The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (37 page)

Nakamura’s anteroom was filled with the hush of vacancy and the repetitive clicks of the keyboard. His assistant looked up when Munroe entered, and seeing her, the woman stood. Hands placed on her thighs, she bowed and then with a gentle sweep of one hand she invited Munroe to the sitting space as if Munroe was a person most welcome.

“Nakamura-san is in a meeting now,” the assistant said. “Please wait if you can.”

“Will he be long?” Munroe said.

The woman’s bow dipped lower and her head bobbed in time with the apology. “I’m unsure,” she said. “I’m sorry, there are many appointments today.”

Munroe sat and the woman brought the tray with water and the doily, and the clock ticked around, burning off minutes as though they mattered not. Munroe drank in measured sips and the assistant replaced the empty glass with a full one. Munroe was on the third when Nakamura finally returned, wearing the harried look of a man running late.

He paused midstep when he saw her, then diverted to the seating area.

Munroe stood, shook his hand.

“Sadly, I’m on my way to another meeting,” he said.

“Ten minutes,” Munroe said. “It’ll be worth your time.”

Nakamura glanced at his watch and then, with a nod, invited her into his office. She sat without waiting for an offer. Her eyes focused on the desk in front of her while her ears tracked his movements about the room: jacket to coat rack, briefcase to receptacle, and then finally water poured into a glass that he carried to his desk.

“Tell me then,” he said, “what do you have for me?”

Munroe placed a file on the desk containing printouts and maps and copies of translated documents culled from her own material—together nearly an inch thick. She folded her hands atop it and said, “You told me once that industrial espionage has a long history and that if one refuses to adopt the weapons of his enemy, one will lose the battle.”

Nakamura took a long draw of water and set the glass on the desk.

She said, “The battle has come back around to you.”

He leaned into his chair, body angled away, and ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “Is that meant to be taken as metaphor or literally?” he said.

“You’ve pointed me toward foreigners and foreign interests,” she said, “but it appears the culprit is one of your own—within the executive ranks.”

Nakamura winced as if she’d nicked him. He swiveled around to face her and stared at her long and hard. “This is a serious accusation,” he said.

“Yes, very serious.”

“When suspicion is cast, it is cast forever,” he said, “left to grow like weeds in a garden that put down deep roots. Knowing a thing, whether it’s true or not, gives that thing its own life. Before you divide from within my company, tell me, do you have evidence for what you will say?”

Munroe reconstructed his question into a promise of outright denial and rejection if he didn’t like what she’d brought. She said, “I’m confident enough that I consider my job finished here. Unless you have a reason to keep me on longer, I’ll need a day or two to tie up loose ends and then I’ll turn in my security badge.”

Nakamura glanced at his watch and then turned back to her and nodded at the documents beneath her hands.

“Will you leave those papers with me?”

“They won’t mean anything to you. The explanations are in here,” she said, and tapped her head.

As if the folder contradicted her words, he said, “Only in your head?”

She’d offered him the lie as an opportunity to silence her before she could share the information with others: a preemptive move against the possibility that Tagawa had merely been the most obvious player in a conspiracy of several.

“No one else in the facility is privy to this information,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

Nakamura took another sip of water and said, “Not exactly, but that certainly helps in damage containment.”

“I’ve already kept you past your meeting,” she said. “If you wish, I can return when it’s more convenient.”

Nakamura tilted his wrist to check the time again, but his focus was on the papers beneath her hands. “May I see them?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “But if you want them to mean anything, it would be better if I explain them as you do.”

He stood and loosened his tie, then walked from his side of the desk to hers. Her body tensed, ready to shift if he moved too close, and she tracked his hands and feet as he crossed the room.

Nakamura stepped out and shut the door.

Voices, muted and hushed, filtered in through the door; not whispers, but guarded speech that could have easily been spoken in her presence or on the phone if he’d not been concerned about her listening in.

The door opened. Nakamura’s footsteps carried him back to his desk and, once again in his seat, he said, “We won’t be disturbed, so take your time and tell me everything you’ve learned.”

Munroe opened the folder, and fingertips resting lightly on top of the documents as both tease and promise, she said, “Please withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to lay out the facts as I know them.”

Nakamura folded his hands, matching the way hers had been, and he leaned forward to see better. She spun the first page around and pushed it toward him. His focus settled on the picture just long enough to register the face and then, eyes wide, his head jerked up and he pushed himself ever so slightly backward.

