The Catch: A Novel (27 page)

M
ORNING CAME EARLY
and Munroe woke with the sun. She handed Gabriel two books that she’d taken from one of the hotel rooms, something to keep his mind occupied while she was gone. She showered and used the stolen makeup to cover the remaining signs of damage on her face and neck. Changed into clothes that fit her well enough and hung the rest of the items in the closet. To Gabriel she said, “I need everything here. Please don’t take anything. Not one thing.”

“I don’t touch,” he said, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. It was one thing for her items to remain unmolested while she was a guest in his house and under his sister’s roof, another thing now that
he was in her place and she was paying him. Left to his own devices and given enough time, he’d likely pilfer everything she had. This was the way of the continent, something to prepare for and deal with without judgment; it just was, like malaria and bad roads and lack of sanitation.

Munroe walked another loop through the restaurants and bar and rooftop and public areas. Tipped well again, and this time asked questions of the staff that eventually netted her eyes to watch and ears to hear; and then, since afternoon had not yet come, she made two separate trips out the front door, head down, glances darting for a look across the street, hoping to find the thug again, the one who’d nearly killed her, another waste of time and another empty quest.

If the delegation was still in the hotel, if they still had work to be done, the thugs would be around. She wanted them dead, but even more she wanted the handler, the local who passed messages one to the next, because surely the foreigners weren’t dealing with them directly.

She reached early afternoon with no forward progress, returned to the room. Found Gabriel sleeping and the captain with his feet untied and working on his wrists. He froze when she opened the door and she shook her head and strode to Gabriel’s bed and reached for the stick. He woke when she touched it, and seeing what the captain had gotten to while he’d been asleep, jumped to his feet and raised his stick in a threatening manner.

“Hit him,” Munroe said.

Gabriel looked askance at her.

“Right there,” she said, and pointed to the captain’s shin.

The captain jerked his legs back, so Munroe pointed to his upper arm.

Gabriel swung hard—though not as hard as Munroe would have had she had the strength and mobility. The captain gritted his teeth and refused to cry out, though the blow had to have hurt.

“Next time it won’t be a stick,” she said, and the captain’s face remained hard, defiant. “Next time I’ll make sure he breaks something.”

Gabriel stood with the stick raised in further threat, and Munroe resecured the captain, then tied the tail of the rope around Gabriel’s waist so there’d be no getting away without an alerting tug. She rummaged through her things for the last box of morphine tabs. Crushed a dosage and scooped it into a nearly empty water bottle, handed it to the captain. “You drink it or I’m sedating you completely,” she said.

He took the water and swallowed it down, continued with silence and closed his eyes. Munroe turned to Gabriel and said, “I’m grateful for everything you and your family have done for me, but this can’t happen again. The men who are looking for him are the ones who killed Sami—this keeps him safe, it keeps me safe, and it keeps your family safe. You understand?”

Gabriel nodded and glanced away, an apology she didn’t want, a humiliation he didn’t deserve. This had been her fault for staying away so long. She’d make an effort to return more frequently, but at the moment she had to leave again for a lunch meeting she couldn’t miss.

M
UNROE FOUND THE
hawaladar
in the rooftop restaurant, seated at a four-person table in a corner with his back to the window, separated from two of his bodyguards by an empty table: far enough away that they were within reach but not quite within earshot.

She scanned the room before approaching: a restaurant half-full with the lunch crowd. From the cacophony of languages and the visual palette of skin tones, the diners were a mixture of visitors from outside the city and abroad with locals scattered in between. No Russians insofar as she could tell.

The
hawaladar
caught her eye; stood when she approached and greeted her with a handshake far warmer than she’d expected: different environment, different man.

She took the seat next to him instead of the one opposite and kept her own back to a wall. He’d already ordered a salad and half eaten it, and when the waiter approached she ordered the same and allowed the
hawaladar
to lead the conversation, which didn’t turn to
business until they’d finished the meal and were on the first cup of coffee.

