The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (19 page)

Of the three men Munroe had come to observe, up close and in person, Tatsuo Nakamura, member of the ALTEQ-Bio board and one of the company’s seven directors, was the man she most wanted to see, and he was out of the office.

She knew his face from the company website, his résumé as translated into horrendous English by Internet translating software, and his connection to Bradford from the name on the contract that had brought Bradford to Japan.

Without Nakamura, Bradford would never have come.

Munroe made an appointment with his office staff.

Four days forward was his earliest opening.

Munroe left for the ground floor, for Okada’s department, and her key card granted her access to the room full of monitors just as Bradford’s had.

Okada was missing, which conveniently spared her the necessity of making awkward conversation and spared him the discomfort of playing dumb when he inevitably recognized her. She only stayed long enough to catch glimpses of the toys the men played with, count heads, watch faces, and gauge body language, and then moved on to the next department, where Bradford had had no allies.

The second security door, too, opened to her clearance badge.

Four faces tipped up when she stepped through. Makoto Dillman, at the desk farthest from the door, stood and came toward her, as he had with Bradford when Bradford had brought her in all those weeks ago.

He stopped just outside her personal space and before he could speak Munroe extended a hand. “Michael Munroe,” she said, “subcontractor on the Capstone contract, here to pick up where my boss, Miles Bradford, left off. Just swinging by to say hello, let you know that I’m around.”

Dillman gripped hard. “Makoto Dillman,” he said. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

Munroe tugged her hand free. “Not that I know of,” she said, and fought the urge to wipe the sweat off on her pants. “Vanessa was with the boss a few weeks back, you might have met her, we’re related, look alike.” Then to change the subject: “So, look, I just had a chat with Kobayashi-san upstairs. He said he’d work out a liaison, but if you’re short-staffed, take your time with that. I’m not in any rush—most of what I do will be based on people, not files, and I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the spoken language.”

“That so?” Dillman said, and he crossed his arms. “You live in Japan a while?”

“I’ve studied.”

He stayed just at the edge of her personal space, sizing her up with unveiled hostility. He said, “My understanding was that the train wreck of last week shifted the work back over to this department.”

“Yeah?” Munroe said, and shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a trained monkey. Here to do a job, Mac. I’ve got no plans to piss on your fence.”

Dillman’s expression clouded, as she knew it would, but unlike Bradford who’d poked the bear, her inflaming served a purpose.

“Makoto or Dillman,” Dillman said, “never Mac.”

“My bad,” she said, and threw as much sincerity into her tone and demeanor as she could muster. “The boss referred to you as Mac, so I thought…Anyway,” she said, and stuck her hand out again, as if she’d be on her way now that she’d inadvertently insulted him.

“No big deal,” Dillman said, and his posture relaxed and he took a step out of her personal space. He motioned to the other men in the room. “Have you met the team?”

“Still new on the job.”

Dillman switched effortlessly from English to Japanese, and with the change of language came a change in character: harsher, deeper, more authoritarian. He introduced the other three in order of department hierarchy: Shigeru Hara, Ken Suzuki, and Yuki Abe, and Munroe sized each man up far more subtly than Dillman had done with her.

She’d come to sign a temporary truce with Bradford’s antagonist, and having gotten more than she’d asked for, Munroe turned to leave.

The hair on the back of her neck rose in animal awareness, the instinct of the prey that a predator was near. “Hey, Dillman,” she said, and spun midstride. “If you need to find me—”

He glanced up, distracted, already focused on something else. “Bradford’s old office,” he said.

“You know it,” she said.

The three other faces watched her go.

Munroe returned to the landing with nineteen minutes to spare. Alina smiled, relief and anxiety washed into one brief flash. Munroe sat beside her and glanced at the notebook, which lay open on her lap.

“Nothing?”

Alina shook her head. “It’s been very quiet.”

Finding the men who’d been with Bradford the night the belt was taken would have been too easy, too lucky, like this. Munroe stood and said, “Let’s go.”

They returned to the hotel the hard way, the long way, along random streets and out-of-the-way misdirection, on the small chance Munroe had been followed from the facility to the stairwell to the bike, always mindful of pedestrians, police, and the many instant roadblocks that arose in the form of delivery bikes and delivery trucks.

A summer rainstorm became an extra delay and an additional precaution, which allowed them a chance to grab something to eat. The sky had started its descent into gray by the time Munroe took the bike into the hotel parking garage.

She was off the bike, helmet beneath her arm, when that same animal instinct of hours earlier, of being watched—hunted—raised the warning along the back of her neck. On the other side of the Ninja, Alina tugged at the chin strap and pulled off her helmet. Munroe put a hand to her arm to get her attention, then her finger to her lips.

With a cut of her eyes and the tip of her head, Munroe motioned Alina over behind a concrete pillar. Alina slipped out of sight and, without turning, Munroe shut her eyes and breathed in the ambience of the garage, feeling for sensory input to tell her what went on behind her back.

The fight had come to seek her out.

They would have been watching when the bike had pulled in, would have likely seen Alina slip away. They’d searched and found, and now they had come to collect and kill, just as Alina had said.

Munroe knelt on one knee beside the bike, buffing scratches and smudges with a sleeve while footsteps reached out from both ends of the garage: a timed pattern that said the bodies coordinated their move in her direction. Seven days of frustration, of stolen life and stolen love, of the need to protect and avenge, stretched out from dark recesses like filthy arms from dungeon bars, crying for release.

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.