Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  He felt that now working side by side with this woman.

  As if the silent labor was a more potent conversation than a smoke screen of speech ever could be. As if he knew her from her soft, sure movements, from the effort she put into assessing the bud’s readiness for harvest, from the care with which she handled the stems. She tried hard to avoid the prickers and to make good clean cuts. She concentrated so hard at times that her tongue peeked out of the side of her mouth. It drove him a little mad to see it.

  He understood, as they went from row to row, that she hadn’t been lying about the drugs—this was not a woman in withdrawal. Though there were times, over the past two days, when he sensed a certain melancholy in her. Shadows under her eyes. The pain that she’d experienced, the hardship. He wanted very much to ask her about it.

  Would she answer?

  On they worked, filling one cart after another. They made good progress, and he was heartened when a few of the women showed up with water and snacks. His word wasn’t good, but his actions spoke.

  As they moved inward, he heard others at work. An iPod speaker played Reggaeton.

  They worked on.

  He stopped, pulled off his gloves, and drew a water bottle from his pack. He handed it to her and watched her drink, watching the undulations in her soft, pale throat, remembering the taste of her skin and her sweat.

  “What drove you onto that plane, Liza?”

  The motion in her throat ceased as she turned her green eyes to him. She lowered the bottle from her lips and licked. “What do you mean?”

  “You quit drugs. Your life was your own. How was it that you became a chip in a card game? Did you owe Mikos money? Was that it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  She gazed across the bright valley. “Sometimes you sink so deeply into a life, you don’t understand that you’re trapped until it’s too late.” She handed the bottle back to him, still not meeting his eyes. “Once it happened, it was dangerous not to go through with it. And I thought I was dealing with Brujos, not El Gorrion. I didn’t sign on for El Gorrion. So…” She shrugged.

  “So…what?”

  She blinked her unnaturally green eyes. “There’s not much more to say.”

  “Why was it too late?” he pressed.

  “It does seem…” She paused. He waited in the silence that followed for her to finish the sentence. “It seems extreme, doesn’t it?”

  “A bit.”

  She smiled.

  He wasn’t accustomed to not getting answers. “It was not drugs. What, then?”

  He found himself hoping that it would not be love. Love for this Mikos.

  Her look was thoughtful. This was a woman looking inward, searching her soul. She would give him the truth. “Maybe I needed to make up for something. Something that I had done. I didn’t owe money, but I owed.”

  “What did you have to make up for that would put you in such a position?”

  She looked away. “Did you ever do something you wish you could undo? Or really fail somebody?”

  “Yes.”

  Her gaze snapped to his. She wanted more. He found he wanted to give her more; he found he wanted to give her everything. He thought again of that pain he’d sensed in her; it had made him feel connected to her, and it wasn’t just the opium; he was feeling it out here in the fresh air and sunshine.

  “It’s worse, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s not what is done to you, but what you do to others that can hurt the most.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You cannot absorb it. You are prevented from that.”

  The blank mask was gone, and in its place, that blaze of intelligence. “So, what do you do? How did you get back from it?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I wish I did.”

  “I think…” She paused. “Guilt makes you small.”

  His breath stopped. In one utterance, she described what he’d become after the Kabakas impostor had killed so many, after he couldn’t save his mother. After the burns.

  “Or you make choices from a shrunken heart or a shrunken spirit or something,” she added. “Or maybe it just hurts too much to be who you are after that. To be large and happy, you know? That probably sounds weird.”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  The moment swelled between them. They stood together in their pain, there among the savincas. It was easy to be with her—as easy as falling. He’d never imagined he could feel so connected to another person. Never imagined he deserved it.

  Was this what he denied Paolo?

  You keep your heart locked up as tight as that cabinet. Was it true? Out here with this woman surrounded by the plants that fed his soul, he wanted to be a better man.

  He pulled the gloves back on, feeling her eyes on him, enjoying them. He took extra care, fitting them to his fingers. He never wanted her eyes off him.

  He never wanted her to leave.

  “Onward,” he said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hugo had an almost frightening amount of insight where she was concerned. She’d told him the truth: her existence had been constrained since the Friar Hovde case. She’d come to realize this out in this wild place, cut off from her entire world, like a crazy bit of espionage wrapped in a vacation from herself. She’d answered his questions with her own truth, more or less, but it made her wonder what Liza would say. Liza had stopped short of getting on that plane, but things had obviously gotten pretty bad. Would it have helped Liza if Zelda had stayed in her life and kept bailing her out? Conventional wisdom said no, that it only enabled Liza in her addiction. But sometimes, conventional wisdom sucked. Zelda had missed Liza so much; keeping tabs on her from afar made it almost worse. So many times, she wanted to pick up the phone and call her to see how she was doing and let her know she was there. Now and then, she’d hear about a job opportunity or a really good rehab program and she’d think about getting Liza away from that Miami crowd of hers, setting her up in a clean new life, but how many times had she tried that? But God, she missed her. The good things never seemed very good without Liza to drag her out for a celebration, and the bad things…she could’ve used a sister after the Friar Hovde thing. Whatever happened, she’d be sticking by Liza’s side.

