Killer Spirit (12 page)

CHAPTER 17

Code Word: Blend

By the time I got to the Quad, everyone else was already there.

“Hello, Toby.”

One look at the half smile on Tara’s face had me preparing myself for her trademarked understated form of teasing, but Tara didn’t get the chance to say whatever she’d planned to, because the others beat her to it.

“I hear that you love puppies.” Brittany stole Tara’s thunder.

“Yup, Toby just wuvs cute wittle bitty—”

“Shut up, Tiffany. Don’t you guys have something to glitter?” It occurred to me a second after I spoke that encouraging the twins to apply any sort of cosmetic product to anything was seldom a good idea—especially since there was at least a ninety percent chance they’d choose to apply it to me.

“What’s wrong with puppies?” Bubbles asked, mystified. Of all of the girls, Bubbles was the only one whose inner depths I’d never discovered. I was pretty sure that she didn’t actually have depths. She’d joined the Squad because of a freakish ability to contort herself into odd, but useful positions. It was an incredibly handy skill, and Bubbles was probably the single stealthiest person I’d ever met in my life, but she wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist.

“There’s nothing wrong with puppies,” I told Bubbles, shooting daggers at the twins with my eyes and daring them to say something else. “I’d just prefer it if the puppies of the world weren’t endorsing my candidacy for homecoming queen.”

Bubbles frowned. “The puppies are voting for
you
?”

She sounded equal parts confused and offended. Oh, Bubbles.

“Noah just sent this email thing around,” Lucy explained. “It had the cutest picture of a puppy in it. I think it’s sweet that he’s trying to help you, Toby.”

“He’s trying to drive me nuts,” I corrected her. “And it’s not sweet. It’s pathological. And in the future, please do not use the words
Noah
and
sweet
in the same sentence.”

Lucy chose to pretend I hadn’t spoken at all, forcing me to wonder what was going on in that cheerful little mind of hers. Was she actually into Noah?

Like I was actually into Jack….

“Are we going to get ready for our missions or what?” I cut off my own train of thought with a question. If I could just flip into spy mode, then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything that existed within the walls of this high school. I could concentrate on terrorists, biological weapons, and reconnaissance, which was a definite step up from boys, brothers, and homecoming.

“I agree with Toby.” At Brooke’s words, the world stopped spinning on its axis. “We may just be tailing the TCIs, but this mission is important. If we want Washington to deal us in on the action when things go down, we need to nail this.” She paused. “That means following orders. Don’t let the TCIs out of your sight, but don’t engage them. Get as much video and audio feed on them as you can, but don’t let them see you. The night shift will take over at 2100 hours, but until then, the TCIs are ours.”

The “don’t screw it up” on the end of Brooke’s sentence went just barely unstated.

“We’ll be working in three groups. Group one will be following Anthony Connors-Wright. Chloe and April, you’ll be working with Bubbles and Lucy on this one. Strategy is up to you, but we want as many angles of surveillance as possible. Same goes for team number two. Britt, Tiff, Tara, and Zee, you’ll be tailing Amelia Juarez.”

“What about me?” I narrowed my eyes at the captain. Tara was my partner. We worked as a team. So why had Brooke assigned Tara and Zee to work together? Shouldn’t Zee have been working with her partner?

“You’ll be with me.” Brooke’s words reminded me just who Zee’s partner normally was. “I want Zee in the field. The closer we can get her to the TCIs, the better she’ll be able to read their body language. You and I will be stationed near Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, so that we can keep an eye out for anything there. As bad as having a biological weapon in Bayport is, it would be much worse if the firm got a hold of it. If we see something suspicious, the Big Guys will be sending a team in, but if they can’t get there fast enough, it may be up to us to make sure nothing goes down.”

Brooke dangled the chance of action in front of me like a carrot.

“Besides, I don’t trust you to stick to orders. If I sent you to tail one of the TCIs, you’d probably manage to get yourself killed.”

“I would not!”

“Get yourself killed or go against orders and engage your mark?”

She had me there. “The first one.”

“Says the girl who almost got blown up yesterday.” Brooke waved away any further objections on my part with a flick of her wrist. “Brittany, Tiffany, go prep the salon. Given the nature of our mission, all teams will be going with a B3 cover.”

