The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (39 page)

The coffee shop only had three tables with their accompanying chairs, but it was a block away from the facility and two floors up; it got them off the street and away from prying eyes and listening ears.

Sato sat poised and model still, hands in her lap, and face down toward the table while the drinks were made and served. The artistry that had been enchanting at the beginning was wearing in its endurance.

The espresso came. Munroe prolonged the quiet with the rituals of adding sugar and sipping cautiously, and then returning cup to saucer, she said, “This long into silence and the average person becomes uncomfortable. They start with questions, tell a nervous joke or two, and then offer a few reasons why I’ve made a mistake and they shouldn’t be here right now. If they become desperate or scared enough, they move into demanding to know what I want.”

“Not all people behave that way,” Sato said. “Not all Japanese people.”

Her eyes never left the table and her voice, just above a whisper, was soft and childlike, but it had none of the stilted broken English of fifteen minutes prior.

“Wouldn’t you like to know how I know?” Munroe said.

“You spoke with my parents.”

“That wasn’t me,” Munroe said, and she took another sip of the rich dark daylight. “But if you’re aware of that connection, then there’s no reason to continue pretending. If I wanted to ruin you, I would have done it a while ago.”

Sato glanced up and her facial expression shifted, almost as if she’d turned into someone not quite her. “Why haven’t you?” she said.

“I don’t care who owns the technology.”

“You were hired to find me, to out me.”

“Correction,” Munroe said. “Miles Bradford was hired to find you and out you. My only interest was in figuring out who set him up and why. Now I’m done, so I’m leaving.”

“You’re certain your discovery was accurate?”

“As certain as you are,” Munroe said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got proof that ties Tagawa to the murder—video footage, maybe—stashed away on the chance he ever managed to get close to you.”

Sato smiled and picked up the bone-white cup, took a sip, then, her eyes never leaving Munroe’s, she set the espresso down. “Tagawa was a plaything,” she said, “easy to manipulate, fun to watch dance. He was never much of a concern.”

“Until he brought Miles Bradford in to find you.”

“I do admit, that was enjoyably clever, watching Tagawa set his barn on fire to burn out the mice. I wasn’t worried. What do you want from me?”

“Your partner.”

“What makes you think I have a partner?”

Munroe leaned back, smiled, and shook her head. “You know what I am and you know that I know.”

“I only presume to know. You’re not an easy person to learn.”

“You know enough.”

“I know that every word out of your mouth, lie or truth, is a way for you to measure and read and learn more than you know.”

“All I want is your partner.”

“Why?”

“Makoto Dillman.”

“I’d much rather Makoto Dillman was alive right now,” Sato said. “I didn’t kill him.”

“But your partner did.”

“Partner,” Sato said, and she snorted. She took another sip of coffee, crossed her legs, and stared out the window. “To be frank, I can’t tell you what you want. Assuming you’re right, assuming such a partner does exist, I don’t know who he is and I have no control over what he does, just as he wouldn’t know who I am or what I do. I would assume that the same people who wire money to my accounts would wire to his, but I had nothing to do with him being brought into this and I’ve never communicated with him directly.”

That explained the wobble, the part that didn’t fit. Explained how Dillman had gotten dead against Sato’s best interests.

Munroe leaned as far forward as the small couch and knee-crunching coffee table would allow and said, “He’s in one of the security departments.”

“I can’t help you with what you want.”

“Oh, I’m quite certain you can.” Someone had destroyed footage, changed records, listened in on conversations; someone had known what Dillman was doing, and only those in security had that kind of access, a dangerous kind of access. “There’s no way you’d trust your safety, your security, or your mission to an unknown quantity, so who is he?”

Sato sighed. “This is tedious.”

“I can find him on my own, but I’m done here. I want to move on, I want the shortcut. Think of it as an exchange of favors.”

Sato smiled then, an evil dangerous smile. Munroe’s heart fluttered in response, drowning in the joy of affinity, the same surge of bliss that made lovers ache. She cared not a whit that Sato read this and played her now, just as Munroe played her in turn. They sat, staring at each other as equals and opponents, knowing and measuring, and finally Sato put down her cup and said, “What I don’t get is why you’d pursue this because of Makoto Dillman. You don’t impress me as the righteous avenger type.”

“There’s nothing righteous about it.”

“The technology is worth a lot of money. Removing the one who watches my back would allow you to cash in on that prize.”

