The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Throughout three years at the facility, through monthly security checks, random security sweeps, and regular background checks, she’d remained above suspicion, above reproach, yet every day brought with the sun a renewed possibility of being discovered.

  That was the problem with long-term commitment, it was why she preferred the quick jobs, in and out, over and done, vanish and start again.

  Six months had turned into a year, and that had turned into three, always following more research, further trials, the end of the road ever one more turn around the bend, the promise of ultimate reward taunting from just beyond reach.

  The danger was in staying and she’d stayed too long.

  Sato put on the blinkers, changed lanes, and rerouted.

  At another station and another phone bank, in thinning invisibility amid the waning evening crowd, Sato dialed, using the information from a prepaid card. She turned her back to the station cameras and after the first ring dipped her finger into the receiver well and hung up.

  The only safe way forward was to assume the call from Kiyoshi had been a pretext; the only safe conclusion, that this had come from the newcomer.

  In return, the only strategy for the newcomer was deception and ambush.

  Doing so wouldn’t clear the fog or allow a better view of the terrain, wouldn’t solve the issue of the marshy ground or fortify her encampments, but by ridding herself of the need to battle on more than one front, she could turn her forces to the other.

  Sato dialed again, hung up again, and then repeated the process a third time. On this last she stayed on the phone a minute longer, holding a pretend conversation with dead air, for the sake of appearance. Then, having in this deception summoned he who would be the foot soldier used for ambush, she left for Suita, for a three-bedroom house, not far from Osaka University.

  In the evening dark, off a well-trafficked road, Sato climbed the stairs at the edge of a wall up to a barren front door and the tiny patches of pebbles where some form of greenery should have gone, had she been the growing kind.

  This was what home was for now, three stories sandwiched between an apartment building and a grocery store with two residences above, and parking just a divot off the road between a retaining wall and the neighbor’s tiered garden of river stones and bent manicured pines.

  Hardly visible within corners and shadows of her doorway, concealed to blend, were the security cameras.

  Sato unlocked the door and stepped into an empty genkan and hall, to the fragrance of mold spores, humidity, and decaying wood. She left shoes and purse on the genkan tiles and walked the wood floors barefoot for the kitchen, pulling the pins out of her bun as she went, running fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp to soothe the itch.

  She poured a glass of cold barley tea, distinctly Japanese and an acquired taste that she’d acquired because, no matter where the family had been stationed, Mother had brought the tea. Sato drank it down, staring out over the room, devoid of furniture but for one lone desk and a small folding table on the floor.

  The house was a wasted, expensive luxury, so much space for one in a city where every square meter mattered and three bedrooms should house three generations. But she required a residence on its own foundation, within reasonable driving distance from the facility, in a neighborhood where people came and went often enough that her presence as a single woman living alone wouldn’t draw the gossip of the neighborhood obachan brigade. That hadn’t left her with many options.

  As her people were so fond of saying, gaman.

  Polite and fatalistic. Suck it up: a national motto.

  Sato rinsed out the glass and set it to dry: it was one of the two glasses she owned, in a kitchen as sparsely furnished as the house.

  She’d never bought more; she’d never intended to stay.

  For her, Japan had always been stifling. Still was. Tight and constricted, spatially and socially: hundreds of unspoken rules that dictated what she could say, to whom, and how; where she could work, in what field, for how long; how she could live, and love, and exist. Made it difficult to understand Mother’s melancholy homesickness and the obsessive way she’d taught Sato to read and write, as if Sato would one day become like her.

  She’d only returned to Japan because of the job.

  Sato picked up the glass again, pulled a handful of ice from the freezer drawer and dumped it in. Poured a shot of whisky.

  Gaman.

  When the money was good, anything could be endured.

  Munroe arrived at the coffee shop eight minutes late and spotted Ichiro Yamada beyond the glass wall, seated on a barstool against the counter. The pricy PI caught her eye and then glanced away, though his focus unobtrusively tracked her to the door and into the venue, just as he’d tracked her approach.

  Yamada shifted to face her. His movement showed no hurry, but neither did it have enough indifference to disguise the guardedness that told her he’d been successful. Munroe nodded toward the back, toward empty tables that were less obvious to all who passed by. “Shall we?” she said.

  “Are you hiding from someone?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Would like to keep it that way.”

  Yamada’s lips turned up with a trace of conspiracy, and he gathered his coffee mug and satchel and walked with her toward the tables at the rear.

  He sat and Munroe shifted her chair to the side, so that its back was to the wall instead of the door. Across from him, she placed the second half of her payment on the table.

  Yamada thumbed through the bills, put the envelope back where she’d placed it, and pulled two much larger envelopes from his satchel. He slid one across the table, moved the other to his right, and rested his hand on top of it.

  Munroe picked up the thicker envelope, flipped through the pages, stuffed them back inside, and nodded to the other. “What about that one?”

  Yamada leaned forward, hand firmly on the envelope. He said, “There are times when finding answers can be more trouble than what they’re worth.”

  Munroe reached for the edge of the envelope and left her fingers there, not far from his hand. “Thank you for the warning,” she said, and she waited for him to move, but he didn’t.

