The Catch: A Novel (9 page)

“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked. “Perhaps a donation to a worthy cause?”

“Just ask for me when you’re ready,” he said. “I’ll leave the list at reception,” and the doctor stood and helped himself off the boat.

Munroe watched him walk up the beach, silhouetted by the small amounts of light that reached out from the hospital, until finally he disappeared entirely.

To Mohamed she said, “Where is Sami?” and although as far as she knew the man didn’t understand English, he understood the intent of her question and pointed to the boat to her left that hadn’t been there when they’d arrived.

T
HE CURRENCY EXCHANGE
took place behind the hospital, haggling kept short while Munroe chugged down the entire bottle of water that Sami brought, and then she traded three hundred dollars for far fewer shillings than they had to be worth; enough to get the captain into the hospital and her through till morning, when she could find Lamu Town and figure out the next step. Tonight she just wanted the captain off her hands and a bed where she could collapse, and she’d get there faster if the boys assumed she was gullible and that money flowed freely.

The three of them got the unconscious man off the boat, and Sami and Mohamed carried him inside. As promised the doctor had the list ready, and Munroe paid for admission, then followed Sami and Mohamed while they carried the captain to the assigned room. The windows were holes with wooden slats, and dirty mosquito netting hung over four low metal beds with sagging mattresses.

There were four other people in the room, two of them sharing a bed, one of them in a hacking fit that racked his frail body and left blood on the cloth he held to his mouth. If the captain survived the night he’d be fortunate not to take with him the seeds of tuberculosis, but at least his own sheets were clean, and above the smells of spoiled food and body odor, the air hinted faintly of antiseptic.

The pharmacy, on the other side of ill-fitting shutters that opened a window to the portico, was a room that held only a small wooden desk and chair, and along one wall were mostly empty shelves. Munroe handed the pharmacy tech the doctor’s list. Meticulously slow to the point of painfulness, he collected the items, and when he had everything, he wrote out the bill by hand with a well-worn sheet of carbon paper placed between two notebook pages.

It took Munroe a hunt to find the cashier to pay for the items, and with a handwritten receipt she returned to the pharmacy, where the man exchanged her items for the paper.

The receptionist sent a runner for the doctor. He arrived more quickly this time and Munroe suspected he’d never left. She gave him the IV bags, needle, tape, gauze, disinfecting wipes, and the rest of what he’d asked for, then followed him back to the captain’s room, though because of the coughing she waited outside the doorway, watching as the doctor inserted the port, hooked up the bag of fluid, and hung it off an ancient IV stand.

If the captain lived, if she chose to take him rather than abandon him here, she’d be the one handling the medical routine: a burden she hadn’t anticipated when dragging him off the ship had seemed simple enough.

She should have just left him there to die.

B
Y THE TIME
Munroe returned to the boat, hunger and exhaustion had become a sharpened edge that made it difficult to play nice or play dumb. She arranged for Sami to accompany her as watchman for the night, and left him to sort out with Mohamed how and when the two would reconvene.

A few kilometers along the shore, clusters of light began to peek out of the surrounding darkness. With Sami’s help Munroe found a jetty that she could tie off to, and before leaving him with the boat, she marked off and pointed out the last of the fuel so that he knew she was aware of the levels and he wouldn’t be tempted to steal from what little she had left. Her actions weren’t a judgment against him, nor an implied accusation, simply an acknowledgment of the way
the continent worked when it came to petty theft, notice that she wasn’t as gullible as he might believe. And then, even though he’d not worked a full day, she handed him two thousand shillings, told him that she wanted fuel and would add an extra two hundred if he found a way to get it to her before midmorning.

“I get it, no problem,” he said, and so she patted him on the shoulder, left him for the night, and wandered up the darkened beach to the nearest cluster of lights.

The hotel, when she reached it, was like pictures out of a magazine, with secluded thatch-roofed bungalows overlooking what would, in the daytime, be white sand beaches and crystalline turquoise water: the tourist version of East Africa. In the unwalled main house guests lounged on oversize rattan furniture under sweeping ceiling fans and gawked as she passed by, as if she were some swamp creature crawling in.

