Hope, in the coming attack, opened the floodgates of rage.
Time slowed and sound compressed into water condensation echoing a musical drip off concrete walls and floors; into the drizzle-spray of tires on the pavement as a car drove by outside; into children’s laughter in the distance.
And footsteps, three sets of footsteps, moving in cautiously behind her back. Munroe waited, focused on the reflection in the bike’s red fairing. Behind her head, shadows of brandished pipes stood tall like baseball bats readied for the pitcher’s windup, elongating and warping as the men neared.
Munroe counted heartbeats and felt the rhythm, and then she rolled.
The metal bars came down hard into the empty space where she’d been a half-heartbeat before. She came up swinging, helmet chin-guard in hand, all her weight, her full momentum thrown into that backward strike. The man on the right flinched. He ducked too slowly, moved too late.
The swing smashed helmet into head. He collapsed.
Time blurred and lost meaning.
The past layered on top of the present, blow against blow; speed, the ability to react and defend, resurrected from those many nights in the dark where, ruthless and savage, she’d survived through absolute refusal to die.
But this was wrong, all wrong.
In every swing she felt it, every dodge and parry.
These men weren’t the past, weren’t even the present.
They had arrogance but not skill; they weren’t fighters.
She waited for them to come at her again.
Instead, they looked at one another: nervous, off-script: foot soldiers who’d brought the fight to her but weren’t the fight she wanted.
The pounding inside her chest groaned in understanding.
The drive for release, for pain, pushed her at them.
She pointed the metal bar toward one, letting him know that she’d marked him for attack. He took several steps toward the garage exit.
A shadow moved in her peripheral vision: his partner flanking and closing in. Munroe pivoted, swung, and connected the metal bar to his shoulder: small pain, a half second of diversion. He retaliated and opened himself up like a fool. She dodged and dropped, then drove the metal bar across his shin: crippling pain, unbearable pain, she knew.
She wrenched the bar from his grasp and cracked it hard against his rib cage. His mouth opened in a soundless yell and he dropped to his knees. She hit him again, then rotated toward his companion, who, in those same seconds, had backed away another few steps. His eyes darted from her to his partners and then he turned and ran.
The crippled one dragged himself away, full of surrender, and Munroe stood in place, rocklike and solid, eyes tracking him, breathing past the urges that drove her to move in for the kill and finish what he’d started. Then he, too, was gone.
Somewhere on the edge of awareness her shoulder throbbed.
With one bar in each hand she walked toward the unconscious man. She kicked him, placing anger and frustration where it was least effective, and then stood over him. Boot to torso, she shoved him onto his back.
He was in his very early twenties, maybe five foot seven, all bone and sinew and stylish hair. In the echo of the garage footsteps shuffled and clothing rustled: movements small and cautious. Munroe knelt and placed the pipes beside the body, then, without turning, said, “You can come out now.”
Slowly Alina came and stood beside her.
Munroe said, “You recognize him?”
Alina shook her head, knelt beside her, and with trembling fingers unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tore it open. She glanced up at Munroe, surprise etched deep in her expression. In a near whisper, she said, “No tattoos.”
Munroe said, “Fanfuckingtastic.”
Then, “We’re leaving. Get your stuff.”
Alina walked past the motorcycle and picked the second helmet up off the ground. Munroe felt for a pulse, then put her ear to the man’s chest, where his heart thumped out strong and steady. She opened his eyelids and checked his pupils. He’d have the mother of all headaches when he woke, but at least she hadn’t killed him.
Munroe searched his pockets for a phone, a wallet, some form of identification, and came up empty. She checked his teeth for damage, but they were clean, and his arms and hands for needle tracks. She didn’t find them, though that didn’t eliminate addiction as the motive that had made him stupid enough to start a fight on someone else’s behalf—money had the same effect.
She stared at his skin, clean and blemish free.
No tattoos, but that didn’t mean anything in and of itself.
For the same reason that members of organized crime embraced tattoos, many also shunned them. Irezumi, ink inserted under the skin needle point by needle point, was painful, time-consuming, and expensive: a badge of honor and manliness, and a mark of the outlaw so culturally taboo that public bathhouses, fitness centers, and hot springs—places where bare skin would be seen—barred those with tattoos from entry, and politicians on witch hunts rallied an already tattoophobic public to fire tattooed employees.
The lack of tattoos wasn’t what marked these attackers as something other than Jiro’s men, their softness did. Boys like these, full of bravado and without a lot of skill, had no business coming after her and she couldn’t begin to guess at who’d sent them.
Munroe stared out toward the exit where the other two had gone. They were a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit—raised questions and possibilities that she hadn’t even begun to ask—not the least of which was how they’d come to be there, lying in wait, well in advance of her arrival.
—
Munroe rode the streets at random, slow, to compensate for the lack of focus that the adrenaline dump brought. Each time they passed a hotel, Alina tapped her on the shoulder, and when at last Munroe found one that felt right, she took the bike another several blocks away and left it there.
