The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (33 page)

Munroe woke to an alarm, showered in the manga café’s facilities, and redressed in the clothes she’d washed and dried throughout the night. Shortness of time pressed down on her, crushing in its weight. She didn’t have enough days to follow the leads on her own. Had no local connections to grant her access to databases and police records. Had no time to establish subterfuge and false storylines to gain access to reluctant sources already disinclined to trust an outsider: She had no option but to rely on shortcuts.

The shortcut came in the form of Ichiro Yamada, a private investigator with a r
é
sum
é
that included seven years of corporate and private research and eight working for prosecutorial departments. Munroe was still weighing that last fact when he showed up, on time to the minute, in clothes casual enough to say that he didn’t fit the corporate mold and shoes priced somewhere between very-good-at-his-job and extortionist shark.

They met at the Umeda station Starbucks, one level down from the translator’s coffee shop, where, in an exchange that took less than five minutes, Munroe went over a list of names and instructions for the details she wanted on each and handed over an envelope of cash.

In the hotel room Munroe set an alarm and stared at the wall, sending her mind free to fly between thunderclouds and hailstorms until the lack of sleep pulled her into oblivion. She woke in the late afternoon and worked the diagram, shifting the connections between patterns. Dillman’s death wouldn’t fit. She placed his card in the circle of unknowns: the gravity wobble, that tiny planet she’d not yet found and named.

Only a few of the upper windows were still lit when Munroe returned to the facility, though the front was ablaze, as always, and the handful of cars that spotted the parking lot would likely still be there in the morning.

The night guards glanced up from their reading when Munroe entered and returned to it, heads down, when her badge cleared her through. She strode the halls for Okada’s security department and swiped her pass through the lock.

The door clicked open and the lone member of the security team stood when she pushed through. He was third, fourth, or fifth in the pecking order—somewhere down the food chain. She said, “I need to go through old footage.”

“How far back?” he said.

“How far back does it go?”

“We keep records for six months.”

Munroe asked for a date two weeks prior to Bradford’s arrival.

“Every camera?” he said.

Munroe searched his expression for clues to his mind-set, to whatever instructions he might have been given regarding any requests from her. “Entry, break room, and elevator cameras,” she said.

He clicked through a digitized directory, a series of screens and menus that for her might as well have been written in hieroglyphics, selecting, until rows of thumbnail files began to cascade across the screen. He stood and offered her the chair, and when she said, “Thank you,” he bowed and turned back to whatever he’d been doing.

She checked her watch and began the sorting.

She had eight hours before the facility would start humming with the first of the day’s employees, eight hours to find what she needed, because she wasn’t coming back for round two—not on this one.

The process moved slowly at first, time wasted in learning and observing, but it grew easier with each passing hour. On the screen, in fast forward and then slow motion, Nonomi Sato came and went, her patterns predictable, each movement perfect, invisible in its normalcy and consistency from the days leading up to Bradford’s arrival, to those after he’d been taken away: an artist in motion, perfection worthy of admiration, worthy of envy.

There were no hiccups, no disruptions, no giveaways, and watching her, Munroe smiled in the way a connoisseur might smile when at last she’d found flawlessness among samples of average. In so much time, with so much room for error, Sato had only twice deviated from routine. The first was three weeks into Bradford’s tenure. Sato had approached for a brief conversation, formal and blushingly proper—likely an attempt at proximity as a way to size up the potential for threat.

The second deviation had come after Bradford’s arrest. Had come four days after Munroe had first announced her presence as his replacement, three days after the boys in the garage had come after her with pipes.

Munroe knew who they were now; knew who had sent them.

Two trackers.

Two players.

Yuzuru Tagawa. Nonomi Sato.

Munroe keyed forward, then backward, watching the same sequence for the fourth time as Sato, with her bag, arrived late and diverted directly for the lunchroom; she tabbed through thumbnail after thumbnail for the entry cameras coordinating to the same time stamps and found herself, there, on the other side of the break-room wall. She sat back and smiled again.

She’d known she’d been watched and had never found the source.

