Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  More men started running. One by one, he dropped them as though it was the easiest thing in the world. His massive, leather-clad hand dwarfed the blades he threw. He was all dark confidence. Nerves of steel. No mercy, no apologies. Never a fuck-up. Never a break in his excellence. She watched him move, body torqueing, pure economy, fingers hugged by the leather, shining where it gripped tightest.

  A silver barong had appeared in his left hand, the essential Kabakas accessory. It seemed to glide alongside him as he closed the distance with a confident stride, brown skin gleaming with sweat, muscles surging over his forearms and disappearing into his gloves. The man pulsed with power.

  Surely it couldn’t be him after all these years, but her heart pounded all the same. It was like seeing your favorite rock star.

  She shouldn’t think of him like that, considering the Yacon fields massacre, but she had a special compartment for pre-Yacon fields Kabakas. The Kabakas from the photo. Her white whale.

  Another barong appeared. His pack, she noted, contained multiple barong swords. The multiple swords suggested he was a fake. Kabakas always carried just two barongs—never more.

  A shot tore the air. Dirt sprayed around his feet. He just kept going as though he believed himself impervious to bullets, another Kabakas thing. Another shot blasted out, and Kabakas, almost lazily, tossed the barong into the far-off jungle.

  Another mistake—Kabakas never tossed a barong sword. The barong was not at all a tossing weapon.

  And then a body tumbled down from the trees. With a sword through his face.

  She stiffened, transfixed.

  Kabakas never did that; yet the brutality, the outrageousness, that felt very Kabakas.

  No. No way.

  Feverishly she worked at the knots as gunfire raged, as men cried out.

  Concentrate, focus.

  Things grew silent. When she looked up again, everyone was dead except for Aguilo behind her and Guz, who cowered behind an overturned truck.

  Motion from the side. A small, dark figure strolled out from the jungle wall, assault rifle in hand. He, too, wore a blood-red mask, but he was small. Just a child.

  The Kabakas impostor ignored the boy; he was going for Guz, clutching the curved hilt of the barong. His hand gripped and pulsed with power inside that glove.

  Guz scrambled out from behind and took off toward the Jeep—toward her.

  No!

  He’d draw the Kabakas impostor’s attention toward her. She redoubled her efforts to get free.

  Guz slowed enough to twist around and shoot wildly behind him as he ran.

  Calm and sure as the moon, the Kabakas impostor strode on, right into the gunfire. With a flick of the wrist, he threw a knife, and Guz was down. Pierced in the knee.

  Wailing in pain, Guz rolled over, leveling his pistol at his masked attacker.

  He was between her and Kabakas now.

  She stiffened as Guz shot, once and then again at nearly point-blank range.

  The man acting as Kabakas reached over his shoulder into his pack and drew out a barong sword. Now he had two. He began to swing them in a figure eight, Sinawali style, as he strolled toward the leader.

  He wouldn’t.

  Except, he would.

  He swung them quickly, expertly. It was something to behold, the way the silver ends shone in a figure-eight blur that sometimes shifted into more of an X pattern.

  Guz shot at him, and the Kabakas impostor just kept walking. Guz shot again.

  Clang.

  Zelda felt the breath go out of her. Using the blades to block bullets. A Kabakas hallmark. It wasn’t magical; if you angled blades just so, and if you were good at gauging directions and trajectories, you did have roving plates of armor.

  Still, it took practice, not to mention guts.

  He might not be Kabakas, but this attacker was nothing short of magnificent.

  Guz scrambled backward and got in a wild shot.

  And the attacker kept going. He understood what Kabakas always had: the closer he got, the more frightened Guz would become and the worse his aim would become, erasing the advantage of point-blank proximity.

  The strange attacker was close enough now for her to see the calm in his eyes through his mask. There was something almost mountainous about him: hard, ancient, immovable.

  Whoever he was, she knew one true thing about him: he was completely in the zone, beyond confidence, a mindless unity with everything that was happening around him. It broke her heart to recognize it, to remember it.

  A desperate yearning for everything she’d lost crashed over her. She worked at the knots.

