The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (32 page)

The streets were mostly empty and that saved them, but still they plunged on, through another intersection, the driver’s foot solid on the gas while the blank look of shock filled his face.

Munroe took one hand off the wheel, shoved it beneath his thigh, and tugged hard. The lead foot slipped off the pedal and the car slowed.

His eyes widened as if in the sixty seconds that had passed between her pulling him into the car and the third intersection, he was only just now starting to make sense of things.

She hadn’t realized she’d hit him that hard.

She slapped his cheek—not enough to hurt, but enough to get his attention. “Focus,” she said.

He nodded and she let go of the wheel and the drive smoothed out.

He glanced at her once, the same way he would have had he discovered himself in an enclosed space with a wild boar. He was a tough guy, tattooed and scarred, but weaponless, alone with the enemy, and still shell-shocked and dazed.

“Just drive,” she said.

Putting him behind the wheel had been the lesser of evils. With his hands busy, his eyes busy, he’d find it harder to attack her. Exactly the opposite of what would have happened if she’d put him unrestrained in the backseat and attempted to take him with her.

He stopped at the light, waiting for the turn signal, his coordination seemingly impaired to the equivalent of three beers.

“Turn left,” she said.

He’d been the oldest of the four and that was to her advantage. Life experience would have already taught him that he wasn’t invincible; made him less likely to see fighting as the only way out; would make him more prone to listen to reason.

Munroe glanced back.

Two shattered windows were going to draw a lot of unwanted attention and having the police discover bullet holes in the car would be as bad as if she’d simply stayed in the garage and gotten shot.

The car was registered to ALTEQ. She’d not been in the driver’s seat for any part of this, which would help when law enforcement analyzed traffic camera data. She’d report it stolen in the morning.

They drove in silence, Munroe scanning the streets for police while Mr. Mafia kept a death grip on the wheel, his eyes never leaving the windshield. He followed her turn-by-turn directions and the car wound outside the city along the same route she’d followed the night Bradford had vanished and Okada had led her to a place where they could talk.

Population density thinned and the road signs pointed to smaller cities. In the passing signage Munroe recognized the kanji and said, “Is that for a train station?”

Mr. Mafia nodded.

“Find parking at the station.”

He did as she instructed, and when at last he’d pulled to a stop, Munroe reached over and removed the key from the ignition.

Eyes still fixed ahead, hands still gripping the wheel, he breathed irregular and jagged.

“I only want to talk,” she said. “Give me your wallet and phone.”

His eyes flickered toward the door handle.

“If you try to run, I’ll be forced to stop you,” she said.

He went back to staring out the windshield.

“I can take your things by force if I have to,” she said.

Still staring forward, he reached a hand for his pocket.

His name was Hideki Kimura and Munroe knew this, not from his license, which she couldn’t read, or from his phone, which would take time to learn to navigate, but because, still disoriented from the blows to his head, he wasn’t sober enough to engage in mental battle.

She emptied his wallet and he watched wordlessly as she searched through each piece of paper, business card, and bank card, looking for something to connect him to the person at the facility who had sent him.

“Do you know who I am?” she said.

He nodded.

“Tell me.”

“You’re the man who stole women from the club to ruin business.”

“One woman,” Munroe corrected. “She was there illegally and against her will. Do you know my day job? The company I work for?”

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

“You do this often? Go out hunting and hurting people?”

Kimura didn’t answer, didn’t shrug.

“I kill people for a living,” she said.

He glanced at her then, he couldn’t help it, and she flashed him a predator’s taunting hungry smile. “Have you ever been to America?”

He shook his head.

That was good. It meant he’d have no way to disprove her lies.

“You like American movies?”

A subtle nod.

“Then you know how it is,” she said. “You’ve seen our assassins and our gunfights and our car chases. I don’t carry a gun because I don’t need one to kill you.” That part, at least, was true. “Will Jiro kill you?”

Kimura offered no reaction to her naming his boss—he had to have still been too addled to catch the significance because he didn’t deny the connection, either.

“Why were you waiting for me tonight?”

“Jiro sent us to take you to him,” he said.

“How did Jiro know I would be there?”

“I don’t know.”

Without a hint toward a change in demeanor, she took the car key and stabbed it into Kimura’s thigh. Not nearly as good as a knife, the key barely broke skin, but Kimura yelped and swung at her.

She blocked his arm and drove fingers into his throat.

He choked for air.

“You’re wasting my time,” she said. “How did Jiro know I’d be there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. There was a plea behind the words.

“You do know,” she said. “You hadn’t been waiting long. You knew where to go and when and what to look for. How?”

“A phone call,” he said, “a phone call.”

“Jiro got a phone call?”

Kimura nodded.

Munroe opened her door and stepped out into the night.

Kimura was a flunky, he had nothing more to give; she read it in his body and smelled it in the fear on his breath. She grabbed her backpack from the rear seat, and with his wallet and his phone, she left him with the car and its bullet holes.

