The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  “I didn’t realize how badly he was injured until we were on the boat—” He stopped himself, realizing he had divulged a detail of their escape from Hong Kong he had managed to keep to himself when he first told her the story. “If I had known, I might not have …”

  “Was he burned?”

  “I am confident that he will—”

  “Was he burned?”

  “No,” he responded. “He was cut and he hit his head. I threw myself on top of him so I was burned. But there was so much glass …”

  A helicopter roared by. The sound seemed to come on them without warning. Overhead the canopy of branches shifted in the back draft, but they were well concealed. For a few moments, neither one of them moved, and after a while, she realized she had bent at the knees and put her hands out as if she thought she were about to be crushed.

  Not burned, cut. As if the latter were the better option. Were these the only kinds of choices that were now available to members of her family? Would the day come when she could go back to worrying about what kind of dressing to put on her salad?

  “There is no chance of what you’re thinking,” Majed said. “What am I thinking, Majed?”

  “He will be alive. But I cannot promise he will be awake.”

  It sounded as if the helicopter had gone straight out to sea. Was it searching the coast for them? Wasn’t that where they were headed?

  “Every day your boss keeps my brother … wherever he is, wherever they are … he makes Cameron look more and more like a terrorist. Does your boss understand this?”

  “My boss does not understand very much that does not have to do with his liquor and his things. Then your brother came and things were different for him. Now he is back to the way he was before. He is afraid of shadows and thoughts. But you are the Swan’s sister and you have his way with words. Maybe you will make him understand, yes? Isn’t that what you have asked for?”

  “The Swan?”

  “This is what I call your brother,” Majed answered. But he had averted his eyes, as if he were ashamed of this admission. “It is not meant to be disrespectful.”

  “Are they in love?”

  “I do not know this,” he said quickly, betraying his aversion to the idea. “What I know is that when your brother was there the Prince was … at peace. I pray you will have the same effect.”

  The Prince. Was that a nickname as well? If not, Majed was unaware of his slip. He moved off into the foliage with new-found determination, while she tried to swallow the idea that she was on her way to visit someone’s idea of royalty.

  After a while, she lost track of time, but she didn’t mind. The helicopters made a few more passes, but the brush got thicker the further downhill they went. They took a few breaks, the two of them sitting on adjacent rocks, avoiding eye contact as they panted like dogs.

  She needed the silence and she needed the exertion. A denial mechanism she didn’t know she possessed was kicking in, and it was being fortified by the strenuous hike. It transformed the adrenaline of terror into a sustaining tonic she could take in small doses.

  That’s all I need. A little cardio. This thought reduced her to seizing laughter. But it sounded like a mad cackle, even as she clamped one hand over her mouth, and Majed shot her a blank look before continuing on through the brush.

  After four hours, the slope flattened out. They passed a broken chain-link fence surrounding a long-abandoned utility building that had been left to the elements. Up ahead, gray water appeared through the tree trunks. This part of the shore had no beach, just a frayed fingernail of rocks and mud. A light-gray Zodiac was tied to one of the trees along the shore. The inflatable boat had two outboard motors and a tall captain’s chair, and it drifted lazily in the calm water.

  She felt like jumping up and down for joy when she saw it. Not only did it mark the end of their journey, but it was small; Majed could have come only so far in it, and that meant her brother was being kept somewhere close by.

  From his front pocket he removed a satellite phone. It looked like a chunky, outdated cell phone, save for the thick, three-inch antennae. When he turned his back on her, she figured someone had answered. Majed spoke in rapid Arabic. The conversation sounded terse. At one point, Majed raised his voice at the same time that he slowed his flow of words. The language was foreign to her but the tone was universal: a parent trying to calm a child. A few more quick responses, and then Majed hung up.

  “The Prince will see you,” he finally said.

  How kind of him, she wanted to say. But instead, she nodded, waiting for him to elaborate. “You talk to him first and then …”

  “I get to see Cameron?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he wouldn’t look her in the eye. He stepped inside the Zodiac and popped open the lid to a utility cabinet behind the captain’s chair. As he pulled out a life vest and several dark blankets, she made no move to follow him into the boat. Carefully he laid these provisions for her on one of the benches in front of the captain’s chair. She still didn’t get in.

  “We can wait until dark if you want, but I cannot see in the dark and we have a long way to go. If we go now and we get caught, I will jump overboard and you can tell them the Arab terrorist kidnapped you at gunpoint.”

  “And Cameron?”

  “That is why I say we go now.”

  “Whoever that was, they didn’t sound very happy to hear from you.”

  “May we please go?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I would love to, Majed. I would really love to just get in your boat without the slightest idea of where we’re going, or where my brother is, or what condition he is in. But I can’t, OK? I just can’t. Maybe I’m just tired, or maybe I’m half out of my mind, but you have to give me more than this.”

  “The last name of my boss … yes. It is Al-Farhan.”

  “And he just let you leave? To come find me?”

  “No, he didn’t. He believes I left him to spare him any association with what happened in that hotel.”

