Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  El Gorrion had planned another attack when he’d gotten intelligence on the identity of Kabakas. Or rather, one of the CIA men hunting Kabakas had gotten the intelligence, and El Gorrion’s surveillance had picked it up. The intelligence led to Kabakas’s mother via a money trail. Far easier to go after Kabakas’s mother. He spread word of a threat against her on a specific day, and he had only to hide and wait.

  The muscled fighter who’d rushed in wearing dark glasses and a hat was none other than Kabakas—El Gorrion knew it for a fact. You knew these things when you got to a certain level. Like angels or devils, recognizing each other among mortals. And yes, it was chaos, but nobody could have gotten out alive.

  What was more, Kabakas was never heard from after that—further proof that Kabakas had died back there.

  This could not be him.

  Ruiz’s ATV sounded out on the trail. Finally.

  The greenhouse lab stood hidden in the depths of the jungle a few miles east of the compound and a safe distance up the hill from a processing lab, because Ruiz didn’t want his activities near any of El Gorrion’s facilities. There was no chance of discovery in the vast wild basin, but Ruiz didn’t want to feel connected to drugs. He wanted to lie to himself, as if that would protect his self-respect. It was just the opposite—it was by being truly who you were that you gained self-respect.

  El Gorrion did not trust a man who lied to himself, but he needed Ruiz. Ruiz was one of El Gorrion’s best defenses against the CIA spraying program. Ruiz had led the effort to splice Roundup-resistant coca plants with one another, creating a strain of drug-resistant crops more valuable than diamonds.

  He needed every advantage in the battle against the CIA, which was an all-out war these days, with the constant loss of planes, fields, men, and processing labs.

  Ruiz had a new project now: an herbicide that destroyed specific crops, suffocating them utterly and driving the farmers to sell the land or simply give up. It broke down a few months later, leaving the soil healthier than ever and ready for a coca crop. By altering the formula, Ruiz would enable him to take over thousands of acres of cropland. El Gorrion could even take out his rival’s conventional coca crop, then turn around and grow his own special strain. Such was Ruiz’s DNA trickery. Basin blight, they called it. Ruiz was still perfecting it.

  Ruiz had been petitioning to test a new faster-acting version. He’d get his chance.

  Did Kabakas imagine he would drive El Gorrion off and that would be that? El Gorrion would destroy his precious mountain and everything on it.

  Finally, the door opened. A man looking to be in his fifties, with thick glasses and a flowered shirt under a white lab coat, entered.

  Ruiz.

  “I have an assignment for you,” El Gorrion said. “You wanted to test the new formula. You will test it in Buena Vista.”

  Ruiz narrowed his eyes, tipping his head ever so slightly. “That would take out the Savinca verde bushes. We discussed this. You said you wanted them for cover. That you would plant among them.”

  “Yes, but now I want them destroyed.”

  Ruiz stared into the middle distance, careful to avoid El Gorrion’s face. “They would go extinct, those bushes. Perhaps if we poisoned the people instead…”

  El Gorrion raised his brows.

  Ruiz shrank back.

  “You asked me for a crop on which to monitor the fast-acting pellets,” El Gorrion said softly and carefully, so that he would understand the gravity. “I have now provided it.”

  “Forgive me. It will do.”

  “You will drop the pellets as soon as possible, monitor the soils, and do your study there.”

  “It is a small village; if I suddenly appear—”

  A good botanist did not a good strategist make. “Who will they call for help once the plants begin to fail?”

  “The university.”

  “Do you not have a post at the university—”

  “During the summers…”

  “Figure it out,” El Gorrion said. “I want it done tonight.”

  Ruiz nodded vigorously. He didn’t like it, but he would do it, perhaps even justify it in the name of science. Ruiz justified a lot in the name of science. He was not a man of honor.

  Once the villagers were ruined and without hope, El Gorrion would offer a reward for information leading to Kabakas. The villagers would have nothing by then. They would sell their connection to Kabakas.

  “I’ll need something quiet. The glider,” Ruiz said.

