Killer Spirit (19 page)

Well, that was less than helpful.

“You want another answer? How about this one: because I could. Because it was fun. Because my brothers set this job up for me, and they leave the toilet seat up too damn much.” I couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not on that last one, so I just listened, open-mouthed, as she continued. “An operation as big as Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray—I knew the government had to be all over that, just waiting for these guys to mess up. I figured that if I stretched things out long enough, somebody would catch on, and as far as I’m concerned, the more players, the better the game.”

Some game. A bunch of people were fighting over deadly technology, and she was acting like this whole mission ranked right up there with Yahtzee.

“So I’m supposed to think you’re a good guy?” I asked, my voice tight. “Because you’ve been stalling your employers?”

“You’re not supposed to think I’m a good guy,” Amelia said. “You’re just supposed to think I’m good.”

“Good?”

“I’ve been playing you, and I’ve been playing them. I knew the second one of your girls put a tracker on my car, just like I knew when Peyton brought me here that all they wanted was someone to follow orders and look good doing it.” She played with the gun in the tip of her hands, stroking her thumb up and down the side. “They thought they were doing my family a favor by offering me this job.” Her lips pulled back into something that looked like a smile, but probably wasn’t. “I disagreed.”

I forced myself to think through everything Amelia had said. Peyton had brought her in to do a simple job, and somehow Amelia had manipulated them into changing the job description. She’d then orchestrated Ross’s decision to host an auction, which had resulted in two more TCIs coming to Bayport. That influx had tipped the Big Guys off to the fact that something was up, and as a result, we’d been brought in on the case. According to Amelia, that had been her intention all along.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So you wanted the government brought in on this case, but once you knew we were on it…”

“That’s when things got interesting.” Amelia’s smile looked genuine this time. “I decided to see if I could get you to take out the competition for me.”

“The competition you brought here to begin with.”

“Except for Jacob, yes.”

“And you expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with his car blowing up?”

“Haven’t we already been over this? I have no idea who killed Jacob Kann, but whoever they are, they’re good. My plan was just to plant a bunch of drugs on him and then lead your people in for the arrest.”

She talked about framing someone so glibly. “You framed him,” I said. Something about her tone and the words she’d spoken earlier led me to my next conclusion. “Just like you did with Hector Hassan.”

Amelia grinned. “I knew somebody would be on this case eventually, and I knew Hassan had some pretty unsavory backing.”

If by “unsavory,” she meant “terrorists,” then yeah.

“I needed to keep track of the others, but figured you guys would be doing the same, so I bugged Connors-Wright and Kann and gave Hassan enough rope to hang himself.”

“You bugged yourself to throw us off track.” In a word: genius.

“That pointed you guys toward Hassan, since he was the only one not already bugged, which led to you guys tracking him and bringing him into custody before he could do any real harm.” Amelia smiled then, the barest hint of satisfaction playing across her even features. “You’re welcome.”

“Okay, so you set up Hassan,” I said. “That doesn’t prove that you weren’t the one who took out Kann.” I knew I was beating a dead dog here, but I just couldn’t help it. Amelia Juarez was apparently some kind of evil mastermind, and she was standing in my bedroom. I wanted her to be the bad guy, because the idea that there was someone out there who’d beaten both of us to the weapon was scarier than the gun still trained on my forehead.

“You don’t want to take my word on the fact that I had nothing to do with Jacob’s murder? Fine. I’m assuming you guys have some sort of database. You might want to check it, because according to Peyton’s reports on the explosion, the bomb was remotely detonated, which means that someone was watching that car and waiting to press the little red button.” She smiled, and I could practically hear her thinking “check and mate.”

“Coincidentally enough, that was the day your group attempted to plant a tracker on my car. They were tailing me when the bomb went off. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the word I’m looking for here is
alibi.
”

I would check our files to confirm what she was saying, but I knew without doing so that she was right. We’d had teams tracking and planting surveillance on each of the TCIs, and if the bomb really had been detonated manually, none of them could have done it without one of our teams noticing. I wondered briefly how we could have missed this, how the Big Guys could have missed this, or if they’d actually missed it at all.

