The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  The strongest security features protected the underground labs, where the sensitive research and development took place. In addition to the multiple biometric stations that an employee had to pass through after the single point of entry, reinforced construction turned the lower levels into a bunker, making it impossible for technology to be stolen remotely through keystrokes or for monitor frequencies to be grabbed through the air. Nothing, data included, went in or came out that wasn’t carried—and for that there were additional protocols.

  The company’s own personnel was the only route secrets might travel into competitors’ hands, and although each employee had been heavily vetted, reviews were conducted regularly, and no thief or spy had been uncovered, the suspicion of theft persisted.

  Bradford had been brought in to use his skills in the low-tech world of blood-and-guts security to seek out gaps that the high-tech guys might be missing. He was there for face-to-face interaction, to spot the combat enemy in peacetime the way he was trained to search out threat in war.

  On the way to the break room, where most of the employees took lunch in one form or another, Munroe said, “You could have really used me on this assignment.”

  Bradford nodded. “Maybe I should have,” he said, “but you know why I couldn’t—still can’t.”

  “Not can’t, Miles, won’t.”

  Bradford stopped and faced her, hurt in his eyes, pain in his posture. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

  “I get that you’re trying to keep me away from triggers,” she said. “I get that our odds are better this way, but I’ve got nothing here, Miles. I’m going through the motions, trying to find friends, taking up hobbies, but come on, this is me we’re talking about.”

  “A month or two and I’ll be out of here,” he said.

  “You’re missing the point. Another location isn’t going to change anything, and as much as I love you, neither will spending more time together if I’m not working. Let me help you,” she said. “Utilize my brain. Please?”

  He searched her eyes, then took her hand and stared at their fingers, while inner debate marched across his face. Finally he said, “I just can’t, Michael. Not the way things are right now. It’s complicated. Let me finish this out, a few more months, that’s all. Can you last that long—for me? For us?”

  Munroe stood silent, arms crossed and motionless.

  Bradford released her hand, cupped her chin, and lifted her face toward his. “I won’t blame you if you feel you need to walk away again,” he said, “if that’s what you need to be all right. But I don’t want you to leave, Michael, I really don’t. Please stay until this is over and then we’ll find a middle ground—something that works for both of us, I promise.”

  They stood there, face-to-face, at the end of the hall, communicating through the silence. She studied him, searched him, and then sighed, giving in because she knew that Bradford’s reasons were drawn from a well of love and concern, and because, for the first time in her life, leaving was no longer possible.

  Bradford stuck out his bottom lip, quivering with puppy-dog adorableness, and that forced her to smile. Then his focus ticked up and passed over her shoulder, and his eyes, like sharks cutting through water, began roaming, as was his way: always aware, always searching the surroundings. He put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Let’s grab food.”

  Munroe stole a glimpse toward the hall junction, searching for what had arrested his attention: two women with lunch bags in hand, walking side by side, their expressions contorting with the curves and lines of deep, earnest conversation.

  The break room was a rectangle with half a long wall open instead of a door. One of the shorter walls was adorned with a sink and a counter, which was topped with microwave, toaster, and hot water pot, and its opposite was lined with vending machines that offered a universe of drink options, instant noodles, and instant hot junk food.

  Bradford threaded between round tables and mostly filled folding chairs to the back of the room, while twenty or so faces did everything possible to avoid making eye contact.

  Munroe whispered, “No one seems to like you much anymore.”

  “They’re scared of me.”

  “Wasn’t like that the last time I was here.”

  Bradford pulled out a seat and offered it to her. “I wasn’t a hatchet man the last time you were here.”

  “Might not be fear,” she said. “Might be avoidance and embarrassment.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  She shrugged. She hadn’t been in the facility long enough, hadn’t seen enough, to know. She said, “Americans—Texans in particular—come with a lot of stereotypes beyond the clothes and the imagined horse and cattle ranches.”

  “Dumb country boy?” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” And the way he said it implied that, if anything, he’d gone to lengths to cultivate that myth. “But I’m still a hatchet man.”

  Munroe scooted between chairs to the vending machines, cleaner and more modern than any other equipment she’d seen in the facility, exchanged coins for liquid nourishment, then returned to their table.

  The two women who’d caught Bradford’s attention in the hall walked in, broke their discussion long enough to take seats, then continued conversing in low, earnest tones as they set out their home-packed bento boxes of a dozen tiny portions and picked at their food, eating with dainty bites.

  Bradford, steaming Styrofoam cup in hand, sat beside Munroe. His eyes ticked once in the direction of the women.

  “What’s up with them?” Munroe said.

  “Trying to figure them out.”

  Munroe took a sip, stole a glance.

  He removed the cup’s paper lid and then raised the rim to his lips and blew against the steam. “Company executives seem pretty convinced that the theft is coming from China’s direction, and they’re the only two Chinese employees.”

  “That would be a bit obvious, wouldn’t it?”

