Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) Read online

  Weapons came into view as well. A few of the men set up in the jungle around the perimeter. Snipers. A full twenty armed men waiting for a plane that couldn’t hold more than eight.

  Who the fuck was coming?

  Zelda didn’t like it on a lot of levels, but she was about to witness something, and she liked that. More information was better than less.

  The plane bumped neatly onto the field, kicking up the dust and grit. It went right to the edge and circled back. The military-issue plane was a Soviet-era workhorse, an expendable plane. The drug runners probably lost their fair share of them.

  A camo-clad guard came down the steps first, assault rifle over his shoulder, followed by a man with dark curly hair and a scar on his neck, obviously the leader. Three more camo-wearing, rifle-toting guards followed him. They all had the walk of battle-hardened guerrillas. The last one pulled along a blonde woman who looked hurt. Dress ripped to hell.

  Zelda bit her cheek.

  Brujos and his girlfriend went up and spoke with the leader with the curly hair. Two things were instantly obvious. One: they’d never met before. And Two: Brujos, though he was hiding it, was deferential to this curly-haired leader. They both stood like bulls, but Brujos was a bull with something to lose. Too much the bull. Brujos snapped and suitcases were handed over. Money.

  The guards began unloading the plane with the help of Brujos’s men—square packages about the size of couch pillows with red birds on the front.

  El Gorrion cocaine. Shit—these were El Gorrion’s people. Brujos was bad, but El Gorrion was worse. This curly-haired man was an El Gorrion lieutenant.

  Why was Brujos letting her see this? She shouldn’t be seeing this.

  It was then Zelda knew: she wasn’t going back.

  She swore under her breath and looked around. Twenty feet of clearing behind her, and then jungle. Could she make it without getting shot?

  No.

  The other option was to kick off the heels and grab a weapon. The leader was the only high-value hostage in this scenario. Could she get to him? It would be running into the fire, but it might be the only way to survive this.

  Somebody carried the food onto the plane—the three brown cardboard boxes full of white bags of food. Grease stains spread out on the sides.

  Decide. Her pulse raced.

  What would young Zelda have done? Zelda before Friar Hovde?

  Suddenly Brujos gestured in her direction. The curly-haired leader looked over at her, up and down, her in that ridiculous outfit. Brujos’s girlfriend smiled at her.

  A gun butt was shoved into her back. A voice behind her. “Vamos!”

  Zelda stiffened. Well, this was one way to get close enough to take a hostage. But she was out of practice. Unarmed. Surrounded by guerrillas used to action. Wearing sexy maid’s lingerie.

  She felt paralyzed. Options were dwindling too quickly.

  The leader looked her over. He reached out and she jumped back. Wrong answer.

  The man smiled. “Okay.”

  “Ella no habla español,” Brujos said. She doesn’t speak Spanish.

  “Bueno,” the leader said. “Sólo hay una palabra que ella necesitará saber.” Only one word she’d need to know.

  Zelda didn’t need the word supplied, but she got it anyway, courtesy of Brujos’s girlfriend. “Mamar.” Suck.

  Dammit.

  At that point, two things happened at lightning speed. One of the guards moved behind her and zip-tied her hands. She splayed her wrists, but they got them tight enough that she wouldn’t be able to work out of them instantly. And then another grabbed the blonde woman, and before the poor woman could even complete her exclamation of surprise, he shot her in the head. Casually, quickly, aiming for the blood and brains to fly away from the group. He guided her to crumple to the ground in a well-practiced motion that chilled Zelda to the core.

  Even Brujos and his girlfriend looked surprised.

  Another guard counted money out of a suitcase as if nothing had happened. “Okay,” he said.

  Her heart pounded. She should’ve gone for the jungle.

  Because she’d just been traded to El Gorrion’s people. El Gorrion, the Valencian guerrilla. Up-and-coming players. Jungle labs. They purchased crops directly from the farmers, though purchasing was a euphemism. El Gorrion’s men would kill farmers who didn’t produce for them. Even farmers who wanted to plant legit crops.

