The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  When Munroe exited the bank, one of the men from the wharf picked up his wheedling, pressed after her between old stone buildings and streets only wide enough for bicycles and donkeys. He gave up when they reached the town’s fort square and she’d still not acknowledged him, and off this open market area on another narrow street, where signs in Arabic and English spanned the few feet from building to building, Munroe found the Internet café.

  She could have used the computer at the hotel but old habits and watching her back wouldn’t allow her to work where she was vulnerable. Answers to the easy questions came fast. She’d come ashore on the major island of an archipelago, less than 70 nautical miles from the Somali border—had another 180 to go to get to Mombasa. She could cut the journey by half if she was willing to take a flight from Manda Island across the channel, but she wasn’t in a hurry and didn’t see the point in sacrificing the boat, and the doctor had been right in his assessment, going by road wasn’t worth the risk with or without the captain.

  The harder questions, those about the Favorita, took longer. Queries on the ship turned up nothing about the owners or the charterer, much less the captain, whose name she didn’t know. Neither were there reports or notices by any of the newsgroups or antipiracy watchdogs within Somalia who would be the first to report the ship’s arrival once it showed up offshore in any of the pirate-haven coastal cities—assuming the ship showed up at all. There was always the possibility that the propeller stoppage had damaged something mechanical and that repairs, if they could even be done at sea, would take time, or that the hijackers had only been after the armaments and without interest in the ship itself, and the crew was already dead on a deserted vessel.

  The obvious stated that whoever expected delivery of the armaments had decided to take them without paying for them, but easy assumptions were often wrong. Answers to why the pirates had specifically wanted the captain alive and had gone to the trouble to track down the Favorita at night would never be discovered in databases and by Internet sleuthing. These were specifics found only on the ground, blending, mingling among those who knew: the type of information hunt upon which she’d built her career.

  None of it mattered. The Favorita was no longer her problem.

  But there was Amber.

  Munroe sighed. Typed in the URL for Capstone Security Consulting, clicked for the blog. The thought of calling Bradford, of letting him know that she was still alive and hadn’t abandoned the ties that bound them, played itself around inside her head.

  The most recent post was a week old already: news links that Capstone’s clients and potential clients would find relevant, and security updates to the various regions in which the private security teams worked. The clues were hidden gems among press release–type details. He was in Afghanistan again, though there was nothing to say how long he’d be away this time.

  Munroe cleared the history and temporary files. Paid for the computer time and slipped back into the narrow street, crowding between bodies and sidestepping donkey excrement and the sewer runoff that flowed in gutters toward the ocean.

  Mohamed was at the boat and he stayed behind while Sami accompanied Munroe to the outside of town, where the streets were dirt and far wider, and they could hire out a donkey and its owner. They hauled the plastic containers off the boat and carried them to purchase more fuel. Moved on to food supplies, water, and sailcloth: simple transactions made one by one, merchant by merchant, that took most of the day.

  They returned to the hospital and Munroe asked for help in finding the doctor and then sat waiting on the concrete for a full thirty minutes before he arrived.

  “You’re still in Lamu,” he said, and she stood to shake his hand.

  He took hers with a tired smile.

  “How’s the patient?” she said.

  “His vitals are much better, hydration much better, though he could use another day of fluid.”

  “I’m leaving for Mombasa in the morning. Can he travel?”

  The doctor shrugged and Munroe didn’t press.

  “He’s also showing some signs of response,” the doctor said.

  “He’s conscious?”

  “We would say a minimally conscious state,” he said, raising and lowering his hand to mimic a wave. “The reactions come and go, up and down, small here and small there. No talking yet, no direct response to requests.”

  “But he might wake up completely?”

  “It’s certainly possible.”

  The unconscious captain had caused no trouble, but when he finally woke, if his memory functioned as it should, the fight on the Favorita would be where he’d left off and there was no guarantee he’d view being pulled off the ship as a good thing.

