The Catch: A Novel (2 page)

Natan lay lengthwise on the living room couch, his bare foot wrapped in an ankle bandage propped up on the wooden armrest. In place of ignoring her as he typically did, he watched her, and when she’d crossed half the room he said, “Leo is looking for you.”

“He found me,” she said, and stopped. Doubled back and stood in front of his foot. “How bad is it really?”

Natan shrugged.

“That’s what I figured,” she said, and his expression gave away what his words didn’t: He knew just as well as she did why Leo had made this switch, and whatever resentment Natan may have felt at staying behind over a minor injury was probably compensated for by watching Leo’s jealousy reach boiling point.

Munroe continued down the tiled hallway toward her room.

She’d never claimed to be male, not to Leo, not to Amber Marie, not to any of the rest of the men. Unlike so many other misrepresentations in her line of work, this one hadn’t been calculated or deliberate, was just a continuation of the way she preferred to dress and operate in countries where being a single woman had the potential to cause endless complications. She was long and lean, with an androgynous body; it wasn’t a difficult transformation and over the years the pretense of behaving and working as a boy had become more natural than assuming her own identity.

She’d shown up in Leo’s office unannounced and asked for a job. He’d given her two weeks to prove her value, and with her skill set and experience it had been easy to ingratiate herself and create dependence, to become part of an operation that, for all of its excellence in weapons and security, lacked the finesse needed to inoffensively grease the daily bureaucratic gears. The side effects of coming onto the team as a male had been a bonus: She didn’t have to endure sexist quips, no one hit on her, and Leo’s men all respected the boundaries of man-to-man personal space.

Except she’d done her job too well, her name had been uttered once too often on the lips of the boss man’s wife, and because Munroe had never bothered to clarify her gender at the outset and it was too late to clarify it now, appearances had turned her into the only guy the wife hung out with and repeatedly talked about during the long stretches the others were away. Call her oblivious, but a husband’s jealousy was a complication Munroe hadn’t planned on.

Munroe paused in front of her room to listen down the hall for Victor.

If the Spaniard was in, he wasn’t moving about. She opened her door to a bare room: a bed she rarely slept in, an empty desk shoved up beside the bed, and a narrow armoire with a few changes of clothes. None of the furniture was from the same set much less the same decade. Her room had no pictures. No personal items. Nothing that said she belonged here.

Munroe sat on the bed and pulled from beneath it a backpack that had been with her for nearly ten years and twice as many countries. Held it in her hands and stared at it without seeing while Leo’s options chased each other around her brain: Board the ship, or leave the team.

To keep his marriage calm, Leo needed to make her departure look like her own doing. She had no attachments that would make walking away difficult, but his clumsy, indelicate, ham-handed attempt to back her into a corner irritated her just enough to prod her into proving points of her own. A little manipulation, a little backstabbing, and the fight in her had breached the surface again.

Munroe sighed. Perhaps she wasn’t as dead to the world as she’d thought. She stood. Unzipped the pack and then dumped the few clothes from the armoire into it. Against her better judgment, she’d board that ship tonight, Somali pirates be damned, and when she got back, when she was ready, she’d leave Leo’s company and Djibouti on her own terms.

Movement and a knock at the door interrupted her thoughts. Amber Marie, the other half of the company, the real brains behind the operation, stood in the door frame, blond hair tied back in a severe bun, baggy clothes hiding both her shapely figure and her age, which was a good ten or more years younger than her husband’s. It was Amber who Munroe truly worked for, solving problems in a world that created new ones daily.

“Leo says you’re going with him,” Amber said.

“I might.”

“You don’t have much time left to decide,” Amber said, and paused. “I guess either way you’re leaving tonight?”

Munroe nodded. “Seems that way.”

Amber smiled, making it difficult to tell if she understood that Natan’s injury was really just a conveniently timed excuse that allowed Leo to force Munroe’s hand. Amber said, “I figure once you get a taste for the ships, Leo will steal you away and you’ll never want to be my go-to guy again.” Gave a halfhearted attempt at another smile. “Either way I came to say good-bye and to thank you for everything.”

