Killer Spirit (15 page)

“Airborne as in—”

“As in you release these nanobots, they spread out, permeate the skin, and start destroying every inch of code it can find.”

Now the phrase
technobiological weapon
was starting to make sense.

“This is what you and Brooke are retrieving,” Chloe said. “They must be containing them somehow, but if those bots get out…It’s bad, Toby. It’s very, very bad, and the two of you deserved to know.”

Translation: The Big Guys should have told us.

“We’ve got to tell Brooke,” I said.

Chloe grabbed my arm and held it. “We can’t tell Brooke. If we could, trust me when I say that I would have been talking to her and not you.”

I jerked my arm out of Chloe’s grasp.

“When it comes to this school, Brooke does what she wants, when she wants to do it. She’s in charge. She makes the rules. But when it comes to the Squad, she’s a different person. She doesn’t break the rules, Toby. She doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t apologize.” Chloe paused and looked away. “This is highly classified information, and Brooke can’t know that we know. She’s their good little soldier, their
captain…
” Chloe’s voice got very quiet. “But she’s my best friend, and there’s no way I’d let her go in there unprepared.”

So. There it was. Chloe couldn’t tell Brooke, so she told me. Standing there, looking at Chloe very carefully not looking at me, I wondered if this was the first time Chloe had kept a secret from Brooke, and just like that, I knew that it wasn’t.

“Brooke doesn’t know, does she?” I asked the question in a voice every bit as quiet as the one Chloe had used a moment before.

“I just told you that she can’t know about this,” Chloe snapped.

“Not about this,” I said. “About Jack’s uncle. She doesn’t know.”

I’d assumed that when it came to the Squad what Chloe knew Brooke knew, but the way Chloe’s lips tightened at my question was enough of an answer to tell me that I’d assumed wrong.

Brooke didn’t have a clue that one of the Big Guys was a Peyton. Apparently, Uncle Alan’s identity was an even bigger secret than I’d thought.

“There you guys are!” Bubbles popped out of the woodwork. I hadn’t even heard her come into the lab. “Brooke’s looking for you guys. You missed the debriefy thingy! We’re ready to go on Operation Cheer Scout, and you guys still need to hit the salon.”

If Bubbles had heard Chloe’s monologue, she didn’t give any indication of it. She tilted her head to the side and wrinkled her nose, looking almost comically quizzical. “What are you guys doing up here anyway?”

The intensity that had been clear on Chloe’s face seconds before melted away, and she smirked at me and then provided Bubbles with a cover story that wasn’t amusing in the least.

“Toby begged me to give her some tips on SDA.”

CHAPTER 22

Code Word: Crazy!

After leaving the twins’ beauty lab, I had confirmed my lurking suspicions that I preferred the makeunder to its high-ponytailed, perky, extra-highlights-in-my-hair, paw-print-drawn-on-my-cheek counterpart. I also discovered that this uniform, which showed a substantial portion of my midriff, was even more uncomfortable than the one I’d worn for the pep rally.

My mind, however, didn’t have time to dwell on either of those decisions. When you’re getting ready to break into a high-security lab to steal a technobiological weapon that could mangle your DNA and kill you where you stood, polyester, paw prints, and ponytails just can’t compare.

“You missed the debriefing.” Brooke was markedly displeased with me, but she never stopped smiling. “This is the most dangerous, most important mission you’ve ever gone on and will ever go on until you’re actually old enough to be doing over-eighteens in the first place, and you missed the debriefing.”

I mimicked Brooke’s forced smile. “My bad.”

She handed me a small, pearly pink Game Boy that someone had meticulously covered in rhinestones. “This contains a copy of the floor plan to the building as a whole, and to Ross’s lab. It’s set up like a conventional office space, with the actual laboratory in the back, and offices, a copy room, and reception in the front. The biggest area of interest, however, is the small kitchen, situated just off the lab.”

“The kitchen?” Somehow, I doubted Ross was keeping his potentially lethal technology in the refrigerator.

