The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  On the other side of the room, Aabid was speaking rapidly into the phone in Arabic. When he felt their eyes on him, he glanced up at them. His expression was tense, but he turned his back to them when he spoke again, before Megan could get a good look into his eyes.

  “Enough.”

  At first, Aabid uttered the word so quietly Megan almost didn’t hear it.

  “Enough!” This time it was loud enough to get Majed’s attention. When he saw Aabid get to his feet, he muttered something into the phone and hung up. But without any further words, Aabid started for the door. They both followed, down the circular staircase with its thick carpeting, and onto the main deck, where Aabid hurried through the dining room and sitting area and out onto the back deck.

  By the time they reached the entrance to a second staircase, Megan’s suspicions about their destination were causing her heart to flutter. The staircase was cramped and narrow. Halfway down it, they came to a door, but when Aabid tried the knob, he found it was locked. This was clearly not according to plan. He struggled against the doorknob with increasing anger.

  Megan felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Majed; he was trying to push past her. She allowed him to. Aabid kicked the door with his foot. “No,” he whispered. “This is not—”

  Megan tried to stifle the questions that were threatening to pour out of her. Who was supposed to be behind that door?

  Majed pushed Aabid to one side, pulled the pistol from the back of his pants, and said, “Cover your ears.” They did as they were told, and Majed shot out the doorknob.

  They followed him down the steps, into the massive engine room that was humming with mechanical activity. On either side of the room, two giant pipes emerged from the floor and traveled L-shaped paths parallel to one another. The center of the room was taken up by an even larger pipe with a T-shaped head; its body was lined with valve wheels and gauges.

  Aabid let out an ear-piercing scream. Majed raised his gun at the source of Aabid’s sudden terror, and Megan followed the direction of the barrel. A Middle Eastern man she didn’t recognize lay sprawled on the floor, his hands bound to the side of the pipe above his head with rope, a balled-up rag shoved inside his mouth. His outfit matched the one worn by Majed and the other two security guards, which meant his black T-shirt almost camouflaged the flow of blood down his chest. His throat had been cut.

  Majed crouched down in front of the man and checked his pulse. That’s when Megan saw some of the man’s arterial spray peppered on the opposite wall. But all she could think of was what Majed had told her earlier. One of the security guards was missing; that meant he was with Cameron. And this was clearly the guard and that meant her brother was here.

  But he wasn’t here. That’s why Aabid had lost his mind. Cameron was gone. Majed brushed past her, ducked around a wall of gauges and dials, and yanked open a large sliding door. It opened onto the lifeboat garage; they were behind and underneath the stairs she had climbed when she boarded the yacht. But the only thing waiting for them was a single slipcovered Jet Ski sitting next to the large empty spot where the lifeboat must have been stored right after they boarded.

  “He was here the whole time,” Megan said. “He was here the whole fu—”

  “Ali is gone,” Majed said. “That’s what they were telling me on the phone.”

  In the engine room, the other security guard was standing watch over Aabid. The little Prince had crumpled to the floor and was rocking back and forth with his arms clamped around his knees as he sobbed. The guard was still in the stocking cap he had worn when he had driven them to the yacht hours before.

  Majed and the guard exchanged furious words in Arabic. But Stocking Cap sounded just as panicked and baffled as the rest of them. Majed gave him an order in Arabic and he responded by curving an arm around Aabid’s shoulders and guiding him to the steps.

  Once they were alone, Majed turned to her and said, “You were right. He was keeping him down here the entire time. But Ali has taken him.”

  The burst of activity had released a new flood of adrenaline within her, and when her eyes wandered over the bloodied corpse in the corner, it was as if she were seeing him on a movie screen.

  “OK,” a voice that was apparently her own said. “Then let’s get him back.”

  Was it genuine concern that furrowed his brow? Or was he nodding at her like she was an unreasonable employer who had just suggested they sprout wings and learn to fly?

  22

  The captain refused to open the wheelhouse door until Majed threatened to shoot his way through it. Inside, a single leather pilot’s chair presided over a curved bank of display monitors that took up the width of the room. Majed aimed his gun at the floor, and the captain, a potbellied man with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair and a hard drinker’s swollen nose, raised his hands in a gesture of defeat.

  He spoke with a heavy Irish accent as he began explaining how he had been instructed not to open the door no matter what happened. Majed cut him off. “How long ago did the lifeboat launch?”

  “They were going to get you, weren’t they?”

  “After,” Majed shouted, but he was studying the glowing monitors. “Ali left in one of the lifeboats after we came back.”

  “Well, he fuckin’ got by me then. I would have seen an alert if he’d activated one of the winches. Did he just open the tender garage door and push the boat out into our wake like a sack of potatoes?”

  “I do not know this. I am asking you. You are the captain!”

  “Bloody hell I am,” the man fired back. “Far as I’m concerned, I’m being held fuckin’ prisoner out here by a bunch of armed loonies and some crazy nancy boy who can’t keep away from the sauce. It’s a damn hijackin’, is what it is.”

  “This is not your boat. How could it be a hijacking?”

  “Fuck the boat,” the captain snarled. “I’m talkin’ about my person!”