  She cut the stems, setting them gently onto the cart. Kids from the village came by with empty carts and took away the full carts. It was exhausting, repetitive work, but an exciting honor on a different level. These were the rare, storied Savinca verde. She loved their gnarled bottoms, their finely serrated leaf margins.

  Those roots were wrong, though. A plant couldn’t survive with coated roots like that. The bushes were already being affected; she didn’t see it, but Hugo and the other farmers did, and they would know. Farmers were like field agents in that way—you always trusted the opinion of the guy on the ground.

  The men had concluded it wasn’t Roundup, and she agreed. Had the CIA switched up the cocktail? But why spray here? These beautiful, legendary plants—the only ones on earth. Who would make a mistake like that?

  As a forensic botanist, she’d never had anything to do with the spraying program or herbicides at all, really. Weeds were her friends. So was pollen and mold. As a forensic botanist, she asked the plants questions about crime scenes and listened to their answers. The herbicide guys were all about killing. They’d always struck her a bit like boys pulling the legs off spiders.

  When Hugo was distracted with Julian, she knelt and dug into the soil, then scraped a bit of the waxy substance off the root and rubbed it between her fingers. What was it? She smelled it. It just didn’t seem natural. She wished she could analyze it. One thing she knew: if it stayed on there, that plant was dead. All of them were.

  Hugo was back, sweat dripping from his brow, so morose and dark, worried about the plants. Most of the men had their shirts off, but he didn’t. She wondered if the sunshine hurt his burns. Or maybe he didn’t like them seeing.

  They moved to
a new field, working together. He was sure and tender with the plants; sometimes her belly would twist around when she watched him. Sometimes she wanted to go to him. Touch him.

  She wanted him not to be Kabakas.

  According to her profile, Kabakas had lived many places as a kid, particularly Thailand and the Philippines, which meant that there was no way he could’ve come from a farming family. Farmers barely took weekend vacations. And the mercado swords, the whole thing.

  No.

  But what if he was? It didn’t seem possible that this man, who cared so deeply for these villagers, for the plants, for Paolo—this man who stole her breath every time he came near—it didn’t seem possible that this man could be responsible for the massacre in the Yacon fields. It didn’t feel right in her gut, and not really in her brain, either. The killing of unarmed innocents required a deep, dark aberration. A mental illness, really.

  Could there be two Kabakas’s? She’d ruled it out before. Had she been wrong in that? Or did she just not want the Yacon fields killer to be Hugo? Was she losing her objectivity, as Dax had suggested?

  Fuck that. She just had to trust. Sometimes a hunter’s best tool was quiet.

  Above all, she needed to avoid deepening their emotional entanglement. That would help nobody.

  She moved to the next bush, clipping carefully.

  In college, she’d worked the test gardens, mostly corn. Trying to grow giant hybrids had felt important, but it was really just a game compared to these flowers. People depended on these flowers for their survival, their future. Being out here with Hugo and the rest, pulling for the village to survive, she felt like a part of something larger in a way she hadn’t for a very long time.

  As soon as they got home, Hugo went to his own field with a flashlight, thinking to check the roots, no doubt. She wanted desperately to go out with him, to continue their connection around the plants. Had this mysterious disease reached so far up the mountain? She wanted to know, too. It didn’t look natural, but then, she wasn’t exactly a savinca expert. Still, it didn’t look natural.

  She went to the kitchen and started the rice and beans going, then chopped plantains and potatoes.

  She knew from Hugo’s expression at the dinner table that the roots he’d checked were coated, too. She wished she could be Zelda the botanist now instead of Liza the drug whore. She and Hugo could dig up a plant and bring it down to the city and locate a microscope to put it under. She’d give anything to know what the substance was made of. It seemed to spread in globules. There were a few basic tests she could do with what was on hand in the kitchen. She could try them if she got the chance. She hated feeling helpless.

  Julian had contacted the Universidad de Valencia, and they were sending somebody—one of the region’s top botanists had happened to be on-site, and he’d volunteered to go out immediately. That would be good.

  A stroke of luck.

  After dinner Hugo threw down his napkin and turned to Paolo. “No math tonight, Paolo.

  She nearly forgot to breathe as Paolo turned to him, trying his best to maintain his usual stern look.

  He’d called him Paolo.

  “I understand you did an excellent job out in the field,” Hugo continued. “Such work deserves a night off, don’t you think?”

  She looked away, not wanting to intrude on the moment.

  “Thank you,” Paolo said.

  They handled a different field the next day, taking rows three by three, which put her farther away from Hugo, but it made sense for speed now that she’d been trained. The work, when Hugo wasn’t around, was monotonous—peaceful, but monotonous. Her whole existence was like another planet; no TVs, no phones, bells, or buzzers, and no world crises to consume her. She felt strangely weightless.

  Even the villagers were more connected to technology and the strife of everyday life than she was now, what with their phones and their lives and their constant arguments about whether to risk rebuilding. They had access to the news, and most of them seemed to be on Facebook.

  Hugo didn’t want her on the Internet, of course.

