Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  She’d said she loved him.

  And she’d fed him drugged candies.

  His heart broke as darkness closed in.

  Chapter Forty

  “No!” Zelda screamed and kicked and twisted as two Associates half dragged, half carried Hugo away by the arms. “No!”

  Hugo tried to shake them off, but they’d given him something powerful.

  “Let me go!” She fought to get out of Riley’s grip and get to Hugo. Riley’s fingertips dug into her arms. “Be careful! He’s shot in the shoulder!”

  “They can see that,” Riley said. “They’ll take care.”

  Hugo.

  God, the way Hugo had looked at her at the end. He thought she’d drugged him. Well, she had. Probably injected right into the middle of the jelly beans. She felt like her heart was being ripped apart.

  God, how did they know?

  She tried to rip out of Riley’s arms, limbs fueled with rage.

  Dax appeared in front of her as they shut Hugo into a nearby van.

  “Don’t do this!”

  “I’m sorry,” Dax said.

  “You can’t,” she said, knowing full well he could. Hugo’s brown shoe lay on the dusty road. “His shoe, you motherfucker,” she said hoarsely.

  Dax went over, grabbed the shoe, and threw it into the van. Still Riley held her. He was one of Dax’s most powerful attack dogs.

  “I won’t have it,” she growled when Dax came back.

  “No choice,” Dax said. “The standoff has to end.”

  The van sped off. She had the impulse to collapse in tears. Fuck that, she thought.

  “I gave you a plan. A good plan.”

  “The Sal angle is a no-go.”

  “Motherfucker.” She jerked Riley’s arms off her, or maybe he let her go—and went for Dax, pushing him clear up to the side of the SUV behind them, full of wild energy. “You will fucking call them back.”

  “And let multitudes of people die? How would you feel if we took the time we needed to turn Sal and send him after the files and the situation went hot? How would you feel about that?”

  She jerked him harder against the vehicle. “My plan would’ve worked.”

  “This plan is better, faster, surer.”

  “Except a good man goes down.”

  “You suspected he was Kabakas. You wouldn’t be wrong about that.”

  She glared, pulse racing. “He didn’t do the Yacon fields massacre. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “In that war?” Dax shook his head.

  She drove her fist into his belly, connecting with soft flesh. He doubled over, holding his belly. He hadn’t even hardened for it.

  “He’s one of the good guys.” She caught Riley’s haunted look. She had maybe one more strike before he stopped her. “Call them back.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  Riley stood by, fierce and strong. Dax was the perceived leader now. They’d at least spoken with Dax; they didn’t even know her. Yeah, Dax had been too happy to let her be the silent partner and she’d gladly taken it, more effects of the shame. Had he always anticipated a rift?

  Of course. Dax anticipated everything.

  She sucked in her breath, trying to get her head clear.

  “Only two blues and one yellow,” she said. “How did you know I wouldn’t eat them myself?”

  “Because they’re your favorites.”

  “All the more reason for me to eat them.”

  Dax shook his head. “Rio saw you together. He watched you. He told us that you’d give your favorites over to Kabakas, that you’d want him to have the best.”

  She went for him again, but this time Riley stopped her.

  Her pulse drummed. They knew how she felt about Kabakas. It meant that they would be expecting her to do anything to free him—ready for her to go all-out.

  “I wish I could do better for you.”

  “Fuck you,” she hissed. “Act on it, then. Grow a conscience for once!”

  He gave her one of those dark Dax looks. Weary resolve.

  She surged at him again, but Riley had her. “How many people did you have to fuck to blot this one out?”

  Dax brushed off his sleeve. “Three so far.”

  She twisted out of Riley’s grip and lifted her hands to show she was done. She had to be smart now. She went to the overlook where she and Hugo had stood minutes ago. No matter how she escalated her efforts, she’d be matched by Riley and Dax until she, too was being bound or drugged in the back of their vehicle. That would not help Hugo. She sucked in a breath, trying to calm her rage, trying not to think about what the enemies of Kabakas would do to Hugo. She’d told Hugo that she had his back and now it was happening all over again—her, letting a good man down.

