Can I delay a stubbed method response with Mockito?

You could simply put the thread to sleep for the desired time. Watch out tho – such things can really slow down your automated test execution, so you might want to isolate such tests in a separate suite

It would look similar to this:

when(mock.load("a")).thenAnswer(new Answer<String>() {
   @Override
   public String answer(InvocationOnMock invocation){
     Thread.sleep(5000);
     return "ABCD1234";
   }
});