CHAPTER 9
Code Word: Naked
Jack is standing next to me. My hands are sweating. I think he’s asking me to dance, but there isn’t any noise coming out of his moving mouth, and really, he should know better than to make any such requests. I don’t dance.
The world around me jumps violently, and when it finally stands still again, I’m dancing, and I don’t understand why. As we’ve already established, I don’t dance. And yet…
My body is moving faster than I can mentally keep track of the motions. I have no control over the spastic, sensual movements, and Jack’s just standing there, looking at me, and all of a sudden, I’m wearing my cheerleading uniform, and Jack is Lucy, and she has a giant fish in each hand.
No, not fish. She has knives. Or is that dynamite? Wait, it’s Chinese throwing stars. Definitely Chinese throwing stars. She throws them at me, and all of a sudden, the stars are fish, and I’m not wearing anything but a towel. And then Lucy is Jack again, and the battle star fish have exploded into confetti.
“And this year’s homecoming queen is…” The voice on the loudspeakers sounds suspiciously like Ryan Seacrest. The words echo in my head—tiny, audible portents of doom.
Jack stares at me with an ironic smile on his face. My heart thumps viciously in my chest, and I wish to God I was still dancing, because even that was better than this.
“Toby Klein!”
It takes me a moment to process that they’ve said my name and another to realize what it means. No. Oh, no.
All eyes are on me, and when I look down to avoid their stares, I realize that I have much bigger problems than any tiaras in my immediate future.
The towel is gone, I’m naked, and Jack is staring at me. Again.
“Toby.” Tara’s voice broke into my mind, and it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as consciousness seeped slowly back into my body, I realized that I had a headache roughly the size of North America. On the other, however, waking up made me realize that the whole thing with the nakedness and Jack and being the homecoming queen was just a nightmare, and that was a Very Good Thing.
“Ow.” I put my thoughts into words as coherently as I could.
“I know,” Tara said. “You took a pretty hard hit to the head. We need to get it checked out.”
I blinked several times and then set about trying to figure out where I was and what Tara was talking about. I’d just realized that I was in the backseat of Tara’s car when her words finally triggered something in my mind.
“Hit to the head. As in my head and the ground? Or my head and flying debris? Because the car…” I trailed off.
“Oh, God, the car.”
“You’re okay,” Tara said, her voice low and smooth.
“You’re going to be fine.”
I sat up, slowly, and Tara leaned toward me. She took my head in her hands, and peered carefully at my eyes.
“Your pupils aren’t dilated,” she said. “Can you track my finger?”
I followed her French-manicured index finger as it zipped back and forth.
“Headache?” she questioned.
I gave her a look that I hoped conveyed a properly large amount of “duh.”
Tara was not the least bit deterred by my response. “Nausea?”
“No.”
“You probably don’t have a concussion,” Tara told me, “but procedure says we have to get you checked out, just to be sure.”
“Better safe than sorry?” I asked, a single note of sarcasm creeping into my voice. I’d known logically that spying was a dangerous gig, but the fact that there were procedures for stuff like this kind of hit that message home.
“More or less,” Tara replied.
“Makes sense,” I said. “I mean, I’m guessing the government likes to cover all their bases when their top-secret underage teenage agents almost get blown to freaking pieces!”
“Drama queen.”
I never thought I’d live to see the day when a cheerleader would call me a drama queen.
“I could have been killed!”
Stupid Big Guys. Stupid bomber. Stupid Jack’s uncle.
This time, Tara just mouthed the words. “Drama. Queen.”
“Exploding car,” I countered. About that time, it occurred to me to ask the question that my subconscious was deliberately skirting. “Jacob Kann?”
Tara shook her head.
“Our mark is dead.” I said the words out loud, but they still didn’t feel real. “Somebody killed him.”
“We’ll find out who,” Tara said. “And why.”
I was in shock, and her words were strangely comforting. Jacob Kann hadn’t exactly been one of the good guys. In fact, there was a very good chance that he was one of the bad guys, but I felt oddly compelled to avenge his death, to find the person who planted that bomb and to make sure they couldn’t ever do it again.
“The Big Guys are sending in a special team,” Tara told me. “Half to run interference with the local law enforcement, and half to speed up the forensics end of the investigation. We should know more about the explosives used by tomorrow.”
I rubbed the side of my head and was immediately rewarded with a sharp, throbbing pain.
“Don’t touch it,” Tara said. “I stopped the bleeding, but it’s going to be a heck of a bruise.”
“Stopped the bleeding?” That sounded serious. “How long was I out for?”
“Five minutes,” Tara said. “I got you to the car and left ASAP, drove a couple miles away, and once we’d cleared the scene and I’d called in the situation, I pulled over to try to wake you up.” She paused and handed me a bottle of something that looked like body splash. I smelled it and my eyes immediately began tearing.
“It’s good for bringing people back,” she said. “Don’t ask what’s in it.”
I accepted her advice.
“You going to be okay to ride the rest of the way to the emergency room?”
I stared at Tara. “Emergency room?”
“Protocol.”