“Like candy left out in an open jar,” Munroe said. “Why tempt me?”

“Measure you,” Sato said.

“I could have stolen the data from your house.”

“You stole my money.”

“I’m short on cash. Dillman was scouring your background when he was murdered, you know? I take the blame for that. I pushed him down the path to discovery and then your idiot partner made the mistake of trying to take out two for the price of one.”

“You’re certain it wasn’t me who did it?”

Munroe smiled the same vicious smile. “Not because of your denials. If you wanted Dillman gone, you would have done to him like you did to me.”

“No hard feelings, I hope.”

“Not if you give me your partner.”

“I give him to you and you walk away?”

“I am you, Nonomi,” Munroe said. “I’ve had my share, I’ve done my time. Staying one step ahead of the world comes with a price and I’m tired of paying it. I’d found a way around it until Tagawa fucked things up, so I can assure you that there’s nothing you have that I want badly enough to chase.”

Sato’s shoulders relaxed and the facade that had slowly come undone throughout the conversation shed completely and she was a different person in the same way Munroe would shed her character when an assignment had ended. Sato ran her spoon along the inside of the espresso cup and, timed to the tinkling musical notes, said, “If today is for confessions and blame, then I’m to Meilin’s death what you were to Dillman’s. It was from me that the rumor of Chinese infiltration came, and then, as you say, that fool Tagawa made the mistake of trying to take out two for the price of one.”

“Why the Chinese?”

Sato shrugged. “Everyone hates them. Everyone suspects them. It made good entertainment watching Tagawa destroy himself trying to find them.”

“And your partner?”

“Technically, my partner doesn’t exist,” Sato said. “When my contacts pass intel my way, they go to great lengths to make it appear as though it has come from multiple sources. And my requests, in the few times I’ve made them, have produced results without any direct evidence as to how. Deniability. It protects their assets from contamination. It would seem they believe I’m smart enough to get this job done but not quite smart enough to understand the way they play the game.”

“Regardless, he knows who you are.” Dillman would still be alive if he didn’t.

Sato’s lips widened and the smile, so full of darkness, came back in an impish grin. “There is always a long-term strategy and sometimes one must sacrifice infantry to capture the castle. Why don’t you turn me in?” she said. “What makes you stop short of glory?”

“I gave them their thief. They’ll pay for the job completion, and that’s enough.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“They’d allow an innocent man to rot rather than risk investors and customers discovering they’d stolen the technology to begin with. If they’re not smart enough to figure out who you are, I see no reason to help them.”

“Shigeru Hara is the man you want,” Sato said. “He was Dillman’s number two, promoted to number one after the murder.”

Munroe set the small cup down and said, “Thank you.”

Bradford’s lists had been drawn from three directions: company executives, security, and lab. She thought he’d suspected one from among them; in reality there’d been one from each. She said, “If you warn Hara before I get to him,
then
you’ll have created something that I want badly enough to chase.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Sato said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had an enjoyable challenge and you’d be an exquisite thrill.”

“Perhaps, but costly nonetheless.”

Sato waved a hand, as if to brush Munroe’s concerns away. “Hara’s been playing both sides, working as Tagawa’s inside man, cleaning up Tagawa’s evidence, watching Tagawa’s back, while at the same time getting paid by my employers to clean up after me and watch mine, all very entertaining until he killed Dillman. Hara’s an idiot, a dangerous damaging idiot, and I want him gone. You’ll save me the trouble. Tell me, Michael, who are you really?”

“Does it matter?” Munroe said. “Yesterday’s truth is today’s lie, and tomorrow we’ll both be someone else.”

“Indulge me,” Sato said. “Two tigers meet by chance in a forest, seeing for the first time in all dimensions the same supple power that has, until then, only met them in the flat reflection at the water’s edge. For that, it matters.”

Munroe smiled and drained the last of her coffee. “A woman with your talents should have no trouble finding what you want.”

Sato sighed an exaggerated sigh. “You torment me,” she said.

The building was a modern three-story walkup, with a glass front and a pebbled wall of buzzers and speaker beside the entry awning. A pricy little pad just beyond the budget of what one would expect for a man of Shigeru Hara’s means.

Munroe punched doorbells at random until the lock whirred and she pushed inside to a tiled foyer and ambient light. Short halls branched right and left, three doors to a side. A head appeared from one of the upstairs levels and an older voice called out, “Who’s there?”