“An infrared scan of the building revealed increased concentration of heat and light in that area.”

I fiddled with the buttons on the Game Boy, and it zeroed in on the kitchen for me.

“Lasers,” Brooke said. “They’re located in the oven, which we believe is nonfunctional and concealing some kind of safe. You’re going to need to dismantle the security, which will mean finding the control panel. We believe it’s in the kitchen, but if it’s not, you may have to improvise.”

First killer nanobots, and now lasers. My life had definitely become a James Bond movie.

As if sensing my thoughts, Brooke leaned over, took control of the Game Boy, and suddenly, I was looking at a diagram of the air ducts in the office.

“Lucky for us,” she said. “You’re small.”

Yet another reason cheerleaders made for good secret agents: most of us were tiny, though some of us had smaller chests than others.

“Let’s go. We’ve got a tight time frame to work with here. I’ve got your goody bag from Lucy, and we’ll go over the exact plan on the way. If you’ve memorized the floor plans, you can leave the Game Boy here.”

I did as instructed. My memory was close to photographic, and floor plans were close enough to geometry that my mind immediately absorbed the numbers and angles in question.

Still, as Brooke and I made our way out to her convertible, I had to wonder how exactly it had escaped her notice that this whole plan was insane. The Big Guys were insane. Our cover story was insane. And the fact that I was supposed to crawl through air ducts in a uniform this tight?

Stretchy fabric aside, still insane.

Fortunately, sanity has never exactly been my strong point, and even now, the adrenaline was pumping through my veins, telling me that we could do this, that I had to do this.

Besides, even if things got dicey, Ross wouldn’t murder two cheerleaders in broad daylight, and even if he tried, I was pretty sure I could take him. The nerds of the world don’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of black belts armed to the hilt.

Speaking of which…

I waited until Brooke started her car and raised the convertible’s top before I asked the question on the tip of my tongue. “What’s in Lucy’s goody bag?”

“Weapons are a last resort,” Brooke told me. “Ideally, we won’t have to use them at all. We get in, we get the bots, we get out. Remember, we were assigned this case because Peyton won’t suspect us of anything. If we break out the weapons, our superiors will have to send in backup.”

I was somewhat comforted to know that if things got truly dicey, the Big Guys would have our backs. Then again, these were the guys who’d kept us in the dark about the fact that the weapon we’d been instructed to retrieve could kill us, so it wasn’t like I had a great deal of trust that they had our best interests at heart.

“If they have to send in a cleanup team, we won’t worry about replacing the target with a decoy. Our main agenda then is to get the target, and preserve our covers. If the Big Guys send a team in, Peyton will know that something is up, and we’ll need to ensure that they don’t realize that that something involves us.”

She was throwing so much information in my direction that I almost forgot what I was waiting for. “Weapons.”

“Last resort,” Brooke said again.

“Gimme.”

With a roll of her eyes, Brooke handed me a small gift sack. Lucy considered “weapons” and “prezzies” to be synonymous.

I reached into the sack and withdrew a small baggie filled with pins that had words embossed across them.
GO
! one declared.
FIGHT
!
WIN
!

“The spirit buttons double as throwing stars,” Brooke said. “Twist the pin on the back, and they’ll morph.”

I did as she instructed and immediately decided that despite all evidence to the contrary, Lucy was a genius.

“What about this?” I asked, picking up a small, half baton.

“Spirit stick,” Brooke said. “It also shoots blow darts. One will stun, two will paralyze.” She paused slightly. “Don’t shoot the same person three times.”

I didn’t have to ask what a third dart would do. I looked at the potentially deadly spirit stick with new respect, but at the same time, my stomach flipped at the idea that with these weapons in my hands, I could be lethal.

Even as a last resort, I wasn’t ready for that. Putting the spirit stick gingerly aside, I took out two pairs of bobby socks.

“Grenades?” I guessed. Lucy had this thing for bobby-sock grenades.

“Yup. Put them on over your socks. If you need to launch them, they’ll tear off, but once you tear them, you only have ten seconds until detonation.”

