The Catch: A Novel (36 page)

“Will they believe it?”

“I told them about Aasiya,” he said. “They believe.”

“Khalid doesn’t know.”

“It’s better that way,” he said. “You’ll have less trouble keeping your army intact if they don’t suspect anything other than victory. I have also withheld mention of your destination or why you go. When you are ready, tell Khalid. He’ll inform the others.”

“What about the papers? What went missing?”

“We’ve only put one room back together.” He took another sip of tea. “We will figure it out.”

“Makes the most sense they’d be looking for something related to the freighter. Did you file documents to seize the ship?”

“I’ve drawn them up,” he said. “I haven’t filed them. I won’t file them until you’re back in Kenyan territory—to be safe—in case someone
is
looking.”

She smiled, acknowledgment of his perception, and he took the cue and stood. Extended a hand and when she shook it he said, “I expect to see you again,” and in his statement was both threat and Godspeed.

“It’s in my best interest if you do,” she said, and when she released him, he placed his other hand on top of hers and said, “Travel safe.”

Munroe walked with him to the front of the house, waited as he and his men got back into the vehicles, the truck included, and she stood in the middle of the track staring after them until all three sets of taillights had disappeared into the foliage. Then, mind switching gears to the work at hand, she turned to Joe, whom the
hawaladar
had left behind.

He’d yet to utter a word in any encounter she’d had with him.

“You have what you need?” she said.

He nodded, and walked from her to the beach and the rest of the men, bringing their hunting party to nine plus a prisoner.

I
N THE HOUSE
Munroe checked on the captain. She allowed him out of the room to shower and wash his clothes, and when she’d fed and watered him and returned him to his cell of a room, she dumped her
few belongings out of the plastic bag and carried the bag down to the beach.

The inflatable boats were on the sand, and Natan and Amber were beside them, tools in hand, assembling parts from the crate while the generator ran loud and Khalid used the air compressor to fill the second craft. The rest of the men crowded around to observe. Munroe joined the circle, noted the progress, and then, bag held toward Khalid, said, “I need all the cell phones.”

He glanced up, squinting against the sun.

“You can have them back when we return,” she said. “If you have a problem with it, call Abdi and ask him. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

He stood and fished his phone from his pocket, dropped it into the bag, and she said, “It’ll be easier if you get them from the others too,” and so he took the bag and against groans of protest and brief arguments, collected phones from each of the rest of the crew. Joe was last, and with a smirk, eyes never leaving Munroe’s, he too dumped his phone in the bag.

Khalid brought the bag to her, and while they watched, she pulled the phones out and one by one removed the batteries. “It’s for your own safety,” she said, though the bigger truth was that it was for her safety and the safety of the mission. From here on out, unless one of them had smuggled in a communications device, only she would have access to the outside world, and that would limit the risk of betraying their movement and position to the
hawaladar
or to Ibrahiin—whoever he was—and by proxy to the Russians or the pirates.

The work on the inflatables had stopped completely—even Natan and Amber had turned to watch her—so Munroe left them. Carried the phones inside the house, put them in a cupboard in the kitchen, and then continued on, out the front with her own phone, far enough away so that the captain wouldn’t be able to overhear conversation.

She dialed Sergey and he answered with the tentative inflection of someone who didn’t recognize a number, though that changed as
soon as she infused honey into her hello, and a reminder of the unfinished promises left behind in the backseat of the car.

“I’m in Kampala,” she said. “Sadly. Stuck here thanks to idiot bureaucrats. I can’t return to Mombasa for another week. Will you still be there when I return?”

“A week?” he said. “Yes, I should still be here.”

“Do I find you at the same hotel?”

“Sentrim Castle,” he said. “Do you know it?”

“I can look for it.”

“Call me when you get back,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, voice lilting and inviting. “We can finish where we left off.”

