The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

“I trust you, Dillman,” she said. “I don’t trust your friends in the security departments any more than you trusted Miles Bradford. Even if they’re not directly responsible, that doesn’t mean they aren’t involved in some way.” She held the card up, put it between their faces for a second, and then slapped it onto the desk. “This stays between you and me.”

  Dillman, arms crossed, his face a blank facade, kept silent.

  “Word of this gets around, you’re the only person it comes back to,” Munroe said. She walked to the door and added, “Don’t be the fish, Dillman, don’t even look like the fish.”

  “What about you, Michael?” he said. There were dark undertones in the question, hints of accusations, and a not-so-subtle challenge in the way he stretched out her name as if it wasn’t really her name. “Are you the fish?”

  Hand still on the door, Munroe turned slightly.

  Dillman, one arm draped over the back of his chair, posture casual and face full of judgment, slipped a folder out of his stack and held it toward her.

  “Since we’re discussing files and fishes.”

  She didn’t move, so he waved the folder in her direction as if to say Go on, have at it. Munroe took the bait and walked back for the folder. She held it at arm’s length, as though she needed reading glasses to see, and read her name off the label out loud for effect. She opened the cover, scanned a few loose sheets, and nodded theatrically.

  Dillman had done his due diligence and come up with about half of what would have been publicly available if he’d dug really, really deep.

  “This looks about right,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s empty,” he said.

  “Almost empty.”

  “You don’t exist,” he said. Paused and then added, “Mi-chael.”

  “Obviously,” Munroe said, dropping the folder back on the desk and crossing her arms, “I exist.”

  Dillman studied her and she studied him, both remaining silent, neither of them conceding territory or breaking. He said, “There is nothing to guarantee you’re qualified for this job. No background on your alliances, no work history, no company other than Capstone to vouch for you or your skills. We have no way to know you haven’t arrived to continue stealing company secrets right where Miles Bradford left off.”

  “That it?” she said.

  His hand on the folder, his eyes never leaving hers, Dillman nodded.

  She waited. He waited.

  Belief was belief, and bias was bias, and getting into a pissing match over Bradford’s calls with Warren Green wouldn’t change that, but if the concern was serious, Dillman would have already gone to Kobayashi and she’d be having this conversation with someone else, somewhere else.

  “What is it you want?” Munroe said.

  “You can’t buy my silence,” he said.

  Munroe laughed. She couldn’t help it, though that only brought red to Dillman’s cheeks, and making him angry was counterproductive.

  She coughed into seriousness. “There’s nothing you have that’s worth paying for,” she said. “You’re doing your job, I get it, and you’re good at it, but waving around a background check as if it means more than what it is only insults us both. Come on, Dillman, you and I know that if you were really concerned, I’m the last person you’d be talking to. Tell me what you’re after so we can get this over with and go back to chasing bad guys.”

  “I want to know who you are and why you’re here,” he said.

  “So it’s personal?”

  “No, it’s not personal,” he said, and then stopped. “All right, yes, it’s personal. I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of whatever is going on.”

  Munroe heard through the unspoken, absorbed what it meant when even the head of the department charged with knowing all things acknowledged vulnerability to what stirred unseen beneath the water.

  “You won’t,” she said.

  “What? Just that? ‘You won’t.’ I have to take your word for it?”

  “Take your own word for it,” she said. “You just made it clear that you’re not afraid that I can’t do this job but that I might do a job too well. There’s a reason you can’t find what you’re looking for—it’s the same reason we will find what we’re looking for. You want to be on the winning team? You’re on it, Dillman.”

  He tapped a finger on the folder. “This doesn’t look like winning. I want you to convince me that we’re on the same side.”

  “Can’t do that for you,” she said. “Not as long as you still hold Miles Bradford as the enemy. I’m sure you can connect the reasoning.” She walked to the door again and stopped at the frame. “I can tell you this, though: Your research skills need polishing.” She stepped into the hall. “There’s more information out there. You just haven’t found it yet.” She smiled and shut the door.

  Munroe killed three hours chatting with the guards, hitting up the security teams for meaningless information, mingling with the employees coming through the stiles, until the clock hands rolled around and she left for the bathrooms to remove some of the hobo shine put on by long hours with little sleep and infrequent showers.

  Hand dryer worked as hair dryer, soap as shampoo, splashes of water and the hand dryer again as a way to remove some of the wrinkles in a shirt now on its second day. She straightened the tie and then, having done the best she could, wound her way upstairs to the office of Tatsuo Nakamura, for her appointment with the man without whom Bradford would have never come to Japan.

  His assistant ushered Munroe into a small waiting area, where the furniture was less utilitarian and a large unframed oil painting splashed color that felt obscene in contrast to the blandness of the rest of the building. In soft formal language the woman offered Munroe a drink and returned with a tray with sparkling water. She set a doily coaster on the coffee table and then the glass, and then bowed deeply, apologizing for the delay, which lasted less than five minutes.

  The door to the inner office opened and Nakamura stood in its frame, svelte, sun-kissed, and in a better-tailored suit than the businesswear draping every salaryman in the building. He was in his early sixties, though he carried himself with the vim of a man who should have had a lot less gray and far fewer wrinkles. “Please come in,” he said.