The only thing left in the bag was a clipboard with a single piece of paper attached. Written on it were several names and addresses and what appeared to be orders for Cheer Scout cookies.

“What does this do?” I asked curiously.

“It makes us look legit,” Brooke said.

“Oh.” I was somewhat disappointed. I mean, after exploding bobby socks and throwing-star cheer pins, who wouldn’t be?

“We’ll hit up some of the other offices in Ross’s building before making our way to his. If he knows some of the other people who’ve ordered Cheer Scout cookies, any suspicions he might have about us should go way down.”

I couldn’t hear the term again without asking. “Cheer Scout cookies? Is there really such a thing as Cheer Scout cookies?”

Brooke executed an eloquent shrug and merged onto the highway. “There is now.”

As we drove closer and closer to Ross’s building and to our target, the deadly nanobots contained within, Brooke went through each step of our plan with me again and again, and I sorted through them on my own, forming a mental checklist.

Weapons? Check.

Memorized floor plan? Check.

Cover story? Check.

Plan for getting to the kitchen? Check.

Method for deactivating the security system? Hmmm.

“What kind of technology are we talking?” I was good enough to hack into almost any system on my own given enough time, but considering we’d only have a few minutes, a few technical boosters couldn’t hurt. Brooke nodded toward a central compartment and I opened it. My eyes fell on a small black box, and I smiled.

Eureka.

If I could find the security panel and it was computer-based, with any luck, I’d be able to rig the black box (also known as one of the seven wonders of the modern technological world) to scramble its signal.

“Where’s the decoy?” I asked. Brooke handed me a small, silver box. I frowned. “If we don’t know what the target looks like, how exactly were the Big Guys able to make a decoy?”

I mentally encouraged Brooke to come to the conclusion that our bosses were holding out on us more than she realized.

“We’ve got an approximation.” Brooke had an answer ready, and I wondered who had fed it to her and if she’d been in contact with our superiors since the phone call that morning. “Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. Ross may be able to tell the difference between the target and our decoy, but nobody else will, and if he’s willing to double-cross Peyton to sell his technology to the highest bidder, I seriously doubt he’ll balk at swapping a decoy in for the real thing.”

“Speaking of the evil nerdling, what’s his deal? Why aren’t we just knocking him out the second we get there and giving him something to alter his memory?”

Memory-altering drugs weren’t nearly as worthy of science fiction as nanobots that could rearrange DNA, so it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Funny you should ask,” Brooke hedged. “Phillip Ross may be a nerd, but he’s an extremely paranoid nerd with heavy security detail.”

And she was just telling me this now?

Keeping one hand on the wheel, Brooke tapped a command into the radio panel of her car, and a flat-screen popped out of the dashboard.

“Show bodyguards.”

The car responded to Brooke’s verbal order, and three pictures popped up on the screen, each depicting a man uglier and more massively enormous than the one before him.

“Larry, Moe, and Curly?” I guessed.

Brooke shrugged. “I was going to go with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, but whatever.”

Okay, I thought. Three gargantuan security guys, a paranoid (and perhaps rightly so) scientist, and in all likelihood, less than three or four minutes until they realized I was up to something.

“If you were eighteen, you would have two and a half years of training before you got a mission like this,” Brooke said, “but you’re not, so you haven’t. If you can’t cut it, tell me now, and I’ll put in a request for a non-Squad hacker with no breasts and an adrenaline addiction. Believe me when I say you’re replaceable.”

Believe me when I say that I didn’t believe her. She followed orders, and she’d been told to take me with her on this mission. If they’d given her a choice, Chloe would probably be sitting in this seat with some kind of breast-reduction bra on.

“I’ll be fine.” In that moment, I actually believed it. Insanity definitely has its perks.

CHAPTER 23

Code Word: Cookies

“Hi, I’m Misty,” Brooke said brightly.

“And I’m Fawn,” I added.

“And we’re selling Cheer Scout cookies,” we chorused together.

