Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  Twenty minutes into the flight, Guz stood. He took a swig of beer and adjusted his cock, eyeing her through the crates. “Te estoy viendo,” he taunted. I see you. The guys laughed.

  At that moment, something kicked in. The decision made.

  She scurried backward, hiding in the corner, hands clasped behind her back. An old trick, pulling back—like pulling a line, inciting the predator to stalk toward you, luring him away from his pack.

  Could she do it?

  Hell, she was doing it. She watched herself position Guz like an out-of-body experience.

  Boot on metal. One step. Another.

  He arrived and stood over her, enjoying her fear.

  “Estás lista para mí?” he asked. You ready for me?

  She whimpered as he unzipped his pants and took out his cock.

  He went on, more for the benefit of his companions, of course. “Tú sabes la palabra mamar?”

  She gave him bewilderment and fear. It wasn’t hard—she really fucking felt it, and he was enjoying it. They were connected now; what he didn’t understand was that she was stoking that connection to control him. She scooted back, drawing him deeper behind the pallets, out of sight.

  He finally caught up. He reached down and grabbed her hair and stood her on her knees, shoving her face into his cock. “Mámamela,” he said, making a sucking sound.

  And just like that, she had his gun.

  She pulled his pants to his knees and jerked the fabric forward, making him fall on his ass.

  She took off the safety and aimed, relieving him of the blade in his ankle sheath before he could gather his wits. Hesitation would kill her now.

  “Stay down. Down!” she screamed when he lifted his head. “Down!”

  Guz complied. The men up front stood and stared.

  She slid his knife into her garter. With trembling fingers, she crouched behind him. She’d positioned him well; they’d have to shoot through him to get to her. What’s more, a lot of electrical was behind her.

  Weapons came up.

  “No disparen!” Guz yelled. He instructed a man named Aguilo to talk to her.

  “You cannot shoot in the plane,” one of the guards said. That would be Aguilo, then. An English speaker. Good. “The plane.” Aguilo made a crashing sound.

  That wasn’t exactly true. You could shoot through the skin of the plane a few times and it could still fly. A good crew could plug it up, but it was risky as hell. And if you shot out the electrical or the fuel, you were screwed.

  But they didn’t need to know she knew that. Or that she could understand their Spanish.

  “I’ll shoot if he moves,” she growled. “Tell him to put his head down and keep it down.”

  Aguilo repeated her instructions in Spanish. He got it right. Good.

  Guz lowered his head. He lay crosswise on the pallets a few feet in front of her, head turned toward the group.

  “Look at me,” she said. She nodded to the English speaker. “Eyes?”

  “Ojos,” he said.

  “Ojos on me,” she said to Guz, pointing with two fingers to his eyes and then hers. She didn’t want him coordinating with his men. A good fighter could do that without a word.

  Guz was obeying. For now.

  Time. She needed to be tracking time. They were going to Valencia, probably the southeast. She calculated the flight time—four more hours. They would land around dawn.

  Back when she was a confident, competitive, high-performing agent, she would’ve gotten off on the thrill of holding the plane for four hours; it would’ve been about feeling the men, adjusting to their emotions, keeping the rein on them from minute to minute, stoking their fear.

  She’d lost so much of herself the night with Friar Hovde. His end-of-the-world cult had operations in several countries, and destructive plans involving missile theft. She’d posed as a follower, working with Agent Randall, who’d climbed into Hovde’s inner circle. Hovde had caught her with files and quickly realized he had a mole. He’d brought her to the basement of an outbuilding, tied her up, and gotten the name out of her. It had taken a few hours, but he’d gotten it in the end. And Agent Randall had paid the price. The agency had moved on Hovde soon after, but it was too late for Randall.

  She’d gone on cases after that, but it was luck that she hadn’t gotten herself or anybody else killed. Shame and guilt tended to erode your sense of self-preservation, your awareness. The minute she thought of it all she could feel her very awareness contract to a small tube.

