Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) Read online

  He and the boy passed the stand of scrub trees and the bright blue rubble of the old church and turned onto the main street.

  Café Moderno was anything but modern, but it had become crucial to his and the boy’s existence. It allowed them to live without a cook, and provided for more interaction and math for the boy. Nobody had to know that Hugo had funded it using the nearby Banco Valencia de Bumcara branch as a kind of front.

  Today wasn’t a market day, but even so, the main street was eerily quiet.

  Instantly, he understood the cause. He tasted the faint scent of destruction on the back of his throat the way a wine connoisseur might take a whiff of Cabernet, identifying its distinct notes. This was a mix of melted plastic and sulfur. Rubber. They’d find burnt-out stores and at least one burnt-out vehicle. A body or two. It took only one more breath to identify the fuel used. They rounded a corner, and he had the user. Like anything else, violence had a signature, right there in the open if you had the eyes to read it.

  El Gorrion’s people.

  He’d always regretted not killing El Gorrion before he’d left the killing game.

  He looked over at the boy, who was still viewing his phone. A furrow in his little brow told Hugo that the consciousness of what he was smelling had gotten at least as far as his instinct.

  How long it would take? Would the boy know to feel fear? The boy had been around five when Hugo had lifted him from the bloody, burning battlefield. A child of a child soldier, crying. It had disgusted and moved Hugo, this helpless sobbing boy, surrounded by dead. Utterly unlike him to rescue a child; but that day, he had. Hugo was not a man to question himself. It led nowhere good.

  Hugo drove on, feeling eyes peer out from brightly painted cinder block hovels. He knew precisely what they’d find in the village center, but he went on now, needing to see the particulars.

  Finally, the boy honed in on the world outside his phone. He looked around, confused, then pointed at the padlock on the door to the school he’d been kicked out of. He’d lasted a mere day.

  “Qué?” Hugo asked, as if he didn’t understand. It was preferable for the boy to feel smart and observant, because feeling smart and observant had the effect of actually making the boy smarter and more observant. The boy was no good to him stupid.

  “La escuela esta cerrada,” the boy said.

  Hugo nodded. “Sí.”

  “Debería estar abierta hoy.”

  “Sí.” The school was locked, when it should be open. Hugo pulled the vehicle to the side of the dirt street in the village center, waiting for him to spot the burnt-out hulk of a car. He suspected that the boy’s body would spot it before his mind would. You learned to trust your instincts when you were a killer, a hunter. He waited, and indeed, the boy stiffened. Hugo watched the fear come over the boy’s conscious mind, then the horror. Expressions Hugo knew well, although they were most often directed at him.

  The boy’s heart would be beating hard now. Hugo sometimes wondered how specific the boy’s memories were.

  “Combate,” the boy said, turning his brown eyes to Hugo for confirmation.

  Hugo remained impassive. The boy needed to be able to determine such things for himself.

  “Combate?”

  It was now a question. Hugo scowled. “Don’t look at my face for the answer. What do you see?”

  Hugo turned off the Jeep and climbed out.

  The boy looked surprised that Hugo would treat this as a lesson, but there was no better time for a lesson. The boy cast his gaze around. Movement behind the iron gate of a shop.

  “Miedo,” the boy whispered, scrambling out from behind Hugo.

  “En inglés,” Hugo said, strolling into the rubble. “Complete sentence.”

  The boy’s adrenaline was kicking in. Hugo’s old Moro teacher had always instructed him to train at the points of high adrenaline in order to best simulate battlefield conditions. Hugo had lived his life under battlefield conditions. He supposed he should be thankful for having been cast into the pits of rabid dogs that went for schools in Germany and America and other foreign lands, a rough-looking brown boy knowing only Spanish.

  As rough as the schools had been, they had always been safer than home.

  “Fear. The people are frightened.”

  Hugo nodded. “Why?”

  They turned the corner and found the worst of it—la plaza de mercado burnt. La farmacia. El Café Moderno. Hugo’s heart sank.

