The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  Green’s love of the bottle had done him in once again, and he found himself living in Bangkok, where he spent nights cruising the prostitute-lined streets of Patong like one of the washed-up, bombed-out Vietnam vets he’d made fun of when he was a cocky young recruit. Then came a visit from one of his old employers at Broman Hyde, who brought with him a fake passport, a plane ticket for a two-hour flight to Hong Kong, and the words every soldier of fortune wants to hear at some point in their career. We’ve got a special job for you. You’re the only man for it. Naturally, there was cash involved.

  The job: place several kilos of cocaine in the hotel room of a suspected terrorist collaborator. The son of a bitch was a flight attendant and he’d been keeping some very dangerous company. The U.S. government was doing everything they could to get the guy, but everyone knows how slowly bureaucracy moves, especially when lives are at stake. They needed to make sure the guy ended up in a jail cell before he caught his next flight. The guy worked Hong Kong to L.A. Think of all those passengers! Think of all that fuel!

  A fake passport. A pickup time and a rendezvous point on Lantau Island. And $15,000 cash for a day’s work. It was the stuff guys like Mr. Green had gone into this line of work for, only to be saddled with reams of paperwork and pathetic, useless training assignments, like teach tiny little Thai men how to fight as if they were twice their actual size.

  He’d checked into his room at the Nordham Hotel, right across the hall from the flight attendant, and after a little cat burglary 101, the kind of shit he’d picked up on the streets of North Philly before the army had promised to set him straight, everything was golden. Did he look inside the bag? Of course he did. And he’d seen several taped-together sacks of white powder that looked plenty illegal to him.

  Then the Arab guy had showed up out of nowhere and moved the damn package before Mr. Green even got a chance to call in the drop. There was a backup team outside, the same guys who had snatched the flight attendant’s wallet to give Mr. Green time to make the plant, but they had given him no warning. And who the hell would have expected him to move the damn package? It was the one thing they didn’t have a contingency plan for.

  In a panic, Mr. Green raced to the maintenance room and searched for the package, but there was no sign of it anywhere. The fucker had thrown it down the laundry chute. As much as the thought made his gut twist, he had to call in and get further instructions.

  Back in his room, he used the cell phone they had given him to call the number they had made him memorize. He never heard a ring, just a sudden, sharp click and a burst of static. There was a loud crack and the plate glass window in his room rattled violently. The second explosion threw him off his feet. He ate carpet as the cell phone that had caused it all somersaulted across the floor and into the far wall.

  In the movie version, a guy like him would have gone on the run, tried to seek some kind of eleventh-hour justice, reunited with an old sweetheart along the way. In Hollywood, guys like him would have marshaled their last shreds of integrity, armed themselves to the teeth with the help of wacky sidekick artillery nuts who had never seen real action. But he wasn’t from Hollywood; he was a refugee from North Philly who had spent most of his adult life in sun-beaten places where even the goats couldn’t be won over to your way of thinking and rich sons of bitches started their own security contractors with Daddy’s money, treating their men like armored cattle while they fleeced the government for millions. He had pins in both elbows and enough shrapnel buried in his right leg to keep him up most nights if he didn’t manage to get his hands on enough Percocet. Most of his dreams were like something out of a Saw film, and on most mornings, he had trouble pissing in a single stream.

  His days of banging Bangkok honeys were probably over, but if he ever wanted to enjoy a glass of good whiskey again he figured it was time to take a chance on the good ol’ FBI.

  A fire stairway, a pay phone, and several long interrogations later, Mr. Green had managed to salvage some of his pride. He was, after all, teaching the men of Broman Hyde a very valuable lesson: there was no one less loyal than an employee you had failed to kill.

  They were placed in protective custody while the statements of one Mr. Green tore through the ranks of Broman Hyde like a flesh-eating virus. Those employees who had not been brought up on charges were all pleading their innocence to any reporter with a pen, and not a one of them had a kind word to say about the man in charge, Zach Holder.

  As soon as charges were filed against Broman Hyde, the Department of Defense canceled $120 million worth of contracts with Holder’s various companies, and the all-powerful Hutton Group, whose wrath Holder had sought to avoid in the first place, ousted him from their board of directors, resulting in the further loss of $20 million worth of construction contracts inside Saudi Arabia.

  A few days after the story broke, and after a brief round of questioning between FBI agents and three of his attorneys—an FBI leak informed a reporter for The New York Times that for as much as he had participated in the actual interrogation, the role of Zach Holder could have been played by “a smiling body double with a strong resemblance to the CEO of Broman Hyde”—Holder boarded one of his private jets and fled the country. But a public statement from his PR firm had made it clear that he was in regular contact with law enforcement authorities and that his abrupt departure was a result of the media firestorm, and not any desire to avoid cooperating with the investigation into this grave matter. Regardless of the motive for his departure, it was clear to anyone who followed the news that Zach Holder was still a man who thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted to.