  She needed to not think about it now.

  Focus.

  “I saw what happened to your last girl,” she announced. “I know that’s what will happen to me.” Best for them to believe she had nothing to lose, that she’d crash the plane.

  “No,” said Aguilo, the English-speaking guard. “We’ll let you go.”

  Right. “Lies.” She took a breath. It was lucky, her getting the gun. If they could underestimate her language skills as well as her fighting skills, she might do this.

  “Let him go,” Aguilo tried.

  “No!” she screamed. “If he moves, I’m shooting him, and then all of you!”

  “Mantenla tranquila,” Guz said. Keep her calm.

  “Okay,” Aguilo said.

  “Put your guns in the aisle,” she said. “All of you!”

  Nobody complied.

  She pointed the gun at Guz’s face, letting him see the determination, finger on the trigger, hand shaking for effect. You never held a gun with your finger on the trigger; that was Firearms 101. But she kept her finger on the trigger, enjoying the fear in Guz’s eyes. “I kill you first.” He’d know the word for kill.

  “Háganlo!” Guz commanded.

  A few weapons went into the aisle. She heard the telltale sounds of chambers being emptied. It was a start.

  Guz spoke in Spanish, calmly. He was looking at her, but addressing his men, telling them to keep her focused on getting off the plane. They’d bide their time, and they’d take her when they landed. She’d be done for once they landed. She had no chance. A voice from the cockpit over the crackly radio. The pilot assured them he’d already radioed ahead and told them of the situation.

  They’d be headed to a private jungle airstrip. Somebody like El Gorrion would have a few of them, and every drug-running guerrilla airstrip worth its salt had an armed contingent sitting around. They probably didn’t even have to call in extra guys.

  Except that she didn’t intend to let them land there. They’d have a change of travel plans toward the end. Yeah, she might die today, but she’d go out fighting.

  She assessed the five men and pointed at the man with the bushiest beard. “Tell the man with the big beard to tie everyone up. Hands behind the back.” Aguilo repeated her instructions, and the man with the beard complied after urging from Guz.

  She watched, waiting.

  “Tell the man with the big beard to bring the guns to me. One by one. And he should hold them by their noses.” She pointed to the barrel.

  The mistake a novice would make would be to have the teen play gofer, but the teen was the one with the least to lose here, and the most likely to be impulsive.

  The guard translated, including her calling the barrel the nose. They all exchanged glances. That had been on purpose. Best that they think her a novice—it was one of her few advantages.

  Yeah, what she’d done, it wasn’t a novice move, but they could tell themselves she got lucky. A man with his pants down, a sidearm. It could happen. And the lingerie, fucking with their minds like an optical illusion, preventing them from taking her seriously as a warrior.

  The bearded man set the guns near her. Three Smith & Wessons. She beckoned him to push them nearer, and he did, gently, not wanting to upset her. Good. He’d been a good choice.

  An extra jacket hung on a hook near the front. She longed to have the bearded man bring that to her, too, so that she could wrap up in it. She couldn’t.

  The shoes were a problem, thoug
h, the way the heels had caught in the walkway. But she couldn’t let them see her scars or missing toes. The puncture behind her anklebone was visible enough, but that looked like an accident unless you saw the rest. They’d figure out what she was, and she’d lose the advantage of the outfit.

  She requested warm, dry socks and a Tuff-Tie, waving the gun, finger on the trigger.

  Aguilo translated, and the bearded man brought her the stuff. Quickly and discreetly she pulled off the heels and shoved on the socks. Then she pointed at Guz. “Tie him!” The bearded man regarded her wildly; he didn’t want to tie Guz.

  “Tie him!” she barked.

  The leader angled his wrists as the bearded man fit the tie around—loosely. Like a flash she was up; she smashed Guz’s wrists together with her stocking foot and yanked the cord tight, and then she was down. It had been a risky move—it gave away some of her expertise, and exposed her to gunfire, but she couldn’t have Guz getting free.

