The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (15 page)

The shopping arcade was a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel, essentially a series of covered pedestrian streets. A department store anchored an intersection and on the floor with beauty supplies Munroe tracked down a set of grooming clippers. Two floors down, where an assortment of stationery supplies filled half the floor with enough miniature office everything to put a hardcore crafter into a cutesy-color coma, she bought pens and paper.

In the hotel room she dumped her trove on the bed and carried the clippers into the bathroom cubicle. Her hair, already overgrown by the time she’d left Djibouti, had lengthened even more over the last few months. Not long enough to be explicitly feminine, but long enough to cause doubt, and doubt was never a good thing in subterfuge.

Munroe leaned over the sink and turned on the shears.

With well-practiced fingers she ran the blade guard up the back of her head and then the sides, switching out combs as needed, feeling for places she’d missed. Strands of dark brown fell into the basin, and then smaller slivers, and then those smaller still.

She shut off the clippers and stood staring at the image made blemished and blotchy under the fluorescent lights. She was no longer the woman who’d arrived in Japan to visit her lover, but the man who would set him free.

Munroe shoved the television to one side of the long, narrow desk and taped several of the large sheets of paper along the wall in a de facto command center. Working off the notes she’d scribbled while still at the apartment, recounting the details claimed from perusing Bradford’s external drive, she compiled the information into a visual representation of the many threads entangled inside her head.

She had no interest in the thief for the sake of uncovering theft; that had been Bradford’s job. But espionage and machinations walked hand in hand, and since theft was why Bradford had been hired, theft would lead her to whoever had set him up.

She drew the facility building according to satellite images and sketched the department divisions according to what she remembered from her visits. Onto index cards Munroe wrote the names from Bradford’s drive, taping them to the facility map based on where they ranked in the company’s hierarchy. This outline was the beginning, the path to the end, and at the moment it was nothing but a big black hole where information should be.

The company employed more than eight hundred people, which provided plenty of wiggle room for murderers and spies. Bradford had, in so many words, told her that the three folders on his drive were the only avenues he’d seen for stolen data to move out of the facility: through upper management, the team down in the lab, or security personnel.

Munroe tossed a pillow from the headboard to the middle of the bed, leaned back, and studied her handiwork, and when thinking reached the point of diminishing returns, she dug through the backpack with Bradford’s things and pulled out a shirt and a pair of pants. She dressed in his clothes, though she didn’t fill them out the way that he had, and emptied the spare wallet he’d left behind, replacing the contents with her own.

She shoved the wad of leather into her pocket, picked up the helmet.

This was her element: stealing secrets.

Now it was time to steal another.

Munroe swiped the badge over the reader, the arm swung open, and she strode through without a backward glance, heading for Bradford’s office.

Above her, cameras tracked her movements. In the security operations center, databases processed the readings off the badge’s RFID chip, and she took her time, providing ample notice that she was in the facility, allowing the security team to red-flag the clearance that had gotten her inside and track her down.

Munroe stopped outside of Bradford’s office.

She knocked and, receiving no reply, opened the door to a room just as empty as it had been when Okada had shown it to her. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed and waiting, and when after several moments there was still no response from the security team, and six employees had passed with the same eye-avoiding courtesy nod-bow that they would have given to anyone else, she continued up the stairs and into the left-branching hall.

Three doors down and then to the right, she found the personnel department, a wide room filled with desks crammed front to back and side to side, much like the desks in the police precinct station had been.

Folders and binders were stacked here and there and the whispered whir of quiet activity and conversation filled the air against finger strokes on keyboards and the hum of photocopy machines.

A woman carrying a tablet stopped and asked Munroe if she needed help. Munroe unfolded the forms Bradford had left tacked to the contract and in English said, “Who do I see about this?”

The woman glanced over the first page, reading it out loud, talking to herself as much as to Munroe, and then motioned down beyond a row of desks, to another door.

In the end, it took less than twenty minutes to get the paperwork sorted out. Bradford had been thorough on the back end and clever in his arrangements, giving basis to his claim that he’d intended to bring her in long before this nightmare had started. Her role as a consultant meant payments went directly to his company, not to her, skirting the issue of her having been hired and putting the need for a work visa into a gray area. For now, having presented herself with the proper documents, Munroe was officially on the company roster, though not as an employee.

She commandeered Bradford’s office through another round of red tape and bureaucracy, culminating in the guarantee that a desk and chair would be waiting for her when she next returned, each step made as visibly as possible, and by the time she’d finished, there was no possibility that either branch of security was unaware of her presence.

