The Catch: A Novel (23 page)

“I can’t,” Munroe said, “but there’s a complication—some stuff you need to think about before you head out.”

If the warning and caution in her voice registered at all, Amber didn’t react to them. “Okay, what?” she said.

“I need you to do something for me before I can tell you.”

“Come on, Michael, I really don’t have time for games.”

“It’s not a game, Amber. This is the difference between you getting out of Somalia alive and not, but I need to know you’re going to take me seriously, that you won’t blow me off, so I need you to read something for me.”

“Fine. What am I looking for?”

“I’m going to give you a website,” Munroe said. “You have a way to write it down?”

“Yeah, hang on a sec.” Faintly in the background there was the shuffling and clacking of things being pushed around on a cluttered desk.

“Okay, go,” Amber said, and Munroe spelled out the URL to a copy of a previous brag sheet, a list of prior jobs—the legal ones—a résumé of sorts, kept on hand for assignments where boardroom decision makers needed a fancy cover-your-ass dossier before signing a contract they’d already begged her to take. She hadn’t had a reason to update the information in the past two years, but even the prior work history would be enough for Amber to see her as more than just a kid with a limited worldview.

“Got it,” Amber said. “What is it?”

“Just check it out,” Munroe said. “It’s self-explanatory. Call me back after you’ve read it. And here, I have a new number.” She recited the digits and Amber repeated them back, and Munroe hit the End button, drained of energy she didn’t even know she didn’t have.

The store was empty and the proprietor studied her with the same crazy-eyed look that everyone seemed to give her lately. She imagined she looked worse now than she had at the hospital, especially if the bruises had begun to mottle green. “I won’t be here long,” she said. “I got attacked and I’m hurting pretty bad. I just need to make a couple of phone calls and I’ll go.”

If the story made a difference, it didn’t reflect on his face, but he said, “It’s no problem. Stay if you need.”

Munroe half-smiled in thanks, closed her eyes, and tipped her head back against the wall. The throbbing had started up again and she desperately craved the pain meds. Could push past it a little longer;
would try to wait until she was back at the house before taking them. Must have dozed in the silence because she woke to the door opening, a customer entering, and a moment later the phone vibrated in her hand. Amber said, “I read the file, but I don’t understand what it has to do with you or us.”

“That file is me,” Munroe said, and waited for the facts to settle, for Amber’s mental dissonance to engage. “When I’m not off taking a vacation in some tiny-ass country like Djibouti, I’m setting up shop in developing countries and scoping out the political and socioeconomic climate for corporate investors.”

Amber said, “What the hell does that even mean?”

Munroe sighed. “I’m a spy for hire, Amber. I travel to developing countries, dictatorships, banana republics. I analyze strategic threats to get a feel for what’s going on on the ground—the stuff that news outlets don’t report and governments try to cover up. Then I figure out who holds the true political clout, who to bribe and who to avoid, and if I’m paid well enough, I do the bribing and make sure my employer’s name never sees print. It’s dangerous. It’s taxing. I’ve made enemies. You get the idea. And those are the jobs I’ve done on the record. The issue of the
Favorita
is right in the center of my work history Venn diagram, and there are few people in the world who can do what I do, so take me seriously when I tell you that driving down to Somalia is a bad, bad idea.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Amber said. “I don’t know what kind of crap stunt you’re trying to pull, Michael, but those documents belong to a woman and I don’t have the time or patience to be on the blunt end of some kind of prank.”

“Yes,” Munroe said. “They do belong to a woman. Welcome to the truth.”

“You’re a woman?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a woman,” Amber said, and this time her tone had the bite of temper rising, as if Munroe playing coy about her gender wasn’t in a whole other universe than Leo’s lying about the purpose of his armed transit contract, of bullying an unwilling participant onto the
ship believing she might get killed, while at the same time cutting that unwilling participant out of the deal that Leo forced her into.

“I never told you I was a guy,” Munroe said. “You all made the assumption and I never bothered to correct it, which has absolutely nothing to do with why we’re talking right now. There’ll be plenty of time to be pissed off later. Now that you know who I am and what I do, that I’m not some eighteen-year-old kid, will you listen to what I have to say and take it seriously?”