  They weren’t allowed internet access or television, but every morning someone brought Megan copies of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which she read on the walled-in porch of the small apartment complex where they were housed under constant guard. She spent the first two days there by herself. Cameron had needed a longer hospital stay to treat a minor blood infection, a result of the injuries he had sustained during the bombing going untreated for so long. She got off easy: a girdle for three weeks to help her internal bruising heal.

  The complex was located on a tiny island just off Hong Kong that seemed to serve a military purpose no one was interested in explaining to her. At night, she and Cameron were allowed to walk the grassy perimeter under armed guard, where chain-link fences topped with concertina wire scarred the ocean views.

  The papers they brought her each morning were full of op-ed columnists foaming at the mouth over the cinematic potential of the coming trial; prosecutors from Hong Kong and America would be making a case against an American-based company that had been charged with the murder of citizens from countries around the world. It would be the Nuremburg of terrorism trials.

  But it was the profiles of her and Cameron that surprised her the most. Now that the story had shifted so dramatically, there seemed to be no shortage of people from their pasts willing to say nice things about them. They were the innocent Americans who had been caught up in a murderous corporate scheme. The security camera footage of Cameron fleeing the hotel lobby had been replaced by family photographs taken straight from the upstairs hallway of her mother’s house. Even the board members from the Siegel Foundation had come forward to praise her fortitude and her altruism, dismissing the reason for her termination as a youthful mistake. Megan and Cameron. All-American siblings, all-American victims.

  But if they went by their own accounts, Yousef Al-Farhan was the biggest victim of them all. Shortly after his badly damaged yacht was seized as part of the investigation, he held a tearful press conference in Riyadh where he brandished a giant photo of his son Aabid, who he announced was “presumed dead at sea as a result of this vicious American conspiracy.” He went on to explain to the world that it was not just his family that had been slandered by Broman Hyde but the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including the royal family, as well as Muslims all over the world. Megan read through the translations of his remarks severa
l times, trying to determine if he was the kind of man who could have ordered Majed’s murder.

  Why the haste to declare his son dead? Was he trying to be free of Aabid and all he had brought down on their family? Or maybe there was some small chance that he was trying to free his son from the forces that were still searching for him all over the world? If Aabid had stayed true to his word, he was wrestling with these very questions, wherever he was, wherever these words had managed to reach him.

  As the days wore on, the agents in charge yielded to some of their demands. Amy Smetherman was allowed to visit. She exploded into tears after five minutes until Cameron ordered her to stop being a drama queen and tell them what good movies they should go to see once they were out. The hairstylist was Megan’s request. If they were ever allowed to leave, she didn’t want them to be the spitting image of their media likenesses. Megan opted for a shoulder-length bob that was about three shades more blond than her natural color, and Cameron asked the woman to practically shave his head and die the remaining bristle jet-black.

  Finally, after a month, they couldn’t take it anymore. Just as they expected, their lawyer threw a fit, and the agents in charge asked for more time. They wouldn’t say what they wanted her to wait for, of course, but she knew: they wanted Holder in custody first. She had allowed them to dance her around this topic before, so this time, she put it to them straight.

  “If he’s going to have me killed, what’s to stop him from doing it from prison?”

  No one had a response to this. But the chances of Megan’s having to testify against Holder seemed to be decreasing by the day. Her lawyer had already told them that her testimony about what Lucas had told her in the tramcar regarding Holder’s involvement would be virtually worthless. Not because Megan would be considered a bad witness but because her cousin was a dead, unreliable one. Surely there were phone records of the communication between Lucas and Holder in the hours following Cameron’s threat, but what would those prove, aside from regular communication between a hedge-fund manager and one of his biggest clients?

  Furthermore, The New York Times had just broken the story that in the weeks prior to the bombing, the head of operations for Broman Hyde, a former recon Marine named Matthew Ellis, had been in talks with the chief officers of several financial companies in Hong Kong about providing regular security for their high-level employees. Most of these companies were reported to have been on the fence after meeting with Ellis. Had Broman Hyde tried to give these CEOs an extra push by increasing the local threat level? Megan didn’t doubt it; she was confident a man like Holder never did anything for just one reason, and at least one of those reasons had to earn him millions of dollars.

  But what was most important to her about this new story was that it did not include any talk of blackmail, or anything that even hinted at the dark secret in her own family—which she had shared at length with the FBI. There was no talk of her brother and Aabid Al-Farhan as having been anything other than pawns in a Broman Hyde’s bloody attempt to move up in the private security world.

  She wasn’t afraid that Zach Holder would make an attempt on her life. She feared the case against him would be dropped altogether. It was too circumstantial, while the case against his employees was too strong.

  The next day they came to tell her she and Cameron could go. In a few days they would be flying home, nonstop, first class.

  After they both took a few a minutes to absorb the shock of this, Cameron said, “Fine. But we’re not flying Peninsula.”

  Megan was the only one in the room who laughed.

  26

  Cathedral Beach

  The condominium complex was only a few years old, a seven-story box of exposed concrete girders and heavily tinted plate glass windows that sat at the spot where Adams Street dead-ended with Mount Inverness. Her mother used to joke that she wouldn’t dream of buying a unit in the place until she was at least eighty years old, but the building had twenty-four-hour security to keep the reporters at bay, as well as any of the other horrible people Lucas might have brought into our lives, Lilah wrote in her last email to Megan.

