The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “I figured you’d have one of your people handle that.”

  “It will be faster if I do,” he said, and she knew what he meant.

  The clearing process was a madness of pushing paper: multiple queues that amounted to mobs fighting for space in first-come firstserve lines that were never lines; seemingly endless rounds of paperwork transferred from authorized stamp to authorized stamp; money changing hands to keep files from becoming permanently stuck at the bottom of piles; money changing hands to revalue items and minimize duty paid; and eventually somewhere in the bowels of the process, money changing hands for access to those with the power to put an end to the ordeal, cutting days into hours by decreasing the number of additional desks the paperwork had to traverse.

  It was never the knowledge of how it was done that shortened time and cost, it was always where the connections tied, and this was what had made Munroe valuable in Djibouti, though Leo and Amber could never appreciate how valuable.

  “How long do you think it will be?” she said.

  “If the right people are in their office today, maybe late afternoon.”

  She opened the door. “Have Omar give me a call before they head back. I need the ride.”

  “You won’t stay?”

  “There’s no reason,” she said. Stepped back out into the muggy humidity. “Soon as anyone sees a white face, the price will go up.”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said, and she shut the door.

  Munroe found Omar on the ground in the shade of the truck, a mat rolled out beneath him, while Ali and the man from the boat whom the others called Yusuf were seated on a mat one over, pulling khat leaves from a plastic bag, cans of 7UP beside them: the first khat use she’d seen in the hawaladar’s men, and although irritating, it was better to be aware now before her life was in their hands.

  She sat beside Omar and said, “No khat for you?”

  He shook his head and she read disgust in his face and knew that she’d found an ally. “What about Khalid?”

  “No,” he said.

  She nodded toward Ali and Yusuf. “There won’t be khat when we travel,” she said. “Will it be a problem?”

  “I think no,” he said. Shrugged. “Maybe.”

  She stood. A handful of khat addicts beginning withdrawals when clarity was most crucial would definitely be a problem.

  “Let me see your phone,” she said, and Omar handed it to her. She punched in her number and handed it back. “Call me before you go back. I’ll be in the city. I need to return with you.” She smiled. “Don’t leave me here.”

  “I’ll call,” he said, though she had her doubts.

  She left him for the guard shack that was the freight depot exit, continued past other parked trucks and men lounging in the shade the way the hawaladar’s men did now, continued beyond the exit, walked to the nearest junction, and under the shade of a palm cluster waited for vehicles to pass, utilizing the dichotomy of the continent and the privilege of white skin to hitch a ride with a car heading back to the city.

  Her host was a portly man in shirt and tie, with sweat stains bleeding out where the air conditioner had left off. Confirming that he was headed in the same direction as she, he invited her into the passenger seat and filled the drive with friendly questions that she satisfied with generic answers twisted back into questions about his work and life so that she kept him talking. He wandered on about the Kenyan Wildlife Service, and her mind traveled elsewhere, filling in the blanks of conversation with just enough to give the impression of being present until they reached Mombasa.

  He left her in the middle of Moi Avenue and she waited at the curb until traffic had swallowed him, then walked to the nearest tower and found a bistro on the ground floor; stayed long enough to eat and catch her breath. She called the Royal Court Hotel and asked for Sergey, was redirected to his room, and with the confirmation that the delegation was still at the hotel, she hung up before the line connected.

  Munroe found a forex to change a few hundred dollars and then another Internet café. There, she sent the picture of the captain on her phone to her e-mail and from her e-mail printed it out; scanned through e-mail subjects before closing, caught another from Bradford.

  Don’t know if you will get this—just want you to know I’m thinking of you. Be safe. Stay alive. Assignment is ending here and I just got a call from a friend for a baby-sitting gig. I think I’ll take it—I need a break as much as you do. Consider coming with me? Escape the world for a little bit?

  She wanted what he offered, the idea of riding off into the proverbial sunset; a want that had haunted her over the years and that she’d fought against, always choosing the hard way because pain was comfortable and familiar, and in emptiness there was never a risk of loss because she had nothing to lose.

  Munroe paused, fingers over the keyboard, and with an inhale and a sigh, typed the words that even now violated instinct and self-preservation.

  Tell me where and when and if I get through this, I’ll run away with you.

  She hovered the mouse over the Send icon longer than necessary, closed her eyes, and clicked. Then shut down her session and cleared the history, paid for the page she’d printed, and made her way back, one busy street corner to the next, and returned to the hotel.

  The street thugs weren’t out by the abandoned storefront when she arrived, so she entered through the main doors and passed through the lobby, noting guests and staff, and took the stairs up a floor to the room for which she still had the key. Swiped the card to test the lock, and although she didn’t expect the magnetic strip to still be active, the door clicked open.

  She waited in the hall for a reaction—voices, movement, something—but there was nothing, so she stepped inside and shut the door. The bed was unmade, belongings left carelessly about, tempting theft, nothing giving the appearance that the occupant would be moving anytime soon. She perused the items in the closet, the suitcase, took time to look under the mattress and in places she would have thought to hide anything worth hiding. Found Sergey’s passport taped to the bottom of a drawer; thumbed through it. His was a Russian diplomatic booklet, with only a single page filled with stamps.

