Killer Spirit (16 page)

And then the mystery intruder grabbed the silver container—the one I’d so kindly left sitting clearly visible on the stovetop—and it was up to me to get it back.

“You wanna dance?” I asked, advancing, ready for a fight. “Then let’s dance.”

Gunfire sounded from the direction of the reception area where I’d left Brooke. I wavered for a split second and then did the only thing I could do.

I ripped the bobby sock off my left foot and launched it toward the person in front of me, hoping that it would be enough to slow him or her down (but not enough to release the nanobots themselves) and then I ran toward the sound of the gunshots. Toward Brooke.

As I ran down the hallway and into the reception area, an explosion sounded behind me, but I barely heard it, because the situation in front of me demanded every ounce of attention I could muster. Brooke had managed to take Ross out, and he was lying in an unconscious heap on the floor, but the guards were a different story. One of them had a gun pressed to her temple. As my breath caught in my throat, the hired goons took their eyes off Brooke just long enough to look at me, and Brooke jabbed a spirit stick into Mopsy’s leg. She must have somehow triggered the release of the darts, because the oversized guard crumpled to the floor, and then it was just me, Brooke, and one guy with a gun.

I leapt toward him, not heeding the obvious danger, and as he swung his gun to aim it at me, Brooke went for his legs. The gun went off, but missed us both, and within seconds, Brooke had managed to grab his head between her feet, and with some pretty fancy footwork, she executed a perfectly flawless standing back tuck and came damn near close to breaking his neck.

As his eyes rolled back in his head, Brooke knelt down next to him to check for a pulse.

“Alive,” she said. “Did you acquire the target?”

And then I remembered the person in the kitchen and took off running without offering Brooke any kind of verbal answer to her question.

The kitchen was in shambles when I got there, scorched and burning as a result of my bobby sock grenade, but the black-clad figure, the silver box and the dangers contained within were nowhere to be found.

I swore. And swore. And swore.

“The hostiles are secured,” Brooke told me, coming into the room on my heels. “The backup team will have registered the gunfire and should be here any moment.” She broke off, processing for the first time the obscenities currently pouring from my mouth. Then she noticed the decoy, which had fallen to the floor.

“There was someone else,” the explanation flew from my mouth like projectile word-vomit. “They made it through a half dozen throwing stars and a grenade, and they moved…” I thought back over the other person’s motions. “They moved like one of us.”

Brooke and I came immediately to the same conclusion. “Amelia.”

We’d underestimated her once, and she’d reconfigured our tracking chip. Then a figure in black showed up here and stole the biotechnology Peyton had hired her to acquire. The aforementioned figure wasn’t nearly big enough to be Anthony, the only other TCI at large, and I had serious doubts that Anthony could have pulled something like this off in the first place.

The math was simple. Amelia Juarez had DNA-wiping technology, and for all we knew, she was on her way to Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray as we spoke.

This time, Brooke was the one who swore—long, hard, and in ways that struck even me as disturbingly creative.

When the backup team arrived to clean up the mess and take Ross and his guards into custody, Brooke and I disappeared back into the building, which, because of the layout and thickness of the walls of these offices, remained blissfully unaware of the chaos in Ross’s lab.

As hard as it was for either of us to act even the least bit normal, Brooke and I did the only thing we could to maintain our cover and exculpate ourselves from any and all suspicion in the Ross affair.

“Hi! We’re members of the Bayport Varsity Spirit Squad, and we’re selling Cheer Scout cookies!”

“The Go, Fight, Cinnamon are to die for.”

CHAPTER 24

Code Word: Mommy Dearest

“That’s it,” Brooke said finally. It was the first thing one of us had said that wasn’t (
a
) something that would have had to be bleeped out on most major broadcasting networks, or (
b
) a pitch for our cookies.

Shortly after we’d returned to “selling” our cookies, the police had arrived and ushered out all of the occupants of the building. We told them we didn’t know anything, and either because they took one look at our faces and were apt to believe that we indeed knew nothing at all or because the Feds were secretly pulling their strings, we were quickly and quietly allowed to leave. Now the two of us were in Brooke’s car, presumably driving back to the school to lick our wounds and further obsess over our failure.

“That’s it.” I repeated Brooke’s words.

“We lost the one object we couldn’t afford to lose. We caused a huge disturbance. If you’d detonated your right sock instead of your left one, we might have taken down part of the building.”

So now she tells me that one grenade had more firepower than the other.

Brooke, oblivious to my train of thought, continued emotionlessly recapping our experience. “Shots were fired, and we both could have been killed.”

I considered her words. “Yup. That about sums it up.”

“You don’t get it,” Brooke said, heat entering her tone for the first time. “We were supposed to try to avoid actual danger. The weapons were for the worst-case scenario, and that scenario happened. They sent us in to get a weapon without being noticed, and we almost blew up the building
and lost the weapon to the one person we were trying to keep it away from.
”

“That’s bad.”

“There are no words for how bad this is.”

“Okay, so we do damage control,” I said. “We find Amelia and take her down before she can give the weapon to the firm.”

