The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  They made it to the staff exit, observed by both employees and guests, but without confrontation, and continued out into the alley to the waiting van. Munroe guided the captain into the far rear seat and had Gabriel sit with him as guard, then slammed the door and took the front passenger seat and in Swahili instructed the driver to take the bridge north.

  They were on their way and pushing out of the city when Natan said, “Who are the guys in the back?”

  “The reason the Favorita was hijacked,” Munroe said, and if either Natan or Amber saw past the facial hair and recognized the captain from when they’d dropped the crew off at the port, they didn’t mention it. “They both speak English,” Munroe said, and for Natan’s benefit added, “and the old guy speaks Russian.” She smiled and turned her back to him and they rode in silence until they neared the turnoff for the property, and Munroe guided the driver toward the coast.

  James stepped from inside the house when they arrived, notice that he had a second key, and Munroe left the van and paid him for it, and asked him to come see her again tomorrow evening; watched as he walked off with a lazy languid stride, and when he’d gotten far toward the beach, she opened the front door.

  Amber and Natan followed her in while Gabriel waited with the captain.

  “You guys can take the two bedrooms,” Munroe said. “I’ll room with Nikola,” which was about the same as offering to share space in a dark closet, though she didn’t plan to spend much time there. “I have a few sheets, but they’ll need to be washed.”

  “We have sleeping bags,” Amber said.

  Natan dropped his duffel on the threshold of one of the rooms and walked the inside of the house, checking the windows and doors, and then without a word left for the outside, presumably to scout the security of the perimeter. When they were alone, Amber said, “I still don’t understand why the old man is with us.”

  “He’s the captain of the Favorita,” Munroe said. “He’s also what the hijackers are after and the best bartering chip we have for getting out if we run into trouble.”

  “Does he know this?”

  “He has an idea.”

  “Which explains the guy guarding him.”

  “Yeah. I saved the captain’s life, Gabriel saved my life,” Munroe said, and she turned back to glance through the open front door to the van, where the driver stood leaning against the hood, smoking, and Gabriel and the captain were still sitting in the sweltering backseat. “What goes around comes around,” she said. “I figure that between us we can keep the captain contained, so I’m sending Gabriel home today—I’d rather another bystander not end up dead from this thing.”

  “How many are dead already?”

  “Not counting whatever mess is left on the Favorita, there’s been one here in Mombasa that I know of—there could be others.”

  “And almost you,” Amber said, though her voice inflected up, as if it were more question than statement.

  “It’s a long story,” Munroe said. “I’ll tell you all about it when you’re settled.”

  Amber nodded, shrugged out of the straps of the backpack she’d carried in, and let it drop to the floor. Natan walked alongside one of the windows and continued on beyond the house toward the ocean, and in the uncomfortable silence both of them turned to watch him.

  Munroe said, “You and I both know that as much as you care about the rest of the guys being held on the Favorita, you’re doing this for Leo. What’s Natan’s reason?”

  “For all of them, I think,” Amber said.

  “Loyalty?”

  “Probably guilt or shame. He should have been there.”

  “We don’t know if any of them are alive. We don’t know if Leo is alive.”

  “Yeah,” Amber said, and she sighed, and then, as if finding a way to change the subject, said, “What’s your reason?”

  “For you, maybe for the ship’s crew.”

  “Not because it’s the right thing to do?”

  “The right thing to do would be to let Leo find his own salvation.”

  Amber crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows.

  “He brought this on himself,” Munroe said. “And everyone with him knew what they were getting into. They put their lives at risk willingly, unlike the ship’s crew, who had nothing to do with it.”

  Amber stared. Munroe shrugged and looked out toward the van, where in the backseat the captain appeared to be getting testy. She turned and met Amber’s gaze. “Let’s say I was doing it for Leo,” she said. “Is he worth it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re about to risk everything for this man, Amber. From my perspective he’s a douchebag of the highest order. You’ll be in debt for the next, what? Ten years? Fifteen? And hopefully not dead in a week—all for standing by him. Does he deserve your loyalty?”

  “You’re an asshole, Michael.”

  “Agreed. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “How do you measure what someone deserves?”

  “Only you can.”

  “Yeah, well then, yes,” Amber said, and her chin tipped up. “He deserves my loyalty.”

  “He’d do the same for you?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Enough to put my life on it, which I am.”

  “That’s all fine and good,” Munroe said. “But we go through all this, and I find out that a year later he’s cheating on you, or beating on you, or that you guys are separated because of dumb married shit, I’ll be pissed off enough to come hunt him down and finish off what we should never have started today.”

  Amber crossed her arms, defensive, defiant. “You’ll never know him the way I know him.”

  “God, I hope not,” Munroe said. “And I hope to hell he’s worth it.” “I can only go forward,” Amber said. “I refuse to live a life of loss and never knowing, always wondering if things would have been different if I’d fought harder. If Leo’s dead, I’ll come to terms with that—” Her voice caught. “Eventually. I’ll come to terms with it knowing that I did everything I could, that I didn’t roll over and play dead. Like you said, only I can decide if he’s worth it.”

  “And?”

  “I’m proving it with my life.”

  “And with mine.”

  “That’s your choice. You seem to have your reasons. You’re certainly not going for Leo.”

  “No,” Munroe said, “I’m not,” and she turned and strode through the front door toward the van, motioning Gabriel out. Pointed a finger at the captain and said, “Get out, walk to the house, don’t try my patience, or I’ll break your fucking leg.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Munroe situated the captain in the windowless maid’s room. Made sure he had water and had used the toilet before locking him inside and securing the door from the outside with a chair beneath the handle.

