The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “What?”

  “Come on, Sam, stop breaking my balls. Just give me the number.”

  “This is my rodeo,” Walker said. “You report to me, not the other way around. You have something to give to the lawyer, it goes through me.”

  Munroe dropped into reptile mode. “That’s fine,” she said. “Talk to the lawyer about the so-called murder weapon, ask him how much the case hangs upon that detail, because it’s not as much of a one-of-a-kind belt as they’d like to believe. I’ve got another one right here.”

  Walker was quiet for a moment. She said, “I’ll e-mail you the details,” and hung up.

  Munroe dialed Warren Green again, went through the same exchange with the same faceless voice, and then the line clicked over to elevator music and Munroe closed her eyes, counting up the minutes, past the ones and into the tens.

  This was due diligence, a thread she had to either tie off or pursue.

  Green finally picked up near the twenty-minute mark.

  “My man,” he said. “Tried calling you back. What’s been going on?”

  “Arrest, followed by mayhem and general unhappiness,” Munroe said.

  Green paused for a beat and said, “Who is this?”

  “This is Miles’s conscience,” she said. “Miles’s brain and body are currently unavailable seeing as they are in jail, awaiting trial for a murder that he may or may not have committed—I say not, the prosecutor says otherwise—and there are a few phone conversations on record of you and him chatting it up like good buddies. This is a heads-up that there may eventually be less friendly people throwing questions your way. Rumors say he might have been attempting to procure a technology of interest on your behalf. True?”

  There was another pause. This time slowly, Green said, “You want to run all that by me again?”

  “Which part?” Munroe said. “The part about Miles getting arrested or the part about him stealing trade secrets for you?”

  “The part about his arrest,” Green said. “He wasn’t working for me, stealing for me, or doing anything for me—that’s a rumor that needs to die. What happened, and is he all right?”

  Munroe had expected denial—regardless of the truth, denial was the only answer—but sincerity underlined Green’s words: no hemming or hawing or ass covering. His concern went straight to Bradford and that pointed toward Green speaking the truth. “He’s okay as he can be, given the circumstances,” she said, “but the finger-pointing in your direction is real.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Green said. “Miles and me, we go way back. We keep in touch—have done it that way for years. He’s told me about work, I know that’s some crazy shit they got goin’ on down in the lab, and I know he’s been twitchy, especially over these past three weeks. Before you ask, no, I don’t know the details. If I did, I’d give ’em to you, honest to God. But like I said, Miles and me, we talk, so given the context of this here conversation I’m goin’ out on a limb and guessing you must be Michael.”

  “Yeah,” Munroe said, and she waited, offering Green the chance to fill in the blanks, all the while weighing his version of events against the transcripts.

  Green said, “There anything I can do to help? God knows he’s a magnet for trouble, but good Lord. Arrested? Murder? You think it’ll stick?”

  “Still sorting through it,” she said. “On the surface, it looks bad. Someone went to a lot of effort to make sure he was the only suspect. If you have any connections in Japan who’d be willing to throw their weight around, ask questions, make sure the local officials know that he’s got friends in high places, that would be helpful.”

  “Let me make some calls,” Green said. “See if I’ve got anyone owing me favors who happens to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” she said. “I’m dropping off the map, so anything you’ve got, give it to his office.”

  “That Samantha, she still the one running things there?”

  “She’s the one.”

  “Woman’s a bulldog. Take off a man’s leg if he’s not careful.”

  “She’ll do good by whatever you send her way.”

  “You got it,” Green said, and gushed on about Samantha Walker. Munroe listened through the headache until finally Green got the hint in her silence, said good-bye, and hung up.

  Munroe shut the computer and leaned back on the bed.

  The conversation wound round and round inside her brain. She sat up and opened the laptop again and reread the transcripts.

  People saw what they wanted to see, believed what they wanted to believe, and the conversations could be played off as the banter between friends or the scheming of industrial espionage, depending on the point of view.

  Gut instinct would have her believe Green, if not Bradford, but in the big picture truth didn’t matter much. The phone calls to the United States, whatever the insiders at ALTEQ believed they meant, were a dead end: a sideshow she’d had to follow through to closure. Munroe stood and pulled Green’s name down off her web.

  Test them to find out where they are sufficient and where they are lacking.

  —MASTER SUN TZU

  At the back of the lunchroom, in the closet where paper goods, cleaning supplies, and assorted restocking items cluttered disorganized shelves, Nonomi Sato pulled a threaded lens out from a hole in the wall.

  She stood quite still, both hands gripping the edges of the palm-size viewer, replaying what she’d recorded. She studied facial expressions and body language, and with each replay the anger grew. The new foreigner was tall and thin, as she’d been told, but likely weak and easily intimidated, no.

  No, no, and no.

  That assessment was wrong to the point of blindness.

  This Michael was younger and smaller than the cowboy, yes, but his eyes were ice and his body moved with the control of a warrior. He’d tensed soon after Sato had peered through the eyepiece—not enough that most people would have noticed the way she noticed—but he’d felt her, had known he was being watched, and had refused to give in to the human urge to turn and look.

