Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (8 page)

Espadas de Kabakas
, the vendor said approvingly.

Not quite. The blades were much too long. Did people think they were that long? The real ones had been created to his specifications by a famous blacksmith in Mindanao. Unfortunately, those swords were at the bottom of the Azolla River where he’d thrown them soon after the fire.

He tightened his hand around the curved-bone hilt; he’d wrap cord around the grip for better handling. “I’ll take all six,” he said. He’d never attacked with more than two swords, but the
mercado
swords could break.

They drove for hours, then ditched the Jeep two miles out from the airstrip and went the rest of the way on foot in the dark. It was part of the ritual, to walk and visualize the fight. They had long training sessions on the walking and the visualizing. Partway in, they stopped and made the fire.

Hugo pulled off his green T-shirt and the boy rubbed salve over the seared flesh of his side and back. The scar tissue was fragile and could rip open with a lot of exertion. There would be some exertion coming up.

He and the boy started the visualization together—
anting-anting
, his Moro teachers had called it. They would do it before archery practice, before arms firing. There was nothing exotic about it; armies the world over—from the Russians to the Israeli Special Forces—had their soldiers perform visualizations before battle, though they would not call them visualizations. Even the Marines did it with their songs and their call-and-response chants. Hugo had picked up something from every godforsaken outpost that the oil executive had dragged his family to.

Hugo stared into the fire and imagined killing. In his mind, he pre-killed the guards around the airstrip. He pre-killed their hangers-on. And then he’d take out the plane in a fiery explosion. One soldier would be left alive to carry the message back, to let the fighters know of Kabakas’s displeasure. There would be doubt at first, considering Kabakas was dead. But not enough to overcome the fear.

Buena Vista would be safe.

They began the trance, staring into the flames. He led the boy through it, as he’d done a few times before. He’d given the boy a child’s version, to help build his concentration. “Perfect concentration on the small and the large,” he said. “The movement of the flame below the night sky.”

The boy did not concentrate well. Always distracted by his phone, often missing the larger context of things. It worried Hugo.

Hugo became one with the flame, one with the present moment, stilling all thoughts, minute after minute, hour after hour.

Beware, you are not a god,
his old Moro teacher would sometimes say. No, he wasn’t a god; he was the devil.

El Gorrion’s men would see that.

Somewhere over Nicaragua

O
ne of them
wanted to take a piss. Aguilo translated, “He must use the bathroom.”

Of course they had to try that one.

“Nope,” she said.

An hour later, she made the bearded one bring her food. She wasn’t hungry, but she needed the ballast. She’d lost her chops as a spy, but the information was still rattling around.

He set it down, but didn’t leave.

“Back,” she said to him.

He glanced at Guz. She pointed the gun at him. “Don’t look at him, look at me! Get back! Translate that! In Spanish!”

Aguilo said nothing.

The bearded man stayed put.

Testing her. Her pulse drummed in her throat.

Fuck.

There was an emperor’s-new-clothes aspect to what she was doing. What did she really have? Nothing much beyond her willingness to crash the plane. And she didn’t really want to do that.

If they so much as sensed that, she was finished.

She took a deep breath and began to count. “
Uno
.”

The plane droned on. The man didn’t move.

She reached down into her heart, into the crazy depths of her fear, and let that show in her eyes, her voice. “
Dos
.”

The bearded man stepped back. She tried to hide her surprise.

They rode in silence.

Maybe she was a little crazy. She calculated how long she’d gone without sleep. The night with Liza was zero sleep. Coming up on thirty-six hours, then. The tension of the takeover had drained her, too, and the drone of the engine was lulling her senses.

The guys struck up a conversation in Spanish about the horrifying things they’d do to her when it was over. What they’d fuck her with. Yeah, that woke her up.

“No talking!” she said.

They shut up.

“Bring me all of the Cokes,” she said.

The bearded man brought her five bottles, setting them where he’d set the guns. As if she were some sort of wild animal.

“
Las abro
?” he pantomimed opening a bottle.

“No.” She shook her head. She just didn’t want the other guys to have them. She’d need them later when she started nodding off.

It came faster than she wanted.

She called the bearded man back. She held up a finger, and then pointed at one of the bottles. “
Uno
.”

He opened one, handed it to her, and shrank back. She took a swig and smacked her lips as though she didn’t have a care in the world.

A good front was half the game.

She sometimes wore beautiful clothes to her meetings with Dax, as if she might be heading out on a date afterward. It was important to her that Dax thought she was doing all right, and that he didn’t know about how she felt inside, or about her Friar Hovde nightmares. She’d worked with Dax long enough to know how to fool him; you input false variables—and they had to be convincing false variables, surface ripples connected to nothing. It was all about surface ripples with Dax. Or the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Tanzania and how that would affect things a world away. You never wanted Dax’s laser beam of a brain focused on you.

The guys were talking again. They discussed how much time had passed – three hours. That was about what she’d figured.

“Hey,” she barked.

They kept on, pushing it. She could feel Guz assessing her. He didn’t tell them to shut up. She’d known this was coming—the moment they would start testing her for real, seeing how far they could push her.

“No talking!”

The one kept on, talked about what they’d do to her. This conversation was scarier than the last, something she hadn’t thought possible.

Her pulse raced as she shifted herself into the position she’d worked out in her mind, giving her the angle by which she could graze the leader’s kneecap and the bullet would sail right past and into the side of the plane, well below one of the windows. It was in the general direction of the fuel tanks, but safely away. And near the guys too, an extra bonus. Risky, but there was no choice anymore—she needed to reestablish her willingness to take them all down.

