“Designers whose last names are hard to spell.”
“In.”
“Heiresses.”
“Out.”
“Celebrity children.”
“In. When Angelina Jolie’s little boy grows up, he’s going to be a total babe.”
“Guys, we have audio.” Chloe took that moment to cut in on their game of “In or Out,” for which I was grateful.
“When you get within a quarter-block of the building, hold back, Tiff. Give Brittany a ninety-second head start.”
“Uh-huh,” Tiffany said.
“Awesome,” her twin agreed.
I watched the plasma screen as the two visual feeds split. From the one on the left, I could see the back of Brittany’s head as Tiffany fell back, giving her sister a lead. On the right side of the screen, the other feed showed us a clear image of the building as Brittany approached.
As Chloe’s surveillance reports had predicted, security on the bottom level was relatively lax. There was a single guard, and if it hadn’t been for the length (or lack thereof) of Brittany’s skirt, he probably wouldn’t have looked up from his computer, which I was about eighty percent certain he was using to look at a website whose name I totally didn’t want to know.
When a flash of real, live cheerleader leg caught his eye, he turned his full attention to Brittany. “Can I help you?” he asked, the question coming out noticeably too fast.
Brittany leaned forward. “I’m looking for a bathroom,” she said.
“Tiffany, move to flank position,” Chloe said. “Brittany, you’re a go.”
Tiffany approached the building and held her position just outside the double-door entrance.
After the security guard stuttered out directions to the nearest bathroom, Brittany flounced off. Two minutes later, Tiffany made her way to the desk. “Which way did you say that bathroom was?” she asked. “I get lost really easily.”
This time, the guard just pointed.
They hit the stairs then, Brittany taking the lead. If I hadn’t been forced to endure the Cheerleading Practice from Hell the day before, I would have been surprised at their stamina, but now I knew better. To someone who could do two hours of kicking, jumping, and shouting out annoying rhymes without ever losing her larger-than-life cheer-smile, eight flights of stairs was nothing.
The door at the top of the stairs was locked, and for the first time, it occurred to me that April, who’d stayed back with Tara to party plan, might have actually come in handy. After all, her “special skill” was lock-picking.
As it turned out, though, the twins didn’t need April.
“Tell them to use the grape-flavored one,” Lucy said brightly. Chloe nodded.
“Guys? Use the grape-flavored one.”
From Brittany’s video feed, I could see Tiffany reach into her bra and pull out what appeared to be a single piece of bubble gum. All business, Tiff unwrapped it and folded it in two. Then she bent down and smushed it between the door and the wall, even with the doorknob.
“Stand clear,” Chloe said, and the twins backed up a few steps.
The next thing I saw from the video feeds was a small spark of light, a single tendril of smoke, and an open door.
“Bubble-gum bombs?” I asked.
Lucy nodded. “Coolies, huh?”
Coolies wasn’t the word I would have chosen to describe that particular explosive, but if I had one soft spot on the Squad outside of my partner, it was Lucy, so I let it slide. Without so much as a single sarcastic comment, I turned my attention back to the screen. The twins were no longer together, and Brittany was approaching a second security desk. There were two guards at the desk, and a quick infrared scan of the building, courtesy of Chloe’s cell phone, showed two more around the perimeter of the offices Chloe had identified as our primary target.
I expected Chloe to dish out some more directions, but instead, she just let Brittany do her thing.
Britt slinked toward the security desk. To their credit, these security guys weren’t looking at porn on their computers, but they were just as fascinated with Brittany as the guy on the first floor had been.
“Hi,” Brittany said, shooting them a slow, sultry smile.
“This isn’t the bathroom.”
“Hell-lo,” one of the guards said. The other one gave her a stern look.
“No, miss,” he said. “This isn’t the bathroom. This is a secured wing, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Brittany stuck her lower lip out slightly. “Leave? But I haven’t gone to the bathroom yet.” She leaned forward and grabbed a piece of candy out of a bowl on their desk. She unwrapped it and put it slowly in her mouth. “Can’t you two help me?”
The first guard dissolved into a puddle of testosterone on the floor.
The second guard trembled noticeably, but held firm. “There’s a bathroom on the first floor, Miss…”
“Bunny,” Brittany said. “My name is Bunny.”
I rolled my eyes. She was already practically oozing sexuality out of her pores. The name Bunny was probably overkill.
“Miss Bunny.” Apparently, the guards didn’t share my reservations about the name.
With security suitably distracted, Tiffany snuck out of the stairwell and positioned herself out of sight, behind a pillar.
“First-floor bathrooms are always so icky,” Brittany said. She let a single finger trail along her chest and down toward her cleavage. “And I’ve got such sensitive skin.”
“Bud, she’s got sensitive skin,” the puddle on the floor begged. “Just let me show her to the bathroom.”
“Please, Bud?” Brittany wheedled.
Poor Bud caved. “Fine,” he grumbled. “But, Jimmy, you wait for her right outside that door, and if anyone sees you, tell them she’s somebody’s niece.”
Jimmy, thanking his lucky stars, hit a button behind the security desk, unlocking the main entrance to the secured wing. Trying desperately to look debonair, he escorted Brittany inside.