  “Tighten the rest like that.” She gave him a wild look, and he did as she said. Their bonds might not hold, but it was a start.

  Now the wait. The landing would be a bitch. She didn’t know how to fly this sort of plane, so she’d need at least one pilot. She couldn’t recognize one airstrip from the next. All she could do was to wait until they were in descent and force them to any airstrip but the one they wanted.

  She sat back against the wall just far enough away from the leader that he couldn’t get to her easily. If it came to that, she’d have to shoot him somewhere non-vital and hope she wouldn’t hit something critical on the plane. She worked out a few angles in her mind.

  He was looking away again. Fine. She took the opportunity to check which of the guns were loaded.

  She might not be fit to be an agent anymore, but she remembered what to do. She just needed a lot of luck now. And to not think about what she’d done to Randall.

  “Ojos,” she said.

  Guz looked back at her, full of oily hate.

  She put one of the guns in her garter belt. Another in the center of her bra. “Now I have enough guns to kill all of you twice,” she announced to the plane. “I’ll shoot everything. I don’t care.”

  Nobody said anything.

  She raised her voice. “Translate it. Tell them what I said.”

  “She’s a crazy fucking bitch with those guns,” Aguilo said in Spanish.

  Yeah, that worked.

  Chapter Six

  Hugo pulled the chest down from the secret compartment above the farmhouse kitchen ceiling and banged it onto the rough wood kitchen table.

  The dust pattern and the scratches on the padlock told him that the boy had been into it.

  He gave the boy an annoyed look. The boy gave him back a steady look, turning one of Hugo’s lessons back on him. Don’t cower unless you have a reason. Don’t fall to your knees until they cut you off at the shins.

  Hugo lifted out a heavy bundle and set it on the table. The bandolier of throwing blades. He pulled out a blade. Newly sharpened. Again he gave the boy a look. Again the boy returned defiance.

  The boy was almost untouchable now, that was how high he was riding on his fucking tide of excitement.

  Hugo had spent time in a dozen different countries thanks to his parents’ jobs as domestic servants of a Bolivian oil executive, and every place had their own version of the hero and sidekick. Batman and Robin, Tintin and Snowy, Asterix and Obelix, Lucky Luke et Jolly Jumper. Valencia itself had Pedro and Paco. No doubt that was what was in the boy’s mind. Maybe that was why he accepted life with a harsh and unfeeling recluse, stranded upon a windy mountaintop. Maybe that was why he so diligently played guard dog and groundskeeper when the pain of the burns drove his master into an opium stupor. For the chance to be Kabakas’s sidekick. Why not?

  The boy had come up in a band of ultraviolent guerrillas. Serving violent men was what he knew. He was five or six years old when Hugo had grabbed him. The boy would remember.

  The boy reached out and touched a blade. Hugo grabbed his wrist. “No es para ti,” he said. Not for you. The boy could never be Kabakas or serve Kabakas. He shouldn’t want that. Nobody should want that.

  Hugo pointed at the Uzi. The boy sighed.

  “Tú llevaras esa.” You’ll carry that.

  The boy said nothing. He’d grown up around Uzis. The Uzi was a bore.

  “Entiendes?” Understand? Hugo demanded, watching as the boy’s hope dwindled.

  Hope was Hugo’s least favorite emotion.

  The boy walked off. Hugo pulled out the red mask and ran a finger over the paint. Red with silver stars, modeled after something he’d found in a little junk shop in Prague. He’d been aimless that year, having destroyed the oil executive who’d employed and ruined his family. That had been the extent of his life plan—fight and destroy.

  Finding the mask had changed something for him—he’d gotten it in his head to do something for the country of his birth, his parents’ native home. Doing something to help Valencia was why he’d become Kabakas, and why he’d allowed Kabakas to die.

  Most of the Kabakas masks sold by mercado vendors were plastic, unlike this one, which had iron plating on the inside and rubber strips designed to hug the cheekbones and nose.