Brittany nodded, and Tiffany—for reasons that eluded me—sighed. “We’ll be ready in five.” With that, the twins headed off to their torture chamber (or, as they preferred to think of it, their “beauty lab”).

“Chloe—”

“Cameras, video cameras, binoculars, communicators, and standard bug sets are ready to go.” Chloe didn’t give Brooke a chance to finish her order. “They’re already camouflaged to go with a B3.”

Brooke smiled in a way specifically designed to convey the fact that she was annoyed, but wasn’t going to say anything about it. “Great. Luce?”

“Yeah huh?” Lucy didn’t have quite the siblingesque rivalry with Brooke that Chloe did, and she docilely awaited her orders accordingly.

“I want Tasers and knockout patches, plus bulletproof push-up bras all around. We’re not engaging the enemy, but we’re not going to take any chances, either.”

“Awesome,” Lucy said. “I redid some of the knockout patches to look like stickers.” She turned her toothy grin on me. “You can have the puppy, Toby.”

Sometimes, it was really hard to tell when Lucy was being serious and when she was teasing, because she used the same earnest tone and expression for both.

Paying no heed to the puppy comment, Brooke continued dishing out orders. “Lucy, Chloe, get things set up in the guidepost, and then report to the salon. Everybody else, let’s get a move on. The TCIs aren’t going to tail themselves.”

There’s not much you can do to mentally prepare yourself for a makeover, especially a makeover of the scale and caliber the twins routinely pulled off. They’d pretty much single-handedly turned me from the slacker no one noticed to the reluctant teen goddess I was today. Since my initial transformation, I’d avoided their lab at all costs, but today, there was no way to avoid a B3. Whatever a B3 was.

“Care to explain?” I asked Tara. “About the B3 thing?”

“You’ll see.” Tara was less than forthcoming.

I knew that the twins’ job description included designing costuming for each mission that would play up whatever attributes would offer us the most advantages, but this was the first time I’d gone on a mission as anything other than my cheerleader self. The Squad worked because we hid in plain sight. Nine times out of ten, the stereotype was the only cover we needed.

Apparently, today’s mission was the tenth. I knew that it was ridiculous that car bombs didn’t scare me, and teenage fashion dictators did, but no amount of mental pep talking could convince me that giving the twins carte blanche to alter our appearances was anything less than bone-chilling.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for another makeover,” I muttered as we entered the twins’ lab. “I almost didn’t survive the first one.”

“Makeover?” Brittany said, wrinkling her nose. “Who said anything about a makeover?”

“Brooke did,” I replied. “You know, a B3.”

Tiffany joined her twin in giving me a blank look.

“You guys live for makeovers.” I stated the obvious. “It’s practically your middle name!”

“Silly Toby.” This was from Bubbles. As in, the girl who thought that puppies got to vote for homecoming queen. “A B3 isn’t a makeover. It’s a make
under.
”

“A makeunder?” April repeated the term. It was times like these that I was grateful that I wasn’t the only new member of the Squad.

“We need to blend.” Brooke elucidated the situation. “If we go out in groups of four looking like this, we’re going to attract a lot of attention, and since the TCIs aren’t supposed to even know we’re there, that’s not exactly a good thing the way it would be if we were planning to interact with them, but didn’t want to be seen as a threat.”

“A B3 makeunder is constructed with that goal in mind,” Tiffany said, her tone absolutely, deathly serious. “Although we can’t disguise our more striking features, we will be downplaying them. Some people call it ‘the natural look.’ We’ve spent a lot of time designing outfits and makeup/hair schema that will serve a dual purpose. To the casual observer, we’ll look average.”

Brittany took over where Tiffany left off. “But if we happen to run into anyone from school, we need to look nice enough that they won’t get suspicious. These outfits aren’t about being unfashionable; they’re about being subtle. The perfect B3 will allow its wearer to blend in, but on closer focus, she’ll stand out because of the ensemble’s simplicity.”

“A B3 says, ‘I’m pretty without trying to be,’” Tiffany continued. “It says, ‘I’m not wearing makeup,’ even though you will be. It says, ‘Don’t look at me, don’t remember me, but if you know me, be impressed with my effortlessness.’”