  She could hear Aguilo panting behind the Jeep. Kabakas always killed everybody but one. The messenger. It was why Aguilo was hiding. He wanted to be the last one.

  Kabakas had never utilized a female messenger. In fact, he’d slaughtered scores of women at the Yacon fields.

  She had to get away. She formed a plan: she’d kill Aguilo herself and force this guy to use her. He’d use her if she forced his hand.

  She sat right up on the side of the Jeep, smashing her wrist. She barely felt it in her fury to get free; she went at the knot with her fingers behind her back. It made her big and made her a target, but it was the only way.

  Guz had thrown away his gun. He scrambled back as the barong blades flashed. It was like a lawnmower coming at him, tipped the wrong way. Maybe ten more feet before contact.

  Kabakas spoke. The breeze had kicked up and she couldn’t hear, but she made out the words Buena Vista as he advanced. Buena Vista, the town the men had been laughing about.

  One side of the knot loosened. She was getting it!

  Guz was weeping, apologizing. The man didn’t stop coming.

  The battle trance. The imperviousness to guns. Of course this fighter would have access to all that myth, too.

  Furiously she worked at the knot.

  He was nearly on top of Guz now, with no sign of letting up. Things were going to get bloody.

  She braced for it.

  And then there it was: the sickening thwap-thwap as he severed the man’s ankles, boots and all.

  Guz cried out as the attacker lit into him with the two barongs, not missing a beat with his pattern as he moved the chops up to his knees, then his hands, the powerful blades became a kind of mill.

  Guz’s cries sounded inhuman.

  Cleaving the extremities first in a kill calibrated to be as bloody as possible and also to keep the man screaming as long as possible.

  This kill would be the one for show, the one designed to be memorable. Kabakas had often singled out leaders for this special treatment.

  Running out of time!

  She went at the knot with her teeth again, ignoring Guz’s cries.

  Her heart fell when they ended abruptly. The head.

  Out of time.

  Bird screeched through the dusk. It felt like they were screeching through her belly.

  She looked up to see the fighter standing over Guz’s bloody, mangled form.

  Movement. The masked boy was advancing on her Jeep from the other side. He had an assault rifle and a revolver, and with a gesture, he had a weeping Aguilo marching out to stand before the attacker. To see the body of his boss.

  “Por favor.” Aguilo raised his hands and begged to be the messenger. He angled his head at her. “La puta de Mikos. Ella no es más que una puta gringa. Ella no sabe español.”

  An American whore who doesn’t even know Spanish. Zelda grunted her protest through her gag and shook her head, not that the attacker even noticed her.

  Nobody will listen to her; nobody will believe her, Aguilo told him.

  Aguilo was right.

  The sidekick seemed to concur; he began to address Aguilo in rapid Spanish. “You go and tell everybody that Kabakas will hunt anybody who attacks Buena Vista or any village on the slope of the Verde Sirca. He will chop them up until their screams reach hell itself. Whoever wants to challenge this village and those farms
, Kabakas will hunt them when they are sleeping. This is now the kingdom of Kabakas.” The boy looked to the attacker as he spoke. The attacker’s gaze seemed to darken through the mask. Was he displeased? Well, the kid was definitely off-roading. Kabakas never made speeches, and certainly not one sounding straight out of a fantasy tale. It was Kabakas’s style to make a simple statement—Buena Vista is mine. Kabakas had a possessive thing going with those he protected.

  He would never have a kid speak for him, that was not a Kabakas thing.

  “Even an army will not protect anyone from Kabakas. Surrounded by an army of forty men, Kabakas doesn’t care.”

  She worked harder at loosening the knot, watching the man watch the boy. She was getting it. She’d get out of this, dammit! She wouldn’t give up.

  It was then that the attacker turned his masked face to her.

  His deep brown eyes met hers, invaded hers. She felt electrified by the darkness, the fury of his gaze, and its endlessness. His eyes were beautiful and terrifying, shining from the kill, or maybe pain or fury. Her heart hammered out of her chest, but she refused to look away or to freak out. She had the deep sense that she knew this man; that she always had.

