The Catch: A Novel (12 page)

“Have you found out anything about K&R on the
Favorita
?” Munroe said.

“I’ve spent so much time trying to get answers and I’m still not sure, but from everything I’ve gathered, I think there’s no policy.” Amber’s voice caught and she took a few slow breaths. “I’ve been to the port several times to talk to the agent,” she said, “had to pay him to give me the name of the charterer, and finally tracked them down in Germany, but the ship seems to be owned by a shell company and if anybody at the charterer knows who the principals are, they’re not telling. I can’t dig any further from where I am and that’s where the trail to the owners ends.”

“Have you been watching for Internet news?”

“Yes,” Amber whispered. “Haven’t found anything, and I’ve got feelers out with some of the other maritime protection agencies, but nothing yet. I’m going to keep bugging. Eventually someone, somewhere, is going to know something and at least we’ll find out where the ship ended up and we can start from there.”

“Have you checked into the AIS?”

“I can’t find anything there either. It’s like the ship has disappeared.”

The AIS was puzzling. Large vessels were equipped with the Maritime Automatic Identification System, transponders that transmitted position, and although it was primarily used as a way to avoid collisions, it was also a tool anyone could use to track any particular ship’s speed and course and coordinates at any given time. For the sake of ship security, most interactive maps didn’t display vessels
in pirate waters, but that the ship couldn’t be located at all was something different—and it was hard to imagine that a ship the size of the
Favorita
hadn’t been fitted with a transponder.

Although Amber hid them well, Munroe could hear the tears, the agony, the nightmare of having been cut off from someone she loved with no way to know where he was, if he was alive, or what would happen to him if he was ever found. She had lived it herself less than a year back.

Compassion swirled in a beaker of conflict.

Paraphrased words from the Book tumbled inside Munroe’s head, scripture committed to memory as a child to please a father who could never be pleased:
If a sister be destitute of daily food and you say be warmed and filled, but give not those things which are needful, what does it profit?

Leo’s betrayal and stupidity still stung, and time away from him only hardened her anger. After what he’d done it was not a small thing to offer a little assistance, but this wasn’t for Leo. “I’ll see if I can find anything from down here,” Munroe said. “Give me a day or two.”

“Thank you,” Amber said, though the words were rote and tinged with hopelessness. Unwilling to drag the conversation out, Munroe hung up and then stared at the phone. Clenched and unclenched her fists, squeezing away death and responsibility.

Indeed. What
did
it profit?

Depending on how hard and how long she tracked this path, she
would
inevitably pick up clues to the mystery of the
Favorita
, and then what? Given that Amber Marie would never be able to ransom the crew, to find the
Favorita
and do nothing more was, perhaps, worse than never looking in the first place.

Now was not too late to walk away. Munroe had the captain off her hands. The Aga Khan Hospital had a charity arm and so was possibly the best place she could have brought him to abandon him. She could give Sami the boat and catch a plane out of Kenya tomorrow. To where, though? Back to Dallas? To do what? Pick up where she’d left off—as if that were even possible?

Purposelessness was madness.

The pictures tucked away in her vest pocket returned, those images together with Miles Bradford during happier times. Had the roles been reversed, if he had been trapped on the
Favorita
right now, she would move heaven and hell to find him and wouldn’t stop until every person responsible for his capture was dead.

Munroe picked up the phone to dial again and her finger, trembling slightly, rested above the touchpad. She replaced the handset. Drew in air to calm her heartbeat and then, in a movement quick enough that she didn’t have time to think it through and change her mind, punched in the numbers for Capstone Security. It was 1:00
A.M.
Mombasa time, 5:00
P.M.
Dallas time, just on the outer edge of business hours, assuming someone was in the office to man the phones.

When the line connected, a woman answered, and Munroe recognized the voice though she hadn’t expected to hear it.

“Sam?” she said. “This is Michael.”

