Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  In movies, villains often revealed their plans to the person they were about to kill. Sometimes they even forced them to watch their triumphant moment. The final explosion, or whatever. A lot of people considered the convention to be ridiculous.

  It wasn’t ridiculous.

  When afforded the chance to be known by another, if only for a short time, most couldn’t pass it up. The yearning to be known was quintessentially human, and spies, fugitives, and killers rarely got the chance. The person you were about to kill made the ultimate confessional.

  She should want him to stop, but part of her needed him to keep going. Because he was Kabakas. She didn’t know which of them needed the fullness of his confession more—him, to be known, or her, to know him. All these years she’d been so full of questions: Where had he come from? Why hadn’t he stepped up to lead when he was at the height of his powers? Why had he turned dark? But Kabakas was giving her something more, something deeper: the love and loss inside him. The true things he wrestled with. The things that drove him.

  She’d wanted to know Kabakas. Now she would.

  “The way he reached up to me,” Hugo continued, “it was as if he chose me.” He was silent for some time, seeming content to dwell with her. “Hope.” He practically spat out the word. Her pulse pounded when his eyes met hers. “How foolish not to note the fact that of all the shiny things in the cabinet, you selected the Moro rites stick to hold and examine. Or how foolish of you. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He drew near to her, stood over her. “You needed to take it, didn’t you? You had to touch it. It belongs to that class of things…the class of things that call out. A hunter feels it.”

  His eyes crackled that root-beer brown, jewels set deep set against the harsh angles of his face and the midnight darkness of his hair.

  “It was as if we were a family,” he whispered again. “It wasn’t real, I know that now, but it felt real.”

  She shook her head. It was all she could do.

  He searched her face, as though he couldn’t believe her cruelty. “Even the devil doesn’t give people heaven before sending them to hell.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The savinca had once calmed him, but when he walked the rows in the early morning dew, he felt only rage, and a pain that reached deeper than the pain of his burns. She’d said she didn’t poison them, but how could he believe her? She was a former CIA botanist. The blight had begun with her arrival. She’d been seen creeping around on the mountainside. Of course she’d try to deflect blame to Ruiz.

  He should kill her and get Paolo out. The Association was worse than the CIA. Smaller, smarter, and more dangerous because they answered to no one. Run by a billionaire genius and his shadowy partner.

  He came to a savinca bush whose leaves had begun to drop. He fell to his knees before it, scrabbling the soil away to expose the white-coated roots. In a rage he grabbed the base and tore it from the ground, throwing it down the mountainside, wild with pain.

  She’d done this.

  Still, he couldn’t get into the mood to kill her. He’d fucked her like an animal, taken her when she was utterly in his power. He wasn’t so unlike his biological father after all.

  He’d taken her like an animal and enjoyed it. It was how he liked to fuck.

  He walked the rows. He’d have to pull Paolo out of the only real home he’d known. They could no longer farm, not as hunted men. He’d been so careful. And even if Ruiz reversed the blight, even if the fields could be rescued, without him here, the village was vulnerable to El Gorrion.

  Unless he killed him. Paolo would be safe with Julian for the time being. He could go out killing. He could kill Zelda and then kill El Gorrion. Kill everybody. It was what he did.

  As he made his way down the side of the field, he heard a Jeep in the distance. Who would be coming up the mountain so early?

  He sprinted around the side of the house and out of the drive just as Julian pulled up. Paolo got out, looking small, so vulnerable.

  Hugo held out a hand. “Come here.” Paolo went to him and he settled his arms around the boy’s fragile shoulders. Julian watched him grimly.

  “I need you to stay with Julian another night,” he said.

  “Is everything under control?” Julian asked, coming up behind him.

  “Yes,” Hugo said.

  Julian nodded, unable to meet his eyes. Hugo couldn’t imagine what was in his mind.

  “I promised Liza I’d work on our experiment,” Paolo said. “I can’t miss a day.”

  Julian looked apologetic behind him. “He insisted. He would’ve run up himself. I didn’t want him to…”

  “You were right to bring him.” Hugo knelt in front of him. “She does not mind if you take a break from your studies.”

  “You can’t take a break from the experiment. If I don’t chart the results correctly, it means we are not listening to the savinca, and we could miss a clue for how to save them.”

  He exchanged glances with Julian, his heart so filled with rage he could not speak.

  “Plants cannot talk,” Julian said.

  “Liza says they will. She says they can tell us how to save them if we ask the right questions and listen to the answer.”

  So cruel to give the boy such hope! It was then, finally, that he felt he could kill her. Hugo spoke through gritted teeth. “Liza cannot talk to the plants, and she cannot save them.”

  “At least she’s trying to!” Paolo screamed. “Don’t you even want to try?”

  He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, but he shook it off. “I promised Liza! Where is she?”

  Hugo moved to prevent him from going in the front door. “Busy. You’ll go back with Julian.”

  “I have to fill in my chart!” Paolo took off running, then, around the house, circling down toward the terraces that way.

  Julian cast an alarmed look at him.

