The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  He glanced at her then, he couldn’t help it, and she flashed him a predator’s taunting hungry smile. “Have you ever been to America?”

  He shook his head.

  That was good. It meant he’d have no way to disprove her lies.

  “You like American movies?”

  A subtle nod.

  “Then you know how it is,” she said. “You’ve seen our assassins and our gunfights and our car chases. I don’t carry a gun because I don’t need one to kill you.” That part, at least, was true. “Will Jiro kill you?”

  Kimura offered no reaction to her naming his boss—he had to have still been too addled to catch the significance because he didn’t deny the connection, either.

  “Why were you waiting for me tonight?”

  “Jiro sent us to take you to him,” he said.

  “How did Jiro know I would be there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Without a hint toward a change in demeanor, she took the car key and stabbed it into Kimura’s thigh. Not nearly as good as a knife, the key barely broke skin, but Kimura yelped and swung at her.

  She blocked his arm and drove fingers into his throat.

  He choked for air.

  “You’re wasting my time,” she said. “How did Jiro know I’d be there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. There was a plea behind the words.

  “You do know,” she said. “You hadn’t been waiting long. You knew where to go and when and what to look for. How?”

  “A phone call,” he said, “a phone call.”

  “Jiro got a phone call?”

  Kimura nodded.

  Munroe opened her door and stepped out into the night.

  Kimura was a flunky, he had nothing more to give; she read it in his body and smelled it in the fear on his breath. She grabbed her backpack from the rear seat, and with his wallet and his phone, she left him with the car and its bullet holes.

  Munroe reached the facility just after seven. A night intended for focus and clarity had detoured into chaos and culminated with three hours of sleep grabbed on station benches while waiting for the first morning train. She’d cleaned up in the bathroom and then spent the morning in the security room at Okada’s workstation, glued to camera footage, first searching for clues to Dillman’s murder that might have been missed when the data was scrubbed, then tracking and eliminating possible suspects through time stamps and footage.

  Whoever had tampered with the data had been thorough, though she learned that Dillman’s body had only been discovered as early as it had been because the door to the office had been left open.

  The open door had been deliberate. The killer had wanted the body discovered.

  Another morning burned and still no closer to setting Bradford free, Munroe left the facility with ten files zipped up inside her jacket, duplicates of what Dillman had been working on before he’d died.

  She returned to the apartment long enough to grab tools out of the bag on the home-office shelf and transfer the folders from her jacket to a backpack. In the garage she removed the Ninja’s fairings, pulled out the tracking devices, and examined the magnetic cases.

  The beacons had served their purpose; playtime was over now.

  With the trackers in her backpack along with the files and the tools, she headed to the airport for the short-term parking, where friends and family had gone to see loved ones off at the security gates, and left both devices up under the still-warm chassis of a gloss-black Porsche.

  The tedious drudgery of riding through thick traffic was made worse by hot humid air and lack of sleep, but Munroe made it to Umeda station with fifteen minutes to spare. She found parking and took the elevator up to a multilevel shopping bonanza of sound and color, of boutique stores, chain brands, and restaurants, where she could blend in to the extent that blending in was possible as a tall white foreigner and, if necessary, vanish within the multiple corridors and constant crowds. She perused clothes and window displays from the wrong side of the glass until a familiar face entered the coffee shop across the way. She knew him from his online bio; he knew her because she walked up and said hello.

  The translator was in his early thirties, out of place among the fashion conscious.

  A phone call and an offer he couldn’t refuse had guaranteed his short-notice availability.

  “Let’s sit,” Munroe said, and that was the extent of the pleasantries. They took a table and she laid out for him all ten files that Dillman had been working on.

  Language, always her strength, the poisonous gift that allowed her to see and be and do what others assumed she couldn’t, had limitations. Without being able to pronounce what she read, she had no mechanism to turn writing into sound, and without sound, no ability to understand.

  The translator retrieved a laptop and dictionaries from an over-the-shoulder satchel, and they sat side by side, hour by hour, over coffee and sandwiches, and then coffee again, as page by page he turned kanji into English.

  These were details Okada could have handled, or any other liaison from the facility if, after Dillman’s death, she could have convinced someone to work with her and if she wasn’t worried about inviting another murder, further complications, and more wasted time.

  They finished minutes before the shop’s closing time, all the other chairs already up on the tables in preparation for cleaning. The translator stood and twisted, popping his spine. He said, “I can have everything typed within twenty-four hours.”

  Munroe shook her head. She wasn’t about to let the files out of her sight—not even for a moment. “The handwriting’s fine.”

  She paid him and watched him leave, then paid the staff to compensate for business lost by the occupied table and wound her way back to where she’d parked the bike.

  —

  The hotel room, when she reached it, was quiet and inviting, with its web of clues up on the wall and a bed that sung sweet enticements of sleep and rest and solitude. Munroe stood on the bed and snapped pictures of the diagrams, so that she carried the full array of connections with her, then collected all the notes and papers brought from work over the last week and slipped them together with her laptop into the backpack, and, leaving behind the clothes and personal items she hadn’t touched in days, was gone again.