  Munroe followed him into the office, observing, calculating.

  Nakamura motioned toward the pair of stuffed leather chairs in front of his desk. “Please,” he said. Then: “A shame, such a shame, about Miles Bradford. He was a good man, a very good man.”

  Inside Munroe’s head the gears locked up.

  Unlike the other company executives, Nakamura had just put Bradford’s predicament front and center. More baffling, he had called Bradford a good man, yet when the accusations had fallen, he hadn’t raised a word in Bradford’s defense. She’d played this meeting out a dozen different ways, but not once had the projections included what had just happened.

  Nakamura returned to the captain’s chair on the opposite side of the desk. He stood with his hands on the high back for the briefest pause, then sat, and with his fingers laced atop the mirror sheen, he said, “What can I do for you?” His English was even better than that of Noboru Kobayashi, the head of security.

  The ease in his interaction spoke of years of dealing with foreign interests and of understanding Western interaction. Munroe chose her words and adjusted her posture accordingly. “I wanted to introduce myself as a way of keeping you aware of progress,” she said. “Although Miles won’t be able to fulfill the contract personally, he has made contingencies and the work continues uninterrupted.”

  “I have been notified,” Nakamura said. “This is good news, but a large role to assume. Do you have the necessary skills?”

  “That’s why Miles chose to bring me onboard.”

  Nakamura nodded, his lips pressed into a forced frown of contemplation that indicated agreement rather than disapproval. He leaned back in his chair. “There’s been much unwanted attention on the company
these past few weeks. All very problematic for our image. I’m sure you can imagine that we hope to avoid any form of repetition.”

  Munroe held eye contact for a moment, parsing the words, and then followed his westernized opening with facetiousness. “Don’t allow myself to get framed for murder,” she said. “I can assure you that my priorities align with yours.”

  Nakamura smiled then and wagged a finger at her. He laced his hands across his midsection and leaned back. “Rather puzzling, isn’t it? Given Mr. Bradford’s expertise, these events don’t seem to fit.”

  Munroe eyed him warily enough that her accusation of backstabbing, her finger-pointing at him for having kept those thoughts private when Bradford had needed them most, wouldn’t need words to be understood.

  She said, “Your viewpoint on that seems to be in the minority.”

  “Unfortunately, that can’t be helped,” Nakamura said. The layer of what was unspoken beneath his words matched hers. “Here, consensus in decision-making is an integral part of business. Caution is needed to avoid statements that might bring shame to others. Unlike the west, we tend to avoid charismatic leaders, and what’s the term the Americans use? Lone Rangers?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t believe Miles Bradford killed that woman,” Nakamura said, “but as the public head of the company, my beliefs, if they disagree with the majority of executives, remain only mine. The decision to bring in an outside contractor was difficult and divided and so, you see, it could be said that these painful results are what we should have expected as a natural result of dissent.”

  Munroe dropped her eyes and studied Nakamura’s reflection on the desk. In a roundabout way he’d given her a motive for Bradford’s setup, and he’d explained the shroud of omissions within the facility: Even for those who believed Bradford was innocent, they would go with the status quo, behaving as if he was guilty rather than be the nail that got hammered down.

  Searching through the unspoken, Munroe said, “If there was disagreement, why risk upsetting the company hierarchy? Why hire a foreigner in the first place? Why allow me to continue here after all that’s already happened?”

  “Ah, yes,” Nakamura said. “But lack of agreement on who would best solve this issue doesn’t equate to lack of agreement over the fact that we do indeed have an issue.”

  “For a foreigner to solve? Whose idea was that?”

  Nakamura shook his head, chiding again, as if she just wasn’t getting it. “We don’t claim ideas as our own,” he said. “Ideas and proposals come together collectively, over time.”

  “Over drinks after work,” she said.

  He half smiled. “Now you understand.”

  “Ideas still have to originate from somewhere,” she said, “even if it’s just the suggestion of possibly thinking about looking into a perhaps.”

  “Very convoluted,” Nakamura said, but he glanced down, body rocking subtly as if intending to conjure memory, and then he cut his eyes back at her. “It’s been a very long time. Many conversations, many meetings, both in the office and out, but perhaps Yuzuru Tagawa, my operations chief, was first to put specific words to what others had already indirectly broached.”

  “Would he feel the most shame over this failure?”

  Nakamura answered with silence, but in its own way this would explain the brusque send-away she’d gotten when she’d stopped in to see her boss. She said, “I suppose Kobayashi, with both security departments beneath him, would have fought hardest against bringing in an outside perspective.”

  “We do have solid technology and a very skilled department.”

  “Why Bradford?” Munroe said. “How did that come about?”

  “That,” Nakamura said, sighing, “that was my doing. Once the decision had been made, the consensus was that we should go far to the edge of our options instead of—what’s your word? Half-assing?”

  Munroe nodded.

  “No half-assing,” Nakamura said. “We would not only bring in an outsider but a foreigner with specialized history in intelligence as a way to guarantee fresh eyes that might see what we don’t see. It fell on my shoulders to handle the issue because I had lived abroad for many years and I knew people who knew people. A mutual business relationship connected me to Capstone Security Consulting.”

