Killer Spirit (17 page)

CHAPTER 25

Code Word: Kisses

While I was waiting for April, my phone rang. It was Zee.

“Sorry I missed your call,” she said. “I was doing yogalates.”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Zee said, and I realized that was exactly what I had been doing. “There’s nothing wrong with yogalates. You can’t honestly expect me to spend all of my spare time working on my latest criminology dissertation.”

“I didn’t even know you were writing one,” I said. “And honestly, I thought you didn’t answer because you were either still selling Cheer Scout cookies, or because you were on the line.”

Gossip queens and phones sort of went hand in hand.

“What do you need?” Zee asked. She seemed to know that I wouldn’t have called unless I really needed something, and that even though I’d accepted my position on the Squad, I was loath to ask for help.

“I just needed a ride,” I said. “April’s coming to pick me up.”

“Good,” Zee replied. “You two haven’t spent much time together.”

She sounded like some kind of twisted matchmaker. I was about to hang up, but just as April’s car pulled into view, I remembered that there was one thing about the conversation with Brooke’s mom that was still bothering me.

“Zee? What’s Brooke’s deal with guns?”

Zee didn’t answer, which caught me off guard. Zee always had an answer.

“Zee?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said, “and if you do, look it up yourself. There’s an information superhighway out there, and you’re the web equivalent of a biker babe.”

I just loved crappy metaphors.

“Tell April hi for me,” Zee chirped, and then she hung up.

I climbed into April’s car, and at that moment, all I wanted was to be at home.

“Where to?” April asked.

“The school. I need to pick up my car.”

April nodded and flipped on her stereo. I listened to the music for a few minutes and nodded my approval.

“Not bad,” I said. It wasn’t exactly good music, but compared to the crap the rest of the girls listened to, it wasn’t horrible.

God, how could I even think about music right now? What was wrong with me that I could do what I’d just done and know what I knew and just sit here, in April’s car, like this was normal? Maybe, after a while, you get so used to living a double life (or in my case, given the whole popularity thing, maybe a triple one) that it just comes naturally to shut off one part of the brain and boot up another.

“That’s the thing about me,” April said lightly, unaware of the serious turn my thoughts had taken. “I’m really not that bad. I’m not a bad person. I’m a good cheerleader, and even if I’m not as good at the secret-agent thing yet, I’m picking it up.”

Apparently, the story about my bombed mission hadn’t circulated yet, because April thought I was good at this.

“I know you think it’s kind of weird that I just ditched Hayley once I made varsity,” April said. “And I know that you and I were never friends before all of this.”

Understatement.

“But the thing is, Hayley and I weren’t really friends, either. I didn’t ditch her. I transcended her, and the only thing she misses is having someone to boss around.”

“She has someone to boss around,” I said. “Kiki…” I searched for Kiki’s last name, reminding myself that she was the PTA president’s daughter.

“McCall,” April provided. The light turned green, and April accelerated.

After that, I expected the conversation to go somewhere. April certainly seemed on the verge of spilling her Poor Little Rich Girl heart, but she didn’t. Instead, she just said, “I don’t mind not having friends, but I like having you guys. Does that make sense?”

Oddly enough, it did. Especially now.

Ten minutes later, when April pulled up to the school, I realized that I didn’t find her company totally abhorrent, which was probably a good thing. Barring any deadly explosions, the two of us were going to be around each other pretty much constantly for the next three years. Eventually, I was going to have to see her as someone other than Hayley’s former sidekick.

“Thanks for the ride.” Things weren’t exactly getting less awkward as time went on, but at least they weren’t getting any worse.

“Anytime,” April replied. “Have to get in plenty of practice before I turn sixteen.”

Her sense of logic was a beautiful thing.

“Hey, April,” I called as I got out of the car. “Do me a favor?”

“Depends on the favor.”

At least she was honest.

“You know that whole homecoming princess thing?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Please win it.”

She grinned. “Done.”

I walked toward my car and was surprised to see Noah sitting on the hood.

“Wasn’t someone supposed to give you a ride home?” I asked. Noah ignored the question.

“Which one was that?”

“Which one was what?”

