The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (28 page)

A duplicate belt wasn’t enough to set Bradford free, and the footage of him going without the belt for those weeks prior to the murder wouldn’t do much, either. These were doubts, insidious doubts, to taint the certainty of evidence. Getting the lawyer to question his own bias was a start. Getting the investigator and the prosecutor to do the same would be a whole other challenge.

Munroe searched the wall, with its web of interwoven connections and lies, seeking not to eliminate but to include, hunting for the larger picture hidden in the abstract. Hiring an outsider had created a rift in company leadership. On which side, she wondered, did the person who’d murdered that woman fall? Perhaps neither, though it continued to defy reason that a professional thief, undercover and entrenched, would have willingly brought such a level of scrutiny into the workplace as part of removing Bradford.

That was an inconsistency that just wouldn’t let go.

Munroe left the hotel for the facility. She was late to work but erratic hours and unpredictability were good for the opponent’s soul. She was altruistic in that way.

Noboru Kobayashi’s assistant nodded politely when Munroe entered the anteroom, and she ushered Munroe to a small sofa to wait. Of all the evils on the map of possibilities inside her head, coming to the head of corporate security was the least of them.

The wait dragged on past twenty minutes. When the door opened, two young men from the NSA side of things stepped out. Seeing her, their expressions darkened with accusation and mistrust and they walked quickly through.

Voice soft and bow low, the assistant motioned Munroe inward.

Kobayashi stood, offering more of that same overstretched welcome that he’d proffered the first time. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m between appointments and only have a few minutes.”

“I’ll be quick,” Munroe said. “I need an additional liaison for three days. I’d like Tai Okada, if you can spare him.”

Kobayashi remained standing and his face drifted into a scowl of contemplation. “My departments are already short-staffed,” he said. “This would deprive me of another man we already don’t have.”

Munroe stood, as if his objection had settled things and now she would go, and offered the closest thing she had to a threat. “I understand completely,” she said. “Knowing how management feels about outsiders, I wanted to bring the issue to you first. If you haven’t got the manpower, I’ll subcontract out.”

Kobayashi’s scowl softened. “Please sit,” he said, and when Munroe returned to her chair, he returned to his. “I appreciate you coming to me first,” he said. The rest of him said that she’d backed him against a wall and he was none too pleased. “With the way my departments have been separated from the work you do, focus has been divided. The liaison allows us to pull together and coordinate. We can find a way. Three days?” he said.

“Hopefully not more.”

“Additional personnel, I can manage,” he said. “Another department head is more complicated. You originally said you preferred to work with someone other than Okada.”

“I had thought starting fresh would be the better option,” she said. “That was a judgment error.”

“I see,” Kobayashi said, though clearly, more than anything, he was trying to see what true meaning lay behind the request and how he might sidestep unforeseen complications.

“Things have been going well in your integration?” he said.

“Very much so.”

“You’re making progress in the work?”

Now he was just fishing.

“Yes,” she said, and stood. “When should I expect Okada?”

Kobayashi eyed her, steely. “If I can make that arrangement,” he said, “he should be available tomorrow.”

He walked with her to the hall and stayed in the doorway, watching her go, just as he’d done on her first visit, and the pieces on the mental diagram shifted slightly to the right, making space for new data.

Munroe took the stairs to the mezzanine and found Dillman waiting at the base, arms crossed, eyes tracking her progress as if he’d come there knowing exactly where and when to find her.

Munroe flashed her badge, RFID chip included. “Are you tracking me?”

Dillman handed her a large, thick envelope. “Perks of the job,” he said. “Saves time. How’s Kobayashi-san?”

“He sends his regards and says don’t fuck anything up. What’s this?”

“The after-work stuff you wanted, redone by me.”

Munroe stopped, cocked her head, and smirked. “Really?”

“I’m not even a fish,” he said, and handed her another envelope, this one thinner. “Everything I could pull on your accountant friend, Nobu Hayashi.”

Munroe glanced down at the envelopes. Hayashi, by inviting her out to a hostess club, had made himself the prime suspect as the English speaker who’d been with Bradford the night the belt was stolen. That, in turn, made every one of his connections within the facility potential accomplices.

“Anyone else know you’re looking at this?” she said.

“Sent the night shift out for a break at two this morning,” he said, “Cleaned the queries out of the log files when I was finished.”

Munroe sniffed and wiped away fake tears. “You make me proud.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Dillman said, and turned to go. Over his shoulder he added, “And find someplace else to look through those because I’m still using your office.”

This early in the day, the break room was quiet. Several faces glanced up when Munroe entered and then went back to whatever they were reading or eating. Two men, foreheads on the table, eyes buried on their arms, missed her arrival entirely.

She took a chair at the back, pulled the pages out of the thicker envelope, and looked them over. Nothing jumped out as incongruent. The value in the new data would be as a control against the originals, a way to spot anything that might have been withheld the first time around, and the originals were at the hotel.

Munroe emptied the thinner envelope, although
thinner
was relative.

Dillman had been thorough, or perhaps passive-aggressive, giving her fifty-eight pages of tiny text and columns, sixty days of dates and time stamps and data tables, phone logs, the to–from of e-mail headers, browser history, and the goldmine of RFID matches on every employee that clocked the same location as Nobu Hayashi for more than thirty seconds a hit.

Pen in hand, Munroe started at the beginning, marking and notating, flipping forward and then back again, redacting first what she knew to be unimportant and then what she assumed to be of little consequence, searching for whatever patterns might be buried within the extraneous. An hour in, she stopped and drew a circle around Yuzuru Tagawa’s name.