  At the front desk she paid for the room and reserved another week, left the bike, without its trackers, in hotel parking, and walked to the nearest station.

  She took the subway two stops down and followed memory for several blocks to the manga café she’d seen in passing, and there, eyes burning, head hurting, she settled in for the hunt.

  The online work came first: tedious searches, tracking down and verifying the details on the translated pages, hunting through back doors and alternate routes in the same way she’d instructed Dillman. The collection of notes grew and filled the margins until at last she had enough to get started, and she slept until her alarm roused her for the beginning of business hours.

  Phone calls followed the Internet searches, hunting for the proverbial needle, not even sure if she had the right haystack, and when she’d exhausted those leads, she started the pattern over again. At 1:03 A.M. on day 17, more than thirty-six hours after she’d walked out of the facility with the duplicate files, names taken from Bradford’s list of suspects as a way to keep Dillman occupied, Munroe uncovered the first inconsistency.

  Nonomi Sato, biotech, female, Japanese citizen, age thirty-four.

  A picture from a defunct alumni website culled from Internet archives didn’t match what was in Sato’s personnel file or what showed on current websites.

  Two more hours of hunt and peck, copying and pasting kanji into search engines, finally netted Munroe another, and this was all she had: two pictures of the same person who bore the same credentials and family history as Nonomi Sato, but wasn’t her.

  Munroe woke to an alarm, showered in the manga café’s facilities, and redressed in the clothes she’d washed and dried throughout t
he night. Shortness of time pressed down on her, crushing in its weight. She didn’t have enough days to follow the leads on her own. Had no local connections to grant her access to databases and police records. Had no time to establish subterfuge and false storylines to gain access to reluctant sources already disinclined to trust an outsider: She had no option but to rely on shortcuts.

  The shortcut came in the form of Ichiro Yamada, a private investigator with a résumé that included seven years of corporate and private research and eight working for prosecutorial departments. Munroe was still weighing that last fact when he showed up, on time to the minute, in clothes casual enough to say that he didn’t fit the corporate mold and shoes priced somewhere between very-good-at-his-job and extortionist shark.

  They met at the Umeda station Starbucks, one level down from the translator’s coffee shop, where, in an exchange that took less than five minutes, Munroe went over a list of names and instructions for the details she wanted on each and handed over an envelope of cash.

  —

  In the hotel room Munroe set an alarm and stared at the wall, sending her mind free to fly between thunderclouds and hailstorms until the lack of sleep pulled her into oblivion. She woke in the late afternoon and worked the diagram, shifting the connections between patterns. Dillman’s death wouldn’t fit. She placed his card in the circle of unknowns: the gravity wobble, that tiny planet she’d not yet found and named.

  —

  Only a few of the upper windows were still lit when Munroe returned to the facility, though the front was ablaze, as always, and the handful of cars that spotted the parking lot would likely still be there in the morning.

  The night guards glanced up from their reading when Munroe entered and returned to it, heads down, when her badge cleared her through. She strode the halls for Okada’s security department and swiped her pass through the lock.

  The door clicked open and the lone member of the security team stood when she pushed through. He was third, fourth, or fifth in the pecking order—somewhere down the food chain. She said, “I need to go through old footage.”

  “How far back?” he said.

  “How far back does it go?”

  “We keep records for six months.”

  Munroe asked for a date two weeks prior to Bradford’s arrival.

  “Every camera?” he said.

  Munroe searched his expression for clues to his mind-set, to whatever instructions he might have been given regarding any requests from her. “Entry, break room, and elevator cameras,” she said.

  He clicked through a digitized directory, a series of screens and menus that for her might as well have been written in hieroglyphics, selecting, until rows of thumbnail files began to cascade across the screen. He stood and offered her the chair, and when she said, “Thank you,” he bowed and turned back to whatever he’d been doing.

  She checked her watch and began the sorting.

  She had eight hours before the facility would start humming with the first of the day’s employees, eight hours to find what she needed, because she wasn’t coming back for round two—not on this one.

  The process moved slowly at first, time wasted in learning and observing, but it grew easier with each passing hour. On the screen, in fast forward and then slow motion, Nonomi Sato came and went, her patterns predictable, each movement perfect, invisible in its normalcy and consistency from the days leading up to Bradford’s arrival, to those after he’d been taken away: an artist in motion, perfection worthy of admiration, worthy of envy.

  There were no hiccups, no disruptions, no giveaways, and watching her, Munroe smiled in the way a connoisseur might smile when at last she’d found flawlessness among samples of average. In so much time, with so much room for error, Sato had only twice deviated from routine. The first was three weeks into Bradford’s tenure. Sato had approached for a brief conversation, formal and blushingly proper—likely an attempt at proximity as a way to size up the potential for threat.

  The second deviation had come after Bradford’s arrest. Had come four days after Munroe had first announced her presence as his replacement, three days after the boys in the garage had come after her with pipes.

