The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  The work on the inflatables had stopped completely—even Natan and Amber had turned to watch her—so Munroe left them. Carried the phones inside the house, put them in a cupboard in the kitchen, and then continued on, out the front with her own phone, far enough away so that the captain wouldn’t be able to overhear conversation.

  She dialed Sergey and he answered with the tentative inflection of someone who didn’t recognize a number, though that changed as soon as she infused honey into her hello, and a reminder of the unfinished promises left behind in the backseat of the car.

  “I’m in Kampala,” she said. “Sadly. Stuck here thanks to idiot bureaucrats. I can’t return to Mombasa for another week. Will you still be there when I return?”

  “A week?” he said. “Yes, I should still be here.”

  “Do I find you at the same hotel?”

  “Sentrim Castle,” he said. “Do you know it?”

  “I can look for it.”

  “Call me when you get back,” he said.

  “Of course,” she said, voice lilting and inviting. “We can finish where we left off.”

  “I look forward to that,” he said, and the hair rose on the back of her neck, the telltale signal that she was being watched. Breathless and full of sugar, she added, “I’ll make sure that you do,” and ended the call, and without turning said, “What do you want, Natan?”

  “You were speaking Russian,” he said. Surprise underlined his accusation.

  “Yes.”

  “The people behind the hijacking of the Favorita are Russian.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “S kem eto ty govorila?”

  She turned to face him. “I’m taking care of business.”

  He walked toward her. Stopped just outside her personal space, as if trying to read her or find some answer to an unasked question while mistrust oozed from his expression and his posture. “What is it you are after?” he said.

  “Same as you.”

  “Not the same.”

  She shrugged, glanced beyond him toward the house. Wouldn’t play his game or get baited into a pissing match. “Either you trust that I’m after the ship just as you are,” she said, “or you don’t trust, and if you don’t trust, there isn’t a thing I can do to make you, so I’m not about to try.” She nodded toward the ocean. “When we get on that dhow tomorrow, my life is at risk just as much as yours, as Amber’s. Stepping on my toes every leg of the journey isn’t going to get you what you want, and it certainly won’t get us safely back.”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “You know who I am.”

  “No. I know who those documents say you are. I know who you said you were when you first arrived in Djibouti. One was a lie, it could all be lies. Who are you?”

  “I’m the person standing in front of you.”

  He clenched his jaw and his breathing shortened.

  “You’re playing word games with me,” he said. “Why are you here?” He swept his hand toward the house, the beach. “Doing this?”

  “We’ve already had that conversation.”

  “It’s an unfinished conversation. There are too many holes and inconsistencies. Now you say that you haven’t spent the last five years in Djibouti, that you aren’t the child of English-teacher parents.”

  “Correct.”

  “But you speak Somali.”

  “Yes. And Afar.”

  “Did you study these languages? For your assignments? Your missions?”

  Munroe sighed. Knew where this conversation was headed. “I learned them locally,” she said.

  “That works for your old story, not your new one.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the twitch of his fingers toward the gun holstered at his side. He said, “In the new version you were only there a month or so before you came to work for Leo.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You contradict yourself in lies.” He smiled a triumphant smile as if waving the proof of her duplicity in her face. “You don’t become fluent in a language in so short a time.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Okay, supergirl, if that’s what you say.” His expression hardened and his lips drew taut. “One lie upon the next,” he said, “and now you are keeping something from us. I don’t trust you.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said. “You and Leo lied to Amber, lied to me. After all of your own lies it must be difficult to believe someone else might be telling the truth. You screwed me over. You should be careful when this is finished.”

  “When this is finished?” he said.

  “It only benefits me to hunt you down and kill you after the mission is complete.”

  Natan’s eyes widened, as if in the many avenues she might be dangerous, that was one he hadn’t considered.

  She smiled. “I’m fucking with you,” she said. “Don’t be a self-righteous asshole, Natan. If anyone here doesn’t deserve trust—doesn’t deserve it from Amber or from me—it’s you.”

  His shoulders lowered and his hands relaxed, and he looked toward the trees and shook his head. “That still doesn’t answer the questions,” he said. “You have other motives and you are keeping secrets.” But resignation filled his voice, almost as if he said it to clear the air and get it out of his system.

  “Supposing that’s true, then that only makes us even,” she said. “You’re not the good guy in this scenario either.” And with the heart of the conversation over, she walked toward the beach. Natan kept pace beside her, and they made it about twenty feet before he broke the silence.

  “About the languages,” he said. “Where did you learn Somali?”

  “In Djibouti.”

  “And Swahili?”

  “Here.”

  “Why do you keep telling stories?” he said. “In this it can’t hurt to tell the truth.”

  “It is the truth.”

  “But it’s not possible.”

  “What? To learn so quickly, to speak so many? Why not?”

  “Nobody can,” he said, and his response irritated her. Not the disbelief, which was fairly standard, but the small-mindedness from which it was born.