Munroe reached the facility just after seven. A night intended for focus and clarity had detoured into chaos and culminated with three hours of sleep grabbed on station benches while waiting for the first morning train. She’d cleaned up in the bathroom and then spent the morning in the security room at Okada’s workstation, glued to camera footage, first searching for clues to Dillman’s murder that might have been missed when the data was scrubbed, then tracking and eliminating possible suspects through time stamps and footage.

Whoever had tampered with the data had been thorough, though she learned that Dillman’s body had only been discovered as early as it had been because the door to the office had been left open.

The open door had been deliberate. The killer had wanted the body discovered.

Another morning burned and still no closer to setting Bradford free, Munroe left the facility with ten files zipped up inside her jacket, duplicates of what Dillman had been working on before he’d died.

She returned to the apartment long enough to grab tools out of the bag on the home-office shelf and transfer the folders from her jacket to a backpack. In the garage she removed the Ninja’s fairings, pulled out the tracking devices, and examined the magnetic cases.

The beacons had served their purpose; playtime was over now.

With the trackers in her backpack along with the files and the tools, she headed to the airport for the short-term parking, where friends and family had gone to see loved ones off at the security gates, and left both devices up under the still-warm chassis of a gloss-black Porsche.

The tedious drudgery of riding through thick traffic was made worse by hot humid air and lack of sleep, but Munroe made it to Umeda station with fifteen minutes to spare. She found parking and took the elevator up to a multilevel shopping bonanza of sound and color, of boutique stores, chain brands, and restaurants, where she could blend in to the extent that blending in was possible as a tall white foreigner and, if necessary, vanish within the multiple corridors and constant crowds. She perused clothes and window displays from the wrong side of the glass until a familiar face entered the coffee shop across the way. She knew him from his online bio; he knew her because she walked up and said hello.

The translator was in his early thirties, out of place among the fashion conscious.

A phone call and an offer he couldn’t refuse had guaranteed his short-notice availability.

“Let’s sit,” Munroe said, and that was the extent of the pleasantries. They took a table and she laid out for him all ten files that Dillman had been working on.

Language, always her strength, the poisonous gift that allowed her to see and be and do what others assumed she couldn’t, had limitations. Without being able to pronounce what she read, she had no mechanism to turn writing into sound, and without sound, no ability to understand.

The translator retrieved a laptop and dictionaries from an over-the-shoulder satchel, and they sat side by side, hour by hour, over coffee and sandwiches, and then coffee again, as page by page he turned kanji into English.

These were details Okada could have handled, or any other liaison from the facility if, after Dillman’s death, she could have convinced someone to work with her and if she wasn’t worried about inviting another murder, further complications, and more wasted time.

They finished minutes before the shop’s closing time, all the other chairs already up on the tables in preparation for cleaning. The translator stood and twisted, popping his spine. He said, “I can have everything typed within twenty-four hours.”

Munroe shook her head. She wasn’t about to let the files out of her sight—not even for a moment. “The handwriting’s fine.”

She paid him and watched him leave, then paid the staff to compensate for business lost by the occupied table and wound her way back to where she’d parked the bike.

The hotel room, when she reached it, was quiet and inviting, with its web of clues up on the wall and a bed that sung sweet enticements of sleep and rest and solitude. Munroe stood on the bed and snapped pictures of the diagrams, so that she carried the full array of connections with her, then collected all the notes and papers brought from work over the last week and slipped them together with her laptop into the backpack, and, leaving behind the clothes and personal items she hadn’t touched in days, was gone again.

At the front desk she paid for the room and reserved another week, left the bike, without its trackers, in hotel parking, and walked to the nearest station.

She took the subway two stops down and followed memory for several blocks to the manga café she’d seen in passing, and there, eyes burning, head hurting, she settled in for the hunt.

The online work came first: tedious searches, tracking down and verifying the details on the translated pages, hunting through back doors and alternate routes in the same way she’d instructed Dillman. The collection of notes grew and filled the margins until at last she had enough to get started, and she slept until her alarm roused her for the beginning of business hours.

Phone calls followed the Internet searches, hunting for the proverbial needle, not even sure if she had the right haystack, and when she’d exhausted those leads, she started the pattern over again. At 1:03
A.M.
on day 17, more than thirty-six hours after she’d walked out of the facility with the duplicate files, names taken from Bradford’s list of suspects as a way to keep Dillman occupied, Munroe uncovered the first inconsistency.

Nonomi Sato, biotech, female, Japanese citizen, age thirty-four.

A picture from a defunct alumni website culled from Internet archives didn’t match what was in Sato’s personnel file or what showed on current websites.

Two more hours of hunt and peck, copying and pasting kanji into search engines, finally netted Munroe another, and this was all she had: two pictures of the same person who bore the same credentials and family history as Nonomi Sato, but wasn’t her.