Finished, she left the facility for the landing across the street from which she’d watched the doors waiting for Okada to arrive, killing time, building familiarity with faces and cars and train and bus schedules while the employees began the slow trickle home: far better than sitting in a hotel room, staring at the wall, attempting to conjure something out of nothing.

Evening came. Lights switched on. When only the late stragglers remained, Munroe left her perch and returned to the bike.

At nine in the evening Kitashinchi had barely begun to wake. Munroe found an empty doorstep within sight of the hostess club and, with her face and her foreignness somewhat disguised within shadows, she waited in the night and the neon and the numbing boredom of surveillance as the streets filled and the clock pushed on toward midnight and at last her mark arrived.

He was a man with expensive shoes, a portly belly, and a blush-red nose that spoke of having already experienced many hours and many drinks before arriving for the evening’s final hit. His visit to the club should have been a group affair, a way to make deals and bring finer points to agreement, ensuring that when they were raised in the boardroom no one risked the loss of face, but he arrived alone, just as he had the night before, chauffeured in a private car rather than by taxi.

Somewhere inside that club a woman counted off bonuses each time he returned for her, because surely that’s why he returned, and it was why Munroe had chosen him.

The car pulled to a stop, blocking the narrow street. The driver stepped out and Munroe rose from her perch. She timed her steps to the driver’s as he opened the rear door, timed her steps to the portly man’s as he heaved himself up from the backseat and the driver returned to the wheel, and collided with her target as his hand reached for the hostess club’s door, knocking him off balance.

She caught him when he tripped, straining as his weight bore down on her and the alcohol off his breath clogged her airway. She mimicked the deference that she’d seen from so many men in the everyday hierarchy that encompassed life in Japan, and then like in a scene from a badly acted movie, she brushed off his clothes with humbled apologies while he huffed and muttered in extreme offense until he realized she was a foreigner.

His tone changed to forgiveness midsentence.

He smiled with a mouth of yellowing teeth, launching into a monologue in drunken English that came close to a donkey’s bray.

Munroe humored him and begged to buy him a drink, knowing that at best he might infer that tonight was a difficult night for such things. She was a foreigner and foreigners were notoriously oblivious to the subtle ways of saying no, and that would allow her to push harder, but there was no need.

He was drunk and pleased to meet her.

The man with the broken capillaries and crooked teeth pounded her on her back and wrapped a meaty arm around her shoulders, and slurring Japanese just slightly more intelligible than his English, he walked her through the door.

The mama-san lit up when they stepped through, yen signs flashing in her eyes with every bat of her thick fake lashes. She was a beautiful woman, soft and feminine with genuine warmth that said she’d known the mark a long time.

She led them to a table in the far back of a room that, like the hostess club Munroe had visited the night before, was lit with mood and ambience. Here, waist-high walls at intersecting angles were topped with tea lights, adding a touch of the dramatic and providing a greater sense of privacy, and off to the side was a small dance floor, where two couples swayed to piped-in music.

The portly man sat and Munroe took her place opposite him, eyeing the hostesses, a mixture of foreign and local, all of them stunning. The mama-san lingered beside the mark, head dipping in rhythm to words Munroe couldn’t hear, body and face saying
Yes
and
I agree
and
Of course.

One of the foreign women, wearing a gold-sequined dress that hardly reached her thighs, blond and petite and with baby blue eyes recognizably dulled by drugs or alcohol, sauntered over and slid onto the sofa bench beside the portly man, snuggling up as if she’d been waiting for a longtime lover.

The mark reacted to his plaything like a cat to sun or a puppy to fingers behind the ear, and paused just long enough to reach for his wallet. He retrieved a business card, thick and heavy, and presented it to Munroe with a flourish of ceremony. Business cards, treated as reverently by the receiver as one would treat the giver, left Munroe fishing for her pocket.

She presented one of Bradford’s cards while an open bottle of Glenfiddich, ice, and glasses arrived from the bar, carried on a silver tray by a young woman in very high heels and a barely there dress.

The blonde reached for the bottle of whisky and the mama-san stood. Full of polite apology, she encouraged Munroe to take a space of her own at a table made available across the room.

“Go, go,” the portly man said in English, waving Munroe on magnanimously. Munroe bowed her thanks and followed the mama-san and, in what had to be a prearranged collusion, a tall pale brunette reached the table at nearly the same time.

Munroe slid into the quasi-booth formed by the bank of sofas and low table and smiled at a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty.