  “You’ve paid for the information,” he said, “therefore it belongs to you.” Yamada scooted closer and, by proxy, his face moved nearer to hers. “At the risk of overdirectness,” he said, “and I apologize, as I don’t wish to create offense. Can you assure me that there’s been no mistake in asking after this man? Perhaps this is a misidentification or an innocent curiosity that, in the end, wouldn’t be worth satisfying.”

  “There’s no mistake,” she said.

  Lips pressed together, Yamada looked down at his hand. “Sometimes,” he said, “merely knowing something can create risks. Having knowledge that someone might not want you to have is dangerous in itself, but once one has the knowledge, there is also the issue of what should be done with it, and occasionally the desire to act upon it.”

  Munroe waited before replying; waited until the silence became thick and Yamada’s eyes drifted up off the table and focused in on hers. “I’m familiar with these types of risks,” she said. “As I’m sure you can understand, being unable to read the language presents a unique challenge. Under other circumstances, this is information I would have acquired for myself.”

  Yamada nodded then and pushed the envelope toward her. He leaned back in his seat. “Be careful,” he said.

  Munroe rested her own hand on top of the envelope. “Did you stop before you were finished?”

  “You have enough,” he said. “More than what you paid for. If you want anything beyond what’s been provided, then the price goes up.”

  Munroe dragged the envelope closer and stacked it on the first one, contemplating the charm with which he’d just told her that he wouldn’t dig deeper no matter how much she paid.

  Yamada handed her his business card even though she already had one. “You might need me again for other things,
” he said, and then he stood, sparing her the necessity of small talk.

  When he’d gone, Munroe followed him out. If there were problems with the information, there would be problems with the source, and the only way to mitigate against that kind of failure was to plan for it. She waited near the bike racks not far from the underground exit, caught the PI’s plates when he pulled out, and with that just-in-case in hand, she headed on foot for a manga café, a five-minute walk from the station.

  —

  In the quiet of a booth, away from prying eyes, Munroe sorted through the pages in the thick envelope, accompanied by Yamada’s meticulous notes, which included time stamps on every action he’d taken, as well as his own opinions and impressions. First was Nonomi Sato, the woman in the alum photos. She was real, her résumé perfect, her family history genuine, but the woman who worked in the security lab downstairs wasn’t Nonomi Sato.

  The real Nonomi had been dead for a little over three years.

  The parents, working-class and elderly, without a history of mental illness, insisted their daughter was alive. Lifestyle and purchases pointed to quarterly windfalls.

  If Munroe could have found a way to make Dillman’s death fit the narrative, then he would have died to prevent this knowledge from being discovered.

  Dillman had done his inquiries from within the facility. Someone had been watching, listening. Someone within those walls knew what Dillman knew, knew or suspected that Dillman had found anomalies, and knew that he’d be talking to her about them.

  But Dillman’s murder didn’t fit any more than the Chinese woman’s had.

  The value in espionage came from burrowing into an assignment and maintaining the subterfuge. Hiding out in the open could only come with familiarity and normalcy, and the disruption brought on by Bradford’s arrest had quintupled in the wake of Dillman’s murder.

  If Bradford or Dillman had been credible threats, a woman of Sato’s skill and professionalism would rather poison them in their sleep, or frame a suicide, than bring an investigation to her doorstep, much less two.

  Nonomi Sato hadn’t killed Dillman, but neither had Yuzuru Tagawa. Munroe had matched his presence to camera time stamps throughout the morning of Dillman’s murder and he’d been nowhere near that office.

  There was that wobble again, the gravitational pull of the thing she’d not yet placed.

  Munroe took the pages, stacked them, shoved them back into the envelope. There were other names she’d asked for, other connections, but those would wait. She moved on to the thinner envelope. Jiro Sasaki: human trafficker and abusive boyfriend; millionaire, racketeer, venture capitalist, and commander of a small army of thugs.

  Most of the dossier consisted of translated printouts of news articles, some that didn’t even pertain to Jiro but upon which Yamada had underlined key phrases. Here the investigator’s notes were sparse and cryptic, making it plain that he’d been reluctant even before he’d begun assembling the material.

  News articles laid the framework, describing a country where mafia families operated in the open, without any attempt to hide affiliation; where many syndicate members maintained offices and carried business cards embossed with gang inscriptions, and CEOs and elected officials openly attended yakuza weddings and funerals, and where local crime bosses held press conferences to air grievances; and explained how a culture built upon rule following and integrity, strengthened by honor and shame avoidance, painted an illusion of legitimacy over a long unbroken history between politicians and the criminal element.

  Munroe reached the end of the report and went back again, and then again, always to the same article. The story told nothing of Jiro specifically, but Yamada had highlighted it well. Hidden within was the answer to Bradford’s arrest.

  Japan’s crime families, responding to a cash crunch brought on by two decades of a dormant economy, had used threats and muscle to diversify into legitimate enterprises and were now heavily vested in banking, real estate, and technology.

  The dots were there. She had only to connect them now.

  Perhaps for Bradford the truth could set him free.

  Munroe stood in the doorway of the hotel room, half in, half out, and then slowly closed the door behind her and took a deep inhale, searching for the fragrance, the scent that had set her on edge.