  Majed stopped in front of a monitor that glowed bright blue. He adjusted one of the dials on the side, and Megan realized he was widening the scope. A tiny green blip came into view. It was a radar screen. “There!” he shouted. Megan and the captain crowded in on either side of him to get a look. “Is that them?”

  “Christ,” the captain muttered. “They must have more than an hour on us, at least.”

  “They left right after we came onboard,” Majed said.

  “Where are they going?” Megan asked.

  The captain said, “China it looks like. Pratas Island is close to ’em and there’s a fisherman’s station there but it looks like they’re going to pass south of it. Shit. Mainland China. Not the best place to be on the run from the law, I’ve heard.”

  Neither one of them answered. The captain said, “So I guess I’m supposed to follow them now. No sweat. Just another nightmarish day at sea with the Al-Farhan fam-a-lee!”

  “Turn off all the lights you can!” Majed said. “And maintain speed until we can overtake them. They are not about to reach land anytime soon. Don’t use the propulsion system until you absolutely have to. He can’t know we’re coming until the last minute. If he sees us coming, there’s nothing to stop him from …” He wouldn’t finish. Instead, he tried to slip from the wheelhouse but Megan grabbed him by one shoulder.

  “Why is Ali doing this?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I will try to find out.”

  He was gone. After a tense silence she felt the captain’s eyes on her. “Enjoying yourself, miss?”

  “My brother’s on that boat,” she said, hoping it would shut him up.

  “Ah, yes. Cameron, is it? Seems like your brother ends up in a lot of places he shouldn’t be.”

  “Please … just get us there. Please.”

  “Of course, of course.” But he had left his chair and was standing next to a series of switches on the side wall. “But first … Hello, darkness, my old frieeeend.” As he held the final note of the Simon and Garfunkel tune, the three running lights on the bow went out, and suddenly they
seemed to be inside a chamber of pale blue light floating through total blackness.

  “We’ll go like this for a bit, miss,” the captain said. “Once they’re within rage, we’ll be on ’em before they know what hit ’em. With the propulsion system Ol’ Man Farhan installed on this baby we could outrun all of Somalia, we could.”

  Once he reached the bottom deck, Majed checked the guest suites to make sure the lights were off, the shades drawn. Then he found a flashlight in one of the supply closets, the same supply closet where he had smashed the lock on the weapons cabinet. The corridor narrowed as he approached the stern; this is where the tiny crew bunks were located.

  Ali’s bunk was right across the hall from his own. But there was no evidence that the man had ever been there. The tiny chest of drawers next to the bed had been cleared out. His clothes were gone, and so was his copy of the Koran. Majed had crouched down to search under the bed when the floor beneath him shifted.

  At first he thought the captain was accelerating, but then his shoulder hit the side of the bunk and he had to grab the chest of drawers to pull himself to his feet. They were turning around. Of course they were. The lifeboat was heading for China, and they had been headed straight for the Philippines. But the movement had been so sudden and dramatic he doubted the captain’s sobriety. Or perhaps the man was just punishing him for pulling a gun.

  Across the hall, the door to his own bunk had been thrown open by the sudden U-turn and he glimpsed a strange bar of light in the wall above his bed. There was a light thud as the entire yacht righted itself, but he couldn’t pinpoint the origin of the sound. He killed the lights in Ali’s bunk, then followed his flashlight beam into the tiny cell he had called home for almost a month.

  Where had the glow come from? It had appeared in the wall above his bed. Was it a strange reflection or was it a … As he ran his hands over the wall, his fingertips grazed an almost imperceptible seam in the wood. The lines formed a square; he pushed on it and the bottom half dipped inside the wall by several inches. This allowed him to get a slight grip so that he could pull the bottom half out from the wall altogether.

  Inside the secret compartment was his own laptop computer, the one he had watched the interview with Megan Reynolds on before Ali forced him to leave the yacht. Of course, he had not been allowed to take it with him, and now it was hooked up to coils of black video cable that disappeared through the back of the compartment. All of this had been done with great care and precision. All of it had been done in his absence. All of it had been planned.

  The computer’s power light glowed green, so he hit the spacebar to bring it out of idle mode. On-screen were four surveillance camera images from throughout the yacht. Only, unlike the system accessible in the wheelhouse, these were not views of the decks, the staircases, and the corridors. These cameras were placed inside the master suite, the upstairs guest suite, and the guest suite at the end of the lower deck. The bedrooms.

  He had been so riveted by these images that he almost didn’t notice the edges of the open web browser visible around the border containing all four camera feeds. He minimized the surveillance program. He was staring at his own email account. The last time he had accessed his account had been days before, in Hong Kong, the day of the bombing. His in-box looked the same, the same spam messages, the same unanswered note from a cousin in Jeddah who had worked up the courage to ignore the wishes of Majed’s father.

  As a ring of pressure tightened around his scalp, as the skin across his arms startled to tingle, he opened the Sent Messages folder. Five hours ago, before Majed had returned to the yacht, someone using his email account had sent a video file to the offices of Al Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. He opened the message and clicked on the attachment.