The observer had been good, professional, she’d known that then, too, and now she knew she’d found the thief—thief, yes, but no answer to what she needed most. Nothing in Bradford’s arrest would have benefited this woman. Nonomi Sato was safe from him and she had to have known it.

Sato hadn’t killed the Chinese woman. And it made no sense that she would have killed Dillman—not in the way he’d died—not there on company property, creating scrutiny and risk.

There was that wobble again.

A prickle of heat ran up Munroe’s neck and she turned to find Okada’s security guy watching her. “Did you locate what you needed?” he said.

“There’s nothing.”

“That has also been our frustration,” he said. “We hoped you would see something different.”

Munroe sighed. Rubbed her eyes. “I’m so tired that right now I wouldn’t see it even if I saw it.” She closed the last of the thumbnails. “I’ve got to catch some sleep,” she said. “No more for tonight. What time do you get off?”

“Another hour,” he said. “After Hara-san comes to relieve me.”

Before Dillman’s death, Shigeru Hara had been the number two in the security operations center and had since been promoted to department head in the interim. “I thought he handled the other side,” she said.

The young man lowered his eyes. “After the tragedy, Kobayashi-san instructed that Okada-san and Hara-san should spend time in both departments, for cross-cooperation.”

So now the two department heads were meant to spy on each other’s work. Way to go for engendering trust and camaraderie. “Hara will probably want to know what I was looking at,” she said. “Do you need a list of the file numbers? I’m sorry I shut them down already.”

Okada’s security man shifted, ever so slightly, in response to her admission of being aware of how closely she was monitored and his role in the reporting. His eyes cast down toward the floor and then toward the door, but he didn’t answer the question.

Even if the opponent is deeply entrenched in a defensive position, he will be unable to avoid fighting if you attack where he will surely go to the rescue.

—MASTER SUN TZU

Nonomi Sato left the facility as early as the unspoken demands of company loyalty would permit. She paused beside her car just long enough to sniff for suspicion, and when she felt no menace, no interest, she slid into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and headed out of the city, to where the traffic was thinner and she could more easily spot if someone followed.

She drove for an hour, watching mirrors and counting cars while ice inside her head turned her thoughts cold, chilling the fever that had taken hold these last days as her carefully constructed encampment had come under attack again, and then again.

Battle terrain was changing.

The landscape was fogging over and turning marshy.

Sato turned off the two-lane highway, pulled to the side, waited ten minutes, and then started the car again. Drove again, waited again, and when she was certain she’d left work alone, she continued to the nearest station, went inside to the phones, and found them just beyond the ticket machines.

Battle on the marsh should be avoided at all costs.

If the ground had indeed turned bad, if entrenchment was no longer possible, then the only way to avoid loss was to hurry away.

But to know the terrain, she first had to clear the fog.

Sato used coins, dialed, and caressed the cold calm of detachment.

It had been six months since she’d last spoken with the parents, longer still since she’d returned for a visit, but the e-mail from this morning, with its one simple sentence, had the potential to change everything:
Daughter, we have missed you.

At last the line connected and a soft voice said, “
Hai, moshi moshi.
”

Sato became air and innocence and said, “Mother, how is your health, and how have you been?”

“We have been well, my child,” the woman said, “very well, although it has been lonely without you. A friend of yours called asking for you. I told him you were away. When will you return to visit? The garden is beautiful now.”

Sato bit down hard on her tongue and drew blood.

“Work has been difficult, but I will visit for Obon,” she said. “Thank you for news of my friend, did he leave his name or a message?”

“Let me see,” the soft voice said, and then, as if reading from a paper, “Kiyoshi is his name. He said that you were close at university.”

Sato shut her eyes, squeezing past the doubts of lives past.

Kiyoshi had indeed been a friend at school. The call could have been genuine, possibly, possibly, possibly. Sato said, “He gave you his number?”

“He said you already knew how to reach him and to please call.”

“Thank you,” Sato said, because that was appropriate, and because staying on the phone brought her nothing, she added, “Please be well,” and replaced the receiver with a gentle drop. And then, with shoulders straight, with a demure emptiness pulled over her face shielding the turmoil beneath, she walked back to the car.