The front desk was on the second floor, and against Alina’s protests, Munroe left her downstairs. She secured the key, then returned to the ground floor for Alina and used the elevator to bypass the lobby and prying eyes who might remember the blonde. The room was slightly bigger and slightly older than the little cube that had been their prior hideaway.
Munroe turned to leave again.
Alina, eyes wide, voice hoarse, said, “Where are you going?”
“To collect the things we’ve left behind.”
Alina stood, reached for her shoes, grabbed her purse, and held it to her chest. Munroe, patience worn thin, tolerance for babysitting used up, said, “I don’t mind another fight, you want one, too?”
Alina dropped to the bed, drew her legs up, wrapped her arms around them, and tucked her chin into her knees, small and childlike. She stared up at Munroe, eyes red and face full of hurt. Munroe stomped into the hallway for the stairs, door thud echoing in her wake.
Their original hotel room was undisturbed, everything as they’d left it, which meant the boys with pipes had never gone beyond the garage. Munroe untaped the diagrams from the wall, folding each page as neatly as possible. Together with the laptop and whatever else she could fit, she stuffed two backpacks.
To take it all, she’d have to make another trip.
Frustration burned her. These things were part of the costume of becoming, items she could have shed if she’d had money to spare and time to waste. She’d return for the rest when Alina was no longer her problem.
—
Alina glanced up when Munroe stepped through the door. Munroe dropped the backpacks on the floor. “Take a shower and try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’re starting early in the morning.”
Like a petulant child, Alina shut off the television and carried her stuffed purse into the ofuro. A few minutes later the water kicked on and Munroe pulled out the laptop, connected to wi-fi, opened the phone application, and dialed the number Samantha Walker had sent for Warren Green, the military contact on the other side of Bradford’s phone transcripts. It had taken
this long to make the go-go-go of real-time work with the time-zones differences and follow the thread.
When the line connected, Munroe said, “Miles Bradford calling from Japan. Please let Warren know it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Green is in a meeting,” a pleasant voice said. “I’d be happy to take a message.”
“When’s he expected back?”
“After eleven.”
“I’ll try again later. Just let him know I called.”
The line went dead. Munroe shut the lid, then blew out exhaustion and irritation. Confirming the truth behind Bradford’s conversation— if she could even get to the truth—wouldn’t help Bradford in the moment, but it would be one less land mine to step on in sorting out the mess of lies.
Munroe stood and shoved the television to the far end of the desk. She unfolded the diagram, straightened the pages, and taped the web of connections back up as they’d been before. The questions were the same, relentless in their press for answers, and the attack inside the garage only raised more of them.
In a big bold scrawl, Munroe added the young men with pipes to an index card, stuck it randomly among the others, and sat in the desk chair tipped back with her hands behind her head, contemplating a puzzle whose pieces had just gotten dumped out and switched around.
She drew down, down, away from the clutter, into the mind of an entrenched spy-thief. She became the conductor in this orchestra of obfuscation, became the thief. Thoughts that had nagged her, incongruences she’d shoved to the background during the last two days of constant movement, came bubbling to the surface.
Munroe opened her eyes, stared at the web, and then stood.
She could make sense of Bradford’s setup. If he’d gotten close, been on the verge of discovery, or had already discovered something without realizing what he had, he would have had to be removed. Murder, too, would have made sense—if it had been Bradford who’d gotten dead.
But setting Bradford up through the murder of a third party, in the same facility where the spy had been entrenched—no, that was wrong.
That was very much a case of shitting where you ate.
If, indeed, a corporate spy had embedded within the organization, if technology theft was a true issue and not merely a pretense used to bring Bradford in as a scapegoat for something else, then the thing that spy would want more than anything other than the technology itself was invisibility.
An investigation conducted by law enforcement on company property looking for accomplices was not conducive to invisibility. Gnawing suspicion among fellow workmates was not conducive to invisibility. And yet, in spite of this, a woman had been murdered inside the company—a Chinese woman—so Bradford could take the fall.
Munroe replayed his words: Company executives seem pretty convinced that the theft is coming from China’s direction. Bradford had used the plural, as if many in upper management were in agreement.
I figure someone’s watching for something I don’t know anything about, he’d said, that they’re using my presence like a stick in the bush to flush game, a wedge to split the log, a straw man, a distraction. He’d evaded when she’d asked him if he’d had any idea who or what, but had left behind an external drive with three lists of suspects. The Chinese woman hadn’t been on any of them.
In the dark, before dawn, Munroe stood beside the bed, staring down as Alina slept on, an arm thrown over her head, blond hair tangled between sheet and pillow. She debated a run for freedom; she could write a note, leave the woman on her own for the day. In the end, her promise of protection wouldn’t let her.
The streets were still sleepy and sluggish when they reached the landing across from the facility. Munroe waited until Alina was settled, then left her there with the notebook and a bag full of food and drinks that they’d purchased from a konbini along the way.