  “I’ll get him.” Hugo set off in a jog after Paolo; a fast little runner, that kid. He reached the terraced rows and heard something from the direction of the shed. He took off that way. The shed door was open, but Paolo wasn’t inside. He finally found him at the far edge of the bushes he tended, off behind the shed. He and Liza had set up colorful strings and tags marked a row of plants, all dying…except for one. The one circled with yellow string looked nearly normal.

  Nearly healthy. The only one on all of the mountainside.

  Hugo went to the boy, who was scribbling in a notebook—filling in a chart.

  Paolo turned and beamed up at Hugo. “Nines and tens,” he said. “This one whispers a clue for how to save them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “She made a solution from the Luquesolama stone.” He put aside the notebook and knelt, scrabbling at the dirt, pulling it away from the roots.

  Solution. Such a scientific word, but of course, Zelda was a scientist. He should have noticed.

  “Look, Hugo!”

  Hugo knelt down next to Paolo. The waxy coating around the root had cracked; in places it was gone. You could see the flecks of it in the dirt. The coating, falling off. “I have to tell her—we have to show her.”

  “How did you get it to crack?” Hugo asked.

  Paolo explained what they’d done. The boy pressed the soil back around the base of the plant and touched one of the shoots up top, bending it, seeming to test its strength, and then he felt the leaves. “She says to grade it with your senses and your heart.” He pronounced that plant an eight out of ten. He scrutinized the less thriving ones. “Three, four, four. Zero is dead,” he said softly, casting his eyes over the pale green rows hugging the contours of the mountainside. There weren’t any zeroes out there. Yet.

  She claimed not to have come for the plants; that she might help save them. Was it possible that she meant it?

  “You’ll go back with Julian,” he said.

  “But—”

  “You must.” He took the notebook. “Liza is busy and cannot see you. I will show her your charts
.”

  He ushered a reluctant Paolo back around the outside of the house to the drive and told Julian to hide him if any strangers appeared. Julian made a comment about the masses of boys roving the hills, how they hid themselves just fine. But if it came to it, Julian would go the extra mile to hide him. Hugo had him wait while he went into the house; he grabbed his emergency cash and went back out and pressed it into Julian’s hands. “You can return it if you do not use it, but take it for me.”

  Hugo waited until they’d driven off, just as he had the previous night. Then he brought the small notebook into the house, walking down the tiled hall perhaps a little faster than normal, hating the way his heart swelled when he knew he’d see her.

  He slipped inside the bedroom door and tossed the notebook onto the bed, then he took out his knife. There was only a minute change in her expression as she watched him—a turn inward—steeling herself, perhaps.

  “Experiments on the field? Have you not done enough?”

  She mumbled as he slid his fingers under the gag and pulled it away from her smooth, warm cheek. He slipped the knife under and cut, slicing the fabric as easily as butter.

  She licked her lips, rubbing them together. “I heard him out there. Did he show you the test plants? Was there any improvement?”

  “Maybe you didn’t put enough poison on one of them.”

  “One is thriving? Which?”

  “The yellow string.”

  She straightened. “What did he grade it?”

  “Eight,” Hugo said.

  “Did you get a look at the root? Is the coating intact?”

  “Cracked.”

  She smiled. “Hugo! This is good, Hugo—it’s the Luquesolama stone.”

  “That’s what you would have us believe?”

  “You saw it with your own eyes. There’s something in that stone that’s beneficial to the plant. Protective. That’s why the February Moon ceremony evolved. Paolo told me about it, and things like that, they’re not just bullshit. I’m wondering if the Savinca verde only grows here because of the mineral composition of the soil. Because of that stone. It’s a fertilizer, a booster, a protective agent.”

  “You would maintain Ruiz did this. Why would Ruiz, a leading scientist, do such a thing?

  “I’m telling you, Ruiz was out there lying. He suggested the problem might be phosphorous. It’s ridiculous. Nobody with any kind of training would think you have a phosphorous problem out there.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But why would I do these experiments with Paolo? Why would I lie when I told you everything else? What do I have to lose?”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, head resting on fingertips, thinking it through.

  Her voice cracked. “We were out there together working on those bushes. We were caring for them together.” She wanted him to look at her, but he could not. “Hugo. We cared for those beautiful plants together.” She wanted him to remember how it was when they were happy together. He preferred not to.

  “Hugo—”

  “If you’re telling the truth, it means Ruiz is lying. Looking for a scapegoat.”

  “To deflect blame. That’s my guess.”

  He went to the window. “But, to poison the savinca…”

  “Has he ever been associated with El Gorrion?”

  Hugo bit his lip. His thinking had run along those lines, too.

  “Has he?” she pressed.

  “There were rumors…” He paused. “You know about the Roundup-resistant coca.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “They attribute it to the farmers, but it is said Ruiz helped with the project.”

  “What do you think?”

  It was here that the picture began to form. El Gorrion couldn’t fight Kabakas, but he could ensure that the mountainside was no longer farmable. He could destroy Buena Vista from the ground up. El Gorrion never liked to feel defeated. “Many people are connected to El Gorrion,” Hugo said. “But to destroy the savinca…”

  “I’d imagine that El Gorrion can be very persuasive.”

