They were involved in an argument. She slipped it out, and then made excuses about having to pee. The phone didn’t have a lot of charge left, but it had enough. She sped down the hill to the outhouse and went in. It was hot and pungent. There was a crack in the wall and she shoved a pebble into it to widen it enough to see though. Nobody coming. She Googled “Luquesolama” and got nothing. Quickly, she dialed an old CIA colleague, a botanist, and told him about the look of the roots and her theories. Had the spraying program evolved in some way? He didn’t think so, but he’d check. He promised to look into the geological makeup of the mountain and the Luquesolama stone.
She got Dax right after that. Dax should’ve been first.
His voice was full of concern. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“We’ve had a situation in the fields,” she said.
“A situation?” he asked, thinking, she realized too late, that it was a situation of danger.
“Nothing like that. It’s the savinca harvest. These little villages, you take their crop and the whole thing implodes. And now there’s this suspicious blight. I don’t think it’s the CIA, but who knows? If there were a way to reverse it…I’m running tests, but I can’t get equipment without blowing my cover. Supposedly, some researcher from the university is here, but he hasn’t come up with anything. It’s not natural…it’s…”
She paused, listening to herself. Obsessed with the crop. “What’s going on with the pirates? Did you turn Sal yet? Is he getting the files?”
“Sal’s scared. He might not turn, Zelda.”
“He wants to turn—I heard it.”
“Not in time. Kabakas is our best bet,” he said.
Her heart sank. “I don’t have any kind of clarity on that yet.”
“No sense at all yet?”
“It’s been difficult…”
“Difficult.”
“Yes.” She hated when he echoed her back. “Difficult.”
“You’re staying with a man who may be Kabakas, and over a course of several days you’ve gained no clarity as to his identity whatsoever?”
“Are you questioning me?”
“You’re the smartest, most tenacious person I’ve ever met. So, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m questioning you.”
She forced her voice to sound calm. “This is a situation with innumerable variables, none of which you have any understanding of.” Having never been in the field. She left that part unsaid.
“Did you crack that cabinet?”
“I haven’t gotten the chance.” She’d never before lied to Dax, though it wasn’t entirely a lie. She hadn’t made the chance.
“So you haven’t been able to rule him in or rule him out.”
“Some evidence says no, and some evidence says yes. We can’t use him if we’re not sure.”
The silence on the line made her nervous.
“You’re one of the foremost Kabakas experts in the world,” he said finally. “If you can look at the evidence and think there’s a possibility he’s Kabakas, I think it’s safe to say we can help the pirates pass him off to the delegation as Kabakas, don’t you?”
“Dax—”
“We don’t need Kabakas; we need a solution. If the delegation believes he’s Kabakas, that’s a solution.”
She felt sick. “What if we put him in the mix and it’s proven that he isn’t Kabakas? What then?”
“He’s got you baffled.”
“Jesus. He has a little boy.”
“Everybody is expendable.”
Her heart pounded. This was what they did all the time as Associates, sent people into peril and even to their deaths if it would save the many. Sometimes even innocents.
“You need to pull together everything that says Kabakas.”
“My week isn’t up. You gave me a week.”
“Two days won’t matter.”
“They will to me. I need to know for myself if it’s him.”
“And what if it’s not him?” Dax asked. Meaning, Will she go along with destroying him?
“I need to know,” she said. “I’m the one who can sell it. This is what I need.”
She could feel his unhappiness through the phone. “The tanker situation won’t stay cold forever,” he said. “You have until Saturday.”
“You don’t want to send Associates after Hugo blind. You’ll lose men. You will wait for me,” she warned.
She traced the edge of the phone after they hung up. They’d need to find a way to handle the long distance bill this poor woman was going to get. That was what she thought about—as if that was the problem.
Would he heed her warning?
She replaced the phone just before the group returned to the fields.
She smiled when she caught sight of Hugo; he seemed to feel her, and he turned and smiled back. Out there in the sunshine and fresh air, it was as if all the lies and secrets were gone, and they were simply working shoulder to shoulder. She was beginning to feel less like an impostor in this life, and the world of Dax and geopolitical concerns seemed farther away.
Chapter Twenty
Usually when confronted with a situation like this, a problem with an agent, Dax would discuss it with Zelda. Her years of experience gave her insights into life in the field that he didn’t have. She supplied that for him. Or at least she had in the past.
She wasn’t under duress now—that was clear. And she didn’t seem frightened, either. They had her working the fields, working as some sort of a maid or governess. Her journey down had sounded trying, but she’d come through intact. Unviolated. He’d gotten that in subtext.
Yet something was happening down there, and she was hiding it.
He wished he could see her eyes. He’d know things from her eyes, but all he had was her voice and it didn’t sound normal—it was lower in pitch, smoother. That could indicate a snap. Or relaxation. Sometimes they felt the same.
Relaxation.