  Munroe knew who they were now; knew who had sent them.

  Two trackers.

  Two players.

  Yuzuru Tagawa. Nonomi Sato.

  Munroe keyed forward, then backward, watching the same sequence for the fourth time as Sato, with her bag, arrived late and diverted directly for the lunchroom; she tabbed through thumbnail after thumbnail for the entry cameras coordinating to the same time stamps and found herself, there, on the other side of the break-room wall. She sat back and smiled again.

  She’d known she’d been watched and had never found the source.

  The observer had been good, professional, she’d known that then, too, and now she knew she’d found the thief—thief, yes, but no answer to what she needed most. Nothing in Bradford’s arrest would have benefited this woman. Nonomi Sato was safe from him and she had to have known it.

  Sato hadn’t killed the Chinese woman. And it made no sense that she would have killed Dillman—not in the way he’d died—not there on company property, creating scrutiny and risk.

  There was that wobble again.

  A prickle of heat ran up Munroe’s neck and she turned to find Okada’s security guy watching her. “Did you locate what you needed?” he said.

  “There’s nothing.”

  “That has also been our frustration,” he said. “We hoped you would see something different.”

  Munroe sighed. Rubbed her eyes. “I’m so tired that right now I wouldn’t see it even if I saw it.” She closed the last of the thumbnails. “I’ve got to catch some sleep,” she said. “No more for tonight. What time do you get off?”

  “Another hour,” he said. “After Hara-san comes to relieve me.”

  Before Dillman’s death, Shigeru Hara had been the number two in the security operations center and had since been promoted to department head in the interim. “I thought he handled the other side,” she said.

  The young man lowered his eyes. “After the tragedy, Kobayashi-san instructed that Okada-san and Hara-san should spend time in both departments, for cross-cooperation.”

  So now the two department heads were meant to spy on each other’s work. Way to go for engendering trust and camaraderie. “Hara will probably want to know what I was looking at,” she said. “Do you need a list of the file numbers? I’m sorry I shut them down already.”

  Okada’s security man shifted, ever so slightly, in response to her admission of being aware of how closely she was monitored and his role in the reporting. His eyes cast down toward the floor and then toward the door, but he didn’t answer the question.

  Even if the opponent is deeply entrenched in a defensive position, he will be unable to avoid fighting if you attack where he will surely go to the rescue.

  —MASTER SUN TZU

  Nonomi Sato left the facility as early as the unspoken demands of company loyalty would permit. She paused beside her car just long enough to sniff for suspicion, and when she felt no menace, no interest, she slid into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and headed out of the city, to where the traffic was thinner and she could more easily spot if someone followed.

  She drove for an hour, watching mirrors and counting cars while ice inside her head turned her thoughts cold, chilling the fever that had taken hold these last days as her carefully constructed encampment had come under attack again, and then again.

  Battle terrain was changing.

  The landscape was fogging over and turning marshy.

  Sato turned off the two-lane highway, pulled to the side, waited ten minutes, and then started the car again. Drove again, waited again, and when she was certain she’d left work alone, she continued to the nearest station, went inside to the phones, and found them just beyond the ticket machines.

  Battle on the marsh should be avoided at all costs.

/>   If the ground had indeed turned bad, if entrenchment was no longer possible, then the only way to avoid loss was to hurry away.

  But to know the terrain, she first had to clear the fog.

  Sato used coins, dialed, and caressed the cold calm of detachment.

  It had been six months since she’d last spoken with the parents, longer still since she’d returned for a visit, but the e-mail from this morning, with its one simple sentence, had the potential to change everything: Daughter, we have missed you.

  At last the line connected and a soft voice said, “Hai, moshi moshi.”

  Sato became air and innocence and said, “Mother, how is your health, and how have you been?”

  “We have been well, my child,” the woman said, “very well, although it has been lonely without you. A friend of yours called asking for you. I told him you were away. When will you return to visit? The garden is beautiful now.”

  Sato bit down hard on her tongue and drew blood.

  “Work has been difficult, but I will visit for Obon,” she said. “Thank you for news of my friend, did he leave his name or a message?”

  “Let me see,” the soft voice said, and then, as if reading from a paper, “Kiyoshi is his name. He said that you were close at university.”

  Sato shut her eyes, squeezing past the doubts of lives past.

  Kiyoshi had indeed been a friend at school. The call could have been genuine, possibly, possibly, possibly. Sato said, “He gave you his number?”

  “He said you already knew how to reach him and to please call.”

  “Thank you,” Sato said, because that was appropriate, and because staying on the phone brought her nothing, she added, “Please be well,” and replaced the receiver with a gentle drop. And then, with shoulders straight, with a demure emptiness pulled over her face shielding the turmoil beneath, she walked back to the car.

  She didn’t have Kiyoshi’s number, had no way to discover if the call had been genuine or if, instead, this had been an enemy using lies and family as a way to reach her. Sato put the key in the ignition and turned out of the parking lot, reconfiguring the positions of her imaginary army.