  Chapter Eleven

  It took Zelda an hour to get the kitchen spotless. She splashed her face in the sink afterward, trying to beat back exhaustion. She’d have to make the journey down the mountainside once the household was asleep, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  She pulled off her apron and wandered toward the thwup–thwup noises outside. She opened the veranda door and slipped out. There they were—the two of them in the moonlight practicing archery, aiming for a distant tree—and hitting it. Consistently. Thwup. Thwup.

  Hugo’s thick, black hair gleamed, and his chiseled features shone with intensity as he drew back on the bowstring, strong and steady, corded forearms taut.

  She could see his body straighten as he became aware of her presence, but his aim stayed true.

  Thwup.

  He hit his mark. Paolo went next. He, too, hit his mark.

  She watched for a long time. They didn’t speak at all, these two males. It was as if they communed through this restful art.

  She found herself drawn to where they practiced, soft footprints in the cool night. She wanted badly to stand alongside them, to breathe with them, to shoot with them, just the three of them in a time-out from the deception. She had always loved the truth and simplicity of archery.

  He’d seemed so tired at dinner. If he was actually Kabakas, he’d been out of it for years. Coming out of retirement, just like her.

  He’d be about thirty-nine. Just a year older than she was.

  “What do you like for breakfast?” she asked between shots. She’d already found coffee, thankfully. That was always her breakfast. “I saw some eggs, and I thought to make coffee, but I wondered how much.”

  “The boy and I will both take two mugs and scrambled eggs. You are ready to give the boy his drill now?”

  “He looks like he’s having a nice time out here,” she said. And he’d been to a massacre and all. Always tiring for a boy.

  Hugo lowered his bow and turned to her. “I wasn’t aware I’d asked for your opinion on his nightly schedule.”

  Paolo’s smirk faded as Hugo turned to him. “Finish here and meet her at the table.”

  Paolo collected the arrows from the tree while Hugo looked on. “We practice each night after dinner. After, the drills.” He led her into the house and stationed her at the dining room table with the book.

  She turned to the pages of drills featuring the addition, subtraction, and multiplication of fractions. There were little pencil check marks by each one—the ones Paolo had presumably passed.

  Her gaze drifted to the cabinet. She really had to get in there.

  He stabbed the book with a meaty finger. “This is where he stalled.”

  Thees ees where he stalled.

  Hugo or Kabakas or whoever he was had a beautiful accent, with a small lilt at the end of certain words, just a tiny extra sound. Stalled-a. Macmillan would be able to explain it.

  Hugo showed her how he used a paper to cover up the answers. She found it hard to concentrate as he turned the pages—or at least, to concentrate on the world beyond Hugo’s hands, so thick with strength and gravity, knuckles just a shade darker than the rest.

  She found herself imagining how the pads of his fingers would feel if he were to draw them across her cheek or slide his knuckles along her jawline.

  Again, she pictured him on the landing strip, the wild confidence of him—a dark, destructive angel who saw only the kill. She might not have this man’s identity nailed down, but s
he felt like she knew things about him. Like the depth of his conviction in a fight, the way he could lose himself. It was how he’d be as a lover, too, she thought with a start. He’d leave human convention behind and fuck on a primal level. Like an animal.

  She looked at his hands and imagined them holding her down, gaze gone wild, lost in passion.

  Zelda didn’t do passion. She hadn’t much done it before the Friar Hovde case, and she definitely didn’t do passion now. She barely even tolerated kindness.

  “You see?”

  He was speaking to her.

  “You see?” he asked again.

  She shook that train of thought out of her head. “Of course I see.” It was fucking high school math. And she was losing her center, mooning over a killer’s hands. That’s all he was, a killer.

  She swallowed as he drew a finger horizontally across a page, forcing it to arch and flip, and then he smoothed it flat. His fingers and hands were extensively scarred—not exactly defensive wounds, but they weren’t paper cuts, either His hands had the harsh beauty of the rest of him. The rest of him she’d seen, anyway.

  He was saying something. She nodded as if she’d been listening.