  “Sedatives will keep him more comfortable until I can get him into another hospital,” she said.

  The doctor eyed her just long enough to state that he wasn’t an idiot. Then, with a sigh that said he was indifferent, he pulled a notebook from his pocket and began to write.

  CHAPTER 10

  The same four people who had been in the captain’s room last night were still there, the coughing just as bad and the smell of decaying body fluid a whole lot worse. The captain was in his bed as Munroe had expected, wearing the same clothes he’d come in with, eyes closed, mosquito net down, IV hooked into his arm with the pack completely drained.

  All of the supplies she’d paid for yesterday were gone; pieces most likely pilfered one at a time by family members of the sick, if not the hospital staff themselves. Theft was the way of the continent; anything not welded in place was so likely to disappear that even gas caps and engine lids were often padlocked shut.

  Munroe went through the multiple steps to reprocure the items on the doctor’s list as well as extras and, because she wanted it, also paid for the sheet on the captain’s bed.

  She returned to the room long enough to detach the empty IV bag and hook up another, then left for the boat with everything else she’d purchased. She handed the supplies up to Sami, climbed in after them, dried off her feet, put the boots back on for the umpteenth time. Sami said, “I go with you to Mombasa.”

  Munroe paused and looked up. “Do you know Mombasa?”

  “I know good,” he said. “My home in Malindi.”

  Munroe recognized the city name from the research earlier in the day: a tourist-based town about a hundred kilometers north of Mombasa—close enough that Sami had the potential to be helpful, and he, apparently interpreting her contemplation as doubt, added, “I watch boat for you, give good price.”

  She finished lacing her boots and glanced up again. He smiled, confident and cocky. She liked the kid. He’d proven trustworthy and reliable, hadn’t stolen anything from her yet, and it would be helpful to have him as an extra set of hands.

  “What about Mohamed?” she said.

  “Mohamed two wives here, he stay.”

  She stood and stepped across the boat for the bench. If she planned to keep the boat running, she would have to hire a full-time guard for it in Mombasa anyway. “I won’t pay two thousand shillings a day,” she said. Paused and returned his cocky smile. “That’s Lamu-only price.”

  Sami grinned, then laughed. He interpreted for Mohamed, who also laughed, and still smiling, Sami nodded. “Five hundred shilling for day,” he said. “Mombasa price.”

  Munroe stretched out her hand and Sami shook it. The offer was still overpriced, but she needed him loyal, and although a good paycheck didn’t mean he wouldn’t eventually steal from her, it notched the possibility down slightly.

  “Have Mohamed stay with the boat tonight,” she said. “Go get whatever you need. We leave before the sun. If you’re not here, I travel without you.”

  “I be here.”

  “Bring a flag with you,” she said.

  “Flag?”

  Munroe used impromptu sign language to indicate what she wanted: a Kenyan flag to fly aft so that on the small chance they encountered officials on the water, there’d be less incl
ination to stop the boat and check for papers.

  MUNROE FOUGHT FOR sleep throughout the night and, unable to find it, finally rose in the early-morning dark. Showered off the sweat again, which in the humidity tended to collect as a permanent layer, pulled down the two hand-washed shirts she’d hung before going to bed, and then redressed, button-down over the T-shirt, protecting her skin, shielding her gender.

  She tossed the last of her things into her bag, pulled a pillow off the bed, debated calling Amber Marie then opted against it. Without any news to add, the conversation would turn on itself with long lingering silences, and Munroe didn’t have the desire or the emotional energy to be Amber’s life support.

  At the front desk she traded payment and the room key for her passport, and when she carried her stuff down to the boat, she brought the pillow. Sami was already at the pier when she arrived, and together the three of them returned to the hospital to collect the captain.

  They beached the boat, trudged past the reception desk and down the open breeze-filled hall, and when Munroe stepped across the threshold, the captain, who’d been unconscious for more than two full days, turned to face her and opened his eyes, expressionless and unblinking.

