And with that, she slid out of the car, shut the door without slamming it, and walked into the gym like she wasn’t a moving ball of stress and fury. I considered following her, but ultimately decided that I liked my head right where it was—on my shoulders, with my ponytail intact. So for the second night in a row, I followed Brooke’s orders and drove home.
I didn’t realize how tired I was until I walked through my front door, and then something in my mind clicked, and staying vertical suddenly became very difficult. Who would have thought sitting around all day, doing nothing, was so exhausting?
“How was your day?” My mom accosted me in the front hallway. If she noticed the zombielike glaze that had settled over my eyes, she said nothing.
How was my day? I considered my response. I’d spent the morning getting debriefed by our contact at the CIA, followed immediately by flaming the gossip fires by kissing Jack in the hallway, had watched my brother have a “moment” with a cheerleader, had discovered that Jack actually knew how to create a password I couldn’t crack, had girl-talked with Brooke while staking out Jack’s father’s law firm, had discovered that the Big Guys knew more than they were telling, and to top it all off, I’d nearly been hit by a car.
“Fine,” I grumbled.
“That’s nice, dear,” my mother said. “Now, you wouldn’t happen to know why your brother’s email stopped working, would you?”
Noah was such a tattletale.
“Not a clue,” I deadpanned, and then, before my mother could say another word, I climbed the steps and headed for my room, stopping only long enough to hear Noah on the phone.
“We’ve got to go bigger. We’ve got to be inventive. My friends, it’s time to think outside the box. It’s time for…” Noah pitched his voice lower, like a TV announcer.
“Homecoming: the next generation. This is an all-new frontier of advertising, gentlemen. So ask yourselves this question: are you ready?”
As soon as I developed the strength, I was going to short-circuit my brother’s telephone line. For now, however, all I wanted was to fall asleep, because the sooner I slept, the sooner morning would come.
CHAPTER 20
Code Word: Flat
“Vote for Toby! She loves puppies.”
Puppies? Again? I glance around the room, looking for Noah. Instead, I see a room full of puppies, all of whom are staring straight at me. Something about their beady little puppy eyes has me looking down at my body, but thankfully, I’m fully clothed.
Unfortunately, I’m wearing a puffy pink monstrosity. It’s so big and fluffy and pink that I can’t even move. I hate dresses, and this one is trying to kill me.
“Nice dress.” And then Jack’s there, only instead of wearing a tuxedo, he’s wearing boxer shorts. Well. This is certainly an interesting (and not entirely unwelcome) turn of events.
“Toby?” Jack says.
I look down at my dress, hating it, and then a moment later, it disappears, and I would give anything to have it back again. I cover myself with the poms I’m suddenly holding in each hand, but Jack doesn’t seem to notice at all.
“Toby?”
“Go away!”
“Toby?”
The puppies are closing in, and when they open their mouths, I see razor-sharp teeth. This is so not good. Rabid puppies, disappearing fluffy dresses, and Jack just keeps saying my name over and over again.
“Toby? Toby? Toby?”
And then we’re at the dance, and he’s holding my arm, escorting me up to the stage, and I’m wearing the pink dress again, but I know with every fiber of my being that the second I step onto that stage and accept that crown, it’s going to disappear.
“Clap your hands, everybody!”
Where is that cheering coming from?
“Toby?”
“Everybody, clap your hands!”
“Toby?”
I’m cheering along with them. I can’t help it. I’m walking toward the stage and cheering, and Jack is calling my name, and the puppies are gnashing their puppy teeth, and I know this just isn’t going to end well.
“Toby?”
“What?” I spit out.
Jack reaches out to touch my face. “Run.”
The second the word exits his mouth, there’s an explosion, and as I fly backward, the world around me engulfed in flames, my last conscious thought is that my fluffy pink dress has disappeared again.
For the second morning in a row, I woke up before my alarm. This was getting seriously ridiculous. A girl can only take so many naked dreams before she commits herself to a life of insomnia.
Looking at my watch, I ascertained that if I got dressed as quickly as I had yesterday, I’d have time for at least two cups of coffee. When I staggered into the kitchen wearing my standard cheer practice uniform—tiny cheer shorts and a sports bra—I wasn’t expecting to be greeted by a large percentage of the freshman class, but there were at least a dozen freshman boys in my kitchen, eating donuts and engaging in some kind of robust debate.
Given the fact that Noah was even less of a morning person than I was, I took this as a very bad sign of things to come.
“Toby!” Noah was either happy to see me, or very, very nervous. “Going to practice?”
I didn’t reply. Instead, I glowered at each and every person in the room, stole one of their donuts, and grabbed a thermos of coffee to go. This morning, dealing with my brother was going to have to wait. At some point, you have to prioritize, and right now, the morning’s debriefing won out. Maiming Noah was but a distant second.
Lucky for him.
As I walked out of the back door, the boys went back to their plotting, and I tried very hard not to wonder what the much-contested “phase three” entailed.