  Jesus. Maybe she needed to forget the Kabakas bit, get down the hill tonight, and radio for an extraction. Stop the madness!

  “…he likes to read in bed, but he must not go until he has produced this column of answers correctly…a deefeecult time with these fractions.”

  “Okay,” she said as Paolo arrived and settled glumly in the chair to her right.

  Hugo stood, looming over them now, thighs like tree trunks, the bump of his tucked-aside cock just inches from her face. “Begin.”

  She centered the book between her and Paolo and focused for the first time on the actual quiz. “You don’t use scratch paper…at all?” she asked Paolo.

  Hugo’s voice boomed down from on high. “He does not need the aid of scratch paper.”

  “It would make things so much easier,” she said. “He could memorize some things, but—”

  “I do not need the aid of scratch paper,” Paolo sneered.

  “Okay.” She pointed to the first problem, 3/4 + 5/6. He made a few wild guesses. She pointed to the four and the six. “The bottom will be something both can factor into. A larger number.”

  He made more wild guesses.

  “Paolo, look. You have to convert different fractions to the same type of fraction in order to add them. So with six and four—”

  “I can do it.” He continued guessing until he hit upon the answer. Jesus, he really was memorizing the test.

  “Check this out.” She began to write the problem out on the back flap.

  “I do not need the aid of scratch paper,” Paolo said, looking at Hugo.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “He can do it the other way. He has done the rest the other way.”

  “All of them,” Paolo said, pointing to the drills with check marks by them.

  “Proceed,” Hugo said.

  She wanted to argue. Learning by rote defeated the whole purpose of math. Apparently Hugo had not been to school, or at least he hadn’t gotten past multiplication tables—not if this was how he thought it worked.

  Hugo raised his brows.

  She pressed her lips together. Pick your battles, she told herself. She went on to the next problem, feeling like she was in a pedagogical fun house.

  Twenty minutes later, Paolo had gotten three of the ten correct from sheer guessing and had committed them to memory. It was completely insane. Hugo had taken to reading at the other end of the table. Paolo sometimes glanced nervously at Hugo when he couldn’t get an answer. Her heart went out to the boy with his fierce little body and big, soulful eyes and his intense desire to please this man.

  The fourth. This would take hours.

  She recalled the outer-space story Paolo had related to Hugo in the car. There had been a code involved, interplanetary communications.

  She sat back, allowing herself to be completely Liza for a moment, the picture of leisure. “I can do any fraction problem instantly with my secret code,” she said casually. “There is a code. I will never divulge it. Never.” She inspected her nails. “Do the next problem. You will not get it without the code.”

  She felt Paolo’s eyes on her. “There is not a code,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Show me a problem. Any from the book. I have a code inside my head. So I can crack it.”

  She could feel Hugo’s attention on her, too. “You will teach him what is in the book,” Hugo said. “This is not story time.”

  Paolo watched her now. “I do not believe you.”

  She smiled. The kid wanted the code. If only he understood the principles behind working with fractions, he could do much of it in his head, but Hugo wasn’t biting.

  And Jesus, what was she doing? She wasn’t here to flaunt his rules. She needed to get them to bed and get down the mountainside.

  She sighed a Liza sigh. Slowly and carelessly she pulled the book back, allowing the paper to shift and the answers to show. Paolo’s eyes lit on them. Such a Liza thing to do. She sat back up and they went on.

  Paolo, it turned out, was a decent cheater, pretending to struggle, getting just enough wrong. She didn’t feel bad; it was idiotic that he’d be taught this way.

  Hugo walked around to their end and clamped his hands onto the back of Paolo’s chair, an ominous mountain of a man—clueless, stubborn, and totally in charge.

  Clueless, stubborn, and totally in charge was one of Zelda’s least favorite combinations, and it should most certainly not be turning her on.

  No, it was his primal love for Paolo she was responding to. Much as he might deny it, he loved that boy, and here he was, fighting for his education—an education that he’d never had. She wondered how many schools Paolo had been kicked out of.

  Paolo “guessed” the last one without pretending to stumble.

