The words came from a group of four men, two of whom she placed at early to mid-twenties, a third who was possibly late thirties or early forties, and the last in his fifties at the least, though possibly older. Clothing and hair and the four-day scruff on the younger two said civilians, but their posture and mannerisms and interaction said they were, or had all once been, military of some sort.
Munroe took smaller bites and, over a water-filled wineglass, studied them, five tables down with a couple from Uganda in between—enough distance that the only way to hear the conversation would be to strain: body language that would betray her before she was ready.
Munroe signaled the waiter, spoke to him in Swahili when he arrived. Glanced at the table where her targets ordered drinks and slid a five-hundred-shilling note onto the table. “I want to know what rooms they stay in,” she said. “If you can get me that, then this is for you.”
“How soon do you need this?” he said.
“Before my meal is finished.”
“I will see,” he said, and wandered off, and after another few moments of work he exchanged conversation with another staff member, and from there he moved out of sight. She took bites even smaller still and spaced further apart between longer sips of water while the body language of her target table continued to tell her a story, one in which the leader separated from the followers and said that the man in his late thirties was the boss.
When at last, even after the delay, she’d finished her meal and the waiter had still not returned, she ordered dessert and then after that coffee, prolonging the legitimacy of her stay, listening as she could to what few words of Russian wafted in her direction from men who seemed in no hurry to go anywhere, and who ordered drink after drink and slowly became louder.
The conversation was lighthearted: not a celebration but the relaxedness she would otherwise have ascribed to people on business that had been completed. If they were concerned about finding the captain, they certainly didn’t show it.
She was on her second cup of coffee, losing patience and ready to move again, when her waiter returned. With the bill for the meal he included a slip of paper with four consecutive room numbers and beside each number a last name.
Munroe slipped payment for the meal onto the small dish on the table and a five-hundred-shilling tip on top of that, and with the waiter beaming a smile, she left the restaurant. She had time. Not a lot. Maybe enough to get through one room before the meal upstairs ended.
She took the elevator to the lobby. There were a handful of guests scattered among the seats and passing through, but none at the front desk. Munroe continued toward the staff, who, caught up in conversation, paid no attention to those who came and went.
Dressed as she was, she marked the male as her target and hands on the counter waited for his attention. When at last he stood and faced her, she smiled, a long, friendly smile, and said, “You’re unlucky to have the night shift.”
He smiled back.
“What time do you finally get to leave?” she said.
“At five.”
“And then a two-hour walk home?”
“You know how it is?”
She nodded. “I’ve spent a lot of time here—have many friends who do the same. I lost my room key,” she said.
He smiled again and asked for her name and room number and she quoted from the paper the waiter had given her.
“Do you have your passport?”
“It’s in my room,” she whispered.
He grimaced and hesitated, and she slid a twenty-dollar bill over the side of the counter and dropped it toward him. “You can take the bus for a few days,” she said. “I don’t want to make complications over a key—it’s not a big thing.”
He gave a nervous peek over his shoulder, confirmed that his deskmate had not seen the exchange, and then went through the process of magnetizing a keycard and handed it over with another smile, thanking the Russian upstairs by name.
She left for the next floor up, for the room she’d chosen at random off the list of four, and paused in the hall listening for voices, for the boisterousness that inevitably followed one too many drinks after a good meal.
In the ensuing hush she used the keycard to slip inside.
The room was smaller than hers: one bed instead of two, and it had been slept on or used as a bench since the maid had last put it back together. She perused the bedroom and bathroom, scanned through the many toiletries and trinkets left out on countertops instead of packed away in the suitcase that lay open on the floor, as if this person had gotten comfortable spreading out, the lived-in way of someone who didn’t expect to have to leave on short notice.
She nudged among the items in the open suitcase and then flipped through the clothes hanging in the small closet. Stopped at the sight of the banana clip on the shelf, the AK-47 magazine that had been inside her backpack; picked it up and found familiar markings, and she knew. She’d found her target.
CHAPTER 29
Munroe searched through the rest of the room for more, but there was nothing else that belonged to her. Ear to the door, she listened for movement in the hallway and, in response to the silence, opened it a sliver and then slipped out for round two. Called Amber along the way.
“Things are set on this end,” Munroe said. “Are you ready to move?”
“Made the last purchase yesterday and got the tickets. E-mailed you the flight information and a few other details. You didn’t get it?”
“I haven’t had a chance to check.”
“We’ll be there in three days. Have you made any progress? Do you know anything more about Leo?”
“I’ve learned a few things,” Munroe said. “I’ll update you when you get here. I’ve got it under control.”
“Just tell me now.”
“There’s nothing about Leo, Amber, nothing that will help you sleep. It’s just strategy and tactics and it can wait.”
“Okay.” Amber sighed and then ended the call.
Munroe took the stairs back up to her own room, a temporary detour from the evening’s plans in order to inject another round of disequilibrium into the captain. Gabriel had his back to the wall and the stick in his lap when she entered.
