The shopping arcade was a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel, essentially a series of covered pedestrian streets. A department store anchored an intersection and on the floor with beauty supplies Munroe tracked down a set of grooming clippers. Two floors down, where an assortment of stationery supplies filled half the floor with enough miniature office everything to put a hardcore crafter into a cutesy-color coma, she bought pens and paper.

In the hotel room she dumped her trove on the bed and carried the clippers into the bathroom cubicle. Her hair, already overgrown by the time she’d left Djibouti, had lengthened even more over the last few months. Not long enough to be explicitly feminine, but long enough to cause doubt, and doubt was never a good thing in subterfuge.

Munroe leaned over the sink and turned on the shears.

With well-practiced fingers she ran the blade guard up the back of her head and then the sides, switching out combs as needed, feeling for places she’d missed. Strands of dark brown fell into the basin, and then smaller slivers, and then those smaller still.

She shut off the clippers and stood staring at the image made blemished and blotchy under the fluorescent lights. She was no longer the woman who’d arrived in Japan to visit her lover, but the man who would set him free.

—

Munroe shoved the television to one side of the long, narrow desk and taped several of the large sheets of paper along the wall in a de facto command center. Working off the notes she’d scribbled while still at the apartment, recounting the details claimed from perusing Bradford’s external drive, she compiled the information into a visual representation of the many threads entangled inside her head.

She had no interest in the thief for the sake of uncovering theft; that had been Bradford’s job. But espionage and machinations walked hand in hand, and since theft was why Bradford had been hired, theft would lead her to whoever had set him up.

She drew the facility building according to satellite images and sketched the department divisions according to what she remembered from her visits. Onto index cards Munroe wrote the names from Bradford’s drive, taping them to the facility map based on where they ranked in the company’s hierarchy. This outline was the beginning, the path to the end, and at the moment it was nothing but a big black hole where information should be.

The company employed more than eight hundred people, which provided plenty of wiggle room for murderers and spies. Bradford had, in so many words, told her that the three folders on his drive were the only avenues he’d seen for stolen data to move out of the facility: through upper management, the team down in the lab, or security personnel.

Munroe tossed a pillow from the headboard to the middle of the bed, leaned back, and studied her handiwork, and when thinking reached the point of diminishing returns, she dug through the backpack with Bradford’s things and pulled out a shirt and a pair of pants. She dressed in his clothes, though she didn’t fill them out the way that he had, and emptied the spare wallet he’d left behind, replacing the contents with her own.

She shoved the wad of leather into her pocket, picked up the helmet.

This was her element: stealing secrets.

Now it was time to steal another.