The Catch: A Novel (29 page)

He responded with silence and an empty expression that said he disagreed but wasn’t willing to offer an explanation.

“Come on,” she said. Measured his lack of response against how far she’d have to push before he called her bluff or caved and finally started talking. When, after a moment of waiting, he still refused to move, Munroe turned to Gabriel, who’d sat observing from one bed over and said, “I’ll need your help. We’re going to get him to the
elevator and down two floors.” She produced the keycard given to her at the front desk, room number scrawled across the sleeve; held it so the captain couldn’t help but see it. “They gave me the key to where we’re supposed to deliver him.”

The captain flinched again, and when Gabriel stood to help get him off the bed, he took a swing with bound wrists and clenched fists. Gabriel dodged back.

“You won’t take me,” the captain said.

“We will,” Munroe said, and she reached for him again, and when he lunged and tried to hit her, she struck back, elbow into the side of his head, base of her palm up under his jaw. He was knocked back against the wall with enough force that he stopped struggling and lay still, blinking up at her.

She swore in a low growl, turned her back to him, and stalked to the bathroom, where she could breathe through the hurt that the force and movement had brought on. Hands to the sink, head tipped toward it, she panted and hoped to hell that she hadn’t just put the captain back into whatever head trauma he’d so recently come out of. Minutes ticked on and the hurt subsided, and when at last she returned to the room, the captain was spitting blood and Gabriel was on the second bed again, staring at the ceiling with a smirk that said he’d taken matters into his own hands.

“Aleksey Petrov,” the captain said. “Alexander. Alexander Petrov.”

And Munroe said, “Excuse me?”

“Is information for you,” he said and, hands raised to his mouth, swiped blood off with his wrist. “Maybe you take some time to find it, maybe postpone a little this meeting with new friends.”

She glanced at Gabriel. “Keep watch on him,” she said, and left the room.

So he’d given her a name—not one on the waiter’s list—toyed with her just enough to send her hunting, to buy what he thought was time. The stress in his voice, his anxiety, told her that whatever this name meant, it wasn’t a red herring.

It was too late in the day to return to an Internet café, and she
wouldn’t risk using the hotel’s business center. She’d start chasing shadows in the morning.

The upstairs restaurant was empty and Munroe passed through to the pool and cabana bar, where music filled the rooftop and guests stood laughing and drinking in small clusters. She spotted one of the Russians among them, bought a drink, a prop to play with through the night, and wound her way to the edge of where he stood, avoiding eye contact and moving in from the side so that she never faced him directly and never encroached on his personal space.

He was one of the younger two, chatting in broken English with a German woman who seemed to be twice his age and whose English wasn’t a whole lot better. Ham-handed come-ons and crude flirtatiousness passed between them in botched attempts at communication, and when the Russian, frustrated with the inability to communicate, said a word in his native tongue, Munroe took the opening. Face still turned toward the pool, she spoke loudly enough that they would hear; interpreted for him, Russian to German.

Both of them turned, annoyed. She smiled. Raised a hand and said, “Sorry.” And so it went as their conversation continued, another word interpreted here, another there, until gradually the ice thawed and she became part of the conversation, and eventually the sieve through which the conversation strained, and at last the focus of the conversation so that by the time the evening had ended the other woman had wandered off, and the Russian had turned his aggressive hitting toward Munroe. She dodged the coarseness with a smile and an apology for an early morning at work and the promise of another evening. He grabbed a napkin and wrote his name and phone number, handed it to her with a verbal invitation to a party the following night, which she accepted.

She left him standing alone and glanced back once to wink, and walked away smiling. She’d found the Sergey over whom the man in the alley had sputtered blood bubbles; had already been in his room, could get back in if she wanted, now with or without the key.

A
LONE IN THE
quiet of her bathroom, Munroe stripped out of the trappings of femininity, let the hot water run long, and washed away the remnants from her hair and off her face, processing the conversation of the evening and the encounter with her first target until the pieces had been properly categorized. Dressed in the clothes she’d previously worn. Needed to find a way to get them clean, though at the moment smelling good was the least of her worries, and in this environment she blended in with every stink around her. She swallowed another dose of ibuprofen to soften the edges and lay beside the captain, counting on his movement to keep her from falling into deep sleep, yet exhaustion overtook her and when she woke the sun was high in the sky.

Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner running, the city noise from the streets reached up from below, life in full swing, gone on without her. Disoriented and sleep drunk, her body’s protests louder than when she’d first lain down, she groaned and dropped her legs over the bed, rolled to get to her feet. In the bathroom she ran cold water over her head and, when finally fully awake, examined her bruises and tugged gently on the stitches that ran down her side to encourage them in their falling out and ease the itching. Then, already late for a day in which she had no time to spare, she paid Gabriel for yesterday’s work and left the hotel for the hot and muggy morning, the belching dust and traffic, for Internet access a few blocks over and the name that the captain had used to pay for another night of captivity.

It took digging to uncover the trail. The name was common enough that it turned up more hits than she had time to sort through, but she stayed with news coverage, preferring the botched autotranslated versions to the tedium of trying to translate Russian Cyrillic into something her faulty wiring could interpret into sound. Within the mixed phraseology were scant details that led to clues—although clues to what, exactly, was difficult to say: Alexander Petrov, if she’d found the
right
Petrov, was a recently appointed first deputy minister with the Russian Ministry of Defense: the first connection she’d come across that even remotely tied the weapons in the
Favorita
’s hold to
any other part of the hijacking or killings: Russian made, Russian sourced, the munitions that Leo had likely given his life for were the one puzzle piece all the players in this madness continued to ignore.

