The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe grabbed the second helmet and stuffed another backpack with several more days’ worth of Bradford’s work clothes. She checked the windows, the doors, and left them closed. The food in the fridge had started to mold, but she’d have to take care of that another day. She routed to the hotel first, to drop off the clothes, and by the time she put the battery back into her phone, more than two hours had passed and Alina had called twice.

  Munroe stopped the bike in front of the consulate gate. The door opened and Alina came bounding for the street. The look on her face and the posture of her stride said that she didn’t have a passport.

  The policemen watched her from the van.

  Munroe pulled the second helmet from the backpack and shoved it onto Alina’s head. “We’ll fix it later,” Munroe said. “Don’t talk now, we need to go.”

  Alina slid up behind Munroe and clenched hard when the bike started up.

  Munroe headed away from the consulate, away from the hotel and the airport, and toward Kyoto, where, because of the sheer number of white-skinned tourists, those who searched for Alina would be less likely to find her.

  Kyoto station was three levels of glass and steel surrounded by multilevel department stores and restaurants. Munroe led them up from the parking level and out the main entrance, across the street to a Starbucks whose large portico patio and interior were filled with so many foreigners they’d never stand out.

  It had been more than a day since she’d eaten, was probably the same or longer for Alina. Munroe ordered enough food from the cold cases to feed four people. They found seats near the back and between bites that curbed the shaking hunger, Munroe said, “How long before they give you a passport?”

  Alina looked down at her food. “How did you know?”

  “I’m familiar with bureaucracy and red tape. Did you tell them the truth?”

  “They would keep me longer to ask questions and would want to make a police report, and Jiro would use that as a map to find me.”

  “How long?”

  Alina reached into her purse and handed Munroe the remaining yen and the receipt for the paperwork. “Two days.”

  Munroe scanned the receipt and passed it back, with the money. “Keep it,” she said. “I’ll drop you off at the hotel, I have to work.”

  Alina’s hand, halfway to her mouth, froze. Voice low and desperate, she said, “Please let me go with you.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Please.”

  Munroe stared at the table weighing options between bites and swallows. Alina had seen things, knew things. Carting her around, out in the open, carried risks; so did leaving her defenseless in a hotel room. She said, “If you saw the men who were with my friend that night, would you recognize them?”

  Alina nodded, far too vigorously.

  Munroe sighed, appetite gone, burden heavy. When height and skin flashed attention-grabbing neon at every step, two days was a long time to keep a target hidden from a man who wanted her dead.

  They sat on the landing, across the road, not far down from the sheared-off glass face, watching the parking lot and facility entrance, and when Alina had grown comfortable in the shadows, Munroe handed her a small notebook and a pen and then stood to go.

  Alina grabbed her wrist. Munroe yanked free.

  Without sound, without sobs, as if a secret tap had been turned on, tears started to flow down Alina’s cheeks.

  Munroe crouched so they were face-to-face. She had felt this fear, had lived the fear, but never the incapacity. “I have to go farther and I can’t take you with me,” she said.

  Alina’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

  “You’ve kept the battery out of your phone?”

  Alina nodded.

  “Nobody knows where you are. Nobody can see you sitting here, tucked away in shadow, and if they can’t see you, Jiro can’t find you.”

  Alina nodded again.

  Munroe tapped the notebook. “This is why I kept you with me instead of taking you back to the hotel,” she said. “If you see anyone familiar, write down everything: clothes, colors, glasses, hairstyle, if he goes to a car or walks to the train—even the smallest detail, okay?” Munroe took off Bradford’s watch and placed it on Alina’s knee. “If I’m not back in two hours, it means I’m not coming back, ever, you understand? If I don’t come back, then take a taxi, go to the consulate, and stay there until they give you your passport. But until two hours have passed, you can’t panic.”

  Alina stared at her feet.

