The Catch: A Novel (28 page)

“I don’t know,” he said, and he tipped his face up toward hers. Blood bubbles blew from his nose and he grimaced through a mouth without teeth. “Please let me live,” he pleaded.

She loomed over this man who’d tried to kill her, who’d been part of what had killed Sami, who would be dead through glue and the
streets soon enough, though only after more crime, more misery. By taking his life she’d be doing the world a favor, might save another in the process. One blow to the head would put an end to him, but she couldn’t do it. Not like this. Not in cold blood with him mewling for his life.

She wished him up, wished him to try to kill her again, to fight for his life, to make a lunge at her and so allow instinct to overwhelm reason so she could finish him. But he didn’t move. Not even a twitch. She turned away and he gave no evil last hurrah, didn’t rise up and come after her in a final attempt at triumph. He stayed on the ground sniveling, defeated.

She lowered the rebar and felt then the first wave of crushing agony that had been but on the periphery in the adrenaline rush of the attack. The alley tilted at odd angles and her head went light. She had to either kill him now, or leave before weakness became her own undoing.

“If I let you live,” she said, “then go away. If you return to Ibrahiin, if I see you again, if you talk about what happened here today, I will find you and I will kill you.”

She didn’t have the resources or the time to track him down, but he didn’t know that. He nodded and blubbered and dripped more blood into the mud-slush of the alley. “I promise,” he said.

Munroe turned from him, walked away, and the last she saw, he was crawling and pulling himself in the opposite direction, hopefully to die from the injuries she’d already inflicted.

She found a doorstep and collapsed onto it, fought hard to keep her eyes open in the wake of the adrenaline dump, trembled from the hurt as pain levels amped higher and took her back to those first days after the beating.

She needed to get to the hotel. Needed to get morphine back into her system. Stood with effort and limped down the street, one foot in front of the other, until eventually the service entrance was before her though she had no recollection of how she’d gotten to it, or how long it had taken; one foot in front of the other and then
she was in the elevator, and then in front of her room and opening the door.

Stumbling, blinded by pain, she somehow found the box of Kapanol and swallowed down a dosage, and somehow Gabriel was beside her, and with the same intuitiveness that had brought him to her on the beach and that had helped her get into her hotel room to collect her things, he helped again now. Walked her to the bed and from the fog said, “Everything is good. You sleep,” and she shut her eyes and descended into the dark.

T
HE RHYTHM OF
a flutter pulled her steadily upward and Munroe opened her eyes to a room filled with the low light of the late-afternoon sun, and a book not far from her face, in the captain’s lap, and the captain with his back to the wall, turning pages at regular intervals. He glanced down when she opened her eyes and exhaled as if disappointed to find her alive.

Munroe rolled onto her back, stretched through the stiffness, struggled upright, and shifted her feet to the floor. Gabriel, on the other bed, jumped toward her and offered her a hand. “You need help?” he said.

“I’m okay,” she whispered, used his arm for leverage, and stood. Shuffled to the closet for an armful of stolen items and carried them to the bathroom. This pain would pass far more quickly than it had in those first few days after the beating, when every small movement was its own living hell and staying still made it that much worse; this was just a small step backward after so many forward, and bearable.

The heat of the water took the remnants of the opiate fog, took most of the stiffness, and when she’d lasted under the pounding stream as long as she could, she stepped from the shower and swallowed a double dose of ibuprofen to pick up where the morphine had left off. Changed into the first of the outfits she’d stolen from the hotel rooms: a loose blouse that allowed her to hide her bandages and a tight knee-length skirt that covered the largest of the bruises on her thighs and accented long legs where the damage had been minor.

Dressed, she stared at the moisturizers, hair product, and makeup she’d collected. Swiped a towel over the steam on the mirror and scrutinized the reflection. It had been a long time since she’d had any need for beauty products, and it felt awkward to apply them to a face she rarely saw anymore.