If none of the TCIs had planted the bomb, that meant that someone else had, and that meant that there was another player on this case. A player who’d killed Jacob Kann and later stolen the weapon from Ross’s lab. A player who, according to Amelia, had already given the nanobots to somebody else.

“Who?” I didn’t bother to elaborate. Amelia knew what I was asking.

“No more questions about my motive? No wondering why I’m being such a good little mob princess and sharing what I know?”

“Just. Tell. Me. Who.”

“I came here with an offer. If you want to know the information, that means you play by my rules.”

“What do you want?” My voice was dull, and the desire to flying tackle her and take my chances with the gun was incredible.

“All I want is a promise that once I tell you who has the bots, you and your little team will be the ones to retrieve them.”

“Done.” I didn’t give even so much as a second’s thought to the fact that we’d been taken off the case. Clearly, this diving in headfirst thing was working for me.

“There is one other little thing…” Amelia looked me straight in the eye. “I want your word that nobody hears about this conversation until tomorrow, and that whoever your team works for stays in the dark until everything’s gone down.”

I couldn’t tell her no. I could, however, lie through my teeth.

“If you break these rules,” she continued, “I reserve the right to blow your cover wide open. I’m sure Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray would love to know that the government has an entire team here, right under their noses.”

For the first time, I realized the full implications of the fact that Amelia was here, in my bedroom. Somehow, she’d figured out who I was. From the sound of it, that wasn’t all she knew.

“I saw you yesterday outside of the firm,” she explained with no small measure of glee. “You had that same unnaturally natural look about you as the girls who’d been following me, so I took a picture and tracked you down via the Web.” She paused. “I never would have guessed cheerleader.”

“Shut up.”

“Nice website, though.”

I knew that class project would come back to bite me in the butt.

“Assuming you play by my rules, your cover is safe with me. And if you win, I’ll even let you mind-wipe me, or whatever it is the government does to keep the ten of you its nasty little secret.” Amelia somehow made those words sound incredibly reasonable.

“If we win what?” I tried to match her tone, but couldn’t quite keep the frustration out of my voice. Being held at gunpoint sucked.

“Since you don’t seem to like the word
game,
let’s call it a challenge. I’m going to tell you who has the nanobots and what they’re planning to do with them, and in the morning, you’re going to share the news with your little team. Then, tomorrow afternoon, right before the action goes down, we’re going to stop it. Like I said before, I don’t particularly want anyone to die, and if we don’t do something, someone will.”

“You want to work with us?” This kept getting stranger and stranger.

“Not exactly.” She looked down the barrel of the gun, straight at me. “Think of it more like a competition. I want the weapon. You guys want the weapon. Neither of us wants it used tomorrow.”

Where were the men with the little white coats when you needed them? This was seriously insane. “You’re actually challenging us to see who can get to the weapon first?”

She had to realize how little sense that made. If she wanted the weapon for herself, why even clue us in to begin with?

“That’s the gist of it,” Amelia said. “And stop looking at me like that. I’m not crazy. I’m
bored,
and the person who has the bots isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. I could take him with one hand tied behind my back, but what fun would that be? Unfortunately, in addition to being no fun, that would also be stupid on my part. If I did steal the bots back and Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray found out that I’d been holding out on them, I’d be a dead girl. If, however, there’s government involvement, then the firm will blame whatever goes down on them. They may not know about your team, but they know they’re being watched, and they know there’s an operative presence in Bayport. If there’s even a hint of government involvement, do you think they’ll suspect for even a second that the pretty little piece they hired to run their errands was involved?”

I seriously had to wonder if the fact that she was making sense to me meant that I was a few people short of a pyramid myself.

