The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  She had nothing but time.

  Shortly after midnight, a key turned in the lock.

  Hara stepped in, haloed by the hallway light. The door shut behind him. He dropped a satchel by the umbrella receptacle, stepped out of his shoes, and, oblivious to Munroe’s presence, continued on to his bedroom.

  Munroe sidestepped across the room and turned the deadbolt.

  She had her hand on the satchel when Hara stepped back out, bare-chested and barefoot with a jinbei bottom tied loosely around his waist. He stopped cold when he saw her, froze for a half second, and then darted back into the bedroom.

  Munroe unplugged the phone jack, carried the satchel around the kitchen counter, and stood on the other side, where the knives were within easy reach. She rustled through his bag, removed the cell phone he’d stupidly left behind, and pulled the battery.

  A bump against the wall, and then another, was notice that Hara was moving about. Munroe pulled a dish towel, thin and light, from off the counter and ripped a strip of cloth from it. She took a narrow canister off a six-piece spice rack and wrapped it tightly into her palm, clenching into a fist.

  Hara stepped out into the hallway, sword lifted, body tensed for attack.

  Underestimating an enemy was a fast way to get dead. Hara had been clever enough, strong enough, to kill Dillman, but his movements and mannerisms only spoke to the sword having ever been an ornament. Refusing to dignify him, Munroe studied her hand and said, “Put that down before you hurt yourself.”

  She pulled papers out of his satchel and spread them on the counter, scanning language she couldn’t read, looking for pictures and hyperlinks and anything familiar, while he stood there, sword raised, postured in rage and menace. She stacked the pages and looked back at him. “Tagawa wanted me dead,” she said. “Here I am, saving you the effort of figuring out how to do it.”

  Hara’s face went red, his jaw clenched, and his eyes darted from the front door, to the phone on the two-seat dining table, and then back to her.

  She shoved the papers into his bag.

  Continuing the psych warfare, she opened drawers, letting them bang as they came out on their rails. She pulled out the three kitchen knives and placed them on the counter.

  “Come on then,” she said. “Now that you know that I know, you can’t let me live. Let’s get it over with.”

  Hara took a step in her direction.

  Munroe ignored him, making a show of testing the knife blades for sharpness. She palmed them for heft and balance. In her peripheral vision, Hara took another step; he was nearly within striking distance.

  “I won’t go easy the way Dillman did,” she said.

  The accusation caught him off guard and he stopped.

  Munroe picked up her knife of choice. Her fingers closed around the handle. Soothing comfort leached up her arm and into her chest, like chamomile tea and honey in front of a warm fire.

  She looked at Hara and smiled a genuine smile.

  Hara lunged at her then, all the tension in his arms throwing the sword in a curving arc toward her body, curving in slow motion the way the hands on a clock held still between ticks. Munroe went up, over the counter between kitchen and living area, into the space between hallway and front door.

  The sword crashed down into the spot where she’d been, and Hara went forward with the swing, thrown off balance by the lack of connection.

  Tile cracked, and so did the replica sword, and Hara was now in the kitchen, boxed in the way Munroe had been seconds before.

  He grabbed a knife off the counter where she’d left them and held it up—perhaps as a threat, perhaps for his own self-confidence—and she beckoned him to her, chest full of want, mind full of need. “I’ll wait,” she said.

  Hara went over the counter in the same way she had, lithe and nimble, providing sensory detail that she used to measure the strength of his threat: He was more comfortable with a knife than a sword, more comfortable now that time had passed and he’d found his element, now that shock and surprise had given way to the edge of adrenaline.

  In the room where space was limited and the walls close enough that three long strides would have carried them from one to the next, Hara faced off against her, circling for an opening. He was shorter than she by two inches, his body defined but not built, light on his feet, his reflexes good. His movements were smooth and she waited for him to attack.

  He could try, and then he would learn the difference between years of practice in a dojo and the speed that came from fighting for life out on the streets and in the nightmare the jungle had been.

  Hara charged. Munroe ducked and spun.

  His fingertips grazed her neck.

  The knife in her hand, alive and warm, breathing and bleeding, cried out to be put to use. She felt for the rhythm of his heart; her mind inside his mind, her chest inside his chest, anticipating, waiting, while the adrenaline surged and heightened her senses, slowing and elongating time.

  He struck again, she dodged again, searching and seeking.

  She found weakness and came in close and threw her left hand, weighted with the metal tube, into his throat.

  Hara gagged and she jabbed again, into his head, hit and hit and hit, before he had time to react or brace for the impact.

  Speed was life and speed was death.

  Speed was his undoing, and his attack turned into defense.

  The knife, an extension of her body, pleaded for release and came to life against her will, cutting a long jagged slice across his torso. In horror at what she’d done, Munroe tossed the knife. Threw it to the floor as if she’d been scalded, threw it before the instinct, built and cemented in the struggle to stay alive, overtook her and caused her to slit his throat.

  In that moment of hesitation, Hara punched her and threw her aside. He grappled and knocked her down. She fought back and then she was on top of him, striking him with the weighted fist in a blind frenzy again and again.