I think the twins might have gone on indefinitely if Brooke hadn’t sped them along. Instead, they multitasked, punctuating my makeunder with theoretical explanations I paid no attention to whatsoever. By the time they finished with me and moved on to the next person, I wasn’t sure what to expect. What was the logical result of spending a great deal of time and effort attempting to look natural?

A quick examination in the mirror revealed my answer. I didn’t look like the old me, but I wasn’t exactly Cheer Toby, either. I was a Neutrogena commercial, clean and cute. I didn’t look average, but I did look generic. Because of my height and the way the twins had styled my hair, I also looked about thirteen.

Makeunder complete.

CHAPTER 18

Code Word: Girl Talk

Brooke and I got ice cream at a shop down the street from the firm and then set up camp on a bench outside the shopping center. Along the way, we also stopped at a few stores, just for good measure, and our packages were spread out on the ground near our feet.

“So what now?” I asked Brooke.

She pulled her feet up and folded them gracefully under her body. “Now we talk.” She took in my skeptical look. “Trust me. It’s something girls do.”

So that was our cover. We weren’t cheerleaders. We were just
girls.
I maneuvered to get myself comfortable, until I was sitting cross-legged on the bench, my ice cream balanced precariously on one knee. “And what do girls talk about?” I asked.

“Boys. Other girls. World domination.”

I was about eighty percent sure she was kidding on that last one, but this was Brooke, who dominated our high school world with seemingly little effort, so I wasn’t willing to completely discount the possibility that she might be serious.

“Which other girls?” That one seemed the safest.

“Whichever ones are pissing us off.” Brooke didn’t sugarcoat it.

“And if no one is?”

Brooke rolled her eyes. “Then you’re lying.”

“Are you trying to say I’m an angry person?”

“Well, yes. But it wouldn’t matter if you weren’t. This is high school. Everybody’s mad at somebody.”

“So who are you mad at?” I asked.

Brooke shrugged. “Chloe for being a brat. Zee for analyzing what’s none of her business. You for almost getting blown up.”

“So, as girls, we’re supposed to sit here talking about how you don’t like me?”

Brooke rolled her eyes. “Technically, we’re supposed to talk about the people who aren’t here.”

Brooke’s phone beeped, and she flipped it open to read a text message. Then she dug into her purse and pulled out an iPod. I stared at it warily, unsure whether this was the communicator iPod that Chloe had given us, or the one that doubled as a high-voltage Taser.

Brooke put one of the earpieces in her ear, and I came to the conclusion that as painful as sitting here with me obviously was for her, she probably wasn’t frustrated enough to resort to Tasering herself. Yet.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“Just a song I like,” she said lightly, and I got the message. She was coordinating the tails on the TCIs, but she wasn’t going to give any verbal indication of what she was doing—not even to me. Considering we were only twenty yards away from the institution our Squad was designed to combat, I couldn’t chalk that one up to anything but common sense, as much as I would have liked to blame it on Brooke’s more PMSy tendencies.

Her fingers flew across the keypad of her cell phone at high speed, and I wondered what kind of orders she was dishing out. Given an infinite amount of time and all of the technology in Chloe’s lab, I might have been able to figure it out, the same way that a hundred monkeys could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, but I didn’t have that kind of time, or the technology, or the monkeys, so I settled for taking another bite of ice cream and watching the parking garage across the street. Trying to appear as though I were gazing vacuously off into space, I zeroed in on a car that was preparing to turn into the Peyton parking garage.

I brought my free hand up to the simple chain at my neck and fiddled with the charm. An almost inaudible click told me that my necklace, which was actually a high-definition digital camera, had taken a picture that might have been of my collarbone, but that I hoped was of the car across the street. I glanced over at Brooke and saw that her dark hair was tucked behind her left ear, clearing the way for a clean shot by the video camera installed in her earrings.

Between the two of us, we were wearing more or less an entire Radio Shack, and thanks to Lucy, I had a puppy sticker in my pocket that, if applied to a person’s bare skin, would render them unconscious in less than a second.

“Come on, Toby. There must be someone you don’t like.” Brooke was back to making conversation. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world coming from her, like she didn’t normally roll her eyes at me eight million times a day. And that was when I realized something.