“How do I know you’ll keep up your end of the bargain?” I asked. For all I knew, she’d already blown our cover to the firm. At this rate, I might not have to deal with homecoming after all. If Jack’s father found out who I really was, if
Jack
found out who I really was…

“Simple. Tomorrow afternoon, we’re going after the same thing. Beat me to it and take me down. After that, it’s just a matter of lie detectors and memory-altering drugs.”

“And if you win?” I had to ask, even though I couldn’t imagine Amelia outsmarting the entire Squad. Again.

“If I win,” she said, “you’re just going to have to trust me. Either way, as long as you play by the rules, my lips are sealed, and your cover is safe. You can believe me or not, but I actually don’t have anything against your team. People underestimate you.” She smiled, wryly this time. “If there’s one thing I understand, it’s that. Who knows? If things had been different, maybe I’d be the one running around in one of those stupid skirts.”

Was it wrong that I felt a vague feeling of kinship with her when she said the phrase
stupid skirts
?

“Tell me when and where,” I said. “We’ll be there.” I really couldn’t see how we had any other choice. If we sat back and did nothing, the weapon would either be deployed, or it would end up in Amelia’s possession. Neither one of those was what I’d call a good outcome.

Amelia, keeping her eyes on mine, lowered the gun. “Tomorrow at three in Walford Park, Anthony Connors-Wright is going to kill his father, and he’s planning on using the nanobots to do it. There’s a political rally, and his father is in charge of security for the good senator. Anthony has some major Daddy Issues and doesn’t have the foresight to realize that unless you pick the right target, the nanobots aren’t that big a deal.”

“Not that big a deal?” I repeated. “How many people at this rally have to die before it’s a big deal? If he releases the weapon—”

Amelia tilted her head to the side. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“There’s a reason that so many terrorist groups wanted this thing,” Amelia said, “and there’s a reason Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray was funding the research. Biological weapons are a dime a dozen. If you want to attack a crowd, there are a half dozen toxic agents a lot less expensive than DNA-wiping nanobots. There aren’t, however, many biological weapons that can be programmed to attack a certain individual.”

I thought back on what Chloe had told me. The nanobots were revolutionary because of the amount of programming they could carry despite their microscopic size. We had assumed that future development on the programming front would concentrate on identifying the specific base pairs to be attacked within a DNA strand, but what if, instead, the programming identified the DNA to be attacked?

“Are you saying that you can let these things loose in a crowd, and they’ll attack only one person?”

“It’s called assassination, and yeah, that’s what the guys at Peyton seem to think this does.”

Suddenly, Chloe’s magnet analogy took on a whole new dimension, because Amelia was standing there telling me that like a metal to a magnet, these nanobots would zero in on a single individual, based on their DNA. You let them loose in a crowd, and they set their sights on their preprogrammed target, leaving everyone else unharmed. I wasn’t sure exactly how to rate this development. On the one hand, instead of killing thousands of people, this weapon would only kill one. On the other, that one person could be the president.

Suddenly, of the two negative outcomes I’d considered earlier, the one where Connors-Wright deployed the bots and killed his father was looking good, because if Amelia actually got a hold of this technology, there was no telling what she would do with it, or who she would sell it to. The Big Guys were going to freak, or at least, they would have, had I actually been able to tell them about it.

“I said what I came here to say.” Amelia raised the gun again and backed toward my window. “You know the rules. Tonight, you tell no one. Tomorrow, Walford Park, three o’clock, winner takes all. You can do all the recon you want, but move in on the target before three, and you can consider your cover blown.”

And then, with stealth that would have made Bubbles proud, she disappeared out the window and into the night.

CHAPTER 28

Code Word: Liberty

“I’m in, but I am NOT wearing one of those stupid skirts.” I knew even as I said the words that I would, in fact, be wearing many a stupid skirt, and that something about this whole scenario wasn’t quite right. I didn’t have time to ponder it, though, because the next order of business was filling the last open slot on the Squad.

I listened and talked and made quips about Bitch Quotients, but even as my mouth moved, I knew that I couldn’t be here again. I’d already done this. Today wasn’t my first day on the Squad, and we’d already chosen April.

