The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

Gabriel swung hard—though not as hard as Munroe would have had she had the strength and mobility. The captain gritted his teeth and refused to cry out, though the blow had to have hurt.

  “Next time it won’t be a stick,” she said, and the captain’s face remained hard, defiant. “Next time I’ll make sure he breaks something.”

  Gabriel stood with the stick raised in further threat, and Munroe resecured the captain, then tied the tail of the rope around Gabriel’s waist so there’d be no getting away without an alerting tug. She rummaged through her things for the last box of morphine tabs. Crushed a dosage and scooped it into a nearly empty water bottle, handed it to the captain. “You drink it or I’m sedating you completely,” she said.

  He took the water and swallowed it down, continued with silence and closed his eyes. Munroe turned to Gabriel and said, “I’m grateful for everything you and your family have done for me, but this can’t happen again. The men who are looking for him are the ones who killed Sami—this keeps him safe, it keeps me safe, and it keeps your family safe. You understand?”

  Gabriel nodded and glanced away, an apology she didn’t want, a humiliation he didn’t deserve. This had been her fault for staying away so long. She’d make an effort to return more frequently, but at the moment she had to leave again for a lunch meeting she couldn’t miss.

  MUNROE FOUND THE hawaladar in the rooftop restaurant, seated at a four-person table in a corner with his back to the window, separated from two of his bodyguards by an empty table: far enough away that they were within reach but not quite within earshot.

  She scanned the room before approaching: a restaurant half-full with the lunch crowd. From the cacophony of languages and the visual palette of skin tones, the diners were a mixture of visitors from outside the city and abroad with locals scattered in between. No Russians insofar as she could tell.

  The hawaladar caught her eye; stood when she approached and greeted her with a handshake far warmer than she’d expected: different environment, different man.

  She took the seat next to him instead of the one opposite and kept her own back to a wall. He’d already ordered a salad and half eaten it, and when the waiter approached she ordered the same and allowed the hawaladar to lead the conversation, which didn’t turn to business until they’d finished the meal and were on the first cup of coffee.

  “You’ve had a chance to discuss my proposal?” he said.

  She nodded. “I can do it,” she said. “I can arrange for some supplies, but you’ll need to commit more than information.”

  “If I get you what you need, in exchange you bring me the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have an idea of what it would take?”

  She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and slid it across the table. He picked it up. Scanned it. “What are the odds you’ll be successful?” he said.

  “With the element of surprise we have a good chance. Without that, there’s no point.”

  He folded the paper and slipped it into his chest pocket. “I risk losing my entire investment if it goes wrong,” he said.

  “I risk losing my life.”

  His lips turned up only slightly. “Just like piracy,” he said. “The irony is hard to miss.”

  “Does that mean we have a deal?”

  He handed her a business card. “It’s my private line. We can haggle the finer details later,” he said. “I have a meeting to get to.”

  She stayed seated and watched him go. Finished her coffee in silence. There’d been nothing beneath his words or hidden in his body language to point to lies or betrayal, but her trust in him ran only as deep as his own motivation, and when money was the driving force, loyalty was easily purchased by a higher bidder.

  MUNROE LEFT THE hotel from the side entrance and cut through alleys until she reached dirt streets and wandered them, asking directions, being pointed along, and finally stopped in front of a construction site. Shielding her eyes, she scanned up the couple of floors to where workers toiled, some barefoot but with hard hats, none harnessed, pushing wheelbarrows filled with cement along wooden planks from one area to the next.

  She found a boy at the edge of a pile of quarried stones. He was maybe twelve or thirteen, hustling for odd jobs that might pay him a few bob now and again. Munroe pointed out a line of rebar. “I want this,” she said, “two pieces,” and she showed him with her hands, measuring out more or less the length of her thigh. “Can you get it?”

  “Three hundred bob,” he replied, and she nodded.

  He ran off and she waited in the shade where she could sit without risking a stray piece of scaffolding or unsecured stone falling on her. Twenty minutes passed and at last the boy returned with the rebar and she exchanged the pieces for money.

  She’d been carrying the knife, having hidden the gun beneath the mattress while Gabriel was in the bathroom and the captain was asleep, but the knife was an obvious weapon; she needed something common, and these two pieces would suffice. She asked the boy directions and a few streets over she found a local market of sorts, an alley where artisans, barbers and welders, basket weavers and tailors, had set up makeshift shops and businesses. Jua kali, they called it, “hot sun,” for those who toiled at their trade out in the open, wherever customers could be had, finding a way to repair or build or do without any formal licensing or education. She located a tailor, his threads and cloth strips set out on a cardboard table and in front of him a pedal-powered sewing machine that he worked with sandal-clad feet.

  She showed him the rebar and described what she wanted, and while she sat behind him with a piece of cloth wrapped around her waist and a growing crowd of gawkers in front of him, he sewed thin pockets along the seams of her pant legs, then handed them back to her.

