The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  They’d come. They’d searched. They’d left empty-handed, and their posture and demeanor, facial expression and interaction, said they were none too happy about the false alarm.

  Soon enough Sato would get the news.

  Soon enough she’d move in for another round.

  But the mind-fuck could work both ways.

  Much strategy prevails over little strategy, so those with no strategy cannot help but be defeated. Therefore it is said that victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

  —ZHANG YU, COMMENTING ON THE ART OF WAR

  The train doors opened and Nonomi Sato, one among thousands, stepped from the women-only car to the platform, carried forward by the outward rush. The segregated cars, meant to provide women with a place free from chronic groping and sexual harassment, were handy when the commuter throng was packed so tightly that station attendants shoved passengers inward so the doors could close.

  She continued up another level, through crowds running to make connections between train lines, patterns that disbursed and recongealed in new arrays like bacteria in humanity’s petri dish.

  She followed another set of stairs, and exit signs, and finally came up top to fresher air, and there, walking around to the other side of the rail, she leaned against the stairway wall and pulled a book from her purse.

  He stood beside her a minute later, clean-cut in his white shirt and thin tie, as if dressed for a day in the bowels of insurance paper-pushing hell. He asked for a cigarette and she said she didn’t smoke.

  He asked if what she read was any good. Sato handed him the book.

  “Take a look,” she said. “You might find it to your liking.”

  He was the man she’d dialed to set deception and ambush in motion, and he cracked the pages open to the envelope she’d left to mark her place. He traded her envelope with one of his own, then handed the book back. “It looks good,” he said. “I should get a copy.”

  “You should,” she said, and by the time she’d placed the book inside her purse, he was gone.

  Sato went back the way she’d come, down the same stairs, and returned to the same platform, waiting for the next train, where she would once more be shoved in tightly among other bodies.

  She reached work early, even with the detour and having taken public transport instead of driving. Perfunctory and part of the scenery, she went through the procedure to access the lab.

  Sato performed for the cameras, performed for her workmates, perfect in the routine as always in spite of today’s lack of focus. Patience was a cultivated skill, but with the envelope waiting inside the book, the weeds of wanting grew wild. She was careful, cautious in compensating for her own weakness, cautious due to the additional scrutiny that had fallen upon the facility.

  So much suspicion, so many accusations, and the police investigators who’d made several trips back to interview anyone who’d been on-site during either of the murders. She was lucky in that so far she’d remained off radar, though there was no telling how long that luck would hold.

  The danger was in staying, and she’d stayed too long, but the promise of success was around the corner, just around the corner.

  —

  Late, late in the evening Nonomi Sato climbed the stairs at the edge of the wall, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside. She pulled the book from her purse, left the purse in the genkan, and headed directly up the stairs for the second floor and her bedroom and the laptop tucked in the drawer beneath her sweaters.

  She sat on the low platform bed and flipped the laptop open, waiting for the boot-up and the password control and then the thumb scan. She slipped the envelope from between the book’s pages while the system ran through the start-up and dumped the micro card into her palm, feeling what it meant to succeed.

  If all had gone well, the threat of the newcomer had been neutralized.

  Sato slid the card into its slot and counted seconds as the data loaded, pictures of the newcomer’s hotel room, taken by the same hireling who would have left the drugs.

  Deception and ambush.

  One hundred and fifteen pictures waited.

  Sato started at the beginning.

  The camera lens took her through the newcomer’s room, everything exactly as it had been laid out and left behind: pictures in place of eyes. Pictures to show her what the long hours required by company loyalty wouldn’t allow her to see for herself. She needed this, needed to know the enemy.

  The newcomer was orderly, but not fastidious. Clean, but not to the point of obsession. He had very few items and few articles of clothing—a man used to traveling light and picking up again on short notice.

  The next photo took in a wide angle. Sato paused and zoomed, studying the lack of personal touches—no mementos or touchstones, making the room emotionally barren.

  She and the newcomer were not so different.

  Twenty-seven pictures in, Sato’s breath caught.

  She expanded the image to fill the full screen, put the laptop on the mattress, flipped over onto her stomach, and stared.

  Now this was a gift. A truly generous gift.

  The series of photo arrays started with the whole wall and then, quadrant by quadrant, zoomed in closer and then again closer still so that one picture made the entire diagram. Then four. Then eight. And at last the photographs were so detailed that she could see the depth of the pen strokes against the index cards.

  These were the facts as the newcomer understood them, an attempt to untangle the mess that had locked away the cowboy.

  The writing was in English, but not exactly. Perhaps a blend of languages? Or perhaps words that meant something to the writer, but without understanding the intent they would mean nothing to anyone else? Sato searched for her own name and didn’t find it, searched for various known quantities and didn’t find them, either.

  So this was a riddle, a challenge.

  To know these words and the way that each part tied in to the whole was to have scouts behind the enemy lines.

  Sato smiled, then stood and carried the laptop down to the kitchen.

  She pulled prepackaged food from the refrigerator. Stripped a small tray from cardboard and plastic and placed it into the toaster oven. Days that turned into nights, and nights into days, turned meals into something no self-respecting human should have to endure. The price of doing business.

