The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  To most in the Western world, Somalia was a single lawless piece of dirt where the battle of Mogadishu and warlords and pirates and starving children all blended into one big impoverished blemish on the map. But geopolitically, Somalia wasn’t one country, it was four or five.

  For Amber and Natan, the problems would begin on the other side of Somaliland, the northwesternmost territory, which operated autonomously as an unrecognized nation with its own government, laws, and currency, and a serene prosperity far removed from televised images of lawlessness; would begin after they’d crossed into the neutral zones that were neither Somaliland nor Puntland and then get worse when they crossed into Puntland itself, a territory that straddled the middle of Somalia and operated as an independent state without any formal declaration of separation.

  Puntland was where most piracy originated. The elected government was weak and ineffectual, and Bosaso, a city of over half a million, was its capital. Beyond the big city, the land area was vast and mostly empty, and deep down in the remote and barren heart of the territory, along the eastern coast, was the town of Garacad—silent c—where the Favorita anchored.

  Clan law kept a fragile order, but when assault rifles were more common than indoor toilets, when foreigners were viewed as a form of currency, two strangers without political connections and protection, who didn’t speak the language or understand the culture, had a solid chance of ending up as hostages or dead, no matter what kind of military training Natan had.

  The man with the boat arrived, cut his engine.

  The bartering took more than an hour, and once the price was settled, the transaction stretched on for another hour while the driver-slash-bodyguard-now-accountant left to retrieve the money and finally returned with a fat envelope that the boatman ferried out. And when Munroe was satisfied, he returned her to shore.

  Beneath the concrete pier, slightly shielded by the pilings, Munroe stashed and scattered half the money throughout her pockets. Then put on her socks, dry from the journey, and her still damp and water-damaged boots, and shoved the rest of the money down out of sight. She strode up the beach to the fronting streets, relatively quiet with the sleepy feel of a small coastal town.

  THERE WERE FEW cars, and pedestrian traffic was light. Spread between palm trees and overgrown flower bushes were one- and two-story buildings with the flat rooftops, wide arches, and porticoes of the Mediterranean, painted in the bright colors of the tropics, as if the town couldn’t quite make up its mind which continent it was built on.

  A tuk-tuk pulled up and puttered alongside her as Munroe walked the dirt shoulder, the driver soliciting a ride at the equivalent of a dollar per trip. He drove her to the edge of the city’s bus depot, a rut-gorged piece of dirt that clearly turned into a swath of muck and mud when it rained.

  Buses in a range of sizes were parked in and around the depot, and crowds of people milled about them. A blue-and-yellow minibus readied for departure, its top overladen with bundles, the inside packed beyond capacity. Children with shallow buckets filled with packaged food atop their heads shouted up at those seated inside. Coins passed down from the windows and goods passed up until the engine revved and the bus began the slow crawl over deep ruts, out and onto the road, and Munroe crossed and stepped out of its way.

  She wanted the first possible ride out of town, but based on the activity around her, the next bus to go would be a patchworked and beat-up monstrosity with its glass busted from a couple of windows and tires with little tread. If seats worn flat to the cushioning of wooden boards weren’t enough of a deterrent to keep her from taking the ride, the idea of multiple breakdowns along the way was.

  A tout told her of other buses that plied the route, fancier and labeled as luxury coaches, air-conditioned with toilets onboard, but they left from a different part of town, later in the day. Munroe opted for the middle ground: a minibus that appeared set to be second to leave. She figured it would be an hour, give or take, before it filled, so she paid for a seat and stayed out in the open air where she could watch the other buses in the off chance she’d chosen the wrong horse.

  She dialed Peter Muthui at Kefesa, thanked him for his time, and canceled the meeting.

  CHAPTER 17

  The return to Mombasa was a four-hour stop-start that dragged on far longer than the distance and potholes indicated it should, a journey segmented by unofficial delays as the driver augmented his wages by picking up passengers from among those waving down buses and trucks from the side of the road and stopping again to let them off at unmarked junctions or tiny villages where wattle-and-daub homes stood behind vegetable stands, hanging bush meat, and handcrafted furniture.

  Munroe dozed and woke with the rhythm and jolts, squished against the window frame, on a bench seat with one person too many, breathing in dusty diesel-filled air from the outside, which was better than the body and food odors from within. And when they neared Mombasa’s North Shore, she studied the strip of hotels and restaurants, not expecting to find anything worth seeing but watching all the same, while the conversation with Amber and the questions of the morning played out again in an endless maddening loop.

  There were priorities and there were priorities. Amber and Natan could drive down through Somalia in their pointless pursuit of Leo’s freedom and Munroe wouldn’t try to stop them, but if they were willing to throw away their lives, there were better ways to put them to use.

  The bus pulled into Mombasa just after one, and Munroe stepped out into another dirt depot, into the searing afternoon sun and the hubbub of motion and smell and noise that accompanied loading and unloading.

