Killer Spirit (18 page)

CHAPTER 27

Code Word: Girly

Remotely accessing the Squad’s database didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. We still had data coming in on Anthony Connors-Wright’s location. He’d apparently been at the park again that afternoon, while the figure in black (*cough* Amelia *cough cough*) had been stealing our target. Since this officially eliminated him as a suspect, I wasn’t any more interested in what he’d done with the rest of his day than I was, for example, in Chip’s philosophical ponderings on the topic of love. Ross had been taken into custody for his mad scientist hijinks, and with no one around to sell him weapons, Anthony posed no threat as a buyer. Whoever had Ross’s nanobots now (and I could only hope that the answer to that question wasn’t Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray) would be looking to deal with much bigger fish than an intelligence brat with a chip on his shoulder. Anthony could go to the park to his heart’s content, and neither I nor the government particularly cared.

Beyond that, the only information I immediately gleaned from our database was the fact that the Big Guys had actually sent us an official electronic cease and desist order. If they thought that would in any way deter me, they clearly weren’t paying their profilers enough.

I scanned through the rest of our files, looking for anything that might tip me off to what Amelia Juarez planned to do next. I read Amelia’s profile again and again, looking for a clue about who exactly Amelia was and wishing that I had Zee’s uncanny ability to make outlandish, but accurate, predictions based only on personality indices, body language, facial expressions, and what she referred to as an individual’s background/environmental matrix.

As I read over Amelia’s files, I kept coming to the same conclusions over and over again. She was smart. She came from a dangerous family. She wanted to prove that she was more than just the baby and the only girl. And somehow, that had led her to Bayport, to working for Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, and—if she really was the one who’d crashed our last mission—to stealing a top-secret, high-tech biological weapon. I tried my best to convert the facts into numbers, to solve the equation that would tell me where to find her and how to stop her, but again and again, I came up with a whole lot of nothing.

Oh well, I thought with a wicked grin. On to Step Two.

Hacking the United States government was
so
much fun.

A mere forty-five minutes later, I was in. I’d like to claim that I’m a genius—and I am—but if I’m being perfectly honest, it didn’t hurt that I still had access to the Squad’s mainframe and that the mainframe and the Big Guys’ systems were configured to file-share, even if there were some major firewalls in place on their side of things. With a flick of my wrist, the sweat of my brow, and what I can only describe as the hacking hokeypokey, I managed to locate the exact system portal that I needed to hack. After that, it was just a matter of using a few of my pet programs—all of which I’d designed myself—to force my way into a system that should have been impenetrable.

It was almost as if the Big Guys
wanted
me to hack them.

Since I had the distinct feeling that my presence wouldn’t go undetected for long, I set several of my decrypt-and-search programs to looking at once, and before I got booted out of the system, I managed to access their file on the current case (shockingly easy—perhaps because they’d originally planned on sharing it with us to begin with?). I wasn’t entirely sure that the files weren’t encrypted with something that would crash my computer, but luckily, Bessie (my laptop) was a tough old girl.

She and I had a lot in common.

As I read through the files I’d managed to borrow (
steal
is such an ugly word), I came to a disturbing conclusion. High school cheerleaders are much better at writing intelligible reports than government operatives are. Reading the government files was like trying to read a book with the plot of Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome
(worst book ever, and one of the English department’s faves) that just happened to be written by a dyslexic Viking writing in iambic pentameter.

In other words, it was worse than trying to read Ross’s dissertation, and this time, I didn’t have Chloe to translate. Piece by piece, bit by bit, I managed to parse what I was reading into something more manageable, and slowly, what the Big Guys had been up to since we’d been pulled off the case became clear.

They’d apprehended Ross, as well as the three security goons, run interference with the local cops to prevent a formal investigation, and confirmed through interviews and a variety of anonymous sources that no one had made a connection between the chaos and any cookie-peddling cheerleaders in the near vicinity. Ross and his cohorts were being interrogated, and they were slated to later have their memories chemically altered. By the time the Big Guys were finished, nobody would remember that Brooke and I had been in Ross’s office, except for the mysterious figure in black who’d caught me red-handed.

