The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (11 page)

To advance irresistibly, push through their gaps. To retreat elusively, outspeed them.

—MASTER SUN TZU

Nonomi Sato passed through the stiles and walked, head down, toward the elevator, listening to the furtive hushed movement within the company’s morning song. Death—murder—had so quickly deepened the timbre.

The cowboy had been framed, fingered as the guilty party, and his threat had been removed, all of these actions adding instruments to the haunting melody of deception. But beneath the suspicion and dread—she could hear it now—flowed running notes of doubt.

Not everyone believed in the cowboy’s guilt.

The beauty of fear, the beauty of social control through judgment, was that that thought would never be voiced. To rise above the collective soul, to raise an opinion that contradicted the accepted sequence of events, was to commit an honorless career suicide. No, the truth had died when the cowboy was led in handcuffs out the front doors.

The police had come, asking questions, bringing intense scrutiny that Sato would have much preferred to avoid, but the deed was done and she couldn’t change that. The only thing left to her now was to contain the fallout.

She wasn’t concerned. Not yet.

She continued to remain above suspicion, but like the running notes in the air around her, she, too, had her doubts. Doubts that the cowboy’s departure was truly the end of the threat. Those who were skilled at the unorthodox, men who were worthy, men like the cowboy, were inexhaustible like great rivers. When they came to an end, they began again, and when they died, they were reborn.

And so it had been.

Another foreigner had shown up in the cowboy’s absence, hunting, sniffing, and scouting. He’d arrived at odd hours, conspiring with Tai Okada, the cowboy’s former accomplice. Sato hadn’t seen this newcomer, but the rumors had reached her by the morning after the murder.

She suspected the man on the motorcycle, the faceless man behind the visor. The rumor said that the newcomer, unlike his predecessor, was not a man of strength or war but was long and thin, likely weak and easily intimidated.

There was no thrill to be found among the weak.

Only time would tell what this strange turn would bring.

Sato reached the elevator and handed the guard her badge.

A new guard, recently hired to replace Haruto Itou, the groper, the stalker, who had written to say he was sick and then skipped the next day and then another. His employer had never looked for him. By now his family would have begun to wonder.

Sato had driven him to the forest and seduced him up a path. Had settled him naked on a blanket, drunk and overdosing on a cocktail of pain medication and muscle relaxants, with pornographic magazines clenched in his hand. She’d stayed long enough to ensure that he’d stopped breathing.

Japanese culture, without a Judeo-Christian morality, held few sexual taboos. Uncommon fetishes, yes: sex with young girls, sex with animals, sex with inanimate objects, sex with animate objects. Yet, somehow, strangely, homosexual sex was the unacceptable shame.

The Japanese had over a dozen words for suicide.

She’d seen to it that Haruto Itou had experienced one of them.

Sato passed beyond the elevator security for the cubicles. The new guard didn’t grope her. With any luck he wouldn’t try to follow her home, either.

Bradford had been married and divorced twice, though he claimed the second marriage, for only eight months, didn’t count. Munroe followed the digital trail of that short-lived marriage through public records. She filled out online forms for a certified copy of his marriage certificate and hunted through searches until she found a specimen of what the real thing would look like, courtesy of an abandoned blog.

She tracked down a custom office-supply business in Thailand, her way to a forged county seal, and, on the chance that she’d be running multiple identities on multiple passports, included a scan of her passport’s entry stamp so that she would have the means to create her own. The manga café became her residence for express shipping, her credit cards an unfortunate trail for expedited processing.

Five hours of hyperfocus and untold broken laws had laid down those first steps, and now with nothing but time and questions, she straightened out body kinks and turned to the external drive Bradford had left in the drawer.

The café’s computers had allowed her anonymity; her laptop, disconnected from the Internet, gave her privacy. Munroe rolled up the futon and stretched out on the floor. Head propped up on the cushion, she plugged in the drive and, with the computer balanced on her stomach, began the slow quest of perusing folders: personnel files, financial records—documents that Bradford likely had legitimate access to but didn’t want anyone knowing he was scrutinizing, nothing personal or illegal.

Three sets of folders, titled 1one, 2two, and 3three stood out from the rest. Each contained five to twenty subfolders beneath, and each of those bore a name, two of which Munroe recognized from promotional material as C-level employees. The subfolders themselves contained material that had been downloaded and assembled from company files, presumably by Okada.

She sat up and scooted across the tatami for the desk. With her laptop on one side, and the café’s computer on the other, she cross-referenced the folders’ names with public information. Extrapolating from those that turned up hits, as best as she could tell, one set of the folders was comprised of members of upper-level management, the second most of the members of the security departments, and the third a selection of employees who worked in the lower-level labs.