  “The world is gifted with mathematical wunderkinds and musical geniuses,” she said. “They’re rare, but they exist. They are everyday people with neurological connections wired differently than yours. Just because you’ve never met someone who can do long math in their head faster than on a calculator doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

  “I speak five languages,” he said, and took on the tone of conversing with a toddler who needed slower talking and smaller words. “Every one of them took years to learn. You’re not a cartoon, Michael, so stop with the pretend play, yes?”

  She stopped walking and turned toward him. “You have your share of flaws, Natan, but until now I never mistook you for one of those fools who use their own inability and limited experience to measure what others can or can’t do.”

  He stared back.

  “You ever heard of Daniel Tammet?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a savant,” she said. “Asperger’s. High-functioning autism. He learned to speak Icelandic in a week—most difficult language in the world—did it for national TV to prove it could be done.”

  “You’re not autistic.”

  She started walking again and Natan kept by her side.

  “Heard of Timothy Doner? He’s a teenager in New York who’s taught himself over twenty languages, learned some in as little as a week. He’s not autistic. What about Emil Krebs, heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Diplomat. He mastered sixty-eight languages and could translate from up to a hundred and twenty. What about John Bowring?”

  “No.”

  “A hundred languages.”

  “You’ve made your point.”

  “Uku Masing.”

  “Just stop.”

  “Sixty-five languages.”

  “Mario Pei.”

  “I
get it,” he said, and so she stopped with the list, and because they’d reached the edge of the sand, she also stopped walking.

  “It’s a defect in human nature,” she said, and turned to him again. “Weak people do it, you know? Turn personal opinion into a fact worth fighting for. That’s what differentiates me from you, makes me a better strategist. Don’t underestimate your opponent by gifting him with your own weaknesses, Natan.”

  “Then you agree: You are an opponent.”

  “Either way your suspicion makes me one.”

  “My suspicion is well justified. You can say differently, but your motives are not as simple as you claim.”

  “Does it matter? We’re here, going after the ship, going after your team. You could never have done this without me. I pulled this thing together out of thin air on short notice in a country where none of us have connections and your trust or nontrust made absolutely no difference. What’s still at stake is the outcome—if you want to fuck that up, then keep riding my tail, otherwise just leave me alone and let me do my job.” Munroe closed in on his personal space and said, “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”

  “You’ve hijacked a ship before?”

  She smiled wryly. “No.”

  He snorted. “Been on a hijacked ship?”

  “The Favorita.”

  “Besides that.”

  “Yes, actually.”

  He raised his eyebrows and then laughed, as if she’d offered him another of her stories, and she let him have that. He’d believe what he wanted to believe.

  “I’ll let you work,” he said, “though you are just as guilty of using your own limitation to view the world. Not once have you asked me of my own history or experience with hijackings—you don’t know what I know.”

  The underhanded conciliation was probably the best she’d get from him, so she met him halfway: sat and patted the sand beside her. “Come, sit,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

  CHAPTER 37

  They left with the tide, an embarkation that had taken close to an hour to get under way in the early-morning dark, and Munroe stood at the gunwale looking out over the house, unlit and abandoned, the base of operations that had served its purpose and upon which she’d left the last twenty-dollar payment and the keys hammered to the front door.

  The dhow picked up speed and with the increase in forward momentum came the rhythm, the pounding rise and fall, and the house became nothing but a blend of all the other darknesses along the shore. This boat was home now, and with them was everything they needed to make the twelve-hundred-mile round-trip. If they’d miscalculated on fuel or food or water, there were no fallbacks, no one to call in an emergency or for rescue.

  Natan sat fore, face to the wind, and Amber beside him, an outline under the moonlit sky, head tipping up and down in conversation that Munroe couldn’t hear. For the moment, Yusuf had the wheel, and the others had staked out territory in the open among the fuel drums and supplies where they could stretch out and sleep. She turned from them toward the canopy, where she’d stashed the captain, boxed in among the smaller supplies.

  She’d delayed bringing him from the house until after most of the men had boarded, and she’d stood with him on the sand while the pirogue returned, using Joe with his imposing size to keep him from making one last mad dash to freedom. The captain’s arrival on the dhow was the first that the Somalis had seen of him, and she listened for the nuance in their muttered surprise, searching for a giveaway that might point to a traitor in their midst so as to cut him loose before the journey began, but she found no tells.

  Munroe shifted boxes to create space and lay beside the captain, close enough that she’d feel it if he got up to rummage. He turned his back to her and she closed her eyes. For the first time since leaving the Favorita, she had no reason to stay awake, nowhere to go and nothing to do, so she allowed heat and time and the rise and fall to lull her down into nothingness.

  She woke and slept and woke again, knew time passing by the bodies that came in for water or to utilize the bucket surrounded by cloth as a makeshift head. The heat intensified and then waned again, and when dusk came once more, she rose, gave the captain water, and left for the bow.