By appearances the captain was asleep, though it could have been a ruse. Leaning over him, Munroe smacked his face.
He lurched and tried to take a swing. “Dobroe utro,” she said.
He twisted away from her, confused, glanced toward the window, where the sky was still dark. “Why?” he said.
“Your Russian friends want to see you.” She tugged on his elbow as if to hustle him from bed, the movement made to keep him off balance while she calculated his response and fear levels.
He jerked away. “What do they want?”
“I have no idea, though I’m sure you do.”
She reached for him again, and he scooted farther away. She motioned him up and he stared at her unblinking.
“Please don’t push me to violence,” she said. “One way or the other you’re leaving this room, and I’d like to deliver you in one piece.”
He still didn’t move, so she straightened and sighed. “I’m tired of putting up with your escape attempts. It’s better for everyone this way.”
“Not better for me.”
“You shouldn’t have been such a pain in the ass—maybe a little more forthcoming when I asked you for help in solving this the easy way.”
“They kill me,” he said.
She motioned him up again. “They didn’t go through the trouble of hijacking the Favorita just to kill you. If all they wanted was you dead, they would have blown the ship up.”
He responded with silence and an empty expression that said he disagreed but wasn’t willing to offer an explanation.
“Come on,” she said. Measured his lack of response against how far she’d have to push before he called her bluff or caved and finally started talking. When, after a moment of waiting, he still refused to move, Munroe turned to G
abriel, who’d sat observing from one bed over and said, “I’ll need your help. We’re going to get him to the elevator and down two floors.” She produced the keycard given to her at the front desk, room number scrawled across the sleeve; held it so the captain couldn’t help but see it. “They gave me the key to where we’re supposed to deliver him.”
The captain flinched again, and when Gabriel stood to help get him off the bed, he took a swing with bound wrists and clenched fists. Gabriel dodged back.
“You won’t take me,” the captain said.
“We will,” Munroe said, and she reached for him again, and when he lunged and tried to hit her, she struck back, elbow into the side of his head, base of her palm up under his jaw. He was knocked back against the wall with enough force that he stopped struggling and lay still, blinking up at her.
She swore in a low growl, turned her back to him, and stalked to the bathroom, where she could breathe through the hurt that the force and movement had brought on. Hands to the sink, head tipped toward it, she panted and hoped to hell that she hadn’t just put the captain back into whatever head trauma he’d so recently come out of. Minutes ticked on and the hurt subsided, and when at last she returned to the room, the captain was spitting blood and Gabriel was on the second bed again, staring at the ceiling with a smirk that said he’d taken matters into his own hands.
“Aleksey Petrov,” the captain said. “Alexander. Alexander Petrov.”
And Munroe said, “Excuse me?”
“Is information for you,” he said and, hands raised to his mouth, swiped blood off with his wrist. “Maybe you take some time to find it, maybe postpone a little this meeting with new friends.”
She glanced at Gabriel. “Keep watch on him,” she said, and left the room.
So he’d given her a name—not one on the waiter’s list—toyed with her just enough to send her hunting, to buy what he thought was time. The stress in his voice, his anxiety, told her that whatever this name meant, it wasn’t a red herring.
It was too late in the day to return to an Internet café, and she wouldn’t risk using the hotel’s business center. She’d start chasing shadows in the morning.
The upstairs restaurant was empty and Munroe passed through to the pool and cabana bar, where music filled the rooftop and guests stood laughing and drinking in small clusters. She spotted one of the Russians among them, bought a drink, a prop to play with through the night, and wound her way to the edge of where he stood, avoiding eye contact and moving in from the side so that she never faced him directly and never encroached on his personal space.
He was one of the younger two, chatting in broken English with a German woman who seemed to be twice his age and whose English wasn’t a whole lot better. Ham-handed come-ons and crude flirtatiousness passed between them in botched attempts at communication, and when the Russian, frustrated with the inability to communicate, said a word in his native tongue, Munroe took the opening. Face still turned toward the pool, she spoke loudly enough that they would hear; interpreted for him, Russian to German.
Both of them turned, annoyed. She smiled. Raised a hand and said, “Sorry.” And so it went as their conversation continued, another word interpreted here, another there, until gradually the ice thawed and she became part of the conversation, and eventually the sieve through which the conversation strained, and at last the focus of the conversation so that by the time the evening had ended the other woman had wandered off, and the Russian had turned his aggressive hitting toward Munroe. She dodged the coarseness with a smile and an apology for an early morning at work and the promise of another evening. He grabbed a napkin and wrote his name and phone number, handed it to her with a verbal invitation to a party the following night, which she accepted.
She left him standing alone and glanced back once to wink, and walked away smiling. She’d found the Sergey over whom the man in the alley had sputtered blood bubbles; had already been in his room, could get back in if she wanted, now with or without the key.