Hadn’t we?

Kiki McCall. April Manning. Hayley Hoffman.

The names were flung back and forth and the other girls debated in slow motion. It was all “legacy this” and “aptitude for climbing” that. And just as we were getting ready to vote April in, I realized what was wrong with this whole situation
—
other than the obvious.

I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

“Dance with me, Toby.”

Jack? What was Jack doing in the Quad? He couldn’t be here. If he knew about us, we’d been exposed
—
permanently. More importantly, he couldn’t be here
—
I WAS NAKED.

“Come on, Ev. Just one little dance.”

DOES NO ONE BUT ME REALIZE HOW BAD THIS IS?

“Dance with him, Toby,” the twins ordered, and then they were dancing
—
with my brother.

“Hey, Tobe,” Noah said. “Looks like you’re naked, huh?”

I tried to cover myself
—
I grabbed at papers and books and tried to position my hands to cover the worst of it, but there was no hope.

“Dance with me.”

“Dance with him.”

“Dance with him.”

I DON’T WANT TO FRIGGING DANCE WITH ANYBODY! I WANT TO WEAR CLOTHES!

“Here,” Lucy whispered. “Put this on.”

Gratefully, I grabbed the clothes she shoved at me, but they disintegrated in my hands until all I was holding was a tiny silver tiara.

And then we weren’t in the Quad anymore, and I was wearing clothes and Jack and I were dancing.

“What’s that on your head?” he asked.

I reached up and tore the tiara out of my hair. I threw it to the ground, and when it hit, it burst into a million microscopic pieces, and all of a sudden, the pieces were crawling and moving and growing smaller by the second until they were invisible to the naked eye.

I could feel them on my skin, then, burrowing in.

My lungs stopped working. I lost all feeling in my legs. And for some godforsaken reason, Brooke’s mother was making out with Mr. J in the corner, and Paris Hilton was standing there, watching.

My body was giving out, my face was contorting, and the last thing I heard before darkness seeped over my mind was a lisping “That’s hot.”

I bolted straight up and, my mind still all cloudy with unwanted images, I tried to assess the situation. I was lying in bed, fully clothed, it was pitch-black outside, and my necklace had gotten tangled up in my hair as I’d slept. It took me a few seconds to remember why I was sleeping in my clothes. I’d been so busy following the “rules” and NOT calling in my encounter with Amelia Juarez that I hadn’t bothered with pajamas, and in the midst of my ceiling staring, I must have fallen asleep.

I blinked several times, trying to get the image of Brooke’s mom and Mr. J out of my head. This was one of those times when I was severely glad that my dreams weren’t prophetic, because
ew.
And also, the whole naked dreams thing was really starting to get to me. And Jack in the Quad? Hopefully, my subconscious wasn’t trying to tell me anything with that one. I was also somewhat disturbed by the fact that in the past two days, Ryan Seacrest and Paris Hilton had both made cameos in my dreams. Before I’d joined the Squad, I hadn’t even known who either of them was, and I would have preferred to wipe their existence on this planet from my consciousness altogether.

Groggily, I stumbled out of bed and across the room to my computer. I hit a few keys to wake it up, and then typed in my log-on password, wondering if anyone had discovered my previous night’s hacking yet.

I had my answer soon enough. My remote access to the Squad mainframe had timed out, and all of that information was gone, but the files I’d gotten from the Big Guys’ computers were still there, exactly where I’d left them. Slowly and as meticulously as I could, given the fact that it was the middle of the night and I was still half-asleep, I deleted the files from my hard drive one by one, erasing any evidence that they’d ever been here.

I’d hacked into the Big Guys’ database to find Amelia Juarez, and instead, she’d found me. I didn’t need their files. I didn’t need their help. All I needed was the rest of the Squad with me at Walford Park by three o’clock today. Together, the ten of us were a match for anyone. Amelia Juarez wanted competition?

We’d give her competition.

