The Catch: A Novel (10 page)

Munroe handed him two hundred shillings.

She needed to get a gauge on exchange rates and prices and find out how badly Sami was hemorrhaging her cash. “We go to Lamu Town,” she said.

“Hospital first?” he said. “Go see you friend?”

“Lamu Town first.”

Sami hopped into the boat and Munroe tossed him the bottles of fuel. Together they dumped them into the tank, set the bottles aside, and let loose the lines. On their way again, Sami guided Munroe up the same stretch of coast that she’d traveled yesterday, past the hospital and a water ambulance beached uselessly on the shore, to where the thinned-out clusters of buildings began to thicken into a tightly packed township. Gleaming whitewashed buildings with arched windows and doorways, porticoes and rust-brown rooftops, stood sentinel along a stone wharf—an old, old city that had passed through many hands and many cultures and yet maintained an Arabic base note.

The number of wooden boats lining the piers and jetties grew, as did the crowds along the waterfront. There were no motorized vehicles that Munroe could see, everything done on foot as Sami had said, with supplies transported by so many laden donkeys: a rural haven that appeared to continue on as it had for centuries.

On the upper edge of town where the shore activity began to thin again, Munroe left Sami with the boat and tracked back along the wide stone shorefront in the direction of the bank that Sami had pointed out, and was accosted at regular intervals by men trying to sell what she didn’t need.

Language erupted and ebbed around her, wave after ocean wave crashing upon her in the form of laughter, talking, yelling, and movement: the cacophony of a thousand voices inside her head, shouting for attention, dizzying mental chaos while her mind tried
to create order and structure and make sense of the clamor and wouldn’t let go, a sensory overload of too many tongues, too many dialects, background noise that most people could simply ignore, even when it was pointed directly at them. For her, always present, demanding attention, without a pattern to hold on to, the turmoil would rush onward, cresting higher until she’d be forced to hurry away into quiet.

Two men continued to tag after her, offering food, boat rides, donkey rides, curios, and wanted to know where she was from and where she stayed; giving the only response that wouldn’t encourage them further, she refused eye contact, refused to acknowledge their presence and kept on walking. Their harassment served her right for coming into town looking like a full-on tourist. She knew better than to mark herself as an outsider, which was the same thing as an invitation, but she hadn’t exactly expected to jump ship when she’d packed for the security escort.

Munroe stepped into the Gulf African Bank, and across the threshold, door shut behind her, she breathed a rush of quiet and the cool of the air-conditioning, relief to her skin and to the tumult inside her brain. She exchanged a thousand dollars for shillings and directions to an Internet café, then rolled the Kenyan money into separate bundles to spread throughout her pockets and smiled at Sami’s audacity: His starting price had been nearly a hundred dollars a day in a country where most worked for a dollar or two, and in agreeing to half of that she’d dropped him into a small fortune.

When Munroe exited the bank, one of the men from the wharf picked up his wheedling, pressed after her between old stone buildings and streets only wide enough for bicycles and donkeys. He gave up when they reached the town’s fort square and she’d still not acknowledged him, and off this open market area on another narrow street, where signs in Arabic and English spanned the few feet from building to building, Munroe found the Internet café.

She could have used the computer at the hotel but old habits and watching her back wouldn’t allow her to work where she was
vulnerable. Answers to the easy questions came fast. She’d come ashore on the major island of an archipelago, less than 70 nautical miles from the Somali border—had another 180 to go to get to Mombasa. She could cut the journey by half if she was willing to take a flight from Manda Island across the channel, but she wasn’t in a hurry and didn’t see the point in sacrificing the boat, and the doctor had been right in his assessment, going by road wasn’t worth the risk with or without the captain.

The harder questions, those about the
Favorita
, took longer. Queries on the ship turned up nothing about the owners or the charterer, much less the captain, whose name she didn’t know. Neither were there reports or notices by any of the newsgroups or antipiracy watchdogs within Somalia who would be the first to report the ship’s arrival once it showed up offshore in any of the pirate-haven coastal cities—assuming the ship showed up at all. There was always the possibility that the propeller stoppage had damaged something mechanical and that repairs, if they could even be done at sea, would take time, or that the hijackers had only been after the armaments and without interest in the ship itself, and the crew was already dead on a deserted vessel.

The obvious stated that whoever expected delivery of the armaments had decided to take them without paying for them, but easy assumptions were often wrong. Answers to why the pirates had specifically wanted the captain alive and had gone to the trouble to track down the
Favorita
at night would never be discovered in databases and by Internet sleuthing. These were specifics found only on the ground, blending, mingling among those who knew: the type of information hunt upon which she’d built her career.

None of it mattered. The
Favorita
was no longer her problem.

But there was Amber.

Munroe sighed. Typed in the URL for Capstone Security Consulting, clicked for the blog. The thought of calling Bradford, of letting him know that she was still alive and hadn’t abandoned the ties that bound them, played itself around inside her head.

The most recent post was a week old already: news links that
Capstone’s clients and potential clients would find relevant, and security updates to the various regions in which the private security teams worked. The clues were hidden gems among press release–type details. He was in Afghanistan again, though there was nothing to say how long he’d be away this time.

Munroe cleared the history and temporary files. Paid for the computer time and slipped back into the narrow street, crowding between bodies and sidestepping donkey excrement and the sewer runoff that flowed in gutters toward the ocean.

Mohamed was at the boat and he stayed behind while Sami accompanied Munroe to the outside of town, where the streets were dirt and far wider, and they could hire out a donkey and its owner. They hauled the plastic containers off the boat and carried them to purchase more fuel. Moved on to food supplies, water, and sailcloth: simple transactions made one by one, merchant by merchant, that took most of the day.

