The Catch: A Novel (35 page)

“Not that I know of,” he said.

“What about someone capable of passing as either Kenyan or Somalian? A dual national, maybe?”

“Several. What are you getting at?”

“Have you been to your office recently?” she said.

“Not since morning,” and then again, “What are you getting at?”

“You have dead people in your office.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you have dead people in your office.”

He was silent for a moment and finally said, “Which office?”

“The law office. I didn’t check the other. I’ll tell you more in person. I need you to pick me up.”

“Who is dead?” he said.

“Your receptionist and a couple of other guys who were in there trashing your place. I’m at the Diamond Trust building. I’ll tell you everything when you come get me,” and without waiting for a response she ended the call.

In the thirty-minute wait, Munroe unboxed her package, a satellite phone and a multiplug. Ran through the instructions and set it charging until the
hawaladar
announced his presence by phone call and, at her request for help in carrying boxes, sent his driver to find her. The man made the first two trips out alone, and she followed him with the third. Found the Land Rover double-parked and blocking traffic, and when the driver shoved the last box into the rear, Munroe climbed in next to the
hawaladar
.

He ended a call abruptly and turned to face her, and though his expression was full of questions he didn’t say anything, as if inviting her to speak, to tell him what she knew.

“You first,” she said.

“It’s as you described.”

“Do you know who they were or what they wanted?”

“Dare I ask what you were doing there?”

“Covering my ass.”

“Spying on me?”

“Yes,” she said, because it’s what he expected to hear and by giving him what he wanted she could redirect his attention. “The men who tore up your place were looking for something. Another got away. He carried off documents. I’d like to think you’ve got your nose deep in other crap and that this doesn’t involve me or the
Favorita
, but experience tells me that would only be wishful thinking.”

He turned from her as if uninterested in conversation and picked up the phone again. Even without seeing the screen she could tell that he clicked through links randomly, without paying attention, nervous energy needing an outlet.

“Who knows we’re coming?” she said.

“No one knows.”

She shifted in the seat so that she faced him directly, leaned in toward him so that he couldn’t avoid her. “If you’re wrong, if you’re lying, your entire investment goes down,” she said. “We only have one advantage, Abdi, and that’s the element of surprise. Without that, if someone expects us, then your cousins, your men, all of us—we’re already dead.”

“I told you,” he said, his voice rising a notch, and she scrutinized his every flinch, every twitch, searching for the lies and the uncertainties. “Nobody knows. Not even Khalid, Omar, the men I sent to you. They might assume, but even then, they can’t be sure.”

If he spoke an untruth, his body didn’t betray him. “Your office wasn’t trashed as a result of nobody knowing,” she said. “They weren’t searching through documents as a result of nobody knowing.”

He didn’t answer, so she shifted to face forward again.

“You’re sure there’s no Ibrahiin among your employees?”

“Where did the name come from?”

“A dead guy.”

“I see,” he said.

His phone rang, and the
hawaladar
listened, then rattled off a one-sided conversation in Somali and tossed the phone aside. “The crates have cleared,” he said, and then to his driver, “We go back to the freight depot.”

Munroe said, “Watch your back. Same people who killed my friend and tried to kill me will start coming for you.”

“I can take care of my own,” he said, and his focus turned back to his phone while his body language continued a story of agitation and stress.

Munroe tipped her head against the window. There was no way that attack had come from someone following her movements about town, could only have come by word out of Somalia, which meant that for all the talk of Russians having screwed over the pirates, the delegation—or someone with similar motives—was still connected to
someone
up north feeding information in this direction. Nothing in Somalia was ever a secret, and this had come because the
hawaladar
had been asking questions.

“How many people did you leave working in your office today?” she said.

“Only Aasiya,” he said.

“Your receptionist?”

He nodded. “My niece.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He turned back toward the window and she said, “The guy who ran off with the documents didn’t behave like a stranger, and he was dressed better than the others. You might want to look closely at the people working for you—by now it’s well known that you were asking about the ship, and you’re not the only one with connections that run both ways.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and his tone implied that he was finished
with the conversation, so they made the return to the freight depot in silence. When they approached the truck there were crates on the ground behind it: Amber’s crates—money spent that she didn’t have, to save a man who might already be dead.

The driver pulled to a stop beside the truck, and the
hawaladar
stepped from the air-conditioning, as did Munroe, who first went to the rear and with the help of the driver transferred the FedEx boxes to the bed of the truck, then came to the crates on the opposite side of the
hawaladar
.

There were two wooden boxes five feet cubed, stuffed with packaging material, and like the FedEx boxes they’d been opened and torn through multiple times, courtesy of the men in the customs building. Omar lifted the lid off the nearest crate and, heads tipped together, they peered inside.

There was no obvious damage, though until they had a chance to unload and inspect they would be unable to know if every piece had survived the journey—or, rather, survived the customs-clearing process. With luck, they now had inflatable tactical boats, engines, mounts, and the tools to put them all together.

The
hawaladar
signaled for Omar to reseal the crates, and he was in the process of hammering the second lid down when a Toyota pickup arrived and pulled in beside the Land Rover.

Two of the bodyguards from the
hawaladar
’s alley stepped out, and the
hawaladar
left the crates to confer with them. When the conversation was over, he got into the backseat of the Land Rover with one of his men, and the two vehicles drove off in convoy.

Omar came and stood beside Munroe, followed her gaze to the dust kicked up by the tires, and when the vehicles were out of sight, he said, “We are ready.”

The sun was red on the western horizon by the time they passed the guard shack on their way out of the freight depot, the sky completely dark when they reached the city, and the return trip up the coast was made longer because the men hadn’t eaten all day and needed food.

Omar pulled off the road at a wayside restaurant just beyond Mtwapa.

