Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (25 page)

She seemed consumed with the crop, this village. It was part of a cover, yes, but it felt like more. He thought about Brando in
Apocalypse Now
, a soldier who’d gone into the depths of the jungle, leaving war behind. Entering a different reality, lost to everything he’d once worked for and believed in.

Was that happening to Zelda now?

Sometimes when he couldn’t work out a problem with his mind, he resorted to the smell of a thing—not literally, but emotionally—how it smelled when he closed his eyes to the thoughts. This really did smell like loss. Like he was losing Zelda in some essential way. Protest as she might, deep down she had a death wish—that incident with Friar Hovde hadn’t simply hurt her, it had destroyed her. She’d been riding the edge ever since. And Kabakas, he represented something
ultimate
to her. Did she unconsciously want him to find her out? Did she want him to end it?

A death wish and an ultimate being. It was not a good combination.

Was he losing Zelda to her greatest enemy?

S
ome of the
leaves had started curling, and people were in a panic. They were right to panic.

The scientist returned that afternoon. Finally.

Dr. Ernesto Ruiz had a friendly face and salt-and-pepper hair. The name sounded familiar to Zelda. He was somebody; he’d written papers.

Ruiz gathered Hugo, Julian, and the other men around the picnic table. Zelda was desperate to join them, but she wasn’t a man and she supposedly didn’t understand Spanish, dammit. So she watched from afar.

As if he felt her gaze upon him, Hugo glanced at her, eyes like a caress. It made her want to die.

After the talk, Dr. Ruiz walked the fields with Julian and a few of the other men. Hugo stayed behind, and she waylaid him.

“What did he say?”

Hugo watched them disappear down the slope; she knew just from his expression that he didn’t like the man. “He is not sure. Phosphorous deficiency, he guesses.”

She tried not to act surprised, but she’d seen nothing that would indicate a phosphorous deficiency—not in the color, not in the growth. Phosphorous didn’t coat the roots with wax. “Really?”

He took a breath as if to gather his thoughts, and related what Ruiz had said. It sounded reasonable…unless you were a botanist.

“Does he have a cure? A remedy?” she asked.

“He’s working on it. We’re to monitor the crop and the surrounding area. Even the trees.”

She wished she could question him, but it was too much of a stretch for her cover.
Phosphorous
. Why would Ruiz lie?

Hugo was his aloof self on the way back to the house that night. “Try to have dinner on time tonight,
señorita
,” he grumbled before heading out. Paolo helped her fix it while they worked on the skills he’d need to pass the nightly drill. Hugo came back in a worse mood.

“The leaves?” she said.

He looked helplessly at the field, not even bothering with a surly answer.

Hugo took his dinner at his desk that night. She’d barely spoken one word to him. She went out to the experiments and crouched in front of the row of plants staked out so carefully with sticks and string. The plants were getting worse. The waxy coating seemed to be thickening and extending upward. Even the plant that had gotten the Luquesolama solution wasn’t improving.

The whole thing seemed unnatural. And here was this scientist, lying.

“Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?”

“Ruiz is no good?”

She stood and spun around to find Paolo standing there.

Paolo repeated her words, mimicking her tone. “Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?” He smiled, enjoying that he’d caught her swearing.

She fixed him with a hard gaze. “I was wrong to say that.”

T
he presence of
the Americans had disturbed Dr. Ernesto Ruiz like a low and persistent hum—something buzzing at the back of his head.

He’d made casual inquiries and learned that the farmer, Hugo, was an American businessman—a builder who had moved from Miami seven or eight years ago to become a hobbyist farmer. The woman his new cook. The American builder was apparently helpless with the restaurant gone. It seemed further that the American and his boy had cooks before, but the cooks had always quit. Established farmers were taking bets on how long this one would stay.

That low and persistent buzz changed the next day when he overheard the child informing his friends of what this cook said.
Phosphorous, my ass. Ruiz, you motherfucker, what are you up to?

According to the child, she was running tests of her own, complete with observation charts.

It was at that point that the hum became an all-out alarm bell.

He was good with children. He gave the boys jobs and joked with them. It took the afternoon to coax the child into describing the tests.

A chill descended over him as he listened, but he forced a tight smile. “
Bueno. Ella es muy inteligente
.”

The child smiled proudly. Ruiz asked him about how they’d found their maid, and he was suspiciously vague. In the valley, he said.

She’d arrived before he’d had the pellets dropped, so her presence wasn’t in reaction to the blight. But she was doing the right tests. She was suspicious of him. And she was no ordinary maid.

He snapped a photo of her and sent it to El Gorrion.