Chloe watched carefully, and the second Brittany was in the bathroom, she cued Tiffany. “Go for it,” she said. “Guard at the desk is named Bud.”
“Bud?” Tiffany approached the desk.
He looked at her. “What are you doing back so soon?” he asked. “And where’s Jimmy?”
Tiffany stuck out her bottom lip. “Jimmy left me,” she said. “And I never found the bathroom.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “I thought maybe you could show me.”
Bud stood straight up, and I got the sense that when he escorted Tiffany toward the bathroom, it was more to ream out Jimmy than because of Tiff’s feminine wiles.
“Lose something?” Bud asked Jimmy darkly.
Jimmy did a double take. “But you’re in there,” he said.
Tiffany subtly pulled her shirt down and her skirt up. “I got lost,” she said, and poor Jimmy melted into another puddle on the floor.
“I’ll take it from here, Jimmy,” Bud said.
Jimmy looked from Tiffany back to the bathroom door.
“But…but…”
“Now, Jimmy.”
Jimmy, looking strikingly like a heartbroken puppy in a security guard uniform, started walking back toward the front desk. Bud gestured toward the bathroom door.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Tiffany said. “I didn’t get lost. I just thought you were cuter.”
And then, while Bud, who was easily forty years old and forty pounds overweight, stared at her, she popped into the bathroom.
After straightening each other’s hair and reapplying lip gloss, the twins flushed one of the toilets, and then Brittany exited the bathroom, leaving Tiffany inside, undetected. From the feeds, I could see a newly confident and swaggering Bud escorting Brittany out of the secured area, and once both guards were back at the desk, Tiffany exited the bathroom.
“Doublemint complete,” she said under her breath.
“Good job, Tiff. Now go into the corner office and place the
magnifier under the desk.” Chloe checked the satellite feed from the infrared scanner. Either that, or she was reading her text messages. From the backseat, it was kind of hard to tell. “One of the guards is in the kitchenette. The other is making his loop. He just passed the southmost corner office. Give it five seconds, and then head in. You should have about two minutes before he loops back by.”
Tiffany headed for the office. It was predictably locked, but another piece of gum (cherry this time) fixed that little problem, and Tiffany slipped the magnifier out of her bra and placed it on the bottom of the desk with the stealth of someone well used to sticking (nonexplosive) bubble gum to the bottom of the tables in chemistry lab.
With a murmur to Chloe indicating her success, Tiff slipped back out of the office, closed the door behind her, and practically skipped back down the hallway.
“Hey!”
I heard the voice from the audio feed, but didn’t see its owner until Tiffany turned around.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the guard said.
“Cohoon,” Chloe hissed. I had no idea what she was talking about, but luckily, Tiffany spoke fluent Chloe.
“Mr. Cohoon told me to meet him here,” she said. “I’m Jill. I temp downstairs, and Mr. Cohoon wanted to…” Tiffany gave the guard a look. “Go over some briefs.”
The guard apologized, and Tiff managed to sneak out without Bud or Jimmy noticing, because Brittany was showing them how she could “totally do a back bend.”
“Britt, Tiff is clear. Move out.”
With no warning, Brittany popped up from the back bend, blew kisses to the security guys, and breezed out the door.
I didn’t need Chloe to tell me that this stage of the operation was officially complete. The twins, who had spent a good twenty minutes impressing upon me the Ten Commandments of Cuticle Management the day before, had just managed to infiltrate a secured site and plant a high-tech device on an executive’s computer with no one the wiser. Maybe there was more to Zee’s statistical tests and profiles than even I’d thought possible.
“Who’s Cohoon?” I asked, not even bothering to sound unimpressed.
“One of their executives,” Chloe said. “He often conducts ‘special meetings’ with interns. It seemed like a plausible excuse.” She rolled her eyes at the way my jaw dropped open. “And, hello! Shouldn’t you be doing the hacker spaz thing right about now? Because there’s no telling what they’ll do when they discover the lock on the office was blown. Wasting time? Not a luxury we have right now, To-bee.”
I opened my Squad-issued laptop (which was, by the way, somewhat glittery—complete technology sacrilege), booted up, accessed the now-magnified wireless signal, and set about showing nose-in-the-air, pain-in-the-ass Chloe that when it came to hacking, I was anything but a spaz.
CHAPTER 24
Code Word: Evil
You know when you were five or six, and you went to a new playground for the first time, and it turned out that they had a twisty slide, a tire swing, and a merry-go-round? That’s sort of what I’m like the first time I access a new system. The adrenaline starts pumping, my heart jumps with joy at the technological twisty slides: firewalls, encryption, passwords, security blockers, antihacker detection programs…just thinking about it made me giddy, and there I was, fingers flying across the laptop keys, working my way around this barrier and that with the grace and artistic precision of an Olympic figure skater.
Of all the things I’ve ever done, hacking is seriously the only one that could even possibly make me think in skating metaphors.
“What’s that do?” Bubbles asked, leaning toward me and scrunching her nose up at the screen.