  She glanced down at those hands. He was near enough now that she saw a sunfire insignia on one of the barong swords, a small mark near the hilt.

  The sunfire insignia. He was using street-corner mercado swords!

  That decided it. This was not Kabakas. No way.

  Kabakas’s swords had the ouroboros, an image of a snake swallowing its tail, the insignia of a blacksmith in Mindanao. The CIA kept that detail under wraps.

  She stared him down as she tried to work herself free, using everything she had to picture the knot in her mind.

  God, attacking a guerrilla contingent with toys? She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted.

  “We will take on any army, any day. Do you understand?” the kid continued. “You will carry this message.”

  There had been twenty fighters at most. Aguilo would remember it as forty.

  Still the man looked at her. Her heart pounded. She didn’t know what to do with this eerie recognition of him, this connection.

  Fuck you, she thought. You’re not Kabakas.

  The boy was on the other side. He yanked open the door on the driver’s side and pulled a rifle and three revolvers out of the Jeep, then a lug wrench. He grunted and stepped back, casually spinning the weapon, eying her. He shot a querying look at his master, who watched her still.

  The stars on the mask seemed to glitter. Probably also fake.

  The man advanced on her, street-corner barongs shining with blood.

  He was coming for her. She sat up, pulsing with anger, aliveness, that strange energy from when she’d heard his name on the plane.

  This couldn’t be how it ended.

  Time slowed as the barong blade came down on her. In that moment, she wondered if she’d died on that plane, if this was her mind’s weird way of replacing the death.

  The blade banged down onto the bar atop the door, severing the rope the held her in place.

  She tumbled back into the Jeep seat. Quickly, she scrambled over the door, thinking to run, but the attacker grabbed her hair and forced her to the side—in protection, domination, or ownership, she didn’t know, but all her fight came back suddenly and she rammed against his legs, wishing her hands were free so that she could hit him and loosen his grip somehow.

  “Go!” he bellowed, glowering at Aguilo.

  Aguilo jumped into the driver’s side and sped away.

  The kid looked up at Kabakas questioningly.

  Kabakas stared back at him. The two seemed to be communicating.

  Fingers tightened on her scalp. Her heart pounded as she struggled, but it was like struggling against a boulder.

  The engine droned away, under the jungle canopy. She could’ve handled Aguilo unarmed. He’d been stripped of his weapons; she could’ve taken him out with her feet as he drove.

  The fighter looked down. Brown eyes speared into her core.

  He had the same hair as his sidekick—short, dark, but it was those eyes that got her, seeing so much, containing so much. He seemed near, yet far. Drugged. In a trance. Something.

  His voice, when he spoke, was a gravelly baritone. “Do you cook?”

  Accented English. Valencian…but not quite.

  “Do you cook?”

  “Yes,” she said, blood racing.

  “Did you graduate from high school?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Twenty-one times six. What is that?” he asked.

  She gaped at him. “One hundred and twenty-six.”

  He shoved her to the ground and walked off. “La puta viene con nosotros.” The whore comes with us.

  Zelda stiffened. Had she heard that right?

  The boy aimed his Uzi at her, eyes filled with disgust. “No la necesitamos.”

  The man halted in his stride. Slowly he turned. The boy stiffened, slim limbs taut with fright.

  Zelda’s blood raced as the man pulled off his mask, as his wild and stormy gaze zoomed into the boy. He had those high Valencian cheekbones, gleaming with sweat, eyes sharp, dark hair sweaty and tousled. His features were large, like the rest of him, not smooth or polished, but jagged and proud, as though chiseled in stone, all crude power and beauty. “Cómo?”

  The kid stiffened even more.

  He addressed the child in Spanish, “Free her hands and help her find something to wear. Her outfit disgusts me.” Then he turned to her, eyes dark and expressive. “You run, you die.” A simple statement. He hardly needed to emphasize his willingness to carry out the threat.

  He didn’t mean to kill her. She wouldn’t be tortured by El Gorrion’s men. Relief and gratitude washed over her.

  The boy whipped off his mask, a small gesture of defiance.