  “You’re not helpless, Alina,” Munroe said, and stood. “You have enough money to hide until you get your passport.” She paused, pulled a small roll of bills from her boot, and shoved it into Alina’s hand. “And you can buy your ticket out.”

  Alina’s fingers wrapped around the roll, but her focus stayed on her feet, so Munroe turned, jogged down the stairs, and continued across the street.

  The why behind Bradford’s setup ate at her.

  Behind that was the why of his hiring: why a company wholly insular in its drive to protect its secrets, operating in a country equally insular in protecting its labor force, had gone through the effort of bringing in a foreign contractor as a security consultant.

  Today was for the food chain: the men who, in part or in whole, had pulled the levers and cranked the gears to bring Bradford to their doorstep.

  Munroe pushed through the lobby doors. If she fucked this up, there’d be no one coming behind her to clean up the mess.

  At the entry stiles she swiped her badge. There’d been plenty of time for the facility’s security to invalidate her access, but the light flashed green and the arm swung open.

  C-level offices were on the second floor and Munroe headed up the stairs with a truncated list of Bradford’s folders cycling through her head.

  She reached the door for Yuzuru Tagawa first: head of operations and Bradford’s boss. She stepped into the anteroom without knocking.

  A plain woman looked up from the monitor that graced a plain desk. Beside her, several filing cabinets were the extent of decor and furniture, and the walls were just as drab as those in Bradford’s office, but without the scuffs.

  Hands slack, gaze lowered, Munroe asked for Tagawa.

  “He’s busy,” the woman said.

  Munroe stayed at the desk, silent and expectant.

  After a moment, the woman looked up again and said, “Tagawa-san is unavailable.”

  “Yes,” Munroe said, and she stayed put, allowing her foreignness to absorb the impact from the breach in etiquette.

  After another moment the woman eyed Munroe over the rims of her glasses, and when Munroe still didn’t speak or turn to leave, she reached for the phone with an exasperated sigh. A brief conversation later, she stood and opened the door to her boss’s office.

  Yuzuru Tagawa, shirtsleeves rolled up and tie askew, glanced up from a stack of paper. He was in his early fifties, with a soft midsection and hair combed over to hide a mostly bald pate. He motioned Munroe inside, and when the door was shut, he turned back to his papers, ignoring her.

  She waited, military at ease, taking in the room and the man who, due to a diversion in the chain of command for the sake of accountability, had become Bradford’s boss and now was hers.

  Tagawa’s focus continued from papers to computer screen and back, his right hand keeping a running commentary on the keyboard’s number pad. Minutes passed and at last he looked up, then stood and stepped around his desk.

  Munroe thrust a hand forward, though bowing would have been the culturally appropriate thing.

  Tagawa shook it uneasily and greeted her in broken English, clearly uncomfortable with its use and, by proxy, uncomfortable in her presence.

  Bradford had always had Okada as an interpreter.

  Munroe lifted the security badge high enough and long enough that Tagawa would get a clear look. Switching to Japanese now would only be awkward and make the discomfort worse, so she continued in English.


  “I’ve been hired by Miles Bradford to finish his work,” she said.

  Tagawa’s lips tightened as he studied the badge, as if he tried to construct words and draw grammar from years-old study. At last he bowed and said, “Thank you for come.” He stuck a palm toward the door as if adding next time make an appointment and bring your interpreter and said, “Talk security, you help.”

  The air of the door kissed Munroe’s backside in its haste to close.

  She nodded at the plain woman in glasses on her way out.

  One down, two to go.

  Noboru Kobayashi was Tai Okada’s boss, the man who would have been Bradford’s boss if Bradford’s position hadn’t been assigned to operations in an attempt to segregate power and accountability. Lies that had become truths granted a quicker, easier access—she had indeed come straight from Yuzuru Tagawa and she did indeed have a message.

  Kobayashi was younger than Tagawa. He was perfectly conforming in his salaryman uniform of navy-blue suit and tie, but had an air of hunger about him and wore an edge of rebel in his highlighted and slightly gel-spiked hair.