  It was footage from the master suite. Cameron and Aabid both sat cross-legged on the bed’s silken comforter, a backgammon board balanced on a large pillow between them. They exchanged few words, but at one point, when Aabid took too long to make his next move, Cameron reached across and gave him a light shove on one shoulder. In response, Aabid grunted and batted his arm away, and Cameron began chanting the words, “Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock,” while Aabid cried for silence.

  Two friends, both of them a little effeminate, playing a board game together in a luxurious setting. Three days earlier, that is all anyone who watched this little film would have seen. Now, it meant something else entirely.

  His urge was to pull the computer from the secret compartment Ali had made and hurl it against the wall. His urge was to steal the one Zodiac left onboard—it was stored just below the wheelhouse, on the bow—and get as far away from this palatial floating prison as he could without stopping to refuel. Where was his rage at having been framed? Where was his rage at having been deceived by the same man who had brought him to this place, offered him this job, promised him what had been, just days before, a delightful, rootless existence?

  Had his anger been stolen from him, along with most of his pride? It was as if his hands had been dipped in poison. He knew there was no real logic to these thoughts, but they were carrying him further and further away from the hard truth before him. And he might have followed them as far as they could take him if it hadn’t been for the gunshot.

  One minute she was staring up at the stars, intensely visible in the new surrounding darkness and the moonless sky, trying to form the first words of a prayer for her brother. The next, she was down on her knees, her hands raised just above her head. The shot had come from behind her, and the deck underneath her legs was so wet she had trouble kneeling and staying upright.

  She had left the wheelhouse as soon as the captain launched into a hoarse rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” At first she had shared in his delirium, but the longer she stared at the blinking green dot on the radar screen that marked her brother’s perilous location, the more she craved oxygen and the sound of something besides the Irishman’s mad music.

  “You are a liar, Megan Reynolds. You and your brother are both liars.” It was Aabid’s voice, coming from somewhere behind her, but the hand that seized her had far more strength. It had to be Stocking Cap, and he was driving her toward the staircase to the engine room.

  “What are you talking about?” she shouted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  There was no response; they just shoved her down the stairs, back into the engine room, where the slain guard’s body had been cut free of the pipe and covered with a blanket from one of the bedrooms. Once they hit the floor, Stocking Cap gave her a light shove that sent her skittering across the metal floor, enough time for him to get a good aim on her. Behind him, Aabid’s hair was coming lose from its ponytail and his bloodshot, tearstained eyes gave him the look of a feral cat.

  “I am on television, Megan Reynolds.” Each time he called her by her full name, her stomach contracted. It was less personal than using just her first name; he was making her more anonymous, less human. Easier to do away with. “Your brother and I, we are on television, playing board games and laughing like little girls.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Megan said.

  “Your brother is part of this,” he continued. But even though he was practically spitting his words, even though his face was a mask of rage, he didn’t have the courage to step out from behind his loyal, gun-toting guard. “He killed Ali and got away. He is a spy!”

  “You know that’s bullshit, Aabid. You know it is!”

  “What I know is that now my family is linked to all of this because of your brother. And because we are the Arabs, we look like the terrorists. This is what Holder wanted and he used your brother to do it.”

  “That doesn’t mean Cameron knew,” Megan said. “That doesn’t mean he was part of it. For Christ’s sake, if he was a spy, why didn’t he do a single thing you wanted him to do? Why didn’t he sleep with you on the plane? Why did he challenge everything you believed? Why, Aabid? Why did he do all these things? If all he needed was
footage he could use on you later, after all this had been done, there were easier ways. A lot easier.”

  Neither of her captors had noticed Majed’s appearance on the steps behind them, or that he had aimed his stolen gun at the man who was aiming a gun at her. Maybe if he hadn’t shown up at that moment, she might not have found the courage to continue speaking.

  “He wasn’t a spy. It wasn’t even about you. It was about him. He couldn’t face the fact that we had been lied to all of our lives. So when he saw a frightened little boy like you, who was lying to himself about who he was and what his life was made of, he tried to help you, Aabid. He tried to fix you. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. And maybe it wasn’t any of his goddamn business. But he didn’t do it to hurt you or anyone else.”

  “Of course you would believe this,” Aabid said, but his voice was a weak tremor.

  “No, I know this. Because I know who my brother is. And so do you.”

  Majed must have made some noise on the stairs, because Stocking Cap glanced over one shoulder, saw him standing there, and immediately began to back up to one side. It looked like he was trying to decide which one of them he should take aim at, and he seemed far more daunted by the prospect of raising his gun on another armed man.

  In a controlled voice, Majed said, “Let us end this, Aabid. In a short time, we will have the lifeboat within sight and our questions will be answered. This is true. Is it not?”

  “Put down the gun! You work for me.” Instead, Majed spoke Arabic to the other guard. Megan realized the man didn’t speak English; it sounded like Majed was simply translating his own words for him. Stocking Cap didn’t lower the gun, but something in his eyes must have looked encouraging to Majed, because he descended several more steps.

  “Do I work for you, Aabid?” Majed asked, but his eyes were locked on the other gun. “It is your father I work for, is it not? He hired me, he hired all of us to protect you from so many different things. Did he not?”