A mixture of languages followed in her path, some unfamiliar, some that sent off flashes of illumination in her brain, all part of the easy way people talked in foreign places when they assumed they wouldn’t be understood: a cacophony of mixed conversation that added to Munroe’s burnout and made her head hurt.

She surrendered passport and money in exchange for a key, and a teenage boy showed her to the bungalow, breezy with a high ceiling and a fan with wide blades that took the sea air and turned it into something cooler.

On the dresser were two bottles of water and a bowl of fruit, which Munroe ate, one piece after the other. And then there in the room, with the burn of the sun and the salt of the ocean spray still crusting on her skin, she let down the mosquito netting, lay on the bed, closed her eyes, and slipped away.

How long she slept, she didn’t know. Long enough to feel rested, not enough for the dreams to overtake her or for the sun to rise. Over the ocean the first hint of color change began to paint the sky, and she followed the pedestrian paths to the great room, quiet and empty.

Munroe called out a low hello and a woman shuffled out from
the back with a slow indifference that said Munroe had woken her and she could only half-pretend to be happy about it.

“I need to use a phone with an international line,” Munroe said.

“It needs a deposit.”

Munroe placed a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “Enough?”

The woman nodded and led her to a door just beyond the wide front desk, a small business center, with a computer, a printer, and a phone all on one narrow table. When the woman left, Munroe sat, sighed, and picked up the handset.

Of all the people who’d screwed her over during this past week, Amber Marie made her the maddest, and there were things to say before Munroe could cut completely free. She dialed, waited out static and hiss while the phone rang long, and eventually, with sleep in her voice, Amber picked up.

Munroe said, “Hey, it’s Michael.”

“Michael?” Amber repeated, and the tone in that one word conveyed disequilibrium and a hundred questions that had no voice or articulation. Munroe waited a second, an exclamation to the silence, and then said, “Yeah, Amber, Michael. And thanks a fucking lot for stabbing me in the back.”

Munroe heard movement on the other end of the phone, as if Amber had sat up, swept the sheets aside, and swung her legs over to the floor. “Wait, what?” Amber said, and the phone was repositioned, one shoulder to the next. “What are you talking about?” And then after another pause, “Michael, where are you, and why are you calling?”

“I can tell you where I’m not,” Munroe said. “Not out on the fucking ocean on a craptastic freighter carrying illegal weapons, that’s where I’m not. And you know what? After everything I’ve done for you, Amber, after the friendship, the times we’ve worked together, and the fact that I’ve watched your back, it would have been real solid of you to at least clue me in on Leo’s little gunrunning mission before I agreed to take the job.”

There was a pause before Amber said, “Gunrunning?”

In the hiccup of that hesitation Munroe heard the bewilderment and breathed down the anger of betrayal. Wished she could take the seething venom back, could rephrase and reword. Understood in that drop of time that of all the people Leo had deceived, his wife was at the top of the list, and that this phone call, which had been meant as a kiss-off and a way to vent her rage before cutting ties
forever, had turned into one of being the bearer of the worst kind of news.

Amber, still several mental paces behind, mellow and pleading, said, “Michael, where are you? Where is Leo?”

Munroe said, “Who brokered the deal to get Leo on board the
Favorita
?”

“I don’t know,” Amber replied. “Someone Leo was tight with in his military years, came by way of a phone call or something.” Then, voice twining higher with desperation, added, “Why, Michael?”

“I’m going to break this to you as nice as I can,” Munroe said. Pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “The
Favorita
is running illegal weapons and Leo wasn’t hired to protect the ship and the crew, but to guard the shipment and make the arms delivery.”

“That’s not possible,” Amber said. “Leo would never have done that without telling me.”

“You’re certain?”

Amber hesitated, and in that delay Munroe found her answer.

“But gunrunning,” Amber said. “The only place they could offload between here and Kenya is off the Somali coast.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh God, Michael, no, he wouldn’t.”