  She slipped it into a pocket.

  It might take him a few days to discover it missing, and without travel documents, he’d be stuck here for as long as it took to have it replaced. Nearest embassy was in Nairobi, so it could be a few days; it would buy her time. Given how much he drank, he could only blame himself for losing it.

  She found five hundred dollars stuffed in a crack behind the air-conditioning unit and took that, too. Tracked back over the room to be sure she’d left it as she’d found it, then returned to the hall and then to the lobby.

  Different staff members meant a different tack for obtaining a new key, so she strode to the desk and slapped the keycard down hard.

  Both women’s heads jerked up and in her direction.

  “You gave me the key to the wrong room,” she said. “Four rooms and you’d think you could get them right.”

  “I’m sorry?” the nearest woman said.

  Munroe studied her chest long enough to be obvious about reading the name tag, then held eye contact and silence far into the territory of uncomfortable, and when the woman glanced away and then back again, Munroe said, “This key doesn’t open my room, Betsy. It opens the room next door to mine.”

  Betsy looked down at the card and at Munroe’s fingers, which remained resting on top of it. “I apologize,” she said. “We will correct that.”

  Munroe said, “Good.” Slid the card in Betsy’s direction and, tapping her fingers against the counter in a show of impatience, recited the name-and-room-number combination off her list. This time, Anton, the thirtysomething-year-old boss.

  Perhaps rattled by the accusation or the display of impatience, Betsy didn’t ask for identification, so Munroe didn’t intensify the act or resort to another round of bribery. Instead, the desk clerk offered three minutes of blaring unc
omfortable silence while Munroe huffed in obvious annoyance and Betsy fumbled and punched buttons and at last swiped the new card and with another apology handed it across the counter.

  New key in hand, Munroe took the stairs again and let herself into the boss man’s room. Anton, unlike the slob next door, had left his bed partially made and kept his belongings neat, not to the point of OCD, but close. She found her backpack in the closet together with the rest of her belongings, minus the magazine from the AK-47.

  As she’d done in the first room, she scoured the hiding places, searching for another passport, documents, anything that might provide insight into who had instigated the hijacking, what they wanted with the captain, or how long they’d stay. In an unlocked attaché case she found personal papers and photographs and she pulled out the pictures and studied them, looking past the smiles and the faces for the secrets they held—these were the loved ones he cherished and they told a story about the man, though not anything that would draw the noose tight or speed revenge to a close. She replaced the pages and left the printed photograph of the captain on the counter.

  Using a pen from the attaché case, she wrote across the bottom: He is still here. Do you want him? Let us make a trade. And with her purpose for this visit accomplished, she returned to the closet and took a change of clothes from her backpack. Stripped out of what she was wearing and swapped old clothes for new. Rolled the castoffs into a bundle, then fished out her knives and took those, too, and with more time flown than she’d planned, left for the hall and the staff exit.

  A bundle would draw attention, so in an extravagant waste she dumped the dirty clothes just outside the exit and went back to the hotel front for one last confirmation that the street thugs had still not returned.

  There were other men playing mancala, and not far beyond them others still who sat idle, staring into nothing, either drunk or high, but none of whom she recognized. Though it was possible that the fight in the alley had left the last of the street gang skittish enough to abandon future job offers, the more likely scenario was that the two she’d led into the trap had been in no condition to pass along the message, and if the others weren’t at the front waiting, they were instead out doing dirty work.

  Munroe left the hotel for Bishara Street and Nehru Road, for the hawaladar’s offices and the opportunity to feel what went on in his absence, and like the night that Sami had died, warning that something was wrong reached her before she arrived. The notice came through silences, through hiccups and broken patterns, in the way that those idling near the building watched the entrance, and the way that the building swallowed the sound and chaos of the street so that the melee of life continued everywhere but there.

  Instinct tuning for threat, searching for the warning that someone had come looking for her and feeling nothing, she pushed open the door. The askari lay unconscious on the floor. Munroe released the knives and, scanning the hall and the doors, knelt, felt for a pulse. Feeling life, she continued on, a blade in each fist.

  The hammer of typewriter keys clacked out from beyond the nearest office door, but beyond that, the building was quiet. The several doors along the hall were closed, unmolested, but for the hawaladar’s office, which lay gaping open, the door listing off one of its hinges as if it had been kicked in. Splinters of the shattered door frame littered the hall, and Munroe approached from the side, tipped her head in to get a look, and then followed into the reception area, where the one piece of art had been torn from the wall and the sofa shredded. The receptionist lay on the floor, blood seeping from a wound on her head, curled in a ball as if trying to protect herself from a bludgeoning.

  As she’d done at the front, Munroe paused to feel for life, and sensing shallow breathing, she continued past for the first office, where file cabinets had been overturned and papers scattered, as if the hunters had been looking for documents, not people. She moved on, room to room, found more of the same mess but no more bodies, and finally reached the office that she assumed connected this building to the hawaladar’s place off the alley on Nehru Road.