  “But that’s not why you left?”

  “I left because the minute the footage from the security camera showed up on the news his family ordered my death. But my supervisor couldn’t do it. He let me go, he gave me this boat, and he lied to the Prince about why I left.”

  “Why did your supervisor lie to the Prince?” Megan asked. “Because he wanted to save your reputation, or because he didn’t want the Prince to know his parents are murderers?”

  “Perhaps you will be able to ask him when you see him.”

  “Did you ask him? Just now?”

  “That was not him,” Majed said. “That was the Prince.”

  He had told her more, and then some, so she started for the boat. As she fitted the life vest onto herself, she was still trying to process what he had just shared with her. He ducked into the shrubs, where he pulled back a tarp and uncovered two fuel canisters. She sank down into the nose of the boat with the blankets. He filled the fuel tank, then he set the other canister behind the captain’s chair. Before the idea of taking to the open ocean in such a small vessel could fill her with fear, she drew the blankets around herself. They weren’t just for warmth, they were for camouflage, but she didn’t mind the cocooning effect in the slightest.

  He untied the boat, waded into the water, and gave them a push away from shore. By the time she had gone to help him, he had already climbed inside. Perhaps she looked at him too long before she returned to her cocoon of blankets, because he said, “You have more questions?”

  Why are you risking your life for me? But the answer came to her with such speed and clarity, she was relieved she hadn’t found words in time.

  Of course he wasn’t risking his life for her. He was risking his life for a chance to kill the man who had turned him into a terrorist.

  17

  As long as she kept the blankets pulled over her head, she could convince herself she was on the floor of a van moving over pot-holed streets. Potholed but sol
id, and no home for sharks. This image held up for a few hours. Then the hard bumps turned into bone-shuddering impacts and the fantasy was lost. Either they were crossing the interminable wake of a great vessel, or they had moved into the open ocean.

  At one point, she found a strand of rope on the floor beneath her back. A firm tug proved it was attached to the nose. Should she tie it to her life vest? A makeshift seat belt? Then she saw the boat capsizing, saw herself trying to claw her way out from under it. … She let go of the rope.

  As their journey wore on, a strange kind of drowsiness threatened to overtake her. It didn’t feel like the result of exhaustion. It was like a prolonged invitation to faint, and she couldn’t decide whether or not to accept. Was she literally shutting down? Was this the next logical step after the denial that had kicked in during their hike?

  When the motor finally died, she threw back the blankets, expecting to find the Zodiac adrift in open ocean, Majed kicking the outboard motors in a vain attempt to bring them back to life. Instead, Majed was sitting calmly behind the wheel, consulting a portable GPS device as they approached a small, desolate island. It was really just a pile of massive rocks crowned with low green shrubs. As they moved in closer, she could see it was actually two small islands, separated by a narrow band of rough sea. Both looked to be uninhabited and lacking in any kind of man-made shelter. The sparse greenery was too low to provide cover from helicopters or airplanes. But if time was any indicator, they had traveled a long way from Hong Kong, a long way from anything she would be comfortable calling dry land.

  It seemed like they were drifting, but Megan realized her captain was looking for a place to land the boat. There were no sandy beaches; the shorelines were composed entirely of massive rocks, some of them jagged, some of them rounded smooth by the lapping ocean waves. But the Zodiac was small enough to get right up to the edge of them.

  When he ordered her to jump out, she didn’t waste a second. He didn’t either. He skittered to the rock beside her, grabbed the nose of the raft, and started to pull. Once she realized what he was doing, she reached inside and grabbed the rope she had felt earlier and together they dragged the entire Zodiac up onto the rocks.

  As soon as the outboard motor came up out of the water, she fell to her butt on the rock and took her first deep breath in several hours. Majed pulled his satellite phone from his pocket and walked away from her; this call he didn’t want her to overhear.

  Fine by me. A little way up the gentle slope she sank down into a carpet of wind-whipped shrubs. Two of the blankets were still wrapped around her and she pulled them close, fully intending to rest for only a few minutes.

  When she awoke, it was dark. Her sleep had been deep and dreamless, save for the brief image of her cousin’s shattered face that assaulted her in the seconds before waking. Several yards away, Majed was a dark shadow sitting in the pale light of an electric lantern. He had made a circle around himself out of the supplies from the Zodiac: various snack foods, a few bottles of water, the extra fuel canister, the two blankets she had left behind when she hopped out of the raft, and the silver pistol that had killed Lucas. She froze when she saw it.

  Despite the darkness, Majed must have sensed her reaction. He picked up the gun and placed it under one corner of the blanket. She took a seat close to him and he passed her some kind of snack-food bar. In the pale light, she tried to read the label. At first she thought the writing on it was Arabic, then she realized it was Thai. The lantern had two settings, and Majed had chosen the dimmest one. Maybe they weren’t as far away from Hong Kong as she thought.

  “Why drugs?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The bomb was disguised as drugs. Why? To fool you?”