“I look forward to that,” he said, and the hair rose on the back of her neck, the telltale signal that she was being watched. Breathless and full of sugar, she added, “I’ll make sure that you do,” and ended the call, and without turning said, “What do you want, Natan?”

“You were speaking Russian,” he said. Surprise underlined his accusation.

“Yes.”

“The people behind the hijacking of the
Favorita
are Russian.”

“Yes,” she said.

“S kem eto ty govorila?”

She turned to face him. “I’m taking care of business.”

He walked toward her. Stopped just outside her personal space, as if trying to read her or find some answer to an unasked question while mistrust oozed from his expression and his posture. “What is it you are after?” he said.

“Same as you.”

“Not the same.”

She shrugged, glanced beyond him toward the house. Wouldn’t play his game or get baited into a pissing match. “Either you trust that I’m after the ship just as you are,” she said, “or you don’t trust, and if you don’t trust, there isn’t a thing I can do to make you, so I’m not about to try.” She nodded toward the ocean. “When we get on that dhow tomorrow, my life is at risk just as much as yours, as Amber’s.
Stepping on my toes every leg of the journey isn’t going to get you what you want, and it certainly won’t get us safely back.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“You know who I am.”

“No. I know who those documents say you are. I know who you said you were when you first arrived in Djibouti. One was a lie, it could all be lies. Who are you?”

“I’m the person standing in front of you.”

He clenched his jaw and his breathing shortened.

“You’re playing word games with me,” he said. “Why are you here?” He swept his hand toward the house, the beach. “Doing this?”

“We’ve already had that conversation.”

“It’s an unfinished conversation. There are too many holes and inconsistencies. Now you say that you haven’t spent the last five years in Djibouti, that you aren’t the child of English-teacher parents.”

“Correct.”

“But you speak Somali.”

“Yes. And Afar.”

“Did you study these languages? For your assignments? Your missions?”

Munroe sighed. Knew where this conversation was headed. “I learned them locally,” she said.

“That works for your old story, not your new one.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the twitch of his fingers toward the gun holstered at his side. He said, “In the new version you were only there a month or so before you came to work for Leo.”

“That’s correct.”

“You contradict yourself in lies.” He smiled a triumphant smile as if waving the proof of her duplicity in her face. “You don’t become fluent in a language in so short a time.”

“I do,” she said.

“Okay, supergirl, if that’s what you say.” His expression hardened and his lips drew taut. “One lie upon the next,” he said, “and now you are keeping something from us. I don’t trust you.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You and Leo lied to Amber, lied
to me. After all of your own lies it must be difficult to believe someone else might be telling the truth. You screwed me over. You should be careful when this is finished.”

“When this is finished?” he said.

“It only benefits me to hunt you down and kill you after the mission is complete.”

Natan’s eyes widened, as if in the many avenues she might be dangerous, that was one he hadn’t considered.

She smiled. “I’m fucking with you,” she said. “Don’t be a self-righteous asshole, Natan. If anyone here doesn’t deserve trust—doesn’t deserve it from Amber or from me—it’s you.”

His shoulders lowered and his hands relaxed, and he looked toward the trees and shook his head. “That still doesn’t answer the questions,” he said. “You have other motives and you are keeping secrets.” But resignation filled his voice, almost as if he said it to clear the air and get it out of his system.

“Supposing that’s true, then that only makes us even,” she said. “You’re not the good guy in this scenario either.” And with the heart of the conversation over, she walked toward the beach. Natan kept pace beside her, and they made it about twenty feet before he broke the silence.

“About the languages,” he said. “Where did you learn Somali?”

“In Djibouti.”

“And Swahili?”

“Here.”

“Why do you keep telling stories?” he said. “In this it can’t hurt to tell the truth.”

“It is the truth.”

“But it’s not possible.”

“What? To learn so quickly, to speak so many? Why not?”

“Nobody can,” he said, and his response irritated her. Not the disbelief, which was fairly standard, but the small-mindedness from which it was born.

