Killer Spirit (20 page)

We ran through the cheer again and again and again, sticking the stunts at the end each time, but there was always something about our performance that wasn’t quite good enough for Brooke. There was nothing uglier than a cheerleader on the warpath.

An hour later, I was drenched in sweat, my voice was hoarse, and my armpits were killing me. At the end of my rope, I stepped forward, just as Brooke yelled, “Again!”

I met her gaze. I flipped my hair over each shoulder and then tucked it behind my ears, and I stared. This time, there wasn’t any pity in my eyes. It was all determination. Our routine was flawless. We’d been working on it for weeks, and until the past couple of days, the spy end of our operation had been limited to training, which we did primarily in the afternoons. We’d practiced enough.

It was time to get down to business.

Brooke narrowed her eyes, and I could practically feel her need to impress her authority upon me, but a second later, Chloe, of all people, came to stand beside me. I could see the question in her eye.

You found something, didn’t you? She asked silently.

I nodded, and then Chloe did something that surprised me. She took her hair out of its ponytail, and then flipped it—first over her right shoulder and then over her left, before nodding at Brooke and tucking her hair behind her ears. As a general rule, it was code for using the back stairs to get down to the Quad.

In this case, it was Chloe telling Brooke that she thought we should go.

I expected the gesture to cause a major catfight. Brooke and Chloe were both really territorial, but whatever they’d talked about on the phone the night before must have temporarily softened the competition between them, because Brooke just sighed and inclined her head slightly.

“Water break,” she said. “Back in ten minutes.”

I read between the lines. We were going to the Quad, and I had exactly ten minutes to make my case.

CHAPTER 29

Code Word: Itchy

“So you think that based on the recommendation of a hostile TCI, who is, by the way, the lead suspect in yesterday’s theft, that we should…what?” Brooke just stared at me. “Go to the park? Take down Connors-Wright? It’s not like we have jurisdiction here. Not anymore.”

“And besides,” Tara said beside me, ever the voice of reason, “I’m sure our superiors are still keeping track of the remaining TCIs.”

“Like they kept track of Amelia so well that she ended up in my bedroom?”

“You should have incapacitated her.” Brooke’s tone was stony.

I gave her my best innocent look. “This operation was a Do Not Engage.”

“There is no operation!” Brooke was coming close to yelling, and even though the cheer-tone was still present in her voice, the veins in her forehead were starting to pop out, just a little.

“There should be an operation.” I was implacable, or at least as implacable as I could be after the stunting torture I’d just been through. “There
has
to be one. You’re acting like Amelia just passed me this information, no strings attached. That’s not what happened. You keep talking about her ‘recommendation,’ but that’s not what we’re dealing with here. This is blackmail.”

“We have no way of knowing if this is a trap.” Chloe kept her voice calm, but I could sense the antagonism coming off of her in waves. “For all we know, Peyton put her up to this to confirm some suspicion they had about
you.
”

I couldn’t miss the emphasis on the last word. Amelia had come to me. She had made me. She’d referred to the others, had alluded to our cheerleading outfits, but she hadn’t explicitly identified them.

“This isn’t a trap,” I said. “And I don’t think Amelia Juarez has ever really worked for anyone other than herself. She knows who we are. She could have gone straight to Peyton with it. She didn’t.” I looked at each person at the table. “And if we play her little game, she won’t.”

This was it. Either they believed me, or we were screwed.

“If she’s telling the truth about Connors-Wright having the nanobots—and I think she is—then we can’t afford not to go. Amelia’s playing a dangerous game, and I honestly have no idea what she’ll do with this technology, or who she’ll sell it to, if we don’t beat her to it.”

Absolute silence greeted my words. If Amelia acquired the nanobots and sold them, then virtually unstoppable assassination technology would be in the hands of terrorists. First they’d study it and attempt to replicate it, but eventually, they’d use it, and somebody important to our national security would die.

I looked around the table, willing the others to snap out of their horrified states and agree. When they all remained silent, I tried to prod them into talking. “Besides, what do we have to lose?”

Brooke snorted. “Says the girl who hacked into their system last night,” she said. The message was clear:
I
didn’t have much to lose. “Do you have any idea how pissed they’re going to be about that?”

