Perfect Cover (12 page)

CHAPTER 21

Code Word: Warm-up

When we got to the gym, everyone else was stretching, and Brooke was staring at her watch.

“Sorry!” the twins chirped together.

Brooke turned to look at me.

I returned the favor. “I stayed up almost all night working on a code,” I said, “my feet may have to be amputated because of these boots, and quite frankly, I don’t give a flying buttkiss about whether you glare at me or not.”

There was absolute silence, and even though I didn’t show any visible signs of it, I tensed my body, preparing myself in case Brooke should launch some sort of physical attack.

Instead, she flipped her hair. “Whatever,” she said.

I glanced around the room, trying to figure out from the others’ responses whether or not I’d won this battle of wills. I was, in fact, so busy looking around that I didn’t notice when the floor began moving under us, and I wasn’t exactly ready to drop three stories onto the trampoline. I managed to land on my feet, but it wasn’t pretty. Or graceful. And it definitely didn’t involve any flipping whatsoever.

This time, I maneuvered my way off the trampoline ASAP, and soon, all ten of us were seated at the conference table at the center of the Quad. For a few seconds, there was silence, and then Lucy started babbling.

“Bubbles and I hung out at the coffee shop across the street from Infotech for like six hours, and logged every person who came into the buildings into our phones. Then I came back here and cross-referenced the pictures we’d taken and our timetables with the system’s files on Peyton’s operatives, and came up with nothing.”

Brooke nodded. “Anything else?”

“I got three phone numbers,” Bubbles volunteered.

“Four,” Lucy corrected.

“Oh yeah. Four.”

Brooke nodded again, as if this, too, was the kind of information she expected us to report. “April and I staked out Peyton, and luckily for us, we weren’t the only ones doing it. Heath Shannon—”

The twins sighed identical girly sighs at the thought of the international playboy.

“—cased out the place, but kept his distance. We took video feed and Zee analyzed. Zee?”

“He’s careful,” she said. “And on the surface, very calm, but he’s getting a buzz from this. I analyzed the video on a frame-by-frame basis, and even though he’s good at concealing his emotions, when you break facial expressions down to small enough units of time, something comes through. He’s anxious, which tells me that the Big Guys were at least partially right—whatever deal he’s brokering hasn’t gone down yet, but there’s a level of self-satisfied smugness there that makes me think he’s well on his way. If I was to
guess
”—she stressed the word—“I would guess that at his earlier meetings with Peyton, he acquired some information from them to pass on to his client or clients. He’s probably received a beginning payment, but not his full commission, which means that Peyton still has information that Heath Shannon and whatever terrorist organization he’s working for do not.”

“Add to that the fact that he was casing the firm, looking for potential escapes, drawing up mental plans…” Brooke left it to us to fill in the blank, and I obliged.

“The meeting the Voice talked about is going to happen soon,” I said. Everyone stared at me. “What? I can’t connect the dots?” I asked. I felt oddly compelled to start defending my dot-connecting ability, but refrained.

“There’s going to be a meeting soon,” Brooke confirmed. “Our best time estimates place it at four this afternoon.”

I opened my mouth to ask how exactly they’d made that estimate based on facial expressions and a very limited amount of video footage, but I didn’t get the chance, because Brooke turned the tables on me.

“What have you got?” she asked.

With all the talk of stakeouts and meetings and international playboys who doubled as terrorist liaisons, I’d forgotten that I had anything at all.

“Chloe said you found a code,” Tara prodded me, good partner that she was.

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Two six-digit numbers. One of the senior partners gave it to another lawyer in preparation for some meeting a couple of days ago.”

More silence.

“I pulled the numbers off of an audio track containing phone tones,” I said. “Since six digits won’t do you any good as a phone number, there has to be something more to it.” I dug around in my bag and pulled out the slip of paper on which I’d written the numbers. “Here they are. I tried looking for a number-to-letter code, but couldn’t come up with anything. I worked the numbers over, looking for patterns, and came up with nothing. I tried running them through a few search engines—nada.”

“Six digits,” Zee mused. “What has six digits?”