“I’m listening,” Amber said, “but that drive down to Garacad is the only thing I have right now. If you’re telling me not to go, if you’re everything that those files say you are, then that means you have a reason, so yeah, I’ll listen, but I want to know the reason, otherwise this is all just bullshit.”

Amber’s words choked off at the end, a tirade that might have kept on going if emotion hadn’t intervened. Munroe felt beyond the anger, felt the unshed tears and knew the pain, the desperation of losing forever the one she loved; breathed it in as the fear of her own past losses. Separated by half a continent, Amber would risk everything to pursue what she loved most, while Munroe ran from the same, yet they were really not so different.

“My phone was stolen five days ago,” Munroe said, “taken by a group of thugs acting on behalf of the people who hijacked the
Favorita
. They tried to kill me, and this is after they’d already killed a guy working for me. They’re after something that they think I took from the ship, and if you left a message for me, then they know your intentions. They’ll be waiting for you, and if they find you, I can pretty much guarantee that they’re going to hold you hostage or kill you as leverage to get me to hand over what they want, but I can’t do that.”

“What is it they want?”

“Something they think I took from the ship.”

“You already said that. What is it?”

“It’s beside the point.”

“Why can’t you just give it to them?”

“Things aren’t that simple.”

“How could they not be that simple? You obviously have it. Just give them what they want and we get Leo back.”

“No, you won’t get Leo back. You’ll get Leo killed. Leo is in Somalia. I’m in Kenya. The thing they think I have is in Kenya. Do you not see the issue?”

“Yeah,” Amber said, and if Munroe heard properly, there were more tears somewhere in the background, part of the same up-down emotional roller coaster that Amber had been riding since she first got the news.

“Look,” Munroe said, “I’m still working on finding out who they are and why they want it. If I can figure that out, then we’ll have far more than just bargaining power—we’ll have a way to play them and open up other possibilities to get the team off the
Favorita
.”

“Why bother?” Amber said, accusatory and angry again. “You already have what you want. Why were you in Djibouti, Michael? Were we just a cover for one of your jobs? A convenient way to chase after this thing that both you and the hijackers targeted on the
Favorita
?”

“What? No!” Munroe said. “Are you insane? This is not a James Bond movie. How could I possibly know six months in advance that Leo would take this job? And if not for him threatening to fire me if I didn’t go, I wouldn’t even have been on the ship to begin with.”

Amber blew out a long breath, was silent for a moment longer as if setting aside her sense of righteous betrayal to try to see the bigger picture. “How close did they get?” she said.

“To what?”

“To killing you.”

“Pretty damn close,” Munroe said, and left it at that. Recounting the details of the attack, relaying her current condition, would only lead to pity and sympathy and
that
was for the weak. “Whoever did this had the money and the smarts to use Somali pirates as a way to hijack the
Favorita
. They’ll come after you in a heartbeat if they know who you are,” Munroe said. “Watch your back.”

“But we’re not the ones who have what they want.”

“It won’t matter,” she said. “They’ll assume you’ll know where it is.”

“I can’t just abandon Leo.”

“I’m not asking you to, but what good will it do him if you go down to Somalia and get killed in the process? You ever think that maybe what he’s holding on to right now is the idea that you’re okay? That maybe fighting to get back to you is what’s keeping him alive and motivated? If you’re determined to kill yourself to go get him, then at least let me help you. I can figure stuff out and you have a better chance of staying alive.”

“You’ll do this to help Leo?”

“No,” Munroe said, though her exact thought was something closer to
Fuck Leo
. “I would do it for you,” she said, though that, too, wasn’t the whole truth, and after a pregnant pause she said, “You told me you’d be willing to put everything on the line to help him, right?”

“Yes.”

“What if that means going into debt?”

“Yes.”

“No matter how much?”

“What are you getting at, Michael? I’m not going to put a price on his head. I’ll do whatever it takes, but I don’t like all the open-ended questions.”