Brooke and I weren’t hanging out. Brooke’s cover was hanging out with my cover. We were supposed to be friends, just two girls chilling on a bench, eating ice cream and talking about boys and shopping and the girls on our metaphorical hit lists. So that’s what Brooke was doing, and she was doing it well.

Two could play that game.

“Hayley Hoffman,” I said. “Her JV mafia. Chip. Mr. Corkin.” I decided to stop listing people, lest I appear to be the angry girl she already viewed me as.

“Hayley’s not that bad,” Brooke said.

“If by ‘not that bad,’ you mean ‘unholy spawn of evil,’ then, yeah.”

“I mean, yes, she’s kind of a bitch, but there are worse things to be. She wants things, and she goes after them. People follow her.”

“So tell me. Are we talking about you or Hayley?”

Brooke snorted. “You’ve been spending way too much time with Zee. And we’re talking about Hayley. If we were talking about me, we’d be using words like
fabulous.
”

Even as we talked, Brooke’s fingers raced across her keypad. She had an uncanny ability to text without looking, and to carry on a conversation with me, whilst listening to reports from the other four teams, issuing orders, and keeping an eye on Peyton, all at once.

Personally, I was struggling with eating ice cream and watching the building across the street.

“Get your phone.”

It took me a second to realize that Brooke was talking to me, even though there wasn’t anyone else around. I dug my phone out of my purse.

“You know that guy you like?” she prodded.

Jack? My mind went there before I could stop it.

“That guy,” Brooke said again, and I followed her gaze to a guy across the street. She glanced just briefly down at my necklace, and I got the picture. With another absentminded fiddle, I’d captured his image, and a few keystrokes to my cell phone allowed me to download the pictures without ever connecting the two. Chloe may have been a brat, but she was darn good at her job.

Once the picture had loaded on my phone, Brooke grabbed it out of my hand and passed me hers. While she keyed in the access code for comparing the picture to the Big Guys’ watch list database, I scrolled through the last few messages she’d sent to the teams.

Team A was at Walford Park with Anthony Connors-Wright. They’d followed orders and kept from engaging, and were currently monitoring him from four different viewpoints. Chloe wanted permission to go in closer, but Brooke had denied the request. No engagement meant no engagement, not even minor physical contact. Nobody on the Squad was so much as going to brush up against a TCI on Brooke’s watch, and her text messages made that abundantly clear in a manner suited to an alpha female.

Team B was following Amelia Juarez in two different cars, careful to keep the tails as subtle as they could. On Brooke’s orders, the girls fell back a mile and followed the tracker we’d planted on the car rather than the car itself. Brooke had notified the Big Guys’ of her decision, and they’d approved.

From the way Brooke was playing things, you would have thought No Engagement meant No Risks. For someone who
made
the rules at our high school, she was awfully hesitant about breaking them elsewhere.

“I don’t think you guys are a very good match,” Brooke said, handing my phone back. It took me a second to read the meaning in her words: the guy I’d photographed didn’t match anyone in the Big Guys’ database.

Soon thereafter, I confirmed something they don’t tell you in spy movies. Recon is boring. So boring, in fact, that I might have actually preferred to be doing toe touches. Brooke and I sat there for hours, repeating the same motions over and over again, thinking of new ways to make them look natural. We rotated locations, going from the bench, inside a lingerie store (near the window, of course), then down the street on the other side, and finally, we ended up back on the bench, eating Chinese food for dinner.

From what I’d been able to glean from Brooke, none of the other teams had noticed anything sketchy, either. Anthony Connors-Wright was still wandering around the park, which might have been a sign of mental instability, since the park wasn’t exactly a hot spot of activity, but probably wasn’t a sign of nefarious activity. He hadn’t actually talked to anyone, other than a hot-dog vendor whose background check had turned out clean when the girls ran his picture through the database.

Amelia Juarez had spent most of the night shopping, which meant that our second team had been able to camouflage themselves without much effort at all. Given the fact that the girls knew the closest mall inside and out (including all of the potential hand-off locations), they felt that they could say with high levels of certainty that Amelia wasn’t up to much other than biding her time.

My mind began to construct scenarios, as Brooke and I sat there, talking about nothing over chow mein, just to keep up the appearance of talking. We’d downgraded to talking about celebrities (most of whom I knew absolutely nothing about), their hairstyles, and their misguided relationships.