  The boy looked up at him, gauging his reaction.

  Hugo kept walking.

  The boy followed him to the gate of a shop farther down the way. The shopkeeper came to the gate. Ramona or Renata. She had several children and a husband who was away on the oil rigs. “Get out! Go back! Pack your belongings! El Gorrion. They killed Pedro, Victor…”

  Hugo nodded grimly as she related the tale in her rough hills dialect. Hugo had been born in the south, near Valencia’s capital city, but his family had been yanked away before his first birthday, so his Spanish sounded foreign to them. The villagers thought he was American. He was content to let them think it.

  Some of the eligible women had tried for him when he’d first taken over the crumbling mountaintop villa, but he’d made it clear he was not interested. When he wanted to enjoy a woman, he went into the city and enjoyed one. He liked women, but only in small doses. And he never brought them to the house.

  “They’ve given us twenty-four hours to get out,” she continued. “They’ll kill anybody who stays—unless they’re prepared to cooperate. Like they did in Lapas. They want fields…”

  Hugo squinted down the street.

  “They’re desperate,” she said. “Looking for cropland this far up the mountainside…”

  He could feel the woman’s eyes on him as he followed the direction of her pointing finger. He always knew when people were watching him with any kind of intensity. It was a tickle. Waiting for him to react.

  She expected fear. Alarm.

  They rarely interacted, he and the villagers, but social order always broke down at a time like this.

  “Ve por ti mismo.” She pointed across the way.

  Another gated storefront. The little repair shop. He knew what he’d find there—he could hear the flies. She bade the boy to stay and help her with something, thinking she was sparing the boy some hell. She had no idea where they came from, Hugo and the boy.

  The boy turned his big brown eyes to Hugo.

  Hugo nodded, telling the boy to obey. The boy understood Hugo’s every gesture and expression.

  Hugo walked across the street and peered inside. Pedro had crawled a ways, judging from the marks upon the dusty slab floor. They had shot him far more than they’d needed to for a kill. Bullets were expensive these days, but this was an efficient use of them nevertheless. Death had never been the goal here. Terror had been the goal.

  Humans were animals, and it didn’t take much to spark terror in them. Terror was something between a taste and a feeling in the blood—when you were on the giving end of it, anyway. When you were on the receiving end, it was a form of madness.

  He stood there for an acceptable amount of time staring at the old man on the ground, but really he was testing the contours of his own darkness. Trying to see if the violence touched him in the way that it touched regular people. He looked at the blood path and imagined Pedro crawling—doomed, but still fighting to get away, trying to work up some sadness or empathy, but it didn’t work. The sight of the man’s body made him feel like killing somebody. Nothing more.

  He turned, watching Ramona guide the boy to some task involving cans. He looked around at the destruction. The villagers had imagined that the remoteness of the village would protect them—that the coca gangs wouldn’t bother reaching up the mountain. But the coca gangs were desperate these days—they were being driven out of places like Colombia and Ecuador in favor of tourism, mining, and legitimate farming. Driven into Valencia.

  El Gorrion. Expanding up the mountain.
/>   He came back. “Lo siento,” he said.

  She nodded, stroked the boy’s hair. The boy frowned, barely tolerating it.

  “Fernando?” he asked. Fernando owned Café Moderno.

  “Drove out an hour ago. They can take what they want. They’ll want your farm, and they’ll take it. Julian is trying to save some of the bushes, but…”

  He nodded. This was the only place in the world that the savinca thrived. The farmers would be saving plants.

  Again he squinted down the street. He should feel more than a killing anger, but that was what he felt. He felt it strongly. Because this was his goddamn village.

  Nobody fucked with his village.

  “No creo que vayan a volver,” he said simply. I don’t think they’ll come back.

  He could feel the excitement shoot through the boy like a fucking arrow. The boy knew not to show it.

  “They will come back,” Ramona or Renata said. “They’ll want your land. You have good land for coca.” Cocaine land. Because that was what this was about. Not quite up to the frost line.