“You’ve had a chance to discuss my proposal?” he said.

She nodded. “I can do it,” she said. “I can arrange for some supplies, but you’ll need to commit more than information.”

“If I get you what you need, in exchange you bring me the ship?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have an idea of what it would take?”

She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and slid it across the table. He picked it up. Scanned it. “What are the odds you’ll be successful?” he said.

“With the element of surprise we have a good chance. Without that, there’s no point.”

He folded the paper and slipped it into his chest pocket. “I risk losing my entire investment if it goes wrong,” he said.

“I risk losing my life.”

His lips turned up only slightly. “Just like piracy,” he said. “The irony is hard to miss.”

“Does that mean we have a deal?”

He handed her a business card. “It’s my private line. We can haggle the finer details later,” he said. “I have a meeting to get to.”

She stayed seated and watched him go. Finished her coffee in silence. There’d been nothing beneath his words or hidden in his body language to point to lies or betrayal, but her trust in him ran only as deep as his own motivation, and when money was the driving force, loyalty was easily purchased by a higher bidder.

M
UNROE LEFT THE
hotel from the side entrance and cut through alleys until she reached dirt streets and wandered them, asking directions, being pointed along, and finally stopped in front of a construction site. Shielding her eyes, she scanned up the couple of floors to where workers toiled, some barefoot but with hard hats, none harnessed, pushing wheelbarrows filled with cement along wooden planks from one area to the next.

She found a boy at the edge of a pile of quarried stones. He was
maybe twelve or thirteen, hustling for odd jobs that might pay him a few bob now and again. Munroe pointed out a line of rebar. “I want this,” she said, “two pieces,” and she showed him with her hands, measuring out more or less the length of her thigh. “Can you get it?”

“Three hundred bob,” he replied, and she nodded.

He ran off and she waited in the shade where she could sit without risking a stray piece of scaffolding or unsecured stone falling on her. Twenty minutes passed and at last the boy returned with the rebar and she exchanged the pieces for money.

She’d been carrying the knife, having hidden the gun beneath the mattress while Gabriel was in the bathroom and the captain was asleep, but the knife was an obvious weapon; she needed something common, and these two pieces would suffice. She asked the boy directions and a few streets over she found a local market of sorts, an alley where artisans, barbers and welders, basket weavers and tailors, had set up makeshift shops and businesses.
Jua kali
, they called it, “hot sun,” for those who toiled at their trade out in the open, wherever customers could be had, finding a way to repair or build or do without any formal licensing or education. She located a tailor, his threads and cloth strips set out on a cardboard table and in front of him a pedal-powered sewing machine that he worked with sandal-clad feet.

She showed him the rebar and described what she wanted, and while she sat behind him with a piece of cloth wrapped around her waist and a growing crowd of gawkers in front of him, he sewed thin pockets along the seams of her pant legs, then handed them back to her.

She checked the workmanship, searched for broken threads, and, satisfied, slipped back into the pants, and then, de facto entertainment over, the crowd slowly dispersing, she slid the rebar into the pockets, and paid the man. She had her weapons. This time she was ready.

H
ER TARGET IN
the peach-colored shirt was in front of the hotel playing
mancala
when she returned, and on seeing him again, the rush
filled her head, filled her lungs, sent her striding, long steps in his direction, fingers reaching for the pockets along her thighs. In terms of Amber, in terms of Leo, the driving impulse might wreck the entire mission. She didn’t care.

Munroe pulled a stick of rebar from its sleeve and approached from behind, slowly enough to avoid drawing attention, fast enough that she had speed and momentum behind her: one chance to get it right, to strike fast and move out of the way and limit the attention from passersby, to avoid starting a riot and getting beaten to death in mob justice.