By the time we made our way into the foyer of Ross’s office, Brooke and I had the Cheer Scout routine down pat. The security guard who’d answered the door eyed us distrustfully.

“And spirit pins,” I said earnestly.

“And spirit sticks.”

“And we’re having a car wash next Saturday.”

“And we’re trying to get Krispy Kreme to sponsor us, so maybe if you buy something now, we can get you free donuts later.”

The security guard seemed taken aback, but he didn’t move at all.

“I can do the splits,” Brooke volunteered, sounding as air-headed as Bubbles at her worst.

“Ronald, what’s going on out there?” a voice called from further back, inside the office.

Ronald—who I’d decided looked like a Mopsy—turned around. “Some girls selling cookies,” he called. “They can do the splits.”

Moments later, Phillip Ross exited his lab and made his way to the reception area, where Ronald/Mopsy, who was eyeing us slightly more speculatively, had nevertheless kept us in the hall, instead of inviting us in. Looking past Mopsy’s shoulder, I could see Ross, who looked every bit as nerdy in person, flanked by another security guard—Flopsy. I could only infer that Cottontail was in the lab or the kitchen, safeguarding the loot.

“What school do you guys go to?” Ross asked, peering around Mopsy’s massively broad shoulder.

“Bayport,” Brooke said. Fake names, real school. It was a combination specifically designed to discredit Ross’s story if he happened to try to pass it on. After all, if we were parading around in our own school’s uniforms, oozing Bayport High spirit from our very pores, why would we bother with fake names? It made no sense, and that was exactly why we did it.

Ross appraised us through his thick, wire-rimmed glasses. “Maybe you’re from Bayport and maybe you’re not. Won’t you come in?”

The invitation sounded ominous. Apparently, inventing an incredibly dangerous little doodad had convinced Phillip Ross that he was a badass. I could only imagine that he was inviting us in to determine if we were who we said we were, and if he didn’t buy it…

Well, then I’d get to really use this so-called spirit stick.

“Awesome,” Brooke said, and the two of us stepped into the office. The doors closed behind us.

I held out the clipboard. “You can sign up for cookies here,” I said. “The Sis-Boom-Baked Chocolate Chip are my favorite.”

“But the Go, Fight, Cinnamon are also really good,” Brooke put in.

The fact that we were even managing to do this with a straight face was remarkable.

“Or you could buy a pin,” I said, holding one up for his inspection. He took it, turned it over, and then handed it back to me.

“So you girls are cheerleaders,” he said.

We nodded.

“You cheer?”

We nodded again.

“Prove it.”

Man, this guy really was paranoid. Then again, he was also right, but that was completely beside the point.

“Prove it?” I repeated dubiously.

Brooke wasn’t nearly as thrown as I was. “Clap your hands,” she said, and then she went into major cheer mode.

“Ready? Okay!”

My response to those two words was purely instinctual. It had been drilled into me over and over again, and I knew exactly what to do.

“Clap your hands, everybody! Everybody, clap your hands!”

We threw ourselves into the cheer, and I managed to keep up with Brooke, move for move, head bob for head bob.

“Goooooooooo Lions!”

Cheering without the entire Squad felt slightly sacrilegious, but it was far preferable to being shot by Flopsy or Mopsy, and Brooke and I finished with bright smiles on our faces.

“They’re cheerleaders,” Flopsy grunted. “Can’t fake that.”

“So, do you guys like want some cookies, or what?” I threw an extra
like
in there, just for good measure. “The guys downstairs bought like a ton.”

“Let me see that,” Ross said, taking the order form. “You guys want anything?” he asked the bodyguards. “I think I’m going to get a couple boxes of Rah-Rah Rum Raisin.”

Do not laugh, I ordered myself silently. Do not laugh.

“That last jump made my tummy all rumbly,” I said instead, sticking out my lower lip and feeling like the idiot I was pretending to be. “Is there a bathroom in here?”