“Yeah, we already covered that, but I just figured…I mean, don’t we have our own doctor? Or some kind of top-secret medical base or something?”
“Absolutely,” Tara said, arching an eyebrow at me. “It’s under a volcano and run by a mad scientist.”
I gave her a look. “We have a helipad,” I told her. “I don’t think a med center is that much more ridiculous.”
She shrugged, conceding the point. “We have somewhere we can go if things are serious. If not, we hit up the ER.”
My super spy senses told me that I wasn’t going to get any more information out of her about the top-secret place we could go for “serious” injuries, and I didn’t really feel compelled to dwell on the fact that my current injuries could have easily been more severe.
“So,” I said. “About that emergency room.”
Ten minutes later, we arrived at the Bayport Hospital ER.
The woman at the front desk asked me the nature of my injury. Tara responded before I had the chance. “We dropped her.”
The woman clucked her tongue. “You girls,” she said. “I swear, you’re in here more than the football players.”
It took every ounce of subtlety I had to refrain from gawking at Tara’s audacity. She was trying to pass off my near-concussion as the result of a cheer injury?
“Well, cheerleading is the second most dangerous sport in America,” Tara said.
The woman smiled. “Right after polo,” she said. Clearly, she’d somehow heard this spiel often enough that she’d come to believe it was true. I sincerely hoped that my health was not in any way in her hands.
“You girls sit down,” the woman said. “I’ll sneak you in just as soon as a room opens up.”
“Thanks, Nora,” Tara said. Then she hooked her arm through mine and prodded me toward the waiting room.
“Second most dangerous sport in America?” I asked under my breath, my tone incredulous. “Where do you guys get this stuff
?”
“Oh,” Tara said as we sat down. “That’s actually true.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously,” Tara said. “Cheerleaders sustain more debilitating injuries than almost any other kind of athlete.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again, completely unsure how to respond to Tara’s claim.
“Really, Toby. Everyone on the Squad has gotten to know Nora really well, and it’s not because of our extracurricular activities. It’s because cheerleading is hard on your body. People get dropped. Ankles get twisted. Teeth get knocked out. It happens.”
“And when something ‘happens’—” I made liberal use of air quotes.
“We come here,” Tara finished for me.
“And so when something…extracurricular happens…”
Tara nodded. “We come here.”
I added this entire conversation to my list of reasons why cheerleaders were actually freakishly suited to life as operatives. Our cover even worked to explain injuries incurred in the line of duty.
For a little while, Tara and I were silent, but I finally had to ask. “So what have you come in here for?”
“Last time, it was a fractured pelvis.”
“Ouch. Somebody drop you?”
“Nope. Herkie.”
I tried to figure out how exactly one could fracture a pelvis doing a cheer jump, but Tara just shook her head, a wry smile on her face. “Don’t ask.”
We fell back into silence then, and I made a mental list of questions I’d ask my partner once I was in the clear to talk about the more classified aspects of our lives, starting with whether or not she’d ever been injured as an operative, and concluding with how exactly she’d managed to get me from the parking lot to her car, presumably without anyone noticing.
“Toby?”
Tara nudged me when Nora called my name. “Let’s go.”
By the time we were situated in a small exam room, I was half-convinced that I was still dreaming. Just to make sure that I was awake, I looked down to confirm that my clothes had not suddenly disappeared.
Still there.
Tara took a seat on the exam table and I did the same. After a moment, she took an iPod out of her backpack and offered me one earpiece.
“Nora’s great about getting us in quickly,” she said, “but the doctors usually take forever.”
I accepted the earpiece somewhat suspiciously. On the whole, I had not been impressed by the musical preferences of my cheerleading cohorts, and there was at least a five percent chance that she’d make me listen to the words to some new cheer we were getting ready to learn.
Instead, I watched as Tara hit several buttons, and a few seconds later, Brooke’s voice came through our earpieces, loud and clear.
“Took you guys long enough. How’s the security reading on your communicator, Tare?”
“There was a wait,” Tara explained. “And it’s good.”
I processed this conversation and then spoke up myself. I had no idea where the microphone was on this not-really-an-iPod, but I decided to go on the assumption that Brooke would hear my words.
“Yes, I’m okay, Brooke. Thank you for asking. Your concern is sweet, but really, you don’t need to worry about little old me.”
“If you weren’t okay,” Brooke said, “you wouldn’t be in the emergency room.”
Her logic seemed counterintuitive, but given the conversation I’d had earlier with Tara about how procedure was different for serious injuries, Brooke’s words made sense.
“So what’s up?” Tara asked, careful to keep our side of the conversation generic and innocuous enough that if the doctor walked in, he wouldn’t notice anything out of the norm.
“No word yet from the special unit the Big Guys sent in to check out the blast,” Brooke informed us.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even let me look at it!” That was Lucy, speaking from somewhere in the background. “Totally unfair.”
There were few things our weapons expert loved more than a good explosion.
“Sorry, Luce,” Brooke said. “I tried.”