With fingers no longer as practiced as they had once been, she changed her hair back into something feminine; painted her face into what most people reacted to as beautiful. The transformation was striking—it always was—though for practical purposes the beauty that the stranger in the mirror reflected back was nothing more than a tool through which she could funnel reactions: a way to lower entry barriers because people were inevitably superficial and reacted differently to poison when it was aesthetically pleasing.

Munroe put down the brush, closed her eyes, and, against the exhaustion and low dull pain, drew in the role, the smiles and flirtatiousness, the poise and posture, the charm and seduction that had once been among her quiver of weapons used to beguile secrets out of statesmen.

It had been a long time; maybe too long.

The captain’s head ticked up when she stepped out of the bathroom, and he studied her as she walked back to the closet to replace the stolen products. She returned to the foot of his bed and staring down said, “I’m just as capable of killing you while dressed as a woman as I was when I wore pants.”

“Are you a woman?” he said.

“Shouldn’t matter one way or the other,” she said, and with Gabriel sitting watch, she left for the rooftop restaurant, for food and for the hunt, because as long as the Russians were still checked in—and according to the clues dropped to her by the staff she’d been tipping along the way, she believed that they were—as long as she continued to haunt the restaurants at mealtimes, inevitably her prey would have to show, and it was only a matter of time and probability before she ended up in the same place as they.

Munroe stood in the restaurant entrance and scanned the room.
Waited for a hostess, and once seated took her time ordering, and when the food arrived took longer still to eat: a way to drag out the evening and increase her odds that she’d be in the right place at the right time. She was halfway through the entrée when the first words, foreign and familiar, announced the arrival of her targets, and she toyed with her food while, without lifting her head, her eyes scouted for the voices that called her out to play.

The words came from a group of four men, two of whom she placed at early to mid-twenties, a third who was possibly late thirties or early forties, and the last in his fifties at the least, though possibly older. Clothing and hair and the four-day scruff on the younger two said civilians, but their posture and mannerisms and interaction said they were, or had all once been, military of some sort.

Munroe took smaller bites and, over a water-filled wineglass, studied them, five tables down with a couple from Uganda in between—enough distance that the only way to hear the conversation would be to strain: body language that would betray her before she was ready.

Munroe signaled the waiter, spoke to him in Swahili when he arrived. Glanced at the table where her targets ordered drinks and slid a five-hundred-shilling note onto the table. “I want to know what rooms they stay in,” she said. “If you can get me that, then this is for you.”

“How soon do you need this?” he said.

“Before my meal is finished.”

“I will see,” he said, and wandered off, and after another few moments of work he exchanged conversation with another staff member, and from there he moved out of sight. She took bites even smaller still and spaced further apart between longer sips of water while the body language of her target table continued to tell her a story, one in which the leader separated from the followers and said that the man in his late thirties was the boss.

When at last, even after the delay, she’d finished her meal and the waiter had still not returned, she ordered dessert and then after that coffee, prolonging the legitimacy of her stay, listening as she could
to what few words of Russian wafted in her direction from men who seemed in no hurry to go anywhere, and who ordered drink after drink and slowly became louder.

The conversation was lighthearted: not a celebration but the relaxedness she would otherwise have ascribed to people on business that had been completed. If they were concerned about finding the captain, they certainly didn’t show it.

She was on her second cup of coffee, losing patience and ready to move again, when her waiter returned. With the bill for the meal he included a slip of paper with four consecutive room numbers and beside each number a last name.

Munroe slipped payment for the meal onto the small dish on the table and a five-hundred-shilling tip on top of that, and with the waiter beaming a smile, she left the restaurant. She had time. Not a lot. Maybe enough to get through one room before the meal upstairs ended.

She took the elevator to the lobby. There were a handful of guests scattered among the seats and passing through, but none at the front desk. Munroe continued toward the staff, who, caught up in conversation, paid no attention to those who came and went.