  They were far within Somali territory now, as much at risk from pirates as the Favorita had ever been, their position measured and guided by a pair of GPS units with batteries recharged by the sun. The relaxed atmosphere that had filled the boat at the outset had since been replaced by a subtle low-level tension, and the weapons, stashed and hidden while in Kenyan waters, had appeared in the form of Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition bands worn by each of the Somalis. Natan, not one to be outdone, had taken the display a step further, wearing two sidearms and combat knives sheathed and holstered around his pant legs.

  Under other circumstances Munroe would have rolled her eyes, but here his peacocking couldn’t hurt. The hawaladar’s men outnumbered hers two to one and she wasn’t certain their instructions were the same as what she’d been led to believe. Trust in the hawaladar had come from necessity—perhaps desperation—certainly not out of confidence in his self-interest or loathing of pirates, no matter how much he professed this to be true.

  Munroe wound her way to the bow and stood watching the distance and endless water, thoughts churning with the waves, until Khalid approached, stopped beside her, and offered a bowl of rice cooked in soupy broth. The food was cold, the last of the dinner from the night before, and she sat with him atop a fuel drum, scooping from bowl to mouth with her fingers as he did. His posture and the occasional catch in his breath indicated he’d made the gesture as a way to converse, but instead his face stayed lifted toward land, eyes tracking the scattered crags and rocky outcroppings in the distance, arrows pointing their way toward Garacad.

  “You miss your home,” she said, and he glanced toward her just long enough to nod before staring out toward land again.

  “You’re from the Mogadishu area?”

  “Galkayo,” he said. “It’s not so long since I was there.”

  The rush of wind filled in for a reply.

  “I didn’t want to leave,” he said. “I had work with the Puntland Maritime Police Force.” He looked at her again and, as if he wasn’t sure she understood the implication, added, “Fighting against pirates.”

  She nodded.

  “When it ended, I tried other things, but there are few jobs and little money. Abdi has provided a better opportunity for me. I work for him and I send the money home.”

  “Your wife is in Puntland?”

  He nodded again, continuing to gaze into the distance, as if the closer they got to his homeland, the more the air itself breathed a familiar song imbuing him with a sense of belonging. She envied him that, a place to which he was always connected, a land that was part of him, something she’d never had, never would have: home.

  “Ali is going to be a problem,” she said. “Yusuf also. Without khat.”

  Khalid leaned back and squinted in their direction.

  The two men sat, backs to the gunwale—squished as they all were among the supplies that filled the dhow—but even lazing in the shade playing a game that Munroe didn’t recognize, they showed signs of agitation. The longer they got into the voyage, the more their tempers would wind up, and with weapons so easily to hand it would be a miracle if they made it to Garacad without a death along the way.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  With their meager meal finished and only silence to fill the space between the engine and the ocean wind, she stood and refilled her bowl. On her way back to the captain, she paused over Ali and Yusuf, and they blinked up with bloodshot eyes. She nodded and carried on.

  When she reached the captain, he was nestled between boxes and the rear bench, on his back, watching Joe at the wheel. Kneeling beside him, Munroe took the knife from her belt and cut the bonds at his wrists and legs. He cocked his head and studied her, rubbed his thumbs over the bands where the rope had worn his skin raw, and then
, as if he doubted his good fortune, he said, “Why? What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and handed him the bowl of rice. He hesitated a moment, then accepted it and scooped greedy bites with his fingers, slurping, chewing with his mouth open and dropping grains of yellow into his beard. Munroe turned from him slightly, disgusted.

  “We’re in Somali waters now,” she said, “about three miles offshore. You can go overboard if you like. It’s a long swim but doable, although I can’t promise what waits for you if you manage to make it. You could also stay on the boat and try to fight for control, but there are nine of us and one of you, and no hostages here for you to take. Or you can eat your dinner and enjoy the ride and come with us when we attempt to take back your ship. We’ll reach the Favorita in probably two or three days.”

  Wiping his fingers on his shirt, he set the empty bowl aside and said, “Will you succeed?”

  “You’re a soldier,” she said. “You’ve commanded your own men. You’ve seen what we’ve done—the planning, the supplies—and you know what we’re up against. Decide for yourself.”

  He harrumphed, as had been his way, but this time, instead of closing his eyes and lying back to ignore her, he ran fingers and thumb along his beard, combed out the food particles, and said, “Maybe for you there is a chance.”

  “Us.”

  He nodded, his focus out somewhere beyond Joe. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe for us there is a chance, and when we come back to Mombasa, everything is good for you, but for my problem, she still exist.”

  “I’m working on that,” she said, and his face jerked back to hers as if that was the last thing he’d expected.

  “Is a possibility?”

  “Could be,” she said. “I haven’t decided. The problem is this story has no good guys. Not you. Not me. Not any of the people on this boat, not the armed guards left behind on the Favorita. Not the pirates, and certainly not the Russians who want you. Maybe your crew,” she said. “They didn’t deserve this. But the rest of us, we’re all scum of one sort or another. It’s only a matter of degree of scum. You want your problem fixed, but maybe the Russians have a good reason for wanting you. Maybe by giving you to them I do the world a favor, I don’t know. And until you talk, I have no way to know.”