The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “Then maybe,” she said. “Possibly. I haven’t looked at it hard enough yet to know what can be done, but if it is fixable, the fixing won’t be free.”

  Bradford smiled again, that sad, sad smile, and with his focus drifting back down toward the counter, he shook his head again. His pride would never allow him to articulate it, so Munroe answered the question for him.

  “Logan used me, but I didn’t go to Argentina to save him,” she said. “That’s what makes this different. I’ll do everything I can to save you, Miles, but I won’t do it for love. You want me to work? You want out? Pay me.”

  “I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place here, Mike—it’s not exactly like I can say no, no matter how fucked up that is.”

  “You can say it,” she said.

  “That’s how it is, then? One bad turns deserves another, and either I succumb to blackmail or you leave me here? Abandon me? Will that make us even?”

  She crossed her arms and he glared at her and she glared back.

  “Look, you can hate me now,” she said, “I don’t care. There’ll be plenty of time later for hurt feelings and licking wounds. I prefer pissed off and angry, anyway.”

  “Michael,” he said. He put his hand to the window again. “I’m genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, sorry. Sorry for thinking I knew what you needed more than you did and not giving you work when you asked for it. Sorry for not telling you there might be storms on the horizon. Sorry for putting you through this.” He tipped his head in the direction of the officer who’d remained standing on his side of the wall. “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was wrong and you deserved better.”

  “Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Tell me what you want to hear and I’ll say it.”

  “I want you to write the goddamn check so I can go to work.”

  “You’re being an asshole.”

  “I’m very good at that.”

  “This isn’t you, Michael. This isn’t who you are. Not to me.”

  “These past few months?” she said. “The lies, the stolen moments and stolen choices while I tried to change who I was for you—for us—was that you?”

  Bradford’s eyes wandered over her shoulder, toward the officer behind her. Voice distant and hollow, he said, “When you contact the office again, tell Walker the score. She can make sure you’re compensated.”

  “Give me your authorization codes.”

  “What? You want a blank check?”

  “You want to rot in here for the next twenty years? You know what I’m worth.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  Munroe shrugged. “What’s the rest of your life?”

  Bradford’s expression hardened. He’d run the full gauntlet from sorrow to pain to anger. “Tell Walker I said to put it all on Armageddon.”

  “I’m not coming back until this is over,” Munroe said. “There are no do-overs, no opportunities to clarify things, so you’d better be sure she’ll understand exactly what that means.”

  “I know it’s hard given the way things are,” he said, “but please, a little trust.”

  “Okay,” she said. She stood to go. Business was done, that’s what she’d come for.

  Half out of his chair, Bradford pressed both palms to the window. “Michael,” he said. “Please, not yet.”

  Munroe paused, then sat again, and Bradford did, too. He drew a long breath. “There are a million things I wish I could tell you, so much I wish I could undo. It plays in my head over and over, the little choices, the what-ifs, the smallest things that might have made a difference. I miss you,” he said. “If I could rewind and do things differently, I would, but I can’t. All I can do is hope you’re able to figure it out. Maybe at least then you’ll understand that my intentions were good and that even in the lies I never meant to hurt you. None of that matters now, but I wish you could know it.”

  Munroe gritted her teeth. She didn’t want him to beg, didn’t want him to suffer, and didn’t want an apology, either—it was easier to feed the monsters from a place of rage. His earnestness tore at her, shredding resolve.

  She placed her hand against the glass, lining her fingers up against his, aching for the touch that had once been, separated by an inch of material that might as well be an ocean and a lifetime.

  Given the circumstances, it might truly be a lifetime.

  Bradford leaned nearer and she did, too, and his eyes traced over their fingers and then up to her eyes. His expression, tightening as if he had no voice and only the agony of failure, ripped the heart right out of her.

  There were no words for good-byes like this.

  Bradford whispered, “Always.”

  Munroe closed her eyes and smiled his sadness.

  This might be the last time she saw him. Ever. And the things she said today might be the last words from her he heard and carried. Even the anger and the sting of betrayal, the confusion and disorientation that had stained and sullied the memories of every moment they’d shared to now, wasn’t worth the future regret of never having said what she needed him to know.

  “Maybe one day you’ll understand, too,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you.” She put two fingers to her lips and then pressed them to the glass. “Always,” she whispered back, “I love you.” And then she stood, and before he could respond, she walked away.

  Munroe left the precinct station on foot and wandered the streets to clear her head and to shed the emotion of the visit until the evening drew on and the sun had set and then she returned to the manga café, where she’d left her things burning money by the quarter hour. The cubicle haven had served its purpose and now it was time to move on.

  Far, far down the street, in the parking area where she’d left it, Munroe strapped Bradford’s backpack to the Ninja’s rear sliver, slipped the straps of the other over her shoulders, and started the engine. She rode the streets away from the café and the apartment, following a zigzag toward ALTEQ, keeping to the main thoroughfares and doubling back along roads that ran parallel to train stations until she found a business hotel that fit what she wanted.