  Gaman.

  Sato poured two fingers of whisky and brought the glass to the small table at which she rarely ate. She sipped and sent eight images to the printer. She taped them together and laid the sheet on the floor. With the whisky in one hand, pulling pins from her bun with the other, she sat beside the printout, mulling over the notes until the timer dinged.

  Sato transferred food from toaster to plate, then folding table on the floor. She went for sticky notes on the desk at the long end of the room, and there, in the soft light of the lamp, she stood, staring.

  The can of pens, always to her right, was on the left side. The stack of colorful notes, always to her left, was on the right.

  Sato took a step back. Everything else was the same.

  She ran for the kitchen table, nearly tripping over her feet in the process. She shrugged out of the tight skirt, flicked the laptop screen to life, and scrolled for access to the footage from the bank of security cameras that watched her house.

  With hands shaking, it took two tries before she was able to key the password in properly, and when finally granted access she flipped through one black square after the next, the last eight hours blank.

  She tore through the door for the laundry room and tugged down a clean jinbei. Shoved her legs into the pants, grabbed a folding ladder, and hauled it into the genkan. She checked the cameras, up in the corners, inside and out.

  The feeds had been cut.

  Sato stumbled down the ladder, heart pounding, mind refusing to accept, unable to believe, terrified to know. She dragged the lad
der back enough to get the front door shut and ran for the downstairs bedroom while inside her head the beat pounded no, no, no…

  Down the street from the hostess club, bathed in neon on the corner of sex and sin, Munroe joked and jostled among a group of twentysomethings, utilizing the crowd and drunken conversation as a cloak of invisibility while she waited for the night to end and the club to empty.

  In her gut, she knew, through circumstantial evidence and connecting the dots, she knew, but knowledge wasn’t enough to set Bradford free. She needed a catalyst, and if she was wrong, if confirmation bias had created a false reality, she would lose.

  Bradford would lose.

  There would be no second try, no do-over.

  So she’d returned to the beginning, to where they’d been before the nightmares and unknowns had ripped away happiness, and amid the disguise of laughter and broken English, Munroe watched the door.

  Eventually, the group she used for cover moved on to other parties, in other venues. Munroe retreated to the shadows, waiting, while up and down the block the restaurants closed and the die-hard clientele emptied into the streets and the night wound into morning. The hostess girls left, too, some of them picked up by boyfriends, others walking away in groups of two and three, and others still collecting bicycles from nearby racks. A few would be transported by Jiro’s men. Alina had been one of those.

  Gabi was one of the last to leave the club, and like Alina on the night she’d fled, she was nearly unrecognizable without the makeup and dressed in jeans and a summer sweater. At the end of the block she split from a group and walked alone toward the train station. Munroe followed from afar until they reached a place where the light was good and the area clean. She called Gabi’s name and closed the distance.

  The woman turned, young and angel-faced, innocent beneath the light. She stood, puzzled for a moment, and then, recognizing Munroe, she blanched, turned, and walked at a faster pace.

  Munroe jogged to catch up and then kept beside her.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Gabi said. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near me.”

  “I just need you to answer a question and I’ll go.”

  Gabi stopped and spun, shoulders hunched, face full of accusation. “Where is Alina?” she said. “What did you do to her?”

  “I put her on a plane. She’s in Russia.”

  “Russia?” Gabi said. Her hands relaxed and the anger radiating from her melted into a softer mixture of sadness, pain, and relief. “This is true?”

  “Yes. True. Promise,” Munroe said, and pulled out the pack of pictures she and Okada had taken to the Chinese woman’s mother in Nishinari. “Do you know any of these men?”

  Gabi ignored the pictures. “There’s been stress for all the girls in the club because of you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Munroe said. She took Gabi’s hand, pressed the pages between her thumb and finger, and raised them closer to Gabi’s face. “Have you seen any of these men?” she said.

  Gabi looked down and then turned the pictures toward the light. She stopped at Nobu Hayashi, the accountant. “He was in the club those nights with your friend,” she said. She continued flipping and stopped at Tagawa’s face. “I’ve seen him, too,” she said. She handed the pictures back and started walking again.

  Munroe kept pace beside her and held Tagawa’s picture in front of Gabi’s face, forcing Gabi to stop walking or risk tripping. “Where did you see him?” Munroe said. “In the club?”

  Gabi pushed the picture away. “Outside the club.” She started up again. Munroe, still beside her, said, “Was he watching the door? Waiting to meet someone?”

  “He was with Jiro in Jiro’s car. They were arguing, maybe. Most men who talk with Jiro are unhappy.”

  They passed beneath a rail bridge and turned a corner. Gabi pointed up at a building that nearly backed into the train tracks. “That’s where I live,” she said, “so good night.” She paused, then cast her gaze down toward the ground and then up into Munroe’s face. “Take me with you, please,” she said. “Take me like you took Alina.”

  Munroe breathed in the night and exhaled the frustration.