  Eyes on the cup, he nodded. “Not to mention that neither of them have access to the lower levels, both have excellent work records, there’s nothing out of order in terms of life habits or patterns, and they are both far too naïve and self-involved to be what I’m looking for. But at this point, I can’t rule anything out.”

  Munroe glanced at him, then at the women. “Have you ruled out the possibility that, in spite of what you were told, you weren’t actually hired to find a spy?”

  “The thought’s crossed my mind.”

  Munroe took another sip, let the conversation thread drop. Bradford jabbed wooden chopsticks into the cup and ate while employees came and went. The women rinsed out their lunch containers in the sink and packed them up and then they, too, were gone. As if there’d been no break in conversation, Bradford said, “What’s your line of reasoning?”

  Munroe capped the empty bottle and rolled it between her palms. “Just doesn’t feel right,” she said. “If it was me, and granted, not everyone thinks like I do, I’d hire a team on the sly. Seven or eight people who speak the language and can blend in—not foreign—and I’d stagger them in as new hires, maybe over a two- or three-month period. I’d set them loose in key areas of the company—would put at least two of them down in the lower levels—and have them do exactly what they claim you were hired for, but do it invisibly. Even without the belt, the hat, the costume, and the legend, as a foreigner you’re incredibly conspicuous—you might as well wear a bell around your neck.”

  “Not too different from my own theory,” Bradford said. He gathered the trash and walked it to the garbage. Sat again. “I figure someone’s watching for something I don’t know anything about,” he continued, “that they’re using my presence like a stick in the bush to flush game, a wedge to split the log, a straw man, a distraction.”

  “No idea who or what?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’ll figure it out.”

  He was a mask but she read the obfuscations in him all the same. She smiled and let them go for
the same reason she agreed to stay until he finished the assignment. In retrospect, it would be difficult to say if that had been a mistake.

  He leaned back and brushed his thumb against her cheek. “I was hired to do a job and I’m going to get it done regardless of what the true motives might be.”

  “What’s really going on down there in the lab?” she said. “I’ve read the brochures, perused the website, done a rough once-over on the company. None of what they advertise adds up to anything big enough to call in someone like you. What’s worth so much that they guard it so carefully?”

  “The Holy Grail of biofabricated engineering,” he said.

  “Humor me.”

  “Body-part replication through 3-D printing.”

  “Can’t be that,” she said. “Biofacturing has been going on for years.”

  “Sure, ears and noses, arteries, lots of variants of skin and soft tissue for transplants and pharmaceutical testing,” he said, “even lab-grown muscle as a sustainable meat source, but most everyone is years, maybe decades, away from developing functional, transplantable organs.”

  Munroe raised her eyebrows and blew a silent whistle. “They’re close?”

  “Dunno. I’m not allowed access to the lab or any of the research.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Given how much they’ve invested in protecting whatever’s going on down there, I’d say they believe they’re way ahead of anyone else.”

  “No donor waiting list,” she said. “Virtually zero chance of transplant rejection. Can you imagine the potential market if they’re able to own and patent the process?”

  “Assuming they figure it out,” he said. “Just about every developed nation has companies and nonprofit teams working on the same type of research. Anyway, just because someone hits the finish line first doesn’t mean they’re a winner. There would still be years of clinical safety trials.”

  “If anyone gets to the finish line, we all win,” Munroe said, “but still…”

  Her sentence trailed off and her mind leapt sideways, scanning what she knew of the facility’s security systems, searching for weaknesses, plotting out how she’d steal the data if she’d been the one hired to get at it.

  Bradford raised an eyebrow and poked her arm playfully, but hard enough to say he knew what was up. “Don’t forget whose team you’re on,” he said.

  She grinned. “It’s tempting,” she said. “Why are they specifically looking at the Chinese?”

  Bradford’s gaze tracked over to the half-wall and the empty space where the women had passed through and where other employees continued to arrive and leave at irregular intervals. “I wish I knew,” he said.

  So did she. The question of Chinese involvement was one she’d come back to more than once over the coming weeks; the answer could have changed things if she’d had it at the beginning.

  The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.

  —MASTER SUN TZU

  Nonomi Sato crept along the open hallway, hugging the concrete railing, careful not to cast shadows or leave traces of her presence. She’d disconnected the security lighting, but nothing could be done about the cloud-covered moon or the bath of light pollution.

  Sato turned the key, slow and quiet. The lock gave and she depressed the handle, nudging the door open one controlled centimeter at a time.

  Shoes in the genkan told the story of the home’s occupants and estimated their ages and sizes: son, mother, father, grandmother.

  This was almost too easy and that took away the fun.

  Sato stepped into the house, shoes still on, clothes black, supple, and tight like a second skin, a nighttime skin, because night was when the carnivores came out to hunt.

  Haruto Itou his badge had said, and she found him in his room, still awake and at his computer, with his back to the door. He never heard her enter. He was bigger and fatter; he would make a lot of noise if she fought him.

  She crossed the tatami silently and whispered his name.

