Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (10 page)

He would never have a kid speak for him, that was not a Kabakas thing.

“Even an army will not protect anyone from Kabakas. Surrounded by an army of forty men, Kabakas doesn’t care.”

She worked harder at loosening the knot, watching the man watch the boy. She was getting it. She’d get out of this, dammit! She wouldn’t give up.

It was then that the attacker turned his masked face to her.

His deep brown eyes met hers, invaded hers. She felt electrified by the darkness, the fury of his gaze, and its endlessness. His eyes were beautiful and terrifying, shining from the kill, or maybe pain or fury. Her heart hammered out of her chest, but she refused to look away or to freak out. She had the deep sense that she knew this man; that she always had.

She glanced down at those hands. He was near enough now that she saw a sunfire insignia on one of the barong swords, a small mark near the hilt.

The sunfire insignia. He was using street-corner
mercado
swords!

That decided it. This was not Kabakas. No way.

Kabakas’s swords had the
ouroboros
, an image of a snake swallowing its tail, the insignia of a blacksmith in Mindanao. The CIA kept that detail under wraps.

She stared him down as she tried to work herself free, using everything she had to picture the knot in her mind.

God, attacking a guerrilla contingent with toys? She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted.

“We will take on any army, any day. Do you understand?” the kid continued. “You will carry this message.”

There had been twenty fighters at most. Aguilo would remember it as forty.

Still the man looked at her. Her heart pounded. She didn’t know what to do with this eerie recognition of him, this connection.

Fuck you
, she thought.
You’re not Kabakas.

The boy was on the other side. He yanked open the door on the driver’s side and pulled a rifle and three revolvers out of the Jeep, then a lug wrench. He grunted and stepped back, casually spinning the weapon, eying her. He shot a querying look at his master, who watched her still.

The stars on the mask seemed to glitter. Probably also fake.

The man advanced on her, street-corner barongs shining with blood.

He was coming for her. She sat up, pulsing with anger, aliveness, that strange energy from when she’d heard his name on the plane.

This couldn’t be how it ended.

Time slowed as the barong blade came down on her. In that moment, she wondered if she’d died on that plane, if this was her mind’s weird way of replacing the death.

The blade banged down onto the bar atop the door, severing the rope the held her in place.

She tumbled back into the Jeep seat. Quickly, she scrambled over the door, thinking to run, but the attacker grabbed her hair and forced her to the side—in protection, domination, or ownership, she didn’t know, but all her fight came back suddenly and she rammed against his legs, wishing her hands were free so that she could hit him and loosen his grip somehow.

“Go!” he bellowed, glowering at Aguilo.

Aguilo jumped into the driver’s side and sped away.

The kid looked up at Kabakas questioningly.

Kabakas stared back at him. The two seemed to be communicating.

Fingers tightened on her scalp. Her heart pounded as she struggled, but it was like struggling against a boulder.

The engine droned away, under the jungle canopy. She could’ve handled Aguilo unarmed. He’d been stripped of his weapons; she could’ve taken him out with her feet as he drove.

The fighter looked down. Brown eyes speared into her core.

He had the same hair as his sidekick—short, dark, but it was those eyes that got her, seeing so much, containing so much. He seemed near, yet far. Drugged. In a trance. Something.

His voice, when he spoke, was a gravelly baritone. “Do you cook?”

Accented English. Valencian…but not quite.

“Do you cook?”

“Yes,” she said, blood racing.

“Did you graduate from high school?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Twenty-one times six. What is that?” he asked.

She gaped at him. “One hundred and twenty-six.”

He shoved her to the ground and walked off. “
La puta viene con nosotros
.” The w
hore comes with us.

Zelda stiffened. Had she heard that right?

The boy aimed his Uzi at her, eyes filled with disgust. “
No la necesitamos
.”

The man halted in his stride. Slowly he turned. The boy stiffened, slim limbs taut with fright.

Zelda’s blood raced as the man pulled off his mask, as his wild and stormy gaze zoomed into the boy. He had those high Valencian cheekbones, gleaming with sweat, eyes sharp, dark hair sweaty and tousled. His features were large, like the rest of him, not smooth or polished, but jagged and proud, as though chiseled in stone, all crude power and beauty. “
Cómo
?”

The kid stiffened even more.

He addressed the child in Spanish, “Free her hands and help her find something to wear. Her outfit disgusts me.” Then he turned to her, eyes dark and expressive. “You run, you die.” A simple statement. He hardly needed to emphasize his willingness to carry out the threat.

He didn’t mean to kill her. She wouldn’t be tortured by El Gorrion’s men. Relief and gratitude washed over her.

The boy whipped off his mask, a small gesture of defiance.

“Nothing bloody,” the attacker added. He picked up a rag from the ground and began to polish a barong.

The boy gestured with his gun. “Up.”

So the boy spoke English, too.

Kabakas was from Valencia. Kabakas reportedly spoke English. But Kabakas would never show his face. Unless he meant to kill her.

The jungle chatter had started back up.

The kid had shoved a baseball cap over his head. He holstered his gun and stormed over to her. His brown cheeks had a rosy glow—from exertion or maybe anger; he clearly didn’t want her there. She guessed his age at eleven or twelve. So young, yet he moved like an old soldier. His dark hair was slightly shaggy, like his companion’s. She got the feeling that these two cut their own hair. They seemed somehow wild.

The kid produced a blade, seemingly out of nowhere, and sliced the rope that bound her hands as the man looked on.

“Thank you,” she said. “Both of you. Thank you so much.”

A dark look from the kid was her only reply. The fighter remained unreadable.

