Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Toby got nominated, too,” Chuck blurted out, and I realized that I’d been wasting my dart eyes on the wrong freshman.

  “Nominated for what?” my father asked, just now tuning in to the conversation.

  “Homecoming court,” my mom said, her voice devoid of any emotion resembling surprise, shock, or outrage.

  “What?” my dad repeated, wrinkling his forehead and blinking several times.

  “Homecoming court,” Noah repeated, flashing me a victorious grin. “I’m her campaign manager.”

  “No, you’re not,” I told him, my voice and my expression equally dark.

  Noah leaned in and spoke in a stage whisper. “We’re going to have to work on your people skills.”

  Noah wasn’t actually a ladies’ man, and he didn’t have my aptitudes for physical competition or mathematical thinking, but when it came to being able to press my buttons, he was nothing short of a prodigy.

  In fact, that was the one thing that Noah and the twins had in common.

  In order to survive the rest of the cozy family dinner, I checked out mentally and let my mind wander. I ran Jacob Kann’s file over and over again in my mind, and then walked back through our mission, step by step, looking for anything we might have missed the first time around, any clue that Kann’s hours were, from the moment we stepped into his hotel room, severely numbered.

  I started with what I knew about him personally. Jacob Kann was single, young, and wanted to prove himself to his mafiaesque family with some insanely big gesture, like bringing in a ton of money from some well-connected terrorist groups. He’d been in Bayport for two days. When we’d arrived at the hotel, he’d been hanging out in the bar, and while we were casing his hotel room, he’d come storming in, obviously in a bad mood.

  I let my mind dwell there for a moment, trying to create possible scenarios in my mind. Why had Kann left his car keys in his room? Had he just forgotten them, or had he not planned on needing them at all? Why had he suddenly been in such a hurry to leave the hotel bar?

  And, I thought, my mind pulling up a question that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, why was he in the hotel bar in the first place? His room, the very definition of lush, had come equipped with its own bar. So why was he drinking in the lobby? Was he meeting someone? Hoping to pick up some girls? Had he left because a woman had rejected him? Or because a meeting had gone sour?

  There were too many possibilities, too many questions that we might not ever get the answers to. One thing was for sure. Jacob Kann wasn’t going to be answering them any time soon.

  I switched the scene in my mind and concentrated on the few seconds that I’d been under Kann’s car. Had I seen anything out of the ordinary? Had the bomb been there, staring me in the face the whole time? How had it been triggered to explode when Kann opened the door? And why did someone want him dead in the first place?

  Then there was the bug in Kann’s phone. Was Hector Hassan—the only TCI who hadn’t been bugged himself—really the one responsible for bugging the others? And if he was, did that mean that he’d been the one to plant the bomb? Or had that been someone else altogether?

  Occam’s razor, I thought. With a physicist for a father, I’d heard enough bouts of random science babble to know exactly what Occam’s razor—a scientific and philosophical principle—said. Given two equally plausible explanations, the simplest one is most often correct. In this case, the simplest explanation was that the person who’d bugged Jacob Kann and the person who’d planted the bomb were one and the same. Someone was keeping tabs on three out of the four TCIs, and for whatever reason, that someone had wanted one of them dead.

  But why? And who? Why were the TCIs here? What were they after? And why kill Kann and not the others? For that matter, why bug only three out of the four?

  “I really think you’re on the right track here, Toby.” Noah’s voice cut into my thoughts. “Going to homecoming with Jack Peyton will do wonders for your image. It just screams homecoming quee—”

  Noah didn’t get to finish his sentence before I closed my fingers around his throat, cutting off the words.

  “Toby,” my mother said mildly, “don’t strangle your brother.”

  I let go of Noah’s throat, and he dared a taunting grin.

  If Noah knew that I was going to homecoming with Jack, there was a decent chance that the entire school knew. I hated it that my business was automatically everyone else’s, just because I sat at the “right” table at lunch. And how in the world had the news spread so fast?

  Thinking about Jack and homecoming made me consider that perhaps Occam’s razor wasn’t the principle of reasoning to use to figure out what had happened this afternoon. In a single day, I’d been nominated for homecoming queen and had a simple surveillance maneuver end with a sonic boom. Maybe this whole situation boiled down to a different kind of philosophy: Murphy’s Law.

  Anything that can go wrong will.

  CHAPTER 12

  Code Word: Hair Products

  An hour and a half later, I was sitting on my bathroom floor, trying to decipher the instructions Brittany and Tiffany had left me regarding my conditioning regime. Between their use of nonwords like fantabulous and bodylicious, their proclivities toward measuring time relative to teen television, and my subpar hair vocabulary, decoding the note they’d left me was easier said than done.

  I turned the bottle over in my hands, hoping for instructions. No such luck. The fact that the superconditioner was in an unmarked container didn’t surprise me. Half of the twins’ hair products were acquired on some kind of beauty black market that I tried not to ask too many questions about. Really, it was better that I didn’t know.

  “Okay,” I told myself by way of a pep talk. “You can do this.” I’d been drafted for the Squad because of my ability to deal with codes of both the electronic and written variety. Pseudo-incomprehensible conditioning instructions should have been a piece of cake.