“I discovered the weapons,” Munroe said. “Brought the issue to Leo and he was pretty pissed that I found them—didn’t think I was worth telling—didn’t want me meddling. I figure Natan has answers for you that I don’t.”

“Natan knows?”

“The whole team knew. Everyone except me. And apparently, you.”

There was another long spell of silence, Amber pulling in these details to reconfigure them, make sense of them, and Munroe didn’t rush her. “If it’s you calling and not Leo,” Amber said finally, “then something went wrong. Where is he?”

“Go talk to Natan first.”

“Hang on,” Amber said, and in the background a door slammed
and Amber’s breathing picked up tempo, as if she’d jogged from the main house to the annex. Another door opened. Slammed. And after that came the pounding of Amber’s fist on Natan’s door. Then Natan’s voice, muted, as if Amber pressed the headset to her chest—arguing, then yelling—mostly Amber—and then more pounding, this time the headset itself, being beaten repeatedly against something while Amber swore in time with the beat, words Munroe had never heard from her before.

And then a door slammed again, and Amber, still breathing heavily, said, “I’m pissed off and angry, but mostly scared. Michael, where is Leo?”

“The ship was hijacked,” Munroe said. “I got off before the fighting got bad. That was around thirty hours ago. Last I saw him, he was still alive on the
Favorita
, about three hundred nautical miles somewhere east of Mogadishu.”

Amber responded with silence—no tears, no hyperventilating. She was in that scary quiet place she went when an emergency struck and she plotted how to fix it. When the reality of what had happened fully sank in, Amber would break down and lose it completely.

“How is it possible,” Amber said, “that the first armed ship ever taken by pirates happens to be Leo’s ship?”

The question was rhetorical, without inflection, emotionless and numb, but Munroe answered anyway. “I can tell you that it wasn’t a typical hijacking,” she said. “Was something closer to a military assault but carried out by people with no military training. It’s possible the ship was targeted because of the illegal cargo.”

“Oh, Michael,” Amber said, but in her tone of patronization what she left unspoken was
What could a boy like you possibly know about a military assault?

Munroe said, “Did the
Favorita
carry kidnap and ransom insurance? Do you know anything about the owners? The charterer? The captain?”

“If a ship carries K&R, then the contract requires that it be kept a secret,” Amber said. “I could try to find out. Leo handled all the coordinating
on this one, so I don’t know what due diligence was done on the ship or the principals.”

“You were okay with this?”

“Work has been really slow, Michael.”

Amber’s justification for mediocrity and sloppy work was a maddening headache, one more frustration Munroe didn’t want to deal with. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Ask around, see what you can find out about the ship. I’ll call you back in a couple of days.”

Amber said, “Please wait.”

Munroe paused.

“I just,” Amber began, and then stopped.

Munroe waited a moment longer and then, unwilling to be a surrogate for Amber’s tenuous connection to Leo, hung up.

She shut her eyes and breathed away the frustration of feeling Amber’s pain, of knowing that no matter how badly she despised Leo or how much this wasn’t her problem, for the sake of the rare individual she related to and truly respected, she couldn’t walk away just yet; she laughed at the irony of having run to Djibouti to get away from being responsible for other people’s lives only to have fate, in an emotional joke of cosmic proportions, encumber her with an unconscious captain who she wished would die already, and a woman whose husband wanted Munroe dead.

M
UNROE LEFT THE
hotel, walked to think and clear her head, and wandered inland without any destination or purpose through the tiny township. Shela was an oversize village that even in its remote poverty catered to those with money—perfect if she’d been looking for a friendly escape from civilization, a place to drop off the map and remain lost for years, but she wouldn’t last a week before her insides started to itch and the perpetual restlessness that raised the hunger for a challenge called for her to come and play.

Munroe found Sami on the pier swapping money with a bare-chested and barefoot man for an assortment of soda and water bottles. At her approach, the man who’d taken the payment greeted
her with a wave and a friendly smile, then left them and padded back to shore. Sami pointed out the eight bottles lined up near her boat, about eleven liters of liquid total. “My friend bring gas,” he said.