He cringed when he thought back through the years he’d known her and realized she’d never taken a vacation—not even a day off. And God, she was working around plants, in nature now. She was a botanist, for fuck’s sake. You didn’t go into botany without a love for nature, and aside from Association-related excursions here and there, she hadn’t been out of the city in…what? Seven years? Eight?
She seemed consumed with the crop, this village. It was part of a cover, yes, but it felt like more. He thought about Brando in Apocalypse Now, a soldier who’d gone into the depths of the jungle, leaving war behind. Entering a different reality, lost to everything he’d once worked for and believed in.
Was that happening to Zelda now?
Sometimes when he couldn’t work out a problem with his mind, he resorted to the smell of a thing—not literally, but emotionally—how it smelled when he closed his eyes to the thoughts. This really did smell like loss. Like he was losing Zelda in some essential way. Protest as she might, deep down she had a death wish—that incident with Friar Hovde hadn’t simply hurt her, it had destroyed her. She’d been riding the edge ever since. And Kabakas, he represented something ultimate to her. Did she unconsciously want him to find her out? Did she want him to end it?
A death wish and an ultimate being. It was not a good combination.
Was he losing Zelda to her greatest enemy?
Chapter Twenty-One
Some of the leaves had started curling, and people were in a panic. They were right to panic.
The scientist returned that afternoon. Finally.
Dr. Ernesto Ruiz had a friendly face and salt-and-pepper hair. The name sounded familiar to Zelda. He was somebody; he’d written papers.
Ruiz gathered Hugo, Julian, and the other men around the picnic table. Zelda was desperate to join them, but she wasn’t a man and she supposedly didn’t understand Spanish, dammit. So she watched from afar.
As if he felt her gaze upon him, Hugo glanced at her, eyes like a caress. It made her want to die.
After the ta
lk, Dr. Ruiz walked the fields with Julian and a few of the other men. Hugo stayed behind, and she waylaid him.
“What did he say?”
Hugo watched them disappear down the slope; she knew just from his expression that he didn’t like the man. “He is not sure. Phosphorous deficiency, he guesses.”
She tried not to act surprised, but she’d seen nothing that would indicate a phosphorous deficiency—not in the color, not in the growth. Phosphorous didn’t coat the roots with wax. “Really?”
He took a breath as if to gather his thoughts, and related what Ruiz had said. It sounded reasonable…unless you were a botanist.
“Does he have a cure? A remedy?” she asked.
“He’s working on it. We’re to monitor the crop and the surrounding area. Even the trees.”
She wished she could question him, but it was too much of a stretch for her cover. Phosphorous. Why would Ruiz lie?
Hugo was his aloof self on the way back to the house that night. “Try to have dinner on time tonight, señorita,” he grumbled before heading out. Paolo helped her fix it while they worked on the skills he’d need to pass the nightly drill. Hugo came back in a worse mood.
“The leaves?” she said.
He looked helplessly at the field, not even bothering with a surly answer.
Hugo took his dinner at his desk that night. She’d barely spoken one word to him. She went out to the experiments and crouched in front of the row of plants staked out so carefully with sticks and string. The plants were getting worse. The waxy coating seemed to be thickening and extending upward. Even the plant that had gotten the Luquesolama solution wasn’t improving.
The whole thing seemed unnatural. And here was this scientist, lying.
“Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?”
“Ruiz is no good?”
She stood and spun around to find Paolo standing there.
Paolo repeated her words, mimicking her tone. “Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?” He smiled, enjoying that he’d caught her swearing.
She fixed him with a hard gaze. “I was wrong to say that.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The presence of the Americans had disturbed Dr. Ernesto Ruiz like a low and persistent hum—something buzzing at the back of his head.
He’d made casual inquiries and learned that the farmer, Hugo, was an American businessman—a builder who had moved from Miami seven or eight years ago to become a hobbyist farmer. The woman his new cook. The American builder was apparently helpless with the restaurant gone. It seemed further that the American and his boy had cooks before, but the cooks had always quit. Established farmers were taking bets on how long this one would stay.
That low and persistent buzz changed the next day when he overheard the child informing his friends of what this cook said. Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?
According to the child, she was running tests of her own, complete with observation charts.
It was at that point that the hum became an all-out alarm bell.
He was good with children. He gave the boys jobs and joked with them. It took the afternoon to coax the child into describing the tests.
A chill descended over him as he listened, but he forced a tight smile. “Bueno. Ella es muy inteligente.”
The child smiled proudly. Ruiz asked him about how they’d found their maid, and he was suspiciously vague. In the valley, he said.
She’d arrived before he’d had the pellets dropped, so her presence wasn’t in reaction to the blight. But she was doing the right tests. She was suspicious of him. And she was no ordinary maid.
He snapped a photo of her and sent it to El Gorrion.
El Gorrion had contacts all over; he’d find out who she was and figure out what to do.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hugo stared into the fire while Liza and Paolo played a word game on the floor at the foot of his chair.
Liza had made the game out of bits of cardboard. Scrabble, she called it. Good for the boy’s spelling, she explained. She’d tried to get Hugo to play, but games in front of a fire, that was too much like a family. Too saccharine-sweet. “It is not for me,” he’d said.
