The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (10 page)

Far down the street from the facility, in a slice of paid parking beside a
konbini,
where customers came and went and life rushed on with the steady pulse of city movement, Munroe pulled the helmet on, straddled the bike, and then just sat.

The contents of the drawer rested against her chest, zipped up in her jacket, bulky and uncomfortable, urging her toward action, toward answers, while inside, deep inside, where air should have been, and knowledge and assurance, was darkness so real it coated her lungs and bled out into her veins, tangible and physical.

She needed speed, movement, to cleanse her head of the fog. Needed the soothing of violence and pain to shove feeling into the background.

She closed her eyes.

Motion and aggression would only provide the illusion of doing something, anything, under the guise of controlling a situation that was chaos.

There was nothing here to control.

Air seeped into her lungs and she held the breath, allowing darkness to rise.

Despair.

This was the same pit that had swallowed her when those she loved had been tortured to control her, when she’d been forced to stand aside as they suffered, unable to save them. Despair. Because the man who had saved her life, who’d had her back, had turned around and stabbed her in it.

One moment to the next, reality, gone.

Munroe brought the bike to life. The machine called her to fly into the arms of fate and once more roll the dice of mortality. She crawled onto the street, staying beneath the speed limit, and followed the most direct route back to the apartment.

There were still no police, no investigators.

Munroe opened the door to an empty home that had once felt vibrant and alive in its emptiness and now screamed of abandonment. She carried Okada’s newest thumb drive and the items from the broken drawer into the living room, dumped them on the coffee table, and glared down at them in a bad dream from which she couldn’t wake.

She inserted the drive into the laptop.

There were five files—phone conversations, as Okada had said—text files consisting entirely of time stamps and English transcripts.

Without hearing the actual dialogue she couldn’t know if one of the speakers was indeed Bradford, but even accounting for typos and misspellings it was clear that both participants were fluent in English military jargon. But there’d been no exchange of information or promise of such, only banter that referenced prior conversations and events in the veiled language of two people who knew they being were listened to.

Bradford had plenty of friends with military connections; that he was spying for one of them was an idea she would have aggressively rejected two hours ago. His lies and obfuscations forced her to reframe what she’d thought she’d known and now left everything open for debate.

Munroe shut the laptop. Didn’t bother with the drive she’d taken from the drawer. None of it really mattered anymore.

She shoved the computer into a backpack and followed it with both of Okada’s thumb drives and everything Bradford had left for her at the office. She went into the bedroom. Pulled a couple of outfits off hangers, grabbed a few days’ worth of essentials, and added them to the backpack. She took what she needed from the sink room and turned her back on the rest. Things only slowed her down, became chains to the past or chains to a place, and she wanted none of that.

She went back through the bedroom and home office for Bradford’s things; took his watch, and the money stashed beneath the bed. She grabbed his favorite shirts and went through his valuables and papers, dumping anything of importance into a second bag. Didn’t matter that he’d speared her in the gut; she wasn’t going to leave anything behind that could be used against him.

She paused and stared at the drawer that held her knives.

She picked up the first and flipped the blade open. The handle was warm in her hand, an extension of her body, alive with its own will, as all knives were when they nestled against her skin. Hunting knife, fishing knife, combat blade, switchblade, fixed blade, and balisong, they were all the same: different weights, different needs, different force and movement, but always, the knife was alive.

Munroe flicked the blade closed and dropped both of them into Bradford’s bag. She couldn’t take them with her, anyway. In the
genkan
she put her boots back on, then stood and smelled the air and breathed in the last of this place that had been home. The memories burned at her, the happiness, the laughter—a fraud, a fake, all of it, none of it real because the man she’d shared it with wasn’t real.

In the airport arrivals parking garage, between a concrete pillar and a stairwell, Munroe strapped the helmet and Bradford’s backpack to the Ninja’s seat and abandoned them there. Eventually the bike would be towed—probably with the backpack and helmet still strapped to it, such was the level of honesty in everyday life here—and she would count the loss of the machine and the money she’d put into it as the price of a hard lesson learned.

She carried her own bag into the departures terminal, where wide de facto corridors were governed by ticket and check-in counters, and lines of passengers and luggage carts snaked between corded, winding pathways. A dozen airline logos lined up on either side like running lights on a bowling lane, and Munroe scanned signage, searching for a carrier that would get her direct to—

She paused and turned a full circle.

Dallas wasn’t an option, not like this, with the wounds so fresh and raw; neither was a return to Africa, the continent of her birth, where the comfortable familiarity of living and working in despot-run dens of corruption would only loop her into a repeat of past mistakes.

Beneath the blue and red of Malaysia Airlines, the line had already begun to lengthen, which meant a pending departure. Munroe stepped in behind a luggage cart and followed the wheels, moving brain-numb and rote from ticket counter, to ticket in hand, through security, to the gate for a flight to Kuala Lumpur.

In the departure lounge she sat on the floor by the window, the afternoon sun casting shadows on her arms. Ear buds piped music in from her phone, drowning out the world enough that if she closed her eyes, she wasn’t there at all, but still Bradford was inside her head, an innocent man with his calendar pages and notes and, most of all, the lies.

She shut off the madness, disgusted by her own hypocrisy.

His few lies, the little he may have used her, didn’t even cover the entry fee into the games of deception and betrayal that she’d played. She’d told thousands and been told thousands—even by those she loved and trusted. Had filled years with manipulating others to achieve her goals, and sometimes been knowingly manipulated in turn so that others could achieve theirs. She’d allowed that. Had gone into the jaws of death as a tool for those she loved, knowing that they used her—and never cared.