Brooke actually laughed then, and it was a brittle, brutal sound. “You think they’re going to let us do that?” she snorted.

I’m not sure what gave her the impression that I intended on asking.

“This isn’t just an over-eighteen case now, Toby. This isn’t just a Do Not Engage. I can guarantee you that this is no longer a Squad operation. Now it’s up to the professionals, and we’ll be lucky to see action again before I graduate.”

“We could—” I started to say, but Brooke cut me off.

“We can’t do anything. They won’t let us. God, talk about disasters. I’m never going to hear the end of this.” Sensing that I was going to interrupt her the way she’d interrupted me, Brooke plowed on, not giving me the chance. “They didn’t even want us on this case after the explosion. They had to be talked into it, but I told them I could handle it. I promised them I could handle it. I even told them
you
could handle it.”

“And you were going to share this with me when?”

“Puh-lease, Toby, no whining right now. I can’t deal with it. I really can’t. We have much bigger problems than this right now.”

Hey! I was not whining.

“What problems might these be?” I asked. “And where are you going?” I hadn’t noticed, because I’d been too busy trying to process Brooke’s rant, but she’d pulled off the highway, and now we were driving through a residential area.

“Home,” Brooke said tersely.

“Home as in your home?” I asked.

Brooke nodded.

“And why are we going there?”

Brooke took a deep breath. “Because that’s where the Big Guys live.”

“Excuse me?” I felt an undying need to start swearing again.

“If you want to get technical,” Brooke said, “that’s where one of the Big Guys lives. She’s one of the smaller Big Guys actually, not based in Washington, not on active duty, but she still calls her share of shots, and right now, all of those are aimed at me.”

Brooke pulled into a driveway and ran a hand angrily through her hair. “Not good,” she muttered. “So not good.”

A second later, someone tapped gently on the driver’s side window, and Brooke, pushing all signs of aggravation off her face, rolled it down.

A woman stood there. She was probably about my mom’s age, maybe a few years younger, but she’d aged well. She was trim and fit, her hair was dark and every bit as thick as Brooke’s, and her eyes were wide set, her lashes long, and her face almost wrinkle-free.

In fact, the only reason that I guessed she was near my mom’s age was the fact that I had a deep and abiding suspicion that this was, in fact, Brooke’s mother.

“Hello, Brookie,” the woman said, a tight nonsmile on her face. “I see you brought a friend.”

“Mom, Toby. Toby, Mom.” Brooke made the introductions, her smiling matching her mother’s exactly.

“Hello, Toby,” Mrs. Camden said. “Won’t you two join me inside?”

She sounded like your average PTA mom—chipper and faux sweet and like she’d have cookies waiting for us in a jar on the counter, but I knew better. Brooke’s mom was one of the Big Guys, and, quite frankly, she scared the hell out of me.

Where were Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail when you needed them?

Brooke rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she told me under her breath. “She’s not going to kill
you.
” The emphasis on the last word did not escape me, and as I slipped out of the car, I couldn’t help but think of everything Zee had told me about Brooke’s relationship with her mom. I’d known Mrs. Camden was a former Squad member herself, known that she’d groomed Brooke for this and that (according to Zee’s latest spiel), she put a lot of pressure on her, but I’d never realized that Brooke’s mother was actually in on our operation.

First Jack’s uncle and now this. Who was going to be next? The twins’ little sister?

With happy-homemaker efficiency, Mrs. Camden got us settled on the couch in her living room, and she actually did bring us cookies. Neither of us ate them.

“Tell me what happened,” she said simply.

I couldn’t read anything in her tone, but Brooke looked like she’d been slapped.

“We entered the premises on the mark’s invitation and immediately identified the locations of all three nonmark hostiles. We convinced all of them of our cover, and I played decoy while Toby exited the room under the guise of going to the bathroom. The first hostile followed her, but she managed to escape the bathroom through the air duct as planned. The mission progressed accordingly for approximately four and a half minutes…”

“That long?” Brooke’s mother mused. She arched an eyebrow at me. “He didn’t break down the door for four and a half minutes? Impressive.”

I made the executive decision not to illuminate Mrs. Camden on the method I’d used to procure as much time as possible. Somehow, I didn’t think this particular desperate housewife would appreciate it.

“I continued distracting the second hostile and the mark while Toby disabled the third hostile and began searching for the security panel. She located the panel, deactivated the security, and found the target, but unfortunately, the third hostile woke up just as the other two realized that she was not, in fact, in the bathroom. I disabled the mark first as instructed, and engaged in hand-to-hand with the other two until one of them managed to pull a gun. He fired a single shot. I succeeded in diving out of the way, but the second hostile caught me and held me at gunpoint. At that point in time, Toby came into the room, providing enough of a distraction that I was able to disarm the hostiles and render them unconscious. Toby returned to the kitchen while I secured the hostiles and the mark, but the target we were sent to retrieve was gone, presumably taken by an unidentified intruder whose arrival had coincided with the third hostile’s awakening and the others’ discovery that we were not who and what we claimed to be.”

If by
unidentified,
she meant “almost certainly Amelia Juarez.”

