The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (4 page)

Bradford stopped at a door with a card reader on the outside. He tapped his security badge against it.

The door clicked and Bradford pushed through into a room six times the size of his office. Monitor banks filled two walls, and the third was lined with desks and computer stations.

Two men stood when they entered, in their late twenties at the outside, both in street clothes as Bradford was, unlike the security guards at the front desk. They avoided direct eye contact while their strained expressions questioned Bradford for having broken protocol by bringing in an unauthorized person.

“Junior team members,” Bradford said, and his words came with the unabashed, unconcerned quality of knowing he wasn’t understood.

The young men kept rigid in Bradford’s presence, a cross between awe and awkward, and Munroe understood then why Bradford had chosen such a conspicuous uniform to wear to work each day: the boots and the starched jeans, the belt and the hat, weren’t about fulfilling expectations so much as creating a persona, a legend. Problem was, a legend could be interpreted in multiple ways and a legend could be its own downfall.

Bradford asked for Tai Okada and the senior of the two answered in Japanese, which Bradford couldn’t understand, and with sign language that indicated half an hour.

Bradford turned toward one wall of monitors, glanced at Munroe, and said, “What do you think?”

Behind her back, one of the desk jockeys said,
What’s he doing here? Who’s the woman?

The other replied,
Nobody told me anything.

Should we report this violation?

The big bosses hired him, they know more, better to let him do his job.

Munroe studied the jumpy black-and-white images tracking across the monitors—nothing spectacular, just standard CCTV fare. Bradford’s question could have meant one out of a hundred things.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” she said.

Bradford’s smile was impish. “Just wondering what your immediate impression might be. No filters.”

“A lot of cameras,” she said. “Not much for quality though. Probably for show—prevention—rather than discovery.”

She looked askance at him and Bradford ignored her unspoken question. “There’s more,” he said.

More turned out to be another security room on the other side of the building, down another bland hallway, behind another nondescript door. They passed employees along the way, a few women who blushed and covered their mouths when Bradford said hello, and men who seemed to separate themselves between those who walked by as quickly as possible, eyes to the floor, as if by not acknowledging Bradford’s presence he ceased to exist, and those who were over-anxious to be his friend. In the wake of the final blushing, giggling woman, Munroe rolled her eyes.

“It’s the clothes,” Bradford said.

Munroe couldn’t argue that the clothes had something to do with it.

Bradford tapped his card to another reader.

This room looked like any paper-pushing office in the basement of a federal building but for a wire rack of digital equipment in one corner and the enormous double monitors on each desk. Four walls, no windows, no art, just five cluttered desks littered with file folders and in-boxes and the stale air of too many bodies in too tight a space for too many days.

The man farthest from the door stood when they entered. He was as much foreign as he was Japanese, at least six feet tall with light amber eyes and wavy brown hair and, seeing Bradford, his expression darkened.

He stepped around his desk in their direction, eyes tracking up Munroe from shoes to head, and then, as if she was a trifling inconvenience, he turned to Bradford and said, “What do you need?” His accent spanned three continents and came to rest in Australia. His tone was from Antarctica.

“Thought Tai might be here,” Bradford said, and then, in timing that amounted to a sigh of oh-well, he said, “Hey, Mac, this is Vanessa. Vanessa, Mac. Mac runs this department and he’s damn good at his job.”

Munroe offered her hand.

“Makoto Dillman,” he said, and he shook with more aggression than necessary. “Makoto or Dillman, never Mac.”

“Got it,” she said.

“And you are?”

“A visiting friend without transportation.” Munroe tipped her head toward Bradford. “Had to twist his arm to be allowed to keep him company for the day.”

“Right,” Dillman said, and then turning to Bradford again as if Munroe didn’t exist, “Not in here. You know that.”

“My bad,” Bradford said. “If you see Tai, send him my way.”

Bradford reached for the door before Dillman could respond and Munroe could feel the stares as they stepped out. They started down the hallway, and if the compass in Munroe’s head was correct, they headed back around toward the front. “What was that all about?” she said.

“That,” he said, “was the Security Operations Center, the half of the security team that scares the bejesus out of the employees.”

“I meant him. What was his problem?”

“That I was hired.”

“You, you or just someone in general?”

“Started as someone in general,” Bradford said. “I mean, the shame, right? What better way for your boss to announce to the entire company that you’re lousy at your job than to bring in some outside guy to do what you haven’t? But now he has a problem with me personally.”

“You’ve been poking the bear.”

“Yeah,” Bradford said, and he grinned.

“Bear’s gonna bite you.”

“Possibly.”

“What’s the deal with bifurcated security?”

“Think NSA in the SOC, as opposed to the feebs in front of the CCTV monitors on the other side of the building.”

“Which half do you work for?”

“Sandwiched between, not welcome in either, dependent on both.”

“Yuck.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I figured if I was going to tour you, it’d be poor form to skip the main attraction.”

