Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (2 page)

“
So nothing
.” Liza frowned and concentrated on the nails. “You are so full of shit.”

Zelda used Liza’s voice. “You are so full of shit.”

“God, you’re me.” Liza moved on to another nail. “Fucking Mikos. He could’ve sent a runner to get a million bucks to put in the pot, you know?” She sniffed. “A million is nothing to Mikos. He promised me he’d win the hand. He was so sure. And suddenly all the guys are throwing down their cards, and Mikos goes, ‘I’ll have her on a plane in twenty-four hours.’ Like I’m a kilo or something. On a plane to fucking Mexico. We were going to be married.”

Zelda nodded. She hadn’t said it, but she didn’t believe Mikos would have married Liza. She’d known a lot of guys like Mikos. Guys like that would say anything. You could never let yourself feel warm toward them.

Liza’s eyes went to the track marks on Zelda’s arm. Temporary tattoos. They’d stay on there at least two weeks. “Fuck,” she said.

“Stop it. We’re good. Okay?” Zelda stared into her eyes. It was like looking in a mirror—that was how completely she and Zelda had switched appearances.

Liza moved on to the other hand. Just hours ago, they’d colored Liza’s crazy bright platinum blonde hair brown, and they’d dyed Zelda’s dark brown hair platinum. They’d trimmed Liza’s hair to match Zelda’s cut, and now they both had shoulder-length hair. Liza had styled Zelda’s bright new hair all Marilyn Monroe. “You’ll just say you got a cut for your stint as a cartel leader’s whore,” Liza had said bitterly. “I would totally do something like that.”

“Good. Perfect,” Zelda said. “Perfect.”

Zelda and various IT guys had erased the link between Zelda and her family many years ago—way back when Zelda had joined the CIA. The idea had always been to protect Liza, not to mention their mother and father in their pretty little home in Okinawa. Now the erased link would protect Zelda; nobody could know she was a twin.

“I can’t believe you’re an agent.”

“Retired,” Zelda said. “And I can’t believe you wouldn’t come to me with this.”

Silence.

Stupid question.
Because why would she come to Zelda after Zelda had ejected her from her life? Zelda had used her connections to bail Liza out of jams over the years, but the last time had jeopardized her CIA career. It was then she’d gone the tough-love route, telling her she couldn’t help her as long as she was using drugs. Yeah, it had to happen, but it had never felt much like love.

“Brujos is a horrible man,” Liza said. “I’ve met him.”

“I’ll just have to be more horrible. If he’s not careful, I may have to put soap on his motherfucking toothbrush. See how he likes that.”

Liza snorted. Soap on the toothbrush was a mean move from teen days gone by. “You always tried to protect me, Zelda. Remember that time when the kids were squishing poison berries in my hair by the swing? You were like a shining warrior. I should’ve known you’d fight for right. You always tried to protect everyone. You always had a passion that way—a passion for justice.”

Zelda smiled wistfully. Passion for justice wasn’t enough, unfortunately. Nobody in their right mind would put her in the field now.

But nobody could stop her. That was one of the advantages of helping to head up the secretive and powerful Association—nobody told them what to do. No officials. No governments. No corporations. She and Dax sent their agents—the Associates—on dangerous missions every day, taking down international criminals and terrorists, preventing flare-ups and massacres. Only fair that she’d be willing to get out there and risk herself.

In and out. It would be easy. Nothing.

Zelda looked longingly at the glasses Liza now wore.
Her
glasses. Zelda hadn’t worn contacts since her field agent days, and of course, Liza couldn’t have normal contacts. They had to be an insane shade of green—dazzling with the bleached hair. Their mother was Japanese; their father of mostly European ancestry. This mix of genes had allowed Zelda to pass for different ethnicities in global hot spots in her agent days, though she’d never gone quite so blonde.

“I have something for you.” Liza closed up the nail polish and handed her a small paper sack. Zelda took it and looked inside. Blue and yellow Jelly Belly jelly beans.