  He startled, turned, and seeing her, put his back to the desk.

  She put a finger to her lips and said, “Don’t tell.”

  His mouth opened. With a seductive pout, she removed the pin from her bun and allowed the wig hair to tumble down in waves. Then she unzipped the upper layer of her body suit, exposed cleavage, and moved closer to him.

  Itou offered a hint of a smile.

  Sato bit her lip in sly promise. “You’ve looked for me,” she said. Slow and sensual, she reached for his hand, brought it to her chest, and rubbed his fingers across a nipple. “You wanted to touch, and now I’ve come to you.”

  She stepped around and nudged her thigh between his legs, sidled up to his groin, and ran his hand down her belly, ever lower. “You want more?” she said. “You can have it all, just as you imagined.”

  He hardened against her thigh and his hands came alive on their own, groping with all the experience of a schoolboy.

  She took his palms and pressed them together, nudged him back, and whispered, “We will need time. More than these few hours left of the night. We’ll skip work tomorrow. Write to your department manager, tell him you’re ill.”

  Itou hesitated and she pressed her mouth nearer his head, ran her tongue from the base of his ear, over his earlobe, and traced her fingers up his thigh. His breath caught.

  “It’s just one day,” she said. “Or I could simply go home now and we can forget this embarrassing incident.”

  His mouth moved in a whisper, but no words formed, then he opened an e-mail. She teased him as he typed, struggling to keep up with the characters that rose on the screen. “Also, a note to your parents,” she said, and she pointed toward the notebook on his desk. She wouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t touch anything inside this home unless she had to. With her hair tight beneath the wig and her body scrubbed clean before she’d dressed, she’d done everything possible to prevent leaving behind evidence that she’d been there.

  He picked up the paper and found a pencil.

  “There,” she said, her fingers still tracing his inner thigh, her breath still heavy in his ear, “tell them you’ve gone for a while and not to worry about you, that there are things”—she paused and took his hand, pulling his thumb into her mouth, wetting his skin with her lips and tongue—“tell them there are things you must think about. That will keep them from bothering you and gives us time, yes?”

  He put down the pencil and turned to face her, his face flushed, hands trying to get further inside her suit. She batted them away. “No, silly boy,” she said. “Write the note so we can go and we can take our time and do things the proper way.”

  He scribbled, and she read over his shoulder, and when he had finished, she took his hand and guided him out of the room into the genkan, allowing him but a second to grab a pair of shoes before they slipped through the door.

  Outside in the hall, she laughed a soft girlish giggle and ran, leading him along by the hand down the stairs and to the alley, where she’d parked the car.

  The mountain road wound tight and narrow, a wall of rock on one side, a guardrail on the other, and enough pavement for a vehicle and a half. The drop over the edge and into the trees was a hundred feet at least.

  Munroe gave the Ninja a little more speed.

  The bike hugged the turn and her body moved with the machine, balanced and beautiful, and perfectly terrified. The heady rush crested in a wave, sweet and smooth, like morphine released through a handheld drip.

  In the near distance, a delivery truck rounded a curve and the vehicle lurched its way toward collision. In pure slow-motion clarity, adrenaline surged, and the self-destructive forces that propelled her to gamble with her life rose from deep sleep.

  Time spliced into nanosecond slivers. In her head she tossed life against a chemical high that soothed and shushed and pushed the world away.

  The truck sounded its horn.

  The engine on the Ninja whi
ned; the urges cried for release.

  Accelerate or brake, there was no third option.

  The roulette wheel began to spin: probability colliding with possibility and churning out the odds of mortality. The road widened slightly. Munroe gauged distance and space, her foot shifted gears, and her hand nurtured the throttle, preparing to tear through the opening between truck and guardrail at the widest point.

  Instead she decelerated, then braked, almost too hard to control the bike. The truck passed on her left, the wrong side of the road, the driver screaming obscenities through the window.

  Munroe stopped and pulled off the helmet. Frustration rose to take the place of exhilaration and she sat silently for a long while, feet on the ground balancing the bike, head tipped up, listening to the sound of the forest that filled in for traffic as the adrenaline ebbed and the reality of the decision she’d almost made hit hard.

  Shame replaced frustration.

  She’d finally reclaimed the happiness she’d had when she and Bradford were last together, before fate had sucked them into a vortex of loss, yet even that wasn’t enough to protect her from herself.

  The surprise wasn’t that she’d been willing to throw everything away on a two-foot margin of error. It was that she’d stopped before the wheel of chance had finished spinning. She might not be so fortunate again.

  She’d been in one place, without purpose, for too long.

  The phone in her back pocket vibrated.

  Munroe glanced at the sky, still far too bright for Bradford to be headed home. She answered his call, oozing sugar into her voice.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Have dinner with me tonight?” Bradford said.

  “Oooh,” she said. “You’re taking me out on a date?”

  “That would depend on if you can find a way to pencil me in.”

  “I might be able to work that. Is it a fancy-clothes night?”

  “Your fanciest.”