  She should steal a phone and check in…but she found she very much didn’t want to. She didn’t want to deal with Dax, didn’t want him staring into her mind. He needed to work on turning Sal, the Brujos guard. Dax was a genius billionaire with a team of spies at his beck and call. He should be able to turn one guard.

  The plants continued to deteriorate at a suspiciously rapid rate. The botanist had come by, according to Julian. He’d dug up a plant and collected some soil for tests.

  She wished she could’ve talked to him and gotten his impressions of the strange substance on the roots. Hugo had said it was climbing the stems on some plants.

  She should stay out of it, but she couldn’t.

  “Science,” she declared after dinner that night. Hugo was bent over reports of some sort in front of the fire. She’d just finished cleaning. “Paolo and I are going to do a science project.”

  He waved them away. It was as if they had a silent pact to keep their distance from each other now—physically, at least.

  The sun was going down as she and Paolo set out. “Let’s go to your plants. The ones whose buds you’ve harvested,” she said. They could experiment there. She’d put together several agents from the kitchen and laundry—lemon juice, borax. Maybe they could find something that would break up the waxy coating. A shot in the dark. Nevertheless.

  She showed Paolo how to make an observation chart. They numbered the plants and decided on characteristics to track: level of wilting, shininess, color, and root coating consistency. “It’s how the plants talk,” she said. “It’s important that we listen closely.” They assigned numbers. She sprinkled baking soda around the base of the first, and Paolo watered it to let it soak in. She did nothing to the second, but she put borax around the third.

  “Like the luna de febrero,” Paolo mumbled as she sprinkled the powder at the base of the fifth plant.

  “What is? What I’m doing right now?” She looked up. “It’s like the February moon?”

  “It’s a celebration,” Paolo said. “Primer Verde. The old people make designs with the stones along the sides of the rows, sometimes large. Sometimes they break them.” He pointed to the powder. “Afterward there is a party. Dancing. Food. Hugo does not like to go. He does not like to dance and sing.”

  “They powder the stone to make designs in the soil?” she asked. “Every February?”

  “A tradition.” He shrugged. “Silly.”

  “What’s the stone?”

  He stood and looked around. “Come.” She followed him across the path to the hill. He kicked at a dirty outcrop until something broke off. “Luquesolama, it is called.” He knelt down and smashed at the pieces with the bottom of his scythe. She gathered a selection of pieces into her hands, tipping it this way and than in the dying light. She crumbled a bit. The mineral was soft, almost like soapstone. “An old tradition?”

  “Very old,” Paolo said.

  From what she’d gathered over the days in the field, there were three harvests: May, August, and November. They then cut the plants back and let them go dormant for three months. February was when the plants would come out of the dormancy cycle. “The new leaves appear right after?”

  “Yes,” he said, surprised she’d guessed it. A ritual this old was more science than superstition—she’d bet on it. She didn’t recognize the stone, but it could be that it was deeply linked to the savinca. Most people didn’t realize how symbiotic plants and rocks were. Plants broke up the stone and dispersed the minerals. Minerals nourished the plants. Had these farmers developed a ritualized way to help it along over the decades? Did this stone add something essential to the savinca? Did it stimulate growth? Support the plant’s resistance to maladies? “Collect the stones for me.”

  “It’s not February.”

  “As an experiment. I’m going to make some solution in the kitchen with these stones. We’ll pour it on, and then
we will see what they say.”

  “We can help the village,” he said. “Like Hugo.”

  An hour later, she’d cooked up a solution with a carrier—those roots needed to get good and coated. Paolo poured it as they discussed the chart. “You have to check it every day,” she said. “You are a scientist now.”

  Paolo nodded. Saving the plants was a long shot, but science was method and consistency—that was a good lesson for Paolo.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She missed the university botanist again the next day. She knew she couldn’t talk with him, but she wished she could at least see what he did—that would give her a clue as to what he thought the substance was made of.

  She definitely learned more about Hugo, though. He didn’t talk about his past, but he had views on everything from Paolo’s reading habits to Valencian rebuilding. He was thoughtful. He cared. She could see him as a man who might have gone up against soldiers, but the later, darker Kabakas who’d slaughtered indiscriminately?

  It seemed more and more unlikely.

  He asked her a lot of questions. She answered as Liza for the most part, hating that she had to. But she could tell he’d found Liza’s blog.

  She could see from his movements that his pain had lessened, and she hadn’t smelled opium for a while. Knowing Hugo, he’d reserve it for extreme occasions.

  That morning, she and Paolo had gone out to check the results of the test area; there was only increased wilting and more shine. Nothing was helping. Not even the Luquesolama.

  The plants were getting worse; it seemed a race now to pull them in before the buds were worthless.

  The villagers were out in force, resolved to complete the harvest no matter what. The older women delivered lunch around noon and the younger women gathered at the tree-shaded picnic table while Hugo ate somewhere else with the men. A few of them spoke English; she asked them about the university botanist but she didn’t get anything new.

  She spotted a phone in one of the women’s bags. She could check in on the situation. Maybe buy more time. And consult on the roots.