“The world is gifted with mathematical wunderkinds and musical geniuses,” she said. “They’re rare, but they exist. They are everyday
people with neurological connections wired differently than yours. Just because you’ve never met someone who can do long math in their head faster than on a calculator doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“I speak five languages,” he said, and took on the tone of conversing with a toddler who needed slower talking and smaller words. “Every one of them took years to learn. You’re not a cartoon, Michael, so stop with the pretend play, yes?”

She stopped walking and turned toward him. “You have your share of flaws, Natan, but until now I never mistook you for one of those fools who use their own inability and limited experience to measure what others can or can’t do.”

He stared back.

“You ever heard of Daniel Tammet?”

“No.”

“He’s a savant,” she said. “Asperger’s. High-functioning autism. He learned to speak Icelandic in a week—most difficult language in the world—did it for national TV to prove it could be done.”

“You’re not autistic.”

She started walking again and Natan kept by her side.

“Heard of Timothy Doner? He’s a teenager in New York who’s taught himself over twenty languages, learned some in as little as a week. He’s not autistic. What about Emil Krebs, heard of him?”

“No.”

“Diplomat. He mastered sixty-eight languages and could translate from up to a hundred and twenty. What about John Bowring?”

“No.”

“A hundred languages.”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Uku Masing.”

“Just stop.”

“Sixty-five languages.”

“Mario Pei.”

“I get it,” he said, and so she stopped with the list, and because they’d reached the edge of the sand, she also stopped walking.

“It’s a defect in human nature,” she said, and turned to him again.
“Weak people do it, you know? Turn personal opinion into a fact worth fighting for. That’s what differentiates me from you, makes me a better strategist. Don’t underestimate your opponent by gifting him with your own weaknesses, Natan.”

“Then you agree: You are an opponent.”

“Either way your suspicion makes me one.”

“My suspicion is well justified. You can say differently, but your motives are not as simple as you claim.”

“Does it matter? We’re here, going after the ship, going after your team. You could never have done this without me. I pulled this thing together out of thin air on short notice in a country where none of us have connections and your trust or nontrust made absolutely no difference. What’s still at stake is the outcome—if you want to fuck
that
up, then keep riding my tail, otherwise just leave me alone and let me do my job.” Munroe closed in on his personal space and said, “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”

“You’ve hijacked a ship before?”

She smiled wryly. “No.”

He snorted. “Been on a hijacked ship?”

“
The
Favorita.”

“Besides that.”

“Yes, actually.”

He raised his eyebrows and then laughed, as if she’d offered him another of her
stories
, and she let him have that. He’d believe what he wanted to believe.

“I’ll let you work,” he said, “though you are just as guilty of using your own limitation to view the world. Not once have you asked me of my own history or experience with hijackings—you don’t know what I know.”

The underhanded conciliation was probably the best she’d get from him, so she met him halfway: sat and patted the sand beside her. “Come, sit,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

They left with the tide, an embarkation that had taken close to an hour to get under way in the early-morning dark, and Munroe stood at the gunwale looking out over the house, unlit and abandoned, the base of operations that had served its purpose and upon which she’d left the last twenty-dollar payment and the keys hammered to the front door.

The dhow picked up speed and with the increase in forward momentum came the rhythm, the pounding rise and fall, and the house became nothing but a blend of all the other darknesses along the shore. This boat was home now, and with them was everything they needed to make the twelve-hundred-mile round-trip. If they’d miscalculated on fuel or food or water, there were no fallbacks, no one to call in an emergency or for rescue.

Natan sat fore, face to the wind, and Amber beside him, an outline under the moonlit sky, head tipping up and down in conversation that Munroe couldn’t hear. For the moment, Yusuf had the wheel, and the others had staked out territory in the open among the fuel drums and supplies where they could stretch out and sleep. She turned from them toward the canopy, where she’d stashed the captain, boxed in among the smaller supplies.