  The food was loaded onto the plane. She’d be next. Favors for the trip.

  People averted their eyes from the dead woman, but Zelda didn’t. The woman deserved a witness, an ally, if only in spirit. Zelda imagined the woman’s soul rising peacefully from her tortured body, even though she wasn’t sure if she believed in such things.

  She’d seen too many people die horribly, but she always took the time to honor the dead in her mind, and to imagine a kind of peace for them. She used to do it with animals on the roadside as a girl, and even plants.

  Zelda honored and fought for all living things.

  During her time with the CIA, she’d been to some places where there were too many bodies to honor individually. She’d always felt bad when she couldn’t, but she’d do it for the group, imagining them finding peace.

  She wondered if anybody would do it for her—witness her death with respect and imagine some sort of peace for her.

  Certainly nobody in this group.

  A teen with a beaten-down look emerged from the plane and threw a plastic trash bag out onto the field. Brujos would take care of it—that was the message.

  The flies had already found the blonde woman. If Zelda were really Liza, she’d have thrown up by now, but there was little point in convincing anybody of anything. She was on that plane. She was the in-flight entertainment. There was no going back.

  She looked out at the jungle, so beautiful and dark and cool, wishing she’d tried for it. There were two ways to survive this flight: total submission or total domination.

  Chapter Five

  Zelda was pushed up the flip-down ladder into an interior just large enough to fit two compact cars. The sides were lined with fold-out seats—two near the front were down, seat belts dangling. The teen had taken the seat nearest the cockpit, which was closed off by a metal door.

  She was shoved down the steel grate walkway that ran between four air mattresses. One of her spiked heels caught in a gap. She barely got her balance back before she was shoved farther back between upended crates that served as makeshift tables, and farther on between messy stacks of wooden pallets to a small bedroll in the back. Next to it lay a pack of tissues. Lip balm. A squeeze tube of lube. The blonde’s spot. These were her things.

  Zelda’s heart sank.

  She was shoved down onto the bedroll. She was the new blonde. Activities back here would’ve been fully obscured when all those containers of coke had been stacked on the pallets. She would be only partly obscured now, obscured from the waist down, thanks to the empty pallets. Right behind was the bathroom. She could smell the disinfectant.

  The rest of the men came on. Six in all, and two pilots.

  She waited, needing to see how things would unfold. She didn’t have a plan yet—there were too many unknowns. She needed to stay open.

  The door slammed shut. Voices from the cockpit. They were moving.

  The plane taxied and took off, engines droning loudly.

  She settled down on the pad behind the wooden pallets. When she sat straight up, she could just see them over the pallets, but she found when she stretched out on her side, she could get a good view of all of them through the gap between the stacks. That was where she put herself.

  She swallowed, ears popping as they gained altitude, wishing she’d taken her chances running back in town. Wishing she had tennis shoes on. Wishing she’d gotten those files. Wishing she hadn’t given up Randall’s name like a despicable coward.

  She watched them and studied them, trying to get the old mind-set back, before Agent Randall, before Friar
Hovde, before she’d crumbled. She needed to survive this flight.

  Thankfully, the food was more interesting than she was for the moment. Calamari tacos, corn tamales, and something else. She was surprised they weren’t making her suck them off while they ate, but they were all apparently waiting for the curly-haired leader, and the curly-haired leader was into the food. He’d heard that the fried calamari was supposed to be the best in the land, but they all agreed that it wasn’t.

  The teen looked on hungrily. There was more than enough to go around—why weren’t they letting him have any? Was he just some innocent kid they’d pulled into the gang? Even so, they should feed the kid. Assholes.

  They’d apparently gotten the memo that she didn’t speak Spanish, or maybe they meant to kill her at the end of the flight, because they were discussing Brujos. They didn’t like him and didn’t respect him, and the leader worried about his fitness as a long-term partner for El Gorrion. At one point one of the men called the leader Guz. Short for Guzman, maybe.

