Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

back to square one.
    Dax was resourceful. He’d think of something—he always did. He saw things other people didn’t.
    A man in an apron scurried out with a box full of bags of fried food of some sort. He was obviously frightened, and apologized for not having enough. “ Esto es lo mejor que tengo. Lo mejor, ” he said. The best I have. The food was loaded into the vehicle in front of them.
    They headed back out.
    “Where are we going?” she asked in English. “Where?”
    The driver turned his grizzled face to her and smiled an ugly smile. He understood the question, and the ugly smile was the answer.
    They bumped on. Scrubby roadside became walls of thick jungle illuminated by headlights and searchlights wielded by soldiers. They passed small concrete buildings, bright paint still on the parts that hadn’t crumbled. Here and there lights flashed on broken-down vehicles slowly being reclaimed by nature.
    Zelda looked at the thick walls of foliage. She would’ve loved to get out and study the leaves. Touch them. Smell them.
    She was a leaf person. She loved the ways they formed themselves, the way they smelled and grew. The dendritic patterning of the veins, like tiny river systems.
    Flowers were what everybody saw first, what people typically remembered about a plant, but the leaves were just as important. The soldiers around her were the same way. They put on a good show for each other, but it was in the quiet moments, the leaf moments, when the truth in a man emerged.
    The jungle grew thicker. The road more rugged.
    Nobody knew where she was—nobody who cared, anyway, and it made her feel so alone. Dax wouldn’t expect contact for at least twenty-four hours.
    An hour later, they entered a clearing. Some of the guards got out and started pulling brush and netting this way and that, and she realized it was a landing strip. Was she being sent back with a shipment north? Returned unfucked as a macho slap in Mikos’s face?
    She hated the idea of leaving empty-handed. Yeah, she’d planted the parabolic mic, and she had the name of a disgruntled guard still inside Brujos’s mansion, but they needed those files!
    The men lined up the vehicles at the edge of the clearing. They made her get out—without her suitcase. It made her nervous.
    She was sweating. Even at night, the humidity was stifling, and the night bugs droned too loud, and she didn’t like any of this.
    She could make out white stripes spray-painted onto the scrubby ground, alongside lights and reflectors. Beyond them on the other side of the clearing, were camouflaged hangars and a few outbuildings. The men stood around their Jeeps, smoking, waiting. She read tension in everybody’s stance. Judging from the direction of their attention, a plane would be coming in from the south.
    A black SUV roared onto the field and parked at the end of the line. Brujos and his woman got out of the back. They ignored Zelda, speaking instead to armed men some distance away. They stopped talking when a low rumble sounded in the distance.
    The navigation lights of a small plane came into view—a small, fast plane. Drug-running plane, probably out of Costa Amarrilla, maybe Valencia. The field came to life with rows of lights.
    Weapons came into view as well. A few of the men set up in the jungle around the perimeter. Snipers. A full twenty armed men waiting for a plane that couldn’t hold more than eight.
    Who the fuck was coming?
    Zelda didn’t like it on a lot of levels, but she was about to witness something, and she liked that. More information was better than less.
    The plane bumped neatly onto the field, kicking up the dust and grit. It went right to the edge and circled back. The military-issue plane was a Soviet-era workhorse, an expendable plane. The drug runners probably lost their fair share of them.
    A camo-clad guard came down the steps first, assault rifle over his shoulder, followed by a man with dark curly hair and a scar on his neck, obviously the