  The boy returned from the other room wearing just such a mask in a child’s size. He also had his small backpack with Sinawali sticks in the pockets, taking the place of the barongs.

  Hugo frowned and held out his hand. The boy removed the flimsy mask from his face. Hugo snatched it and turned it over, bent it this way and that, disgusted. “Have I taught you nothing?” he hissed. He cast it aside and shoved his own mask into the boy’s hands. “Cuál es la diferencia?”

  The boy ran his fingers over the inside of the mask. He’d probably been in the chest while Hugo went on his business trips to the city. Playacting. Maybe even sleeping with the stuff.

  “Say more,” he demanded.

  The boy pointed to Hugo’s reinforced mask. “Strength.”

  True enough. Hugo’s mask wouldn’t protect against a direct shot to the face, but it could deflect some of the cheap shot out there and had. Wearing an unreinforced mask from a vendedor de mercado would be suicide. “Say more,” Hugo demanded.

  “Imagen y substancia,” the boy said.

  “Inglés,” Hugo said.

  “The thin mask, it is all image and no substance. Kabakas is a great warrior of both image and substance.”

  “Not great. Kabakas is nothing special. He practices hard, so that he is a little better than everybody else, and he doesn’t let emotion into his mind.”

  The boy said nothing. He wanted Kabakas to be something more than a cold-blooded killer. They all had.

  Hugo said, “It is the belief that bullets can’t hurt him that has his opponents shooting wildly. It’s the terror. Kabakas doesn’t vanquish his opponents. Kabakas’s opponents vanquish themselves.”

  Undaunted, the boy picked up the Uzi and checked it over with quick, efficient motions. His heart would be thundering. Something you never wanted in the killing business.

  “Kabakas is no different from a successful farmer or businessman,” Hugo said. “It’s about projecting yourself as somebody to respect, to do serious business with. Do you understand?”

  The boy frowned. He didn’t give a fuck about his flower business now that the Kabakas stuff was out.

  The battles Hugo fought were won in the first moment, not the last. He won the moment an enemy understood what he was; the kill was just the outcome. Things worked the same way with women. It was not the last moment, the fucking, that made a woman his. It was in the first moment that a woman fell.

  Defiantly, the boy fingered the bandolier. God, he was practically feral. Hugo had really fucked up with him. He could put back entire battalions, but he couldn’t get this small boy to behave. He had picked up an old math textbook and he’d been trying to teach him from it, but the boy refused to do the lessons by the book. Hugo himself barely understoo
d it. The boy was growing up as an animal. He needed schooling. The boy liked reading, but nothing else interested him.

  Except, of course, Kabakas.

  They packed up the things they’d need, and the boy made them a simple meal of beans, rice, and plantains. The beans were undercooked; the rice and plantains burnt. Café Moderno usually packed them off with meals to heat. No more of that, now.

  He really should’ve killed El Gorrion when he’d had the chance. It had just served no practical purpose at the time, and Hugo was a practical man.

  Even now he didn’t need to kill El Gorrion; he just needed his men to stay off the mountain. It was El Gorrion’s men that Hugo needed to terrorize.

  Hugo’s contact had provided him an acceptable target: a plane expected at dawn in a jungle airfield near the Papas Sud River. He would take out men, money, and a plane in one painful swipe. He’d put the fear in them so deep that they wouldn’t even look at the mountain again.

  After that, he and the boy would eat in Bumcara.

  They headed out five hours early, leaving time for washed-out roads. They stopped at a mercadillo and Hugo ran his finger along the thick, leaf-shaped blade of one of the barong swords on display. He could sharpen it. Make it work. He hefted one. It felt heavy and good in his hand—too good. He’d sworn off this, and he didn’t want it to feel good. He tried to feel bad about what he was going to do, but he felt only anger. Saw only the old man, dead on the ground. He tightened his hand around the grip.

  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.