Ross amiably pointed me toward the bathroom, all suspicion he might have once harbored toward me flying out the door. I was young, I was a cheerleader, and—as every single member of the Squad had pointed out—I had the world’s flattest chest, which, for some reason, meant that I was the exact type of person that Ross instinctually saw as unthreatening and trustworthy.

He must have had some bad experiences with big boobs in the past.

I made my way to the bathroom, aware as I walked that Flopsy had slipped away from the group to follow me. I opened the bathroom door, stepped inside, and locked it. I crouched and listened, until I could see Flopsy’s feet right outside the door.

Now I just had to undo the vent and climb into the air-conditioning ducts without making any noise that might tip my good friend off to the fact that I was dealing with more than a rumbly tummy.

Luckily, I was good at improvising.

I put the toilet seat down and stood on top of it to reach the vent. I took a bobby pin out of my hair and began to unscrew the screws holding the vent in place, and to cover the noise, I did something that no other member of the Squad would have thought to do.

I pressed my lips against my arm and blew, making an incredibly loud and disturbingly realistic fart sound. There were some pluses to having grown up with a little brother, and this talent, nay, this
gift
was one of them.

I took another screw out and let out another juicy noise. Outside the door, I could see the bottom of Flopsy’s feet as he took a cautionary step away from the bathroom.

Chalk one up for fart noises.

The vent finally came off, and I let out one more massive faux fart, and just for good measure, I groaned a little.

Outside the door, Flopsy backed further away.

“I…uhhhh…I think I might be a minute,” I called.

Flopsy was too traumatized to reply. Excellent.

I set the vent cover down and boosted myself into the air duct. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that this building had air ducts big enough for me to fit into. Most modern buildings didn’t, and honestly, you would think that if a person was planning on being an evil mastermind, he would invest in an office that didn’t provide his enemies with a convenient route of passage through his wannabe lair.

Once I was inside the duct, I started crawling. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted quickly, and I made my way as fast as I could toward the kitchen. My brilliant performance in the bathroom had probably bought me a couple of minutes (Flopsy wasn’t exactly going to be anxious to break down the bathroom door), but I couldn’t count on more than that.

I counted inside my head, imagining how fast I was going and calculating the distance between the kitchen and the bathroom, and finally, I stopped over another vent. There, right below me, was Cottontail.

He was bigger than either of the guards I’d already seen, and he looked significantly more deadly. Someone who’s had as much martial arts training as I have can spot another master a long way off, and the guy below me was good, no question. Very quietly, I reached for my spirit stick blow gun. I’d been instructed to use it as a last resort, but time was passing, and the only way to ensure that I didn’t engage the enemy was to take him out now. Besides, if Ross wasn’t going to advertise the fact that he’d lost his prototype and acquired a decoy, I doubt he’d take out billboards announcing that one of his guards had fallen asleep on the job.

As for Cottontail, from what I understood of the darts, he wouldn’t remember a thing.

Positioned directly above someone this dangerous, I was struck by a momentary fear that he would look up, but just as he began to gaze unwittingly toward me, I heard a voice from the other room.

“Hey, Merv? You want any cookies?”

If he said yes, I wouldn’t have to go against orders and dart him. And even if he said no, at least the question distracted him long enough to allow me just enough time to double-check my aim.

“No,” Merv barked. “No cookies.”

All right, I thought. One…two…three!

Pffft. Pffft.

I shot two darts in close succession, and both of them hit Merv in the side of the neck. He dropped to the floor. I winced at the sound and hoped that they hadn’t heard it in the other room.

“The lion sensation is taking the nation—blue and gold…let’s go!”

Brooke’s voice carried and I breathed a sigh of relief. Her cheerleading antics would hopefully keep Mopsy and Ross occupied long enough to let me disarm the security and swap in the decoy.

I pushed the vent aside and dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch on the floor. First things first, I retrieved the darts from Merv’s neck and checked to make sure there was no visible sign that they’d ever been there.

Excellent.