Yuzuru Tagawa, her boss, as the head of operations, had legitimate reasons for interacting with a senior accountant, but the consistency and timing stuck out as anomalous. Tagawa had been on Bradford’s drive as one of the company executives, had been on her short list due to his link in the chain of Bradford’s hiring, and here in Hayashi’s connections Tagawa showed up again within three days on either side of each of Bradford’s visits to the hostess club.

Wary of falling prey to the same bias she despised in those who would imprison Bradford, Munroe set down the pen and stared at the spread-out pages. Twenty-twenty hindsight was a beautiful thing but not a divining rod and she didn’t believe in her own ego enough to condemn a life simply because the hunch felt right and the circumstances fit.

Her thumbs tapped out thought and analysis in irregular beats against the table. Time passed, people came and went, and four times employees she’d previously bantered with in the hallways stopped to say hello, one more inconsistency. She held the same position that Bradford had, yet except for the men in Dillman’s department, they interacted with her without the fear and suspicion they’d displayed toward him.

The room filled with the lunch crowd. Okada entered without food and, pulling out the chair beside her, kept a healthy distance from both Munroe and the table. He sat, shaggy hair hanging over his thick glasses, posture saying he would have preferred anything other than to be there right now, eyes staring large from behind his lenses as if wanting an explanation.

Tone flat, he said, “Kobayashi-san told me to talk with you.”

Munroe turned slightly to see him better. “Did he tell you why?”

Pleading, as if in having requested him she’d demoted him in a way that working with Bradford never could have, he said, “Michael, you already have the help you need.”

She said, “There are some things that only you can do.”

The night air, polluted with light, carried the rumble of evening trains and, with the thinning traffic, less of the city’s sense-dulling fragrance. Munroe left the facility for the far end of the lot, where she’d parked Bradford’s car, and pulled out to the street, watching for patterns in the rearview.

Things being what they were, trackers would have been placed on the Mira long before they’d been put on the Ninja, and things being what they were, she expected another tail.

Bradford had known about the trackers. At the least, he had to have suspected. In retrospect, the signs were all there. He’d left his phone behind that night he’d used her as cover to case the hostess club in Kitashinchi, a gesture that had been sweet in the moment, a way of ensuring that work wouldn’t encroach on what little time they had. And they’d gone on foot, supposedly to avoid the hassles of finding parking—lies behind the mask, now just more details rearranged in the maddening clarity of hindsight.

Headlights filled Munroe’s rearview mirror. A different set of lights than those of the night before, and a much different driving pattern.

She changed lanes and so did the lights.

She meandered and the car followed, much closer than the sparse traffic warranted, much closer than anyone following a tracker had any right to be.

The mental map changed shape again; mind adding, including, connecting through the abstract from hostess club to Bradford to Jiro to the facility.

She caught two shadows in the front seat, possibly a third in the back.

Munroe flipped the blinker and, taking her time, took a corner.

The car kept tight behind through each random turn and double back. The driver made no attempt to hide that he was there or any effort to communicate. He simply was, like a headache that wouldn’t go away, and so Munroe burned time and distance, routing toward high population areas where multiple stop-starts burned fuel faster. The guys behind her with their bigger car would inevitably run out first.

Lights in the mirror flashed brighter, flooding the Mira’s interior. The hood behind drew close enough that with a touch of speed, or a hint of her brakes, its grille would plow into her.

Munroe nudged the accelerator.

The headlights closed the distance and then the Mira jerked, as if it had been hit with a battering ram.

Munroe toed the gas and the little engine took up speed reluctantly.

The lights in the rearview trailed behind and then moved in closer.

The next bump came harder.

Munroe gripped the wheel, scanning options, running the odds.

The driver behind her didn’t let off the gas the way he would have if he wanted her out of the car, checking for damage. And he didn’t try to nudge in beside her to push her off the road, into lampposts, barriers, or buildings.

He wanted her to go faster.

Making the point, the grille slammed hard into the rear and the Mira juddered. Her options were limited. Brake, and the car behind would plow into her and the Mira would accordion and crush directly into an intersection; speed up, race through these narrow streets that had no stoplights or stop signs, and she invited vehicular homicide or its local equivalent, if a wreck didn’t kill her first.

The next slam sent Munroe’s chest hard into the seat belt and her neck snapped back. Ahead the roads were empty. No pedestrians, no bikes. She stomped on the accelerator and raced through the intersection blind, bracing for a crunch of metal and death.

She cleared through, the lights right up behind her.

Strategy arrived by way of a neon arrow and a parking garage ahead, promising room to maneuver just across the next junction.

The grille bumped her again.

Munroe punched the gas and peeled into the intersection. She slammed a foot onto each pedal and pulled the wheel hard. The Mira spun out, little tires crying against the pavement, chassis shuddering under tension it had never been built to handle. The car lurched to a stop, body angled nose to wall, but off the street.

Munroe threw off the seat belt and dumped out the passenger door.

The grille with the headlights and shadows sped by. She stared after the car, legs shaking, data sorting, questions tumbling, adrenaline racing.

The vehicle peeled a corner and the engine noise faded into the distance. The night went quiet and all that remained was her, the Mira, bright vending machines, a group of pedestrians far, far down the street, and the buildings standing in mute witness on either side.

Munroe opened the driver’s door and stood, eyes on the seat, seeing without really seeing. The boys in the garage with their pipes had been a warning, meant to wound and intimidate. Jiro’s men in her room, with their knives, had been revenge. This had been a setup for an accident, for criminal charges, to remove her from the facility in the same way Bradford had been removed.

Whatever she’d just escaped tonight would inevitably come back in another guise. This was just the warm-up.