“Toby, a cheerleader just came within a hundred yards of my person, and I didn’t notice until it was too late. This is a very serious matter.” It was hard to take Noah seriously when he had that goofy, puppy dog smile on his face.

“It was April,” I said, “and she’s not interested.”

Noah rolled his eyes. “That’s what you always say.”

I thumped him in the shoulder. “It’s always true.” I walked past him and opened the driver’s side door. “Get in the car.”

By the time we got home, Noah had actually managed to distract me from thoughts of our failed mission, the weapon that Peyton would probably sell to the highest bidder if the Big Guys didn’t stop them first, and the conversation I’d just had with April in the car.

The only thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was Brooke’s mother, and as soon as we got home, I went to join my own in the kitchen.

“Want to help make the salad?” my mom asked, not commenting on the fact that I was home early for the second time this week.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

She handed me a knife, and I began chopping up lettuce.

“You’re thinking about something,” my mom said. It was a simple comment, and she left it up to me if I wanted to share what I was thinking. No pressure, no wheedling. That was my mother.

“I went over to our captain’s house today after school,” I said. “Her mom was a little…” I decided to go with Zee’s word of choice. “Intense.”

“An intense cheerleading mom?” my mom feigned shock. “Never.”

“You’re not surprised,” I concluded.

“When you were little,” my mom said, handing me some carrots and peppers to go in with the lettuce, “there was a big scandal about this mother in Texas whose daughter hadn’t made the cheerleading squad. She was so upset about it that she took matters into her own hands.”

“Complained to the school board?” I guessed.

“No,” my mom said, sliding the salad dressing down the counter. “She hired a hit man to take out one of the other girls.”

“Seriously?”

My mom nodded. “Seriously. It made national news. So if your friend’s mom is a little intense, well…it’s an intense sport, Toby.”

The fact that she’d called it a sport didn’t go unnoticed. I thought about the fact that we were going to be actually practicing tomorrow morning, and that instead of finishing up a case and safeguarding the world, we’d be flipping and flying and doing all kinds of motions that would inevitably make my armpits hurt.

That was the thing about cheerleading. The jumps were torture on your leg muscles, and the conditioning could be hell, but at the end of the day, your armpits were always sore. Or maybe that was just me.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for not being a crazy cheer mom.”

“No problem.” My mother paused. “Though in fairness to all of those mothers out there who are only partially crazy, I did enroll you in martial arts classes when you were really young, and that world can be just as competitive.”

My mom was a karate instructor, and she was right—I’d been kicking butt for as long as I’d been walking.

“But you weren’t…intense about it,” I said, choosing my words carefully again. She’d never forced me into competitions. She’d never looked at me and said “Oh, Toby” in that put-upon way.

More importantly, she didn’t give a rat’s bum about homecoming. Thinking of homecoming reminded me of something.

“By the way,” I said conversationally, “I should probably tell you that if Noah stages one more publicity stunt on my behalf, I am going to hurt him.”

“What did he do?” my mother asked.

I gave her the grand total for the past couple of days.

“Ran through the school in his boxers, walked around wearing a sandwich board with my face on it, sent out mass emails to the whole student body, and pretended to be a pirate in the middle of the cafeteria.”

My mom showed no signs of surprise, but she did let out a single giggle.

“Mom!”

“Toby, you have to admit, the pirate thing is just a little bit funny.”

I most certainly did not have to admit that, and I didn’t have to stand there and take the abuse, either.

“Just consider yourself lucky that he didn’t open a kissing booth to raise money for your campaign fund,” my mom said. “I’d be surprised if the idea hasn’t crossed his mind.”

As we have already established, my mother is never surprised, which led me to conclude that Noah had, in all likelihood, considered the idea. And if Noah had considered the idea, he probably wouldn’t have had the foresight to decide against it.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I stuck my head into the living room. “Noah?”

“Yes?”

“How much money did the kissing booth make?”

“It’s not really the amount of money per se that determines the success of a booth,” Noah opined. “It’s the number of girls I managed to kiss before some…errrr…
angry
young men shut down my operation.”

“And what is that number?” I asked.

Noah grinned. “Two.”

