The Catch: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t see, Amber loved him enough that for her the rest was worthwhile.
    Munroe turned from him to the water, to the invisible danger that might or might not lurk in waiting. The captain had taken them northeast, presumably into the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, an unmarked sea lane between Yemen and Somalia where warships from two dozen nations patrolled nearly six hundred miles along the world’s busiest sea route.
    Fortune had turned against Somali piracy in recent years; the rate of hijacking attempts had fallen far below the heyday when dramatic confrontations and multimillion-dollar ransoms made international headlines. But the threat hadn’t gone away. Ships were still hijacked, just not as often. Travel in the Gulf of Aden was a calculated risk: The ocean was too vast for the warships to respond to every distress call, yet the odds were slim that any one ship would be the losing pocket on a roulette wheel of twenty-two thousand a year. Armed guards made safe transit a sure thing; in spite of attempts, no armed ship had ever been hijacked.
    Defending a moving fortress, guards had the advantage of the high ground; they were also better trained and better equipped, and three or four could do what twenty pirates on skiffs below could not. Even so, most merchant ships traveled without them. Armed transit was expensive, controversial, and, depending on the ships’ flag state, in many cases illegal.
    Leo moved out of sight to the far side of the bridge, so Munroesat on the deck and leaned against the bulwark. Across from her, not more than a smudge of shadow beyond the crane, David held watch the way watch was meant to be held. He was Leo’s friend from their years together in the French Foreign Legion: two men already used to working as a team, now on the same sentry cycle to compensate for her perceived uselessness. That would be the order of things until they reached Mombasa—four hours on, four hours off, in a schedule that would turn days and nights into eight-hour segments and force her to wait several shifts before her off time rolled around at an hour that most on the ship would be sleeping and she’d be free to explore unobserved and unhindered.
    Munroe stood again, and, almost as if on cue, Leo’s voice sounded in her earpiece. She made a show of fiddling with the bud and then spoke too loudly so that he yelled at her in a whisper, and that made her smile. He instructed her to walk the port side of the ship, to keep alert, and so she made a slow amble, aft to fore and back again, with ocean spray carried up by the wind stinging her face and probabilities playing against facts, because as much as she didn’t care what happened to the ship, she cared what happened to herself. No matter what Leo claimed, this wasn’t a standard voyage or standard contract, and she fully intended to get back to land no matter how badly anyone else fucked things up.
    The sun rose, and Victor came as part of the relief of the next watch. “You do good?” he said.
    She pulled the flashlight from a pocket and handed it to him. “Your weapon,” she said. “Just in case.” His beard twitched and he wagged his finger, so she gave him the whistle as well.
    When he laughed, she grinned and turned away for the galley to grab food and see what more she could learn from her shipmates. Leo’s team was far too egalitarian to fit neatly into the formal segregation of officers and crew, but at sea they followed the patterns of their hosts, and on the
Favorita
that meant Leo and David ate in the officers’ mess, socialized with the officers, and had their berth on the officers’ deck while the rest of them were relegated to the crew’s mess and crew’s quarters.
    The arrangement was how Munroe preferred things—it kept Leo away from her—and in any case, the crew interested her most. She ate in silence, listening to the cook hash out an issue with the mechanic, understanding nothing of the words rattled off in