The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (7 page)

The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.

—MASTER SUN TZU

Nonomi Sato crept along the open hallway, hugging the concrete railing, careful not to cast shadows or leave traces of her presence. She’d disconnected the security lighting, but nothing could be done about the cloud-covered moon or the bath of light pollution.

Sato turned the key, slow and quiet. The lock gave and she depressed the handle, nudging the door open one controlled centimeter at a time.

Shoes in the
genkan
told the story of the home’s occupants and estimated their ages and sizes: son, mother, father, grandmother.

This was almost too easy and that took away the fun.

Sato stepped into the house, shoes still on, clothes black, supple, and tight like a second skin, a nighttime skin, because night was when the carnivores came out to hunt.

Haruto Itou
his badge had said, and she found him in his room, still awake and at his computer, with his back to the door. He never heard her enter. He was bigger and fatter; he would make a lot of noise if she fought him.

She crossed the tatami silently and whispered his name.

He startled, turned, and seeing her, put his back to the desk.

She put a finger to her lips and said, “Don’t tell.”

His mouth opened. With a seductive pout, she removed the pin from her bun and allowed the wig hair to tumble down in waves. Then she unzipped the upper layer of her body suit, exposed cleavage, and moved closer to him.

Itou offered a hint of a smile.

Sato bit her lip in sly promise. “You’ve looked for me,” she said. Slow and sensual, she reached for his hand, brought it to her chest, and rubbed his fingers across a nipple. “You wanted to touch, and now I’ve come to you.”

She stepped around and nudged her thigh between his legs, sidled up to his groin, and ran his hand down her belly, ever lower. “You want more?” she said. “You can have it all, just as you imagined.”

He hardened against her thigh and his hands came alive on their own, groping with all the experience of a schoolboy.

She took his palms and pressed them together, nudged him back, and whispered, “We will need time. More than these few hours left of the night. We’ll skip work tomorrow. Write to your department manager, tell him you’re ill.”

Itou hesitated and she pressed her mouth nearer his head, ran her tongue from the base of his ear, over his earlobe, and traced her fingers up his thigh. His breath caught.

“It’s just one day,” she said. “Or I could simply go home now and we can forget this embarrassing incident.”

His mouth moved in a whisper, but no words formed, then he opened an e-mail. She teased him as he typed, struggling to keep up with the characters that rose on the screen. “Also, a note to your parents,” she said, and she pointed toward the notebook on his desk. She wouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t touch anything inside this home unless she had to. With her hair tight beneath the wig and her body scrubbed clean before she’d dressed, she’d done everything possible to prevent leaving behind evidence that she’d been there.

He picked up the paper and found a pencil.

“There,” she said, her fingers still tracing his inner thigh, her breath still heavy in his ear, “tell them you’ve gone for a while and not to worry about you, that there are things”—she paused and took his hand, pulling his thumb into her mouth, wetting his skin with her lips and tongue—“tell them there are things you must think about. That will keep them from bothering you and gives us time, yes?”

He put down the pencil and turned to face her, his face flushed, hands trying to get further inside her suit. She batted them away. “No, silly boy,” she said. “Write the note so we can go and we can take our time and do things the proper way.”

He scribbled, and she read over his shoulder, and when he had finished, she took his hand and guided him out of the room into the
genkan,
allowing him but a second to grab a pair of shoes before they slipped through the door.

Outside in the hall, she laughed a soft girlish giggle and ran, leading him along by the hand down the stairs and to the alley, where she’d parked the car.

The mountain road wound tight and narrow, a wall of rock on one side, a guardrail on the other, and enough pavement for a vehicle and a half. The drop over the edge and into the trees was a hundred feet at least.

Munroe gave the Ninja a little more speed.

The bike hugged the turn and her body moved with the machine, balanced and beautiful, and perfectly terrified. The heady rush crested in a wave, sweet and smooth, like morphine released through a handheld drip.

In the near distance, a delivery truck rounded a curve and the vehicle lurched its way toward collision. In pure slow-motion clarity, adrenaline surged, and the self-destructive forces that propelled her to gamble with her life rose from deep sleep.

Time spliced into nanosecond slivers. In her head she tossed life against a chemical high that soothed and shushed and pushed the world away.

The truck sounded its horn.

The engine on the Ninja whined; the urges cried for release.

Accelerate or brake, there was no third option.

The roulette wheel began to spin: probability colliding with possibility and churning out the odds of mortality. The road widened slightly. Munroe gauged distance and space, her foot shifted gears, and her hand nurtured the throttle, preparing to tear through the opening between truck and guardrail at the widest point.

Instead she decelerated, then braked, almost too hard to control the bike. The truck passed on her left, the wrong side of the road, the driver screaming obscenities through the window.

Munroe stopped and pulled off the helmet. Frustration rose to take the place of exhilaration and she sat silently for a long while, feet on the ground balancing the bike, head tipped up, listening to the sound of the forest that filled in for traffic as the adrenaline ebbed and the reality of the decision she’d almost made hit hard.

Shame replaced frustration.

She’d finally reclaimed the happiness she’d had when she and Bradford were last together, before fate had sucked them into a vortex of loss, yet even that wasn’t enough to protect her from herself.

The surprise wasn’t that she’d been willing to throw everything away on a two-foot margin of error. It was that she’d stopped before the wheel of chance had finished spinning. She might not be so fortunate again.