That was it. Absolutely it. The twins had to be stopped, whatever the cost. I’d beg if I had to, and if that didn’t work, well, I still had my second bobby-sock grenade, and it had even more firepower than the first.

CHAPTER 26

Code Word: Rebel

That night, I sat in front of my computer for a long time thinking about exactly two things. The first involved Brooke, her aversion to guns, and Zee’s insistence that I could find out on my own, and the second was peripherally related to the fact that when I was little, and report cards were made up totally of S (for satisfactory) and N (for not satisfactory), I’d always gotten an N in two areas—plays well with others, and, more importantly, follows directions when they are given.

I had a healthy disrespect for authority, and for as long as I can remember, when someone said “don’t do that,” what I heard was something more along the lines of “doing that would probably be fun.”

Based on our interaction with Brooke’s mom, and the way she’d told Brooke to concentrate on homecoming and not worry at all about the biotechnological weapon now in the hands of some anonymous independent operative, I could only conclude that we’d been given the official (if subtle) cease and desist that Brooke had seen coming.

I didn’t feel much like ceasing or desisting. If I’d managed to take the operative down and still saved Brooke, we wouldn’t have been taken off the case. If I hadn’t almost gotten blown up the first day, the Big Guys wouldn’t have been watching this particular mission so closely to begin with. We’d been pulled off this case because of me, and I felt vaguely like Brooke’s mom and her superiors were dangling all of the answers just out of reach, doing the covert version of “nanny nanny boo boo!”

The fact that the phrase
nanny nanny boo boo
had just crossed my mind made me briefly question my own sanity, but that didn’t change the feeling in my gut. I’d been told to stay away from this case, and what I heard was “diving into this case headfirst would rock your world.”

I didn’t really care if the Big Guys Upstairs gave me an N on my espionage report card. I didn’t even care if I was, as Brooke had so sweetly put it earlier that day, “replaceable.” I wanted answers. I wanted to know if anyone else had even come to the same conclusion Brooke and I had about the identity of our faceless intruder. I wanted to know where Amelia Juarez was. I wanted to know if the Big Guys had a tail on her. I wanted to know when she was going to give the weapon to the firm, and what could be done to stop her. And while I was at it, I wanted to know what the CIA knew about Alan Peyton.

After I figured all that out, I wanted to stop the bad guys, save the day, and flip Brooke’s mom the metaphorical bird.

What can I say? I’d tried being a good little girl who didn’t hack into government databases, but that just wasn’t me. This was. I organized my plan into steps. Step One: Access Squad database. Step Two: Hack the Big Guys’ database to see what they were holding out on us. Step Three: Victorious evil laughter.

Okay, so Step Three wasn’t exactly a step, but I figured that planning too far ahead was a waste of time. The name of the game was improvisation, and sometimes, plans just got in the way.

“Okay,” I said. “How to access the Squad’s database…” I pondered out loud. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone up to the school. I could get into the Quad—I had the entry codes and my own key to the school, courtesy of Mr. J’s lack of foresight and natural trust of girls in uniform. But I didn’t want to go back up to the school. I was tired, and on the off chance that I had been the target of the original bomb, I didn’t think traipsing around Bayport by myself at night was the world’s best idea.

And they say I have no impulse control, I thought wryly.

That left me with exactly two options. I could try to hack into the system blind, which would be time-consuming and possibly futile, or I could call Chloe to see if she’d built a remote-access mechanism into my Squad-issued cell phone.

Let’s see, I thought. Hundreds of hours worth of work, or thirty seconds on the phone with Chloe? It was a tough call and would have been even tougher if I’d thought for even a second that Chloe might turn me in. Given that she’d done some illicit hacking of her own that afternoon, I wasn’t too worried, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to this particular phone call.

While I mulled over my choices, I pulled up a search engine and typed in Brooke’s name. And then I typed in the word
gun.
And then I almost hit enter, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I wasn’t really sure why. Maybe it was something about the way Zee had sounded on the phone, or maybe it was the depths of the undercurrents I’d sensed between Brooke and her mom on that particular topic. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t imagine Brooke Bow-Down-and-Worship-Me Camden being afraid of anything, let alone a weapon she’d probably been exposed to from a very young age.