  She stepped closer, waved a hand in front of his face, got nothing, and gradually his lids shut again.

  Munroe injected the sedatives into the IV tube, waited a few moments, then untucked the bottom sheet from the bed and showed the boys how to use the sheet as a sling to carry him out.

  The captain stank. She didn’t want to touch him, didn’t want the boys to touch him either. With effort they got him and the IV attachment into the boat, and when they had him situated under the makeshift sailcloth tent, Munroe put the pillow under his head and, with the duct tape she’d taken from Djibouti, strapped him to it. This would do better than her vest at protecting him, though not by much.

  She balled up the soiled sheet and threw it onto the sand. Someone would find it. Wash it. Use it. Not even disposable containers meant for single use in the West would go to waste here. Munroe paid Mohamed and sent him off. She attached the flag that Sami had brought, and without any fanfare they began the slow journey down the channel, back to the open ocean, back to the full throttle of the engine’s cry, where time and monotony would allow her mind to wander freely and the puzzle of the captain and the Favorita to become the chew toy that would keep the demons quiet and the memories at bay.

  THIS CLOSE TO the equator daylight began and ended at nearly the same time year-round, making it possible to pace and predict by the shades on the horizon, and so the rise of the sun in its arc across the sky marked the progression of time and the concept of distance and brought, with its rising, the heat.

  In between the long spells of silence Sami pointed out markings on shore and narrated a travelogue that tied in with his own history, and after he’d interrupted her thoughts for the fifth or sixth time, Munroe said, “How many languages do you speak?”

  “I have five.”

  “Perfectly?”

  “Three perfect,” he said. “I have Swahili, my mother Kikuyu, my father Kalenjin all perfect. And I have English, Arab, and some words here there for more.”

  “Good,” she said, and scooted slightly on the bench. Patted it to indicate he should move in closer. “Come talk to me in Swahili.”

  “Then you cannot understand,” he said.

  “You can interpret,” she said. “Tell me the story twice.”

  He smiled again, his cocky smile, and she liked him all the more for it. He sat next to her and throughout the hours recounted one tall tale after the next, first in Swahili and then with equal animation and flourish in English, each story growing longer, larger, and more animated as his audience prompted and questioned. Through snippets and flashes, between water and food and the occasional reapplication of sunscreen she’d picked up in a tourist shop in Lamu, Munroe learned his family’s history, of his many siblings and half siblings, his education—or lack thereof—and his adventures on the water as a fisherman that had started when he was ten.

  By the time they passed Malindi in the early-afternoon hours, Munroe could feel the syntax, the grammar, the resonance of patterns of the country’s lingua franca beginning to form, could feel the tension relaxing now that the key to the aural lock had been handed over, and soon enough, over time and of its own accord, her ability to speak would grow and she would rapidly become more and more fluent.

  This same poisonous gift—this savantlike ability to visualize the way the words configured into shapes—had defined her life and turned her into what she was now. Without language, there would have been no gunrunning, without the gunrunning no nights in the jungle fighting off the worst of human predators, without the nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed and the need to kill that had marked her every moment, waking and sleeping, since.

  THEY REACHED THE outer stretches of Mombasa in the late afternoon. Beach houses and large hotels spread out between palm trees and lush manicured greenery, and the rate of sea traffic seemed fast-paced and hectic after the idyllic slow quiet of Lamu.

  The beach shallows sloped out far into the ocean, and jetties and docks were plentiful. Munroe chose one at random, tied off, and then utilized the easier and less attention-garnering option of sending Sami on ahead to discover whom the pier belonged to and if space could be rented. In his absence, she knelt to untape the captain from the pillow, was overwhelmed by the strength of his stench, and held back the gag reflex.