She walked into the wide glass doors at seven, ahead of all but the most dedicated of employees, and took the stairs up, winding through the hallways toward the back half of the building, to the research and development lab that didn’t require high-level clearance.
Munroe waited outside the hall that branched to the department, spent fifty minutes nodding and greeting employees as they arrived, until her target appeared: white blouse and bland gray skirt, same as every other woman in the building, short black hair pulled into a clip just as it had been on the day Bradford had pointed her out. Two Chinese women had lunched and left together that day she’d visited with Bradford, and one of them was still alive.
The woman shied away when Munroe approached, cringing, like she’d been backed against a wall by an attacking dog. Munroe presented the security badge and the woman blanched, then whispered in protest.
“The police have already spoken with me,” she said. Her Japanese was fluent with only the slightest hint of an accent. “I’ve already answered the other security men’s questions.”
Munroe touched the woman’s elbow, using her body as a tool to crowd her. “We’ll be very quick,” she said, guiding her back into the main hall.
Other employees passed by, staring blatantly. The woman glanced right and left, as if seeking help or assurance, but she didn’t resist the pressure encouraging her forward.
Munroe walked her down the stairs to the conference room that Okada had taken her to when she’d surprised him on the day after Bradford’s arrest. He knew the layout of the building’s listening devices better than most and if the room had been good enough for him, then it would suffice for her.
Munroe opened the door and the woman, eyes wide and jaw clenched, went to sit in the chair farthest away, clutching her bag up tight to her chest.
Munroe pulled the second seat from the wall and positioned it so that she was at an angle, blocking the view to the door, yet close enough that their knees almost touched, though not so close that they crossed the boundaries of propriety. Leaning in, Munroe said, “Don’t be scared, you’re not in trouble. I’m new with the company. You’ve been here a lot longer than me, so maybe I should be scared of you.”
The woman cracked the tiniest of smiles, then swallowed. “I’m not scared,” she said. Tension in her body and her shallow breathing said otherwise.
Voice soothing and friendly, Munroe said, “You must be so tired of the same questions over and over. I have just a few more—they’re new to me, but if in my confusion they’re already old to you, will you tell me? So I can save you time?”
The woman nodded again and her grip on the bag eased just a bit.
Munroe said, “Tell me your name, please, just so I can be sure everything is accurate.”
“Xiao Wei,” the woman said.
Munroe smiled and said, “See? This is so easy.”
That earned another slightest blush of a smile.
Munroe said, “The police and the security men have asked you about Meilin’s work habits, her friends, and her personal life, but it seems they didn’t ask you about her boyfriend.”
A victim had been killed inside the facility and found in an emergency exit stairwell, yet there’d been no cries for help and no evidence of a struggle—not even the smallest skin sample beneath her nails to keep Bradford out of the situation he was in now. On its face, the woman had died at the hands of someone she trusted enough to rendezvous with in an-out-of-the-way place.
The victim hadn’t been married, so a boyfriend had been a place to start, and this was cold reading, starting from a logical assumption and using this woman’s answers and body language to guide the conversation. Being right didn’t matter; making her comfortable did, so that she’d clarify what was wrong between the facts.
The woman in the chair whispered, “Yes, they asked.”
Munroe said, “But you told them that you didn’t know anything, correct?”
The woman nodded.
Munroe said, “You and Meilin were good friends. She may not have told you who her boyfriend was, but there are things you do know about him that you haven’t mentioned.”
The woman’s grip on her bag tightened and when her eyes jumped back up, there was fear.
Munroe placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s not your fault that you weren’t asked the best questions.” She waited a beat. “Meilin’s boyfriend works here, too, doesn’t he? Perhaps he was someone important and they needed to keep their relationship a secret.”
The woman nodded and whispered, “Yes.”
“Do you know why it had to be a secret?”
“Only what you said, that he worked here and he was important and they couldn’t be seen together.”
“Because of his wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“Meilin was happy with this type of relationship?”
“Sometimes.”
“It can be difficult to keep a relationship a secret—she must have also been sad at times.”
Xiao Wei nodded again.
Munroe waited several heartbeats, then said, “Was her boyfriend good to her at least? Did he treat her well?”
The woman stiffened slightly. She said, “Sometimes.”
Munroe followed the resistance. “Meilin had bruises.”
“She fell.”
“You didn’t believe that.”
The woman’s eyes stayed toward the floor. “She wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
“You couldn’t help her then,” Munroe said, “but there were chances to make things right after she was killed. The police asked about her relationships. That would have been a way to tell them about the boyfriend and the bruises.”
“They only wanted to know about the foreign security man, they asked if he was her boyfriend, they asked if he showed anger and jealousy. I told them that I didn’t know anything about the foreign man, that Meilin’s boyfriend was Japanese but that I didn’t know his name or anything about him.”
“They asked if he worked here?”
“They seemed only interested in the foreign man.”
“What about the security men?”
The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel Page 15