The man in the peach shirt, still squatting in front of the game, leaned forward on his toes to make a move, and in that moment she swung hard: a left-handed strike to limit the most severe movements to her undamaged side. She connected with every bit of strength she could find, struck his rib cage, felt the crack as it hit, and nearly screamed with the pain that charged through her when it did. He cried out and doubled over, and when the face of the other player rose to hers, she recognized him, too: the man who’d first stopped her on the path, the one who supposedly didn’t speak English.

“Remember me?” she said, and through the breath-crushing agony pounding through her chest and arm, she smiled.

He stood, paused a comical half second as if torn between the idea of bolting or challenging her. She said, “Without your friends you’re not so tough—just a little boy,” and that seemed to fortify him enough to take a step in her direction. He paused again, glanced down at Peach Shirt, who’d since rolled into a ball on the piece of cardboard, then took another step in her direction.

She backed away. Not enough to lose him or allow him to think he’d won or made a point, just enough to keep a safe distance. And when he slowed in hesitation, she taunted him again. “You need eight friends to help you fight?”

The man in peach pulled himself to his feet, listing to the side she’d hit, arm wrapped protectively around his chest. She took another step in retreat, and they both picked up machetes and followed.
She slipped through a break in traffic and taunted them again from across the street, luring them toward the hotel, to the block where she knew every alley, every turn: houses with their doorways and the streets with their sewage, and places where she had walls and ditches for leverage.

They followed more cautiously than she’d expected, as if leery of a trick or a trap, and only after they were behind the hotel, in an area rank, fetid, and strewn with garbage, did they increase speed, and with more confidence closed the distance. She didn’t have the strength and physical dexterity to fight them off, but she had the knife and she had the rebar, and all she needed was one really good swing.

Munroe limped on. Turned a quick corner and scurried up on top of a welded cage that held equipment of some sort. Pulled the second piece of rebar from its sleeve and held both together. Waited for the men to come around the building, directly into her path, and with the force of her entire weight brought the metal down onto the head of the second
mancala
player.

He crumpled. Silent. Maybe dead.

The man in peach turned first to his friend, then looked up at her and took a cautious step backward.

She dropped off the cage and shifted the bars, one to each hand.

They were even now: damage for damage and one on one.

Except he held the machete and she had two sticks of metal.

He raised his weapon, took a step forward in challenge; she sidestepped, focused on his breathing, his eyes, the minute expressions of his body that would warn her and give her microseconds of lead time.

She jabbed him with the end of the rebar.

He swung the machete. She spun and slammed the bar down on his forearm hard enough that the reverberation stung her hand, and when he screamed, she did, too. He kept hold of the weapon and struck out wildly, madly, and with each attempt, she hit back.

Pain was out there, somewhere on the edge of awareness, shouting for attention, drowned and muted in adrenaline and the hunt as she struck again, and then again. Even in her weakness she was faster than her opponent.

She took him down in a battering, blow by painful blow, in the way the fists and sticks had nearly taken her life down on the beach, struck until he dropped to his knees and covered his head and pleaded for her to stop—as if he would have stopped had she begged that night when they’d come for her.

Out of breath, lungs stabbing glass shards, body seared with branding irons, she picked up the machete and tossed it into a gutter.

“Who do you work for?” she said, and in Swahili he whimpered, “I don’t know.”

She kicked him, and he screamed, “I don’t know!”

“If you don’t know, then you are worthless,” she said, and she kicked again, his stomach, his groin.

Hands wrapped protectively around his head, he yelled, “Ibrahiin, Ibrahiin,” and Munroe paused.

It was an Arabic name. “A Kenyan?” she said. “Somali?”

“Mix,” he said.

She drew back her foot to kick again and he said, “I heard Anton. I heard Anton. I heard Sergey.”

“Who are they?”

He was sobbing now. “I don’t know.”

“Why are you here at this hotel?”

“Waiting for more work,” he whimpered. “Waiting for money. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Who pays you?”

“Ibrahiin.”

“What do you do next?”