eye had been replaced by a mess of gore and splintered bone. Then he hit the floor on his knees, revealing the chipped bullet hole in the window behind him. His shoulder hit the side of the car and the bloodied side of his face dragged along the security doors, his right cheek pulling away from his teeth as if it were being pinched by an adoring aunt. Then his forehead slammed to the bench next to her with an empty thud.
She threw herself to the floor for cover and found herself staring up at the roof of the car. The cable continued its slow and steady work, oblivious to the bloodshed below, pulling her closer to the person who had just shot her cousin.
Shadow swallowed the car. They had entered the station. A trembling moan escaped from her. Had she been shot too? Was she in shock? Her hands were shaking. Where were her prayers? Why wasn’t she pleading for her life, with God, with her cousin’s ghost, with anyone?
Let go, she told herself. This is it. Let go.
There was a light scrape against the doors next to her, and suddenly one of them popped open. The car had slowed down but it was still moving through the station, several feet above the concrete floor. Walking confidently beside it was a man in a black ski mask and black sweatshirt and jeans. If he had a face, he might have smiled at her, given how relaxed he appeared to be. Instead, he steadied the open door with one hand, and raised a fat silver-plated gun on her with the other.
Then the angle of the car shifted, but the hooded man didn’t miss a step. There was an explosion of orange light followed by a long, sharp hiss. This is it …
She heard a loud, startled grunt, the kind of sound a comic book artist would have loved to spell out in big, bold letters—OOOF! A ball of brilliant orange light slammed into the shooter’s face and knocked him off his feet. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, saw the guy writhing on the concrete floor as he clawed at his smoking, flaming ski mask, legs kicking. There was a control booth off to the right, but the blinds over its window were closed and no one came running out of its single door. At first she thought the high-pitched keening sounds were some kind of fire alarm. Then she realized they were coming from the man who had almost killed her.
I’m alive, I’m alive. … The words shot through her and suddenly she was crawling out of the car. Her palms hit the concrete but her legs were suddenly entwined in Lucas’s legs. She kicked madly and walked herself forward on her hands. Then her weight shifted and she fell forward, free of the car, free of her dead cousin’s limbs.
She got to her feet, turned her back on her dying would-be killer, and found herself standing face-to-face with another stranger.
This man had a face, but he wore a baseball cap and sunglasses. He had dark olive skin and a strong jaw that seemed vaguely familiar to her. He was just under six feet tall, broad shouldered, and solidly built. His hands were raised in the universal gesture of surrender, but he was clutching something in the right one: a thick swollen-looking gun of some kind.
A flare gun, she realized. The flare gun he had just used to cripple her would-be shooter.
Megan felt herself nod, as if all of this somehow made easy sense, but just this small motion sent her to her knees. The man approached her and laid a hand on her shoulder. Meanwhile, the cable car carrying her cousin’s corpse glided into open air once more, but all she could see of the carnage was the bullet hole in the front window and the matching blood spray across from it.
The stranger’s hand left her shoulder. He trotted over to the spot where the ski-masked figure lay facedown, stone still, his arms frozen at different angles, as if he had died trying to cross-stroke through the concrete. The silver gun was lying on the concrete several feet away. The stranger retrieved it and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans as if it had been stolen from him just moments earlier.
He pulled her to her feet by one shoulder. “My name is Majed,” he shouted over the whine of the cables. “Come with me now if you want to see your brother.”
There was a set of stairs right next to the control booth; he dragged her toward it. Her instinct told her to make a break for the control booth to try to get help. But the door and the blinds had remained closed throughout the burst of violence outside. Either the control booth was empty or whoever was inside had met the same fate as her cousin.
The Moonlit Earth Page 16