  “Very good,” Hugo said. “You see?”

  Zelda nodded. It was a lot of fractions to have remembered. Was he using a mnemonic device?

  Paolo stood, said good night to Hugo in a ridiculously formal way, and walked off.

  Hugo’s booming voice startled her. “Wait.”

  Paolo froze and turned.

  “Did you forget something?”

  Paolo looked bewildered, his expression ashen. The boy was overtired. What had he forgotten?

  Hugo turned and pulled out Paolo’s chair.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “The boy forgot his manners. Now he must start a new lesson.”

  No way.

  Paolo was already slinking to the table. Hugo stared at her expectantly.

  “You’re using math as a punishment?”

  “You wish him to do two more drills?” Hugo said.

  “Well, this’ll show him how to love math,” she grit out sarcastically, so low that a normal man might not hear. But Hugo was no normal man. He was a hunter, a killer, a man about three klicks up from a caveman.

  “Loving math was never the intention,” he growled. “The boy must exercise perfect concentration on things small and large. He remembered his drills tonight, but he lost the larger context.”

  She sat. She was Liza, and Liza would play along.

  She turned the page, covered the answers with the paper, and began again. “Next.”

  She glanced over at Hugo. His eyes didn’t have the usual quartz-like intensity, as though the life and the light were out of him. It was like he was consumed with something. Such a fucking tyrant.

  Glumly, Paolo cast around for the answers, avoiding her eyes, wishing her gone, no doubt.

  The larger context.

  The child needed sleep; that was the larger context. The larger context was that might did not make right. And principles mattered. And she told herself that if this were Kabakas, she’d have to bring him in. No one got to massacre whoever he wanted to; certainly not dozens of women and children. She s
at up, filled with confidence and conviction. And then, she stilled. This feeling. She hadn’t felt this way since…before Friar Hovde.

  As soon as she turned the spotlight on the good feeling, it was gone, and she was back tied up in that dark basement, and all the pain and shame and blood and terror flooded her senses. She curled her toes as Paolo toiled away at his quiz.

  The toes were where Friar Hovde had begun cutting. God, she’d screamed so much toward the end. Blowing Randall’s cover was unforgivable. That was the worst thing to happen down there—letting Friar Hovde know that one of his trusted elders was a CIA agent. But screaming for Friar Hovde had been devastating in a different way, too, because it had been a kind of intimacy. You never wanted to open your heart to your torturer like that, even if you were opening it in fear. Like a bear in a cage, she went over the old pathways of thought, worn flat from compulsive tracing. Something about being with this man had allowed her to break free for a second.

  She looked at Hugo, feeling so strange. She felt…different around him.

  “What?” he growled.

  “Next,” she murmured.

  Hugo rose and left, moving in and out while they finished the lesson. She could always feel when he neared, somehow, as if he changed the ions in the very air, like a thunderstorm. Through a combination of cheating and sheer willpower, Paolo managed to complete his quiz, and some twenty minutes later, he stood and bid them both good night, doing it the proper way this time, eyes still not quite meeting hers. “Good night, Liza.”

  “Good night, Paolo,” she said.

  “Good night, Hugo,” Paolo said.

  “Good night,” Hugo said. Which, in her mind, she amended to Good night, PAOLO.

  Paolo walked off.

  She turned to Hugo. “Good night.” She half expected that twist of his lips, but his expression remained stony, The skin beneath his eyes was shadowed, as if he’d been rubbing them. “It’s been such a day,” she said softly.

  He seemed to focus on her now. “Yes.”

  “Good night,” she said. “Gracias.” Her sister knew a few words in Spanish.

  He nodded. “Go to bed. Stay there until the bell.”

  “Right.” The bell. It was all she could do not to start laughing out of the sheer insanity of it all. She headed off to her room, pausing in the doorway to draw a square of wax paper from her apron pocket. She unfolded it and swiped her finger through the dollop of lard she’d enclosed inside it, and applied it to the door hinges, swinging the heavy paneled thing to work in the lubricant.