I shut down my computer, careful to disconnect it from the internet first. If the Big Guys hadn’t realized I’d hacked them and hadn’t hacked into my system to see what I knew, I wasn’t going to give them the excuse or opportunity to do so from here on out.

I looked at my watch and then back at my bed and groaned. Five-thirty in the morning was going to come really early. And yet, with the way my throat was burning with secrets I couldn’t tell until morning, there was a good chance that it just wouldn’t come early enough. I climbed back into bed, and as I closed my eyes and pulled my pillow to the side, I spent a few seconds hoping that my subconscious didn’t have anything else in store for me, and then I floated back off into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Unlike most mornings, I didn’t bother cursing or slapping at my alarm. I picked it up and threw it against my wall. Hard. I smiled sadistically when it broke into three large pieces and several tinier ones.

Feeling somewhat vindicated, I climbed out of bed and headed directly for the shower. Most of the time, I showered at night, but I could tell already that this morning, coffee wasn’t going to be enough to wake me up and prepare me for the day. Somehow, I didn’t think Brooke was going to take everything I had to tell her very well.

I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower. I turned on the water and basked in the heat and steam and wonderfulness of it for a few minutes before my mind came fully online and I started making a game plan for today.

I needed to tell the others everything Amelia had told me. I needed to tell them about Anthony’s plans, and about the fact that none of the TCIs were responsible for killing Jacob Kann. I needed to tell them about Amelia’s challenge and the fact that our entire program was riding on our ability to win. More importantly, I needed to convince them to play by Amelia’s rules, because they hadn’t seen her the night before; I had, and I was one hundred percent positive that she wasn’t bluffing. If we told the Big Guys what was going on, if we didn’t show up this afternoon or if we brought any kind of backup with us when we did, she would expose us to Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, and the Squad as we knew it would be over.

I could not imagine this discussion going particularly well. As I tried to figure out the best way of framing my proposition for the others, I finished scrubbing up, and noticed—with no little amount of annoyance—that there was
still
blue glitter on my chest. I attacked it with a nearby bottle of shower gel, and every time I thought I’d gotten it all, I’d shift positions, and light would dance off my skin in a new way.

Darn the twins and their stupid G.A.

After a few minutes, I gave up and turned off the water. I towel-dried off and absentmindedly scratched at my left shoulder, which was itching like crazy. I made a mental note to ask the twins what exactly they put in my Squad-issued shower gel. As a general rule, I tried to avoid using it and usually managed to shower using my own contraband bar soap, which I’d hidden before the twins’ last visit so that they couldn’t confiscate it, but this morning, I’d been too busy thinking—about my theory and about the glitter—to pay attention to the fact that I was using the gel.

“Okay,” I muttered. “Time to wake up.”

I wrapped a towel around my body and stumbled back to my room and into some clothing—a pair of low-rise designer jeans with rhinestones on the butt and legs, and a blue silk camisole top. I looked at my shoes and spent a few moments mourning the loss of any and all pairs of comfortable shoes I had once owned, save for the combat boots I’d managed to save from the wrath of Britt and Tiff.

I stared longingly at my old boots, but ultimately decided that today was not the day to start reclaiming my former identity. Today was about credibility. It was about convincing the others to do what I said. It was about breaking the rules for the right reasons, instead of the wrong ones. It was about the ten of us doing what had to be done.

With a wince, I threw on a pair of blue knee-length boots that matched the camisole, and then I grabbed my papers and began to stuff them into my schoolbag. Deciding that leaving sensitive information in with my math and English books probably wasn’t a good idea, I rummaged around my room, found the Squad history book that I’d been meaning to give back to Lucy since she’d given it to me, and stuffed the papers inside, before sticking the book in my bag and heading out the door.

I was halfway to practice before I realized I’d forgotten my coffee. This did not bode well for my future. At all.

“You’re late.” Brooke greeted me with two words the second I walked into the gym. She was a creature of repetition.