“That” was my refiguring the security settings on the wireless network. They’d set it up with double-sided protection—you weren’t supposed to be able to file share, and you definitely weren’t supposed to be able to poke around someone else’s hard drive, but after I’d convinced the system that I, and not someone whose username was GSeymor5, was the network administrator, those settings were easily changed. I turned on some quality one-way file sharing, meaning that all of the computers could share information with me, but I couldn’t share with any of the others, and none of them could share with each other.
I could tell you how I did this, but then I’d have to kill you.
Honestly, though, I lie—I probably couldn’t tell you how I did this. I just did. I was in the zone. I was unstoppable. I ran a scan on each of the four hard drives belonging to Infotech executives, searching for encrypted files and the type of program they would have needed to hack a secure government database. Not that I was intimately familiar with that kind of program or anything. I certainly hadn’t written several of my own.
I concentrated on what I had to do. I’d had it banged into my head over and over again—first by the Big Guys, then by Brooke, and at least five times by Chloe on the way here: find the program Infotech had used to implement the hacks, confirming the Big Guys’ hypothesis that they were the guilty party; get copies of any and all files they’d managed to steal; and then do everything I could to completely and utterly cripple their system. It was a three-pronged attack, and in my own special Toby way, I was multitasking and laying the groundwork for all three prongs at once. I could have done it faster with my own computer, but despite the fact that it had a glittery finish, the Squad-issued laptop came equipped with a variety of hacking programs almost as good as ones I’d written myself.
Apparently, the previous hacker, whoever she was, hadn’t been a complete imbecile.
The computer made a happy beeping sound as it located a program that fit the parameters I’d been searching for. It was impossible to tell anything about it at first glance, but based on file size and the basic configuration, all of my hacker instincts were telling me that this was the evidence I’d been looking for. I convinced the computer to scan for encrypted files tagged with the program-specific document tag, and a few minutes later, the results came absolutely pouring in.
“Bingo.” As the names of the encrypted files started popping up on my computer, I couldn’t help but gloat audibly.
Find the program used to initiate the hack? Check.
Locate any and all files related to the information acquired in the hacks? Check.
Download those files? It would take some time, but I was willing to give myself a preemptive check on that one, too.
“Bingo!” Lucy echoed my victory cry. Then she turned around and cocked her head to one side. “What bingo?”
“Encrypted files,” I said. “Tons of them, actually.”
I paused. I hadn’t counted on there being this many. As the file names piled up, I bit the inside of my lip. Depending on whether or not they used a different encryption on each file, this could take some serious time to go through. What if I was wrong? What if the program I’d identified had nothing to do with the hack? What if…
“Problem?” Chloe asked.
Normally, I might have taken offense at the tone, but I was still in hacker mode. My mind was racing to find solutions, not paying any mind to Chloe’s bitquo.
“There could be a problem,” I said. “But I’ve got it covered. I’m widening my download to include all of the encrypted files, on the assumption that if these guys have been stealing classified information, they’re not going to leave it in their system unprotected.”
Unfortunately, from what I was reading on the screen, it looked like nearly all of the system’s files were encrypted. Not surprising given that these guys secured websites for a living, but still a pain in my butt. “There are hundreds of files here,” I said.
Faster now, more and more names appeared on the list.
“Maybe thousands.”
“Can you tell if any of them are the files we’re looking for?”
“I could start decoding,” I said. “Maybe screen for files that include imported data or encrypted applications, but…”
“But with that many files, decryption
would still take forever and a day.”
Unfortunately, yes. My mind buzzed, working the problem over and over again. I typed in some parameters and narrowed down the possible files of interest, and looking at them made me salivate to start decoding, but…
ACCESS DENIED.
I stared at the words.
USERNAME/PASSWORD INVALID.
“Problem?” Chloe asked.
My mouth responded while the rest of me went into hyperdrive. “They’ve switched the security settings. They might use a roaming administrator or…” I hit five keys in quick succession. “Or,” I continued, “they might know I’m here.”
“Do you have the files?” Chloe asked.
“Some of them. The downloading process wasn’t complete.”
Besides, even assuming that the information we needed was in the files I’d managed to download, Infotech’s system was still up and running, and that meant that my job here wasn’t done. I’d been given three very specific instructions, and so far, all I’d done was locate the program and begin downloading the files.
I still had to crash their system.
ACCESS GRANTED.
“Was that a happy beep?” Bubbles asked cautiously.
“Back door,” I said. “A second way in. I created it when I was controlling the system. If they’re looking for me, they’ll find it sooner or later, but it should give me enough time to boggle their files, insert a couple of viruses, and convince their programs they want to stealthily self-destruct if anyone tries to access them.”
The twins said something in response to my words, but I barely heard them. I searched my laptop for programs that would wreak a suitable amount of havoc on the Infotech system. Given more time, I could have come up with something a little more elegant, but the program I’d located would eat their system from the inside out, and if they tried to transfer any data at all, they’d just end up transferring the virus, which would devour any hard drive it came in contact with.
DOWNLOAD COMPLETE.
If the Squad’s technology hadn’t been remarkably fast, I might not have finished in time.
If the programs I was working with hadn’t been written by someone almost as good as I was, I might not have finished in time.