“Oh, Liza.” The blues were blueberry, and the yellows were buttered popcorn. When you put two blueberries with one popcorn, you got a blueberry muffin. It was Zelda’s favorite candy, what she always got after doing something successful, a childhood habit. “But I only get to eat these after a mission is accomplished.”

“I’m not going on to a plane right now to be prostituted to Brujos,” Liza said, “because you’re taking my place. Because of your bravery. Because you saved me. Mission accomplished.”

Zelda crinkled the small bag, tears heating her eyes. She spoke without looking up. “You’ll stay in that safe house, right? Don’t listen to anybody outside of my guys. You’ll be bored—”

“I know, I know,” Liza said. “Don’t worry. I’m ready. I want a boring, simple life.”

A phone beeped. It was time.

“If anything happens to you…”

“Nothing will.” Zelda whispered. “I’ll go in there and do my job, and the intelligence I gather will be a gift. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“After this, I’ll personally make sure the only job Mikos can get is licking trash cans at a Buck ’n Burger.”

Liza smiled, tears shining like diamonds in her deep brown eyes.

Z
elda stood in
front of the hotel waiting for Mikos’s limo, clutching the handle of Liza’s bejeweled suitcase full of her crazy outfits and some cleverly disguised equipment. Business travelers streamed in and out of the hotel, ready for their meetings and presentations, everything perfectly predictable.

She closed her eyes.
Stop it.

The worst thing an agent could do was to dwell on the possibility of unpredictability, of danger, of failure. But when you were a failed agent, failure was all you thought about.

All you have to do is last,
she told herself, scanning the street.

Just last.
It had become her mantra over the past few years.
Just get through it
. She kind of hated that she’d developed a phrase like that. Because really, what was
just last?
Gum stuck on the bottom of a table could
just last.

But she needed it now. She’d use everything to get through this. She’d pull it out for Liza.

A man absorbed in his phone moved into her periphery. He was waiting for a taxi, or so he would have it seem. He spoke without looking up. “Nice day for a limo ride.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she hissed through her teeth.
Clears the mind
was the response he was looking for: the all-clear signal their organization used. “I’m not saying it. What are you doing here?”

He waited.

“Clears the mind,” she grumbled.

“Mikos was detained. There’ll just be the driver now.”

So. Dax had created an emergency to keep Mikos out of that limo.

Zelda quelled the impulse to react angrily. He was trying to help her—she knew that. But couldn’t he see that this last-minute help just showed that he didn’t trust her to pull this whole thing off? They’d run the Associates together for years now. He should realize this. She took a breath. “That works,” she said, in the way a strong agent would reply.

“We located a body—same age as you and your sister. Car crash—”

“Oh, right, that wouldn’t be suspicious,” she said sarcastically. “Liza miraculously dies in a car crash the hour before being whored out to some monster. That exposes our contacts and our machinery—and you know it, Dax. You
know
it.”

“Putting yourself in harm’s way—”

“Stop it,” she said. “Seriously. I’m not doing this again, and especially not out here.”

“What is that old saying? Shame splits you into two people deep down; the one who wants to get free of it and feel good again, and the one who believes only death can set you free.”

Zelda smiled. If she became reactive, he’d think he was right—that going on this mission was half death wish. “With any other Associate, we’d see that as a plus,” she said.

Dax didn’t reply. He knew it was true. Look behind the best spies, and you’d find plenty of darkness.

“This solves something big,” she continued. “Does this not solve something big?” She paused, letting the rhetorical question hang. “How many lives are we talking about?”

A man in a white suit got out of a white Mercedes. A valet walked up and took his key.

“Is white the favorite color of everyone in Miami?” she asked. “All the fabulous blues around here with the sky and ocean, but they all go for white.”

“Zelda—”

“I’m the only one who can do this. I’ll have the run of the mansion,” she added. “It’s a no-brainer.”

“I don’t like the odds.”

“We never like the odds,” she said.

