The Catch: A Novel (32 page)

M
UNROE LEFT THE
hawaladar
’s office, original waybills tucked into a pocket, and made her way to one of the Internet cafés she’d used a few days prior. Reached it minutes before closing time, offered the proprietor double the price if he’d let her stay an extra half hour, and when he agreed, she took a terminal and searched for the second name the captain had given her: Nikola Goran.

This was an easier trail to follow than that of the deputy minister. As with the first search, she found her answer in news coverage, war coverage: Bosnia during the height of Yugoslavia’s coming undone in the early nineties, brutal coverage that associated the name Nikola Goran with genocide and mass graves, the name of a man who’d disappeared after the war and was still wanted for crimes against humanity.

There were pictures of Nikola as a younger man, most of them grainy, but the similarity was close enough that if Munroe took away
the ocean-weathered skin and the facial hair and the paunch of age, this Serbian colonel resembled the Russian master of the
Favorita
. Which made absolutely no sense. Oh sure, that the men might be one and the same, yes. But that someone within Russia would have used pirates to act as cover to capture an alleged war criminal a quarter century after the war—no connection, not even an abstract one. It wasn’t as though the guys in town were modern-day Simon Wiesenthals tracking down evil to bring it to justice. These guys were their own kind of criminal. And the only commonality that tied them together was the weapons in the hold, and that only by implication.

She printed enough to keep track of what she’d learned and then tried e-mail again, and this time a response from Bradford waited for her:

His few words said what no one else would ever understand, and she read the paragraph again, and then a third time, and although tempted to print it and take it with her, she wouldn’t risk exposing the connection to him—not to the people who’d tried to kill her, not to Amber or Natan.

She had no words for what she barely understood, would write again when her thoughts weren’t hijacked by emotion, but left him a reply.

Munroe paid the bill, nearly the last of her shillings, which meant she’d need to stop at a forex to change more dollars soon, and they’d be closed by now. And she was down to her last two thousand dollars. If she had any hope of getting out of the country on her own dime when this was finished, then only half of the dollars were available for expenses, which was about the same thing as being broke. She could access accounts from Europe, but none of the banks she used had branches in Kenya, which meant that from here on out money was going to be a problem, and she no longer had the luxury of hiring private cars and taxis.

Munroe found a grocery store still open, bought several boxes of packaged food and bottled water and, hiring help from a porter on the street, carried the boxes to the bus station. Counting out what shillings she had left, she negotiated the fare for a one-way ride.

I
T WAS DARK
when Munroe stepped off the bus. Still not healed enough to lift and carry the boxes, she left them on the dirt shoulder; waited until the bus had continued out of sight. Then, once certain she was alone, she shoved them by foot into nearby bushes and walked the rest of the way to the house.

Unlocked the front door and opened it to a gun in her face.

Remained motionless until Natan had lowered the weapon. “Killing me would be a bad idea,” she said. When he’d tucked the weapon away, she said, “There’s food for us out by the highway, but I’m not able to carry it.” He hesitated a moment, as if he couldn’t understand the why behind her statement, so she added, “I need your help.”

Natan called out to Amber to let her know he was leaving the house, followed Munroe out because that was the only appropriate response she’d left him, and they walked in silence along the rutted track, between trees and foliage that grew thick along the sides, the crunch of dirt beneath their shoes loud against the buzzing mosquitoes and insects and the subtle sounds of coastal night.

They’d gone three hundred meters at least before Natan spoke.
“Amber has told me what she knows of the hijacking,” he said. “She’s also told me what she knows of you. It’s not a lot.”

The neutrality of his words was underlined and punctuated by the same simmering accusations that had accented his actions throughout the day; a tacit indictment that, spoken to someone else, might have invited defensiveness and far too much talking. Instead, their footsteps crunched in the silence.

They reached the boxes and she pointed them out.

“They’re small,” Natan said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t carry them?”

“No,” she said.

He turned from the boxes to face her directly, took a step into her personal space, and her hand reached for the knife on her belt.

“Every day you climbed to the rooftop next door,” he said, “and here you can’t even carry these?” He leaned down, lifted the first of the two boxes, which probably didn’t weigh but ten or fifteen pounds. “Turning into a girl did this to you?”

“No,” she said. “Two fractured ribs did this to me.”

He grunted. Stacked the second box on top of the first, picked them both up, and heaved them onto a shoulder, and they began the return trip to the house.

After several minutes Natan said, “You got the fractures during the hijacking?”

“After the hijacking.”

“I don’t understand how you got off the ship,” he said: another subtle jab and not-so-subtle accusation.

“I went over the side and took one of the attack boats.”

“Very convenient for you that it was there waiting.”

“It was also very convenient that I speak Somali.”

“You could have fought with them. You and your supposed skill. You could have made a difference.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Would have too, if Leo had agreed to cut me in, paid me what he was paying everyone else, you included.”

“You abandoned your team,” Natan said, and he spat the words with far more venom than the point required. “The plan to hijack the ship back, what is this? Atonement? Apology?”

Munroe paused, breathed past the rising anger. His rush to condemn wasn’t bait meant to taunt or prod her into revealing information; his was a genuine smug self-righteousness, and it provoked the same rage as Leo’s arrogant dismissal when she’d found the weapons and he’d denied her what was fair.

“They weren’t my team,” she said. “Yours, but not mine, and if you want to point fingers, point one at yourself. You colluded with Leo to put what you thought was an ignorant eighteen-year-old kid on the ship when you, just like Leo, knew the risks. You should have been there and you know it. Don’t project your guilt onto me.”

