The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (25 page)

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.

“I trust you, Dillman,” she said. “I don’t trust your friends in the security departments any more than you trusted Miles Bradford. Even if they’re not directly responsible, that doesn’t mean they aren’t involved in some way.” She held the card up, put it between their faces for a second, and then slapped it onto the desk. “This stays between you and me.”

Dillman, arms crossed, his face a blank facade, kept silent.

“Word of this gets around, you’re the only person it comes back to,” Munroe said. She walked to the door and added, “Don’t be the fish, Dillman, don’t even look like the fish.”

“What about you, Michael?” he said. There were dark undertones in the question, hints of accusations, and a not-so-subtle challenge in the way he stretched out her name as if it wasn’t really her name. “Are you the fish?”

Hand still on the door, Munroe turned slightly.

Dillman, one arm draped over the back of his chair, posture casual and face full of judgment, slipped a folder out of his stack and held it toward her.

“Since we’re discussing files and fishes.”

She didn’t move, so he waved the folder in her direction as if to say
Go on, have at it.
Munroe took the bait and walked back for the folder. She held it at arm’s length, as though she needed reading glasses to see, and read her name off the label out loud for effect. She opened the cover, scanned a few loose sheets, and nodded theatrically.

Dillman had done his due diligence and come up with about half of what would have been publicly available if he’d dug really, really deep.

“This looks about right,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s empty,” he said.

“Almost empty.”

“You don’t exist,” he said. Paused and then added, “Mi-chael.”

“Obviously,” Munroe said, dropping the folder back on the desk and crossing her arms, “I exist.”

Dillman studied her and she studied him, both remaining silent, neither of them conceding territory or breaking. He said, “There is nothing to guarantee you’re qualified for this job. No background on your alliances, no work history, no company other than Capstone to vouch for you or your skills. We have no way to know you haven’t arrived to continue stealing company secrets right where Miles Bradford left off.”

“That it?” she said.

His hand on the folder, his eyes never leaving hers, Dillman nodded.

She waited. He waited.

Belief was belief, and bias was bias, and getting into a pissing match over Bradford’s calls with Warren Green wouldn’t change that, but if the concern was serious, Dillman would have already gone to Kobayashi and she’d be having this conversation with someone else, somewhere else.

“What is it you want?” Munroe said.

“You can’t buy my silence,” he said.

Munroe laughed. She couldn’t help it, though that only brought red to Dillman’s cheeks, and making him angry was counterproductive.

She coughed into seriousness. “There’s nothing you have that’s worth paying for,” she said. “You’re doing your job, I get it, and you’re good at it, but waving around a background check as if it means more than what it is only insults us both. Come on, Dillman, you and I know that if you were really concerned, I’m the last person you’d be talking to. Tell me what you’re after so we can get this over with and go back to chasing bad guys.”

“I want to know who you are and why you’re here,” he said.

“So it’s personal?”

“No, it’s not personal,” he said, and then stopped. “All right, yes, it’s personal. I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of whatever is going on.”

Munroe heard through the unspoken, absorbed what it meant when even the head of the department charged with knowing all things acknowledged vulnerability to what stirred unseen beneath the water.

“You won’t,” she said.

“What? Just that? ‘You won’t.’ I have to take your word for it?”

“Take your own word for it,” she said. “You just made it clear that you’re not afraid that I can’t do this job but that I might do a job too well. There’s a reason you can’t find what you’re looking for—it’s the same reason
we
will find what
we’re
looking for. You want to be on the winning team? You’re on it, Dillman.”

He tapped a finger on the folder. “This doesn’t
look
like winning. I want you to convince me that we’re on the same side.”

“Can’t do that for you,” she said. “Not as long as you still hold Miles Bradford as the enemy. I’m sure you can connect the reasoning.” She walked to the door again and stopped at the frame. “I can tell you this, though: Your research skills need polishing.” She stepped into the hall. “There’s more information out there. You just haven’t found it yet.” She smiled and shut the door.