“An unidentified entity, an ‘intruder’ as you so blithely put it, has the weapon you were sent to retrieve?” Mrs. Camden asked, her voice still sickly sweet.

“Yes.” Brooke’s answer was short, and her voice was neutral, but I could feel the tension beneath the surface of her tone.

I expected Mrs. Camden to yell, or to lash out physically, or to do something drastic, but instead, she just sighed.

“Oh, Brookie. What are we going to do with you?”

“It wasn’t her fault,” I surprised myself by saying. “It’s mine. If I’d taken Amel—errr—the intruder out the first time I’d seen her, this wouldn’t have happened.”

That was true enough.

Mrs. Camden considered me, her face the epitome of polish and homemakerly grace. “You’re green,” she said. “And you’ll learn.”

I got the feeling that from her, this was high praise. Beside me, Brooke stiffened.

“Don’t wrinkle your forehead, dear,” Mrs. Camden chided. She must have had incredible eyesight, because as hard as I looked, I couldn’t make out a single wrinkle. “You’ll have worry lines before you’re thirty.” Then, without sparing Brooke so much as another look, she turned her attention back to me. “Why didn’t you disable the intruder?”

I hedged around the question. “When I first noticed her, I mean, when I first noticed another person in the room, I was engaged in combat with the…uhhhh…third hostile.”

“And then?” Mrs. Camden prodded. She was sharp. Nothing got past this woman, and there was no way around telling her the truth.

“I went to help Brooke.”

“And why did you need help?” Mrs. Camden asked her daughter, like someone talking to a very young child who’s been quite naughty.

“I didn’t disarm them fast enough.”

“Which,” Mrs. Camden said, “wouldn’t have been a problem if you’d been properly armed.”

Brooke looked away.

“Tell me, Brooke, if they’d had knives instead of guns, do you think you would have been able to disarm them quicker? Or what if you’d had a gun as well?”

I didn’t see where this line of questioning was going, but Brooke apparently did.

“I’m not sure.”

“Yes,” her mother said, “you are. One of these days, Brookie, you’re going to have to get over this thing you have with guns. You’ll have to use one eventually, and you can’t freeze up every time you see one, not even for a second.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Brooke said, her calm exterior cracking just a bit.

“Don’t get worked up, dear,” her mom said. “And don’t talk back. Right now, I don’t want you to even worry about the operations end of things. I’ll smooth things over, and you’ll have a new case before you know it. I’ll make everything all right. You just worry about homecoming.”

I read the look in Mrs. Camden’s eyes and the expression on Brooke’s face and translated them into words, even though neither Brooke nor her mother actually said a thing.

Mrs. Camden: Try not to screw that one up, too, Brooke.

Brooke: I won’t. I’m not a screwup. Screw you. Don’t be mad.

And before I knew it, Brooke was walking me to the door.

“Do drop by again, Toby,” Mrs. Camden called. “We expect great things from you.”

Sure, I’d drop by again. WHEN HELL FROZE OVER.

On the way out, we passed a bookshelf full of pictures. All of them were of Brooke, and in each and every one of them, she was cheering. In the earliest picture, she was probably about five or six. Trophies sat on the top shelf, and I squinted, making out the names of several individual cheerleading competitions.

1
ST PLACE.

1
ST PLACE.

1
ST PLACE.

Why did I get the feeling that first place was the only place that Brooke or her mother understood?

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Brooke said evenly. “We should practice before school. Big game on Friday.”

Her voice sounded the same as it always did, but I felt like there was something missing, something dead.

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my own voice sufficiently subdued.

I didn’t realize until I stepped out of her house and onto the front porch that I didn’t have a way home. I pulled out my Squad-issued phone and dialed the other girls one by one.

Tara didn’t answer.

Neither did Zee.

I got Bubbles on voice mail, which was somewhat amusing, because she’d had technical difficulties programming her phone, and the whole prerecorded message was just her going, “Is this thing on? Is it working? If I like say something, will…oooh, what’s that beep?”

I had no desire to call Chloe, and I wasn’t exactly looking my best postmission, so I decided to avoid calling the twins as well. I tried Lucy—who, after all, deserved some major kudos for the bobby-sock bomb, even if it hadn’t saved our mission. When Lucy didn’t answer, either, I dialed the last number on my list.

April.

She answered on the third ring.

“Toby?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling more than a little awkward. Of all the girls, April was the only one my age, and the one I’d interacted with the least. We didn’t really know each other, and once upon a time, she’d been Hayley Hoffman’s second-in-command, which meant that the few times I’d registered on her social radar pre-Squad, she hadn’t exactly been friendly. “Listen, I’m at Brooke’s house, and I kind of need a ride. Do you have your license yet?”

“No, but I have a car,” April replied. “Actually, I have two, so it’s no big if I wreck one. I’ll be there in a few minutes—it’s on Calloway Street, right?”

I wasn’t sure, but that sounded good to me. “I think so.”

“Okay. Just hang tight and give me five. Later!”

I hung up my phone, and as I stepped off Brooke’s front porch and walked down her driveway, I hoped that April would hurry.

The sooner I could get away from this place, the better.