He turned and with his free hand jabbed a finger toward her chest. Instinct overrode caution and the threat of pain. She batted his hand away and moved into his personal space before she’d taken a breath, and it was clear that the response, which he should have anticipated based on what he now knew, took him by surprise.

He stood awkwardly, with one hand balancing the boxes on his shoulder, while they remained chest to chest and she read the calculation in his eyes. She stayed in his space, breathing his air, until at last he laughed as if she were a joke, exhaled, and took a half step back. “You are using Amber and me for something,” he said.

“I’m going after the ship,” she said, “for Amber, maybe Victor, for the ship’s crew, who didn’t have a choice in any of this.”

“No,” Natan said. “That would be altruistic. There is no such thing, not even for Mother Teresa.” He jabbed his finger at her again, careful to keep it from touching her. “A feeling of goodness, scoring bonus with God, whatever the reason, even the saintly get something for the sacrifice, and you are no saint. You are not doing this out of goodness. You have a motive and it’s not noble.”

“You don’t believe in altruism?” she said.

“No.”

“Good. Neither do I, so we both agree that since Leo refused to pay me for my work, I was under no obligation to save his ass.”

Natan’s mouth opened, then shut, then opened again, and he said, “But you pretend to save it now.”

“Confusing, isn’t it?” she said, and she smiled a fake smile. “Like I told you, I’m going after the ship.”

They reached the front door and Munroe opened it. Amber stood in the hallway with a rifle raised toward the door, same as Natan had when she’d first returned, as if the two of them expected an assault on the house at any time—wariness that would certainly come in handy if the Russians did get wind of the hideaway. “I told you guys not to bring weapons,” Munroe said.

Amber lowered the gun. “It was our call. Our necks if we got caught.”

“There’s food in the boxes,” Munroe said. “Is the captain still here?”

“He’s in the room.”

“When did you last check?”

“When Natan left with you. He’s sleeping.”

“Supposedly. He say anything while I’ve been gone?”

“He’s asked a few times who you are, but nothing more than that.”

“Didn’t ask about you and Natan?”

“Nope, just you,” Amber said. “I gave him the same story you told us when you came looking for work.” Then she paused. The absurdity settled in, and she snickered, and then the snicker turned into a snort, and then into laughter, and her laughter was infectious and Munroe laughed too.

Natan huffed and brushed past with a box under each arm and carried the supplies into the kitchen. Let them down with a thud loud enough that it filtered back into the foyer. When the laughter subsided, Amber said, “You look pretty rough. When’s the last time you ate?”

When was it? Dinner yesterday? Munroe shook her head.

“Slept?”

“Off and on.”

“I know there’s a lot of tension right now,” Amber said, and nodded toward the kitchen, where sounds of containers being dumped against the tiled counter reached out. “He’s being a drama queen. Just let it go. And no matter what his problem is, I trust you—I appreciate what you’ve done so far, appreciate your sticking with us. After what Leo did to you, this really isn’t your fight.”

“Thank you,” Munroe said, and left it at that. Amber’s was an empathetic gesture, especially considering she wasn’t even aware of the full extent of Leo’s betrayal. Amber said, “If you want to sleep, I can watch your prisoner.”

“I got it,” Munroe said, and she moved for the kitchen.

Amber hovered and when Munroe glanced back, Amber said, “It’s good working with you again, Michael. Wish the circumstances could be different, but I’ve missed you.”

Munroe stood a moment facing her, then offered a small smile and continued on. Pain levels that had risen tremendously over the past hours had amped higher in her smack-back against Natan, and now that he was out of sight the full impact wound through her limbs and left her shaking. She needed rest. Needed food even more.

When she walked into the kitchen, Natan turned and left. Munroe ignored him. Running this rescue would be a whole lot easier if it didn’t involve dealing with a grown man with the emotional development of a thirteen-year-old. She picked out a couple of eggs and a packet of
maandazi
, deep-fried dough pieces, the Kenyan version of doughnuts, which would have enough carbs and calories to bolster her energy levels. Opened a bottle of water, drank half of it down,
and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, while in the living area Natan conferred with Amber in hushed clipped conversation, his hands chopping the air with angry punctuation.

A
T THE WATERLINE
the waves rolled in, low and slow in their long approach to the beach, and Munroe sat just beyond the water’s reach and drew in the ocean air and the last of the calm of solitude. From behind, beyond the house, came an approaching rumble that broke the morning stillness. The heat hadn’t started yet, but it would come soon. Another sunrise, another day alive, another debt waiting to be claimed.

She’d woken before the sun, and much as she had on the rooftop in Djibouti, she’d come to the water’s edge waiting for the light to rise. She’d roused the captain when she’d gotten up, allowed him to bathe and to use the threadbare sheet from the bed as a sarong of sorts so that he could wash out the clothes he’d lived in for the past several days, and then returned him to his room and left him there, the door barricaded again by the chair.

The truck had already shut off by the time she reached the front of the house. The taste of burned diesel still hung in the air, and the three men who’d been in the snub-nosed cab had climbed out and now stood by the open doors in a silent standoff, their attention turned toward the front of the house, where Natan and Amber casually filled the front door’s threshold.

There were no weapons visible, but they were surely at hand, both with the mercenaries and within easy reach of the visitors, somewhere inside the truck cab. Munroe called out a hello in Somali and all five turned to face her, an instant break in the tension. The man on the passenger side of the truck lifted aviator sunglasses and walked in her direction. Like his two compatriots, he was dressed casually, collared short-sleeved pullover shirt, baggy jeans that had seen extended wear, and imported sports shoes. No jewelry or watch, but there was an outline of a cell phone in his pocket, and he carried himself confidently enough that it seemed he was used to giving orders.