Munroe waited a beat and then began with the facts, much as she had with Bradford’s lawyer, adding details she’d neglected in the law office, but leaving out the hostess club, the trackers, the truth behind the attack in the garage that had led to Bradford’s car being reported stolen, and the issue of Nonomi Sato.

Nakamura asked questions. He stood. He sat. And stood again, arms crossed, pacing, as she led him along the trail, dot to dot and point to point, and when she was finished, she took the pages back, stacked them, and stuffed them inside the folder. Then she said, “What will you do?”

Nakamura turned from her, a smaller man than he’d been an hour ago, and stared at the wall as if the world pressed down on his shoulders and threatened to squash him. “It’s not my decision alone,” he said.

“There’s an innocent man sitting in jail right now.”

He stared out the window. “My responsibility is to the company.”

The unspoken was so loud he might as well have screamed. Going to the police about Tagawa’s theft wouldn’t happen because calling on the law would reveal his own company’s practices and open a whole other can of disgrace, loss of face, and legal action.

As far as Nakamura was concerned, Bradford was fucked.

That answered the issue of what she’d do about Nonomi Sato.

Munroe pushed back from the desk and stood. Picked up the folder and tucked it under her arm. “I understand your position,” she said.

Nakamura turned from the window. “Please leave the documents.”

Munroe returned the folder to the desk, let herself out, and left for the wall of monitors in the security room, where she and Okada could watch in real time as the puppets played to the pull of the strings.

Munroe and Okada stood side by side, watching wordless as the story unfolded in grainy silence, and Nakamura, footsteps heavy, left his office.

In the hour since Munroe had walked out, the activity in the executive wing had picked up, the company bosses leaving one by one for the boardroom, and they were all there now, waiting for Nakamura, all but Yuzuru Tagawa.

Okada’s phone beeped. He checked the screen, answered a text, and to Munroe said, “Maybe twenty minutes.”

Those were the first words spoken since she’d entered the room, silence their best precaution against electronic ears. They’d soon have company as the evening techs, sent off on errands by Okada, finished the busywork designed to keep them away. On the monitor, Nakamura entered the boardroom.

By design there were neither cameras nor recording devices beyond those walls, but she had no doubt that in the security operations center on the other side of the building, there were ears listening in.

Tagawa, too, had gotten wind that something was afoot.

In her days at the facility, Munroe had observed him; first as a part of Bradford’s initial list, then as a suspect as the data continued pointing toward him. Tagawa was well-kept, fastidious with his appearance, a man of routine and long hours, never arriving later than seven or leaving before eight, but in the days following Dillman’s murder he’d grown disheveled and had begun displaying the jumpy nervousness of a man with demons at his back. Now, at just after seven in the evening, breaking routine and a history of patterns, he was in the hallway, headed for the stairs, head hung low as if in a trance or deep in thought, on his way out of the facility.

Okada pointed toward the screen.

Munroe was already on her way for the door.

Wars were won through exploiting the enemy’s weakness.

Shame was Tagawa’s weakness, honor was his weakness, and in using Nakamura to force a catalyst, she’d manipulated both.

Tagawa would lose his job, but that was the least of his worries.

Munroe raced down the stairs and reached the entry in time to catch a glimpse of Tagawa through the glass, rounding the corner for the parking lot.

Losing his job would mean losing access to ALTEQ’s trade secrets, but selling those to Jiro had been an undermining operation in the short term for which Tagawa had been well compensated, revenge for which ALTEQ had no proof, thus no way to retaliate legally or otherwise.

The technology in the lower lab had been Tagawa’s ultimate goal, the theft for which his brother had been held responsible and over which the brother had taken his life. Tagawa’s failure to steal it back would be a bigger shame but not the end of everything. No, the reason for his slow coming-apart, the reason he’d left the facility dazed and weighted like a man on the way to his own funeral, was the murder. Tagawa knew what the authorities didn’t, knew that if his role as thief had been uncovered, his connection to Jiro would soon follow, and then accusations, possibly arrest, for murder wouldn’t be far behind.

In this shame-based society, where judgment was the social control, where a man maintained his value not by choosing right over wrong but by living according to the expectations placed upon him, Tagawa had exceeded his brother’s dishonor. He would bring his family greater shame.