Munroe left the Internet café and on the way back to the hotel bought boiled eggs and fried plantains from a street vendor. Carried the greasy food wrapped in newspaper up to the room and gave it to Gabriel. He ate and Munroe sat on the bed staring at the captain. No words, and although at first he matched her stare, his eye contact became less consistent as the food portions dwindled until there were only a few bites of plantain and one egg left and his focus turned completely to Gabriel’s breakfast and he said, “I too have hunger.”

Munroe held out a hand toward Gabriel, motioning for what was left, and he brought it to her. “I’ll be leaving again soon,” she said. “If you want to shower, now is a good time.”

He left them for the bathroom and Munroe set the food in front of her. To the captain she said, “First we talk, and if we have a good talk, then you can eat.”

He turned from her toward the window. Looked out at nothing and said, “Am not so hungry to sell my soul for food.”

“I think your soul’s already been bought and sold a few times.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Look, my only interest in keeping you is to find a way to get the crew off the ship and to track down the person who did this. You help me get what I need and we can forget the Russians—I’ll let you go—you can walk away and continue on as you’ve been.”

He shrugged, face turned up toward the ceiling and then back toward the food, and Munroe rolled the egg in her hands, peeled the shell in a slow succession of movements, then handed it to him. When he reached for it, she pulled her phone from her pocket and snapped a picture.

“Why do you do that?” he said.

“Proof that you’re alive.”

His cheeks flushed: anger or shame, she couldn’t tell. Probably a mixture of both; she’d taken him by surprise, and the last thing someone in his position would want was a photograph floating loose.

“Who are they?” Munroe said. “These men who want you.”

Mouth full of egg, the captain said, “I told you this already.”

“You gave me a name,” she said. “That doesn’t get me very far, so it doesn’t help you much if you want to avoid being turned over to them. I need more than that. Who are they? Why do they want you?”

In answer he sighed down words he wouldn’t speak, never took his eyes off the soggy newspaper. She handed it to him. He shoveled the few bites into his mouth and the grease from the plantains dripped down into his beard. He rubbed the smear off with his sleeve and wadded the paper, clenched it in his hands, and said, “You let me go, not let me go, is the same. I never go back to the way before. Maybe I run and hide, but no more ships. You make that problem fix, then I can tell you everything.”

She got off the bed. Took the newspaper from him and tossed it into the garbage. If she fixed anything she’d do it for herself, not to save his ass, and the clumsy attempt to manipulate her into cleaning up his mess would have been amusing if keeping him alive hadn’t already left a trail of bodies. “You want me to fix it,” she said, “tell me who you are and what they want with you.”

He glanced up, as if trying to determine if she was actually capable of solving his problems, and in his hesitation was the sliver of an inroad she’d been waiting for. She turned her back to him. Strode to the bathroom; knocked on the door.

Gabriel opened, towel wrapped around his waist.

“You ready?” Munroe said.

“Very nearly.”

Munroe closed the door and didn’t so much as acknowledge the captain. He’d ceased to exist. As soon as Gabriel stepped back into the room, Munroe left for the hall. The abrupt end, walking away before the captain had a chance to articulate his lies and schemes, would give him time to stew without ever knowing how far he could push or if she even cared enough to negotiate at all.

Munroe left the hotel by way of the staff entrance and stepped out to the front long enough to determine that the thugs hadn’t returned. At the
matatu
depot she found an empty share taxi and haggled over a day rate with the driver. They drove north, another trip over the Nyali Bridge with the hot breeze and dust blowing through the broken windows; through traffic that slowed around car-size potholes, a fit of stops and starts until they were fully away from the city, up the Mombasa–Malindi road, past the hotels and resorts, up to where the stretches between buildings grew emptier and to where, although expatriates were likely, tourists were a rarity. She had no set destination in mind, only an idea of what she needed and the memory of what she’d seen from the boat on that first arrival in Mombasa.

A small cluster of makeshift structures dotted the highway edges up ahead, more stick than stall, and for these roadside sellers Munroe had the driver stop. They were markers pointing to the proximity of villages and population clusters.

In the slow banter of bargaining, Munroe inquired about empty houses, about owners looking to rent; a line of seeking that netted her questions and references to cousins or uncles or friends, but nothing solid, so she returned to the car with her items and they
continued on again and then stopped again, vendor to vendor, while bush meat and dried fish and more fruit made its way into the car.

The tedium drew long into the afternoon, and the evening invitation that would bring her closer to the men responsible for Sami’s murder and her own beating called Munroe back to the city. Without finding what she was after, she’d be forced to repeat this trip tomorrow, which was a problem insofar as Amber and Natan’s arrival was concerned.

Munroe spotted another rack of drying meat ahead and asked the driver to pull over yet again. The vendor was a gray-haired man with leathery skin, knobby knees, and a red-and-orange cloth wrapped around his waist. With him was a young boy, perhaps nine or ten years old.

The alcohol on the old man’s breath was strong and his eyes were cloudy, but in response to her question about houses, he stood and leaned against a rough-hewn walking stick, its top-knob polished by what had to be several decades of use.

In beautifully articulated English he said, “My son has a house to let.”

She doubted that he’d accurately pegged the definition of “has,” but as he offered to show the way, she offered the front seat of the car, and they left the boy behind with the rack of bush meat.