They returned to the hospital and Munroe asked for help in finding the doctor and then sat waiting on the concrete for a full thirty minutes before he arrived.

“You’re still in Lamu,” he said, and she stood to shake his hand.

He took hers with a tired smile.

“How’s the patient?” she said.

“His vitals are much better, hydration much better, though he could use another day of fluid.”

“I’m leaving for Mombasa in the morning. Can he travel?”

The doctor shrugged and Munroe didn’t press.

“He’s also showing some signs of response,” the doctor said.

“He’s conscious?”

“We would say a minimally conscious state,” he said, raising and lowering his hand to mimic a wave. “The reactions come and go, up and down, small here and small there. No talking yet, no direct response to requests.”

“But he might wake up completely?”

“It’s certainly possible.”

The unconscious captain had caused no trouble, but when he
finally woke, if his memory functioned as it should, the fight on the
Favorita
would be where he’d left off and there was no guarantee he’d view being pulled off the ship as a good thing.

“Sedatives will keep him more comfortable until I can get him into another hospital,” she said.

The doctor eyed her just long enough to state that he wasn’t an idiot. Then, with a sigh that said he was indifferent, he pulled a notebook from his pocket and began to write.

The same four people who had been in the captain’s room last night were still there, the coughing just as bad and the smell of decaying body fluid a whole lot worse. The captain was in his bed as Munroe had expected, wearing the same clothes he’d come in with, eyes closed, mosquito net down, IV hooked into his arm with the pack completely drained.

All of the supplies she’d paid for yesterday were gone; pieces most likely pilfered one at a time by family members of the sick, if not the hospital staff themselves. Theft was the way of the continent; anything not welded in place was so likely to disappear that even gas caps and engine lids were often padlocked shut.

Munroe went through the multiple steps to reprocure the items on the doctor’s list as well as extras and, because she wanted it, also paid for the sheet on the captain’s bed.

She returned to the room long enough to detach the empty IV bag and hook up another, then left for the boat with everything else she’d purchased. She handed the supplies up to Sami, climbed in after them, dried off her feet, put the boots back on for the umpteenth time. Sami said, “I go with you to Mombasa.”

Munroe paused and looked up. “Do you know Mombasa?”

“I know good,” he said. “My home in Malindi.”

Munroe recognized the city name from the research earlier in the day: a tourist-based town about a hundred kilometers north of Mombasa—close enough that Sami had the potential to be helpful, and he, apparently interpreting her contemplation as doubt, added, “I watch boat for you, give good price.”

She finished lacing her boots and glanced up again. He smiled, confident and cocky. She liked the kid. He’d proven trustworthy and reliable, hadn’t stolen anything from her yet, and it would be helpful to have him as an extra set of hands.

“What about Mohamed?” she said.

“Mohamed two wives here, he stay.”

She stood and stepped across the boat for the bench. If she planned to keep the boat running, she would have to hire a full-time guard for it in Mombasa anyway. “I won’t pay two thousand shillings a day,” she said. Paused and returned his cocky smile. “That’s Lamu-only price.”

Sami grinned, then laughed. He interpreted for Mohamed, who also laughed, and still smiling, Sami nodded. “Five hundred shilling for day,” he said. “Mombasa price.”

Munroe stretched out her hand and Sami shook it. The offer was still overpriced, but she needed him loyal, and although a good paycheck didn’t mean he wouldn’t eventually steal from her, it notched the possibility down slightly.

“Have Mohamed stay with the boat tonight,” she said. “Go get whatever you need. We leave before the sun. If you’re not here, I travel without you.”

“I be here.”

“Bring a flag with you,” she said.

“Flag?”

Munroe used impromptu sign language to indicate what she wanted: a Kenyan flag to fly aft so that on the small chance they encountered officials on the water, there’d be less inclination to stop the boat and check for papers.

M
UNROE FOUGHT FOR
sleep throughout the night and, unable to find it, finally rose in the early-morning dark. Showered off the sweat again, which in the humidity tended to collect as a permanent layer, pulled down the two hand-washed shirts she’d hung before going to bed, and then redressed, button-down over the T-shirt, protecting her skin, shielding her gender.

She tossed the last of her things into her bag, pulled a pillow off the bed, debated calling Amber Marie then opted against it. Without any news to add, the conversation would turn on itself with long lingering silences, and Munroe didn’t have the desire or the emotional energy to be Amber’s life support.

At the front desk she traded payment and the room key for her passport, and when she carried her stuff down to the boat, she brought the pillow. Sami was already at the pier when she arrived, and together the three of them returned to the hospital to collect the captain.

They beached the boat, trudged past the reception desk and down the open breeze-filled hall, and when Munroe stepped across the threshold, the captain, who’d been unconscious for more than two full days, turned to face her and opened his eyes, expressionless and unblinking.

She stepped closer, waved a hand in front of his face, got nothing, and gradually his lids shut again.

Munroe injected the sedatives into the IV tube, waited a few moments, then untucked the bottom sheet from the bed and showed the boys how to use the sheet as a sling to carry him out.

The captain stank. She didn’t want to touch him, didn’t want the boys to touch him either. With effort they got him and the IV attachment into the boat, and when they had him situated under the makeshift sailcloth tent, Munroe put the pillow under his head and, with the duct tape she’d taken from Djibouti, strapped him to it. This would do better than her vest at protecting him, though not by much.