By the time midnight rolled around and the subdued noises of the café had grown slightly louder, Munroe had found nothing to explain those nights when Bradford’s words had said he was at the office and his calendar notes said he wasn’t. She lay down and draped an arm over her eyes to block the room’s low light.

The lies returned, and the months of conversations and interactions, prodding and searing like hot branding irons, casting doubt on every kiss and every promise. She knocked her head back against the futon in a physical attempt to make the roller coaster stop, yet couldn’t sever the personal obsession from cold investigation.

Munroe pulled out the calendar sheets and went over them again, measuring every entry, every day, against the days she’d lived, the experiences they’d shared, the stories he’d told, the touches, the words of affection; judging and questioning, attempting to divine truth from obfuscation and growing angry in the process. Wary and guarded was who she was to the world, but not with him, and she hated him for having stolen from her that one small shred of trust.

With a list of phone numbers in hand, Munroe left her temporary haven for the outside, where the day had already long begun and the remnants of rain that had fallen in the night had thickened into weighted humidity.

Here, the streets were wider than where the apartment stood, and the sidewalks were actual sidewalks. Tucked out of the way of foot traffic, she dialed the first of the numbers that, for the sake of privacy and her desire to be able to speak freely, she couldn’t dial from within the café.

An hour of calls and many lies led her to the facility in which Bradford was held, and the confirmation that he was there and he was alive, such a small connection to him, brought both agony and relief.

The marriage certificate was the first package to arrive. Clock ticking on a booth that she kept paying for, Munroe left for the train station and found an electronics store nearby, where three tightly packed floors of cameras, TVs, computers, and gadgets put American big-box retailers to shame in the way a Swiss village cheese shop trumped a Walmart deli counter.

In the camera section a question she posed to the first employee seemed to transfer of its own accord through tiny huddles of conspiracy and finally netted her a phone number for a photography studio. A call provided walking directions and Munroe found the place just down the road, four floors up a narrow stairwell, with a coffee shop, hair salon, and restaurant stacked like LEGO blocks beneath it.

The door led into a single room, the entry separated from the studio by a long, tall glass-topped counter that held a display of urban photography. At the far end of the room, a woman glanced up. In flawless English, she said, “Can I help you?”

Munroe pulled Bradford’s marriage certificate from the envelope. “I need a document photographed,” she said. “We spoke about thirty minutes ago.”

“Oh,” the woman said, and then, as if the surprise had escaped her lips before she’d had a chance to censor, she smiled slightly and said, “Your Japanese is very good. I didn’t realize you were a foreigner.”

“Your English is good, too. California?”

“Oregon. Went for college and married instead.”

“You miss it?”

The woman reached for the document and Munroe handed it to her. “Sometimes,” she said, “though I don’t miss my ex.” She tilted the paper against the light so that the watermarks showed. They were what had turned getting a quality digital copy into more than a visit to a scanner.

“This shouldn’t be too difficult,” the woman said. “I need to set up the equipment—maybe a half hour or so.”

Munroe left for the restaurant a few floors down, another little box with a countertop that ran parallel to a windowed wall, the accoutrements of a kitchen behind the counter, and lounge-style seating filling what was left of the space.

She ate without tasting, without enjoyment or appetite, pork cutlet—
tonkatsu
—and rice and cabbage, satisfying a need for protein and a semblance of nourishment because her brain required fuel. When the food was gone and an hour had passed, she collected her prize from the studio upstairs and returned to the manga café.

Altering the digital file would have been easier if the available software had been in English, but eventually, pixel by pixel, Bradford’s ex-wife’s name became Munroe’s. A quality print on heavy-weight paper cut down to letter size created a replica so near to the original that only the absence of watermarks separated fake from original, with nothing to indicate that watermarks had originally been there.

The seal arrived by special delivery in the afternoon and its embossing became the texture of the lie. On such short notice and without connections, the forgery was as close to the real thing as Munroe could get. She ran her fingers over the raised seal, closed her eyes, and breathed in the illusion.

The marriage certificate was a prop, a way to satisfy bureaucratic expectations. Far more important was her ability to play the role ordained by the paper and so become what those with the power to say yes expected to see and no one thought to question the paper’s provenance.

She needed one visit, only one. If she failed to acquire that, if the officials insisted on verifying the document before letting her in, then even she, as Bradford’s best hope, wouldn’t be enough to fix this mess and he was already lost.