Samantha Walker had once been a vivacious bombshell of a sniper, had been one of Miles Bradford’s closest allies, and had nearly been killed in an attack on Capstone’s facility. Shrapnel had taken her spleen, part of her liver, twenty feet of intestines, and forced her into months of physical therapy. Bradford’s best friend had died in the same blast, and Samantha was lucky that the worst of her damage was the scars and permanent limp. That explosion had taken lives, changed lives, changed everything, really, and were it not for Munroe, it never would have happened.

“It’s been a long time,” Sam said, tone friendly enough, but there was an undercurrent that cut like knife to skin and told Munroe what the blogs and Internet breadcrumbs never could. “We weren’t sure if you were still alive.”

“Still alive and swimming hard,” Munroe said. “Is Miles around?”

“He’s on assignment,” Sam said, and left it at that. Didn’t offer any indication of where, though Munroe already knew, and made no suggestion to patch him in, though Munroe knew she could.

“Would you tell him I called?”

“Sure,” Sam said, “I’ll tell him.” But where she normally would
have asked if Munroe wanted to leave a message or if there was a number where Bradford could get back to her, there was only empty silence.

Munroe put down the receiver, nausea mixing with heartache. At least in Samantha, Bradford would find someone stable, someone whose nightmares didn’t make her try to kill him in her sleep, who didn’t feel the driving urge to take off for developing countries every time things got quiet. She was happy for him. For them. And she had her answer now, even if it wasn’t the one she wanted.

What did it profit?

Better to start work tomorrow cutting the trail that would lead her to the
Favorita
and give Amber the gift of possibly saving Leo, if he was still alive to be saved, than to wander aimless and homeless while turmoil devoured her from the inside. There was peace in the compartmentalization of shutting down, in switching off emotion, and for the first time in a long time Munroe slept beyond sunrise.

M
UNROE REACHED
S
AMI
at noon; found him sleeping beneath the tarp and let him be. Headed back up between the hotel and the bordering houses, up the same dirt alley they’d used to carry the captain to the ocean highway, and at the weed-eaten and eroded edge of the road she approached the first woman she came upon and in childish and broken Swahili asked where to wait for a
matatu
to the city.

The woman beamed a smile at Munroe’s botched attempt to communicate. She raised a hand to steady the overladen pot nestled upon a rag rolled atop her head and shifted the baby carried in a sling on her back. Motioned up the road to a bright red building with a high thatched rooftop, a restaurant it seemed, and in English replied, “You stay there, he come.”

The wait wasn’t long, and with two others who lingered at the spot, Munroe climbed into a lime green van named
SPHINX EYES
. She scooted bent-over and sideways along a narrow walking space and squeezed into the second bench from the rear as the others squished in behind her. There was no air, albeit plenty of smell.
The
matatu
operated on a pay-as-you-go system, in which everyone seemed to know the price and clunked change into the tout’s hand as bodies, bowed, climbing over laps and belongings, squeezed in and out of the van at irregular intervals.

Munroe watched. Counted. And when the van came to a final stop in the midst of a potholed and mud-spattered lot somewhere still on the outskirts of town, she got off with the remaining passengers and handed the tout her coins.

Another woman pointed her to a second ride, and Munroe climbed into a nearly full van with a tumult of words and voices trailing behind her.
Mzungu
was the one most often repeated, one she would have understood even without the patterns and comprehension picking up faster now; the same mocking whisper that followed her any time she submerged into local cultures on the continent:
white person
.

M
UNROE STEPPED OFF
the
matatu
somewhere along the north end of Moi Avenue, a main artery that ran through the center of Mombasa. Far up and down both sides of the multilane thoroughfare, cars, trucks, bicycles, hand-drawn carts, city buses, and
matatus
juggled for road share in the clog of diesel fume and dust, all part of the vibrant chaos that made Africa’s big cities what they were.

The sidewalks, cracked and littered, were a slow rush of pedestrian bustle, and Munroe oriented herself to the rough map she’d drawn on her palm, followed the lines and got lost several times, which she expected and which was part of the process of breathing in the ambience, the sounds, the heartbeat, of a new location.