  They liked that she was Mikos’s whore—la puta de Mikos—and they seemed to know who Mikos was, but considered him a snot. They felt his fast rise was luck.

  There was one thing they could agree on.

  They laughed about the blonde and relived the kill, as very bad men typically did.

  “¿Vieron la cara de Brujos?” one of them said. Did you see Brujos’s face? When they killed her, they meant. They all laughed about that and agreed that the blonde had cried too much on the way up. They began to exchange kill stories, casually, the way people might discuss pet antics. You should see this trick my dog does. Except that men, women, and children were dying. You should’ve seen…

  The stories seemed to center on things they’d done recently in a village called Buena Vista. Zelda was glad they couldn’t see her face—keeping the disgust away took energy, and she needed energy for handling this. She should’ve taken the run. The odds of surviving a run into the jungle while getting shot at were far better; but no, she’d choked. Dax had been right to try to talk her out of this thing. She had no business in the field.

  The old Zelda would never have made these errors. She would’ve put things together faster. She’d been in the South American network, and she’d had a keen sense for trouble. You had to if you were in the field during the regional civil wars. Valencia had been the worst—the war had ravaged the tiny country for years, a raging bonfire of mythical proportions. There hadn’t been a good side. It was one of those conflicts where the minute you decided who was least bad, they did something horrific.

  These days, the regional situation was more like glowing coals with occasional flare-ups. It didn’t help that the men roaming the countryside across Valencia had only killing and terrorizing on their résumés. The men on the plane were murderers and terrorists. Fighters like them had been banding together in different factions and flavors for years. Some guerrilla factions were political and anti-drug; others were political, but funded through drugs. Some were more about kidnapping and coups. Some were simply gangs of thugs, thriving on the coca trade; others were more sophisticated, such as organized crime families with anti-government roots and international networks. Even the oil-rig pirates could be traced back to the wars. And then there were the paramilitary groups with their own varieties of hate, politics, and violence.

  El Gorrion was of the quasi-political, drug-thug variety of guerrilla. He’d come up fast and hard since the sweep of arrests some ten years back, and his people were strong and battle-hardened. She had no illusions about fighting five of them, plus a teenage kid and two pilots. She’d need luck to win.

  They spoke more about Buena Vista, which means beautiful view in Spanish.

  The leader, Guz, was slowing his eating. It was about time. They’d make her go up, or Guz would come back.

  Guz’s right-hand man, a guy with a small black moustache and a bandana, was back on the Buena Vista village takeover. They argued about the division of the new cropland. An overseer would be brought in. That was pretty standard guerrilla practice in order to force the farmers to grow coca. It was the most lucrative crop; yes, but most farmers would grow the legit crop if given a chance—it wouldn’t pay as much, and there were logistical and start-up obstacles, but they wouldn’t have to deal with guys like these. They argued about one of the farmers. Guz thought he would be trouble, but his right-hand man felt confident he’d stay in line.

  “Que Kabakas te castigue,” one of the farmers said, and they all laughed about that.

  Que Kabakas te castigue.

  For a second, she forgot to breathe. Que Kabakas te castigue. Loosely translated, it meant I hope Kabakas will punish you. The saying had been popular during the war; a curse. People were still saying that? Energy surged through her, a wild energy sparkling with magic and anger and longing. For a second, she wasn’t trapped on a plane clad in ridiculous maid lingerie in the midst of ruthless killer-rapists—she was back in the field, confident and fierce and in control again. Back in the field hunting Kabakas.

  Kabakas was a near-mythical assassin who’d burst out of nowhere at the height of the Valencian Civil War, though assassin was barely even accurate; Kabakas had been more like a super-mercenary, capable of taking on armies single-handedly. He’d become famous across Valencia in a matter of months, the subject of tales epic and tall. One story had it that he’d go into a killing trance that made it so bullets couldn’t touch him. Another said that he could use his mind to throw off people’s aim, or even to explode weapons in fighters’ hands. Some said that he would pre-tie his limbs before battle to prevent blood loss so that he could be shot multiple times and still fight. He killed with knives and barong blades more often than with guns. Well, that one was true. She’d seen the gruesome aftermath of his attacks with her own eyes.