  The building was ten stories, narrow as most buildings were, and at the grungy higher point of the low-end, with a clean and brightly lit lobby minus security cameras and overattentive desk staff.

  Munroe filled out the requisite information card using a false name and false local address, claiming to be a resident. Only foreign visitors were required to show their travel documents and if speaking fluent Japanese didn’t convince the clerk she lived there, nothing short of an ID would. Had he argued, insisted on seeing her passport, she would have left and tried again elsewhere. Rules were rules, but polite unwillingness to be confrontational made enforcement hit or miss.

  He handed Munroe the key and she carried the helmet and backpacks up to a room that was small, even by hotel standards, with a solid molded-plastic shower and sink to act as bathroom and barely enough space to walk between the desk and the double bed.

  Munroe closed the curtains, adjusted the thermostat, set an alarm, and tumbled into oblivion. She woke four hours later and booted up her laptop.

  International calls were easy enough with a wi-fi connection and voice-over Internet app, but the extreme time zone difference was an issue. Her darkness was Dallas’s daylight and the clock in Osaka was just now heading toward ten at night.

  The phone at Capstone Security Consulting rang twice and then a male voice she didn’t recognize answered with the baritone smoothness of a Madison Avenue advertising firm, belying the bullets-and-blood outfit Munroe knew the business to be. “This is Michael,” she said, “calling from Japan for Sam Walker.”

  “You’re with?” he said.

  “She knows who I am. Put me through and tell her it’s an emergency.”

  The line clicked over to Beethoven’s Ninth and Munroe pressed her thumb to the bridge of her nose, waiting for a conversation that she really, really, really didn’
t want to have. There was history here, most of it left unspoken, all of it better left untouched.

  The line picked up and Walker said, “Michael?”

  Munroe searched for ice in the tone, for bitterness or anger, and didn’t find them. “Sorry to barge in on your day,” Munroe said. “Have you heard from Miles at all in the past couple of weeks?”

  The line filled with a pregnant pause and then Walker said, “I thought he was with you.”

  Munroe sighed at the nonanswer answer.

  For anyone else she would have continued with argument and manipulation, but for the woman who wore scars and a permanent limp because of an explosion that never would have happened if not for her, for the woman whose intermediate lover had picked up and moved across the world to play house with her, Munroe had only the dance of avoidance and the game of guess-who-knows-what. “Miles was arrested for murder a few days ago,” she said. “He’s being held at a local detention center.”

  Another long pause filled the line, and in that pause was the answer to the first question: Bradford hadn’t called the office to notify them of his pending arrest any more than he’d notified her.

  Finally Walker spoke. “Objectively,” she said, “how bad is it? What are we looking at?”

  “Personally, I think it’s a hit job,” Munroe said. “It’s not good. There’s plenty of evidence to convict him. He’s going to need a lawyer and he’s going to need someone to run interference for him. I’ve already notified the embassy, and there’s an international organization that deals with these types of situations but they have to be retained through legal counsel and I can’t take care of that. He said if any of his friends could help pull strings, you’d know who they were and what to do.”

  There was another pause and Munroe could hear the whispered swearing. Walker already had her hands full managing the gunpowder-and-testosterone-fueled company while Bradford was away, but he would come before the company—he was the company—and for Walker, too, this was personal.

  Munroe spared her from having to beg for details.

  “I don’t know anything more than what I’m telling you,” she said. “I was able to get in to see him—he’s holding up okay—but with everything recorded, there’s not much we could discuss. He knows I’m making this call. I need to know who he was talking to at the Pentagon.”

  Walker said, “He was doing what?”

  Munroe listened past the words for the tone; wished it was possible to see Walker’s face, to read her body language. Information was only as good as its source and this source had motive aplenty for holding back pertinent details. She said, “The accusations from within are that he was using his position as security contractor to turn around and sell what he learned to the U.S. military or military intelligence.”

  “That’s absurd. You burn that kind of card in this industry and you never get another client.”

  “I agree,” Munroe said. “And Miles didn’t have access to any data worth stealing or selling, but that’s beside the point because he was talking to someone about something. I’ve read the transcripts.”

  “Taking your word for it,” Walker said. “I’ll have to dig through his files and see who I can turn up—gonna have to get back to you on that.”

  “Add another to your list,” Munroe said, “and this I need ASAP. You have access to Miles’s e-mail, his phone logs. I need the person on this end who contacted him, the one who set up the approach for the contract.”

  “Approach was through an intermediary,” Walker said, “one of Miles’s longtime acquaintances, but the name won’t be on file anywhere—standard precaution to protect the sources from blowback.”

  “You know who it is?”

  “If I did, I couldn’t tell you. Nondisclosure agreement and all that, but he’s vetted.”

  “Then I need the someone who handled things on this side of the intermediary. There’s going to be a record somewhere of conversations before the initial meet—contract negotiation notes, e-mails, whatever.”

