Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (17 page)

Paolo, it turned out, was a decent cheater, pretending to struggle, getting just enough wrong. She didn’t feel bad; it was idiotic that he’d be taught this way.

Hugo walked around to their end and clamped his hands onto the back of Paolo’s chair, an ominous mountain of a man—clueless, stubborn, and totally in charge.

Clueless, stubborn, and totally in charge was one of Zelda’s least favorite combinations, and it should most certainly
not
be turning her on.

No, it was his primal love for Paolo she was responding to. Much as he might deny it, he loved that boy, and here he was, fighting for his education—an education that he’d never had. She wondered how many schools Paolo had been kicked out of.

Paolo “guessed” the last one without pretending to stumble.

“Very good,” Hugo said. “You see?”

Zelda nodded. It was a lot of fractions to have remembered. Was he using a mnemonic device?

Paolo stood, said good night to Hugo in a ridiculously formal way, and walked off.

Hugo’s booming voice startled her. “Wait.”

Paolo froze and turned.

“Did you forget something?”

Paolo looked bewildered, his expression ashen. The boy was overtired. What had he forgotten?

Hugo turned and pulled out Paolo’s chair.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“The boy forgot his manners. Now he must start a new lesson.”

No way.

Paolo was already slinking to the table. Hugo stared at her expectantly.

“You’re using math as a
punishment
?”

“You wish him to do two more drills?” Hugo said.

“Well, this’ll show him how to love math,” she grit out sarcastically, so low that a normal man might not hear. But Hugo was no normal man. He was a hunter, a killer, a man about three klicks up from a caveman.

“Loving math was never the intention,” he growled. “The boy must exercise perfect concentration on things small and large. He remembered his drills tonight, but he lost the larger context.”

She sat. She was Liza, and Liza would play along.

She turned the page, covered the answers with the paper, and began again. “Next.”

She glanced over at Hugo. His eyes didn’t have the usual quartz-like intensity, as though the life and the light were out of him. It was like he was consumed with something. Such a fucking tyrant.

Glumly, Paolo cast around for the answers, avoiding her eyes, wishing her gone, no doubt.

The larger context.

The child needed sleep; that was the larger context. The larger context was that might did not make right. And principles mattered. And she told herself that if this were Kabakas, she’d have to bring him in. No one got to massacre whoever he wanted to; certainly not dozens of women and children. She sat up, filled with confidence and conviction. And then, she stilled. This feeling. She hadn’t felt this way since…
before
Friar Hovde.

As soon as she turned the spotlight on the good feeling, it was gone, and she was back tied up in that dark basement, and all the pain and shame and blood and terror flooded her senses. She curled her toes as Paolo toiled away at his quiz.

The toes were where Friar Hovde had begun cutting. God, she’d screamed so much toward the end. Blowing Randall’s cover was unforgivable. That was the worst thing to happen down there—letting Friar Hovde know that one of his trusted elders was a CIA agent. But screaming for Friar Hovde had been devastating in a different way, too, because it had been a kind of intimacy. You never wanted to open your heart to your torturer like that, even if you were opening it in fear. Like a bear in a cage, she went over the old pathways of thought, worn flat from compulsive tracing. Something about being with this man had allowed her to break free for a second.

She looked at Hugo, feeling so strange. She felt…different around him.

“What?” he growled.

“Next,” she murmured.

Hugo rose and left, moving in and out while they finished the lesson. She could always feel when he neared, somehow, as if he changed the ions in the very air, like a thunderstorm. Through a combination of cheating and sheer willpower, Paolo managed to complete his quiz, and some twenty minutes later, he stood and bid them both good night, doing it the proper way this time, eyes still not quite meeting hers. “Good night, Liza.”

“Good night, Paolo,” she said.

“Good night, Hugo,” Paolo said.

“Good night,” Hugo said. Which, in her mind, she amended to
Good night, PAOLO.

Paolo walked off.

She turned to Hugo. “Good night.” She half expected that twist of his lips, but his expression remained stony, The skin beneath his eyes was shadowed, as if he’d been rubbing them. “It’s been such a day,” she said softly.

He seemed to focus on her now. “Yes.”

“Good night,” she said. “
Gracias
.” Her sister knew a few words in Spanish.

He nodded. “Go to bed. Stay there until the bell.”

“Right.”
The bell.
It was all she could do not to start laughing out of the sheer insanity of it all. She headed off to her room, pausing in the doorway to draw a square of wax paper from her apron pocket. She unfolded it and swiped her finger through the dollop of lard she’d enclosed inside it, and applied it to the door hinges, swinging the heavy paneled thing to work in the lubricant.

She shut and locked the door. With nothing else to do but wait, she turned back the covers and slipped into the cool, smooth sheets.

She was oh, so tired.

Back in New York, she’d always bring her phone and computer to bed in order to get the latest reports, often waking up at intervals.

Not tonight.

She gazed up at the moon and guessed it to be a few minutes before ten. Ten at night in Valencia would be three in the morning in Algiers and ten in the morning in Bangkok.

She wondered how Dax was faring alone. Not well, she imagined. They needed each other. She needed Dax’s foresight, and Dax needed her understanding of the field. He couldn’t tell when Associates were getting dangerously overworked. He didn’t know how to put them into teams. He couldn’t recognize a high-performance agent like she could. She was the one who’d recognized the use they could make of the linguist Peter Maxwell, hunting him and verifying his story before sending in Rio for an extraction.

And Dax had serious blind spots. The loftier capabilities of the human heart could mystify him at times. And he was ignorant of his own heart in many ways. Like when he’d lost objectivity with Thorne—he’d been blindsided when he realized Thorne regarded him as a father. She’d had to talk him down from that. And then there were the demons that drove Dax to his sex addiction. He thought he had a handle on them. Yeah, he had a handle on them. The way you have a handle on the tip of an iceberg. Dax was absolutely brilliant and absolutely fucked up.

