“Let me talk to Natan,” Amber said. “I’ll call you in an hour.”
Munroe’s food arrived and she ate until she couldn’t anymore; packed up what was left to eat later and continue the calorie and protein infusion that her body needed to repair the damage it had suffered. Amber called again before Munroe left the restaurant.
“We think you’re insane,” she said. “But if it’s planned and supplied right it might actually work. You really believe this is the best shot we have?”
“Unless I turn up leverage from another direction, yes, this is the best we’ve got.”
“Then we’re coming down. What do we need?”
“You have a pen?”
“Yeah.”
Munroe started down a mental inventory, items she wouldn’t be able to easily acquire locally, if at all, and with each one Amber drew a subtle inhale that expressed what her words did not: The list wasn’t short and the pieces weren’t cheap; equipment costly enough to put her in the red for the next decade and create a hell of an issue when it came to prying them out of the hands of Kenyan customs agents—an issue Munroe would figure out when the time came. There was always a way and the right pocketbook to line.
Amber said, “Is that everything?”
“I’ll try to keep it that way.”
“What about weapons and ammunition?”
“I have a local source. It’s not worth you guys getting arrested coming into the country.”
“I need about a week,” Amber said. “And I’m not sure about shipping time lags. I’ll expedite what I can.”
“It works,” Munroe said. “I’ll e-mail you a name and an address for the invoices and waybills. You’ll fly directly into Mombasa?”
“Possibly Nairobi.”
“Find a way to get here without hopscotching, it’ll save a lot of headache.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Update me by e-mail,” Munroe said; spelled out the e-mail address: “[email protected]. I’ll arrange to pick you up. If you have to call at some point and I don’t answer, please don’t leave a message.”
Amber was silent another minute, scribbling. She said, “Michael, you’d better be legit. If this is some throwaway plan you’re setting up, using my love for Leo as a way to accomplish one of your assignments, I swear to God I will hunt you down and kill you.”
Munroe smiled; tried not to let the smile escape into her voice. “I wouldn’t blame you,” she said, and then ended the call. Amber did well to be suspicious, but she and Natan would get what they wanted in the bargain.
Munroe sat staring at the phone for a long while. She could have purchased the items up front, handled the air freight herself; and considering the sum of money she had sitting useless, accruing interest in accounts on three continents, it wouldn’t have cost her nearly what it cost Amber. But she couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t. She had no reservations about putting her life at risk but drew the line at paying to rescue the asshole who’d tried to get her killed.
Taking back the Favorita wasn’t impossible, it just had the potential for a one hundred percent fatality rate. The regret that had filled her during the fight on the beach swept in again—a reminder of the things she’d left unsaid, the unfairness to those left behind if she never came back: those left to wonder and wait and who would eventually try to find a way to stop caring because the unknown was most painful of all. She’d accepted death more often than she cared to count, but things were different this time. There were conversations she’d put off for far too long.
Feet on autopilot, Munroe found her way to the Internet café.
The letters to family and surrogate family came easy: e-mails touched with humor that said nothing about what had recently happened or where she’d been; heartfelt love that hinted at where she was and, if they could read between the lines, the possibility that she might not return, ever.
But she couldn’t do that to Bradford. Fingers resting on the keyboard, she puzzled over words that wouldn’t come until the physical pain reached the point of being unbearable. She’d lived a life on the edge, without regret, with every choice, every decision no matter how awful, made in full acknowledgment of the responsibility she bore, and with fear fully conquered. Remorse, foreign and unfamiliar, now eroded her soul. She couldn’t push him away, didn’t want to, really; she just didn’t want to feel, didn’t want to care. What was the point of caring only to watch those who mattered die? Again. And again.
In reply she bled her heart, vulnerable and naked, onto the screen.
I’ve been running, Miles. From myself. From the world. But no matter how far I go or where I hide, I am still with me. I’m working again—back in Africa, though on the east coast this time. It’s been good for me, but not without consequences. If I get through this job, I am ready to return, but I am afraid. Of myself. Of happiness. I know you understand. You’re the only one who ever truly did.
Munroe hit Send without rereading; didn’t want the opportunity to change her mind. Cleared the cache and her history and made a lackluster attempt at covering her tracks. She hurt too badly to think clearly anymore, and the desire for medication consumed her. Another minute. She could last another minute. And then maybe another minute after that. Just long enough to get back to the little house and make sure the captain was still there.
THE ROYAL COURT Hotel was a seven-story building that filled the corner of a block not far off Moi Avenue, a hotel that catered more to business guests than tourists, the hotel where, according to the hawaladar, the Russian delegation out of Somalia now stayed.
