The Moonlit Earth by Christopher Rice

Author:Christopher Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

15

Fifteen minutes. That’s how long they had before the man’s corpse reached the end of the line, before someone sounded an alarm. Majed tried not to imagine the horror of the blood-soaked cabin pulling up in front of a crowd of waiting tourists, but his effort at resistance only made the image burn brighter. As he dragged the girl deeper into the brush, he counted the odds that were actually in their favor.

The southwestern shore of the island was undeveloped, with no access roads large enough for vehicles and only a few trails, trails he had hiked during his free time in Hong Kong, awaiting the arrival of the Swan. If there was going to be a pursuit, it would have to be on foot. The dense brush would provide good cover from airborne eyes, but it wasn’t so thick that they couldn’t use their own hands to claw through it.

These were good things. They bought them time. (It had taken him almost three hours to get up the side of the mountain from where he’d hidden the Zodiac. But he hadn’t been running for his life, just trying to avoid detection by the occasional hiker.)

There had been only one shooter. Unless, of course, the second one had fallen back after Majed took his fateful shot. If that had been the case, they would have been fired on by now. But the only sounds around them were the branches snapping under their feet, the gurgling stream that marked their downhill path, and the girl’s pained grunts. If Megan Reynolds was in shock, it did not prevent her feet from moving.

Just one shooter. He would bet their lives on it. He was betting their lives on it. More important, the shooter had given no indication he suspected someone might be watching him. All morning Majed remained in his surveillance position in the nearby hills, watching through binoculars as the technician made her regular foot patrol every thirty minutes. But then, right after Megan arrived in Tung Chung, the foot patrols stopped, and Majed realized the flare gun he had brought as a precaution—it was the closest thing to a weapon he could find aboard the Zodiac—was about to be of unexpected use to him.

Someone had fed the shooter information about Megan’s destination. And his gut told him it had something to do with her companion. If the man hadn’t been shot dead, Majed might have been furious with her. He might have fled the minute he saw them together.

But who was he to claim betrayal? How many times over the past forty-eight hours had he offered the woman behind him a chance to see her brother again? He had made it sound so easy, this reunion she surely craved with all her being. Did she expect he would want something from her in exchange? Lucas, the name Cameron had whispered in those last seconds before the first explosion ripped through the Nordham Hotel, the name Majed had used like a whip to drive himself forward these past few days.

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