The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (31 page)

Munroe sat in a chair in a commandeered conference room, hands behind her head and face toward the ceiling, thoughts unspooling, rage simmering.

Her passport and paperwork had been returned shortly before nine.

Effort and manipulation thereafter had gotten her furtive snippets from a security team who’d been afraid to speak. This much she knew: Dillman had been found in her office with his throat slit and burn marks on both arms.

She blew a long exhale of manufactured calm and gained another minute tethered to rational control. Dillman, for all his faults and quirks, hadn’t deserved to die any more than Bradford deserved to be sitting in jail.

The investigators had finally left at nine-thirty, and by then most of the employees, released individually after questioning, had been sent home.

There’d been no arrests.

One murder, with an easy scapegoat, had been easy to solve. By a fortunate circumstance she’d had a rock-solid alibi and so deprived them of another. Without her as the guilty party, this second murder changed everything, creating suspects out of any number of employees and turning the facility’s atmosphere, already thick with guardedness, into witch-hunt paranoia and suspicion.

A knock on the door interrupted the brooding.

The handle moved, then Okada’s head peered in. He slipped inside and shut the door. Munroe cut her eyes toward him. “The investigator,” she said. “Tadashi Ito. Was he the same one running things last time?”

“Yes,” Okada said.

Munroe went back to staring at the ceiling. Okada took a seat one over and they both sat in silence for a long, long time.

“It’s also the same as before,” Okada said. “The footage has been altered. There’s no evidence of what happened.”

Munroe closed her eyes. “Whose security pass was that done under?”

Okada whispered, “Yours.”

Anything less would have been too easy.

Munroe motioned for paper and a pen and Okada handed her both. She scribbled a note and a list of names and slid the page over.

Two trackers. Two sets of players. She’d given Dillman busywork to keep him out of her way. He’d wanted to discuss the files he was working on—names she’d culled from Bradford’s list of suspects—and died before he could.

Possibilities chased their tails in circles:

Dillman had been the intended target and she the patsy.

Or Dillman’s murder, mirroring the Chinese woman and Bradford, and like the incident of the car’s grille with its headlights pushing her toward manslaughter, was an attempt to remove her from the facility.

Or, perhaps two for the price of one, covering both options.

Munroe wanted the contents of Dillman’s files, suspected they’d been with him when he died—were possibly the reason he’d died—and needed new copies.

“It’s not a problem,” Okada said.

“Remember your concerns on the train yesterday?” she said. “The reason you made that phone call?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“That’s the problem.”

“I understand,” Okada said. “I will find a way.”

She offered him another out. “I can get someone else to do it.”

“No,” he said. He stood and walked to the door and then remained there, hand on the hardware, unmoving. He turned back and made eye contact while seconds dragged on in silence. “The databases and log files have also been edited,” he said. “We don’t know who was here when that happened.”

In what was unspoken he’d told her he had her back, trusted no one but her, and expected her to guard his in kind. When he’d gone, Munroe closed her eyes again.

“Dillman,” she whispered. “Dillman, Dillman.”

She breathed the anger in and shut all emotion down.

Personal feelings had no place here.

This death was merely new data, meant to be sorted with the same clinical manipulation as everything else, but she had no cornerstone for it: that single piece of certainty upon which she could build. Every fact, every name on her web of connections had more than one fit, and Dillman’s death didn’t correspond to any of them.

This felt like a larger planet wobbling in the gravitational pull of a smaller neighbor.

Something she hadn’t seen yet, hadn’t found.

Frustration poked finger holes into the dike of logic and control, wiggled in and buried inside her brain, taunting her with the only facts she knew without doubt: Bradford was still behind bars, the prosecutor could formally charge him at any time, and she’d not yet found the lever for release.

She was running out of time, wasting resources, expending energy she didn’t have to stay free of the traps and machinations set against her by players she couldn’t see, all of whom knew who she was and where she was, while she was left groping in the dark.

Munroe stood. One foot in front of the other, she paced the few steps across the room, back and forth, animal in a cage. And then she stopped and slammed her forehead into the wall. The pain was instant and calming: partial relief to the addict’s need, methadone in place of heroin, pathway to clarity.

The hotel room, with its wall of facts and its bed and the promise of sleep, called to her, but Munroe diverted first to Bradford’s apartment to return the Mira and collect the bike with its easy to find and remove trackers.

She turned down into the garage to discover that trouble, in the form of four men, had already come for her. They were a mixture of young and middle-aged in buttoned-up dress shirts and loose slacks like the clothes worn by the men outside the bars in the drinking district.

They loitered by the Ninja, haloed in cigarette smoke, but with only a few butts at their feet, they couldn’t have been waiting long. Seeing them, Munroe’s pulse quickened, the inner war drum signaling impending battle.