  She leaned over, gripping the bar, letting her forehead touch the metal, warm from the sun.

  The fact that she hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, was drowned out by an oceanic surge of old shame and guilt.

  Dax came up next to her. “Is El Gorrion still alive?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?” she snapped.

  “Would’ve been best if Hugo had killed El Gorrion. Surely you agree.”

  “Hugo’s one of the good guys.”

  Dax gave her a look. It didn’t matter to Dax.

  She looked away, disgusted.

  “Do you know how most partnerships die?” he asked.

  “Betrayal?”

  “I deserve that, of course,” he said. “But no. It’s the things that attract the partners to each other that break them apart. You liked me because I see what nobody else can see. And because I have the balls to do what needs to be done, even if it’s repugnant.”

  She’d said that, of course.

  “I liked your tenaciousness,” Dax continued. “Your passion for justice. It’s what we have in common.”

  “We have nothing in common.”

  “What did you say at the beginning when I told you not to go after your sister?” Casually, he flicked a bit of brown hair from his eyes. Just another day at the office for Dax. “You said that everybody is expendable, even you. That what we do is bigger than one person.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “It’s what you said, Zelda, and the fact that you don’t agree now is irrelevant.”

  She waited for him to give her some sort of “live by the sword, die by the sword” rationale with Hugo. She thought that if he did that, she really would kill him. But Dax was too smart for that. Too smooth.

  She took a measured breath and forced aside the messy spiral of guilt, the shame, the rage. She’d told Hugo she had his back, and she meant it. She’d do what it took to get Hugo back. Whatever it took. She knew how the Associates worked. She could figure out how to defeat them.

  She took another breath and loosened her grip on the rail, purely for Dax’s benefit, letting the pink go back into her knuckles, even though she felt like ripping the thing from its concrete footings and casting it to the rocks below.

  Dax would put Hugo at one of the hotels he owned. The Embajador, probably. It was perfect for holding dangerous people—a few of the rooms featured soundproofing and hookups of the structural kind. Hugo would have to pull the whole hotel down to get loose. They’d arrange a transfer.

  They’d expect her to try something. She guessed that Dax would put Riley in charge of her until the transfer of Hugo to the vice president was complete. Nobody got away from Riley.

  Cole came up from the other way. He didn’t like this—she could tell from his dead expression and from the way he chewed his gum. None of them would like this, but they were loyal, these men. Dax had saved a lot of them.

  Cole nodded at her. She nodded back. People were tense.

  “The metal canister in the Jeep. We need it to save the Savinca verde fields up around Buena Vista,” she said. “El Gorrion poisoned the savinca. There’s a notebook next to it with a formula and instructions. Somebody needs to take it to this farmer there—Julian.” She mad
e Dax put Cole on it and she gave him elaborate instructions. He’d handle it. He took off with one of the guys.

  Dax left with another Associate, dust kicking up behind the shiny black vehicle.

  She felt Riley come up behind her. “Let’s go.”

  She spun, going for his weapon. In a swift, simple movement he caught her hand in a lock. She’d have to break it in three places to get out. She would’ve been more of a match for him in her agent days.

  “Please,” Riley said. “I know you had to try, but…” He would let her break her own hand. And in a way she wanted to break it. She wanted to die when she thought what Hugo must think.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I really am,” he said as he whipped out handcuffs.

  “Don’t.”

  “Just until this is over.” He slapped them around her wrists in front of her.

  She wrenched away from him and he caught her by the shoulders. “Save us both the trouble—”

  A gunshot sounded, shoving him into her. He tightened his hands on her as if for support. With the second shot he was down.

  “Riley!” She knelt and grabbed his gun but they were surrounded suddenly by men in battle fatigues, half with assault rifles pointed at her, half at Riley.

