The Catch: A Novel (18 page)

“What would you do with this information if you had it?”

“Probably use it to find and kill a few people.”

“Somalis?”

“I’m after the foreign investors. Maybe a few pirates depending on what happens with the crew aboard the ship. It’s hard to say, but I’m world-weary enough to know that nothing is black and white.”

“You’re not CIA?”

“No.”

“Armed forces of any kind?”

“No.”

“Connected to any government?”

“No.”

“Vigilante justice?”

“Something more like that.”

He sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“That kind of knowledge is relative.”

“Now you’re playing games,” he said, and his expression hardened.

Munroe slipped slowly back from the desk, away from the bills, shrank as far into the chair as space would allow so that she would appear smaller and be less of a presence to interrupt his thought process.

“There are Somalis involved,” he said. “Of course there are, nothing like this would be possible without local cooperation.”

“That’s not the same thing,” she said, and when the resultant silence became uncomfortable, she refused to break it. Everything in
his posture, in the guarded words he offered, and in what he left unspoken, said that he hated those who’d done this more than he distrusted her.

The seconds ticked on, and at last the
hawaladar
leaned forward. “There was the promise of a lot of money,” he said. “The rumor comes to me thirdhand, possibly further removed than that, but I’ve heard it from two different people, so you can take what you want from it. I make no promises.”

Munroe nodded and said, “Go on.”

“Supposedly, about three or four weeks ago, the faction out of Eyl was approached by an intermediary offering investment for a hijacking.” He paused, backtracking. “Do you know much about the state of piracy today?”

“Some,” she said. “I’m not an expert. I know that every hijacking is financed, I understand the concept of shares.”

“I assume you know that these days hijacking carries a greater risk than it used to? Many skiffs have been destroyed, a lot of supplies destroyed, investors are looking for more secure places to put their money.”

“Yes,” she said.

“There used to be a lot of money in these small towns, huge inflows of cash, and now they’ve dried up. It’s addicting, you know? The money. It buys a lot of prostitutes and a lot of khat. So when an intermediary approaches with a proposal for an easy payday, people listen.”

He paused and raised his eyebrows, and she said, “I’m still with you.”

“The investors flew in, a group of four or five, and they outlined plans to take this ship. They knew the schedule and had a way to track the vessel exactly. Rather than capture the ship in the Gulf of Aden, where the military presence was strong, they would take it in international waters off the east Somali coastline, making the risk very small. The investors offered weapons and training, and when word began to spread that there was money coming into town on
the promise of the capture of a valuable ship, others wanted in on the investing pool.”

The
hawaladar
pushed back from his desk and stood. “Somali financing paid for the boats and supplies and fuel in exchange for equal shares of the ransom money. The foreigners provided the training and specialized equipment beyond what was already available.” He began a slow pace. “Unfortunately, once the ship was taken, my countrymen realized, too late, that it wasn’t worth what they’d been told. But the investors had already left town, they and their money disappeared. So it seems the foreigners got what they came for, but for the Somalis the only way to recoup the investment is through the ransom of an aging ship.”

“So the talk of investment was just talk? Almost everything came out of Somali pockets?”

“It appears that way,” he said.

Munroe blew out a low whistle. “So the pirates got screwed both ways.”

“I won’t say it doesn’t serve them right.”

“What were the foreigners after?”

The
hawaladar
shrugged. “I’m baffled,” he said.

“Did they get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But if the group was out of Eyl, what’s the ship doing in Garacad?”

He shrugged again and put his palms up. “Who can say? Lack of fuel? A show of antipiracy by Farole’s people to keep the money flowing from the West? I’m simply passing along what I heard.”

“The shipowners won’t pay out,” Munroe said.

“How do you know this?” the
hawaladar
said, and, avoiding eye contact, as if he might give away some secret, he shut the ledger and replaced it on the shelf. In his attempt to shield his thoughts, he announced that there was something that drew him to this hijacking, something more than just an aversion to piracy or anger over his people having been scapegoated, and so Munroe pressed on, answering his question, guiding her words by his reaction to them.

“The ship doesn’t carry K&R,” she said, “and given the condition the ship is in, I expect it would be headed for scrap soon anyway. With the principals shielded through the charterer—they probably own it through bearer shares anyway—I can’t see why they’d show up to claim it.”

The
hawaladar
glanced at her again with that same sly, curious, concealed smile, as if his mind had already jumped topics and his calculations had run in an entirely different direction. “But the ship is seaworthy,” he said.

“Yes, just old.”

“That’s an interesting thought,” he said.

“Wouldn’t be the first time an owner abandoned his crew with the ship.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Most of them are from the Philippines,” she said. “A few Egyptians. Russian captain and Polish officers, I think, so there’s not a lot of money to be had from the families. Maybe the Russian or Polish governments, though I doubt it.”

He sat again, hands clasped together across his midsection, and he avoided eye contact by studying the midpoint of his desk.

She said, “Where did the investors come from?”

He nudged the dollars back in her direction and this time there was a sense of finality in his action. “That’s really all I have,” he said.

“Why tell me everything else and leave out the key detail?”

“I have children, and news travels both ways.”

There was no answer to that, so she stood and left the money on the table. “Keep it for me,” she said. “There are plans in motion and I might still need to make
hawala
after all.”

“What kind of plans?” he said.

“Investor plans.”

He half smiled and the smile widened into a grin that said he would welcome her back for another discussion at the least. She’d give him another day or so to mull over the situation, would press harder to pull from him this thing she sensed he wanted more than
money, and exchange it for the pieces about the investors that he held back.