  He spoke fluent English with the accent of one who’d lived or studied abroad years ago, and when Munroe repeated a larger, better-worded version of the introduction she’d made a few offices over, Kobayashi crossed his arms, sat on the edge of his desk, and studied her with a mixture of smirk and challenge.

  Then he held out a hand for her badge.

  Munroe lifted the lanyard from around her neck, gave it to him, and waited, silent, while Kobayashi glanced at it. Like Tagawa before him, he didn’t seem surprised to see her. He handed the badge back and said, “When were you subcontracted?”

  “Right before the arrest—it’s taken a while to get caught up on all the notes, so this is the first chance I’ve had to make official introductions.”

  Kobayashi’s head ticked up just a little too quickly. “He left notes? I thought the police cleaned out his office.”

  “He handed them off to me the day before.”

  “Well, that was fortunate timing,” Kobayashi said, then stood. “It’s good that you have something to work with—we won’t have to start at the beginning. Have you already arranged for a liaison? Are you working with”—he paused and snapped his fingers, as if trying to remember a name, though the action had a certain falseness. “Who was it?” he said. “Tai Okada, right?”

  “I should start fresh,” Munroe said. “Mr. Tagawa said to speak with the security department. I’m on my way downstairs to put in a request.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Kobayashi said.

  He walked with her the few steps from his office door to the end of the hallway, and she felt his eyes boring holes in her back as she continued on. She turned once, not for confirmation that he watched her, which she didn’t need, but to let him know she knew.

  She waved, as did he, then he returned to his office and Munroe started up again, head down, eyes to the floor, attempting to sift an accurate sense of what had just happened through a sieve of cultural mores that avoided directness and potential conflict.

  There’d been not a question asked about Bradford.

  She could excuse the lack of surprise at her arrival—that spoke to the security departments having done their jobs well since she was last on-site and explained why the clearance was still active. But even if touching on the issues of murder and arrest pushed hard against the boundaries of politeness, she would have expected Kobayashi, with his good English and foreign familiarity, to have at least asked about her work history and connections to Bradford, especially when she’d provided him the opening.

  Like the office downstairs, it was as if Bradford had never been.

  Of the three men Munroe had come to observe, up close and in person, Tatsuo Nakamura, member of the ALTEQ-Bio board and one of the company’s seven directors, was the man she most wanted to see, and he was out of the office.

  She knew his face from the company website, his résumé as translated into horrendous English by Internet translating software, and his connection to Bradford from the name on the contract that had brought Bradford to Japan.

  Without Nakamura, Bradford would never have come.

  Munroe made an appointment with his office staff.

  Four days forward was his earliest opening.

  Munroe left for the ground floor, for Okada’s department, and her key card granted her access to the room full of monitors just as Bradford’s had.

  Okada was missing, which conveniently spared her the necessity of making awkward conversation and spared him the discomfort of playing dumb when he inevitably recognized her. She only stayed long enough to catch glimpses of the toys the men played with, count heads, watch faces, and gauge body language, and then moved on to the next department, where Bradford had had no allies.

  The second security door, too, opened to her clearance badge.

  Four faces tipped up when she stepped through. Makoto Dillman, at the desk farthest from the door, stood and came toward her, as he had with Bradford when Bradford had brought her in all those weeks ago.

  He stopped just outside her personal space and before he could speak Munroe extended a hand. “Michael Munroe,” she said, “subcontractor on the Capstone contract, here to pick up where my boss, Miles Bradford, left off. Just swinging by to say hello, let you know that I’m around.”

  Dillman gripped hard. “Makoto Dillman,” he said. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

  Munroe tugged her hand free. “Not that I know of,” she said, and fought the urge to wipe the sweat off on her pants. “Vanessa was with the boss a few weeks back, you might have met her, we’re related, look alike.” Then to change the subject: “So, look, I just had a chat with Kobayashi-san upstairs. He said he’d work out a liaison, but if you’re short-staffed, take your time with that. I’m not in any rush—most of what I do will be based on people, not files, and I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the spoken language.”