“Locker combinations.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until after I heard and processed my own words. “If you break the numbers up into a sequence of three two-digit numbers, it could be a locker combination.”

“And Peyton would be dealing with lockers why?” With a tone like that, I didn’t need to see her glossy lips moving to know that Chloe was the one speaking. “They’re passing on top-secret information. And if this is actually the information, and not some random payment scheme, then chances are it’s either the names of the operatives’ aliases, or their locations.”

“The only name I could get out of the numbers was Cho,” I said. “I’ve got some other combinations, but nothing that looked familiar.” I slid them across to her. “If you think you can do better, knock yourself out.”

Tara touched my arm softly, Zee cleared her throat, and I shut my mouth.

“Locations,” Lucy mused. “So we’re talking what? City names? Addresses? Map coordinates?”

An image of the map the Big Guys had shown us during our debriefing popped into my mind, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of the possibility that the numbers were coordinates before now.

“Map coordinates.” Our mighty captain latched onto the last possibility immediately—apparently, I wasn’t the only one who saw the logic. “Computer,” she said loudly, “locate 02-32-43.” She paused for a moment. “North, south, west, or east?” she wondered.

“We’re talking Europe, Asia, or Africa,” Tara said. “Possibly South America, but more likely not.”

“Show grid for 02-32-43 east,” Brooke said.

I paid no attention to her words, as I was caught halfway between berating myself for not thinking of the map coordinates thing (I mean location, duh) and giving in to the itchy feeling in my brain. As a map popped up on the plasma TV, with a vertical region highlighted, I gave in to the itch and let my mind go where it wanted to go.

023243. 024106. I didn’t like that both numbers started with a zero. Why “02” instead of just “2”? I mentally scratched the zeros off the end as Brooke ran a cross-reference analysis of the highlighted portion of the map with the information that may have been compromised on the (not so) secure CIA database.

(0)23243. (0)24106.

I shook my head, completely dissatisfied. It just felt wrong. Going on a whim (I like even numbers better than odd), I threw out the last digits as well, making the numbers(0)2324(3) and (0)2410(6).

“Two degrees, thirty-two minutes, and forty-three seconds east…no matches found.” The computer sounded distinctly peppy, but I barely noticed. Somewhere, in my subconscious, I registered the fact that the coordinates Brooke had tried hadn’t worked. There was no 02-32-43 east, at least not one that mattered.

East.
The word echoed in my head, complete with peppy computer voice.
East. East. E.

E = 3.

It came to me more like a splash of water in the face than a lightning bolt. On the telephone, the letter
E
was on the number 3, and the number 6 was the letters
M, N,
and
O.

0-23-24 E, 0-24-10 N.

I scribbled the numbers down and handed them to Brooke. “Try these,” I said. Miracle of miracles, she did, and even more remarkably, it actually worked.

“Al Jawf, Libya.”

My eyes went immediately to Tara’s, but she gave no sign of whether this was good news or bad news.

“How many operatives in Al Jawf?” I asked, hoping the answer would be “none” even though I knew in the pit of my stomach that we’d gotten the code right.

“I don’t know,” Brooke admitted, “but I’m getting ready to find out.” She picked up her cell phone and dialed. We couldn’t risk uploading anything to our superiors’ breached database, but a secure phone call was a different beast altogether.

On the other end of the phone line, someone answered, and Brooke didn’t spend any significant amount of time beating around the bush.

“Al Jawf, Libya,” she said clearly. Then she paused, and about fifteen seconds later, she hung up.

“There are three operatives in the area. They’re alerting two of them. The third is in too deep.” Brooke tilted her head slightly and her hair (pulled into a high, glossy ponytail) fell to one side. “The primary assessment is that younger operatives will stand a better chance of moving in undetected, especially since our covers aren’t at risk from the leak.” She paused. “We’ve been authorized to send in a team of post-eighteens.” From her demeanor, she might as well have been talking about a sale on capri pants (still no idea what those were) at the mall.

“I’ll go.” Tara spoke immediately.

“Guess that means I’m in, too,” I said. I wasn’t sure, but I was going to go out on a limb and guess that going to Libya would get me out of Mr. Corkin’s class and cheerleading practice. If I was lucky, it might even get me out of Saturday’s halftime performance. Besides, there was such a thing as loyalty. I wasn’t about to let Tara go it alone.