She’d been in one place, without purpose, for too long.

The phone in her back pocket vibrated.

Munroe glanced at the sky, still far too bright for Bradford to be headed home. She answered his call, oozing sugar into her voice.

“Hey, stranger,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Have dinner with me tonight?” Bradford said.

“Oooh,” she said. “You’re taking me out on a date?”

“That would depend on if you can find a way to pencil me in.”

“I might be able to work that. Is it a fancy-clothes night?”

“Your fanciest.”

“What’s the special occasion?”

“Do we need one?”

“Now you’re being tricky.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a maybe.”

“What if I beg?”

“I’ll accept groveling.”

“I’ll be home at eight.”

She smiled. “See you at eight.” She stared at the clock on her phone. So far out of the city, she’d have to push to get to the apartment in time. This was fate tempting her.

Munroe shoved the phone into her pocket and pulled the helmet on. Bradford had said another month or two until he finished this contract, but that was wishful thinking. The job would drag on indefinitely, and she could only last so long within the constraints of societal control that accompanied safe predictability, ignore so many of the same stares and glares and fake friendly smiles, visit so many temples and shrines, spend so much time bathing in ancient culture, touch the limits of nuance in flower arranging and so many tea ceremonies, before she lost her goddamn mind.

Munroe checked behind her and eased back onto the road, giving the Ninja speed slowly, holding back against the addiction that called her to open up again and hurtle, bike screaming, into peace. If Bradford’s goal was to keep her alive until his job was finished, something was going to have to give.

It would soon.

And she’d come to wish she’d not been so careless with that thought.

Munroe knew, even before she parked, that something was wrong. The hints and whispers, like blank spaces on a cluttered canvas, were in the posture of those who headed out of the facility’s front doors, in the way they clustered in groups while walking for the train, in the furtive steps they took, rushing for their cars, as if they shared a common fear.

Munroe pulled the Ninja as close to the corner as possible, and with the bike rumbling, she called Bradford to let him know she’d arrived.

She got his voice mail and hung up without leaving a message.

He’d been late before; slow to answer before.

Half the windows in the facility reflected the dark of empty offices. Security lights in the parking lot blinked on in the evening light.

Munroe called again, got Bradford’s voice mail again, hung up again.

On another night she would have attributed the lack of response to an extended meeting or to the insane work hours that kept him late into evenings and over weekends. But tonight her instincts rose and the texture between beats of silence hinted at more.

The clock on her phone now said eight o’clock.

He’d asked her to pick him up at seven-thirty.

Munroe sent a text and with each passing minute of nonresponse, the slow roil of fear and uncertainty stretched higher, from deep down in the pit of her stomach, where the churning always started before bad news arrived.

She slid off the bike and stared in the direction of the facility’s doors. Called Bradford again. No answer again.

Anxiety filled her diaphragm in anaphylactic response to the allergen of experience: a life in which those few she grew close to, that she dared to love, were inevitably torn from her by death’s wretched breath.

Munroe left her helmet beside the one bungee-corded to the passenger seat and, on autopilot, strode for the doors.

At the security desk she asked for Bradford.

Instead of phoning, as was typical, the uniformed guards told her to step aside and wait, then conversed in hushed tones.

The roiling thickened, suffocating in its prescient awareness that fate had come to snatch away the one she loved once more.

The guards came to an agreement. They made a call and then, with false reassurance, told her the wait would be but a moment longer.

Munroe heard the hurried, shuffling footsteps and knew from the beat that they didn’t belong to Bradford. Tai Okada rounded the corner, his face a guise covering agony.

He didn’t sign for her, didn’t request a temporary badge.

He motioned to the front doors and said, “Please, let’s go outside.”

Fight or flight instinct collided with itself, because in the moment she could neither fight nor flee, and she followed silently, treading water with every lurch, drowning in each forward surge.

Okada stopped ten or more meters down, the building to his back at the midpoint between two windows where there’d be less chance of being overheard. He brushed hair out of his eyes. He fidgeted, his hands seeking each other, then releasing again.

Munroe stared at him.

“The police came for Miles today,” he said. “They took him.”

The words filtered from his mouth into Munroe’s ears, and on hearing them she almost laughed with a heady rush that made her dizzy with hope.

Bradford was still alive.

“Why?” Munroe said.

“A woman has been killed in the building. They say Miles killed her.”

Elation dissipated into a vortex of convolution and error.

Given the life that Bradford had led, he wasn’t an innocent man.

War made murderers out of honest men—proclaiming guiltless by law what the conscience would later bear in shame—but there was innocence and then there was innocence, and if Bradford had targeted a kill, then the body would have disappeared and the evidence scattered and never found.

Munroe took a step into Okada’s personal space, forcing him to look up at her, and like a five-year-old on constant replay, she said, “Why?”

“They found the body this morning,” Okada said. He stepped to the side, out from under her glare. “She was killed this morning, early.”

The answer was a nonanswer, information without connection, but the hair on Munroe’s arms rose in recognition nonetheless. Bradford had received an early morning call and because of that she’d taken him in an hour ahead of his routine. “Tell me everything you know,” she said.

Gaze focused on the sidewalk, Okada said, “I cannot.” He twitched with the nervous right-left of a man expecting to be caught, questioned, and accused. Munroe measured the unspoken.

If Okada had known nothing, or he’d had nothing more to offer, he would have framed his statement differently. She took a step back and then walked away.