The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (36 page)

If you know the place and time of battle, you can join the fight from a thousand miles away.

—MASTER SUN TZU

Sato slid the
shoji
open and stared an arm’s length in, at the door behind the door. The cameras between them had been pushed up to face the ceiling, an announcement that whoever had been in the house had been here, too, and wanted her to know.

But the steel door to the vault on the other side was still secure.

Sato tested the handle, then keyed in the code on the numerical pad.

The lock popped and she pulled the door open to cold air.

The room within the room was soundproofed and climate-controlled, and the lights turned on automatically with the motion of the door.

This was the reason she’d needed a house, not an apartment.

This was the reason for everything.

Sato stepped inside and sealed herself in, then scanned the waist-high shelves that lined opposite walls.

She shouldn’t be here, not still wearing her work blouse, not without showering and gowning for decontamination, but she had to see, had to know that the work hadn’t been disturbed.

She walked the shelf, looking over the 3-D printer, the computer, and the wires between, confirming that all was connected as it should be. She knelt to check the refrigerator and the glassed-in temperature box where the cell cultures incubated. This was a small-scale replica of the lab inside the facility, minus the operating theater and the test animals, although maybe one day she would add those, too.

As long as she had this lab, no amount of security at the facility could keep her from walking out with each day’s knowledge, and duplicating behind these walls what had worked there. She had no need to risk secreting the data out when she could create the successes fresh and skip the days of mistakes, sending the filtered knowledge on for a hefty fee.

The danger was in the staying, and she’d stayed too long because it had taken her six months just to catch up with the work already in progress while faking an education she hadn’t had. But she was good at her job. Both of them.

She knew the research, knew the competition.

Anyone with a 3-D printer, a little know-how, and the right cellular soup could biofabricate organs. The trick wasn’t in printing them, nor even in choosing the correct cell structures to lay down the network of veins and build multiple cell types; the trick was in controlling temperature, was in keeping the cells oxygenated and viable and providing them with a way to grow and function like native tissue. The fabricated cell lattice needed to incubate within a host.

They were close now, and in this Akio Tanaka in his genius was years ahead of the rest. They’d done two transplants, a culmination of the six years he’d spent perfecting the inherited technology. In the most technical sense, the transplants had been failures, but Sato knew them for the successes they were. They’d come so far, and they had learned, and they would move on to the next phase.

Sato wiped condensation off the incubator glass, then stood and left the room within the room and sealed the door, shutting the
shoji
to hide the room. She’d harvested her own cells, grown her own cellular soup, and stolen from other labs what she couldn’t create herself.

The day Tanaka successfully printed a heart she would print one of her own, and when the first human transplant trials started, she would arrange a trip to Thailand and, honoring Mother as a daughter should, become Mother’s own donor. The danger was in staying, and she’d stayed too long. Pride had kept her here, and now this sacred life-giving place had been violated.

Sato glanced up at the cameras, pointed toward the ceiling.

This wasn’t the address on her paperwork at the facility. This wasn’t the address to which her vehicle was registered. There wasn’t a way, in any meaningful sense, for someone to have found her and followed her here without her knowing about it, and yet they had.

Whoever had done this, knew what they were doing.

Whoever had done this had left a message.

Sato dragged a chair from the kitchen and stood on it to readjust the camera angle, then stalked over to her computer and went back through the footage.

Only one camera still functioned, on the third floor, leading to the unused bedroom. Sato ran up the stairs for the futon closet, to the false floor that hid the money box. She pulled hard, pried the board up, and stared into an empty hole.

If she could have screamed, she would have shattered glass.

She’d only had a month’s pay in that safe, but that wasn’t the point.

Someone had known where to look, had taken what was hers, had taken just enough to cause her pain and wanted her to know they’d done it.

Sato clenched her hands and gritted her teeth, then spun around.

She slogged down the stairs, into the empty dining room, and stared at the floor and the sheet of paper she’d laid down. Her food was cold, but what did that matter, she had no appetite. She grabbed the whisky glass, still half full, and tossed the smooth liquid into the sink. Then she sat, and with the fever burning, she stared some more.