  “That so?” Dillman said, and he crossed his arms. “You live in Japan a while?”

  “I’ve studied.”

  He stayed just at the edge of her personal space, sizing her up with unveiled hostility. He said, “My understanding was that the train wreck of last week shifted the work back over to this department.”

  “Yeah?” Munroe said, and shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a trained monkey. Here to do a job, Mac. I’ve got no plans to piss on your fence.”

  Dillman’s expression clouded, as she knew it would, but unlike Bradford who’d poked the bear, her inflaming served a purpose.

  “Makoto or Dillman,” Dillman said, “never Mac.”

  “My bad,” she said, and threw as much sincerity into her tone and demeanor as she could muster. “The boss referred to you as Mac, so I thought…Anyway,” she said, and stuck her hand out again, as if she’d be on her way now that she’d inadvertently insulted him.

  “No big deal,” Dillman said, and his posture relaxed and he took a step out of her personal space. He motioned to the other men in the room. “Have you met the team?”

  “Still new on the job.”

  Dillman switched effortlessly from English to Japanese, and with the change of language came a change in character: harsher, deeper, more authoritarian. He introduced the other three in order of department hierarchy: Shigeru Hara, Ken Suzuki, and Yuki Abe, and Munroe sized each man up far more subtly than Dillman had done with her.

  She’d come to sign a temporary truce with Bradford’s antagonist, and having gotten more than she’d asked for, Munroe turned to leave.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose in animal awareness, the instinct of the prey that a predator was near. “Hey, Dillman,” she said, and spun midstride. “If you need to find me—”

  He glanced up, distracted, already focused on something else. “Bradford’s old office,” he said.

  “You know it,” she said.

  The three other faces watched her go.

  Munroe
returned to the landing with nineteen minutes to spare. Alina smiled, relief and anxiety washed into one brief flash. Munroe sat beside her and glanced at the notebook, which lay open on her lap.

  “Nothing?”

  Alina shook her head. “It’s been very quiet.”

  Finding the men who’d been with Bradford the night the belt was taken would have been too easy, too lucky, like this. Munroe stood and said, “Let’s go.”

  They returned to the hotel the hard way, the long way, along random streets and out-of-the-way misdirection, on the small chance Munroe had been followed from the facility to the stairwell to the bike, always mindful of pedestrians, police, and the many instant roadblocks that arose in the form of delivery bikes and delivery trucks.

  A summer rainstorm became an extra delay and an additional precaution, which allowed them a chance to grab something to eat. The sky had started its descent into gray by the time Munroe took the bike into the hotel parking garage.

  She was off the bike, helmet beneath her arm, when that same animal instinct of hours earlier, of being watched—hunted—raised the warning along the back of her neck. On the other side of the Ninja, Alina tugged at the chin strap and pulled off her helmet. Munroe put a hand to her arm to get her attention, then her finger to her lips.

  With a cut of her eyes and the tip of her head, Munroe motioned Alina over behind a concrete pillar. Alina slipped out of sight and, without turning, Munroe shut her eyes and breathed in the ambience of the garage, feeling for sensory input to tell her what went on behind her back.

  The fight had come to seek her out.

  They would have been watching when the bike had pulled in, would have likely seen Alina slip away. They’d searched and found, and now they had come to collect and kill, just as Alina had said.

  Munroe knelt on one knee beside the bike, buffing scratches and smudges with a sleeve while footsteps reached out from both ends of the garage: a timed pattern that said the bodies coordinated their move in her direction. Seven days of frustration, of stolen life and stolen love, of the need to protect and avenge, stretched out from dark recesses like filthy arms from dungeon bars, crying for release.