  The cowboy, removed, had been replaced with an enigma.

  Sato shoved the microcamera into the case that held the viewer, anger burning higher. How could anyone, with any sense of strategy or understanding of human nature, have missed such simple observations? How?

  Those who didn’t know the plans of competitors couldn’t prepare alliances. She’d thought she’d known, but no.

  Blind, ignorant, worthless…worthless…worthless…

  Limited time, work hours, and circumstance had compelled her to rely on a weak alliance, to use the observations of another in the same way she’d used him to drill this hole right here after his overconfident, ignorant analysis had lost her the advantage, forcing her to scout for herself.

  The victorious warrior took a stand on ground where she couldn’t lose, but she, based on his faulty assessment, had chosen the wrong ground when sending hirelings to corner the newcomer in the garage. Even accounting for exaggeration and shame avoidance, even if half the report was true, the newcomer could have easily killed all three, he simply hadn’t.

  The victorious warrior won first through strategy and then went to war.

  Likely weak and easily intimidated…

  She’d relied on defective thinking and hadn’t properly qualified the men to do the intimidating; she’d sent men to intimidate the weak.

  Worse, through faulty strategy she’d shown her hand.

  Sato took a breath, then smoothed down her skirt. Anger opened the mind to weakness. Emotional excitement spurred carelessness in battle. She waited for the heat to pass.

  The newcomer had good instincts.

  That was a problem.

  That was absolutely the problem.

  The cowboy had carried a different kind of instinct, manly and survival-based, dripping of pheromones, testosterone, and war. Backstabbing and blindsiding had taken him down because a direct attack w
ould never have worked. This younger one would require a different strategy still.

  Sato grabbed a stack of napkins—the pretense that had brought her into the storage area—and mindful of the voices and conversations that came and went on the other side of the lunchroom’s paper-thin divide, she strode back in and with a huff refilled the napkin dispenser.

  Such trivialities were beneath her job.

  When the air had cleared of bad energy, she stepped beyond the two young men, with their early-morning bento and their manga, for the vending machines, for a bottle of jasmine tea that she drained in long swallows.

  The sun couldn’t be set back on its course or the days undone, but she could shift, formless like water, and launch again when least expected.

  She could use the enemy to defeat the enemy.

  Sato tossed the garbage, and with the satchel slung across her shoulder, left for the entry. She’d taken a risk, breaking from her pattern to observe the newcomer, but relying on the faulty word of an ally required gaining her own knowledge.

  She had what she needed now.

  The terrain had been set and the match begun.

  To win by avoiding conflict would be the highest form of victory.

  She could fight—she’d never be a victim like that poor woman in the stairwell, Muay Thai in Bangkok’s alleys had seen to that—but she was no fighting fuck toy. Asian girls with their big doe eyes and tiny bones, kicking butt through martial arts and throwing weight that would make a sumo proud, were such a sexist cliché. When force became necessary to win the battle, it meant she’d already lost the war.

  She preferred stealth, preferred to let others do the dirty work when muscle was needed, and only got her own hands muddy if she must. Brains were by far the better weapon. The human race proved this in seven billion ways: weak and breakable life forms at the top of the food chain, overrunning the planet like yeast on sugar, all due to rich neural networks and dense gray matter.

  And she was a most prime yeast specimen.

  Sato stood in line for screening outside the elevator.

  The line moved forward, and she with it, and discomfort crawled up her skin, as if someone watched her now just as she’d been watching.

  Sato handed the guard her badge, refusing to give in to the human urge to turn around and look.

  Her instincts, too, were good.

  Hands behind her head, Munroe tilted back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. She’d gotten through the night on four hours of sleep and had returned to the facility before six. Dillman had arrived an hour later. He’d made his presence known at eight by knocking on her office door and tossing a stack of pages on the desk.

  “The names you wanted,” he said. “The connections between who’s done after work with whom over the past two months.”

  “How complete is it?”

  He shrugged. “We’re not the FBI. This was pulled together overnight by the team on duty using algorithms that scanned e-mails for keywords.”

  Munroe’s mouth said “Thank you,” but inwardly she sighed. The list was worthless. Not just because of holes in the methodology, but because without any idea of who’d compiled the data, the data became valueless.

  Dillman left and she thumbed through pages of names, grouped by dates and time stamps, searching for Bradford, but didn’t find him. That didn’t mean that the men who’d invited him to the hostess club weren’t listed there, only that she had no way to connect them to him.

  She scanned the list again and recognized two names from her interaction in the hallways and none from the folders on Bradford’s external drive. Didn’t even know if the men who’d set Bradford up by inviting him to the hostess club had made it onto his drive—didn’t even know if they knew they’d set Bradford up.

  Munroe placed the pages back on the desk. These were threads to compare, names to balance against paths to nowhere. She left for the entry.