She didn’t have Kiyoshi’s number, had no way to discover if the call had been genuine or if, instead, this had been an enemy using lies and family as a way to reach her. Sato put the key in the ignition and turned out of the parking lot, reconfiguring the positions of her imaginary army.

Throughout three years at the facility, through monthly security checks, random security sweeps, and regular background checks, she’d remained above suspicion, above reproach, yet every day brought with the sun a renewed possibility of being discovered.

That was the problem with long-term commitment, it was why she preferred the quick jobs, in and out, over and done, vanish and start again.

Six months had turned into a year, and that had turned into three, always following more research, further trials, the end of the road ever one more turn around the bend, the promise of ultimate reward taunting from just beyond reach.

The danger was in staying and she’d stayed too long.

Sato put on the blinkers, changed lanes, and rerouted.

At another station and another phone bank, in thinning invisibility amid the waning evening crowd, Sato dialed, using the information from a prepaid card. She turned her back to the station cameras and after the first ring dipped her finger into the receiver well and hung up.

The only safe way forward was to assume the call from Kiyoshi had been a pretext; the only safe conclusion, that this had come from the newcomer.

In return, the only strategy for the newcomer was deception and ambush.

Doing so wouldn’t clear the fog or allow a better view of the terrain, wouldn’t solve the issue of the marshy ground or fortify her encampments, but by ridding herself of the need to battle on more than one front, she could turn her forces to the other.

Sato dialed again, hung up again, and then repeated the process a third time. On this last she stayed on the phone a minute longer, holding a pretend conversation with dead air, for the sake of appearance. Then, having in this deception summoned he who would be the foot soldier used for ambush, she left for Suita, for a three-bedroom house, not far from Osaka University.

In the evening dark, off a well-trafficked road, Sato climbed the stairs at the edge of a wall up to a barren front door and the tiny patches of pebbles where some form of greenery should have gone, had she been the growing kind.

This was what home was for now, three stories sandwiched between an apartment building and a grocery store with two residences above, and parking just a divot off the road between a retaining wall and the neighbor’s tiered garden of river stones and bent manicured pines.

Hardly visible within corners and shadows of her doorway, concealed to blend, were the security cameras.

Sato unlocked the door and stepped into an empty
genkan
and hall, to the fragrance of mold spores, humidity, and decaying wood. She left shoes and purse on the
genkan
tiles and walked the wood floors barefoot for the kitchen, pulling the pins out of her bun as she went, running fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp to soothe the itch.

She poured a glass of cold barley tea, distinctly Japanese and an acquired taste that she’d acquired because, no matter where the family had been stationed, Mother had brought the tea. Sato drank it down, staring out over the room, devoid of furniture but for one lone desk and a small folding table on the floor.

The house was a wasted, expensive luxury, so much space for one in a city where every square meter mattered and three bedrooms should house three generations. But she required a residence on its own foundation, within reasonable driving distance from the facility, in a neighborhood where people came and went often enough that her presence as a single woman living alone wouldn’t draw the gossip of the neighborhood
obachan
brigade. That hadn’t left her with many options.

As her people were so fond of saying,
gaman.

Polite and fatalistic.
Suck it up:
a national motto.

Sato rinsed out the glass and set it to dry: it was one of the two glasses she owned, in a kitchen as sparsely furnished as the house.

She’d never bought more; she’d never intended to stay.

For her, Japan had always been stifling. Still was. Tight and constricted, spatially and socially: hundreds of unspoken rules that dictated what she could say, to whom, and how; where she could work, in what field, for how long; how she could live, and love, and exist. Made it difficult to understand Mother’s melancholy homesickness and the obsessive way she’d taught Sato to read and write, as if Sato would one day become like her.

She’d only returned to Japan because of the job.

Sato picked up the glass again, pulled a handful of ice from the freezer drawer and dumped it in. Poured a shot of whisky.

Gaman.

When the money was good, anything could be endured.