ALONE IN THE quiet of her bathroom, Munroe stripped out of the trappings of femininity, let the hot water run long, and washed away the remnants from her hair and off her face, processing the conversation of the evening and the encounter with her first target until the pieces had been properly categorized. Dressed in the clothes she’d previously worn. Needed to find a way to get them clean, though at the moment smelling good was the least of her worries, and in this environment she blended in with every stink around her. She swallowed another dose of ibuprofen to soften the edges and lay beside the captain, counting on his movement to keep her from falling into deep sleep, yet exhaustion overtook her and when she woke the sun was high in the sky.
Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner running, the city noise from the streets reached up from below, life in full swing, gone on without her. Disoriented and sleep drunk, her body’s protests louder than when she’d first lain down, she groaned and dropped her legs over the bed, rolled to get to her feet. In the bathroom she ran cold water over her head and, when finally fully awake, examined her bruises and tugged gently on the stitches that ran down her side to encourage them in their falling out and ease the itching. Then, already late for a day in which she had no time to spare, she paid Gabriel for yesterday’s work and left the hotel for the hot and muggy morning, the belching dust and traffic, for Internet access a few blocks over and the name that the captain had used to pay for another night of captivity.
It took digging to uncover the trail. The name was common enough that it turned up more hits than she had time to sort through, but she stayed with news coverage, preferring the botched autotranslated versions to the tedium of trying to translate Russian Cyrillic into something her faulty wiring could interpret into sound. Within the mixed phraseology were scant details that led to clues—although clues to what, exactly, was difficult to say: Alexander Petrov, if she’d found the right Petrov, was a recently appointed first deputy minister with the Russian Ministry of Defense: the first connection she’d come across that even remotely tied the weapons in the Favorita’s hold to any other part of the hijacking or killings: Russian made, Russian sourced, the munitions that Leo had likely given his life for were the one puzzle piece all the players in this madness continued to ignore.
Munroe left the Internet café and on the way back to the hotel bought boiled eggs and fried plantains from a street vendor. Carried the greasy food wrapped in newspaper up to the room and gave it to Gabriel. He ate and Munroe sat on the bed staring at the captain. No words, and although at first he matched her stare, his eye contact became less consistent as the food portions dwindled until there were only a few bites of plantain and one egg left and his focus turned completely to Gabriel’s breakfast and he said, “I too have hunger.”
Munroe held out a hand toward Gabriel, motioning for what was left, and he brought it to her. “I’ll be leaving again soon,” she said. “If you want to shower, now is a good time.”
He left them for the bathroom and Munroe set the food in front of her. To the captain she said, “First we talk, and if we have a good talk, then you can eat.”
He turned from her toward the window. Looked out at nothing and said, “Am not so hungry to sell my soul for food.”
“I think your soul’s already been bought and sold a few times.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Look, my only interest in keeping you is to find a way to get the crew off the ship and to track down the person who did this. You help me get what I need and we can forget the Russians—I’ll let you go—you can walk away and continue on as you’ve been.”
He shrugged, face turned up toward the ceiling and then back toward the food, and Munroe rolled the egg in her hands, peeled the shell in a slow succession of movements, then handed it to him. When he reached for it, she pulled her phone from her pocket and snapped a picture.
“Why do you do that?” he said.
“Proof that you’re alive.”
His cheeks flushed: anger or sha
me, she couldn’t tell. Probably a mixture of both; she’d taken him by surprise, and the last thing someone in his position would want was a photograph floating loose.
“Who are they?” Munroe said. “These men who want you.”
Mouth full of egg, the captain said, “I told you this already.”
“You gave me a name,” she said. “That doesn’t get me very far, so it doesn’t help you much if you want to avoid being turned over to them. I need more than that. Who are they? Why do they want you?”
In answer he sighed down words he wouldn’t speak, never took his eyes off the soggy newspaper. She handed it to him. He shoveled the few bites into his mouth and the grease from the plantains dripped down into his beard. He rubbed the smear off with his sleeve and wadded the paper, clenched it in his hands, and said, “You let me go, not let me go, is the same. I never go back to the way before. Maybe I run and hide, but no more ships. You make that problem fix, then I can tell you everything.”
She got off the bed. Took the newspaper from him and tossed it into the garbage. If she fixed anything she’d do it for herself, not to save his ass, and the clumsy attempt to manipulate her into cleaning up his mess would have been amusing if keeping him alive hadn’t already left a trail of bodies. “You want me to fix it,” she said, “tell me who you are and what they want with you.”
He glanced up, as if trying to determine if she was actually capable of solving his problems, and in his hesitation was the sliver of an inroad she’d been waiting for. She turned her back to him. Strode to the bathroom; knocked on the door.
Gabriel opened, towel wrapped around his waist.
“You ready?” Munroe said.
“Very nearly.”
Munroe closed the door and didn’t so much as acknowledge the captain. He’d ceased to exist. As soon as Gabriel stepped back into the room, Munroe left for the hall. The abrupt end, walking away before the captain had a chance to articulate his lies and schemes, would give him time to stew without ever knowing how far he could push or if she even cared enough to negotiate at all.
The Catch: A Novel Page 22