The building was but a room, a patchwork of tin siding and a thatched roof where kerosene lamps blinked out from screened windows. Yusuf stayed with the truck while Munroe followed Omar and Ali into a cramped and crowded space, and amid the laughter and drunken conversation they found an empty table, a shaky wooden contraption covered with plastic and marked with cigarette burns. Smoke from a charcoal fire kept the mosquitoes at bay, and Lingala blared out from blown speakers in a radio roped to the rafters.

The rhythm of the room, which had hiccuped when Munroe walked in, picked up again when she nodded and took a seat, and the conversations loud and boisterous swirled with speculation about the lone white person, no thought given to the possibility that she might understand what was being said.

The food, when it arrived, was pilau, a rice pilaf, served without meat—the
hawaladar
’s men unwilling to eat what was not halal—and hot enough that pathogens should have been killed, though Munroe couldn’t vouch for the silverware or cooking utensils or the water they’d been washed in. Although Kenyan beer flowed freely around the room, the
hawaladar
’s men also abstained from alcohol; in an odd contradiction, by religion they eschewed anything fermented yet accepted khat addiction as a normal part of the culture: both were mood- and behavior-altering substances, yet to them two distinct and separate issues, one forbidden, one not.

Food was sent out to Yusuf, the meal progressed, and so did the conversation as Omar and Ali began to relax, and although Munroe occasionally interjected a few sentences as a way to answer questions or elicit laughter and build camaraderie, her focus stayed on her new phone, and on the bleached-out colored plastic plate as she toyed with her food, interested not in the meal but in the interaction that went on across the table: the stories, the jokes, giving her the opportunity to unobtrusively learn and read these men in preparation for what was yet to come.

Natan, flooded by the truck’s lights, stood in front of the house, rifle gripped in his hand. Omar slowed to a stop and Munroe slid from the cab and walked ahead as a way to mitigate accidents from trigger-happy fingers, and then with Natan by her side, she guided the truck down toward the beach until the brakes squealed, the engine shuddered off.

Ali and Yusuf climbed off the truck bed, and watching them, Natan said, “Everything arrived?”

“Seems like,” she said. “Smaller boxes need to go in the house—the crates can stay outside,” and when he paused and stared at her, she motioned to her ribs and said, “Girl.”

Natan smiled: the first crack in the ice. He unsnapped a flashlight from his belt, used a tire to boost himself up, and ran the beam over the crates. She left him there and wandered toward the small fire on the beach, where Khalid and the other man from the dhow had made dinner, and where the three from the truck had already joined them. Best as she could tell, the audience under the mango tree had gone home for the night.

Khalid stood when she approached, invited her toward the fire. Risking that he’d take offense, she declined on account of work that she still needed to do. “Have you heard from Abdi?” she said.

“This morning, yes. Before the truck returned to Mombasa.”

“Good,” she said. “We had a successful day,” and left it at that. She’d expected that the
hawaladar
would at least have warned his lieutenant about the attack on the office, but there was no indication that he had.

She walked toward the house, and Natan, who’d hovered just beyond the light, joined her in silent company up to the grass and then headed to the truck for the boxes. Not far from the back door were thatched mats and blankets that Munroe assumed Khalid had laid out. She glanced at the clouded sky and anticipated rain at some point in the night, figured the men would move beneath the truck if it happened.

Amber met her on the porch, asked the same question Natan had.

“It’s all in the truck,” Munroe said. “Natan is getting the boxes.”

“So, tomorrow?”

“Test run with the boats, a last run for supplies, make sure we have what we need. Then wait for the weapons and ammunition.”

“And then,” Amber said, and her voice trailed off, and Munroe followed her line of sight toward the ocean, where the dhow’s single light lifted and lowered with the rhythm of the water.

“The captain tried to escape today,” Amber said. “Rushed the door when I opened it to feed him. Knocked me over and ran for the front.” “He pretends to sleep a lot, but he pays close attention to sound and routine.”

“Natan hit him pretty hard.”

“Good.”

“How bad do we need him?”

“Depends on the condition of the crew and the ship. If we don’t run into too many walls, and the first mate is still alive, then he’s only valuable as a personal trophy for me.”

“And if we do hit walls?”

“We can trade him for freedom,” she said.

Munroe slept on the living room couch where the air was fresher, woke before the sun, and left for the outside, for the water and the
sand and the quiet of her own private cathedral until light in its many hues filled the horizon and noise from behind told her that the others had begun to stir.

T
HE
L
AND
R
OVER
and the Toyota arrived in midafternoon carrying the
hawaladar
, his driver, and two of his bodyguards. They’d used shipping boxes as the disguise for the armaments, and the bodyguards transferred them from the rear of the Land Rover to the pirogue.

Munroe stayed on the porch and allowed the men their space, and when the
hawaladar
came to join her, she stood and shook his hand and, nodding toward the beach, said, “How many people know about the contents of those boxes?”

“You. Me. Khalid,” he said, and he turned toward the largest of his bodyguards, the one who’d always faced her when she entered the alley. “And Joe.”

She paused in response to the name. Raised an eyebrow.

The
hawaladar
smiled, almost bashfully. “Too many American movies,” he said.

“So only us four?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re moving weapons, someone’s going to piece it together. We lose the element of surprise, we’ve already lost the ship.”

“Nobody knows,” he said.

She offered him tea, which he accepted, a gesture made in conciliation, and toward trust and cultural bonding in a scenario where no one truly trusted anyone. He endured her clumsiness, which came from working with the house’s broken pots and mismatched utensils, and they sat in the shade and talked of unimportant things for a time, until gradually she turned the conversation back to the office on Bishara Street and said, “Have you learned who came for your office, what they were after?”

“I’m still working on it,” he said, “but I’ve told my people in Somalia that I no longer have any interest in the ship.”