  “Hang on,” Walker said, and in the silence, Munroe closed her eyes again and pressed her fist into her forehead, counting long, deep inhales that muted the need for action, for movement. The rustles that came over on the line hinted toward opening drawers, fingers against a keyboard, and shuffling paper. When Walker returned, she said, “I’ve got a Nakamura-san and Tatsuo Nakamura.”

  The names were variants for the same person; Munroe recognized him from one of the folders on Bradford’s external drive. “Are there any notes?” she said. “Observations? Personal opinions?”

  “Nothing that seems worth mentioning. I can scan and e-mail copies if you think it matters.”

  “It matters,” Munroe said. “I’m going to find a way to get him out, Sam, and bring him home—legally if I can, by other means if I can’t—but my involvement comes with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar price tag.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Walker said, and this time the spite was there.

  “I’m very serious,” Munroe said, “and that’s a discounted rate that doesn’t account for expenses. You can hate me later. He said to tell you to put it all on Armageddon.”

  “Fine,” Walker said, and she spit out the word, venom dripping. Munroe didn’t begrudge its presence. If anyone had a legitimate reason to hate her, Walker did, and so much more now that this discussion of money and payment had come as a result of her helping Bradford.

  Munroe ignored the bite, wouldn’t be baited.

  Explanations and apologies, if there were to be any, could come later.

  “I have contracts in Miles’s office,” Munroe said. “They shouldn’t be difficult to find. The language and terms are standard and nonnegotiable, but you’ll have to fill in the blanks for the fee and the contract length, which is three months from tomorrow. If I haven’t fixed things by then, extra time won’t matter. Wiring instructions are included in the contract. I need you to sign that, e-mail it to me, and I’ll get you a countersignature. I start work when the money arrives.”

  “And if the money never arrives?”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Munroe said.

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “That’s my only answer,” Munroe said, and she disconnected.

  In the resultant silence she stared at the laptop screen.

  In Bradford’s eyes, in Walker’s, to the rest of the team at Capstone, her demands were indefensible. Twice Bradford had put his work, his company, his team, on hold to cover her ass when she was falling into the abyss. He was there to pull her out when self-medicating seemed to be the only way to keep the nightmares at bay. He was the one who’d risked everything to save her life and the lives of her loved ones nine months later when death came knocking again. And the same explosion that had nearly killed Walker had taken the life of Bradford’s best friend.

  Because of Munroe.

  They had suffered, all of them had suffered, because of her.

  To them, this demand for payment to do what they had done willingly, unquestioningly, out of loyalty and devotion, was nothing more than a mercenary knife in the back, a middle finger in the air as a way to say thanks: the very opposite of leave no man behind. Munroe had no desire to defend herself or to try to make them understand.

  She and Bradford were two fucked-up people who’d had no business playing at love, and yet they had, and that love had been real. In giving in to happiness, she’d let go of the anger and rage that had driven her hard; in accepting what it meant to love, she’d put the predator to rest, and in its place a foreign thing had risen, soft and weak, full of easily hurt feelings and self-righteous indignation. There was either happiness or brutality; love or anger; laughter or the driving need to win. She couldn’t play it both ways and be any good at either.

  This was the only way that she could help him.

  Munroe shut the laptop and breathed through to nothingness, drawing back to what she’d been before Bradford, back to the time and place when
being the lone operative had been enough: shut off, focused entirely on work, on the adrenaline of the hunt, of doing what needed to be done.

  The moment the money hit her account, the link between love and work would sever. She would have a client, a job, a history of success to defend, and an obsessive passion that would compel her to succeed or die trying. The moment the payment hit her account, the apex predator would rise from hibernation.

  To be saved, Bradford needed the predator.

  She hadn’t demanded payment to purchase Bradford’s freedom.

  She’d made the demand to sell her own.

  Kitashinchi, the high-end nightlife and drinking district at Osaka’s heart, was what most people envisioned when they thought of Japan: a maze of narrow, pedestrian-crowded streets with building facades covered in neon signs of every shape and color. This was where the rich and the beautiful and the weird and the exotic collided, and the party raved the long night through in clubs and restaurants and bars and all manner of dens of iniquity, yet always in the best of taste.

  Munroe came to the end of a block, glanced at the address she’d written down from Bradford’s calendar and the hand-drawn lines she’d copied off online maps, and took a left, down another street within the matrix.

  Storefronts and stairwells, bathed in light and cluttered by advertising boards, opened directly to the passersby. Taxis crawled among the pedestrians who, without sidewalks and crosswalks, went where they pleased as they pleased. Scantily dressed women—both hostesses and ladies of the night—competed with transvestites and street hawks for the attention of the salarymen in their suits and ties, many of them incoherently drunk, and the businessmen who came to entertain clients, and others who came for entertainment and thrills.

  Munroe paused, and in the middle of the street, jostled by pedestrians on all sides, she turned a slow circle, glancing up and around.

  The street was familiar, but not in the way the last ten had been.

  This was familiar because she’d been here before.

  Munroe swore under her breath and pushed forward until she stood in front of the stairs that led to the restaurant where Bradford had taken her to dinner less than two weeks back.