Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (5 page)

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 vehicles 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.

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.

Z
elda 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.