She lay in bed with just the night birds and bugs for noise—no horns, no planes, and no random yells out on the street, like in Manhattan. And the near total darkness—the moon was just a glow behind the clouds. She hadn’t experienced this level of darkness and silence—not to mention tech silence—since she was out in the desert. Like a fucking sensory deprivation chamber, and she didn’t like it. The Friar Hovde nightmares were bad enough back home in a sea of noise and gadgets. She felt more vulnerable to them in the quiet, as though they might get hold of her, and she’d be trapped inside that nightmarish loop of trying desperately to get free from the ropes Friar Hovde had bound her with, trying over and over to kill Friar Hovde and save Agent Randall. Save the man whose death she’d so shamefully ensured.

Trying over and over to kill Friar Hovde.

She never could.

She decided to allow herself one hour of sleep, which had her waking at 11:30. She could do that—sleep at precise intervals and tell time by the moon. Some field skills never left you.

Z
elda rose exactly
two hours later and changed into the dead man’s coveralls. She used a selection of knives she’d nicked from the kitchen to loosen the grate over the window. Minutes later, she was out front retrieving the weapon and the flashlight. She set off, jogging down the mountain road, moving at a slow, controlled pace, slowing to a walk as the way got steep, staying to the inside, sometimes touching the walls of stone, dodging rocks and snakes, catching the eyes of night creatures here and there with her flashlight. It was hard going, but the way back up would be harder.

It took over an hour to travel the five or six miles to the village ruins. She rounded a corner, panting, making her way down the dark, dusty street toward the little store, her best candidate for a com setup—that’s where she’d seen the antenna. The abandoned place was even eerier at night. Dogs barked nearby. Wind rustled leaves and papers.

She picked the lock and slipped into the store, stepping carefully over downed racks. Animals had been in the stock—she heard a few scurrying off.

She found what she was looking for in the far back—the satellite phone terminal. Its casing was destroyed, but all in all, it wasn’t so bad. She’d seen repeaters down the mountain when they drove in—they’d go to this. She pulled apart the pieces and began to twist wires, wishing she had her glasses instead of Liza’s uncomfortable contacts.

After a half hour, she had a signal. It cut in and out, but she got hold of Dax.

“Zelda, thank God,” Dax said. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, but I got relocated before I could get Brujos’s files. They pulled me out of there so fast, dammit. Too fast. I’m in Buena Vista—it’s on the southern slope of the Verde Sirca, about seventy miles north of Bumcara.”

“Wait—you’re in Valencia?”

“I got traded down—Brujos’s woman freaked. It’s fine. I’m safe. Are the pirates still quiet?”

Dax filled her in—they were still sitting tight. Good. She told him about the Brujos guard, Sal, who might be turned. It wasn’t as good as having the files in hand, but Dax got right on it. She could picture him at his desk in his condo overlooking Central Park, could see his thumbs flying over his keyboard, sending out instructions to check out Sal’s family ASAP. You needed to know about a man’s family to know how to turn him.

“What’s your immediate situation?” Dax asked. “I could have a team in Bumcara by lunch.”

“Hold off.”

“We have a team ready—” The line began to crackle, and then it cut out.

Fuck.

A team. It would be Riley the strategist he’d send in, along with Cole, all smarts and muscle.

She found the break, bared a new length of wire, and re-twisted. The last thing she needed was a helicopter coming down. Ten minutes later, she had Dax again. “You have to leave me here,” she said quickly. “I’m on a farm north of Buena Vista. I’m the help. I’ve got my own thing going.”

“You’re the what?”

“Maid, governess. Perfectly safe. Dax, listen,” she said. “This is probably nothing, but there’s a tiny possibility I’ve found Kabakas.”

Even over the shitty connection, she could hear the breath
whoosh
out of him. “
What
?”

She enjoyed his amazement, but something twisted in her stomach. “It’s probably nothing—just a skilled impersonator. And really smart how he did it. Effective.”

“You’ve met him?”

“It’s probably not him. A lot of things don’t add up.”

“But some things do.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I also haven’t slept for two days. I just need to rule him out. It’ll bug me if I don’t rule this guy out before I leave. He
feels
like Kabakas.”

“Kabakas brutally massacred dozens of unarmed civilians,” Dax said. “Does this guy feel like that? Because if this guy feels like that—”

“Stop. I’m fine. And, there’s a way where he
doesn’t
feel right. It’s hard to explain…” She didn’t know how to explain about the moments where he’d felt like Kabakas from
before
the Yacon fields massacre. The Kabakas she’d profiled and hunted and obsessed over. Out there on that field, he’d felt like the shining warrior from that photo above her desk. “I’m in a position to investigate the fuck out of him, but you need to give me time.”

“You’re not on his fucking staff, are you? I thought you said you were safe—”

“I am safe,” she insisted, deciding to leave the whole captive angle out of it. That was just a little too 300
bc
for Dax to handle.

“I’m sending somebody. I’ve got your location.”

“Don’t you dare,” she said, regretting she’d said anything at all now.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

A sick feeling came over her.

“Who was it that put up that bounty? The Valencian vice president, right? Juarez? Right? He’s in the ministry now. He has influence with the delegation. Jesus, if the pirates could deliver Kabakas—”

“No,” she whispered.

“Juarez could put pressure on the right people…” Dax named off a string of people, one affecting another and then another, complex horse trades that could end with the pirate situation getting solved. “We could use Kabakas. He would work as a bargaining chip…”