Dax was usually the one to sacrifice compassion. He always argued that any Associate was expendable if his death saved lives. Dax worked on numbers like that—one life for the many. And she was taking perverse pleasure in smacking him down with his own arguments. Not a lot of people won an argument with Dax.

“I’ll get those files,” she said.

The files were key to saving a lot of lives. They would serve as bargaining chips to defuse a nasty standoff on the South American coast. “Or have you found something else to bargain with? A bargaining chip that’s somehow more tantalizing than those files?”

“There’s always another bargaining chip.”

“Any other Associate, and you’d be 100 percent behind this mission. The only problem we have here is you standing there looking like an amateur PI from an Elmore Leonard novel. You haven’t touched your phone in, like, forever. God, swipe or tap already!”

He tapped his phone. Dax had never been an agent. He was the brains behind each mission: the big-picture thinker.

“Everybody is expendable,” she said, trying not to smile. Because that’s what Dax always said.

“Though some people feel more expendable than others.”

That hit. Dax was her best friend, and he could hit a target inside her like nobody else. He had no conscience—not like regular people, anyway. His lack of conscience made him dangerous, unless he was on your team. When he was on your team, his lack of conscience made him effective.

“I don’t plan on dying,” she said smoothly. “I need to be able to come back to lord this whole thing over your head. Here it is, finally—the day you suggested one
couldn’t
be expended for the many. I will never stop giving you shit about it. I will make you so sorry, my friend.”

His lips quirked in a half smile. “I look forward to it.”

She snorted. A flash of black appeared down the road. “Here we go,” she whispered.

The limo pulled up to the curb, gleaming in the sun. Zelda’s heart pounded as Bernie, the driver, got out and came around to open the door.

The backseat was empty.

“Where’s Mikos?” she demanded in Liza’s emotional tone.

“Called away,” Bernie grunted.

She gave Dax a quick glance as she slid in, sitting in that Liza style, getting into character.
I’m medium friendly with Bernie the driver, but not at all a pal,
Liza had said.

Bernie shut the door.

She winked at Dax through the window as Bernie went around to the driver’s seat. A little private joke. Dax hated winking. His brown Armani suit looked great with his dark hair. He’d head back into that hotel and find a stranger to fuck within ten minutes. Maybe five, looking like that. Hopefully nobody too crazy, though. She wasn’t the only one who needed worrying about.

Bernie guided the limo slowly away from the curb.

“A meeting? He couldn’t postpone that?” It felt good to vent. She really was pissed off on Liza’s behalf. Mikos saw her as a possession to be gambled away, nothing much more than a prostitute, but he’d said he’d see her off. He could’ve at least done that much.

Bernie drove on, silent and uncomfortable.

“Is this an inconvenient time for him to send his fiancée off to slimy Brujos?” she pressed. Liza would do this—let out a torrent of emotion.

“Something came up with the Baja line. An unexpected accident. I was there when he got the call.” Bernie met her gaze, finally, in the rearview mirror. “I swear it, Liza.”

She sat back, breathing deeply to calm her nerves.

When they arrived at the airport, Bernie actually parked the limo in short-term parking and walked her to security. Liza had said Bernie wasn’t at all a pal, but Liza didn’t understand how people took to her. Bernie felt sorry about sending her to Brujos—it was all over his face. He stuck out a hand. “Good luck, Liza.”

Zelda took his hand. “Thanks, Bernie.”

She watched him walk off. They’d know if she didn’t get on the plane, of course. Mikos and Brujos had eyes everywhere.

Just yesterday, right about the time Zelda had been enjoying a late lunch at her favorite Manhattan bistro, Liza had gone to the DEA, begging for protection in exchange for providing information on trafficking routes, trying to get out of being sent to Brujos. Luckily, the right person had recognized her resemblance to Zelda and had gotten Zelda involved, and they’d yanked Liza the hell out of there before anything went further. Liza would be dead by now if they hadn’t pulled her out then and there, because it was true—the cartel guys had people everywhere, including the DEA and the US Marshals. Liza wouldn’t have been safe even if they’d agreed to give her witness protection, which they likely wouldn’t have.