Of the scenarios I’d managed to construct, Scenario one went a little something like this: Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray wasn’t at all involved in this biological-weapons scare. Since Jacob Kann was dead and Hector Hassan was in custody, that just left Amelia and Anthony, both of whom were waiting on a call from the biological-arms dealer before moving forward with their plans, whatever those might be.

Scenario one was my favorite, mostly because it meant that my relationship, or non-relationship, or whatever-it-was with Jack wouldn’t come into spy play. If Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray wasn’t involved, I was in the clear. Scenario one also had the advantage that it would be pretty simple for us to save the day. We’d keep track of the TCIs until the Big Guys identified the seller, and then we’d take him—and the weapon—out of the picture.

Scenario two was the pessimistic one. In that one, Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray was either responsible for brokering the deal that had brought the TCIs to Bayport in the first place, or they’d noticed the influx the same as we had. Either way, they were now in the center of everything, and at any given moment, one of the most insidious, impenetrable rogue operations in the country would have access to a weapon we still knew nothing about.

Scenario two had the plus side that it might mean that Brooke and I would eventually see some action, but the Jack factor was enough to make me resign myself to discussing celebrities’ bangs and hoping that the rest of the night would be equally tame. By the time we finished dinner, I didn’t even have to think about working my camera anymore, or checking pictures or license plate numbers against our database, and I’d developed an eerie sense for reading Brooke’s reactions to the news she was getting through her communicator.

I was also bored enough that I considered using the puppy in my pocket to knock myself out.

And then, just as I was cursing my own boredom, Brooke abruptly switched topics. “So,” she said. “You and Jack.”

There was something underneath her tone that I couldn’t quite read. Jealousy? Intensity? Heartbreak? Or maybe it was just that her tone was so painfully neutral that I couldn’t help but read into it all of the above.

“There is no me and Jack,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be able to lie better than that,” she informed me blithely.

“It’s…” I was going to say that my involvement with Jack was just part of the job, but I didn’t. “It’s complicated.”

That was, quite possibly, the biggest understatement that had ever been uttered.

“Things with Jack Peyton are always complicated.”

This was my opportunity to ask her about Alan Peyton and his involvement with our organization. Unfortunately, I couldn’t risk it. Not in public. Not so close to the firm. Instead, looking at the expression on her face, I found myself wondering for the first time if Brooke or Chloe had ever really liked Jack. Chloe’s jealousy wasn’t enough to convince me that she had, and most days, Brooke didn’t even show any emotion—including jealousy—unless she wanted other people to see it. I’d always just sort of assumed that the other girls had used Jack to get to his father and the firm. Brooke was all Squad, all the time, half cheerleader/half agent, and nothing left for anything else, and Chloe was basically the wannabe Brooke. They’d dated Jack because he was popular, and because he was the easiest way to the firm.

But technically, those were the reasons I was dating Jack, too. Only I
wasn’t
dating Jack. I’d decided not to date him. Homecoming was simply an unavoidable fluke.

“You like him.” Brooke spoke the words carefully, enunciating each one.

“No, I don’t.” My first reaction was always to argue, especially when I didn’t want to consider the fact that Brooke was absolutely right.

“Yes,” Brooke gritted out. “You do. And you’re not supposed to, and it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.”

So much for the two of us pretending to be friends. We couldn’t even keep up appearances for a few hours before things went to heck in a pom bag.

Then, without warning, Brooke began cursing, quietly and possibly in more than one language.

I guess she felt more strongly about this Jack thing than I’d realized.

“You know that thing Tara and Zee were doing?” Brooke said.

I nodded.

“Well, they kinda lost it.”

Lost it? As in lost their mark? As in a TCI was out there, completely unsupervised, quite possibly acquiring a weapon we really didn’t want her to have?

“Yeah,” Brooke said, her voice conveying so much pissed-offedness that I got the feeling that the safest thing to do would be to back away slowly. “They lost it.”

I didn’t have to ask if the twins had lost Amelia as well. Despite Brooke’s calm outward appearance, she was freaking out, and that meant that things were bad.

Brooke’s fingers flew across the keys of her cell, and I wondered if she was giving instructions to the others, or if she was reporting the situation to the Big Guys. I wondered that right up until I saw a green sedan pulling into the parking garage across the street.