  Yes, he imagined he could. “So we make the solution? You think that will cure them?”

  “I think it could, but too much might kill them. And too little would be useless. There’s too much I still don’t know. What components did Ruiz use, and how much? What was the concentration?”

  “You think he sprayed poison?”

  She shook her head. “People would’ve noticed. I think he dropped pellets. Something fast-acting…”

  “So we can try to save them, but we may kill them.”

  “Fuck that. We need answers, and then to do it right. If you can get me the answers somehow…”

  There it was, that passion. Something in his heart squeezed. “You think the answers are on his computer?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “An eminent scientist like that? No, he doesn’t spell out that sort of thing on his computer. Too risky. The clues would be in his lab. He would have a secret greenhouse somewhere—he wouldn’t want colleagues to see him killing plants; they’d ask too many questions. No, he has an off-site workspace, somewhere he can work in peace. He’d need chemical deliveries. Access to a plane.”

  She went on, fiery and beautiful and seeming to forget she was tied up. It was all about saving the savinca. He closed his eyes. It felt good to hear her like this, and that good feeling was a poison. Nobody had gotten so close to taking him down.

  She went on. “The key is the minimal concentration necessary to offset the herbicide. That’s the goal. We might not save the shoots—this crop is gone, but there’s still time to save the woody bases, the old part of the plant. They’ve lasted all those years—they’re tough and beautiful, those old bases. I could give you a list of questions. A list of things to look for. If you could find the lab.”

  He couldn’t trust her—he knew that now.

  But he could trust her passion for the plants.

  He flicked open his knife and walked around her chair. He grabbed her hair, looking into her eyes, filled with such a strange mix of feelings—anger that he was doing this, that he had no choice but to trust her. And beneath it all, excitement. They would take a trip together. “I’ll find the lab.” He sliced the cord that bound her wrists, heart slamming in his throat. “You find the cure.”

  She brought her hands together and rubbed her wrists, watching him warily.

  “And if you try to run,” he continued, “I’ll kill you. Understand?”

  He’d keep her alive—long enough, at least, to find a cure for the blight. She went to the dresser and pulled out underwear. “How will you find the lab?”

  He told her how Ruiz had been emailing the farmers with instructions for monitoring the soil. Forwarding things. He felt that his man in Bogotá could get a location from the IP address—he’d done as much before. He might even be able to determine who paid the bill. “But I have my suspicions. Jungle labs, planes, deliveries. This is El Gorrion’s compound you’re describing.”

  He leaned in the doorway with the knife, running his thumbnail over the joinery, the small circle of the hinge that allowed it to snap up. She turned away from him and peeled off her clothes, shy about undressing in front of him without the heat of passion to cover her.

  Still he wanted her. He did not want to kill her. But how could he trust her?

  “Be quick.”

  She pulled a maid’s dress from the closet and put it on.

  “We’ll have to cover your hair. Or change it.”

  “It’s not my real hair anyway.”

  “I know,” he said. “And you wore glasses.”

  “I prefer them,” she said.

  As did he. “One move out of order, and I’ll kill you.”

  “I got it. I’m with you on this. Okay? I give you my word, Hugo.” She spoke with intensity and seemed to want him to believe her. Keeping her word meant something to her. She went into the bathroom, and he followed. She hesitated
in front of the toilet. “Really?”

  “Hurry up.”

  He turned and leaned back against the sink, eyes fixed on his blade as she peed. They felt again like a family. It was a feeling he enjoyed.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It wasn’t hard for Rio to get the story in the village. He paid for it, yes, but people would’ve talked for free; they were outraged at the CIA spy who’d come to poison their crops. A female agent; clearly Zelda. Living in the house up the mountain.

  On the way up to the house, Rio passed men inspecting the engine of a broken-down car—a stakeout if he’d ever seen one. The road up was being monitored. Interesting.

  He kept going—Zelda could be in danger.

  He parked and approached quietly, entering through the back, moving through the dark spaces like a ghost, weapon at the ready, itching for a pop of movement of the wrong kind. He was very much in the mood.

  Nothing.

  He found food left half prepared in the kitchen. He inspected an onion slice. Old. There were plates and pans on the floor, as though there’d been a struggle.

  A rustling from the bedroom.

  He slipped across and into the open door of the bedroom, his 500 down at his thigh. Curtains blew in the wind; that was the sound he’d heard. There was a chair, cut ropes on the floor. She’d been tied up, then released. Vehicle gone.

  Dax wasn’t going to like this.

  Further inspection turned up a chest at the back of the pantry, recently pulled down.

  He opened it to find knives, guns, blades, boxes of shells, and a few decent rifles. A number of weapons had been removed, no doubt. Had Kabakas piled her into his vehicle and left, meaning to kill her elsewhere? Why not kill her out back, where he had complete and utter privacy? Why not send her over the cliff? And where had they gone?

  He made his way back down the mountain, pulling off the road a ways up from the stakeout. He went to the stakeout on foot, sweating in his suit jacket, which made him extra unhappy. The men were smoking and leaning on the car, having abandoned their pretense of inspecting the engine. He came up behind them, silent as the night.