On the drive to the school, my mind checked out, and I went into the zone, completely absorbed in my own thoughts, but somehow able to navigate the early-morning traffic. There were so many questions swimming around in my head. The Big Guys owed us so many answers, and my gut instinct told me that we weren’t going to get all of them.
If I were the CIA, I probably wouldn’t tell my teenage operatives everything, either. That didn’t make this particular pill any easier to swallow, and I wondered what they would hold back. Not information about the bomb in Jacob Kann’s car—they owed me that much. Not information about the seller’s ID and the nature of the weapon for sale—without the information I’d torn from Kann’s laptop, they might never have made the connection. And they could hardly hold back on what had transpired between Amelia and the higher-ups at Peyton the day before. I’d been the one to plant the bug at Peyton in the first place.
On second thought, if I were the CIA, I’d tell us everything.
Someone tapped on my car window, and it took me a second to realize that I’d parked it. Grabbing my coffee and my bag, I turned the car off and slipped out.
“Good morning.” Tara’s voice was just slightly hoarse.
“Long night?” I asked her.
She inclined her head slightly. “I couldn’t sleep.”
I thought back on my naked dreams. “That makes two of us.”
“You didn’t lose a tail yesterday.” Tara’s words surprised me. She almost never talked about spy stuff so plainly, especially outside of the Quad.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been naked in every dream I’ve had for the past forty-eight hours.”
That got the slightest hint of a smile out of Tara. “You win.”
I waited until we reached the safety of the locker room before I voiced a more sensitive question. “What do you think they’ll tell us?”
“Whatever they want us to know.”
Those weren’t exactly the kind of words that inspired confidence.
It’s amazing how quickly even the most extraordinary things can become routine. I barely even registered our journey from the locker room to the conference table, but soon, I was drinking my coffee, and Brooke was giving us the rundown on Amelia Juarez in anticipation of the Big Guys
’ call.
“She shouldn’t have been able to lose any of you.”
Brooke’s words didn’t have a visible effect on anyone in the room, but I somehow doubted that Zee had gotten any more sleep last night than Tara had. As for the twins, they weren’t polishing each other’s nails, which put them toward the more solemn end of the Britt-Tiff spectrum.
“But she did lose you, and that tells us something. It tells us that there’s a lot we don’t know about Amelia Juarez, because the four of you are good. And if she lost you, then she’s much, much better than we gave her credit for. Zee?”
Zee nibbled on her bottom lip, and for a split second, I could see the awkward little kid she must have been her first time through high school. “I did some more digging. The profiles the Big Guys gave us were explicit, but far from complete. We knew that Amelia had a need to prove herself to her family. She’s the youngest of five and the only girl. Her family is known for being brutal, merciless. They control everything from prostitution to the drug trade in at least three states. From what I’ve been able to tell, Amelia hasn’t been allowed to take much of a leadership role in the business.”
“What does that tell us?” Beside me, Tara cut quickly, but smoothly to the point.
“Her family is smart, but they rely more on strength, intimidation, and power to get things done.” Zee paused. “I dug up some old aptitude tests from Amelia’s elementary school. They’re outdated, but they tell us one thing for sure. Her family is smart. Amelia is smarter.”
If Zee was impressed with Amelia’s scores, that meant the TCI gave new meaning to the word genius.
“This wasn’t entirely our fault.” Brooke was sure of that.
“We weren’t given any reason to believe that Amelia had ties to Peyton. If our superiors had suspicions, they didn’t share them, and they underestimated Amelia, too.”
“She found the tracker on her car,” Chloe offered suddenly. “But she didn’t get rid of it. She reprogrammed it. That’s how we lost her. We followed the signal, and the signal lied.”
A supersmart TCI who was deeply involved in the world of organized crime, working for Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. This could not possibly be a good thing.
At that exact moment, an all-too-familiar pop song started blaring from Brooke’s cell phone, and in response, she tapped the access code into the keypad on her chair’s arm, and the flat-screen television clicked on.
“Good morning, girls.”
Good morning, Uncle Alan.
“As you know, yesterday, Amelia Juarez met with associates at Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. Unfortunately, they did not conduct this meeting within the typical range of our audio surveillance. We were, however, able to go back over the audio feed and match a recorded sample of Amelia’s voice to trace sounds recorded in the background. As a result, we managed to reconstruct a very small portion of the conversation. While this provided very little new pertinent information, it did allow us to confirm our previous assessment of the situation.
“Amelia has been in contact with an individual who has dangerous technology that the firm considers rightfully theirs. While this individual believes Amelia came to Bayport representing her own interests, she was in fact recruited by the associates at Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray to do two things: acquire the technology and take out the seller.”
Take out? The way Jacob Kann had been “taken out”? We’d suspected Hector Hassan was behind the bombing, because all signs indicated that he’d been the one to plant the bugs we’d discovered on each of the other TCIs. But if Amelia was brought here to take out the seller, what would stop her from taking out other potential buyers?
While I was pondering this question, a picture appeared on the screen: a middle-aged man who practically had the word nerd emblazoned on his forehead.
“Phillip Ross,” the voice informed us. “Ross holds a triple PhD, one each from Harvard, Oxford, and Bayport University.”