  She let go of Riley’s gun just as El Gorrion appeared.

  Even if she hadn’t seen the photos, she’d know him from his aura. El Gorrion was a thickset, clean-cut man with a neatly trimmed beard—he’d look like an office worker on holiday if it weren’t for the cold eyes and the camouflage baseball cap that matched his green jacket.

  “Where is he? Where is Kabakas?”

  “Fuck off.”

  He grabbed her by the hair. She went for his trachea, then his balls. A blinding pain on the back of her skull made the world burst like a fireball and darken completely.

  Chapter Forty-One

  He was in some sort of hotel room, shackled to a wall by chains that went to a wrist cuff that would be near impossible to break free from.

  Hugo didn’t know how he’d woken up; he could feel the sedative still working in him. A powerful sedative. The candies. They’d patched up his shoulder at one point. No doubt it had started bleeding again when they dragged him away.

  He feigned sleep, fighting to keep real sleep from coming over him by pushing his fingernails into his own flesh. The pain was nothing compared to the fire of confusion raging inside him. It had been her idea to stop, and yes, she had fed him the drugged candies, picking out specific ones and insisting that he eat them. You will love this. And yes, these were her people.

  Yes, even as every fact around him screamed that she had betrayed him, but still he couldn’t believe it. He trusted her passion. He trusted her heart.

  Men moved in and out of the room—he tracked them with his eyes closed. There was always at least one keeping watch over him at all times. He could tell by the chat between them that they were setting up a meet of some sort. He’d be handed off—to the vice president, no doubt.

  He identified the man in charge by his tone of voice—Dax, people called him. Dax spent time on the phone, negotiating. One trade was to lead to another. Earlier this Dax had sent a team to the mountain, to Hugo’s home—to find proof and provenance, he’d said. Proof that he was Kabakas, no doubt. They’d pull it together, no problem; these were the famous and feared Associates. He thought about the savinca. Were they doing anything to get the recipe to his people?

  He felt Dax draw near at one point, but not near enough that he could take him out with his legs, assuming his legs could still function. Bedsprings creaked, telling him that Dax had settled onto a nearby bed. Silent for a while. Watching him. Alone in the room as far as Hugo could tell. If only he would come near.

  “You know what we do,” Dax whispered suddenly. “You know how it is.”

  Hugo’s heart thundered. Was he talking to him? Did Dax know he was awake? No, he couldn’t know. Hugo stayed still, regulating his breathing to mimic sleep. He had the element of surprise; he wasn’t about to lose it.

  He knew only one thing: Zelda wouldn’t have wanted this. She would stop it if she could. So where was she?

  Hugo felt the fire flow into his limbs.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  She awoke in a dim, cavernous space, tied upright to a bench of some sort, head lolling to the side, throbbing with pain from the blow.

  From the scent on the air and the sounds outside, she guessed she was in El Gorrion’s compound. Her wrists were bound behind her to two cool metal poles—slender and squarish with notches in them. Her legs were tied straight out in front of her on a padded bench; ropes cut into her thighs and calves, even through her jeans. She could make out a corrugated metal roof in the dim light. A shed? A garage? She shifted around, realizing that she was on a modified weightlifting machine. Which meant it was very unbreakable.

  Not good.

  She sensed other people around, possibly behind her, so she stayed quiet as a mouse as she went to work wriggling her hands and wrists. Not a lot of wriggle room, but sometimes if you wriggled enough…

  Voices behind her. Three men, maybe four or five, some distance away. Then footsteps, light on the dirt ground. Her heart sunk.

  “Ella está despierta,” he said. She’s awake.

  The footsteps continued and she found herself face to face with El Gorrion.

  She gazed up at the shaft of light coming down from a skylight, working her hands.

  He addressed her in Spanish. “You know how to find Kabakas. It’s all we need. All we want. Tell us, and you’ll be on your way. We know now that he is the farmer, Hugo Martinez. Tell us where he went.”