El Gorrion had contacts all over; he’d find out who she was and figure out what to do.

H
ugo stared into
the fire while Liza and Paolo played a word game on the floor at the foot of his chair.

Liza had made the game out of bits of cardboard.
Scrabble
, she called it. Good for the boy’s spelling, she explained. She’d tried to get Hugo to play, but games in front of a fire, that was too much like a family. Too saccharine-sweet. “It is not for me,” he’d said.

“Maybe it is for you,” she’d said.

He’d glowered. “Paolo knows not to ask me twice when I’ve said
no
to something.”

She’d eyed him in that way of hers, and then turned away.

They enjoyed each other, these two, with their games and nature experiments. Her expression always lightened when Paolo entered the room. Paolo, too, grew brighter when she was around.

Your heart is locked up as tightly as that little cabinet
. She thought it was selfish that he kept it closed. She didn’t understand that some things were best left closed. Like the cabinet with its painful memories. Like the bloody heart of the savinca.

Liza laid the small squares out to spell a word. Paolo added her score.
Paolo
. He’d liked being called by his name. Such a simple thing.

Paolo laughed and set a few squares of cardboard down.

It never ceased to amaze Hugo, the way things could go on as the world crashed. As Kabakas he could destroy entire armies, and now he couldn’t stop a simple white substance from killing the savinca. Some of the men had taken to manually scraping the roots of the older, stronger bushes, but the coating would regrow overnight.

He hadn’t felt this helpless since the other Kabakas had gone out and slaughtered in his name. Hugo had spent weeks hunting the impostor, determined to make him pay. That had all ended with the fire, and when he’d emerged from months of recuperation, he’d found the war winding down, and rumors that Kabakas had died in a fire. He didn’t know how the rumors had started, but the other Kabakas had not struck again, and Hugo felt certain that going back into action as Kabakas would only bring this Dark Kabakas back to life.

He could see over her shoulder, and it frustrated him to watch. She was going too easy on the boy. She put down
tire
and smiled up at Hugo. He frowned and pointed at the
D
.

She gave him a blank look. Letting Paolo win. If he had her letters, oh, the words he’d spell.

On they went, laughing. Their laughter made him feel very alone. She’d accused him of locking everybody out of his dark cabinet, but he did not know how to do anything else. It felt dangerous to open the cabinet. Nearly as dangerous as opening his heart.

She formed the word
vent
.

Hugo cleared his throat. She had an
A
and a
D
in reserve; she could make
advent
. She turned to face him, raised her pretty dark brows in mock annoyance.

He frowned. She shouldn’t let Paolo off like that; Paolo needed to be toughened up, not coddled. She turned back to the game, firelight kissing the slope of her forehead and the voluptuous curve of her cheekbone. Her skin would be warm to the touch.

He’d told himself to leave her alone. He was not his father; he would fuck the hotel lobby women in Bumcara if he wanted to fuck. He’d always had that rule, to keep his sexual exploits out of his home.

On they played.

She shifted when it was her turn, intent on the game, tucking her legs anew. At one point she leaned sideways against what she thought was his chair but was, in fact, his leg. He went still, not daring even to breathe, so awash in desire for her he couldn’t stand it. It was a gift, just this touch. Who would gamble her away in a card game? Who would do that?

She laid out
corn
on the board when she could’ve laid out
corner
.

Hugo sighed.

Again she twisted to look up at him. The movement removed her soft weight from his leg and he wanted to cry out.

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“You know what.”

Her green eyes flashed with humor and happiness. “If you won’t play, then please, no commentary.”

Was she toying with him? Drawing him into the game with deliberately careless play?

He frowned. “If you’re going to do something, do it right, or there is no point…” The sentence died as he saw Paolo stiffen, thinking, perhaps, that he’d put a stop to the game. That was what Paolo thought of him. Right there. He couldn’t have it.

He wouldn’t have it.

He stood up from the chair, feeling both their eyes on him, and then lowered himself to the floor between them. “Give me some of those letters.”

The boy seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.

Liza slid over seven bits of cardboard. She kept a neutral face, savoring it, perhaps, as a victory.

Hugo felt huge and clumsy down there with them. He formed the word
lute
. And just like that, he was playing.

And the game went on.

She laughed a lot. She’d seemed rigid and drawn when he’d first pulled her from that field, but her face had softened in the space of a week. She looked calmer, more beautiful. She’d modified some of the old housekeeper’s clothes by hand, with needle and thread she’d found, and this version of the gray dress left her long arms bare. Even the track marks seemed less pronounced.