  “I can’t help you the way I helped her. I can get you to the station, I can put you on a train to Tokyo, so you can get to the embassy, but I can’t protect you.”

  “There have been stories,” Gabi said.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “The girls in the club talk about a gaijin who beat Jiro’s men,” Gabi said. She twirled a finger through her curls, managing both threat and plea in that one simple action. “Jiro is still looking for him.”

  “I’m sure he would be,” Munroe said. “I can’t help you, Gabi.”

  “Anything you want, I give it to you,” Gabi said.

  Munroe held up Tagawa’s picture again. “How do you know that this was the man you saw?”

  “It was him.”

  Munroe turned to walk away.

  Gabi grabbed her arm and Munroe smacked her. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  Gabi blinked, took a step back, and said, “It was him. He stepped out of the car as I was walking to the club. We nearly collided. He yelled at me, up in my face, very close, angry yelling. It was him.”

  “I want to help you,” Munroe said. “I can’t.”

  Gabi’s eyes drifted toward the ground, her face growing redder with suppressed tears while she picked at her cuticles.

  “Give me your bag,” Munroe said.

  Hand tight around the shoulder strap, Gabi pulled back.

  “You want me to help you? Give me the bag.”

  Gabi held on, so Munroe let go and walked away.

  “Wait,” Gabi said, and ran after Munroe, her bag outstretched. “Take it.”

  Munroe kept walking. Gabi caught up and half turned, tripping backward, held the bag toward Munroe. “Please,” she said. “Please. I want to go home.”

  Munroe grabbed the oversize purse, then Gabi’s wrist, and pushed the woman against the retaining wall. Munroe dumped the contents on the ground and sorted through them, tossing makeup, perfume, paper, and a spare change of clothing back in. She rifled through the wallet, found three thousand dollars in yen, shoved the money back in, and tossed the wallet into the purse. Found Gabi’s passport.

  Munroe pulled the battery from Gabi’s phone, and threw it hard down the street. “You don’t need my help,” she said. “You have the money to get to Tokyo. Go. Get out.”

  “I have the money, but not the safety.”

  Munroe pressed her thumb to the bridge of her nose and glanced up toward the light-polluted sky. Gabi was a witness to the connection between Jiro and Tagawa, she could be useful if that card needed to be played, but Alina, with the information she’d provided, had been a burden, and this one was that much worse.

  “I can’t keep you safe,” she said.

  “If I run to Tokyo, Jiro will find me even there. He will catch me and kill me to make an example to the other girls.”

  Munroe stepped toward Gabi, into the young woman’s personal space. Gabi smiled sheepishly: manipulation mixed with flirtation.

  Munroe stared hard for a moment, then put her hands on Gabi’s shoulders. She shook her hard, then shoved her back. Gabi half tripped, caught her footing, then stood and glared at Munroe.

  “Live in fear or die free,” Munroe said.

  She turned and started walking. Gabi called out after her, “I’ll tell Jiro you were here. I know what you look like, I’ll help him find you.”

  Munroe waved her off and continued on.

  If you know the place and time of battle, you can join the fight from a thousand miles away.

  —MASTER SUN TZU

  Sato slid the shoji open and stared an arm’s length in, at the door behind the door. The cameras between them had been pushed up to face the ceiling, an announcement that whoever had been in the house had been here, too, and wanted her to know.

  But the steel door to the vault on the other sid
e was still secure.

  Sato tested the handle, then keyed in the code on the numerical pad.

  The lock popped and she pulled the door open to cold air.

  The room within the room was soundproofed and climate-controlled, and the lights turned on automatically with the motion of the door.

  This was the reason she’d needed a house, not an apartment.

  This was the reason for everything.

  Sato stepped inside and sealed herself in, then scanned the waist-high shelves that lined opposite walls.

  She shouldn’t be here, not still wearing her work blouse, not without showering and gowning for decontamination, but she had to see, had to know that the work hadn’t been disturbed.

  She walked the shelf, looking over the 3-D printer, the computer, and the wires between, confirming that all was connected as it should be. She knelt to check the refrigerator and the glassed-in temperature box where the cell cultures incubated. This was a small-scale replica of the lab inside the facility, minus the operating theater and the test animals, although maybe one day she would add those, too.

  As long as she had this lab, no amount of security at the facility could keep her from walking out with each day’s knowledge, and duplicating behind these walls what had worked there. She had no need to risk secreting the data out when she could create the successes fresh and skip the days of mistakes, sending the filtered knowledge on for a hefty fee.

  The danger was in the staying, and she’d stayed too long because it had taken her six months just to catch up with the work already in progress while faking an education she hadn’t had. But she was good at her job. Both of them.

  She knew the research, knew the competition.

  Anyone with a 3-D printer, a little know-how, and the right cellular soup could biofabricate organs. The trick wasn’t in printing them, nor even in choosing the correct cell structures to lay down the network of veins and build multiple cell types; the trick was in controlling temperature, was in keeping the cells oxygenated and viable and providing them with a way to grow and function like native tissue. The fabricated cell lattice needed to incubate within a host.