  Yeah, she’d known all about Kabakas—he’d been a white whale for her back when she was based in South America. It wasn’t just the bounty on his head, though you could buy a small island with it. He was the ultimate prize. The Holy Grail and Rambo rolled into one. Maybe a little bit of an obsession.

  Kabakas had started out as something of a benevolent mercenary; threatened villages would often recruit him to attack their attackers, although, sometimes different factions of fighters would pay him a lot of money to destroy various enemies.

  The really serious Kabakas hunters agreed he’d been trained by the Moros of the Philippines, and most believed he’d come out of the Balkans in the late 1990s—a teen mercenary with brown skin, jet-black hair, and the uncanny ability to put a blade in a man’s right eye from a hundred feet away. Similar stories came out of Algeria, and later along the Israeli/Lebanese border. The sheer old-school strangeness of throwing a blade and always hitting the eye had spooked a lot of fighters, and myths began to swirl around him. Zelda’s thinking—and she was not alone in this—was that his ideas for the Kabakas persona had been formed in these conflicts when he was just a mercenary. He’d brought the persona to Valencia at the height of the war. At this point he’d taken up the mask, a blood-red mask with silver stars painted on it.

  He charged a lot for his services, but he would do freebies—that was a known fact. Fighting on the side of the really downtrodden. Not often, but he did it.

  The CIA’s interest in Kabakas had been pragmatic. The fear was that he’d create a guerrilla faction of his own, seize power, and threaten the oil industry. The bounty on his head had come from the Valencian vice president himself, whose grudge seemed personal, but everybody in Valencian politics hated and feared Kabakas. His popularity made him dangerous. People thought he was something special.

  And then he’d carried out the infamous Yacon fields massacre. She and the other hunters would spend hours over pitchers of Pilsen in tiny torchlit cafés, armed to the teeth, arguing about what had turned Kabakas so dark so fast, or if he’d always been dark. She’d seen the aftermath herself: all those people with blades through their eyes, bloody faces, and frozen expressions. Ch
illing.

  Even after the Yacon fields massacre, Kabakas masks were sold in most street-corner stalls; even fake barong swords. Props for the fantasies of Valencian males, but still deadly. People still wanted to believe.

  The best intelligence had it that Kabakas had died in a fire nine years back. A Kabakas hunter considered one of the best had tracked him to a small town called Vasquez, only to see him run into a burning house that exploded seconds later. She knew the man; he was good. Smart. Trustworthy.

  What’s more, Kabakas’s activity had ceased at that point—further proof that he’d perished there.

  Considering the Yacon fields massacre, she should’ve been overjoyed about Kabakas’s death. But losing him as a quarry had been…strange. She still thought about him and dreamed about him, too.

  There was one known photo of Kabakas in existence, taken from the phone of one of the dead. The photo caught the killer in whirling motion—masked face, body, and barong swords a blur—everything a blur except for a large hand clad in a black leather glove. At the height of the hunt, Zelda had the image blown up and she’d hung it above her desk. She’d stare at that huge, muscular form and that leather-wrapped hand for hours, trying to get into his head. Wondering what it was like to have that kind of nerve, that insane level of ability, and no mercy whatsoever. Unapologetic might and darkness.

  She looked around at her esteemed fellow passengers. The beauty inside the human spirit. So much bullshit.

  She kept her arms behind her back—even though she’d long since worked free of the tie.

  Total submission or total domination.

  What would Kabakas do?

  She banished the thought. Fuck Kabakas. The old Zelda could handle these guys. She could return to that mind-set.

  The leader had a .357 in a shoulder holster. If he came back alone, maybe she could take it off him.

  She sucked in a breath, reminding herself that the sexy maid outfit was a power outfit; it endowed her with a massive element of surprise.