The kid pointed her in the direction that the man had pointed. She went along, feeling him behind her with that Uzi. He could handle the weapon; that much was clear. She had the element of surprise back, but she had time now. The attacker wanted to know if she cooked. If she knew math. Did he have a job in a drug lab for her?

What if she’d said no, that she couldn’t cook? What if she’d done the math problem wrong? Would he have killed her, then?

She inspected her wrists as they went. She’d gouged the side of her arm—that was where the blood had been coming from. It had stopped bleeding.

The boy walked loosely, like a warrior, giving no more thought to the corpses around them than a hiker might give to trees in a forest. He was heading for a hut, faithfully following the direction of faux Kabakas’s eyes. He turned and gave her a dark look, an unspoken command to stay. He ducked in and came out with a mechanic’s jumpsuit. It was dark blue and stained with grease, but it wasn’t bloody—and it wasn’t a negligee. Zelda pulled the thing on over the maid’s outfit. It was a hundred degrees, but she didn’t care. With shaking hands, she buttoned it up.

“Thanks,” she said.

The boy had slung his rifle over his back; he had his revolver out now, spinning it on his finger like an old West gunslinger.

“Move.”

They reached the fighter, who had completed the task of polishing his swords. He shoved them in his pack. He turned his eyes toward her stocking feet, and then he glared at the boy. A shadow crossed the boy’s face. He turned and made a beeline for a group of dead fighters and yanked the boots off one of them and returned. They were too big for her by a mile and smelled bad, but she took them happily.

The boy smirked. He was young, hard, and angry, and he had the kind of emptiness in his eyes that she’d seen in child soldiers and war orphans.

“Put them on,” the fighter growled.

She donned the dead man’s boots. Whoever these two were, they were giving her clothes to wear, and that was a good sign. She was safe for now.

The fighter pointed to the suitcase some yards away. The boy retrieved it. The fighter then tipped his head and the boy handed it to her. He had perfected the art of commanding the child with minimal effort.

He might not be Kabakas, but he was smart and powerful and dangerous all the same.

The suitcase was heavy, but she bore it without showing it.

“You will cook for us and you will teach the boy his math. Do you understand?”

A cook? A tutor?

“Do you understand? Do you agree?”

“Okay, yes,” she said.

The fighter turned and walked into the jungle.

“
Vamos
,” the boy said, motioning with the revolver for her to walk in front of him.

She went, mind spinning.

You wheel cook for us.
Poot them on.
Definitely a Valencian accent, but slightly British, or the kind of British accent you would hear in India in terms of music. One of the Associates, Macmillan, would be able to give her his entire linguistic history from just that sentence.

“En inglés,”
the fighter commanded. “You will speak to her in English only. Only and always English.”

The boy said nothing.

She carried the suitcase in front of the boy and behind this fighter who styled himself as Kabakas. On they trudged, farther and deeper. She caught the vanilla and honey scent of the
Prosthechea fragrans
and looked around in the dim morning light until she spotted a profusion of the cream-colored orchids covering the trunk and branches of some of the older, larger trees. Gratefully she sucked in a breath, sweet and thick with life.

The boy’s revolver glinted in the gloom as he spun it. Was he the dark attacker’s son? Though he seemed to obey the attacker more as a subordinate to a military commander than a child. A dog to a master.

So much about this fighter said
impostor
.

Yet he
felt
like Kabakas to her.

It was impossible. But what if?

What if?

The possibility felt like a tide of magic inside her.

But no. He’d let her see his face and live.

Sweat poured off her skin. She rolled up her sleeves, loosened the buttons. People didn’t realize how heavy a suitcase full of money could be, but she carried it gratefully.

The jungle became darker the deeper they walked. The attacker lit a torch and continued on. Where were they going? Did these two have some sort of a compound nearby? The too-big boots were giving her blisters, but she trod on.

She thought about the tanker standoff. Had anything new happened? She needed to contact Dax ASAP and let him know the files were not forthcoming, but maybe they could work on the disgruntled guard. And her sister was home free.

The mission was only half a failure.

In maybe two miles, they reached a Jeep. The boy stuffed the rifle and Kabakas’s weapons into a pair of duffel bags and then he took the driver’s seat; the fighter took the passenger seat. The kid was driving? He was young to drive.

The fighter motioned. “In,” he said to her.

She swung the suitcase into the backseat, keeping her expression a blank slate, and settled herself next to it. The fighter was already in the front. He twisted in his seat, nodding at her left arm. “No drugs. Understand?”

Her left arm—that’s where they’d put the track marks tattoo. The long sleeves of the jumpsuit covered it now, but even in the heat of battle, he’d seen it, remembered it.

“I’m not on drugs,” she said in English, maintaining her cover as Liza, the prostitute who spoke no Spanish. Convenient that Aguilo had made that possible. “I quit. No drugs.”

He eyed her. “Lie to me, and you die,” he said. “Disobey me, and you die. Run, and you die. Do you understand,
señorita
?”

Her blood raced. The Kabakas impostor was literally taking her
captive
?

“Do you understand?”

Would he expect sex, too? Of course he would. She’d been presented as a prostitute. She’d ditch him before that happened, of course. She’d get to a phone and call Dax for an extraction.

But every time she imagined leaving, a sparkly little question still played in the corner of her mind:
What if?

Everything about him said
impostor
—his weaponry, the boy, and the carelessness of letting her see his face.

But there was something about him…

What if?

“Answer me.”

“I’m not on drugs,” she repeated. “I said I wasn’t, and I mean it.”

He turned in his seat. “
Dale la caja
,” he said to the boy.
Give her the box?
What did it mean? It sounded ominous.

The boy passed back a small box. She opened the top; it was loaded with gauze and bandages. Ready for wounds.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.