“No and hell no,” Brooke said, responding to us in order. “Tara, you’re too close to it, and Toby, (a) you’re not eighteen yet and therefore not eligible for any mission designated post-eighteen, and (b) you’re a mess. No offense.”

Why was it that girls like Brooke always said something offensive, and then followed it with the phrase
no offense
? And what was up with having to wait until I was eighteen to go on any of the really cool missions? I vaguely recalled Brooke saying that at age eighteen we had the option of being promoted to full CIA status, and yeah, I could see the legal benefits to only letting the older, more trained girls go international, but that didn’t mean that I had to be happy about it, and it didn’t mean that I planned to wait another two years before I got in on the action.

“Zee, you’re in,” Brooke said. “So am I. Lucy, we’ll need complete weapons hookup in less than an hour. The Big Guys will have their fastest jet here within the hour, but it’ll still be a ten-hour flight, minimum. Chloe—”

Chloe waited, her arms crossed over her chest.

“—I need you here. Getting this agent out is only half of our problem. If I know Peyton—and believe me, I do—this is only the beginning. I think there’s a very real chance that this was the freebie, a show of good faith that they gave Heath Shannon to prove that they’ve got legitimate information. Once Shannon’s clients manage to verify the information, they’ll want more, and one guess as to when that particular exchange will be going down.”

Bubbles waved her hand madly in the air.

“Yes, Bubbles?” Brooke said.

“Four o’clock today,” Bubbles said brightly, proud of her inference skills.

“Okay,” Chloe said. “I get it. We need to send a team in to intercept the data Shannon’s collecting from Peyton.” She paused. “And we need to hack Infotech ASAP, crash their system, and make sure they can’t get any more of our intel.”

It seemed simple enough. One trip to Infotech to shut down the leak, and one trip to Peyton to take down Heath Shannon and keep him from passing on any more information to his terrorist contacts. Personally, I was liking this plan a lot better than the one that involved me seducing Jack Peyton.

Unfortunately, fate (and Brooke) was against me. “Getting into Peyton and bugging their offices is still important, but right now, the most important thing is stopping this transfer and containing the leak. After that, you can do your…thing with Jack.”

I wanted to go on the record that Jack and I would not be doing any thinging, but didn’t have the chance.

“Does that mean we’re moving the party back?” April asked glumly.

The twins looked absolutely scandalized by the very idea.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brooke said. “Chloe will take a team to Infotech this morning. You guys should plan to be back by lunch so you can spread the word about the party, and then head over to Peyton during seventh period. The party won’t start until nine or ten tonight—that should give everyone plenty of time to get ready, even if Zee and I will have to play hooky because of the whole Libya thing.”

I glanced around the room and verified that, yes, I was the only one who seemed to be thinking that this time frame and Brooke’s priorities qualified her for the loony bin.

“You think you can get the agent out with only two people?” Tara asked.

Brooke gave her a look that made me think a “no offense” statement was forthcoming, but in the end, all she did was smile and nod.

“Zee, you’ll handle our covers?” Brooke’s voice rose at the end of the sentence, but everyone (including Zee) knew that it was an order, not a request. Brooke Camden didn’t make requests.

Zee ran her tongue over her lip as she thought. “Let me download some information on Al Jawf,” she said, “but we’ll probably go with either visiting schoolgirls or actresses there for an on-location shoot, unless antifemale sentiment is too high, in which case we’ll go with a blender.”

“Blender?” I mouthed at Tara.

“Blending in,” she said.

I looked at Brooke and then at Zee. Boobaliciousness and blending didn’t exactly go together.

Brooke turned to the twins. “Prepare wardrobes for all three scenarios,” she told them. “And get ready to hyperdye us.”

Our great and mighty captain stopped talking then, and without being told, the rest of the Squad began to disperse. Lucy skipped off to prepare “goody bags” filled with firepower, bulletproof bras, and stun guns; the twins sauntered toward the salon; Zee whipped a laptop out of her designer bag; and Brooke disappeared through an unmarked door without another word.