She paused on a corner to get her bearings and a young girl, three or four years old, held her hands up, begging for coins, saying
jambo, jambo
in the high-pitched voice of toddlerhood. Munroe shook her head and the little one pestered her for a block at least and Munroe fought the urge to look back, to see which adult kept track of the child; it would only make her angry. Street children were endemic Africa-wide, the young ones often put out to beg by their parents or
relatives though a few were orphans, all of them drawn to the tourists, easy marks in their softheartedness and unwitting propagators of the blight in their giving.

There were nonprofits that worked exhaustively to get kids off the streets, housed them, educated them, clothed them, but the street was an addiction hard to shake with its easy money, glue sniffing, and freedom from rules. Most returned to begging, and eventually as they grew older and their cuteness wore off, to lives of hard crime, prostitution, and early death: Like everything else in Africa, there were no easy answers and no easy fixes.

On Digo Road Munroe found the Safaricom shop, a branch of one of Kenya’s largest telecom carriers. She purchased the cheapest phone available and set up and paid for a noncontract account. First call was to the Aga Khan Hospital and Dr. Patel for an update on the captain.

“He’s showing signs of responsiveness,” the doctor said.

“He’s lucid?”

“Not with words, but his eyes follow movement and he responds to voice prompts.”

“You think he’ll pull out of it completely?”

“It’s highly likely.”

Munroe lingered over the answer, strategized over the possibilities and the dilemma they forced her into. There were things the captain could tell her, answers she wanted for Amber Marie, and she needed him conversational to get them. Problem was, she could only get answers if he didn’t take off first, and there weren’t a lot of options to ensure that one didn’t happen before the other. She said, “I told you, he needs to be sedated.”

“At this stage, I don’t feel the need,” the doctor said. “There are signs of agitation, but that’s normal in his condition. There’s nothing of the violence you mentioned.”

“Put it this way,” she said. Paused, and chose her words for highest impact. “As long as your patient remains sedated, I’ll continue to pay for his bed and medical expenses. If you choose not to keep him
sleeping, then chances are when he is fully awake and when no one is watching, he’ll get up and walk out of your clinic. If he does that, I refuse to foot the bill for his stay. What’s more, if he doesn’t fully recover, it will fall on your shoulders to turn him out of your clinic. It’s your decision, but it seems to me sedation would be the simplest for everyone.”

There was a long hesitation, then he said, “You are blackmailing me?” and in the gaps between his syllables she could hear the bewilderment and frustration.

“Just making a request.”

“This is not a request you make.”

“It’s very much a request,” she said. “Let me know what you decide.”

The doctor was silent for another space and then there followed a discussion in the background, something between him and the front desk that lasted a minute or two. “All right,” he said finally. “I will keep the patient under mild sedation for the next seventy-two hours while he continues to recover, but you need to pay the fee for his entire stay in advance.”

“I’ll be there this evening,” she said, and flipped the phone closed.

Seventy-two hours to sort out the next step.

T
HE
S
OMALI MARKET
was on Nehru Road, a potholed street in which stagnant muddy water filled what asphalt didn’t, a street vibrant with color and chaos, where cars came and went at an impatient crawl, and people and porters crossed between them at will and without regard for the rules of the road, slowing traffic down further. In both directions tailors and merchant shops hid behind glass doors and windows that could barely be seen for the collection of wares displayed on the sidewalks in front of them, mixed among and sandwiched between open-front bodega-style stores, with products stacked up the walls, each establishment brandishing a specialty of sorts: expensively priced cheap electronics, used and new clothing in bright, almost neon colors, piles of hats or handbags or trinkets in
cheap plastic sheaths, all inevitably imported from China, laid out on make-do wooden tables or under umbrellas, or draped over vehicle hoods and sometimes spread out on burlap between parked cars on the street itself.

Munroe strolled the street, browsing merchandise, dodging clustered foot traffic and mud puddles, a game of street chess that involved thinking many moves ahead to avoid ending up spattered with filth, searching for the familiar signs to indicate that she’d arrived at what she’d come for, but by the time she’d reached the far end of the road where the congestion eased, and the pedestrians and shops were far fewer, she’d still not found it.