Amber’s words choked off at the end, a tirade that might have kept on going if emotion hadn’t intervened. Munroe felt beyond the anger, felt the unshed tears and knew the pain, the desperation of losing forever the one she loved; breathed it in as the fear of her own past losses. Separated by half a continent, Amber would risk everything to pursue what she loved most, while Munroe ran from the same, yet they were really not so different.
“My phone was stolen five days ago,” Munroe said, “taken by a group of thugs acting on behalf of the people who hijacked the Favorita. They tried to kill me, and this is after they’d already killed a guy working for me. They’re after something that they think I took from the ship, and if you left a message for me, then they know your intentions. They’ll be waiting for you, and if they find you, I can pretty much guarantee that they’re going to hold you hostage or kill you as leverage to get me to hand over what they want, but I can’t do that.”
“What is it they want?”
“Something they think I took from the ship.”
“You already said that. What is it?”
“It’s beside the point.”
“Why can’t you just give it to them?”
“Things aren’t that simple.”
“How could they not be that simple? You obviously have it. Just give them what they want and we get Leo back.”
“No, you won’t get Leo back. You’ll get Leo killed. Leo is in Somalia. I’m in Kenya. The thing they think I have is in Kenya. Do you not see the issue?”
“Yeah,” Amber said, and if Munroe heard properly, there were more tears somewhere in the background, part of the same up-down emotional roller coaster that Amber had been riding since she first got the news.
“Look,” Munroe said, “I’m still working on finding out who they are and why they want it. If I can figure that out, then we’ll have far more than just bargaining power—we’ll have a way to play them and open up other possibilities to get the team off the Favorita.”
“Why bother?” Amber said, accusatory and angry again. “You already have what you want. Why were you in Djibouti, Michael? Were we just a cover for one of your jobs? A convenient way to chase after this thing that both you and the hijackers targeted on the Favorita?”
“What? No!” Munroe said. “Are you insane? This is not a James Bond movie. How could I possibly know six months in advance that Leo would take this job? And if not for him threatening to fire me if I didn’t go, I wouldn’t even have been on the ship to begin with.”
Amber blew out a long breath, was silent for a moment longer as if setting aside her sense of righteous betrayal to try to see the bigger picture. “How close did they get?” she said.
“To what?”
“To killing you.”
“Pretty damn close,” Munroe said, and left it at that. Recounting the details of the attack, relaying her current condition, would only lead to pity and sympathy and that was for the weak. “Whoever did this had the money and the smarts to use Somali pirates as a way to hijack the Favorita. They’ll come after you in a heartbeat if they know who you are,” Munroe said. “Watch your back.”
“But we’re not the ones who have what they want.”
“It won’t matter,” she said. “They’ll assume you’ll know where it is.”
“I can’t just abandon Leo.”
“I’m not asking you to, but what good will it do him if you go down to Somalia and get killed in the process? You ever think that maybe what he’s holding on to right now is the idea that you’re okay? That maybe fighting to get back to you is what’s keeping him alive and motivated? If you’re determined to kill yourself to go get him, then at least let me help you. I can figure stuff out and you have a better chance of staying alive.”
“You’ll do this to help Leo?”
“No,” Munroe said, though her exact thought was something closer to Fuck Leo. “I would do it for you,” she said, though that, too, wasn’t the whole truth, and after a pregnant pause she said, “You told me you’d be willing to put everything on the line to help him, right?”
“Yes.”
“What if that means going into debt?”
“Yes.”
“No matter how much?”
“What are you getting at, Michael? I’m not going to put a price on his head. I’ll do whatever it takes, but I don’t like all the open-ended questions.”
“There are other ways to get him out, but they’re not going to be free. I just need a little time to plan and sort through how to do it.”
“How much longer is a little time?”
“Three days,” Munroe said, and with that commitment the impact of having to function with a body unable to keep up with her mind became the burden of a deadline she wasn’t sure she’d be able to meet. “If I haven’t called you by then, I’m either dead or useless,” she said, “and then you’ll have to figure it out on your own.”
CHAPTER 24
Munroe left the Safaricom store to find clothes. Snickers followed in her wake, sidewalk merchants and street-store touts who noticed the bare feet and local attire, and she found them amusing; pickpockets were what concerned her. Every bit of money she had left was spread between her pockets, and here on these busy streets she was most at risk for having it taken from her.
She finally spotted a store, one street over, that sold imported clothes, and there found a pair of cargo pants that fit well enough and a couple of T-shirts that might, with minimal washing, last a couple of weeks. She changed into the new clothes before leaving, added a button-down for the layering, but without a shower the effect was something akin to dressing up a pig. Shoes and socks came next, and after that a pharmacy where she purchased soap and shampoo, antibiotic ointment, and another box of morphine. And when she’d acquired all that she could reasonably carry without straining, she found food, and then a taxi and asked the driver for a local hotel, a place that might possibly cater to the occasional backpacker but never the packaged tours.