  “Nothing bloody,” the attacker added. He picked up a rag from the ground and began to polish a barong.

  The boy gestured with his gun. “Up.”

  So the boy spoke English, too.

  Kabakas was from Valencia. Kabakas reportedly spoke English. But Kabakas would never show his face. Unless he meant to kill her.

  The jungle chatter had started back up.

  The kid had shoved a baseball cap over his head. He holstered his gun and stormed over to her. His brown cheeks had a rosy glow—from exertion or maybe anger; he clearly didn’t want her there. She guessed his age at eleven or twelve. So young, yet he moved like an old soldier. His dark hair was slightly shaggy, like his companion’s. She got the feeling that these two cut their own hair. They seemed somehow wild.

  The kid produced a blade, seemingly out of nowhere, and sliced the rope that bound her hands as the man looked on.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Both of you. Thank you so much.”

  A dark look from the kid was her only reply. The fighter remained unreadable.

  The kid pointed her in the direction that the man had pointed. She went along, feeling him behind her with that Uzi. He could handle the weapon; that much was clear. She had the element of surprise back, but she had time now. The attacker wanted to know if she cooked. If she knew math. Did he have a job in a drug lab for her?

  What if she’d said no, that she couldn’t cook? What if she’d done the math problem wrong? Would he have killed her, then?

  She inspected her wrists as they went. She’d gouged the side of her arm—that was where the blood had been coming from. It had stopped bleeding.

  The boy walked loosely, like a warrior, giving no more thought to the corpses around them than a hiker might give to trees in a forest. He was heading for a hut, faithfully following the direction of faux Kabakas’s eyes. He turned and gave her a dark look, an unspoken command to stay. He ducked in and came out with a mechanic’s jumpsuit. It was dark blue and stained with grease, but it wasn’t bloody—and it wasn’t a negligee. Zelda pulled the thing on over the maid’s outfit. It was a hundred d
egrees, but she didn’t care. With shaking hands, she buttoned it up.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The boy had slung his rifle over his back; he had his revolver out now, spinning it on his finger like an old West gunslinger.

  “Move.”

  They reached the fighter, who had completed the task of polishing his swords. He shoved them in his pack. He turned his eyes toward her stocking feet, and then he glared at the boy. A shadow crossed the boy’s face. He turned and made a beeline for a group of dead fighters and yanked the boots off one of them and returned. They were too big for her by a mile and smelled bad, but she took them happily.

  The boy smirked. He was young, hard, and angry, and he had the kind of emptiness in his eyes that she’d seen in child soldiers and war orphans.

  “Put them on,” the fighter growled.

  She donned the dead man’s boots. Whoever these two were, they were giving her clothes to wear, and that was a good sign. She was safe for now.

  The fighter pointed to the suitcase some yards away. The boy retrieved it. The fighter then tipped his head and the boy handed it to her. He had perfected the art of commanding the child with minimal effort.

  He might not be Kabakas, but he was smart and powerful and dangerous all the same.

  The suitcase was heavy, but she bore it without showing it.

  “You will cook for us and you will teach the boy his math. Do you understand?”

  A cook? A tutor?

  “Do you understand? Do you agree?”

  “Okay, yes,” she said.

  The fighter turned and walked into the jungle.

  “Vamos,” the boy said, motioning with the revolver for her to walk in front of him.

  She went, mind spinning.

  You wheel cook for us. Poot them on. Definitely a Valencian accent, but slightly British, or the kind of British accent you would hear in India in terms of music. One of the Associates, Macmillan, would be able to give her his entire linguistic history from just that sentence.

  “En inglés,” the fighter commanded. “You will speak to her in English only. Only and always English.”

  The boy said nothing.

  She carried the suitcase in front of the boy and behind this fighter who styled himself as Kabakas. On they trudged, farther and deeper. She caught the vanilla and honey scent of the Prosthechea fragrans and looked around in the dim morning light until she spotted a profusion of the cream-colored orchids covering the trunk and branches of some of the older, larger trees. Gratefully she sucked in a breath, sweet and thick with life.