And that was the point then, wasn’t it? That she cared.

Bradford, in lying to her, in taking choice away from her, had done the one thing that no one else had yet managed.

Across from her a young couple, deep in conversation, leaned into each other over the armrest. Happiness was etched across their faces and oozed out of their pores so thick it created an aura.

Munroe blocked them out.

She’d been there; she’d had that. One minute to the next, it had been ripped away. She would have paid any price to keep it.

Could still pay that price.

In self-righteous fury she readied to throw everything away, to throw him away, to make the pain of love’s betrayal stop.

Munroe tapped the boarding pass against her fingertips and weighed the ticket against never knowing what had happened in that facility, weighed killing her soul against abandoning the person she claimed to love most in the world, weighed a chance of having what might have been against allowing him to rot.

She stood. Picked the backpack off the floor, shut off the music, and began the long stroll out of the airport. Victimhood was unbecoming. Bradford’s actions didn’t control hers. She wasn’t finished here until she chose to be finished.

The entrance to the manga café wound up narrow stairs to the second floor of a four-story building, to a single room that took up the entire floor, where the lighting was dim, the ambience subdued, and two clerks in their late teens or early twenties manned the front counter. Beyond the entry, half the room was row upon row of head-height cubicles, the other half shelving that held magazines, books, and DVDs—enough manga and anime to satisfy every cartoon fetish known to man. At the back were smaller rooms with proper walls and doors, snacks and drinks, and showers and laundry facilities.

Munroe paid in advance for a twenty-four-hour stay and one of the clerks showed her to a numbered booth. She left her shoes in the hall, slid the door open to a tatami floor, and stepped inside a cubicle just large enough that she could lie down flat. It had been over thirty-six hours since she’d slept.

Manga cafés, not really cafés, were twenty-four/seven businesses, renting out space in expensive quarter-hour increments, providing solitude away from heat and cold and rain; places where those who’d missed the last train after a night out drinking could catch a few hours’ sleep and clean up before the next daily grind, where students who lived at home with three generations of family could luxuriate in an escape from human contact for an hour or two, and where the creepy manga fetishist could get his freak on in private.

Munroe slid the door closed, sat on the futon, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. Here, without the need to supply an ID, where there were no cameras, no security to speak of, and where she had unlimited access to the Internet without attaching her name to searches and queries, she could rest and figure out the next step. Here, for a time, a tall white foreigner could disappear.

She woke with a start, eyes burning, dazed for a heartbeat before she caught her bearings. She blinked back against the dryness, the reawakened nightmare, and checked the time on her phone: four hours of sleep.

Munroe pulled herself off the floor and angled for the low table, where a computer monitor, TV, DVD player, and game consoles all competed for precious tabletop real estate. She tapped the monitor to life and stumbled through nearly indecipherable clicks and links and succeeded in changing the settings to English. She needed to know, to understand.

She’d caught a glimpse two nights back, when she’d learned that Bradford had been arrested and had killed the battery on her phone waiting for Okada, of what it might mean if a murder charge was the enemy; knew that the investigators could detain Bradford for twenty-three days for each charge—longer if the prosecutor convinced the judge that there was good reason; knew that until formal charges came, Bradford had no right to legal counsel and even his own lawyer, once he had one, wouldn’t be allowed access unless the investigators allowed it, and all the while he would be isolated and interrogated, and anything he said under those circumstances would be summarized and opined upon by the investigator whose words, however inaccurate or conflated due to language misunderstandings, would be treated by the court as if Bradford had said them himself.

The culture’s shame-sensitive tendency to admit to wrongdoing made confessions an integral part of the process, but there were no laws to protect against coercion, nothing to regulate how long the interrogations could last or the methods used to elicit the confession. Torture and cruel treatment were common enough that human rights organizations decried the violations.

Munroe searched through papers written by foreign sociology professors, and found blogs and forums and firsthand accounts of foreigners who’d been through the Japanese legal system.

If Bradford was formally charged, and if he went to trial, the odds of winning were slight. Japanese prosecutors averaged a ninety-nine percent conviction rate. If it was presented as a capital case, he would face life in prison with relatively little chance of parole. A lesser murder charge might see him out in fifteen years, but Japanese prisons were not like American prisons where a man like Bradford, the Great White among a school of smaller sharks, could easily fend for himself. Incarceration in Japan, especially if attached to hard labor, was but a few rungs up from the prisoner-of-war camps of World War II.

Footsteps and whispers, rustled curtains and sliding doors, marked the passing of time as the day crowd shifted into night, and the voices beyond the thin divider grew drunker. Head pounding, Munroe slid back, away from the table, leaned into the futon, and allowed the thoughts to churn.

If she planned to save Bradford, hope lay with the prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office ran on a tight budget and tended to only bring the most obviously guilty to trial. That’s what they had now: obvious guilt. But throw the evidence into question, muddy the waters of inevitability, or find new evidence to make a conviction less certain, and perhaps Bradford could escape indictment. If she was to do this, she had twenty-three days to accomplish the impossible task of proving a negative. Twenty-three days to end this nightmare before it pushed forward to a trial and the best of Bradford’s years were lost to the echoing halls of the forgotten.

Two days had already come and gone.

Bradford had been cut off from the world, and she needed to see him.

Family members could make visiting arrangements, and possibly a representative from the U.S. embassy. No friends, no acquaintances, certainly no
girlfriend
, but there were things to be said before she could shed the role of pissed-off lover and become his pissed-off avenger.