The driver took her in the direction of the old city and turned off onto a dirt road just as pitted as the paved ones; pointed her toward a block-shaped four-story building with a hand-painted sign, bars on the windows, and wide deep green double doors. The lobby matched the outside, wasn’t much more than a shoddily built desk and an empty space, cooler than the outside heat due to the thick walls, but still hot and humid. The clientele were those who’d be in from the smaller cities: merchants who’d come to buy supplies from items fresh off the boat or perhaps pull their own wares out of customs at the port. Cell phones were abundant and languages cluttered, and many of the guests loitered in the lobby or around the front and in the small restaurants next door. If there were women here, Munroe didn’t see them.
Munroe paid for a room with its own shower. A boy in torn pants and slippers crafted from old rubber tires led her up a steep narrow stairwell to the third floor, an exhausting climb.
There were clean sheets on the bed, a fan, a little bit of space to walk from bed to bathroom, and a window that opened to the street below, where the noise of car horns and motorbikes lifted up with just enough breeze to keep the room from sauna-level heat. But the bathroom had a towel and running water and the water was hot, and this was why she’d come.
Munroe stood under the lackluster stream, hands to the wall, neck to the spray, allowing the heat to wash away the dirt and grime, and with the cleansing her body began to relax, and in the letting go came the memories and the emotion that she kept tamped down in favor of the rage and anger that pushed her toward survival. They bubbled up into pain worse than the fractures or the lacerations, and she didn’t fight them, allowed the flow to take the history and the scars, the losses and the impossible choices, and wash them away, and when they were gone, Munroe shut off the valve and reached for the towel.
Above the small sink was a cracked and worn mirror, enough to examine the wounds that she’d not yet seen. Her face was mottled, but not the worst that she’d experienced—
and probably looked better now that she was clean. The bruises on her shoulders and torso were extensive and deep, would be a long time in healing, and the laceration along her side would be another scar to add to the collection of slivers that crisscrossed her abdomen and back, mementos of the history that had taught her what it meant to fight for life.
She re-bound her chest with the same tape, dressed again, and lay back on the bed fending off the urge to sleep. The simple acts of making her way into town, getting the phone, shopping and showering, had depleted her energy, and the headache was back again. With the emotional clutter washed away and her thoughts running clearer, her mind circled around through the strategy at hand and then twisted dizzily along the scenarios and events that had brought her to this point, warped into a looping maze that had no beginning and no end.
She needed sleep.
Munroe took more ibuprofen and checked the time on her phone. Set the alarm. She could afford a few hours. The fan buzzed a hypnotic lure to the background of street noise against clean sheets and clean skin, and then one blink into the next the phone alarm pierced the melody and she lurched back into the rush of the world and the need for answers.
Feeling weak and hating the weakness Munroe took a taxi back up the highway. Exited several hundred meters before her destination and, on foot again, stopped to buy bananas and bread and bottled water from a small roadside stall, ate again as she walked.
Sunlight was fast fading when Munroe entered the compound, where she found Mary in the lean-to kitchen, squatting beside a charcoal fire and fussing over an aluminum pot. The woman glanced up when Munroe approached; smiled her trademark smile as if there was no reason to be concerned that she was here outside and not in the room with the captain where Munroe had paid her to be.
“He is sleeping,” Mary said, and Munroe nodded and forced a half smile. Handed the woman a loaf of bread and the bag of Gabriel’s borrowed clothes.
She expected to find the captain awake and working at his bonds, or missing entirely, but he was indeed as Mary had said, fully out and snoring in a way that only old men could.
Munroe set the remaining loaf and the bananas beside him and he didn’t open his eyes. She dropped a couple of morphine tablets into a water bottle and put it beside the food. Didn’t know if they’d dissolve but she didn’t have the energy to crush them. Swallowing a half-dose of morphine, she drank heavily to rehydrate, eased down onto the mattress, and sank hard into sleep. Woke to sunlight, and to a shaking movement: to the captain upright and shoveling food into his mouth.
Only a small portion of the loaf remained, and none of the bananas. He’d probably be rewarded with vomiting considering he hadn’t eaten solid food since she’d taken him off the ship. She lay watching until he registered her staring and turned to face her, eyes locked onto hers while he continued to feed bread into his mouth.
She stretched. Felt the aches a little less than yesterday and less still than the day before; rolled to the floor and to her knees, limped one room over, and confirmed that the house was empty. Opened the front door, peered out into the compound; and certain that they were as alone now as they could be, she pulled the handgun from the sofa cushion where she’d stashed it and carried the weapon back into the bedroom.
Standing in the doorway, she released the magazine, pushed it back into place. Pulled the slide, though her hand had barely enough grip to manage what should have been a straightforward maneuver. The captain stopped chewing and tracked her movements.
She walked to his side of the bed.
He put down the bread; swallowed his last bite.
She unhooked the rope that secured him to the wall and he blanched. “Where do we go?” he said.
“The latrine.”
“You’ll kill me there?”
“Only if you try to run,” she said.
Although she’d never seen him do it, he’d been using the empty water bottle to relieve himself, and considering that until today he’d eaten nothing after their flight from the Favorita, the bottle had been enough, but wouldn’t be for long; best to get him used to a new pattern.
Munroe nodded toward his makeshift urinal. “Might as well take that,” she said. “Get rid of it while you have the chance.”