“Maybe it is for you,” she’d said.
He’d glowered. “Paolo knows not to ask me twice when I’ve said no to something.”
She’d eyed him in that way of hers, and then turned away.
They enjoyed each other, these two, with their games and nature experiments. Her expression always lightened when Paolo entered the room. Paolo, too, grew brighter when she was around.
Your heart is locked up as tightly as that little cabinet. She thought it was selfish that he kept it closed. She didn’t understand that some things were best left closed. Like the cabinet with its painful memories. Like the bloody heart of the savinca.
Liza laid the small squares out to spell a word. Paolo added her score. Paolo. He’d liked being called by his name. Such a simple thing.
Paolo laughed and set a few squares of cardboard down.
It never ceased to amaze Hugo, the way things could go on as the world crashed. As Kabakas he could destroy entire armies, and now he couldn’t stop a simple white substance from killing the savinca. Some of the men had taken to manually scraping the roots of the older, stronger bushes, but the coating would regrow overnight.
He hadn’t felt this helpless since the other Kabakas had gone out and slaughtered in his name. Hugo had spent weeks hunting the impostor, determined to make him pay. That had all ended with the fire, and when he’d emerged from months of recuperation, he’d found the war winding down, and rumors that Kabakas had died in a fire. He didn’t know how the rumors had started, but the other Kabakas had not struck again, and Hugo felt certain that going back into action as Kabakas would only bring this Dark Kabakas back to life.
He could see over her shoulder, and it frustrated him to watch. She was going too easy on the boy. She put down tire and smiled up at Hugo. He frowned and pointed at the D.
She gave him a blank look. Letting Paolo win. If he had her letters, oh, the words he’d spell.
On they went, laughing. Their laughter made him feel very alone. She’d accused him of locking everybody out of his dark cabinet, but he did not know how to do anything else. It felt dangerous to open the cabinet. Nearly as dangerous as opening his heart.
She formed the word vent.
Hugo cleared his throat. She had an A and a D in reserve; she could make advent. She turned to face him, raised her pretty dark brows in mock annoyance.
He frowned. She shouldn’t let Paolo off like that; Paolo needed to be toughened up, not coddled. She turned back to the game, firelight kissing the slope of her forehead and the voluptuous curve of her cheekbone. Her skin would be warm to the touch.
He’d told himself to leave her alone. He was not his father; he would fuck the hotel lobby women in Bumcara if he wanted to fuck. He’d always had that rule, to keep his sexual exploits out of his home.
On they played.
She shifted when it was her turn, intent on the game, tucking her legs anew. At one point she leaned sideways against what she thought was his chair but was, in fact, his leg. He went still, not daring even to breathe, so awash in desire for her he couldn’t stand it. It was a gift, just this touch. Who would gamble her away in a card game? Who would do that?
She laid out corn on the board when she could’ve laid out corner.
Hugo sighed.
Again she twisted to look up at him. The movement removed her soft weight from his leg and he wanted to cry out.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“You know what.”
Her green eyes flashed with humor and happiness. “If you won’t play, then please, no commentary.”
Was she toying with him? Drawing him into the game with deliberately careless play?
He frowned. “If you’re going to do something, do it
right, or there is no point…” The sentence died as he saw Paolo stiffen, thinking, perhaps, that he’d put a stop to the game. That was what Paolo thought of him. Right there. He couldn’t have it.
He wouldn’t have it.
He stood up from the chair, feeling both their eyes on him, and then lowered himself to the floor between them. “Give me some of those letters.”
The boy seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
Liza slid over seven bits of cardboard. She kept a neutral face, savoring it, perhaps, as a victory.
Hugo felt huge and clumsy down there with them. He formed the word lute. And just like that, he was playing.
And the game went on.
She laughed a lot. She’d seemed rigid and drawn when he’d first pulled her from that field, but her face had softened in the space of a week. She looked calmer, more beautiful. She’d modified some of the old housekeeper’s clothes by hand, with needle and thread she’d found, and this version of the gray dress left her long arms bare. Even the track marks seemed less pronounced.
“Your turn.”
She looked up and caught his eye. “I know.”
“Need help?”
She smiled and looked down.
Paolo concentrated, switching his letters into different combinations behind the small box that served as a barrier, and sometimes he’d consult the English dictionary. Maybe it was good spelling practice.
Little by little, Hugo relaxed. He was playing with them. There was no trick to playing, it seemed; no mystery to it other than the participation. Simple participation. You didn’t have to laugh or have fun; you simply had to participate.
He stood at one point and placed another log on the fire. He crouched in front of it, stoking the flames to get more warmth into the room on the crisp night, and then he stood and turned.
Paolo curled sleepily on his side with a tiny smile. Liza was brushing a hand over the boy’s hair with a look of fondness that shattered Hugo’s heart. And his fire blazed and warmed them.
Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) Page 18