  How long until she realized he no longer struggled?

  Munroe shoved off him, crab-crawling backward, while repulsion mixed with the thirsty need to finish what was started.

  Munroe picked up the knife again and grabbed Hara’s ankle. She dragged him down the hall into his bedroom. She tore the sheet off the bed and pulled the frame away from the wall. She cut strips and secured his hands and feet and shoved him up, securing the ties that bound him to the legs of the bed.

  And then she sat on the floor, her back to the wall, adrenaline dumping, exhaustion consuming, while inside her head the clouds roiled dark and thunderous, and self-loathing rode the lightning flashes.

  She hadn’t meant to cut him; she’d lost control.

  Not because of Dillman.

  More than a breach of suppressed emotion over Bradford.

  This was rage over everything that men like Tagawa and Hara and Jiro represented, men like the mercenary who’d made her what she was; rage over the lives they took in selfish interest, the pain they caused, and the destruction they left behind.

  Hara moaned and Munroe stood, pushing hard against the storm until the emotion was tight and small and she could lock it away.

  He moaned again and then came to gradually. Realizing he was bound, Hara yanked at the cloth and strained his head upward. Seeing Munroe, he sighed and dropped his head. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  “I can,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

  He closed his eyes. “What do you want?”

  “To know who you work for.”

  “Are you mad? Blind? You come into my house, attack me, to find out where I work, but you’ve seen me at work every day for the last month.”

  Munroe sighed. Pretenses and lies in the face of the obvious could be so damn exhausting. She sat on the bed and leaned over him so he couldn’t avoid her. “Drag this out if you want to,” she said. “The one thing I don’t have to worry about is time.”

  “They’ll miss me at work. My family will get worried.”

 
“Your family hasn’t heard from you in a year. I’ll call in sick for you before morning, and I’m about to quit your job. It’s a shame, too, because once you quit, you’ll lose value to everyone who pays you and then what will you matter?”

  Hara gritted his teeth and yanked hard against the cloth, and when he opened his mouth to scream, Munroe stuffed the last strip of sheet between his lips.

  She patted his face. “Get some rest,” she said. “It’s going to be a long, long night.”

  Munroe left Hara for the kitchen, and with the bedroom door open so she could hear him and he could hear her, she pulled together ingredients from his meager food supply and made a meal. She left the dishes in his sink unwashed, set an alarm, and slept a few hours on his couch with the subtle groan of his yanks and tugs playing in the background.

  When she returned to the bedroom just after dawn, he was still awake.

  She checked his wrists, red from the struggle. She pulled the cloth out of his mouth and he gulped greedy breaths. “I don’t want a lot,” she said, “just the contact information for your employer.”

  He choked back a crazy laugh. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

  She stuffed the cloth back into his mouth. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,” she said, “but eventually.” She turned and left him there.

  When business hours rolled around, she left the apartment long enough to call Bradford’s lawyer and held her breath when he picked up. “The charges will be dropped,” he said. “My client will be released.”

  “When?”

  “There is paperwork, there are formalities. It may be another day or two.”

  “Did the investigators get a confession from the killer?”

  “It’s not possible for a man in my position to know. Regardless, circumstances have changed.”

  Munroe’s hands shook and she tried to calm the rapid breaths that were fast turning to hyperventilation. “Information has a way of doing that,” she said. “Does his office in the United States know?”

  “The news came only fifteen minutes ago, I’ve not yet made any calls.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said, and he rang off.

  Commercial flying time out of Dallas was a minimum of sixteen hours—longer, depending on the connections—and if Walker caught the first flight available, she might possibly make it to Osaka before Bradford was released.

  The fourteen-hour time difference put Walker in the early evening, and without time to waste collecting a computer or hunting down prepaid cards, Munroe put the battery back into her phone and dialed directly from her cell to Samantha Walker’s, waiting impatiently through the long rings, hoping that an international number on display would be enough for Walker to take the call.

  When Walker answered, her voice was tinged with the kind of rushed distraction that came from juggling several things at once. Munroe said, “Miles is going to be released. I don’t know when, the lawyer will have that information. Get a flight booked and be ready to pick him up.”

  “Wait,” Walker said, and Munroe could hear the mental brakes lock up. Everything else on the other end came to a standstill. “When did you get the news—how did you get it?”

  “Five minutes ago from the lawyer. I don’t have any details. If you want them, you’ll have to call him.”

  “You’re not going to be there when he’s released?”

  “Can’t promise to make it,” Munroe said. “Better to be sure that someone is.”

  “I’ll be on the first flight out,” Walker said, and the line went dead.

  Munroe turned her face to the sky and the moment swept in, dry and thirsty, waiting for rain. Repressed emotions came rushing hard, uncontrollable, like a wall of water off the ocean. She let them come, and when the surge receded, the wash took with it the detritus and left a barren landscape in its place.

  This wasn’t over yet. Not for her.

  Using Hara’s keys, she let herself back inside the building and into the apartment with its new furniture smell, stale air, and the muffled yells of captivity from the bedroom.