“There are other ways to get him out, but they’re not going to be free. I just need a little time to plan and sort through how to do it.”

“How much longer is a little time?”

“Three days,” Munroe said, and with that commitment the impact of having to function with a body unable to keep up with her mind became the burden of a deadline she wasn’t sure she’d be able to meet. “If I haven’t called you by then, I’m either dead or useless,” she said, “and then you’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Munroe left the Safaricom store to find clothes. Snickers followed in her wake, sidewalk merchants and street-store touts who noticed the bare feet and local attire, and she found them amusing; pickpockets were what concerned her. Every bit of money she had left was spread between her pockets, and here on these busy streets she was most at risk for having it taken from her.

She finally spotted a store, one street over, that sold imported clothes, and there found a pair of cargo pants that fit well enough and a couple of T-shirts that might, with minimal washing, last a couple of weeks. She changed into the new clothes before leaving, added a button-down for the layering, but without a shower the effect was something akin to dressing up a pig. Shoes and socks came next, and after that a pharmacy where she purchased soap and shampoo, antibiotic ointment, and another box of morphine. And when she’d acquired all that she could reasonably carry without straining, she found food, and then a taxi and asked the driver for a local hotel, a place that might possibly cater to the occasional backpacker but never the packaged tours.

The driver took her in the direction of the old city and turned off onto a dirt road just as pitted as the paved ones; pointed her toward a block-shaped four-story building with a hand-painted sign, bars on
the windows, and wide deep green double doors. The lobby matched the outside, wasn’t much more than a shoddily built desk and an empty space, cooler than the outside heat due to the thick walls, but still hot and humid. The clientele were those who’d be in from the smaller cities: merchants who’d come to buy supplies from items fresh off the boat or perhaps pull their own wares out of customs at the port. Cell phones were abundant and languages cluttered, and many of the guests loitered in the lobby or around the front and in the small restaurants next door. If there were women here, Munroe didn’t see them.

Munroe paid for a room with its own shower. A boy in torn pants and slippers crafted from old rubber tires led her up a steep narrow stairwell to the third floor, an exhausting climb.

There were clean sheets on the bed, a fan, a little bit of space to walk from bed to bathroom, and a window that opened to the street below, where the noise of car horns and motorbikes lifted up with just enough breeze to keep the room from sauna-level heat. But the bathroom had a towel and running water and the water was hot, and this was why she’d come.

Munroe stood under the lackluster stream, hands to the wall, neck to the spray, allowing the heat to wash away the dirt and grime, and with the cleansing her body began to relax, and in the letting go came the memories and the emotion that she kept tamped down in favor of the rage and anger that pushed her toward survival. They bubbled up into pain worse than the fractures or the lacerations, and she didn’t fight them, allowed the flow to take the history and the scars, the losses and the impossible choices, and wash them away, and when they were gone, Munroe shut off the valve and reached for the towel.

Above the small sink was a cracked and worn mirror, enough to examine the wounds that she’d not yet seen. Her face was mottled, but not the worst that she’d experienced—and probably looked better now that she was clean. The bruises on her shoulders and torso were extensive and deep, would be a long time in healing, and the laceration along her side would be another scar to add to the collection
of slivers that crisscrossed her abdomen and back, mementos of the history that had taught her what it meant to fight for life.

She re-bound her chest with the same tape, dressed again, and lay back on the bed fending off the urge to sleep. The simple acts of making her way into town, getting the phone, shopping and showering, had depleted her energy, and the headache was back again. With the emotional clutter washed away and her thoughts running clearer, her mind circled around through the strategy at hand and then twisted dizzily along the scenarios and events that had brought her to this point, warped into a looping maze that had no beginning and no end.

She needed sleep.

Munroe took more ibuprofen and checked the time on her phone. Set the alarm. She could afford a few hours. The fan buzzed a hypnotic lure to the background of street noise against clean sheets and clean skin, and then one blink into the next the phone alarm pierced the melody and she lurched back into the rush of the world and the need for answers.