  The employees knew her now and they indulged her as often as they shied away, the women especially, with their hands up over their mouths as they giggled in embarrassment and crowded into one another like starstruck teenagers. The men were more reserved, especially the older ones, who tended to ignore her or turn their backs on her.

  Not rude. Just cultural. Like giggling.

  Okada found her forty minutes later. He shook her hand and then moved on, and in her hand he’d left a folded slip of paper. Munroe waited long enough to avoid suspicion, then headed for the toilets and once inside a stall read the note and then flushed it.

  Okada had made good on their conversation those two nights back, had delivered what he’d said he couldn’t. Law enforcement had, as she’d surmised, been pointed in Bradford’s direction after the body had been discovered.

  Makoto Dillman had been the one to do it.

  —

  In the opening of a hall that branched off from the wide entry, with another afternoon fading, two names Munroe hadn’t found on Dillman’s list of after-work connections found her.

  They were exactly as Alina had described Bradford’s hostess club companions: just like any other man. Average height, average build, same navy-blue shapeless business suits worn with polished black shoes. Give them each a folded-up newspaper and a briefcase and push them onto the subway at rush hour and they would effectively become invisible.

  In perfect English that lifted on a British accent, one of the men said, “Hey! You’re Michael, right?”

  He stuck out a hand, a tad too jovial, a little too friendly, even for a man who might have lived and worked abroad for years. Munroe connected her palm with his just long enough to be polite, withdrew her hand, and said, “That would be me.”

  “Nobu Hayashi,” he said. “The way you hang out here, by now the entire building knows who you are.” He leaned in closer, as if letting her in on a secret. “Miles was a good friend.” He glanced around. “We hung out a lot. Crazy what happened—no one expected that. Do you know anything about why? Have you talked to him? He’s still in Japan, right?”

  Expression tight, deliberately uncomfortable, Munroe said, “I’m just his replacement. Nobody tells me anything.”

  Hayashi got the hint and dropped the subject. “Couple of the guys are heading into Osaka tonight. Doing clubs Japanese style. Have you done that yet?”

  “Don’t think so,” she said.

  “Missing out,” he said. “Come with us.”

  Last time Bradford had gone out with good ol’ buddy Nobu, it hadn’t worked out so well for him. “Maybe I should,” she said. “What time?”

  “We leave here at eight. We can carpool and get you home after.”

  So that was how the game was played. So simple. So easy.

  Bradford had gone not once but three times. He would have gone for the same reason she would have gone if she, in speaking Japanese, hadn’t had a better way to study her suspects, and if she wasn’t concerned about the possibility of showing her face at the same place from which she’d stolen Alina; he would have gone as a way to discover where their connections led. English was the bait: a chance to have a conversation about the facility while away from the facility, a way to gain insight under the lubricant of alcohol. They would have given him something—enough—to keep him going back. Bradford hadn’t run into trouble through lack of smarts; he simply hadn’t had the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight.

  “I wish I could,” Munroe said. “Tonight’s difficult, another time for sure. You have a card? I can check my schedule, let you know.”

  “Of course,” Hayashi said. He reached for his wallet.

  Munroe took the card and watched Hayashi and his silent partner go, and when they’d reached the entry stiles, she called after them and said, “Hey, thanks for the heads-up.”

  Munroe found Dillman in his office, hunched over the desk with papers spread out from corner to corner, pen in one hand and a telephone beside the other. He glanced up when she walked in, then went back to the pages.

  She stood beside him.
/>
  He stopped writing and stared up at her.

  She handed him Nobu Hayashi’s card. “Do you know this guy?”

  Dillman took the card and read it, flipped it over to check the reverse side, and then handed it back. “Only that he works in the accounting department. Why?”

  “I need everything we have on him,” she said. “Not his personnel file, though that wouldn’t hurt. I want everything we have on his after-work, but most specifically, his habits and associations within the facility.”

  Dillman huffed in exaggerated exasperation and tapped his pen. Munroe leaned down and scanned his progress. Nearly one full day and he’d made it a quarter way through file number one. “Nice work,” she said.

  “Lots of interruptions,” he said, and glared.

  “Priorities,” she said. “I want it by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Dillman turned back to the paperwork. “You’re the boss.” The sarcasm was thick and unmistakable.

  Munroe crossed her arms and stood there, looking down at him. Dillman stacked pages and pretended not to notice until finally, hands on the desk in a show of frustration, he pushed back and said, “What?”

  “Who pulled the list of after-work connections?” she said.

  “I don’t know, the guys in my department. That was something anyone could do, I didn’t stay to micromanage.”

  Munroe sat on the desk edge and remained silent.

  Dillman scooted his chair farther away so he didn’t have to tilt up to look at her.

  “I know who you are in this company,” she said. “Employees take orders from you, not the other way around. Having to run my errands is beneath you, I get that. But as long as you’re assigned to work for me, if I give you something to do, I expect you to be the one to do it. We’re searching an ocean to find one fish. The only thing we know is that you’re not that fish and I’m not that fish. Anyone else could be.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said, drier but just as sarcastic.

  She let him have his moment.