Good warriors sought effectiveness in battle through momentum, not from individual people. The ambush had failed, but this map was momentum.

Munroe found temporary refuge and a few hours’ sleep on a futon in a manga caf
é
cubicle and was on her way again before the workday began. She took the train to the city center and walked the awakening streets, following directions she’d mapped out a week earlier when threats to Bradford’s lawyer had seemed appropriate and reasonable.

She stopped at the western entrance of an eighteen-story building that filled an entire corner, shadowing sidewalks and portions of the wide multilane intersection from the morning sun. She dialed, glancing up, and waited through the tones.

When the line connected, there were no receptionist lies.

Soon the lawyer answered, and Munroe said, “Has your client been indicted?”

“Not yet,” he said.

With those two words, the reality of the present washed in, bringing weakness, bringing loss and longing with the dread she’d not allowed herself to feel. Munroe pushed it all away. This was a lapse, a momentary lapse.

She had a client, she had a goal.

Until the contract was fulfilled, there was only that and nothing more.

She said, “Has he confessed?”

“I’ve not received notification of such. There has also been pressure from important people on my client’s behalf—my client has many friends.”

This was good. Perhaps Warren Green had pulled rank. Or someone Sam Walker had drawn in from among those who owed Bradford favors. Regardless of who or where the influence was coming from, it would minimize Bradford’s suffering. Abuse of power had a way of dissipating when those in power realized that the seemingly helpless had powerful friends.

“Have you seen him?” she said.

“Briefly, together with a representative from the U.S. embassy.”

“I promised to get you what you need to help your client,” Munroe said. “I have material for you.”

“I have an appointment in thirty minutes.”

“I’m outside your office,” she said. “Give me those thirty minutes.”

Munroe took the elevator up to the sixteenth floor. An assistant greeted her at the door and walked her through a narrow tiled hallway to a corner office, where a bookshelf lined one wall and the floor space was barely enough to squeeze in a desk and chairs, but the view was nice.

The lawyer was a small man, quick on his feet, oozing the type of energy that came packaged in cans and bottles. He stood when she entered, sizing her up from top to bottom in a blink. He motioned to a chair. “We only have a little time.”

Munroe sat, pulled a box from her pack, and placed it on the desk.

“The murder weapon,” she said. She’d scuffed the belt and for what it was worth rubbed the buckle with Bradford’s dirty laundry, then wiped the leather down to remove prints as a plausible explanation for why Bradford’s weren’t on it. The lawyer looked into the box, harrumphed, and then capped it again.

Munroe followed with a piece of paper that she laid out flat.

The lawyer took his chair. Munroe picked up a pen.

Convincing him wasn’t the same as convincing a judge, but in a system where informal negotiations outside the courtroom were what guided the process forward, she would give him a way to adjust the timbre.

Human nature begged for simplicity, for easy answers within already established beliefs. The more complex the truth, the further a scenario strayed from what was commonly accepted to be true, the easier it became to reject the truth. Belief mattered more than fact.

Belief was effortless, like belts and foreign killers.

She said, “I’m going to throw a lot of information at you—motives and connections—I’ll do it in as few words as possible, but it’s messy.”

“Is it provable?”

Munroe met his eyes and held his gaze.

“Yes,” she said, “but not with the money you’re being paid. I’ll give you the facts, you figure out what you can do with them.”

She drew a circle in the middle of the page.

“ALTEQ-Bio Gaisha,” she said. “A cutting-edge leader in the biotech field. The executives believe someone on the inside has been stealing trade secrets and selling them to a competitor.”

She blocked out a square on the bottom left of the page.

“Yuzuru Tagawa, head of operations for ALTEQ,” she said. “Six years ago a security flaw at Kinjo Ichi Gaisha, which was ALTEQ’s chief rival at the time, resulted in data theft on a valuable, tightly controlled project. Two months later ALTEQ announced a breakthrough with the same technology. Tagawa’s brother, responsible for maintaining Kinjo Ichi’s security, was fired. He committed suicide. A year later Yuzuru Tagawa began working at ALTEQ.”

Munroe blocked a square in the top left corner.