  Amber watched from down the hall but said nothing.

  “I’ve got to get back into town,” Munroe said. “Need to get Gabriel home and run a few errands. If I manage to get back tonight, it’ll probably be late—don’t let Natan kill me coming in.”

  Amber shook her head and gave a half smile.

  “I’m not kidding,” Munroe said. “Do you have copies of the air waybills for any of the shipments?”

  “Yeah,” Amber said, and from her backpack she pulled out a small file folder and thumbed through a few pages, handed four of them to Munroe.

  Munroe scanned the details and tucked the pages into a pocket.

  “If you take your eye off the captain for even ten minutes,” she said, “I guarantee he’s going to try to run. Might be a good idea for one of you to sleep in the doorway.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for him.”

  Munroe nodded. Fished the knife out of her plastic bag of be longings; debated taking the handgun, but it just wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught with it, and she was never as comfortable with a gun as with a knife anyway. She hooked the knif
e sheath onto her makeshift belt, left the house, and climbed back into the van.

  They stopped just north of Gabriel’s family’s compound and Munroe stepped out with him while the driver waited in the vehicle; they walked until they were out of sight and she paid Gabriel the last of what she owed him. Between the days that both he and Mary had helped her, she’d dropped at least a half year’s wages in their hands, a windfall that would likely disappear into drink and gambling as quickly as it had come. She shook Gabriel’s hand and then put an arm around his shoulders and said, “Be smart and stay safe, okay?”

  “You do also,” he said, and she nodded, turned, and left him there.

  Perhaps in his intuition, in his daily experience of hustling those tourists brave enough to walk the beach, he’d developed the smarts and determination to defy the odds, would invest the money, use it to better their lives. Mary would have been the wiser choice for that, the women always were, but she hadn’t been the one to do most of the work.

  Munroe had the van drop her off at the mouth of Bishara Street. It was late enough in the afternoon that she expected the hawaladar to have already left his alley office for his professional one, and although she could have called to find out, she wanted the surprise of showing up face-to-face as a way to gauge through his expression and body language what she still didn’t trust from his words.

  He offered a hand when she entered, and when she reached to shake it, he said, “No threats for me today?”

  She grinned. “I have the base for loading supplies,” she said. “You have the dhow?”

  “I promised.”

  She handed him a slip of paper on which she’d written, turn by turn and landmark, directions to the house on the far North Shore, studied his reaction when he browsed the details, saw no hint of treachery in his expression.

  Gifting him directions to where she slept, to where her catch was housed, was the same as handing him a knife and offering him an opportunity to stick it in her back. As vulnerable as this made her, hers was a preemptive strike against betrayal. If he would turn on her, better that he did it now than wait until she’d traveled several hundred miles up the coast and had no other way out.

  “You still have a phone?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I can give my men your number?”

  “Yes, but if I don’t pick up, they shouldn’t leave a message.”

  “I will have them there tomorrow morning. Call me if there are issues.”

  “I’ll need you to clear some supplies out of customs for me.”

  “When do they arrive?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Do you have papers?”

  “If you have a photocopy machine.”

  The hawaladar called for his receptionist, and Munroe handed him Amber’s paperwork, documents that listed the hawaladar as the consignee and his company as the receiver. He shook his head in disapproval and she read the resignation on his face. “You’ve taken liberties,” he said.

  “Only small ones.”

  He turned one of the pages toward her and tapped the date. “Before we agreed to this venture jointly,” he said.

  “True.”

  He raised his eyebrows as if waiting for an explanation.

  “I’ll get the items myself if I have to,” she said. “Same as I would have if you hadn’t signed on for this. It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  As with the directions to the property that she’d just given, if he was going to screw her over, this was cheaper than dying.

  “Is there anything illegal mixed in with these items?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “It’ll be easier that way,” he said. He raised an eyebrow. “What are you getting out of this?”

  “I get the crew back.”

  The hawaladar’s lips twisted in a slow rejection of the idea and he shook his head as if deep in thought. “I stand to make at least twenty-five percent of the ship’s value,” he said, “one hundred percent if the owners fail to claim it and pay me. But even knowing this you’ve never asked me for a cut, only information and the supplies you’d need to capture the ship.” He paused and she stayed quiet. “I feel I am missing something,” he said.

  She smiled. “Would you like to cut me in?”

  He smiled back and shook his head.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “If all goes according to plan, you’ll get your ship and I’ll get everything I need.”

  He continued to glance over the bills of lading and then grunted approval. “You’ve done this before,” he said, and since it wasn’t a question, Munroe didn’t bother correcting him. His continuing to ascribe her actions to covert U.S. government involvement meant the less chance of him turning on her.

  MUNROE 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:

  Home is where you are and what you make of it. It’s a terrifying thing to taste happiness—to WANT—when the threat of losing what you want is always right around the corner. Trust me, I know. There’s no shame in that fear, Michael. You once said that you’re already dead and that every day is a debt waiting to be claimed. Maybe now it’s time to burn the chit, maybe now it’s time to choose to be happy, maybe now it’s finally time to live.

  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.

  I’m heading to Somalia in a few days. If I make it back, I will find you. As you say, maybe now it’s time to live. If I don’t turn up again in the next three or four weeks, then it’s time to open my will. Please tell Logan I love him and that I’m sorry. PS: I haven’t forgotten. I may have disappeared for a while, but always means always.

  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 use
d 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.

  IT 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.