The rawness of Dillman’s death burned beneath the surface. The desire for pain rolled through her, a craving to inflict and feel it, and to fight to win, because in seeking blood she had control.

They straightened when the car rolled in, all of them attuned to the Mira’s approach, and although they didn’t go so far as to form a line between her and the Ninja, the impression of a line was there.

Munroe backed the Mira into its space and they stood watching.

She left the engine running and the lights on, and they squinted to see beyond the glare. The oldest dropped a cigarette to the pavement and ground it with his foot. Beneath his rolled-up sleeves the bare edges of a tattoo crept out.

Strategy flowed into battle formation and instant assessment.

Logic, like a parent, soothed against what instinct, a toddler in full meltdown, screamed for: She was weaponless, and they wouldn’t have come unarmed. Not after what she’d done in the hotel room.

But the adrenaline uptick had already begun. The fight called to her, compelling her toward the rush where time separated from reality and hurt ceased to exist because all that mattered from one heartbeat to the next was whatever it took to stay alive.

Munroe gripped the wheel tight against the tingle in her hands.

Jiro’s men tracing her to an apartment in the middle of the city, waiting in the right place at the right time, spoke of deliberation and knowledge.

Two sets of players; two trackers.

These were Jiro’s men, but Jiro hadn’t installed the trackers.

Just like Jiro hadn’t invited Bradford to the hostess club.

The men in the headlights stepped away from the Ninja.

In slow motion she watched them, two heading for the garage exit to block her way out and block residents from entering. The others strode toward her.

She felt their bodies inside her head, the way they would rotate and heave and bend. The chemical flood coursed through her veins.

Munroe revved the engine.

The men in the headlights twitched, giving away strength and strategy in that instinctive reaction. This group of four had arrived with a single semiautomatic. Gun out and now exposed, the man holding it changed tactics.

He aimed at the Mira’s windshield and headed for the driver’s side. His unarmed partner took the left.

In a country where handguns were nearly impossible to obtain and police pursued violators so relentlessly that even criminals lived in fear of gun laws, firing the weapon would be enough for him to face life in prison.

The weapon was for threat, pulling the trigger a last resort.

By their footfalls she timed them, focus burned on the man with the gun and the finger that rested outside the guard, watching his eyes, not his hands, watching his posture and the tension that ran in the lines along his neck.

Footfall to footfall she waited, hand brake released, vehicle in gear, breathing out long with a predator’s patience, footfall to footfall, weapon coming ever closer and then.

Munroe lurched forward, gas and wheel and brake working in microbursts, speed and calculation, car spinning, tires screeching.

The Mira’s rear curved toward the man with the gun.

He fired in response, the weapon’s report a cavernous boom in the underground.

The back passenger window shattered.

Skin and bone thumped and thudded off the side of the hood.

Munroe reversed and hit soft flesh.

She yanked the emergency brake and was out the driver’s door, legs in motion before her feet hit the pavement.

Half seconds mattered. Quarter seconds mattered.

In the gap between shock and reality, the time it took for the brain to register what had just happened, she had already reached the front of the car.

The man without a weapon turned a fraction before she hit him.

She twisted midstride. Kicked his knees out beneath him and charged into him. He landed hard on the pavement with her on top, and she grabbed his hair and slammed his head against the concrete, again and again, while he struggled and then struggled less.

The gun was on the ground, three meters behind her, thrown when she’d reversed into its owner. Beneath the car she saw hands and knees crawling for it.

In the garage exit, the other two men were missing.

The handgun had discharged. They would run as far and as fast as possible to prevent being looped in as accomplices and spending equal time in prison.

Munroe pounded her knee hard into the man’s chest: leverage to get to her feet. She grabbed his collar and pulled him.

“Stand up,” she said. “If you want to escape this, stand up.”

Dazed, he blinked and struggled to his feet.

“The police are coming,” she said, and she pushed him toward the car. Without letting go she swung backward into the open driver’s door, scooted over the console, legs twisting and tangled, and dragged him in after her.

He didn’t fight; he understood.

She reached over him, yanked the door shut. “Drive,” she said.

He was aware now, not as alert as he should have been, but enough that he reached for the seat belt. She ignored hers; she needed her hands.

She released the hand brake. “Drive!” she said again, and in the vanity mirror the man behind the car got to his feet, weapon aimed toward her again.

What difference did another discharge make now?

The garage echoed loud with the clap of thunder.

The bullet punched through the rear door and spit-popped into the backseat. The driver hit the gas and the car fishtailed. Munroe leaned over and with both hands on the wheel she pulled.

The hood straightened in relation to the exit.

Then came another deafening roar and another shattered window.

The Mira careened up the ramp and Munroe leaned hard against the wheel in the opposite direction. The car wailed into the street, between a moss-covered stone wall and parked cars, then sped through an intersection.

“Slow down,” she yelled.