“Main attraction,” she said, and smiled.

But Bradford had been right about that. Everything he’d shown her, she’d need again, and the question that would burn her in weeks to come was whether Bradford had already known at this stage, and if knowing was the real reason he’d brought her in.

Yelling seeped out from beneath a door and Munroe paused and stared in its direction. Bradford shook his head and she sighed and kept on walking. She didn’t need to ask and Bradford didn’t need to explain. This was just a louder version of what she’d already experienced from city streets to countryside among a rule-following population that feared shame above all else in a society that cultivated a fear of sticking out and making mistakes. Discovery came swift and sure for those rare few who stepped out of line, encouraging collective decision making at every level of public and private life so that only none, or all, could be blamed: a small step of progress from centuries past when citizens were expected to police one another and groups would be punished as a whole for the crimes of one.

Here, behind corporate walls, bosses badgered and bullied the junior staff—
sempai
—shooting down rock stars and star players before they were born, promoting for tenure rather than effort, and calling out and dissecting even minor blunders in group sessions, ensuring that being one with the hive was the only way to survive.

They found Tai Okada outside Bradford’s office, leaning up against the wall, his face to a stack of papers, and jotting notes. His work attire, white shirt and dark tie, the same as every other man in the building, somehow managed to appear slightly askew and sloppy, and his hair, just on the edge of needing a cut, dangled over thick-rimmed tortoise glasses.

He looked up when they approached, and seeing Munroe, he smiled.

Smiles from men in Japan were rare and his was the first she’d been offered within the facility. Munroe couldn’t help but like him.

He bowed first, juggling pen and paper to shake her hand, and managing to affect the same sort of sloppiness in his actions as he did with his clothes. In English chipped and halting in the way of someone who had a lot of book knowledge but not much practice, he said, “Very nice to meet you.”

Bradford opened the door. To Okada he said, “You could have used the desk. Let yourself in next time, okay?”

Okada nodded yes but the rest of his body said no.

To Munroe Bradford said, “Tai’s my guy Friday. Runs interference between the departments, handles the language issues, explains the innuendo behind the corporate culture, and gets me what I need from the haters at the NSA and FBI.” Inside the office, he paused. He looked at Munroe, then at the room, and glanced at the door. “You can wander if you want,” he said, “or stay here. We’ve gotta go over some stuff. I’ll surface for air for lunch—that okay?”

Munroe dragged the extra chair over to the corner and held up her phone. “I’ve got a book,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”

Bradford’s focus turned toward Okada and work, as if a switch had been thrown and she’d ceased to exist. So she sat and fought the urge to listen in, her mind still stuck on what Bradford had said about Okada’s role. Information was only as good as its source, and if Okada was the funnel through which all of Bradford’s information was sourced, then on this job Okada was Bradford’s point of weakness.

Munroe shut down the thought.

Those were old patterns, old ways of thinking. This was Bradford’s mission, not hers, and in spite of her requests to work along with him, he’d made it clear she wasn’t welcome.

Bradford and Okada left the room and Munroe stared at the door. After all the times she and Bradford had worked together, had guarded each other’s backs, kept each other alive, he now relied on someone else and had left her behind. It was new, this sensation of feeling useless, of feeling unneeded—unwanted.

Eyes to the screen, she tried to focus on the book but couldn’t.

She pulled ear buds from her purse, tamped them into her ears, and cranked up the volume. Shut her eyes and drew a deep breath, moving backward into black and nothingness, but still the tingling burn persisted.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

—MASTER SUN TZU

The light flashed green, the machine chimed, the arm swung open, and Nonomi Sato, in flat, comfortable, ugly shoes, walked on toward the elevator bank, invisible in the routine.

The soft
dings
rang on behind her, right and left, layering over footsteps and hushed conversation. This was the company’s morning music, a melody of dread carried inside every employee, dread that today might be the day the corporate gestapo wanted another review.

Dread, harmonized with fear and suspicion.

Really, it was a beautiful song.

Sato stopped outside the guard station that led to the elevator. The prescreening procedure only allowed for one employee at a time.

Cameras watched, but she didn’t worry about them. They were deterrents for conformists and rule followers, an obvious announcement that the eyes were always, always recording, keeping honorable people from violating their own sense of honor. For deceivers, the threat was in what couldn’t be seen.

And even about those Sato didn’t worry.

She belonged here.

She was five foot two, with shoulder-length hair pulled tight into a bun, and wearing a drab knee-length skirt and dress shirt; clothes indistinguishable from those of every other female in the building. For that matter, she was a woman, indistinguishable from any other woman in the building. But, unlike most of the others, her teeth were straight and white and her chest a full cup size bigger, courtesy of Thailand’s best.

Sato handed the security man her badge and stood patiently, eyes lowered, as he matched the picture to her face, studying her intently.