  Sour body odor and perpetual decay were part of the pungent bouquet that made up the sub-Saharan landscape, but the body fluid and days without bathing, amplified by the humidity and the hours in the sun, had turned his stink into something else altogether. With only one IV pack left she needed to get him to a hospital soon, and there was no way to take him into a city like this.

  Munroe emptied a plastic container, dipped it over the side, and dumped the water over the captain, and when he didn’t react, she did it again and again until he was thoroughly soaked and the runoff took with it the harshest of the smell.

  Sami returned to the pier with a local watchman, an askari as Sami called him, a man Munroe pegged as in his early fifties, who wore a worn-out button-down shirt, pants two sizes too large, and shoes made from tire rubber, and carried a handmade baton as a symbol of authority. The askari negotiated with Munroe for the price of berthing, money that would go directly into his own pockets—or more likely a beer bottle—but as long as it kept the boat from being disturbed for a night or two she was fine with that. She paid the few hundred shillings he wanted and then, with business settled, pulled her pack and vest off the boat and left Sami to stand guard over the captain and her supplies.

  On Mombasa’s North Shore, the hotels were larger, more spread out, covered far more length of beach apiece than they had in Shela, and in the search for a place that suited her purpose, Munroe walked a kilometer or two.

  She settled finally on a hotel that was a cross between one of the larger block-style monstrosities and the smaller boutique locations and, in a repeat of what had happened in Lamu when she’d come strolling in after the hard journey at sea, hotel patrons stopped and gawked. She passed through to the front desk and languages started up behind her.

  HER ROOM WAS on the first floor of a three-story building, one of five in the complex, at the far end of a wide tiled hallway and with a porch that opened to the manicured gardens and the ocean. Munroe drew the curtains, though they didn’t close completely. Turned the air conditioner down a notch. Eventually she’d shut it off altogether because the cool air would only make it harder to stay adjusted to the climate.

  She dumped her belongings on the bed and pulled the irreplaceables from the vest and the backpack. The toilet tank, a ziplock bag, and duct tape became her storage for the handgun, and the bottom pockets of the legs on the bamboo bedframe safekeeping for the money and documents that she didn’t want to carry. Munroe stayed long enough to rinse off the ocean
spray and change her clothes, and then with the help of the front desk staff called for a taxi, and the driver took her to the hotel that fronted the pier where she’d docked. She instructed him to wait and then walked through the hotel grounds back to the boat.

  Until she knew the area better, had gotten friendly with the eyes of the beach—the askaris and the beach boys who spent each day hawking wares and attempting to separate tourists from their money, those who felt the pulse of their own strip of sand—she couldn’t leave the boat alone. Not unless she was willing to return to a stripped-down empty shell. So she waited with the boat and sent Sami to find a boy who’d be willing, for a small fee, to help carry the captain.

  He returned fifteen minutes later with two men about his age.

  They got the still damp and stinking captain from the boat and to the pier, carried him up the beach to a dirt track that ran between houses and hotels, and finally to the coast highway—if it could be called a highway—where the taxi waited.

  She didn’t need to know the city to understand that the viable options for medical facilities narrowed into two choices. Easiest and cheapest would be a government hospital, which, for whatever modern medical equipment it might boast, was still the place to take the captain when she was ready for him to die. In a city this size there would have to be private facilities, smaller and more expensive, that catered to expatriates and tourists and the local population of rich: The doctors would treat first and bill later and save her the hassle of making a daily visit to a pharmacy to replace stolen items or to buy whatever the captain might need next, and this is what she asked for.

  THE HIGHWAY TOWARD the city was a two-lane patchwork of asphalt, potholes, and worn-off edges, and in both directions cars, dilapidated trucks, and brightly painted vans blew by in a treacherous dance of road share with overladen bicycles, pedestrians, and animals. An orange spray-painted van with metallic stickers on the rear window spelling TOTAL INSANITY crossed into oncoming traffic, cut off the taxi, then rushed to the side of the road to let off passengers.