She sat beside Munroe and, in Japanese that was fluid in the way practiced lines were fluid, said, “I am Gabi, please allow me to request for you a drink.”

“I drink what you drink,” Munroe said, and then she repeated the sentence in Russian. The language was a guess, the closest she could offer the foreign accent from within her repertoire, and she’d not been far off. Gabi’s eyes widened and her mouth opened just slightly, and she stumbled through placing an order with the bar girl who’d already arrived, perfectly timed, at their table.

When the liquor came and the drinking began, Munroe learned that her hostess was Lithuanian. Her Russian wasn’t fluent, but the conversation flowed far better than it would have in Japanese or English, and when the ice had been broken and Gabi had relaxed, Munroe slid a picture of Bradford onto the table. “He’s my friend,” she said. “I’m trying to find him, I’ve heard he’s been here.”

Gabi leaned forward, picked up the picture, then moved it closer to a nearby candle and examined it more closely. She handed it back with a nod that might as well have said
You’d better put that away.

Munroe tucked the photo into her wallet.

Gabi traced a finger across Munroe’s hand and managed to both flirt and pout in the same breath. “He has been here, but not with me,” she said, and she leaned back slow and sultry, each muscle tensed with the perfection of a stage performer fully aware of how every movement was watched by someone, somewhere. Gabi looked down the room toward the front, closer to the door, and kept on looking until Munroe followed her gaze.

“You see the red dress?” Gabi said.

Red dress was an understatement.

Munroe turned back to the drinks and said, “I see the dress,” although what she’d seen were long legs that kept on going forever, stopped by clingy red material topped out with a chest that had to have been enhanced. And long blond hair that flowed in coifed waves over bare shoulders, which were attached to elegant arms and hands pouring drinks at a table with three Japanese men.

“That is Alina,” Gabi said. “She was at the table with your friend.”

An elegant Filipina approached and Gabi said, “You know how it works?”

Munroe shook her head. “Tell me.”

“You want me to stay? You want a new hostess?”

“Stay,” Munroe said, “and when the red dress gets free, I want her here.”

Gabi smiled, waved the other girl away. “Give me some minutes,” she said, “I will make sure you get what you want.”

They chatted more, small talk to fill the time, and then Gabi slid out to the floor, only slightly stable on platform shoes, and she wandered out of sight, either to the mama-san or the master, it was hard to know.

Munroe was an hour in and a hundred and fifty dollars lighter when the red dress showed up. Munroe patted the seat and invited her to sit, just a bit too happy, as if she was a little too affected by the booze.

Alina smiled and offered more of the same coy, playful fawning that permeated the air, but no amount of sensuality could hide the bored indifference that punctuated every move.

She was older than Gabi, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six.

“Twenty-seven,” Alina said, and showed no surprise at Munroe having engaged her in her own language.

Presumably, Gabi had spread the word.

Alina answered the next question before Munroe could ask, as if this was a litany she endured with all new customers and pulling off the exchange without descending into condescension or implied snark would take effort. “I’ve been in Japan for four years,” she said. She took the tiniest sip of the drink Munroe had bought her and then added, “I can speak enough Japanese to get by.”

“I’m looking for a friend,” Munroe said. “I was told you’ve seen him. I’m hoping you would tell me what you know of him.”

“I’ve seen him,” Alina said.

“You don’t want to look at the picture?”

“There’s no need. Any one of us would recognize him if he came back.”

“He came here often?”

“Three times, I think.” Alina shrugged. “Do you smoke?”

Munroe shook her head. Three nights accounted for each of Bradford’s unexplained absences according to the notes on his calendar.

Alina sighed, dropping the pretense that Munroe had come for any other reason than information. Time was time, and she got paid either way. “Another hour and I go home,” she said, and lit the cigarette, leaning back into the sofa and crossing her long legs. She inhaled and then let out the smoke toward the ceiling.

Munroe said, “Tell me about my friend.”

Chin raised, cigarette balanced between two fingers, Alina traced her eyes over Munroe’s face. Munroe knew the look; she’d seen it on strippers and fortune-tellers and politicians—those who’d so finely perfected the ratio between bullshit and charm that people believed what they heard and willingly opened their wallets for more.

“I tell you about him,” she said, “and in exchange you tell me about you: one for one.”

Munroe picked up her drink and ran the glass between her palms.

In a few words the woman had said she believed Munroe had something she wanted and she’d hold the information about Bradford hostage to get it.