He returned the badge, and when she reached to take it, he didn’t let go. Her eyes rose to meet his. He licked his lips. Folds of his chin pressed down into his collar and tiny beads of sweat dotted his hairline. Sato blushed, as was appropriate, and averted her gaze. The culture demanded such things.

The culture was suffocating.

Even nights tumbling in Bangkok’s dirty alleys, or working a hustle in Manila’s red-light district, would have been better than the claustrophobia and polite face-saving of Osaka’s corporate halls. But business was business.

She would remain proper and demure for as long as it took. Would keep her thoughts concealed in the same way that conformity concealed her individuality. Mother would be so proud.

Sato pressed her palm to the scanner embedded in the desk.

The machine rolled and whirred and chimed the all-clear.

She bowed several inches while her face maintained a polite mask. The guard’s hand brushed her thigh as she passed, his fingers racing in and up, claiming ownership for that brief second over what did not belong to him.

His boldness had grown, and with his boldness the violations had become more frequent. This, too, was part of the melody of dread and fear and suspicion. This was discordance, born from the ability to retaliate that emboldened those in positions of power to lord over the powerless.

Sato glanced at the guard’s badge and caught the name again, confirmation of what she’d read the day before yesterday.
Haruto Itou,
his badge said. In spite of her mother’s best attempts, kanji would always be a struggle and concealing this weakness was Sato’s daily atonement.

Itou was in his twenties, perhaps, recently promoted and full of self-importance. His insolence was an annoyance Sato could endure for the sake of the job; his obsession and stalking was another matter.

He’d attempted to follow her home for the third time last night.

This was a problem.

Sato continued from the guard’s post to the locker station around the corner. The door was already open, a workmate stuffing jacket and shoes into one of the many square cubbies that lined the room floor to ceiling.

Half of the lockers still had keys.

Sato chose an empty box and put her purse inside, performing for the hidden cameras and the audio recorders. She’d never searched for evidence of their existence—she wasn’t a fool—she simply assumed they’d be there, of all places, where peasants, mistrusted by the feudal overlords, exchanged one garb for the next.

Sato traded her shoes for company-provided slip-ons, closed the locker, and clipped the key to the lanyard with her security badge. Aside from her clothes, no personal belongings were allowed beyond the elevator doors.

They’d check her more thoroughly coming out.

These were layers of precaution for which she could thank legions of industrial spies throughout the decades: Chinese hackers, American government, Israeli military, corporate spies, in any combination, mixed and matched and more because the world was one big pond in which hypocritical thieving scum controlled an ecosystem where the many, many little fish living near the surface snapped at flies, squabbling over scraps, playing in the sun, blissfully unaware of what went on in the murky depths.

Sato, too, was a bottom feeder, but not like the others.

The security protocols focused on preventing data transmission.

Thick walls without windows and self-circulating ventilation kept the lab free of contaminants and prevented listening devices and lasers from stealing data out of the air. Without cables leading to the lab computers, without wireless connections, there was no pathway for hackers to break in and steal.

If the security protocols worked as the company had designed them to work, the other players, with all of their intelligence, gadgets, and technology, were locked out of the game, but none of the precautions were designed with a woman like her in mind. As long as she worked here, nothing they did could stop her from taking what she wanted.

Sato returned to the elevator, where the line was now backed up with two people waiting for the body scan. At the building’s front entrance, the cowboy walked in.

Sato kept her face toward the floor and observed him to the degree that she wasn’t obvious. He stopped at the front desk and chatted with the guards for a minute, letting them practice their English on him and buying goodwill for cheap. He stayed in the open area longer than any other employee would dare, smiling and nodding like a simpleton while his eyes tracked over each person, taking in more than he let on.

That was easy when most everyone wrote off his behavior as just more of the
gaijin
being a
gaijin,
even those who believed the rumors and gossip.

Sato moved forward one space in line.

The cowboy intrigued her. He was a hunter, keen enough to sniff out a trail. He’d proven that already, though he likely didn’t know it yet.

As if he’d read her thoughts, the cowboy’s head ticked up and he walked toward the elevator bank. Sato shifted her back to him slowly, a natural movement that wouldn’t flash evasiveness and challenge the pack leader to chase.

The line moved forward. She stepped between the screening walls beside the elevator so some pervert in the security department could get a good snapshot of her body, and when she stepped out, she glanced up to find the cowboy watching her.

Sato blushed when she made eye contact and covered her mouth when she smiled so slightly, because the culture demanded this, too. She turned to the elevator and pressed her thumb to the biometric reader while the cowboy’s eyes bored into her back. By the time she’d stepped inside and pressed her thumb to the interior reader, he was gone.

The doors closed and her hands and feet tingled.

For three years she’d toyed with her competition and teased the men in the security departments, but they were all like babies, easily taken and confounded by games of
inai inai ba
. But the cowboy, he was a man and a warrior, and the idea of facing off against a worthy combatant made her toes curl.