  She answered the door in jeans and a white long-sleeved T-shirt, but her anxiety over Megan’s visit was betrayed by her full makeup.

  “Cameron?”

  “He’s not ready,” Megan answered.

  “OK,” Lilah whispered, but she looked down at the floor as she turned away, like a woman trying to hold back tears. At first glance, the condo had the look of a furniture store and not a residence. Almost every piece from her mother’s house had been crammed into the living room. Had she moved out overnight?

  Lilah navigated through the maze of blond woods and cream-colored upholstery, toward an ashtray where a lit cigarette sent a curl of smoke toward the ceiling. It had been ten years since her mother had smoked a cigarette. “Mom.”

  Given the magnitude of what they were there to discuss, Lilah seemed relieved it was only her smoking which had earned her daughter’s quick disapproval.

  “You want me to put it out?”

  “I’d rather you not smoke at all.” This long-term investment in her mother’s health brought a genuine smile to Lilah’s face. But the moment was broken when Megan saw the typewritten letter sitting on the coffee table in front of her.

  “That’s it,” her mother said. “It’s right there, so …”

  Megan took a seat at the table and picked up the letter her mother had referenced in her email, a letter Lucas had written her before following Megan to Hong Kong.

  Dear Lilah,

  I think I know how to fix all of this. I promise to bring your children back to you. But you need to prepare yourself for something.

  Cameron knows what happened between us all those years ago. Did you tell him? I can’t believe you did, but somehow he has found out. Like I said, I can fix this, but you need to prepare yourself for this. I think he has done stupid, irresponsible things because he is angry at you. But I promise to bring him home to you.

  Lucas

  Finally, her mother said, “What was he going to do? To fix it?”

  “He was going to tell Holder that Cameron didn’t know anything about his little conspiracy. But first, he had to find out what Cameron knew. So he followed me because he thought Cameron was coming out of hiding to meet me.”

  “What good would that have done? Telling Holder about our …”

  “None. It was too far along by then. He was desperate.”

  Lilah nodded at the window. Finally, she said, “So. Do you need it? The letter?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your email, you said it might be evidence.”

  “It’s not enough,” Megan said. “Besides, they’re going to stick to the facts. They don’t care what Cameron really knew. All they care about is what Holder thought Cameron knew. Right now they’re trying to break this head guy from Broman Hyde, Matthew Ellis. They’re hoping he’ll admit that Holder gave the order himself. If that happens, they’ll make the case that they were trying to raise the threat level in Hong Kong to drum up business. Cameron will only have to testify that he and Aabid Al-Farhan were friends and that they met on a charter flight arranged by Holder. I probably won’t testify about anything Lucas told me.”

  “Good,” Lilah said. “So …”

  “It’s not going to come out at trial. The stuff about you and Lucas.”

  Her mother bowed her head, and extended more effort than needed for a single dry swallow. “That isn’t my concern,” she said. “You really think that’s what worries me? I may be a dizzy bitch sometimes but I know what it would mean if you had to testify against that horrible man, OK?” She had never heard her mother refer to herself in such derogatory terms, and it left her at a loss for words. “Besides, that wasn’t what I was going to ask anyway.”

  “What were you going to ask?”

  “If it was true that you were there when he was shot.”

  “Lucas?”

  Lilah n
odded.

  “I was.”

  This confirmation seemed to wound her mother deeply. Her eyes moistened and she chewed on her lower lip as she studied Megan. “Are you OK?” she asked, a wet sound in her voice.

  “I’ll get there.”

  Lilah nodded quickly, then stared into her own reflection in the tinted window.

  “Are you OK, Mom?”

  “Why isn’t Cameron ready to see me? What is it you two think I did?”

  “He has pictures of you and Lucas and—”

  Before Megan could elaborate, Lilah let out a series of pained grunts and placed one hand against her chest. As she steadied her breaths, she groped for her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray, as if this menial task were a slender lifeline back to sanity. Given the horrors Megan had witnessed overseas, she couldn’t blame herself for not being sensitive to the impact this information would have on her mother. Her own children, perusing photographs of her performing oral sex on a man who wasn’t their father. Of course it was mortifying for her.

  “So your father showed him?” Lilah asked.

  “No. Cameron found them himself.”

  Lilah studied Megan intently as she crossed the crowded room and took a seat at the coffee table across from her. Why did her mother appear so skeptical?

  “And so what does Cameron think?”

  “He thinks Dad was devastated, but that he didn’t speak up because if he showed anyone the pictures Uncle Neal would be furious and he wouldn’t pay for us to go to college.”

  Lilah closed her eyes and shook her head, as if the supposition Megan had just shared with her gave off a foul odor that would pass through the room after half a minute if she just remained very still.

  “He showed me the pictures,” Lilah finally said. “The pictures were for me.”

  Megan waited for her mother to continue, but instead she rubbed her temples, opened her mouth to speak a few times, and lost her words each time.