I thought I heard a note of strain in Brooke’s voice and inferred that trying—and failing—wasn’t something Brooke was overly fond of. If she’d tried to get Lucy in on the explosion recon and hadn’t been able to, that meant that the Big Guys had forbidden it, which meant that maybe Brooke wasn’t exactly as in charge of this mission as she had been this morning.
Knowing her as I did, I could imagine just how well that was going over.
“So how did everyone else’s thing go?” Tara asked, still keeping with the quality vagueness.
“You know how when you called in Toby’s injury, you mentioned that you’d found a chip in Kann’s phone?” Brooke asked.
I just loved it when people talked about me like I wasn’t even on the secured, high-tech line.
“Were there more?” Tara asked, her voice even and measured.
I could practically hear Brooke nodding her ponytailed head. “Two of the other phones were also already bugged—Amelia Juarez’s and Anthony Connors-Wright’s.”
“And the third?” I asked, screening my words to make sure they would be opaque to potential eavesdroppers.
“Hector Hassan’s phone was not bugged,” Brooke said.
“We haven’t gotten anything significant from the audio yet, but if Amelia, Jacob, and Anthony were all bugged and Hector wasn’t—”
“Then chances are, he’s the one who…” I tried to censor myself. “Did the phone thing to the others.”
“That’s the current theory,” Brooke said. Then there was a long, significant pause, and I got the distinct feeling that I was missing something. It fell into place the second that the doctor stepped into the room.
If Hassan was the one who’d bugged Jacob Kann’s phone, then there was at least a chance that he was the one who’d planted the bomb. I was suddenly overcome with an urge to jump off the exam table and rush out to kick some TCI a-s-s. Because as it turned out, almost getting blown up? Not nearly as much of a deterrent as one might think.
“Toby Klein?” the doctor said.
I nodded, and Tara subtly hit the pause button, ending our communication with Brooke, before gently taking the earpiece from my ear.
“Sorry,” she said. “We were in the middle of a song.”
The doctor nodded and approached me. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I…uhhhh…got dropped.” I still couldn’t believe that anyone would buy that excuse.
“Prep or full extension?” the doctor asked.
I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that this doctor knew cheerleading terms that I didn’t.
Seeing my confusion, the doctor grinned. “You must be new,” he said. “Let me ask it this way—how high up were you?”
I tried to gauge the right way to answer that question. “Kinda high up?” I answered. “I think I hit pretty hard. I blacked out for a few minutes.”
The doctor shook his head and then took a closer look at the cut on the side of my head. “It’s not deep,” he said. His gentle tone lulled me into a false sense of security, and then his fingers prodded my bruise. “Does this hurt?”
I yelped and let loose an impressive string of expletives.
“Okay,” the doctor inferred, seemingly bemused, “that hurts.”
He pulled a light out from the front pocket of his lab coat and shined it in my eyes. He continued examining me as he ran through a list of questions, some of which Tara had asked me earlier, and some of which she hadn’t. In the end, he said that he didn’t think I had a concussion and that an MRI wouldn’t be necessary this time.
“You got off easy,” he told me. “If you’ll take my advice—and they never do—you’ll get out of this game while you still can.”
I had to remind myself that he was talking about the cheerleading aspect of it. He had no idea what we were really up to. Either way, there was exactly zero chance of me quitting. If anythi
ng, recent events had caused some perverse part of me to want to throw myself into this mission more.
Seeing the refusal to quit in my eyes, the doctor sighed. “I have three daughters,” he said. “The oldest one is five. If she wants to play football when she’s in high school, I’ll buy her the jersey, but the second the word cheer leaves her mouth, I’m locking her in her room until she’s thirty. It’s just too dangerous.”
And with that, he was gone.
I turned to Tara. “And you said I was a drama queen.”
Tara grinned. “Let’s go,” she said. “I think you have something Brooke will be very, very happy to see.”
Tara’s words registered, and after a few seconds, my hand flew to my throat. My necklace was still there, and the charm appeared to be in one piece. Until that moment, I’d completely forgotten that I was wearing the contents of the late Jacob Kann’s laptop around my neck.
I smiled, thinking how satisfying it would be to hand the data stick to Brooke all gloatylike, and echoed Tara’s words. “Let’s go.”
And then, because a full fourth of my brain had become dedicated to cheers, I rephrased my words with but a hint of irony in my voice. “L-e-t-s-g-o, let’s go, let’s go, l-e-t-s-g-o…”
Tara grinned. “Let’s go!”
CHAPTER 10
Code Word: Prezzies
By the time Tara and I got back to the Quad, my mood had improved significantly. You know your life is bordering on the absurd when a day you almost get blown up, but don’t have a concussion, is a good day. I think it’s safe to conclude that I was pretty much in happy denial land. All I could think about was that, despite our mission’s disastrous ending, I’d managed to do something that none of the other girls had.
I’d gotten computer intel. If any of Jacob Kann’s lovely, unencrypted files contained information about what he was doing in Bayport, that would be huge. Now more than ever, we needed to find out why the TCIs were here, because with Kann’s death, one thing had become crystal clear.
Whatever it was that had brought the TCIs to Bayport was worth killing for.