“Sorry.” This time, I actually offered up a response, but Brooke seemed to sense the fact that I wasn’t apologizing for being late so much as I was for the fact that I’d been part of that awful exchange with her mother the day before. Being Brooke, she didn’t exactly welcome my sympathy.

“And what are you wearing?” She sounded so aghast that I glanced down, terrified for a split second that somehow, I’d forgotten to get dressed that morning and was not, in fact, wearing anything at all.

I breathed a literal sigh of relief when I saw the top of the camisole. “What’s wrong with my clothes?” I asked. The one time I’d actually tried to be relatively fashionable and make a good cheer impression, I’d somehow violated an unwritten mandate of matching?

I really needed my coffee.

“You’re not dressed,” Brooke informed me, her lips pursed. “For practice.”

She said the words like they were two separate sentences, and it took me a while to realize that they weren’t, and another second or two after that to process what she was saying.

Everyone else in the gym was dressed in their regular practice clothes—cheer shorts and sports bras and the occasional tank top. How was it that I’d worn cheer clothes the past two days, and we hadn’t said so much as a
Go Lions,
but today, I got dressed for school, and all of a sudden it was bona fide practice time?

“Go change,” Brooke ordered.

I had to remind myself that she didn’t know what I knew, and that there were so many issues behind her captain complex that I couldn’t really hold it against her, but her tone still rubbed me the wrong way.

“Listen,” I started to say, and then I cut myself off and decided to opt for gestures instead. I tossed my hair over each shoulder and then tucked it behind my ears.

We need to go down to the Quad, I thought. I willed her to understand.

“No.” She understood, and she wasn’t buying.

“I like found some stuff out last night,” I said, pitching my voice into a slight lilt and doing my best to speak in a ditz code she’d understand.

“Practice first,” Brooke said. “Stuff later.”

And right then, I almost had a meltdown, full-on Toby temper tantrum. I’d spent hours hacking and going through files, trying to come up with a way for her to save face, a way for us, as a Squad, to get the job done and do something right, and then I’d spent a good fifteen minutes with a gun in my face, and she wasn’t even going to let me explain.

I felt a hand squeeze my shoulder gently, and I noticed Tara standing next to me. “Practice first,” she said softly. “Unless it absolutely can’t wait.”

I thought about the fact that Amelia had made it quite clear that we weren’t allowed to move in until this afternoon, and the fact that taking orders from a known hostile was just crazy enough that Brooke wouldn’t need much of an excuse to dismiss it out of hand.

“Fine,” I said evenly. “Practice first.”

Brooke stalked over to her bag and tossed me a pair of blue shorts and a navy sports bra. “Go change.”

I did as I was told. My shoes and socks were still in my locker, and I managed to pull off a pretty quick change, especially considering the fact that the atrocious boots on my feet weren’t exactly easy to take off.

When I got back into the gym, the others were in formation for our newest cheer—the one we’d be debuting at the homecoming game on Friday. It was a simple triangle shape, with Brooke on point, the twins behind her, Chloe, Lucy, and Bubbles in the row behind them, and the rest of us in the back row. I was conveniently tucked away in the back row middle, where any mistakes I made would likely go unnoticed.

Under Brooke’s sharp commands, we practiced our formation changes, going from our opening formation to spreading out in two lines of five, and finally, to our ending formation. This cheer was the first one they’d ever taught me that included stunting. I was just happy that I’d been relegated to the relatively benign position of “front spot,” which basically meant that while the “bases” lifted the “flyer” up into the air, and the “back spot” held everything together and watched out for the flyer’s safety—I just kind of stood there and looked pretty, adding in whatever extra balance I could.

The stunt itself was called a liberty. Originally, the plan had been to go for a “scorpion-liberty-heel-stretch, double full down,” but ultimately, they’d scaled it back for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that even as a front spot, I could still send the whole thing crashing down. As much as my cheer skills had improved the past couple of weeks, when it came to life or death maneuvers on the field, no one trusted me farther than they could throw me, which, coincidentally, I’d found out the week before was surprisingly far. Don’t ask.