“Jiro Sasaki,” she said. “I’m pretty sure you know who he is. One of his legitimate businesses is also in the biotech field, and starting a year after Yuzuru Tagawa began work at ALTEQ, his company has twice beat ALTEQ to the market with identical products.”

She drew a line connecting the two boxes and drew an
X
in the middle.

“If you look hard enough and ask questions of the right people, you’ll be able to connect Sasaki and Tagawa through clandestine meetings.”

The lawyer, protest and objection written on his face, opened his mouth.

Munroe held up a hand. “I’m just getting started,” she said. “Wait until I’m finished.”

She drew a square in the bottom right corner.

“Miles Bradford,” she said. “Hired on by ALTEQ to uncover the thief.” She traced a line from Tagawa’s box to Bradford’s and drew an
X
in the middle. “Meilin, the murder victim. If you talk to her family, you’ll discover that she was Yuzuru Tagawa’s clandestine lover. This lead, a plausible motive and a potential suspect, was dismissed and then abandoned by Tadashi Ito, the lead investigator.”

She drew a second
X
between Tagawa and Bradford. “The belt, the murder weapon,” she said, and drew arrows to both Tagawa and Jiro. “Again, if you ask the right questions of the right people, you’ll learn that Miles Bradford had been invited by ALTEQ employees to a hostess club in Kitashinchi, also owned by Jiro Sasaki. Two weeks before the murder there was a fight at the club in which Jiro’s men took the belt from Miles Bradford.

“Lastly,” she said, and she drew a fourth box on the page and placed a question mark within it. She drew a line between Jiro’s box and the question mark and scratched another
X
between them. On the
X
she wrote in Tadashi Ito.

“The man who investigated the murder your client is said to have committed, the same man who dismissed the fact that the murder victim had a lover at the facility, who never looked beyond the crime scene at the facility or put resources to anything other than establishing your client as the guilty party. Look hard,” she said, “and you’ll find a link between him and Jiro Sasaki. I got my information from a private investigator, so it shouldn’t be difficult for you to do the same. I have met Tadashi Ito and I believe he has a circumstantial detail that points away from your client as the murderer. In the United States we call that exculpatory evidence, and the prosecution, if honest, will turn that over to the defense.”

“What is this circumstantial detail?” the lawyer said.

“There’s been a second murder at the facility.”

The lawyer glanced up, his expression washed in surprise. “When did this take place?” he said.

“Six days ago.”

“You only tell me now?”

“I’ve been busy trying to not get killed,” she said. “Technically, I shouldn’t have had to tell you at all.”

“It’s different here,” he said. He glanced down at the page and pointed to the empty box in the upper right corner. “What about the question mark?”

“Yuzuru Tagawa has been stealing and selling company technology, but so has someone else. He initiated hiring your client as a way to eliminate his competition within the company. Presumably your client uncovered damaging information and the murder was a way to remove your client from the facility.”

“You’re saying Yuzuru Tagawa killed the woman?”

“Yes.”

“And that he acquired the murder weapon from Jiro Sasaki?”

“Yes.”

“And the question mark?”

“I only know that it exists,” Munroe said.

The lawyer crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair, leveling accusation and suspicion in that one movement.

“The second murder,” he said. “Who did it?”

“That’s for the investigator to determine,” she said. “But it wasn’t your client.”

“You evade.”

“My concern is your client.”

The lawyer continued studying her and then leaned in toward the paper again. The silence was filled with the beat of a metronome on the wall and soft voices from down the hall, while he examined what she’d drawn. At last he nudged the page in her direction. “This presents a very clear theory,” he said, “but even if every detail is accurate, without a way to prove the connections we remain in the same position.”

“What do you need?” she said. “What would be enough to convince the prosecutor that your client isn’t their man?”

The lawyer blew out a long exhale and stared out the window.

He wouldn’t say it, but she knew the sigh.

If those investigating the case were in bed with special interests, they couldn’t predict who else in the justice food chain might be as well.

“Use the information as best as you can,” she said, and stood. “I’m going to get you a confession.”

“From my client?”

“From the killer.”

“How?” he said.

“Don’t know,” she said. “But there’s a good chance I’ll get arrested in the process, and if that happens, you’ll get a call. You’d better come find me.”