  “Ellos no volverán,” he said. “Tell the others—twenty-four hours will pass, and they will not return.” He shouldn’t feel happy about returning to the killing.

  Hugo started up the Jeep. Fighting and killing was going to be hell on his burns.

  The boy got in, face glowing. He spoke in Spanish. “You’ll save them. You’ll make them sorry for what they did to the old man. El Gorrion has hit the nest of a hornet.”

  Hugo kept his eyes on the road. The boy was still idealistic. He wanted him to be something more than a cold-blooded killer.

  “You think this is about justice?” Hugo growled.

  The boy’s silence told him yes, he thought it was about justice. At least he hoped it was.

  “This isn’t about justice.” Hugo said icily. “It’s about llapingachos.”

  Chapter Four

  Footsteps in the hall. She sucked in a breath. It was night—maybe eleven. She’d wondered when he’d come.

  A key in her door.

  She spun around. A slim man with a goatee strolled in—Brujos himself—followed by a woman and then two guards.

  The woman came up to her with fire in her eyes and slapped her.

  Zelda forced herself to cry, to look bewildered. Brujos’s girlfriend—it had to be.

  Brujos came up to Zelda, now. She braced herself. It was going to be something bad with the two of them, or nothing at all.

  But Brujos didn’t touch her. “La puta de Mikos,” he said—Mikos’s whore—and he spat in her face.

  She wiped it off because Liza would wipe it off. Just last.

  It was easy to guess what had happened. The girlfriend had learned about Brujos winning her in a card game and had come to stake out her territory. She wanted Brujos all to herself.

  She could have him.

  “Ahora. Antes de que se vayan.” The woman pointed sideways. Now. Before they leave.

  They? Who?

  But she and Brujos were already walking away.

  “What about the deal?” she asked.

  The two guards came up and took her arms, one on either side.

  “Wait!” She twisted away and grabbed the small suitcase. She couldn’t leave that equipment behind, dammit. She couldn’t leave at all—she hadn’t gotten the files.

  She was hustled out of the mansion and put in the back of a Jeep. She wanted to scream, thinking about the standoff, about the pirates holding that tanker off Costa Amarrilla. People would die if they blew that thing up. The ecosystem up and down the coast would be destroyed. She had to get back into that mansion.

  Two guards with fully automatic weaponry sat up front. There were Jeeps in front and behind her, also full of guards. A convoy of five. The seat covering was rough and warm on her bare ass, which the thong did nothing to cover. At least she had the apron to cover her in front. And the top.

  Her blood raced. Why the heavy guard? “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Nobody answered, not that she expected it. She really just wanted to remind them that she spoke only English, so that they’d feel free to speak in front of her.

  One thing was clear: they weren’t guarding her. Something larger was going on.

  Headlights were flipped on and the small motorcade rumbled to life in a cloud of diesel. She strained to listen to the chat in the front seat, but got nothing of importance. Deep down, she knew they weren’t going back to that mansion, or at least she wasn’t.

  She eyed the suitcase. Wherever they were going, the stuff in there could give her away. Put Liza in danger. She eased open the lid and pretended to be searching for something, but really she pulled out the vibrator, unscrewing the top and dumping the drive. She quickly crushed it under her heel and shoved it out a rust hole in the bottom of the vehicle, and then she ripped that remaining parabolic mic out of the lining.

  “No!” the man in the passenger seat said, tension in his voice.

  She held up a shirt. “I’m getting a shirt to wear.” She pressed it to her front.

  He grabbed it and threw it out onto the shadowy wayside.

  “Hey!”

  He shook his head, pointing to her barely covered breasts. “No more.” He clapped his hands together and pointed to the suitcase. A sign to shut it.

  She complied, and once he turned, she got rid of the parabolic mic. Clean now. But where were they going?

  She’d done enough time in hot spots around the world to know when soldiers were tense. These men were on high alert. Beyond high alert. It wasn’t so evident in their banter with each other, quips and jeers in Spanish over the screaming muffler, putting on brave, macho faces, but you could tell it in the way they held themselves in the silent moments. They expected trouble.