Munroe strolled past the building twice: first to scope out its location relative to the buildings around it, second to get a feel for security, which aside from the standard baton-carrying askaris was pretty much nonexistent. On both sides of the building, traffic kept the roads busy, and across the street from the main door, men hung out idly under the eaves that fronted a store with empty windows and a security grille pulled tight and padlocked. With cardboard for chairs, two of them squatted on either side of a mancala game, while others sat on concrete steps, smoking, staring at nothing, waiting for work if it should happen to arrive in any form.
Munroe entered the air-conditioned lobby, where white paint reflected the light that reached in from outside and the walls were filled with bright art deco, and the furniture attempted something modern. A handful of guests milled about, all of them foreigners. Munroe strode past the reception desk and wound her way inward as if she knew where she was going.
The architecture was colonial Africa, and no amount of renovation would mask the unmistakable fragrance of age, of a hundred years of humidity and seasonal rains and the resultant mildew that even air-conditioning couldn’t prevent. She met hallways and a wide spiral staircase that circled up from the ground floor to the rooftop. Took the stairs one floor up, passed a small restaurant, and found the elevator, and there, accommodating the exhaustion that still plagued her, broke from her preference for traveling on foot and took the lift to the rooftop.
The restaurant up top was closed, so she continued through to the terrace and pool area and found a seat at the bar cabana. Ordered a bottle of water and watched a couple of travelers frolicking in the pool. The building was large enough, had enough rooms, that a simple inquiry at the front desk wasn’t going to get her what she wanted, but being able to confine her search to just one building—assuming the hawaladar’s information was accurate and that he told the truth—made the hunt doable.
Munroe returned to the lobby, checked in, and wandered the halls again, upstairs, downstairs, kitchen and staff rooms, until the map of the layout had been branded into memory. She left the building through the staff side door, followed the alley, putrid and full of garbage and human waste, scouted the nearby streets, then returned and started over until slipping in and out of the hotel unseen from the front or by the hotel staff was a fluid process.
Finished for the day, she left the hotel and caught somethin
g familiar in one of the men playing mancala across the street; nearly stepped in front of an overladen bicycle as she strained to look.
He wore a new peach-colored button-down shirt but the same ratty shoes, squatting in front of the game, half turned away. The stockiness of his torso and the odd mixture of his clothes brought on a flood of memory. The bicyclist yelled at her and the mancala player glanced in her direction; didn’t see or didn’t recognize her and returned to the game.
Whether or not the Russian delegation had anything to do with the Favorita, one of the men whose hands were dirty with Sami’s blood was outside their hotel. Rage and pain rushed through her senses and Munroe tamped down the driving urges that screamed for revenge and retribution. She turned in the opposite direction. This was a fight she couldn’t win. Not now. Not in this condition. There were other ways to even the battlefield.
MARY WAS IN the room when Munroe returned, leaned up against the inside wall, arms wrapped around her knees, watching the sleeping man. She smiled when Munroe entered, and Munroe put a finger to her lips, a signal not to wake him. She peeled several bills off a small wad inside her pocket and paid the remainder of what she’d promised, and then beckoned Mary outside.
“I will leave tonight,” she said. “Can you find Gabriel and ask him to come with the car?”
“I send for him,” Mary said.
“Can you come with me? I can pay you. Five thousand shillings per day—” Munroe stopped and her voice caught. She’d offered Mary—had been paying her—the same money that Sami had asked for when she’d first hired him on.
“For how many day?” Mary said.
“I don’t know.”
The woman gazed out toward the house as if calculating numbers, trying to find a way, and she said, “Maybe Gabriel can do,” and Munroe nodded.
Gabriel would have been the better choice regardless.
Mary called over her oldest daughter, and with discussion and instructions running in the background, Munroe returned to the captain and set about with the supplies she’d picked up at a pharmacy before returning. The captain jerked awake when she took his arm, jerked away farther when he saw the needle.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Putting you to sleep.”
“Is it forever this time?”
“Don’t be stupid. I still need you in case I don’t find another way to ransom the ship and the crew.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you putting me to sleep this time?”
“So I can move you.”
“To where?”
“You demand a lot of answers for a man in your predicament.”
“Cooperation is better when I know what goes on.”
Munroe snorted. Nothing he’d done so far had been cooperation—surveillance and intel gathering and waiting for a chance to slip away were more like it. “There are some Russians in town who want to have a look at you,” she said.
The captain’s eyes widened, his body stiffened, and his mouth moved as if he had words to say but no voice to say them with: the first genuine reaction he’d shown yet to anything she’d said. Munroe reached for his arm again to administer the sedatives and he jerked away from her, scooted as far away as the rope would allow.
The comment had been a throwaway, an opportunity to test the validity of the hawaladar’s information against what the captain knew, to discover any obvious link between the Russian delegation and the Favorita, and his reaction answered far more eloquently than words.
Munroe let him flail. “This is what I get for answering your questions?” she said.
“Do not take me to them,” he said.