“I’m so sorry,” Munroe said. “I pushed the wrong number.”

A door above shut. Munroe took the stairs to the second floor and paused outside of Hara’s apartment, attuned to the entrance below while she scrubbed the lock, working with skills gone rusty through lack of use.

But, even rusty, locks were easy.

Locks were an illusion that helped mostly honest people stay honest.

Munroe slipped inside to the chemical fragrance of leather and new upholstery. The front half of the apartment blended kitchen, living, and dining area into one. The walls were bare and the furniture sparse; nothing to indicate permanence or home. Directly ahead, an overhead light in the stubby nook of a hallway illuminated the frames of three doors, and Munroe stepped out of the
genkan
in their direction, shoes still on, moving slowly, testing the wooden floors for squeaky boards.

The hallway doors led to
ofuro
, toilet, and the single bedroom, where a sword was mounted on the wall above the unmade western-style bed and the desk had nothing on it, not even dust. In the stand-alone closet, Hara’s clothes, expensive as they were, were few.

The kitchen fridge contained a small assortment of food and the cupboards only a handful of dishes. The drawers were similarly limited in knives, silverware, and cookware, leaving the impression that there might be other homes, other places where Hara spent his time, or that this situation was temporary and he’d soon be moving on to better things.

Munroe crossed the living area for the far wall. Tagawa was still being detained and there’d been no further news on Bradford’s case, so Munroe slid into the chair that backed into the corner and sat in the dark, waiting with predatorial patience for the man who’d killed Dillman, the man who had, in aiding Tagawa, facilitated Bradford’s setup and arrest.

She had nothing but time.

Shortly after midnight, a key turned in the lock.

Hara stepped in, haloed by the hallway light. The door shut behind him. He dropped a satchel by the umbrella receptacle, stepped out of his shoes, and, oblivious to Munroe’s presence, continued on to his bedroom.

Munroe sidestepped across the room and turned the deadbolt.

She had her hand on the satchel when Hara stepped back out, bare-chested and barefoot with a
jinbei
bottom tied loosely around his waist. He stopped cold when he saw her, froze for a half second, and then darted back into the bedroom.

Munroe unplugged the phone jack, carried the satchel around the kitchen counter, and stood on the other side, where the knives were within easy reach. She rustled through his bag, removed the cell phone he’d stupidly left behind, and pulled the battery.

A bump against the wall, and then another, was notice that Hara was moving about. Munroe pulled a dish towel, thin and light, from off the counter and ripped a strip of cloth from it. She took a narrow canister off a six-piece spice rack and wrapped it tightly into her palm, clenching into a fist.

Hara stepped out into the hallway, sword lifted, body tensed for attack.

Underestimating an enemy was a fast way to get dead. Hara had been clever enough, strong enough, to kill Dillman, but his movements and mannerisms only spoke to the sword having ever been an ornament. Refusing to dignify him, Munroe studied her hand and said, “Put that down before you hurt yourself.”

She pulled papers out of his satchel and spread them on the counter, scanning language she couldn’t read, looking for pictures and hyperlinks and anything familiar, while he stood there, sword raised, postured in rage and menace. She stacked the pages and looked back at him. “Tagawa wanted me dead,” she said. “Here I am, saving you the effort of figuring out how to do it.”

Hara’s face went red, his jaw clenched, and his eyes darted from the front door, to the phone on the two-seat dining table, and then back to her.

She shoved the papers into his bag.

Continuing the psych warfare, she opened drawers, letting them bang as they came out on their rails. She pulled out the three kitchen knives and placed them on the counter.

“Come on then,” she said. “Now that you know that I know, you can’t let me live. Let’s get it over with.”

Hara took a step in her direction.

Munroe ignored him, making a show of testing the knife blades for sharpness. She palmed them for heft and balance. In her peripheral vision, Hara took another step; he was nearly within striking distance.

“I won’t go easy the way Dillman did,” she said.

The accusation caught him off guard and he stopped.

Munroe picked up her knife of choice. Her fingers closed around the handle. Soothing comfort leached up her arm and into her chest, like chamomile tea and honey in front of a warm fire.

She looked at Hara and smiled a genuine smile.

Hara lunged at her then, all the tension in his arms throwing the sword in a curving arc toward her body, curving in slow motion the way the hands on a clock held still between ticks. Munroe went up, over the counter between kitchen and living area, into the space between hallway and front door.