Munroe returned the half smile. “It’s been a good run,” she said, and in response, Amber shifted, anguish in her body language. If Natan hadn’t been in the living room, Leo’s wife would have invited herself in, sat on the bed, and in response Munroe would have walked her through logic as she’d done so many times before, would have reassured her that based on probability alone, Leo would be home soon and that stress was pointless. Or they would have sat and laughed about the local inefficiencies and exchanged stories that played to similarities in lives that had left them both strangers to their homeland, citizens of a planet on which, no matter where they went, neither of them ever really belonged. But given the way things were now, Amber remained leaning against the wood, arms crossed, trying to look brave.

“So I’ll see you when you get back,” she said.

Munroe shoved the last of the clothes into the backpack and gave her the same answer she’d given Leo.
Maybe
.

Amber Marie nodded and with a mock salute left for the living room. The few words she exchanged with Natan filtered back as a mumble, and then the front door closed to quiet. Munroe stared through the empty door frame.

Amber’s parents had been English teachers, not missionaries, but the dynamics were the same. Like Munroe’s, Amber’s loyalties, few as they were, were to people—not to any place or culture or flag. Born abroad, raised abroad, ever on the move and anxious if she stayed in one place too long, caught between cultures, with no allegiance to
the country stamped on her passport—the easiest way to answer the question
Where are you from?
was to lie.

Munroe slung the pack over her shoulder and shut the armoire with finality. In the living room Natan, still on the couch with his ankle propped up, called out as she strode through. “Where are you going?” he said, and she ignored him, just as she had Leo.

The two beat-up company vehicles were parked in the dirt space between the houses, which meant that everyone was accounted for and on the property. Like everything else, the cars were Leo’s, made available if Munroe wanted them for work, provided none of the other team members had need of them. She paused in front of the Land Cruiser, the easy way out with its keys beneath the front seat, and, with the evening dimming, walked out of the compound through the pedestrian gate.

Touches of light from the recently set sun guided the way, augmented by the artificial glow that streamed out of nearby houses. She strode along the side of the road, over hard-caked dirt and sand and outcroppings of weeds, toward a larger junction several hundred meters away, where she could flag down a taxi.

Voices and conversations rose and fell within lengthening shadows, clusters of people gathered on doorsteps or in gateways, part of the vitality that the cooling darkness brought to the sleepy daytime streets. The white of her skin marked her as a beacon and men called out as she passed, then followed with shocked laughter when she responded in their tongue. Language was what protected her, had guided and guarded her throughout the years, the ability to understand,
to communicate in a way that, because of her foreignness, most assumed she couldn’t.

Munroe reached the crossroads, a thoroughfare more heavily trafficked, where proper streetlights obscured the stars and clusters of pedestrians followed along the edges, while vehicles, some decrepit, some shiny and new, competed for right-of-way in an orchestrated dance of chaos. Occupied taxis slowed for her, shared rides that would charge a lesser fare, and she waved them on in favor of an empty car. She argued with the driver over the rate and, knowing he was under khat influence, climbed in, numb to the risk and the casual recklessness with which he drove, life-threatening and yet so commonplace in a galaxy of Third World experience.

It took but a few minutes to reach the heart of Djibouti, where, like the thoroughfares that had brought them here, new money had paid for new roads, and the potholes were few and far between. She’d once heard the city described as a French Hong Kong on the Red Sea, but whoever had said it had clearly not been to the parts of the city she more often frequented—the parts where the roads were pitted and shacks were assembled with whatever material was to hand, and camels and goats played backdrop to the encroaching desert.

The taxi stopped a block over from her destination, and Munroe paid and stepped out into the night and into early evening noise that had only just begun to trickle out from the nearby bar and restaurant that catered mainly to foreign military, expats, and what few tourists had discovered this stop on the far, far edge of the map.