  She strode along the busy streets in the general direction of where she’d seen a cybercafé. Stepped into the cool air. She couldn’t stay long, only a few rushed minutes to do the double-checking she’d had no time for in Malindi, to run queries and confirm what Amber Marie had told her. In the corroboration, lack of sleep scraped at nerves already frayed, limiting her ability to analyze. The AIS still couldn’t locate the Favorita, there were no mentions of the weapons in the hold, and not even a hint that the ship had been taken in an armed conflict—nothing that would appear to indicate the attack had been anything other than a typical Somali hijacking.

  Clarity turned into self-doubt, making it difficult to sort reason from fantasy, and impossible to think sharply enough to pull the threads together into any semblance of tapestry. She shut down the browser, and then in a hurry opened it up again to check her e-mail. There were several messages waiting, but the one that caught her eye was the one least expected, and having spotted it, she couldn’t control the pounding inside her chest—and that made her angry. Mouse hovering over the icon for a moment, she clicked through.

  The e-mail came without a subject or greeting or signature, but she knew the address, and more, she knew the words:

  Samantha told me you contacted the office. You can’t know how happy it made me to know you’re still alive out there, wherever you are. Wish you would have given me a heads-up, I would have made sure to be near a phone so that she could patch you through. I’ve missed you, Michael. I still do. Home waits for you.

  That one paragraph hurt more than a knife to the gut, and still she read the e-mail several times before logging off. It wasn’t lost on her that Bradford had referred to Sam by her full name, but Munroe didn’t reply. Couldn’t. What was there to say? That she still loved him? That she was sorry and she was coming back? Why? So that she could hurt him and watch death swallow him the way it did everyone else she got close to?

  MUNROE PAID FOR her usage and made her way to the Aga Khan Hospital to answer the question that had been crawling through her head ever since Sami’s death. The conversation between the hijackers on the Favorita had told her that the captain’s picture had been shown around, that he was important to them for something, and in the aftermath of Sami’s murder, the same man whom she would just as easily have let die was now a prized asset.

  Munroe walked through the hospital g
ates, past the foyer and reception, and up the stairs. Found the captain immobile and placid on his bed, as he’d been when she’d last left him.

  She stepped inside and shut the door. Crossed to a straight-backed chair in the corner, carried it to the bedside, and sat there and studied the cypher, this mass of skin and bones for whom Sami had died. He was a man with a name and a ship and a history that cried out with secrets and lies; he had answers to the unknown, and whatever he knew, Munroe wanted.

  She reached for his hand and touched cool, dry skin. Pinched his thumb for a reaction and got nothing. His chest rose and fell with methodical breathing, the body’s autonomic nervous system continuing on while his mind lit up a vacancy sign. Munroe envied him the luxury of his bed, the quiet and solitude, the lack of pain and burden that unconsciousness must bring.

  The minutes ticked on and in the silence his face became the object upon which she focused, wrestling with the facts as she knew them, turning them, twisting them, molding them into a plausible, hole-filled scenario that made the most sense. Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation with the fewest moving pieces, and this man was at the center of it. She played the scenario against itself. Unfolded and rewrapped, but she didn’t have enough to take what she knew and use those pieces to avenge Sami or save Victor.

  Munroe stood and stared down at the captain. She had just two days before she was obligated to collect him and was tempted to take him with her now as a preemptive maneuver against those who would try to steal him from her, but until she’d established whether or not her own hotel and identity had been compromised, she had nowhere to put him, had no guarantee that in pulling him from this hiding place she wouldn’t gift him directly to those who’d killed to find him, and she had no way to mind him and hunt at the same time.

  Munroe dragged the chair back to its corner, left the room, and jogged back down the stairs. She would win, would figure this out, would find some sense of closure for herself, for Sami, and possibly for Amber. She wouldn’t allow a nameless, faceless opponent to steal her catch—not after what he’d cost thus far, not until she figured out who he was and what he was worth and how well she could use him to barter for what she wanted.

  Munroe stopped at reception on her way out and warned the hospital staff not to allow the captain any visitors, and when the response was casual indifference, as if they’d seen crazy people before and knew how to humor them, she described in graphic detail what potential disaster might follow if they didn’t listen. Then, having done the best that she could to keep her loot safe for the next day or two, Munroe left the hospital for Nehru Road and the hawaladar.

  CHAPTER 18

  The same bodyguard stood in front of the wall when Munroe entered the alley, and this time she approached with the casual air of an old friend. Unhooked the knife case from her waistband and walked toward him with the heel extended. When she was within a couple of feet, he reached out and took it from her and tossed it on the ground behind him.

  The man in the doorway watched with a barely concealed smile. Munroe nodded and gave him a half grin, and when she approached, he didn’t hesitate as he had the first time, rather opened and motioned her forward into the hallway with its bare and solitary light-bulb.

  Inside, the way to the hawaladar was blocked by the man on the stool, and instead of ushering her on toward the next door, he had her wait. Munroe slid down the wall to the floor beside him, and as the minutes wore on, the tin-topped and unventilated hallway’s air, stifling and thick, exacerbated the fatigue and lulled her slowly into slumber. A creak at the far end of the hall jerked her awake.

