Munroe swiped the badge over the reader, the arm swung open, and she strode through without a backward glance, heading for Bradford’s office.

Above her, cameras tracked her movements. In the security operations center, databases processed the readings off the badge’s RFID chip, and she took her time, providing ample notice that she was in the facility, allowing the security team to red-flag the clearance that had gotten her inside and track her down.

Munroe stopped outside of Bradford’s office.

She knocked and, receiving no reply, opened the door to a room just as empty as it had been when Okada had shown it to her. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed and waiting, and when after several moments there was still no response from the security team, and six employees had passed with the same eye-avoiding courtesy nod-bow that they would have given to anyone else, she continued up the stairs and into the left-branching hall.

Three doors down and then to the right, she found the personnel department, a wide room filled with desks crammed front to back and side to side, much like the desks in the police precinct station had been.

Folders and binders were stacked here and there and the whispered whir of quiet activity and conversation filled the air against finger strokes on keyboards and the hum of photocopy machines.

A woman carrying a tablet stopped and asked Munroe if she needed help. Munroe unfolded the forms Bradford had left tacked to the contract and in English said, “Who do I see about this?”

The woman glanced over the first page, reading it out loud, talking to herself as much as to Munroe, and then motioned down beyond a row of desks, to another door.

In the end, it took less than twenty minutes to get the paperwork sorted out. Bradford had been thorough on the back end and clever in his arrangements, giving basis to his claim that he’d intended to bring her in long before this nightmare had started. Her role as a consultant meant payments went directly to his company, not to her, skirting the issue of her having been hired and putting the need for a work visa into a gray area. For now, having presented herself with the proper documents, Munroe was officially on the company roster, though not as an employee.

She commandeered Bradford’s office through another round of red tape and bureaucracy, culminating in the guarantee that a desk and chair would be waiting for her when she next returned, each step made as visibly as possible, and by the time she’d finished, there was no possibility that either branch of security was unaware of her presence.

Finished, she left the facility for the landing across the street from which she’d watched the doors waiting for Okada to arrive, killing time, building familiarity with faces and cars and train and bus schedules while the employees began the slow trickle home: far better than sitting in a hotel room, staring at the wall, attempting to conjure something out of nothing.

Evening came. Lights switched on. When only the late stragglers remained, Munroe left her perch and returned to the bike.

—

At nine in the evening Kitashinchi had barely begun to wake. Munroe found an empty doorstep within sight of the hostess club and, with her face and her foreignness somewhat disguised within shadows, she waited in the night and the neon and the numbing boredom of surveillance as the streets filled and the clock pushed on toward midnight and at last her mark arrived.

He was a man with expensive shoes, a portly belly, and a blush-red nose that spoke of having already experienced many hours and many drinks before arriving for the evening’s final hit. His visit to the club should have been a group affair, a way to make deals and bring finer points to agreement, ensuring that when they were raised in the boardroom no one risked the loss of face, but he arrived alone, just as he had the night before, chauffeured in a private car rather than by taxi.

Somewhere inside that club a woman counted off bonuses each time he returned for her, because surely that’s why he returned, and it was why Munroe had chosen him.

The car pulled to a stop, blocking the narrow street. The driver stepped out and Munroe rose from her perch. She timed her steps to the driver’s as he opened the rear door, timed her steps to the portly man’s as he heaved himself up from the backseat and the driver returned to the wheel, and collided with her target as his hand reached for the hostess club’s door, knocking him off balance.

She caught him when he tripped, straining as his weight bore down on her and the alcohol off his breath clogged her airway. She mimicked the deference that she’d seen from so many men in the everyday hierarchy that encompassed life in Japan, and then like in a scene from a badly acted movie, she brushed off his clothes with humbled apologies while he huffed and muttered in extreme offense until he realized she was a foreigner.

His tone changed to forgiveness midsentence.

He smiled with a mouth of yellowing teeth, launching into a monologue in drunken English that came close to a donkey’s bray.

Munroe humored him and begged to buy him a drink, knowing that at best he might infer that tonight was a difficult night for such things. She was a foreigner and foreigners were notoriously oblivious to the subtle ways of saying no, and that would allow her to push harder, but there was no need.

He was drunk and pleased to meet her.

The man with the broken capillaries and crooked teeth pounded her on her back and wrapped a meaty arm around her shoulders, and slurring Japanese just slightly more intelligible than his English, he walked her through the door.