The sword crashed down into the spot where she’d been, and Hara went forward with the swing, thrown off balance by the lack of connection.

Tile cracked, and so did the replica sword, and Hara was now in the kitchen, boxed in the way Munroe had been seconds before.

He grabbed a knife off the counter where she’d left them and held it up—perhaps as a threat, perhaps for his own self-confidence—and she beckoned him to her, chest full of want, mind full of need. “I’ll wait,” she said.

Hara went over the counter in the same way she had, lithe and nimble, providing sensory detail that she used to measure the strength of his threat: He was more comfortable with a knife than a sword, more comfortable now that time had passed and he’d found his element, now that shock and surprise had given way to the edge of adrenaline.

In the room where space was limited and the walls close enough that three long strides would have carried them from one to the next, Hara faced off against her, circling for an opening. He was shorter than she by two inches, his body defined but not built, light on his feet, his reflexes good. His movements were smooth and she waited for him to attack.

He could try, and then he would learn the difference between years of practice in a dojo and the speed that came from fighting for life out on the streets and in the nightmare the jungle had been.

Hara charged. Munroe ducked and spun.

His fingertips grazed her neck.

The knife in her hand, alive and warm, breathing and bleeding, cried out to be put to use. She felt for the rhythm of his heart; her mind inside his mind, her chest inside his chest, anticipating, waiting, while the adrenaline surged and heightened her senses, slowing and elongating time.

He struck again, she dodged again, searching and seeking.

She found weakness and came in close and threw her left hand, weighted with the metal tube, into his throat.

Hara gagged and she jabbed again, into his head, hit and hit and hit, before he had time to react or brace for the impact.

Speed was life and speed was death.

Speed was his undoing, and his attack turned into defense.

The knife, an extension of her body, pleaded for release and came to life against her will, cutting a long jagged slice across his torso. In horror at what she’d done, Munroe tossed the knife. Threw it to the floor as if she’d been scalded, threw it before the instinct, built and cemented in the struggle to stay alive, overtook her and caused her to slit his throat.

In that moment of hesitation, Hara punched her and threw her aside. He grappled and knocked her down. She fought back and then she was on top of him, striking him with the weighted fist in a blind frenzy again and again.

How long until she realized he no longer struggled?

Munroe shoved off him, crab-crawling backward, while repulsion mixed with the thirsty need to finish what was started.

Munroe picked up the knife again and grabbed Hara’s ankle. She dragged him down the hall into his bedroom. She tore the sheet off the bed and pulled the frame away from the wall. She cut strips and secured his hands and feet and shoved him up, securing the ties that bound him to the legs of the bed.

And then she sat on the floor, her back to the wall, adrenaline dumping, exhaustion consuming, while inside her head the clouds roiled dark and thunderous, and self-loathing rode the lightning flashes.

She hadn’t meant to cut him; she’d lost control.

Not because of Dillman.

More than a breach of suppressed emotion over Bradford.

This was rage over everything that men like Tagawa and Hara and Jiro represented, men like the mercenary who’d made her what she was; rage over the lives they took in selfish interest, the pain they caused, and the destruction they left behind.

Hara moaned and Munroe stood, pushing hard against the storm until the emotion was tight and small and she could lock it away.

He moaned again and then came to gradually. Realizing he was bound, Hara yanked at the cloth and strained his head upward. Seeing Munroe, he sighed and dropped his head. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“I can,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

He closed his eyes. “What do you want?”

“To know who you work for.”

“Are you mad? Blind? You come into my house, attack me, to find out where I work, but you’ve seen me at work every day for the last month.”

Munroe sighed. Pretenses and lies in the face of the obvious could be so damn exhausting. She sat on the bed and leaned over him so he couldn’t avoid her. “Drag this out if you want to,” she said. “The one thing I don’t have to worry about is time.”

“They’ll miss me at work. My family will get worried.”

“Your family hasn’t heard from you in a year. I’ll call in sick for you before morning, and I’m about to quit your job. It’s a shame, too, because once you quit, you’ll lose value to everyone who pays you and then what will you matter?”

Hara gritted his teeth and yanked hard against the cloth, and when he opened his mouth to scream, Munroe stuffed the last strip of sheet between his lips.

She patted his face. “Get some rest,” she said. “It’s going to be a long, long night.”