Munroe gave him time to reach his car and then tagged after him to the Ninja, which was closer. She followed him because suicide, embedded as a noble tradition within the culture’s history, and still often viewed as a moral responsibility, meant that many a man, facing financial pressure and much less disgrace than Tagawa did now, had turned to death by his own hand as the means of preserving honor.
Inseki-jisatsu,
responsibility-driven suicide.

Munroe wanted Tagawa dead.

To save Bradford, she needed him alive.

He drove a wandering route, erratic and unpredictable as he braked, then sped up, and made lane changes at the last second or too far ahead of time, driving like a drunk or a man so distracted that he was no longer mentally present. He received calls and made calls, then rerouted back toward Osaka proper, and in a sudden about-face, turned in for a train station and abandoned his car in a no-parking area. Munroe swore, looped around, and lost sight of him in the process.

She hastily parked, left the helmet with the bike, and rushed for the entrance, searching for her target and for traps so easily missed in the hurry to find him.

The station had four tracks, two to a platform. She slipped the transit pass into the ticket stile, pushed through, and took the first set of stairs.

There was no way to hide if he waited for her at the bottom.

Speakers chimed. A woman’s voice announced a train arrival.

Munroe stopped halfway down for a glimpse along the front end of the platform, then leaned over the rail and scanned the parallel platform. Tagawa was there, two tracks over, in line at the door mark, hands limp and head down, oblivious to the lights of the approaching train.

Munroe raced up, ran down the concourse. The train hissed to a stop below. She pushed against the crowd of bodies starting up. Her feet hit the platform as the doors began to close and she rushed the nearest car, shoving an arm between rubber stoppers. She pulled the doors apart enough to slip between.

All eyes in the crowded car were on her when she squeezed inside.

The train lurched and Munroe grabbed a handhold ring, caught her breath, and then started the slow walk, car to car, in Tagawa’s direction. She stayed with him for several stops, followed him through a line change, and when at last he stepped off onto the white tiles of Kitashinchi station, Munroe slipped along the stairwell’s edge, realizing what he’d done.

This was Jiro’s territory.

The flow of passengers headed up the stairs, but Tagawa crossed to the other side, just shy of the yellow safety line, and stood there even after a train had come and gone. Munroe inched closer and watched him: every step, every muscle; the way he held his head; the way he breathed; tense and ready to call upon speed and reflex and intervene if necessary.

A
human accident
, the polite term for railway suicide.

She expected him to jump, eventually, but not there. Not yet.

He hadn’t seen her following him, but someone in the facility had; someone had called him. And then Tagawa had made calls and he’d changed paths and abandoned the car. He’d brought her to Jiro, laying the trap and gifting the gift, and waited for Jiro’s men to take her first: revenge for what she’d done to him, honor before an honorable death. Two wins for the price of one.

The taste of underground, of metal and heat and oil, filled the air inside Munroe’s head, where on a chessboard of strategy knight played against rook and pawn against king. Shoes and boots thudded down the stairs, echoing a tell of a cluster greater than regular foot traffic. There were six of them, conspicuous in the way they didn’t belong, conspicuous enough that transiting passengers averted their eyes deliberately so as not to see as Jiro’s men fanned out among the crowd, searching for white skin in a sea of beige.

Munroe looped around the back of the stairwell in Tagawa’s direction.

She stood behind him at the edge of the platform, on the danger side of the caution line. He felt her presence and turned; seeing her, his eyes narrowed.

Munroe drew nearer to him.

Jaw clenched, he said, “You heap shame upon me.”

“You brought it on yourself.”

A shout not far away overrode whatever next escaped his lips.

The station’s speakers chimed. The voice announced an arriving train.

Jiro’s men came striding for her.

Waiting passengers moved out of their way.

Familiar eyes bored into her from a familiar face distorted in rage: the man with the gun, the man she’d hit with Bradford’s car. He moved in close and took a swing.

Munroe braced for impact.

He hit her back and punched her side.

Munroe gritted her teeth and smiled while his fellow thugs crowded in, sandwiching her and Tagawa in the press. She grabbed a fist full of Tagawa’s shirt and belt while blows rained down, and she panted past the need to strike, counting seconds, feeling the rolling thunder through her feet, and then she jerked—away from the fists and kicks, backward, off the platform, dragging Tagawa with her, into the path of the oncoming train.