Let’s see, I thought, which one of these things does not belong?
“What are his degrees in?” As the resident PhD herself, Zee quickly zeroed in on this question.
“Biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, and genetics.”
I took this entire conversation to mean that Phillip Ross was smart. Smart enough to develop a new kind of biological weapon. The image on the screen changed, and this time, words appeared.
Nanotechnological Advances in the Field of Gene Targeting: A Study of Technobiological Viruses in the Common Mouse (Mus musculus).
“This is the title of Ross’s most recent dissertation, from the University of Bayport—where, incidentally enough, his research and schooling were supported by the prestigious Kaufman Grant for Advances in Science.”
Kaufman. As in Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.
“So the firm was bankrolling his research,” Brooke concluded.
“Correct,” our contact confirmed.
“And then his research started going really well, and Ross realized that he might get a better offer elsewhere.” That was from Chloe.
“So he starts making subtle inquiries.” Tara.
“Invites the interested parties, or their emissaries, to Bayport.” Brooke again.
“And he figures that if he keeps a low enough profile by only negotiating with people who aren’t normally considered true players in their own right, Peyton won’t find out about it.” Zee provided that bit.
“Except they did find out about it.” Now it was my turn, teamwork at its best. “So they made Amelia an offer, and now they’re counting on her to get the weapon for them.”
There was a brief pause, and then April added in the last piece of the puzzle. “And to make sure that Ross never backstabs them again.”
Even given the seriousness of the situation, some petty part of my mind couldn’t help but think that growing up with Hayley Hoffman as a best friend, April probably knew a lot about backstabbing and retaliation.
“So what do we know about this weapon?” Chloe asked. Our contact wasn’t immediately forthcoming with information, so Chloe started musing on her own. “Whatever he was testing on mice for his dissertation, he must have found a way to apply it to humans. Nanotechnology means we’re dealing with something so small it can’t be seen by the naked eye, but so technologically advanced that it has some sort of computational ability. Gene targeting means we’re talking about DNA. And the fact that the words virus and weapon are used suggests that whatever the nanotechnology does to genes, it ain’t pretty.”
“Very good, Chloe. In generic terms, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m afraid we can’t share specifics at this time, but rest assured that the resulting technology is incredibly dangerous. We cannot allow it to fall into enemy hands.”
I stared at Ross’s dissertation title on the screen and memorized it. My dad was a career scientist with a PhD of his own, and I’d absorbed enough physics babble over my lifetime to know that dissertations were usually published—if not in a scientific journal, at least in some kind of university collection or database. Good old Uncle Alan might not be gung ho on giving us specifics, because he was so very good at leaving out important details, but with a little more information on Ross’s dissertation research, we could probably figure it out for ourselves.
While I was staring at it, the image on the screen changed, this time to reveal a picture of a building.
“Ross’s lab is located here,” the voice said. “On the fifth floor. Security is tight, and while we could break in, we need to do so in a way that won’t advertise our presence to Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. We need to acquire this technology, but if Peyton doesn’t realize we’ve done so, they may proceed with their plans.”
And if they proceeded with their plans, the Big Guys might actually be able to pin something on them. Maybe not the whole firm, but at least some of the associates.
“We need to get in and get out, and the configuration of the building eliminates the possibility of going in unseen. That means we have to go in unnot
iced, and that means we need you girls.”
The next picture on the screen made me wonder if there was a slight chance I was still dreaming.
“Cheer Scout cookies?” I asked.
“Cheer Scout cookies,” the voice said. “This is your cover. As of 1500 hours this afternoon, all five teams will commence fund-raising at strategic locations spread throughout Bayport, specifically, large, commercial buildings.”
It took me a second to realize that one of the locations in question was the building that housed Ross’s lab. I must have been playing this game for too long now, because in a twisted way, this whole cookie thing made sense. If we were all doing “fund-raising,” then the fact that a subset of us chose to do it at Ross’s lab wouldn’t raise suspicions. Clever.
“Girls, I must stress the incredibly sensitive nature of this case. We must acquire the weapon prototype that Ross has constructed, replace it with a decoy, and get out without raising suspicions. Due to the danger involved in penetrating Ross’s lab, we’ve designated the active part of this mission as eighteen and over. We’ll be sending two operatives in; the rest of you will be acting as decoys across town.”
Eighteen and over meant that the CIA wasn’t comfortable handing this part of the case over to minors, which meant that dangerous was an understatement. The last time a case had been given this designation, Zee and Brooke had been caught in a crossfire in Libya.
“Unfortunately, however,” the voice continued, “after a deeper analysis of Ross’s technological capabilities, psychological profile, and security detail, the task force assigned to this case has recommended that at least one of the operatives sent on the primary mission have a strong technological background, superior fighting skills, and…errrrr…”
Chloe preened, sure the voice was describing her.
“The psychological profile revealed that our best chance at countering Ross’s paranoia is to go in with someone young, female, and unintimidating.”
As far as I could tell, that description fit each and every one of us.