She was totally missing the point. Either we trusted that Amelia would play by the rules of her own sick little game, or we didn’t, and if we didn’t, we were beyond screwed anyway. “The Big Guys are going to be mad I hacked them? Allow me to pretend that I care.” I paused.

“Not very convincing,” Tara said mildly.

I shrugged. “That hurts, Tara. Right here.” I tapped my heart, and Tara stifled a giggle.

“Tell you what, Toby.” Brooke oozed condescension.

“We’ll look into Connors-Wright’s father. I’d be surprised if he’s even stationed in Bayport right now.”

“And if he is?” I pressed.

“If he is, then we’ll see.”

At least she was saying “we” instead of “you.” That seemed to indicate that she hadn’t mentally kicked me off the Squad. Yet.

At the head of the table, Brooke typed in a few short commands and brought up the records for operative individuals currently residing in or visiting Bayport, and as the names flashed across the screen, it occurred to me that the elder Connors-Wright wasn’t the only person we should be looking for.

“Whoever stole our target out from underneath us yesterday was good,” I said. “Operative-level good, and if it’s the same person, they managed to blow up Kann’s car without leaving much of a trail. If it wasn’t one of the TCIs, what are the chances that it was another operative?”

“A rogue operative?” Brooke was nothing if not skeptical. “You really think there’s a rogue operative in Bayport? And that this rogue operative somehow knew about the weapon, piggybacked on our mission to steal it, and then, out of the goodness of his or her heart, gave it to Anthony Connors-Wright so he could waste it on his father?”

“You got a better explanation?”

Brooke stared me down. “Yes. Amelia played you like a fiddle, and for reasons we can’t wrap our minds around, she wants us at that park this afternoon.”

Her words and tone poked holes in my confidence, but as I replayed the scene with Amelia the day before, I couldn’t deny the fact that I still believed Amelia, one hundred percent. She was crazy and she seriously needed to find a hobby that didn’t involve becoming a criminal mastermind, but she hadn’t lied to me. She hadn’t needed to. Rather than making this argument again, I tried the tactic Amelia had taken with me the night before and went with incontrovertible logic. “What about the fact that Amelia couldn’t have remotely detonated the bomb, that none of the TCIs could have?”

“We can check that out, too,” Tara volunteered. “We’ll have to go back over our video and audio surveillance. There’s a chance we might not have noticed a remote-detonating mechanism.”

“We should also recheck phone records,” Chloe volunteered. “Any of the TCIs could have hired someone to detonate the bomb.”

Darn them and their logic. Why hadn’t I thought of it the night before? Why hadn’t I poked holes in Amelia’s claims the way the rest of the Squad was poking holes in mine? The only answer I could come up with was that every instinct I had told me that Amelia had been exactly what she’d seemed. Psychotic, but truthful. “Run the data all you want,” I said, “but if it checks out, then we do something about it.”

As I waited for a response, I brought my hand up to my left shoulder and scratched absentmindedly.

This really wasn’t my morning: itchy shoulder, no coffee, antagonism aplenty, and nobody believed a word I was saying. I scratched harder.

“Ummmm…are you okay, Toby?” Lucy asked, her voice tentative. “You look…uncomfortable,” she finished diplomatically.

“I’m fine,” I said. “My shoulder itches.”

Beside me, Tara leaned closer. “It’s awfully red,” she said.

“I’ve been scratching.” This had to be the most inane cheerleading operative conversation that had ever taken place. Before it could move forward at all, I suggested we turn our attention to the flat-screen, and all of us began scanning the list for Connors-Wright’s name.

Nothing.

I barely registered the I-told-you-so expression that flitted across Brooke’s face. “Ummmm…Toby?”

“Ummmm…Lucy?” I answered.

“Your shoulder is kind of, you know, pink now.”

Hadn’t we already established this?

“Like neon pink.”

I looked down. My shoulder was hot, hot pink. I might have handled that better on a day when I’d had some caffeine, but in retrospect, probably not.

“What the hell did you two put in that shower gel?” I sent the twins dart eyes.