  Damn.

  She looked down at her feet. She wanted to take the shoes off—she could run and move better in bare feet, yet she still felt protective of them. She always had, ever since Friar Hovde.

  The convoy of armed Jeeps turned onto a dark side street and rumbled past barren cantinas strung with lights. They parked in front of a dark strip of restaurants. Zelda surveyed the area. She could make a run for it, but her odds of surviving wouldn’t be good—running could turn into hunting practice with men who were tense like this. The question was, what would her odds be of surviving where they were going? And what was happening?

  Bottom line, the mission had failed.

  She thought miserably about the standoff. All the lives threatened. It had begun two weeks back, when South American pirates had seized an oil tanker off the South American coast, demanding the release of certain prisoners, mostly in Valencian prisons. The Valencian delegation had refused to negotiate. The pirates were threatening to let the oil run out into the bay and set it all on fire. It was bad.

  It had been Dax’s idea to slide the pirates something to trade. Brujos’s legendary files would have been perfect—the files would’ve enabled officials across the region to move on cartel collaborators, taking prisoners far more valuable than the pirates’ friends.

  Now they were back to square one.

  Dax was resourceful. He’d think of something—he always did. He saw things other people didn’t.

  A man in an apron scurried out with a box full of bags of fried food of some sort. He was obviously frightened, and apologized for not having enough. “Esto es lo mejor que tengo. Lo mejor,” he said. The best I have. The food was loaded into the vehicle in front of them.

  They headed back out.

  “Where are we going?” she asked in English. “Where?”

  The driver turned his grizzled face to her and smiled an ugly smile. He understood the question, and the ugly smile was the answer.

  They bumped on. Scrubby roadside became walls of thick jungle illuminated by headlights and searchlights wielded by soldiers. They passed small concrete buildings, bright paint still on the parts that hadn’t crumbled. Here and there lights flashed on broken-down vehicl
es slowly being reclaimed by nature.

  Zelda looked at the thick walls of foliage. She would’ve loved to get out and study the leaves. Touch them. Smell them.

  She was a leaf person. She loved the ways they formed themselves, the way they smelled and grew. The dendritic patterning of the veins, like tiny river systems.

  Flowers were what everybody saw first, what people typically remembered about a plant, but the leaves were just as important. The soldiers around her were the same way. They put on a good show for each other, but it was in the quiet moments, the leaf moments, when the truth in a man emerged.

  The jungle grew thicker. The road more rugged.

  Nobody knew where she was—nobody who cared, anyway, and it made her feel so alone. Dax wouldn’t expect contact for at least twenty-four hours.

  An hour later, they entered a clearing. Some of the guards got out and started pulling brush and netting this way and that, and she realized it was a landing strip. Was she being sent back with a shipment north? Returned unfucked as a macho slap in Mikos’s face?

  She hated the idea of leaving empty-handed. Yeah, she’d planted the parabolic mic, and she had the name of a disgruntled guard still inside Brujos’s mansion, but they needed those files!

  The men lined up the vehicles at the edge of the clearing. They made her get out—without her suitcase. It made her nervous.

  She was sweating. Even at night, the humidity was stifling, and the night bugs droned too loud, and she didn’t like any of this.

  She could make out white stripes spray-painted onto the scrubby ground, alongside lights and reflectors. Beyond them on the other side of the clearing, were camouflaged hangars and a few outbuildings. The men stood around their Jeeps, smoking, waiting. She read tension in everybody’s stance. Judging from the direction of their attention, a plane would be coming in from the south.

  A black SUV roared onto the field and parked at the end of the line. Brujos and his woman got out of the back. They ignored Zelda, speaking instead to armed men some distance away. They stopped talking when a low rumble sounded in the distance.

  The navigation lights of a small plane came into view—a small, fast plane. Drug-running plane, probably out of Costa Amarrilla, maybe Valencia. The field came to life with rows of lights.