  Ten seconds or ten minutes, Munroe didn’t know. She pressed her palms to her eyes and pushed back the disorientation, stood to keep from succumbing again to the cotton stuffing inside her head. The door to the hawaladar’s office opened and a woman dressed fully in black, eyes the only visible part of her body, stepped out into the hall. Was halfway to the exit when the man on the stool nodded Munroe onward.

  As she’d done the first time she entered the hawaladar’s office, Munroe took a chair from the side of the room and dragged it to the front of the desk. She sat and he said, “You don’t look well.”

  “I haven’t slept much in the past couple of days.”

  Tipped back in his chair, arms crossed, he studied her a moment and then reached for a ledger on a nearby shelf. Opened to the pocket into which he’d placed her thousand dollars and withdrew not half but all of the bills. Counted them out onto the desk like a banker exchanging currency and slid them toward her.

  “Your money,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Somali financing paid for the hijacking?”

  “You said you’d take the money and be on your way,” he said.

  She picked up the bills one by one, slowly, dramatically, to buy time, because no matter what his words said, there was something in his tone and in his body language that told her the conversation was far from over.

  “It’s hard to imagine you haven’t heard anything.”

  “I learned enough to know that I don’t want to keep asking questions.”

  She tapped the long edges of the bills on the desk to stack them and, avoiding eye contact, said, “Without specifics, tell me at least, was the hijacking financed by foreign investors?”

  The hawaladar answered with a single nod that clarified what Munroe had suspected since the night of the firefight. She said, “And I suppose the financiers weren’t your typical Yemeni or Kenyan venture capitalists.”

  “You would guess correctly,” he said, and with this validation the puzzle pieces pulled more tightly together.

  Munroe placed the bills neatly in front of him again and tapped them.

  “I hired a boy,” she said. “Took him on as an askari to watch my boat. I returned to the pier last night to find his throat slit. They left him out on the sand, dumped like garbage. Take the money, please,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know much.”

  “But you’ve heard the rumors and the gossip.”

  “Well, yes, there’s plenty of that.”

  She nudged the bills closer to him.

  “I don’t need the money,” he said.

  “It’s a matter of principle.”

  He nudged the bills back. “So is this. I’ll tell you what I’ve heard. Not because of your askari and not for your money. I’ll tell you because I don’t like what I hear. Maybe you’re in a position to do something with the information, maybe not, but either way I don’t side with the pirates. They bring shame and a stain on my country and they are haram.”

  Haram. A repeat of his thoughts the first time: forbidden; against the tenets of Islam. “This hijacking is something else,” he said. “Scapegoating, I think, and Somalis have had far too many years of that—as if the world thinks we’re their latrine, that they can shit on us and walk away.”

  She sighed and said, “So if I’ve pieced this together properly, instead of dumping nuclear waste along your coast, or raiding your waters for fish, this time the foreign interests have used Somalis to hijack a ship carrying something they wanted, and now with their tracks covered, the foreigners who started the mess will simply disappear while the blame for the hijacking remains placed at the feet of piracy.”

  The hawaladar’s mouth opened a half inch. “If you knew this,” he said, “why did you come to me under the pretense of needing information?”

  “I only hypothesized,” she said, and when he eyed her accusingly and suspicion cast a dark veil over his face, she added, “I was on the ship, I pay attention, and I’ve learned a lot from my own contacts within the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Then why are you here?” he said.

  “Because I want to know who’s behind the hijacking, and you’re in a position to learn things that none of my contacts know.”

  “What would you do with this information if you had it?”

  “Probably use it to find and kill a few people.
”

  “Somalis?”

  “I’m after the foreign investors. Maybe a few pirates depending on what happens with the crew aboard the ship. It’s hard to say, but I’m world-weary enough to know that nothing is black and white.”

  “You’re not CIA?”

  “No.”

  “Armed forces of any kind?”

  “No.”

  “Connected to any government?”

  “No.”

  “Vigilante justice?”

  “Something more like that.”

  He sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “That kind of knowledge is relative.”

  “Now you’re playing games,” he said, and his expression hardened.

  Munroe slipped slowly back from the desk, away from the bills, shrank as far into the chair as space would allow so that she would appear smaller and be less of a presence to interrupt his thought process.

  “There are Somalis involved,” he said. “Of course there are, nothing like this would be possible without local cooperation.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” she said, and when the resultant silence became uncomfortable, she refused to break it. Everything in his posture, in the guarded words he offered, and in what he left unspoken, said that he hated those who’d done this more than he distrusted her.

  The seconds ticked on, and at last the hawaladar leaned forward. “There was the promise of a lot of money,” he said. “The rumor comes to me thirdhand, possibly further removed than that, but I’ve heard it from two different people, so you can take what you want from it. I make no promises.”

  Munroe nodded and said, “Go on.”

  “Supposedly, about three or four weeks ago, the faction out of Eyl was approached by an intermediary offering investment for a hijacking.” He paused, backtracking. “Do you know much about the state of piracy today?”