  She checked the workmanship, searched for broken threads, and, satisfied, slipped back into the pants, and then, de facto entertainment over, the crowd slowly dispersing, she slid the rebar into the pockets, and paid the man. She had her weapons. This time she was ready.

  HER TARGET IN the peach-colored shirt was in front of the hotel playing mancala when she returned, and on seeing him again, the rush filled her head, filled her lungs, sent her striding, long steps in his direction, fingers reaching for the pockets along her thighs. In terms of Amber, in terms of Leo, the driving impulse might wreck the entire mission. She didn’t care.

  Munroe pulled a stick of rebar from its sleeve and approached from behind, slowly enough to avoid drawing attention, fast enough that she had speed and momentum behind her: one chance to get it right, to strike fast and move out of the way and limit the attention from passersby, to avoid starting a riot and getting beaten to death in mob justice.

  The man in the peach shirt, still squatting in front of the game, leaned forward on his toes to make a move, and in that moment she swung hard: a left-handed strike to limit the most severe movements to her undamaged side. She connected with every bit of strength she could find, struck his rib cage, felt the crack as it hit, and nearly screamed with the pain that charged through her when it did. He cried out and doubled over, and when the face of the other player rose to hers, she recognized him, too: the man who’d first stopped her on the path, the one who supposedly didn’t speak English.

  “Remember me?” she said, and through the breath-crushing agony pounding through her chest and arm, she smiled.

  He stood, paused a comical half second as if torn between the idea of bolting or challenging her. She said, “Without your friends you’re not so tough—just a little boy,” and that seemed to fortify him enough to take a step in her direction. He paused again, glanced down at Peach Shirt, who’d since rolled into a ball on the piece of cardboard, then took another step in her direction.

  She backed away. Not enough to lose him or allow him to think he’d won or made a point, just enough to keep a safe distance. And when he slowed in hesitation, she taunted him again. “You need eight friends to help you fight?”

  The man in peach pulled
himself to his feet, listing to the side she’d hit, arm wrapped protectively around his chest. She took another step in retreat, and they both picked up machetes and followed. She slipped through a break in traffic and taunted them again from across the street, luring them toward the hotel, to the block where she knew every alley, every turn: houses with their doorways and the streets with their sewage, and places where she had walls and ditches for leverage.

  They followed more cautiously than she’d expected, as if leery of a trick or a trap, and only after they were behind the hotel, in an area rank, fetid, and strewn with garbage, did they increase speed, and with more confidence closed the distance. She didn’t have the strength and physical dexterity to fight them off, but she had the knife and she had the rebar, and all she needed was one really good swing.

  CHAPTER 28

  Munroe limped on. Turned a quick corner and scurried up on top of a welded cage that held equipment of some sort. Pulled the second piece of rebar from its sleeve and held both together. Waited for the men to come around the building, directly into her path, and with the force of her entire weight brought the metal down onto the head of the second mancala player.

  He crumpled. Silent. Maybe dead.

  The man in peach turned first to his friend, then looked up at her and took a cautious step backward.

  She dropped off the cage and shifted the bars, one to each hand.

  They were even now: damage for damage and one on one.

  Except he held the machete and she had two sticks of metal.

  He raised his weapon, took a step forward in challenge; she sidestepped, focused on his breathing, his eyes, the minute expressions of his body that would warn her and give her microseconds of lead time.

  She jabbed him with the end of the rebar.

  He swung the machete. She spun and slammed the bar down on his forearm hard enough that the reverberation stung her hand, and when he screamed, she did, too. He kept hold of the weapon and struck out wildly, madly, and with each attempt, she hit back.

  Pain was out there, somewhere on the edge of awareness, shouting for attention, drowned and muted in adrenaline and the hunt as she struck again, and then again. Even in her weakness she was faster than her opponent.

  She took him down in a battering, blow by painful blow, in the way the fists and sticks had nearly taken her life down on the beach, struck until he dropped to his knees and covered his head and pleaded for her to stop—as if he would have stopped had she begged that night when they’d come for her.

  Out of breath, lungs stabbing glass shards, body seared with branding irons, she picked up the machete and tossed it into a gutter.

  “Who do you work for?” she said, and in Swahili he whimpered, “I don’t know.”

  She kicked him, and he screamed, “I don’t know!”

  “If you don’t know, then you are worthless,” she said, and she kicked again, his stomach, his groin.

  Hands wrapped protectively around his head, he yelled, “Ibrahiin, Ibrahiin,” and Munroe paused.

  It was an Arabic name. “A Kenyan?” she said. “Somali?”

  “Mix,” he said.

  She drew back her foot to kick again and he said, “I heard Anton. I heard Anton. I heard Sergey.”

  “Who are they?”

  He was sobbing now. “I don’t know.”

  “Why are you here at this hotel?”

  “Waiting for more work,” he whimpered. “Waiting for money. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Who pays you?”

  “Ibrahiin.”

  “What do you do next?”

  “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.

  THE 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.