  “That makes Bradford’s failure your fault?”

  “Collective decisions, collective blame.”

  “And shame?”

  “The problems within the company and the scrutiny they have brought us are reflected on me,” Nakamura said. “Certainly I carry shame. But this comes from the judgments of others rather than acknowledgment of my own failing—I am still not convinced that Mr. Bradford is responsible for our current predicament. It would bring great relief if in the process of doing your work you also uncover answers and so restore honor and face to the company leadership.”

  “There are many pieces that don’t connect,” Munroe said. “You can see them—it’s surprising that the others won’t even acknowledge they exist. You’d think they’d want to know if there’s a murderer wandering their halls, if only to protect themselves. If it was my company, my first concern would be to find out if this predicament, as you say, was the hint of something deeper.”

  Nakamura smiled just slightly and said, “Would it?”

  “You don’t find it rather convenient for a thief when the man responsible for tracking down the theft is removed from the facility? You protect yourself from threat by knowing the enemy. Miles Bradford wasn’t—isn’t—your enemy, but someone is, and by pretending otherwise, everyone involved only makes it possible for the enemy to thrive.”

  Nakamura’s smile faded back into the forced frown of contemplation. He studied Munroe for a moment and then stood. Hands on the back of his chair, he leaned toward her. “The threat of a thief selling trade secrets is a problem. Police coming into the facility and confiscating equipment is a bigger problem. However,” he said, turning away to the window that opened to the rear of the building, “the largest problem is questions that lead to unknown places. For the greater good, for long-term stability, some answers are best left alone.”

  “If that’s a trade you want to make, it’s your company and your decision,” Munroe said. “But every choice comes with consequences, and hiding from the truth to save face now might leave you with no face left to save in the future.”

  Nakamura turned back to look at her, but stayed by the window.

  She said, “If the murder and the theft are connected, I’ll likely learn as much as a by-product of doing my job, but accidental discoveries come with bigger surprises, are difficult to contain, and have the potential to do more damage to the company image. If keeping the company out of the public eye is your goal, wouldn’t it be prudent to allow me to pursue both avenues quietly and to keep you updated with the progress?”

  Nakamura returned to his chair. “You are very convincing,” he said. “How many others would know what you are doing?”

  “Everyone might assume, but only you would know.”

  “Do you have suspects?”

  “It’s too close to the beginning for that,” she said. “Miles Bradford was told that the threat of theft came from the Chinese. Is there a basis for this?”

  “The Chinese are a threat to everyone.”

  His answer dodged the question, and although the cultural norm was to avoid directness, he’d already defied that trend several times, which turned this avoidance into something else. Through her silence, Munroe demanded more.

  Eventually he said, “We don’t know if the threat is the Chinese, the Koreans, the Americans, or someone else—” He stopped and looked pointedly at her. “Considering what I’ve heard about the phone calls, the threat could very well be the Americans.”

  Munroe allowed the provocation to pass. Now wasn’t the time. “You speak of the threat in terms of nationalities,” she said. “Are those corporate interests or government interests?”

/>   “We would have to assume both. Theft is theft and in the end it would be the same for us either way.”

  “How long have you suspected?”

  “About five years.”

  “Five years?”

  “This is why we were finally resigned to bringing in an outside contractor,” Nakamura said. “That would never have been our first preference.”

  The hesitancy to bring in an outsider, yes, but the rest didn’t add up.

  “It’s impossible to prove a negative,” she said. “Five years of not proving a suspicion isn’t enough to encourage that type of action. There had to be some proof, some definitive reason Miles Bradford was told that the threat came from the Chinese.”

  “I don’t know who told him that,” Nakamura said, “but there have been indications. Our company has been at the edge of innovation for over a decade. Some development lines take longer than others, but twice now in the past five years, competitors have been first to market with products identical to ours, products that we invested heavily in and that we lost by a margin of weeks. This has damaged our reputation as an industry leader and stolen market share, pushing us into a position of second best for products in which we should have been first.”

  Munroe opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  This was suspicion and jealousy, and that only projected lunacy and turned it into a witch hunt among employees. ALTEQ-Bio didn’t own the right to ideas or research, and they certainly weren’t the only company in the biomedical and biotech fields.

  Nakamura said, “Industrial espionage has a long history, and if one refuses to adopt the weapons of his enemy, one will lose the battle.”

  And so there it was, then: the pot calling the kettle black.

  The reason the company executives were convinced that there were spies and thieves within their ranks wasn’t only because they’d been beat by identical products, but because they’d stolen from others and had their own spies placed among competitors. How very generous to throw Bradford into the mix.

  No wonder none of them openly accused him of murder, no wonder they behaved as if his departure was a mere inconvenience. Their shame wasn’t in Bradford’s supposed failure; it came from the unwanted attention drawn to the company. So much easier then to sweep it all away, to allow Bradford to take the fall for what he hadn’t done while the engines kept running and the internal hunt to protect the company continued unabated—just a little misstep in a long-standing arms race toward profit and market dominance.