The Big Guys hadn’t yet positively ID’d the intruder, but the dominant theory did seem to be that it was Amelia Juarez, working on behalf of Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. The firm was under constant surveillance, with upward of eight teams ready to swarm in the second Amelia appeared within a five-mile radius of the “hot zone.”

Additionally, the Big Guys were working on “minimizing the threat” posed by the “loss” of the biotechnology. Their motto was more or less “Contain! Contain! Contain!” They wanted this threat contained to Bayport, and they wanted it done yesterday. As such, they were keeping a close watch on all of the airports and bus stations, and they’d set up roadblocks on the way out of town.

“Okay,” I said out loud, “you’re making sure Amelia can’t get through to Peyton and that she doesn’t get out of town, but where is she
now
?”

The most disturbing thing about reading the Big Guys’ files wasn’t the complete lack of writing skills; it was the fact that they didn’t have an answer to my question. They knew Amelia wasn’t at Peyton, and they knew she hadn’t skipped town, but beyond that, they weren’t even looking.

In my twisted mind, all of this information led clearly to a single conclusion, a solution as clear as 4 to 2 + 2. The Big Guys could watch Peyton. They could contain! contain! contain! to their hearts’ content. That wasn’t enough for me. The costs of this mission had been huge. Too much had happened for me to just shrug it off. Somebody had killed Jacob Kann. Somebody had stolen a weapon I’d been sent to retrieve. Between the explosion, the car last night, and the security gorilla with a gun this afternoon, I’d had not one, not two, but three near-death experiences while on this case.

I didn’t want to contain the threat. I wanted to eliminate it, and that meant finding Amelia Juarez, even if I had to do it myself.

“Somehow, I pictured you being bigger.”

The voice shocked me out of my almost meditative state of thought. It was light and female and coming from directly behind me.

Please, I thought, let that be Bubbles.

I swiveled around in my chair, and a girl—no, a woman—with dark, glossy hair and even brown eyes stared back at me.

For a single instant, I stopped breathing, and my mind refused to process what I was seeing. Soon, though, it became perfectly clear. I didn’t need to find Amelia Juarez. She’d found me.

“What are you doing here?” I kept my voice low, lest Noah burst into my room and attempt to flirt with someone who would in all likelihood kill him for the effort.

“Same thing you are,” Amelia replied, leaning against my wall. She had this blatantly casual air about her, as if she routinely showed up in my bedroom and the conversation the two of us were having wasn’t strange in the least.

“I live here,” I told her, stalling for time as my mind tried desperately to come up with a plan. I scanned her body, trying to identify whether and what she was packing, and then examined the distance between us. If I could take her down before she could draw a knife or a gun or, God forbid, the nanobots, this case would finally be over.

“That’s not a good idea,” Amelia said, her voice still light and airy, her posture never changing.

“What isn’t?”

I mentally prepared myself to attack.

“Attacking me.” Without another word, Amelia shifted her position, and just as I was preparing to throw myself at her, she drew a gun. “I don’t want to use this.”

I snorted. “That makes two of us.” If I could just keep her talking, if I could get her off balance…

I mean, really, what’s a fourth near-death experience when you’ve already had three?

“I have an offer for you.”

Of all the things I expected Amelia to say, which ranged from “Meet your doom” to “It’s not my fault; I had a bad childhood,” that definitely wasn’t one of them.

“An offer?”

“Allow me to explain the concept. I give you something you want, and I get something I want in return.”

I knew what I wanted: the nanobots. I couldn’t begin to imagine what she thought I could give her.

“I know who has the weapon you’re after.” Amelia’s tone never changed. It would have been more appropriate to a discussion about the weather than one on technobiological warfare. “I know when they’re planning to use it, and who they’re planning to kill. If you and I can come to an agreement, then nobody has to die.”

I stared at her. “So either I help you or you kill someone?” That didn’t sound like much of a deal to me. “I don’t think so. And for the record, I know who has the weapon, too.” I took a step forward, playing the odds that she wouldn’t actually shoot me for a single misstep. “You do.”