The captain brushed crumbs off his chest and out of his beard. With hands still bound, he leaned over to pick up the bottle and twisted to get to his feet. His movement was agile for a man who’d been sedated and fed off an IV for a week, and Munroe took note of that; an assessment of what she’d be up against if he managed to run or take a swing. She motioned him toward the front door.
Rope in one hand, weapon in the other, she followed him out and took him around to the rear of the house, to the farthest edge of the property and another thatch-roofed wattle-and-daub structure. Its vertical sticks had been woven with horizontal ones and filled in with mud, and an open-hole doorway stood on the side that faced away from the houses and the kitchen. Inside was a dirt floor, a hole in the ground, the high-pitched whine of flies, and an unmistakable stench.
Munroe nodded the captain inward and let out enough slack so that she could keep hold of him without having to step in behind him. He sighed and walked to the middle. Even with his wrists secured he had the dexterity to dump the bottle and unzip his pants, and although it took him a while to get going, he did his thing and Munroe turned her shoulder to him, keeping an eye on him with her peripheral vision. When he’d finished, she nodded him to the nearby water bucket and scoop, where he washed his hands and then his face and neck, and she nudged him along and back into the house and to the bed, and when he was situated she said, “There are people looking for you.”
He inched farther into the mattress and grunted.
“They killed a boy working for me and then nearly killed me to find you.”
He lay back, put his bound hands behind his head, and studied the ceiling.
“They’re not the only deaths over this, either.”
She fastened the rope to the wall’s supporting beam, keeping it taut enough that he didn’t have much in the way of leverage to get off the bed, though if he got crazy he’d probably pull down the house.
“I kept you hidden and saved your life,” she said.
The captain gave her nothing, not even eye contact.
“Your crew and the armed men you hired are still on the Favorita,” she said, “under guard by pirates off the Somali coast—at least the ones that are still alive.” She paused to allow for a response, didn’t get one, and so stood over him so that he couldn’t avoid eye contact without admitting weakness. “The vessel is pretty much worthless,” she said. “The hijackers didn’t go through all that effort to track and target the ship for the ship’s sake. And it seems that for now nobody but you and your crew even know about your weapons cache down in the hold, so I can think of only one thing valuable enough to keep them hunting, and that’s you.”
He closed his eyes and rolled over, turning his back to her. She said, “When they didn’t get you, they abandoned the ship to the pirates, which creates a problem for me because now the pirates are demanding three million dollars for the release of the crew.”
More silence.
“I haven’t got three million dollars to spare,” she said, “but I do have the thing that started the hijacking in the first place, and that’s something I can use to barter for the crew.”
He rolled back over.
“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” she said. “I figure you don’t want to go to Somalia to be traded off in exchange for the ship and the crew, so if you can think of anything that would work as an alternative, now would be a really good time to start talking.”
“Where am I?” he said. “And who are you?”
“You’re in Mombasa, but the real question is Who are you?”
He grunted again, rolled over again, and she let him be. There was no point in attempting to interrogate him while she was weak and more exhausted than he. She’d get her ans
wers eventually; would crawl inside his head and figure him out, and she had tomorrow for that and the day after, but today she would leave him and pursue the last of the threads she’d left untouched in the city.
CHAPTER 25
Mary returned to the house late in the morning and Munroe greeted her with a smile and open friendliness. Accepted the offer of coffee and sat on the threadbare couch enduring the tedium of small talk until enough time had passed that she’d fulfilled social obligations and so offered another five thousand shillings if Mary would watch over the captain again.
She used the promise of real food and the last of the sedatives to put the captain under and stayed with him until his eyes closed. On the dirt floor, her back to the wall of sticks, she ordered and reordered pieces on a mental game board, fighting for checkmate against an invisible army and a king she couldn’t see while on her side she had but three pawns: Amber; the captain; and the hawaladar, who, because of his connections and business, could just as easily be one of the financial backers in the Favorita’s hijacking or, for that matter, responsible for Sami’s death.
Munroe left the compound for the highway, for another matatu into the city. This would be the last time. She’d already kept up patterns for longer than was prudent and every time she returned to her host family she increased the odds of bringing death with her. By tonight she’d have to have a better place to stash the captain.
Unwilling to squander what little strength she had, she stayed off her feet, took a taxi to the nearest Internet café, and there set out the chessboard again, pulling up satellite images of Mombasa. Hunted through the maps for Nehru Road and, finding her target, enlarged over Bishara Street, a smaller road to Nehru’s west, gauging rooftops and building shapes, judging distance and pattern, searching out the closest match to what she’d come up against in the hawaladar’s alleyway.
She paid for printouts of the maps and, with the pages in hand, left for sidewalks teeming with the daily hustle; made another trip by taxi, this time to the mouth of Bishara Street, and from there followed the narrow road, crowded with smells and heat, squeezing between humanity: measuring, comparing, judging in person and in real time what she had scouted online until she located the match and stopped in front of a white four-story colonial building that angled off the road and stretched back far enough that it abutted against and possibly encroached on the buildings on Nehru Road.
The Catch: A Novel Page 18