  She’d breathed in a human smell, but not natural and not housecleaning; a smell of body products, or hair gel, or laundry detergent, lingering in the air in the way smells did in rooms without air circulation and climate control—rooms like hers, where a key card in the connector was necessary to keep the air conditioner running.

  Munroe pressed a palm to the toilet door and tipped her head inside, then did the same with the ofuro, and, assured she was alone, walked to the bed and closed her eyes, breathing deeply again, finding the fragrance there, faint and subtle, mixed in with the heat and not fully dissipated.

  Whoever had been there had only left recently.

  She turned a slow circle, searching for hints of disturbance and theft.

  Everything in the room and on the wall and within her map of diagrams was how she’d left it: the desk with an undisturbed patina of dust due to the many days of Do Not Disturb signs and lack of housekeeping, the TV slightly off angle, her backpacks stacked in a line beneath the window and Bradford’s dress shirts still on hangers off the wall hook, as she’d left them.

  Munroe turned back to the bed, to the bedspread just slightly askew, and knelt and angled to see the bed top at eye level. The tight hospital corners weren’t quite as tight; the bedspread was wrinkled in places where it had been disturbed and smoothed out again, as if someone had climbed onto it, left indentations, and had flattened out the traces in a hurry.

  This wasn’t Jiro; not his modus operandi.

  She stood, glanced at the wall and then at the bed, and then at the wall again and swore in a low grumble. She, too, had stood on the bed, several days back, to take pictures of the wall, documenting her documentation.

  Munroe’s chest beat heavy, an inner fist pounding against her ribs, primal and childish and full of wounded rage. She stood on the chair and tore the map down. Folded it along the seams, one forceful shove after the next, and then stuffed it into her backpack. Coded notes aside, she hadn’t been back recently enough to have added anything of value, but she wanted nothing more than to throw the whole fucking thing at Nonomi Sato and tell her to enjoy herself.

  Munroe took the stairs down to the lobby, paused in the stairwell to pull an air of casual indifference into her posture, and then strode to the front desk.

  The night clerks were both women in their late twenties or early thirties, one of them she’d not seen before. Munroe smiled. Waited a beat for effect.

  “Room 201,” she said. “Have I had any visitors while I’ve been away?”

  The women glanced first at each other and then at Munroe; they searched through a message pad for notes, came up without answers, and in near unison, nodded bows of apology. No tell of guile showed in either expression, no betrayal of secrets in pose or posture, so Munroe thanked them and took the stairs back up, counting minutes in her head.

  At her door, she ran a finger beneath the lock, feeling for the data port.

  If the person or persons who’d been inside hadn’t gotten a key from the desk clerk, they would have had to hack in, though that wasn’t particularly difficult to do. The devices to mimic the portable programmers were easy to replicate, if you knew what you were doing, which most people didn’t.

  Munroe let herself back in, turned the door lock, and ran the chain.

  She’d never brought the Ninja, with its trackers, to the hotel.

  Never put the battery in her phone.

  Finding her here would have meant surveillance, or triangulating off the bike’s many parking locations, or pounding the pavement from door to door asking for her, and all of these options would have come with a hefty price tag in time, money, or both. Munroe shut her eyes and drew in
the opponent, became the opponent.

  No way would Sato have gone through the effort and expense of tracking her down just to take pictures of a wall map she didn’t know existed. Nonomi Sato dealt in treachery and sleight-of-hand; there would have been another reason for coming. Pictures of the notes were a little bonus.

  Munroe started with the bathroom, searching every place a thing could be hidden, removing the shower rod and the drain plug and checking behind electrical outlets. She cleaned behind each step with a washcloth that she wet, and rinsed, and wet again, wiping off prints and residue and anything that might come back to haunt her. She checked drawers and inside the desk frame and beneath the bed. She pulled the faceplate off the air conditioner and the casing off the back of the TV, and by the time she’d finished, she’d recovered four small bags of white powder.

  Unlike Bradford’s arrest, unlike Dillman’s death, this made sense.

  This fit the narrative. This was devious, this was ambush; this was Sato at work removing a perceived threat in a subtle way that the Chinese woman’s and Dillman’s deaths would never be, in the same way that Sato had sent the boys with the pipes as a warning.

  Fucking Nonomi Sato.

  Munroe emptied the contents into the toilet and flushed them, one by one. She turned the bags inside out, rinsing them in the sink, washing away the traces, and then cleaned the toilet and the sink once more when that was finished.

  Sato would have known when she’d left work. Would have allowed enough time for errands and detours, but the police would be alerted soon, and Munroe had no desire to explain the unexplainable on the chance that she’d missed something along the way.

  She packed what she needed most into one of the backpacks, took everything else she could manage to carry on the bike, and left the rest, saying not a word to the desk clerks when she squared the bill on her way out.

  She wandered the block to make sure she wasn’t followed, eventually looping back to the building next door, and took the stairs up a level to a landing where narrow windows opened to the street below. She waited less than half an hour before flashing lights filled the street. From her angled view she caught glimpses as the police rushed in and again when they came out less than two hours later.