M
UNROE RETURNED TO
the streets and strode along what were now mostly empty sidewalks, judging shadows, and the people in them, and second-guessing her own analysis. Aside from what little rest she’d managed on the bus from Malindi, and the minutes she’d stolen in the
hawaladar
’s hallway, it had been thirty-six hours since sleep, and it was like having had one drink too many. The deprivation blunted her senses, slowed her reactions, took her to the edge of tipsy and slightly off control. She needed to stop, badly, but couldn’t just yet.

At the
matatu
depot she found a van for Mombasa’s North Shore, took the ride to within a half kilometer of the hotel, and asked the tout to let her out. Hanging from the open door, he banged coins on the rooftop, the signal to the driver to pull over, and Munroe squeezed past other riders into the night, where light bled from multiple restaurants and bars, where the smell of woodsmoke and music and laughter filled the air and almost as many tourists as locals walked in the dark along the roadway edge.

She walked along the paved turnoff that led to the hotel reception area and followed it past lampposts and manicured foliage toward the room she’d not visited since she’d first left for the city. Sleep beckoned with its siren song, but possessions were what called her back: pictures and passports and money and weapons that she’d left behind on the possibility she’d be searched going into the
hawaladar
’s office; items she didn’t want to walk away from as long as she might still retrieve them.

She reached the small parking lot, still fifty meters beyond the lit reception area and the hotel wings that spread out on either side. Nothing in the air warned her in the way the gaps and silences had over Sami’s death. Habit had kept her mindful when moving about Mombasa; she’d been careful to create no link between the hotel and the hospital and the
hawaladar
, but other than the nearly two kilo
meters of coast that separated the hotel from the pier, she’d done nothing to avoid connecting herself to the boat: If the violence that had killed Sami had traced her here, it would have come from that direction.

She opted for hiding in plain sight. Walked to the open reception area, past the front desk, where the staff was busy attending to an arriving family, beyond the handful of guests seated on the lobby furniture, their focus glued to wireless devices, and slipped through to the walkways on the other side, invisible in the normalcy. Once out of sight, she stepped off the path and into the treed and grassy area, slipped from shadow to shadow toward her room, and passed alongside her patio.

Found the glass door slightly ajar, the curtains askew, and far more brightness coming from inside than what the bathroom light could put out, which was all that she’d left on. Lack of movement and shape on the other side told her that whoever had been here had probably come and gone, but she was too tired to trust her own judgment and so left the place and slowly looped back to the front.

Even if every piece of the room had been torn apart, she needed to get inside to find out what had been left behind, but not now, not tonight; better to avoid the room until after she’d had a chance to sleep and pay her body the dues it demanded, and if indeed there was nothing left in the room for her to collect when she came for it later, she would report yet another stolen passport to yet another U.S. embassy and call on Miles Bradford to wire operating cash from her reserve fund.

Munroe returned to the lobby. It took three minutes at the front desk to instruct the hotel staff to ensure that no further housekeeping would be done on her room—long enough for anyone paying attention to confirm that she’d returned, yet the only way to prevent those with good intentions from disturbing the scene and stealing from her the only clues she had.

Conscious of every breeze, every whisper, Munroe left for the highway, for the
matatus
to the city where she could find another
hotel and disappear for the night. Was halfway through the parking lot when the first warning crawled up her skin: notice that someone, somewhere, studied her intently. The sensation mixed together with smell and sound and heat and humidity to create the equatorial Africa of her adolescence: spiked a potent and powerful trigger. The past became the present, became the fight for survival that would once have sent her plunging into the dark to hide and hunt, to refuse to be the victim yet again. Munroe paused and drew in the night, breathed past the urges of years gone by, faced the darkness, and moved her fingers toward the knife sheathed on the makeshift belt.

Munroe hunted for the source of the disquiet, scanned windows along the hotel wings, and found nothing to answer the rising warnings. On the road ahead she caught a shift in pattern beyond one of the perimeter lights, and when she turned to face the movement, two men emerged from the bushes and strode in her direction.

They were in their late teens, possibly early twenties, wore a mixture of tattered clothing that spoke more of life on the streets huffing glue than of the boys who sold overpriced curios to tourists on the beach. On another night she would have led them to the dirt track on the other side of the wall-like hedges, enticed them to follow her toward quiet and emptiness so she might at least take one of them alive and, assuming they were at all connected to the destruction of her room or Sami’s murder, try to learn from him what she could. Being this tired, she’d only set herself up for a fight she couldn’t win.

Shifting strategy and changing plans, Munroe retraced her way to the lobby. The men slowed when she retreated, hovered near the edge of the parking lot, far enough away from the front to avoid catching the attention of the
askaris
, but still close enough to say they weren’t leaving. Munroe pointed them out to the watchmen on her way back inside.

Sitting out the night in the lobby or finding a place to hide on the hotel grounds was out of the question. The men in the lot hadn’t targeted her by random coincidence any more than Sami had been killed by chance, and a few batons and nightsticks, possibly machetes, would hardly be a long-term deterrent to keep them away. She’d be no safer in the lobby than in her room, and staying until the evening deepened, when she was even further sleep-deprived, would only put her in a worse situation than she was in now.

She waited until the guards gave chase and the shouts had traveled far up toward the highway, then turned and passed back through the lobby to the beach side of the property. Leaving the path she’d just come from, she took long strides in the direction of the north edge, where she could find a way through the hedges and avoid whoever might be waiting down on the beach.

A shadow shift twitched in her peripheral vision.

Munroe increased her pace, and from the opposite direction a man stepped out several feet in front of her. He appeared slightly older than the two in the lot, but like theirs his clothing spoke of street life. He wore a raglike T-shirt and cloth tennis shoes, his toes protruding through holes, but new jeans and an expensive watch on each wrist, as if he carried his every possession on his body, no matter how mismatched, because it was the safest place to store things.