  It, too, was trashed, but not more than the other rooms. If the intruders had been looking for a way to the other side, they’d missed it completely, and unless this was a random act of violence, which didn’t seem likely, there were few culprits at whom to point fingers.

  Munroe crossed into the next room, also tossed and shredded, also without any additional victims, which was odd. She would have expected more people at work at this time of day. She stood, staring at the wall, processing the mess she’d wandered into, trying to place it within the larger puzzle, when a sniffle and the slightest shuffle of footsteps whispered in from far down the hall, perhaps outside the office itself.

  The only way out was through the front, so Munroe backed into the wall beside the door frame. The footsteps neared, the sporadic sniffle grew louder, and she separated the sound into two people, at least. A whisper followed and, with it, furtive movement that confirmed that whoever had walked through the door had not come as a friend.

  CHAPTER 35

  Instinctively and without thought Munroe balanced her knives while, eyes closed, her ears drew in careless footfalls on the other side of the wall and measured movement by their progress.

  Whispered Swahili carried to her, saying, “How many came in?”

  “Only one.”

  Then a third voice answered, “Are you sure? Maybe he left already.”

  Poised for a strike, the knives grew warm in her hands, extensions of her body, comforting, soothing in the lullaby of death. In the anticipation of the coming attack, calm descended and the world grew silent and slow. A heartbeat carried out long. Clarity drowned in time while the broken stop-start squeak of rubber against the tiles announced a clumsy tiptoe forward and men near enough that she marked them by their breathing and the intermittent sniffle.

  She smelled him first, other senses drawing in what sight denied her, felt him approach before the machete and hand appeared outside the door, and then ripped and torn pants. The shadow of his body filled the doorway. Heartbeat pounding with recognition, she waited for him to step fully into the room, working against rage, running the odds of taking at least one man alive to try to learn from him what she’d been unable to get from the thug in the alley.

  He turned and saw her. Made eye contact, hesitated only a second, and swung the machete. Instinct overwhelmed reason. She stepped aside. With his own momentum, she pulled him fully into the room and in that same movement struck in self-preservation, plunged knife to throat and cut off his air, his scream: a fight over before he was aware of its having started; a fight already won a decade ago when speed and silence had kept her alive.

  Adrenaline amping higher, she waited for the next to come, knew that he would because now his partner was missing. Felt the pain out there, somewhere, reminding her again that she was weak, and the urge for blood that blocked out the weakness heightened her senses, flooded her reflexes.

  Another shadow, another body through the door, and she fixated on the movement, waited as he called out carelessly to his now-dead companion and so announced his presence, his distance, and when he stepped through, she took him down before he had a chance to raise the machete.

  He dropped, one body on top of the other in an unnatural embrace, and she stepped over them and into the hall, where the footsteps of the last man called to her. He was in the reception area hovering over the woman on the floor, and he turned before Munroe reached him. With his head behind the desk, she couldn’t see his face, but he saw the knives. The blood.

  With papers in his hands, he turned and fled.

  Munroe knelt beside the woman again, checked for a pulse again, and this time there was nothing. Heart still pounding, she strode into the hall, caught the slam of the door to the street, and ran to the exit, yanked it open. Scanned the road in both directions, strained to see the break in the pattern, finally spotted him heading toward the narrow end of the road, and ran after him.
/>   He stepped into a car.

  She moved off the sidewalk and into the street, where she could get after him faster. Shimmied between vehicles that blocked her way, and by the time she got clear, the car ahead was gone.

  A horn blared. Munroe swerved and, seeing without seeing, stared through the windshield of the truck that had nearly hit her.

  A man leaned out a window and cursed at her, and she stepped out of the road, breath laboring, pain laddering higher, and glanced again toward the invisible contrail left by the killer with his papers. The roads ahead would be crowded, the car couldn’t have gotten far, but the ability to overtake him on foot belonged to the Munroe before the beating, would belong to her again one day, but now this was a time in which strength and endurance had been replaced with feeble limbs and a struggle for air.

  She doubled over and knelt beside the road. Sheathed the knives without a chance to wash off the blood, and when she had the strength to pull herself up, could breathe without shards of glass shredding her insides, she stood and turned and hobbled in the opposite direction, replaying the scene in the office, attempting to brand to memory the finer details that would fade in the wake of the adrenaline dump.

  She moved slowly up Bishara Street, waved down a taxi, sank into a worn and lumpy backseat. The trail of bodies was going to be a problem. Sooner or later even the most inept police department would have to start asking questions.

  The taxi returned her to Moi Avenue, to the large, clean, and modern Diamond Trust Arcade, to the ground floor, where a slice of corporate America, grafted to the root stock of East Africa, greeted her in the form of the purple-and-orange FedEx logo and an air-conditioned shipping office designed to mimic what she would have found in the United States.

  There was no one in line before her, and with a passport for identification she collected the three boxes Amber had shipped, already opened by customs inspectors: smaller than the crates that would be coming through the airfreight depot, larger and heavier than what she was capable of carrying; then she collected her own, a package she’d ordered during one of her Internet forays.