“Are you all this dramatic?” Amelia asked. “Or this stupid?”

I was getting really tired of people calling me a drama queen.

“Allow me to break this down for you. I’m not going to kill anyone. I don’t have the weapon. I’m honestly not sure why you think I do.” There was no humor in Amelia’s voice, nothing that made her words come across as anything but cold, hard fact. “What I
do
have is information that you need, and all I want in return is a promise.”

Her words confused me so much that I honestly wasn’t sure whether she was speaking English or not. Did she really expect me to believe she didn’t have the nanobots? Of the other TCIs, one was in custody, one was dead, and the last one was wandering aimlessly around a park. If Amelia hadn’t stolen the weapon, that meant there was another player on the scene, and really, what were the chances of that?

“Give me one good reason I should believe anything that comes out of your mouth,” I told her, vaguely aware of the fact that it sounded like something out of a horribly cheesy movie.

“Believe me because it’s true,” Amelia said, “or believe me because if I had the weapon, your bedroom is the last place I’d be right now. Take your pick.”

When she put it in those terms, I realized she was right. If she’d been the one to steal the nanobots, she’d either be sneaking her way into Peyton or halfway to Tahiti by now. Neither of those scenarios involved a detour by my house.

“If you didn’t steal the weapon, who did?” I didn’t really expect her to answer, but I couldn’t help thinking out loud. I’d been so sure that Amelia was the person in black that I hadn’t spent any time thinking of alternative hypotheses. Amelia had the motive, she had the intel, and she had the ability to pull the whole thing off. Other than the girls on the Squad, I couldn’t think of anyone else for whom that was true.

To my surprise, Amelia had an answer to my question. “If I had to guess who stole the nanobots, I’d go with whoever blew up Jacob Kann’s car.”

Originally, the Big Guys had suspected Hassan of the bombing because he’d had the other TCIs under surveillance. Until about forty-five seconds ago, I’d thought Amelia had probably set the bomb herself. Now, I wasn’t sure what to think.

“You’re saying that you didn’t take Kann out?” I had to ask.

Amelia snorted. “He’s an idiot, and a womanizer, and he was under the impression that he was going to have sex with me, but I wouldn’t have killed him.” Amelia never took her eyes off me and the gun never wavered, but somehow, she managed to look exactly like the twins did when they started filing their nails out of boredom in the middle of one of our meetings. “As much fun as chatting is, can we get on with it? I don’t know who stole the weapon, but I do know they’ve disposed of it, and I know who has it now. If you’re very, very nice to me, I just might tell you who it is.”

“Why would you do that?” I couldn’t fathom her reasoning. This whole interaction was so insane that I half-expected my clothes to disappear, revealing that this was just the latest in a long line of twisted naked dreams.

“You act like this is the first time I’ve dealt your people in,” Amelia huffed. “Without me, your bosses wouldn’t have Hector Hassan in custody right now, Jacob Kann would have bought the weapon from Ross days ago, and Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray would have intercepted Kann, taken the weapon, and killed Ross just because they could. I’ve been playing the players and throwing kinks in the firm’s plans for days now, and this is the thanks I get? I’m not sure you deserve my offer.”

“Kinks?”

Amelia shrugged. “Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray brought me in to act as their little lapdog and fetch the nanobots as soon as Ross sold them. They didn’t exactly endear themselves to me, and I figured that if something this big was going down, your people would clue in eventually. I just stalled things for a couple of days. I convinced Peyton to let me bid against Kann for the nanobots instead of stealing them from him after the deal went through. When Ross realized he was dealing with more than one potential buyer, he decided to hold an auction, just like I knew he would.”

Amelia was still speaking a language I couldn’t quite understand. She’d stalled Peyton and convinced them to wait before moving in? She’d somehow prevented Ross from closing the deal with Kann earlier in the week?

“Why?” I glanced down to make sure my clothes were still in place, because this kept getting stranger and stranger.

Amelia shrugged. “Why not?”