“You actually used the shower gel?” Tiffany asked, impressed. “We thought you’d smuggled in some sucky soap or something, because your scent matrix has been kind of…”

Was she trying to say that I smelled? And, on a related note, did she want me to kill her? These were very important questions, but they weren’t nearly as important as the one I’d just asked.

“Shoulder,” I prompted. “Pink. Why?”

“It’s a security thing,” Brittany said. “The shower gel has these special chemical thingies in it, and they react and turn different colors for different things.” She turned to her twin. “What’s pink again?”

“Something electronic, I think,” Tiff said, wrinkling her nose. “Like maybe a bug?”

“No,” Brittany said. “Bug is blue, remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

“It has to be a chip of some kind then, right?”

They seemed to be approaching this whole conversation with the same solemnity with which they considered fall colors. No more, no less.

Brooke, however, snapped to attention. “Somebody get a scalpel. Now.”

If you’ve never heard a cheerleading captain speak these words, then you have never felt true terror. A scalpel? And just what was she planning on scalpeling? Because she had to know that I wasn’t letting her come anywhere near me with something of the sharp and pointy variety.

Lucy with the knives had been more than enough.

“Got one!” Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Miss Knives-Are-Interesting had a scalpel handy. I wasn’t going to ask about that. I really didn’t want to know.

“Who do you want cutting it out?”

“Cutting what out? There will be no cutting! None. Lucy, step away from the scalpel.”

Lucy rolled her eyes and handed the scalpel to Tara.

“You have a chip in your shoulder,” Tara said softly, like she was talking a stray puppy out from underneath a car. “Most likely a tracking chip of some kind, just below the skin. The shower gel reacts to certain alloy metals and electrical currents. That’s why you’re itching, and that’s why your shoulder’s pink. You’ve been tagged.”

Okay, now this day officially sucked.

“We have to take it out, Toby. For all we know, someone may be tracking you to the Quad as we speak.”

I didn’t respond. I was too busy thinking. There was a chip in my shoulder. A chip in my freaking shoulder. A freaking chip in my freaking shoulder. Someone was tracking my movements.

“
Amelia
may be tracking you to the Quad as we speak.” Brooke amended her original statement.

“She never touched me. She never even came close to me. She was across the room the entire time. She couldn’t have done this.”

In the privacy of my own mind, I came up with an alternative theory. Not one, but two of the missions I’d gone on in the past two days had gone badly, both times because of the presence of a third party. Someone had blown up Kann’s car, and someone had stolen the nanobots. I’d wondered how the intruder could possibly be an unknown player, how they could have known to come to Ross’s lab, and now I knew.

Whoever the figure in black was, I’d led them straight to the TCIs. Straight to the weapon. Some independent operative had tagged me to piggyback on our operation, and now that person had some seriously scary technology. And, to add salt to the wound, if I’d used the twins’ stupid shower gel before now, we might have discovered this fact before we’d lost the nanobots and before the aforementioned figure had sold them to Anthony Connors-Wright.

“Got it.” Tara’s words snapped me back to reality, and I realized that she’d already made a small incision in my skin, so small that it barely bled and didn’t hurt until I realized that it should have.

“Chloe.” Brooke didn’t say more than Chloe’s name, but our gadget girl snapped into motion, and carefully bagged the chip, leading me to question whether or not she typically carried evidence bags around in her sports bra.

“I’m on it,” Chloe said. “I’ll have the sample analyzed by lunchtime at the latest.” She smiled half of an ironic grin. “Guess our stunting technique is going to have to wait.”

“Our stunting technique is already flawless,” Brooke said. “Right now, we have other priorities.”

Sure, I thought. I got blackmailed by a TCI, and Brooke was all about practicing our cradles, but the moment it turned out that I had a tracker chip in my shoulder, she admitted that we’d already outpracticed ourselves. It figured.

Everyone else was so concentrated on the chip that I was the only one who noticed when the data on the screen in front of us changed. A second, automatic search had just revealed that Anthony Connors-Wright’s father was in Bayport, protecting a senator who was scheduled to speak at four that afternoon.

Without a word, Chloe set about examining the chip from my shoulder, and the others went back over our files, looking for evidence that Amelia had led me astray.

Then one by one, they reported back, confirming everything Amelia had told me.

I took in the information and came to my own conclusion. “Game on.”