  “To fool whoever put it there. But I do not know who they are so I cannot say with certainty.”

  She ignored the dig. “But that person would realize what they had done the minute the bomb went off.”

  “Perhaps that person would be dead by then.”

  “I’m no bomb expert but there are timers and there are remotes, right? If it was a timer, there was no stopping it, but if it was a remote, and they knew you had moved it, then—”

  “Enough. Please.”

  “I’m just trying to, like, let you off the hook here.”

  “You do not have that power.”

  “I guess not. But you apparently have the power to kill sixty people without intending to.”

  “I would know nothing of what they found in the laundry chute if it was not for you. Did you expect me to have no reaction? To laugh it off as if it were nothing?”

  The same question had slugged her in the chest the minute the words had left her mouth. Now, she bowed her head and was surprised to find herself picking at a thumbnail. Could she tell him the truth? I wanted to see how you really felt about killing. I wanted to see how afraid of you I should be.

  The lie came out of her effortlessly. “I thought you were going to find out eventually and I wanted to prepare you so you wouldn’t flip out the minute we were in front of a television. Not like there’s much risk of that now. … That was a joke, Majed. I’m sorry.”

  “You are the same as your brother. You both make too many jokes.”

  “Is that what he’s doing right now? Making jokes?”

  Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. The look he gave her seemed more pensive than angry.

  “How did your cousin know about the information your brother had on this terrible individual you will not name? How did your cousin know to call and warn this individual?” She could see where he was headed with this, and her temptation was to tell another lie. But she resisted it. Unfortunately, that left her scrambling for words. He filled the silence with ease. “Perhaps your brother said too much to the wrong person. Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut. Can you take a lesson from him?”

  “That’s right. I forgot women aren’t allowed to speak in your part of the world.”

  “My part of the world? You exonerate me for murder but give me ownership of Saudi Arabia? You are full of contradictions, Megan Reynolds.”

  “Fine. So it’s not cultural. You’re just an asshole.”

  Majed barked with laughter. She got to her feet and turned her back on him. Patches of stars were visible through the cloud cover, but there was a fine mist hanging over the entire island that had seeped into her clothes.

  “I’m sorry this upsets you,” he said.

  “You’re sorry what upsets me?”

  “The real reason we are here.”

  “The real reason? Is that what we’re doing now?” She advanced on him. He craned his neck slightly but felt no need to match her height, even though her building anger was undeniable. “If you’re so eager to take responsibility for something, why don’t you tell me why you really threw those drugs down that laundry chute? Is it the same reason your boss sent an armed guard to meet his friend? Is it the same reason you thought it would be a better idea to take my brother to some boat instead of the hospital? We are here, Majed, because your boss has a very big secret and you have done absolutely everything in your power to protect it.”

  He closed his eyes and bowed his head. Maybe the lantern was playing tricks on her eyes, but it looked like he was praying. The elation of catharsis lasted for only a few minutes, then it seemed to ride the waves back toward Hong Kong.

  After a while, she was alone on a barren rock with a man she had just cut to the bone. In another context, perhaps she would have interpreted his stony silence as a kind of victory. But not here, not with this chill wind ripping across her, not with only the pale light of an electric lantern to hold back an ocean’s worth of darkness.

  “I lived in your part of the world,” he finally said. “In Florida. I attended classes at Nova Southeastern University. Every day I met another big-boned white girl who was eager to help me with my English. My English was already very good but I let them help me anyway. And I made love to many of them, and I dined w
ith them and listened while they repeated things they had heard on television about how men should be. I was their exotic foreign pet, and they were mine.

  “And then one day, men I did not know flew planes into buildings, and everything changed. The fact that I had learned how to fight suddenly meant I wanted to burn down your cities. My days were spent in offices trying to explain that my part of the world was a small sliver of forgotten history. I tried to explain to them that while my father lived in Jeddah, he was Sufi and so he had to practice his religion in secret because it preached love instead of hate. They did not care that my father would not speak to me, that he would refuse to take me back in because he was furious at me for abandoning his crazy dreams of chasing the Wahabi from the Kingdom. They knew that in Saudi Arabia, a father’s law is law, so they refused to believe that mine would allow me to leave, even if it was for the price of never speaking to me again.

  “After they deported me, I realized the mistake I had made. I was begging them not to send me home so I told them about the pain and the anger that was waiting for me there. But then, when they looked at me they saw only pain and anger, a man with enough pain and anger to hate America as much as those other men. I should not have said anything about my father. I should have talked only of the pretty girls who helped me with my English.”

  Once she realized he was finished, she sat down, not as close to him as she had been sitting before their argument, but not so far that they couldn’t hear each other.

  “Our father left us when we were teenagers,” she finally said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I have my opinions. I mean, he wasn’t a great dad. He gambled. He didn’t like being at home very much. But … when it comes down to it, I don’t know.”

  “Your brother said you taught him to love. Is that because you had no father?” His tone was cold, that of a detached observer who had repeated her brother’s words verbatim because he had no vested interest in embellishing them.