Dressed as she was, she marked the male as her target and hands on the counter waited for his attention. When at last he stood and faced her, she smiled, a long, friendly smile, and said, “You’re unlucky to have the night shift.”

He smiled back.

“What time do you finally get to leave?” she said.

“At five.”

“And then a two-hour walk home?”

“You know how it is?”

She nodded. “I’ve spent a lot of time here—have many friends who do the same. I lost my room key,” she said.

He smiled again and asked for her name and room number and she quoted from the paper the waiter had given her.

“Do you have your passport?”

“It’s in my room,” she whispered.

He grimaced and hesitated, and she slid a twenty-dollar bill over the side of the counter and dropped it toward him. “You can take the bus for a few days,” she said. “I don’t want to make complications over a key—it’s not a big thing.”

He gave a nervous peek over his shoulder, confirmed that his deskmate had not seen the exchange, and then went through the process of magnetizing a keycard and handed it over with another smile, thanking the Russian upstairs by name.

She left for the next floor up, for the room she’d chosen at random off the list of four, and paused in the hall listening for voices, for the boisterousness that inevitably followed one too many drinks after a good meal.

In the ensuing hush she used the keycard to slip inside.

The room was smaller than hers: one bed instead of two, and it had been slept on or used as a bench since the maid had last put it back together. She perused the bedroom and bathroom, scanned through the many toiletries and trinkets left out on countertops instead of packed away in the suitcase that lay open on the floor, as if this person had gotten comfortable spreading out, the lived-in way of someone who didn’t expect to have to leave on short notice.

She nudged among the items in the open suitcase and then flipped through the clothes hanging in the small closet. Stopped at the sight of the banana clip on the shelf, the AK-47 magazine that had been inside her backpack; picked it up and found familiar markings, and she knew. She’d found her target.

Munroe searched through the rest of the room for more, but there was nothing else that belonged to her. Ear to the door, she listened for movement in the hallway and, in response to the silence, opened it a sliver and then slipped out for round two. Called Amber along the way.

“Things are set on this end,” Munroe said. “Are you ready to move?”

“Made the last purchase yesterday and got the tickets. E-mailed you the flight information and a few other details. You didn’t get it?”

“I haven’t had a chance to check.”

“We’ll be there in three days. Have you made any progress? Do you know anything more about Leo?”

“I’ve learned a few things,” Munroe said. “I’ll update you when you get here. I’ve got it under control.”

“Just tell me now.”

“There’s nothing about Leo, Amber, nothing that will help you sleep. It’s just strategy and tactics and it can wait.”

“Okay.” Amber sighed and then ended the call.

Munroe took the stairs back up to her own room, a temporary detour from the evening’s plans in order to inject another round of
disequilibrium into the captain. Gabriel had his back to the wall and the stick in his lap when she entered.

By appearances the captain was asleep, though it could have been a ruse. Leaning over him, Munroe smacked his face.

He lurched and tried to take a swing. “
Dobroe utro
,” she said.

He twisted away from her, confused, glanced toward the window, where the sky was still dark. “Why?” he said.

“Your Russian friends want to see you.” She tugged on his elbow as if to hustle him from bed, the movement made to keep him off balance while she calculated his response and fear levels.

He jerked away. “What do they want?”

“I have no idea, though I’m sure you do.”

She reached for him again, and he scooted farther away. She motioned him up and he stared at her unblinking.

“Please don’t push me to violence,” she said. “One way or the other you’re leaving this room, and I’d like to deliver you in one piece.”

He still didn’t move, so she straightened and sighed. “I’m tired of putting up with your escape attempts. It’s better for everyone this way.”

“Not better for me.”

“You shouldn’t have been such a pain in the ass—maybe a little more forthcoming when I asked you for help in solving this the easy way.”

“They kill me,” he said.

She motioned him up again. “They didn’t go through the trouble of hijacking the
Favorita
just to kill you. If all they wanted was you dead, they would have blown the ship up.”