“They just want to look.”
“No, is not true.”
She paused. A fake hesitation, as if the connection had suddenly dawned on her. “Are they the same ones who tried to kill me, you think?”
He studied her, weighing one evil against another. “What do I get in exchange?” he said.
She reached for his wrist again and he pulled away.
“You get a change in plans,” she said. “And if you tell me why they want you, I promise not to give you directly to them.”
“You give me indirectly?”
“I might still trade you for the Favorita.”
“But not today?”
“You still have plenty of time to plot your escape,” she said, and he glared and shoved his arm in her direction.
CHAPTER 27
There was a form of poetic retribution in hiding the captain in the same hotel where his hunters stayed: chicken in the foxes’ den, the least likely place they’d look for him; and even if the killers had managed to get a scan of her passport from the front desk at her hotel on the North Shore, it was unlikely they’d recognize her even if they sat across from her at the dinner table.
Munroe and Gabriel entered the hotel from the alleyway entrance, navigated the captain through storage and staff areas to the hallways, and then to the elevator and up to the fifth floor. Far enough up that the captain would be a fool to try to go out the window—though she didn’t put it past him.
The room, clean and efficient, held two double beds, a small desk, and a tiny TV, and was attached to a serviceable bathroom. Like most hotels in the West, and unlike most on the continent, the keys were magnetic cards, which would make coming and going a whole lot less of a headache. She motioned the captain onto the bed farthest from the door and gave the other to Gabriel. Munroe used the foot of Gabriel’s bed to fasten the tail of the captain’s rope, made sure his bonds were still secure, and left them with Gabriel cradling a hefty stick and a round of instructions given as much for the captain’s benefit as for Gabriel’s.
She took a detoured loop through the hotel’s public space, scoping out the clientele to see if she might bump into anyone who resembled a Russian delegate, and, turning up empty, returned to the rooftop restaurant. She bought drinks she didn’t want and a meal she didn’t have time to eat, an excuse to mingle with the staff and tip heavily and listen to whispers and conversation that might give her what she needed.
The evening dragged on without profit, so she eventually returned to the room, gave the mostly uneaten meal to Gabriel, and left for the North Shore, for the hotel that had once been home, where the guests were tourists and dressed like it, where she knew the lay of the place and how to get inside rooms that weren’t hers.
It took thirty minutes and slipping into four rooms, rifling through clothes and makeup, shoes and hair products, to commandeer the items she wanted: pieces that she would have bought locally if she’d had the time and if she could have found them. With her loot thrown into a bag also taken from one of the rooms, she strolled back through the lobby, took a taxi for the return into the city, walked the last distance to the hotel, and called it the end of an overworked day.
She slipped out of her shoes and lay beside the captain in the same clothes she’d been wearing for days. Dumped a heavy dosage of ibuprofen into her system, but no more morphine. She was done with the painkillers. Not because she didn’t hurt, but because she couldn’t afford the risk of taking them anymore.
MORNING CAME EARLY and Munroe woke with the sun. She handed Gabriel two books that she’d taken from one of the hotel rooms, something to keep his mind occupied while she was gone. She showered and used the stolen makeup to cover the remaining signs of damage on her face and neck. Changed into clothes that fit her well enough and hung the rest of the items in the closet. To Gabriel she said, “I need everything here. Please don’t take anything. Not one thing.”
“I don’t touch,” he said, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. It was one thing for her items to remain unmolested while she was a guest in his house and under his sister’s roof, another thing now that he was in her place and she was paying him. Left to his own devices and given enough time, he’d likely pilfer everything she had. This was the way of the continent, something to prepare for and deal with without
judgment; it just was, like malaria and bad roads and lack of sanitation.
Munroe walked another loop through the restaurants and bar and rooftop and public areas. Tipped well again, and this time asked questions of the staff that eventually netted her eyes to watch and ears to hear; and then, since afternoon had not yet come, she made two separate trips out the front door, head down, glances darting for a look across the street, hoping to find the thug again, the one who’d nearly killed her, another waste of time and another empty quest.
If the delegation was still in the hotel, if they still had work to be done, the thugs would be around. She wanted them dead, but even more she wanted the handler, the local who passed messages one to the next, because surely the foreigners weren’t dealing with them directly.
She reached early afternoon with no forward progress, returned to the room. Found Gabriel sleeping and the captain with his feet untied and working on his wrists. He froze when she opened the door and she shook her head and strode to Gabriel’s bed and reached for the stick. He woke when she touched it, and seeing what the captain had gotten to while he’d been asleep, jumped to his feet and raised his stick in a threatening manner.
“Hit him,” Munroe said.
Gabriel looked askance at her.
“Right there,” she said, and pointed to the captain’s shin.
The captain jerked his legs back, so Munroe pointed to his upper arm.
The Catch: A Novel Page 20