  —

  Thirst was a weapon, as was hunger, and fear of the unknown, and fear of the knife. Hara broke long before a better man would have—the price paid for being soft and pliable, for living out an infiltrator’s fantasy within a civilian mind, for being a fool.

  She only cut him twice and that more theatrics than damage, more drama than pain. When he caved, she dripped water down his throat in exchange for information. By the time he was finished, she had phone numbers, e-mail accounts, and a name that might or might not mean something; she had geolocation tags and copies of correspondence, and Hara offered up his secrets, giving her access to his own understanding of the workings of the facility.

  Knowing that Dillman was working on Sato’s file, that he’d discovered something worth discussing with Munroe outside the facility, Hara had reported as much to his handlers. They’d given him leeway in fixing the problem. Killing Dillman had been his idea, and he’d carved out his own promotion in the process. Munroe could have admired his cleverness, justified his actions in a perverse way, might have excused him if there’d been any long-term strategy to what he’d done. But he’d reacted without artistry or intuitiveness, just short-term thinking and blind ambition, ignorant of far-reaching consequences and oblivious that his actions were a greater threat to Sato’s entrenchment than Dillman had originally been.

  Hara was a thug, a minion: dull and incapable of seeing beyond immediate gratification, unable to make sacrifices for long-term gain. She despised him for that weakness, and having made him bleed and stolen from him what he valued most, she wouldn’t squander life energy killing him.

  Dillman’s murder investigation was still open, and there were always anonymous tips. The proof was there if anyone was willing to look. She’d make sure they did.

  Hara would claim she’d kidnapped and tortured him.

  He had no way to prove it.

  Munroe worked through the apartment, wiping down the few things she’d touched, cleaning blood streaks off the floor, washing away the few traces of evidence she’d left behind. In Hara’s bathroom she found a handful of pill bottles, brought them to him, and had him read the labels.

  The best she could do was a combination of pain medication and antihistamines, and she stuffed enough pills down his throat to push the limits between oblivion and overdose.

  She wouldn’t cry if she’d guessed wrong.

  “I’m going to let you live,” she said. “You talk about me and you’ll be dead in a week. Understand?”

  Hara nodded and eventually drifted off into a medicated fog.

  She unbound him and gathered the sheets and stray threads and bagged them together with the dish towel she’d shredded, then wiped down his room to catch blood drops, stray hairs, and footprints. She’d spent thirty-two hours in that apartment, with his cries muffled and his torment heightened by tricks of the mind: long enough for Walker to get from Dallas to Osaka; long enough for the bureaucracy to move its slow way through the release process.

  Munroe stood in the doorway, staring at Hara’s unconscious body, then left the apartment and the building, carrying the bag of evidence far across town, to mix with wet garbage behind a grocery store. She then turned for the precinct where Bradford was housed and the hope that she might watch him walk out into the light, a free man.

  Munroe took a cab to within a block of the detention facility and continued on foot to the bus stop with its unobstructed view of the building’s front doors. Ear buds blaring to block sound and voices and unwanted emotions, Munroe leaned into a beam that supported the small overhang and there she waited.

  She’d returned Bradford’s things to the apartment, had tucked his passport and valuables back where they’d once been and rehung what clothes were still clean. She’d cleared out everything of hers that mattered and thrown away what didn’t. Walker would return with Bradford to collect what was his and turn over the ke
ys. They wouldn’t stay long. They’d be eager to get out of the country lest fate tempt good fortune and find freedom taken away once more, but there’d been no reason to leave remnants of her presence as a form of torment—for Bradford, for Walker.

  Munroe’s stay would be longer, if not by much.

  She’d told Sato the truth when she’d said there was nothing the woman had that she was inclined to chase and had lied by omission. Nothing Sato had, true, because why steal from a thief when for far less risk she could draw payment for silence from those who employed the thief?

  She’d gone after Hara to learn who pulled his strings, and he’d handed over the entire puppet show. She’d have to disappear, build a subterfuge, and then disappear again. She’d need time and distance, but the challenge was seductive.

  At just after five, the lawyer’s car pulled into the lot.

  Samantha Walker rode shotgun.

  The car parked. Driver and passenger stepped out.

  Jet-lagged and exhausted as she must be, Walker oozed charm and sensuality, as had always been her way. Physically, she was everything Munroe wasn’t: petite, voluptuous, and exotic. This was the first that Munroe had seen her since those first months following the explosion, when Walker’s days had been counted in terms of nurse cycles and visitation hours and then gradually segued into assisted living and physical therapy. Now the visible scars were few, the limp less noticeable, and her thick black hair as luscious as it had been before.

  The biggest damage had been on the inside.

  The lawyer and Walker strode together for the building’s front doors and in their interaction it was clear, even from a distance, who called the shots. For Walker, the leash and the way she maneuvered men on her lead was merely a way of facilitating business. The lawyer, like Warren Green, like most who came in contact with her, was oblivious to the reality that nothing he fantasized or projected would ever materialize.