I began sweeping the room. Of all of the aspects of the mission, this one—locating the security panel—was probably the one I was least qualified to do. My basic training had included several sessions on sweeping a room, but I hadn’t done it enough for it to be automatic, and right now, I didn’t have time to think.

I just had to act.

If I was a hidden security panel, where would I be? I walked along the length of the walls, looking for a loose panel, uneven paint, or anything that might give me the answer I desperately needed.

Think of it as a code, I told myself. A giant, living code. Where’s the aberration? Look for natural repetitions in the room and find something that breaks the pattern. Think of everything you know about Ross, about this room.

I continued searching the room manually and visually with no luck, until I opened the refrigerator. No way should a mad scientist’s fridge have been this neat and tidy. And what was with having multiple kinds of milk in one refrigerator? I reached up to examine the milk, and when I tried to pick one of the containers up, I encountered some resistance. I pulled harder, and with a pop, the back of the refrigerator opened to reveal a security panel.

In a twisted way, it made sense. If the guy had laser-sensors to protect a safe in his oven, of course the security system would be based in his refrigerator.

Now that I had access to the security panel, I concentrated on disarming the system. I pulled my black box out of the bag of tricks I’d brought with me. With a little technological ingenuity, I hooked it up to the hardware inside the panel and keyed in what I could ascertain about the make of the system.

Luckily, the black box came equipped with pictures, and once I narrowed the choices down, it quickly recognized what kind of system we were dealing with, which meant that it knew how many digits the password was. The box heated beneath my hand, and I waited as it accessed a satellite that would hopefully allow it to hack directly into the security provider’s system.

I looked down at my watch.

Hurry, I thought. Hurry, hurry, hurry. If Ross had actually invested in a system that was more secure than the black box could hack, I might have to get creative, and for once in my life, I really, really didn’t want to get creative.

Beep.

I took in a sharp breath at the sound, but the lights on the system went off, and I breathed out a sigh of relief.

Black box, I thought, how I love thee, let me count the ways.

As I moved toward the oven, I spent one second devoutly hoping that the box would pull its last trick—scrambling any remote signals that the system might be sending to the security provider.

I opened the oven door and stared at it for a second. To say that I’m not familiar with cooking or any of the tools used to do so would be an enormous understatement, so I wasn’t exactly sure if there was anything unusual about this oven, but time was running out, so I strong-armed it, and a back panel popped inward.

There, just within my grasp, was a small silver box. I grabbed the decoy, which was more of a gray, out of my bag of tricks and moved to swap the two. With any luck, I could make my way back to the bathroom, and Brooke and I could walk out of there with the weapon before anyone realized that Merv was in dreamland.

Unfortunately, the second before I made the swap, things began falling apart at warp speed.

I felt Merv behind me before I saw him, and I turned. He was easily three times my size, but he was groggy from the sedatives, and I was quick. I sank a punch to his stomach and kicked the gun out of his hand. He lunged at me, but I dodged and planted a hard kick to his groin, pushing him back. Once I had enough space to move, I steadied myself and then prepared my go-to move.

I was halfway through the roundhouse when I saw a flash of black and realized that Merv and I weren’t alone. But before I could figure out who our new black-clad friend was, we were interrupted by Flopsy realizing at high volume that I was no longer in the bathroom.

Seconds later, I registered a male scream, as Brooke attacked either Ross or Mopsy in the foyer.

Midturn, I appraised the situation without ever slowing down. I had to take Merv out quickly. Brooke was in the other room with Ross and two security goons. That meant at least three guns, and as good as she was, she couldn’t stop a bullet, even though Lucy’s bulletproof push-up bra had been known to stop one or two in the past.

Ignoring the sounds and sights assaulting my senses, I threw my momentum into finishing my roundhouse, and microseconds after my foot connected with his neck, Merv went down for the count.

My movement propelled by adrenaline, I zeroed in on the next threat and whipped out my pin/throwing stars, activated them, and starting launching them at the mysterious person in black, but even when I heard them hit, the person—whoever it was—didn’t stop.