Off the sidewalk and under a portico, she pushed open a narrow door and headed up an equally narrow staircase, wooden, poorly constructed, and dimly lit by a loosely hung bulb. At the landing she knocked on the door. There was no answer, so she knocked again, and when still no one came, she let herself in with a key.

The apartment was small, part of the repartitioning that went on in a city where the population increased faster than new construction. Light filtered in from the short hallway, and she turned on another so that the common room was fully lit. The area had been
tidied up, bright colored floor pillows organized, though two opened cans of 7UP and scraps of khat said that she hadn’t missed the homeowners by much.

Munroe stepped into the kitchen at her right and into the smell of burnt cooking oil, cumin, and cardamom. Passed around a double gas burner and counter space to get to the end wall, and another door, which she surveyed for disturbance of the random threads she’d left, before pulling them away and unlocking.

The room was half the size of the one she kept at Leo’s place, probably maid quarters in its prior life, dusty and stale, the air hot and difficult to breathe. A bare mattress on a crude wood frame filled the longest wall, and beside it stood a padlocked trunk, turned so that its hinges faced out. She tugged a frayed string to turn on the light, another single bulb that put out less wattage than the one in the stairwell, and opened the window to let in oxygen. It had been a month at least since she’d last been here.

Munroe knelt at the trunk and turned it toward her. Unlocked and lifted the lid. Not counting the Ducati she’d left behind with a friend in Dallas and the few possessions she stored along with the bike, everything she owned was in this room, and still, these were emergency necessities more than possessions.

She didn’t need things, or want them, trappings to hold her hostage, clutter that had to be fussed and worried over and protected from theft and rot and ruin. Even these items were a ball and chain, but the tactician in her had refused to let them go, and in the moment that seemed wise enough.

Munroe shuffled through clothes for the brick of bills buried among them, and when she found it, broke off a wad of dollars and euros to create a dozen small rolls that she stuffed into pockets and shoes and undergarments. She dropped the last half of the money into the backpack, pulled a tactical vest from the trunk, studied it for a moment, and with a long inhale, reached into a pocket and drew out one of the knives. Palmed the weight and felt the heft. Waited for a reaction, for the cravings and the urges to come, and when they didn’t, she let out the air.

Munroe shoved the knife back into the vest, wasn’t about to unsheathe it to find out how far her newfound calm had taken her, dropped the entire thing into the backpack, and followed with a single box of ammo and a handgun she’d brought with her from Europe.

She preferred the knives, silent extensions of her body, but considering the territory she was about to wade into—attempted hijacking or not, Leo wouldn’t weep if she had an accident—the gun was a necessary evil.

She pulled a small fireproof safe from the bottom of the trunk, and balanced it on her knees to unlock it. Inside were the rest of her documents, and photos stored in ziplock bags, the only mementos she allowed herself, personal touches of her former life that she would never bring onto Leo’s property as an invitation for someone to dig through her stuff and try to find answers to the questions left open to speculation.

She added the documents and a few pieces of clothing to the growing collection in her pack, tossed in a roll of duct tape, weapon and tool of choice, the one thing she never allowed herself to forget, replaced the items she would leave behind, and then paused at the photographs. Slipped one out of its protective covering and glimpsed the faces she hadn’t dared look at these past months, smiles she’d once felt, peace she’d briefly had. With the picture came the sense of loss, and the pain, a knife slice against her torso that she blocked out, stomped down, and buried.

She turned the image facedown, caressed the back of it with her thumb, and then pushed the picture in with the others and dropped them into her pack. Shut and relocked the trunk. This was as close as she ever got to good-bye, and if she never returned, her hosts would eventually figure she was gone for good, would commandeer what she’d left and rent the room out to someone else; if she never returned, she had with her what she couldn’t afford to lose.

Munroe opened the door and nearly bumped into the teenage sister working in the kitchen. The girl lowered her eyes and stepped aside to allow Munroe to pass.

“Where is your brother?” Munroe said, and the girl motioned
toward the front door. Munroe put one of the small rolls of bills on the counter. “Tell him I came. Tell him to keep my room for another month.”