She discreetly stuffed a bit of cardboard in each ear. The blast was going to be loud as a motherfucker.

Another started talking, expressly against her rules.

It was time. She let her voice go hysterical. “Stop it!”

He kept on. She jerked up the gun, aimed, and shot. The deafening blast ripped through the little plane. The leader cried out. A flurry of papers whipped around. The roar of the engine filled the air. Men were up, shouting.

“I’ll shoot again!”

“
No! Para
!” Guz held his knee. She’d nicked him just as she’d meant to, and pierced the side of the aircraft.

“No more talking!” Aguilo ordered. “No more talking, no more shooting, okay?”

It was official: she was crazy enough to shoot up the plane and shoot at the leader. The guys were already working on the hole. Through his expression, Guz calmed them and showed them he was okay.

Good.

Still, Zelda kept her eyes wild. Her ear canals squeezed with pain. “I’ll kill you all!”

“No more talking, okay?” Aguilo said.

They blocked the hole with part of a cardboard box and duct tape. She looked on, shaking like a tree. Thank goodness she’d ditched the heels.

She sat and drank another cola, imagining her exit strategy. She’d need the leader as a hostage. She’d keep the lingerie on no matter where they landed, even if it was a major airfield. People would see her exposed like that, and even though she’d be the one holding a gun to a man’s head, she’d seem like the victim. Maybe she’d even rip off the apron. It would be a fucking Escher painting where the stairs lead up onto themselves.

It might be enough to get her out.

She felt the hope rise inside her body, followed by the guilt. It was how it always happened, the good feeling trumped by the sickening guilt of the Friar Hovde incident. Liza had made so much of Zelda’s passion for justice, but deep down, Zelda knew if there was real justice, she’d be dead and Agent Randall would still be alive, drinking his shots of Jägermeister and customizing his scopes.

The plane droned on. It was louder now, but the patch looked like it would hold. She pulled the cardboard out of her ears when they weren’t watching. Later she peed in a bucket off to the side.

She was tracking time, but even if she hadn’t been, she’d know they were near just from the restlessness of her captives.

She directed all five of them to lie on the floor on the far right side, including the leader. She made the bearded man put bags and T-shirts over their heads, a task he completed with an ugly look that she felt almost physically, like bacteria in her chest. She tightened the ties, then she got the copilot out, and he got the same treatment.

She yanked the ties tight. They would suspect that she was something more than
la puta de Mikos
at this point. It couldn’t be helped.

She hustled Guz up to the front. She took the copilot’s seat, forcing the leader to crouch at her side.

The pilot eyed her nervously, but he worked the controls smoothly and surely. They were in descent. She could see the runway in the growing light. It looked like so many other airstrips around, lush green surrounded by foliage. A few figures in camo. Her welcoming party. A hangar and a row of Quonset huts opposite, a boulder at the corner.

“
Súbelo otra vez
,” she said.

The pilot looked at her wildly.

“
Súbelo otra vez
,” she hissed, gesturing upward with the gun. “Up in the air.
Ahora
!”

He pointed at the fuel gauge. “
Gasolina
!”

“
No me importa
.” She demanded to know where a different landing strip might be.

He looked down at the leader between them.

She told him to land it elsewhere, or she’d kill them all.

Guz told him to do it and the plane nosed back up. And up.

She’d use the boulder to recognize it if he tried to trick her and fly back there.

She was really doing it. She scanned the dark horizon. She was pulling it off.

A fugitive feeling of triumph appeared in her heart, fragile tendrils of hope. For a second she felt good, but then there it was: the tide of guilt: washing the hope away. Randall’s body on the linoleum floor, dead eyes that would never see his children again, see life again. She could get free of these men, but she could never be free of those five seconds of cowardice that trumped everything she was, everything she ever could be.

Totally and completely unforgivable.

Motion at her right. Shit! Guz was getting the bag off his head. She lunged. The pilot banked the plane, throwing her off balance.

Before she could even get in a shot, Guz was twisting the gun from her fingers. She fought him, but he had the arm strength and the hand strength. Strength enough to take it.

Pain exploded in her skull as he smashed her head onto his knee. The plane circled and righted as he held her head to his shin, grip like iron.

“You’ll be begging for death by the time I’m done with you,” he hissed, roughly ridding her of the rest of her weapons and binding her wrists viciously tight.

He dragged her back to where the guys were and cut one free. They began to free each other. She lay facedown on the metal strip with three boots on her back and her hands tied. Probably six guns on her head.

Guz spoke in Spanish. “I’ll deal with her on the ground.”

She swallowed as they descended, heart racing. She believed Guz, of course. She’d be begging for death. She’d embarrassed him, and there would be no end to his retaliation.

She whimpered, and somebody gagged her.

Her eyes clouded with tears. She lay there trying to enjoy the way it felt to breathe and have a body that wasn’t in too much pain. Soon, she’d give anything to have this feeling. She just prayed he wouldn’t start on her feet.

The plane circled. The touchdown was bouncy. The plane taxied and slowed, then did a U-turn and rolled back down, probably to the line of Quonset huts.

She closed her eyes.

The door opened and the cabin filled with the scent of diesel tinged with rich, moist jungle air. She strained against the boot on her back, catching a glimpse out the door. The dirt runway was dark, but the sky was pale yellow and gray, echoing with birdcalls. Dawn in the jungle. Across the way stood a pair of airplane hangars covered with camo net. That would be where they’d store, fix, and fuel the planes.