  “Nunca,” she hissed.

  He knelt beside her.

  No way would she send El Gorrion’s men to the hotel. The Associates would have Hugo chained up—he’d be a sitting duck, especially if they had him in a room alone. And El Gorrion’s men would have the element of surprise over the Associates. Good agents could die.

  He moved to the end of the bench—near her feet. Horror speared through her. He couldn’t know—he couldn’t. He began to untie her boot, watching her face.

  He knew.

  She swallowed, fighting to keep her expression neutral, trying to keep her pulse from racing. Not that it would matter.

  El Gorrion focused on her intensely, almost clinically, as he loosened the laces, just as Friar Hovde had. He continued on, seeming fascinated with her lack of reaction. Or maybe he saw some reaction. Surely he saw the pulse banging away inside her throat.

  “What should we do now, do you think?” He loosened the leather, pulling apart the sides, freeing the tongue. He pulled off the boot with sickening gentleness.

  No jerking, she told herself, no sounds. She would give him nothing, and most certainly not the intimacy of her fear. She’d broken down with the Friar, screamed and begged. Never again.

  She swallowed as he yanked her sock off. Her foot was bare and vulnerable to him at the end of the bench, now. And she so wanted to scream.

  Instead she worked furiously at the knots binding her wrists. Tying bad knots wasn’t a mistake El Gorrion’s men would make, but she went for it anyway, just to have something to focus on. She couldn’t do this again, she couldn’t.

  Stop thinking like that.

  He began untying the other boot, watching her in that eerie way, like a vampire, almost, feeding on her fear. She’d gotten the sense that Friar Hovde had no interior life, and El Gorrion seemed like that, too. He spoke to her in Spanish. He’d learned everything about her, apparently. “It’s a known fact that people who crumble under pressure once are ten times more likely to crumble again. Did you know that?”

  “If that’s what you need to believe, go for it,” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel.

  His knuckle grazed her stocking foot as he worked, sending a sickening shock through her. Even the brush of the sock set her nerves going. How would she handle the blade?

 
; He continued on with those gentle movements.

  The gentleness was horrible in just the same way that it was horrible to extend kindness to a man you were sending to his death. It was something about the contrast—the lavish last meal followed by the electric chair. This killer’s light caress before the cutting. Removing the boot so gently.

  Her heart pounded.

  He had access to the report, like a treasure map to her weakness, her cowardice, her frailty. He knew everything.

  Nothing bad has happened yet, she told herself, but it was a lie. Something bad had happened. Something bad would happen now. Finally El Gorrion had both of her boots off. Even in the socks, her feet felt naked. The air was warm and humid, but it felt cold on her feet.

  The socks would be next.

  Would he start where the Friar had left off? Threatening to sever her Achilles heel, the thick, fat tendon that connected her heel to her calf? Or would he clip off the tips of three toes as the Friar had? Would he take an entire toe?

  She told herself it didn’t matter. Torture was a kind of odyssey you entered into. Once in, degrees meant nothing. Soft and hard and painful and less painful—it was all part of the same hell.

  She closed her eyes. There was one thing he wouldn’t know about—the injection to enhance the pain that Friar Hovde had given her. She’d never told anybody about it. Except Hugo.

  Her throat felt thick, thinking about Hugo. Where was he now? How many hours had passed?

  “It’s harder for them to hold up a second time,” El Gorrion continued, pulling off a sock. The cotton grazed her ankle as he pulled. It tickled her foot. “The pain has created neural pathways. As has the fear. As has the relief from cooperation. You know how to make it stop. You know it’s within your power at any given time.”

  With that, he tossed aside the sock. He started on the other.

  “You disagree?” he pressed when she didn’t answer.

  He would get nothing from her.

  She had Hugo’s back—her view of him felt so pure, suddenly. And she had the Association’s back—they were still her people. She would go down trusting the things that she knew in her heart.