Or maybe I was just crazy. That could have been it. After all, here I was planning to hack into one of the U.S. government’s most secure databases on a whim. Again. The first time had gotten me recruited to the Squad. The second time could get me kicked off.

Nanny nanny boo boo, I thought. And then I picked up the phone and called Chloe.

“If you’re not calling to tell me that you’ve been horribly disfigured or had a sex-change operation, I don’t want to hear it.”

“You know, Chloe,” I said. “Most people just opt for ‘hello.’”

She didn’t dignify that comment with a response.

“Have you heard from Brooke?” I asked her.

Silence. I took that as a no. I knew something that she didn’t, which just added to the resentment I could practically hear from her side of the telephone.

“The mission didn’t go well,” I said. “We lost the weapon to an intruder—probably Amelia Juarez—and the Big Guys took us off the case.”

I actually heard Chloe take in a sharp breath.

“Brooke’s mom is unhappy,” I said simply.

“I’ll call her,” Chloe said quietly. “Not her mom. Brooke.”

Some days, it was easy to forget that the two of them were best friends, as well as rivals. Between the tone in Chloe’s voice now, and the way she’d leveled with me before our mission, today wasn’t one of those days. The two of them had been through a lot together, and if anyone understood the relationship between Brooke and her mom better than Zee, it was probably Chloe, who’d been along for the ride since she and Brooke were eleven years old.

“You should,” I agreed. “Now, I’m going to ask you a hypothetical question.” I paused. “Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to access Squad files remotely from my room, would my cell have some kind of technology that helped me to do that?”

“Hypothetically speaking,” Chloe said, “you’re crazy, but if you hypothetically wanted to do that, you’d set your phone to D mode, type in your passcode, and flip the switch on the very top of the phone to the far right.”

“What’s my passcode?”

“If I told you that,” Chloe replied, “you might actually start to think I like you. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You’re the hacker. Figure it out your hypothetical self.”

She was a hypothetical bee-yotch, but she’d answered my first question, and she was going to call Brooke, and that was going to have to be enough for me.

“Goodbye, Chloe.” I didn’t wait for a response before I hung up the phone. I followed Chloe’s instructions and immediately set about figuring out the passcode. It took me two and a half hours, and by the time I hit on the correct one, I was ready to upgrade Chloe’s status from hypothetical bee-yotch to actual to enormously huge.

I funneled my energy into the work, selecting the files I wanted the phone to download. A warning popped up on my phone’s screen, letting me know that these files would self-destruct within two hours of download, and that I wouldn’t be able to access them from this phone again. As far as security measures went, it was a must, but in terms of my difficulties with speed-reading late at night, it was unfortunate.

I finished selecting the pertinent files, hit the send button, and entered my passcode again. The phone started downloading, and as it did, I turned my attention back to the open window on my computer.

Brooke Camden. Gun.

I hit enter. The search returned too many hits, and I narrowed it down by adding one last parameter.

Bayport.

And there it was. A small news blurb, and below that, an obituary. I opened the blurb first, and somehow, I knew exactly what to expect.

Christopher Camden, age thirty-two, died on Friday at Bayport General after suffering three gunshot wounds to the chest. The circumstances surrounding his death are somewhat unclear, and the BPD has no leads at this time. Camden is survived by his wife, Karen Madden Camden, and a daughter, Brooke, age four.

The obituary was simple and sweet and said only that Brooke’s father would be missed. A second news article mentioned, albeit briefly, that there had been one witness to the shooting. One guess who.

It was no wonder that Brooke had an “aversion” to guns. I probably would have found them pretty averse if I’d seen my father killed with one, too. And her mother! How could she just sit there and act like it was something Brooke should just magically be over by now?

If I hadn’t already decided to stick it to Brooke’s mom and the whole damn system by solving this thing myself, reading these articles would have been enough to push me in that direction. As it was, it made me view Brooke, her relationship with her mom, and her domination of our school in a whole different way.

Mainly, though, it made me realize that if Brooke didn’t win homecoming queen because of Noah’s rare and annoyingly undiagnosable personality disorder, I’d deport him myself.