  After about five more minutes, I gave up hope of deciphering the third line of the instructions and decided that my best bet was to wet my hair, slap the goop on it, leave it there for “three episodes of Laguna Beach on DVD,” and then rinse it out.

  I stood up, stuck my head in the sink and turned on the faucet. The water was warm on my head, and as I soaked my hair, I couldn’t help but think that it didn’t feel like my hair. It was soft and smelled like flowers instead of generic all-in-one shampoo/conditioner. In short, this really wasn’t my hair, despite the seemingly contradictory fact that it happened to be growing out of my head.

  Once my hair was soaked, I turned off the faucet, sat back down, and counted backward from three as I unscrewed the top to the bottle.

  “Three, two, one…here goes nothing.”

  The conditioner smelled strongly of mint, and just breathing it in had me blinking back tears. That was some potent stuff. I briefly considered the possibility that the twins were experimenting on me, and then decided against it. Of all of the cheerleaders, I was the one most likely to voluntarily shave my head, and the twins were responsible for making sure that I didn’t commit hair felonies. Anything they gave me was guaranteed to make me girlier and more starletesque, so the chances of the two of them experimenting on me were really slim to none.

  Desperate to protect myself from the scent of the treatment, I wrapped a towel around my head and went back into my room in search of a distraction. Out of habit, I ended up at my computer, but instead of launching an internet browser, I pulled up a Word document I’d been working on for the last few weeks and added a new line of text.

  The twins don’t know anything.

  “And,” I said under my breath, unable to ignore the tingling in my nostrils, “they might be trying to kill me.”

  As I skimmed the rest of the file, I wondered why I was even reading it again. I knew what it said. I’d written every word myself, and I thought about it almost every day. This document—not even a half-page long—contained everything I’d managed
to find out about Jack’s uncle. His name was Alan Peyton. He’d grown up in Bayport and was a year older than Jack’s dad. He wasn’t listed in any of the Peyton firm’s official annual reports. Chloe acted sketchy when I hinted that I’d figured something out. None of the other girls had reacted at all.

  And that was it. Given that I was part of an elite operative team, I probably should have been able to find out more, but short of hacking into the Big Guys’ mainframe (which I was pretty sure would be frowned upon), there wasn’t much I could do besides talk to the others and run a Google search on the name. It wasn’t like I needed to know; I just wanted to. I wasn’t concerned about the connection. If I’d figured it out, there was pretty much zero chance that it had somehow evaded the CIA’s notice. I mean, good old Uncle Alan left messages on the firm’s answering machines. That wasn’t exactly lying low.

  Since I wasn’t worried about the connection, I could only conclude that my fascination with it was based on two things. The first was the fact that I viewed the world in terms of patterns, and the inner workings of this particular family tree didn’t fit any I’d ever seen. This whole situation just did not compute. If Jack’s dad had been older, and the uncle had been younger, then maybe I could have made sense of it, but I just couldn’t figure out why the heir to the family business would dedicate his life to tearing it down. The second factor in my fascination, as much as I hated to admit it, had to do with Jack, and the way that on some level, I couldn’t help but wonder where he would fall on the family tree. Figure out the pattern, figure out Jack.

  I’d officially spent way too much time around Zee, because before I’d joined the Squad, I hadn’t analyzed my own motives nearly this much. I shut the Word document and pushed all thoughts of Jack out of my mind.

  Great, I thought, now I need a distraction from my distraction. I got up from my desk and started looking for something that wouldn’t have me analyzing my subconscious desires, and I found it under my bed.

  It was a plain, vanilla-colored notebook, with no title and no decoration on the cover. Of everything that the Squad had given me, this book was the lone item that wasn’t sparkly, lacy, or ridiculously brightly colored. For the first time since Lucy had handed it to me, I opened the book.

  It was supposed to be some kind of history of the Squad program, but since Lucy had provided me with the Cliffs-Notes version, I’d never read it for myself. As I flipped through the pages, I smiled. If I’d realized the book was written in code, I probably would have paid a lot more attention to it a lot earlier.

  On the surface, the scrapbook seemed straightforward enough: pictures and pieces of fabric and neatly written paragraphs about games, halftime routines, and private jokes. It was at least twenty-five or thirty years old, and as I flipped the pages, I couldn’t help but notice how cheer fashions had changed over the years. The skirts were significantly shorter now, and half of our tops revealed midriff. Our plethora of cheer uniforms (because we wore our uniforms every game day and couldn’t repeat outfits in a given week) boasted more eclectic styles, too.

  I paused, wondering if Zee could somehow reverse the fashion programming the twins had obviously crammed into my head somewhere along the way.

  “Look at the code,” I told myself sternly. “Not the clothes.”

  I scanned through all of the written material, looking for letters that were bolded or tilted or written in a slightly different script than the others. That was the Squad low-maintenance encoding technique of choice.

  I found nothing.

  Okay, I thought. This could get interesting.

  I tried looking for words that felt out of place in context with the others on the page. If I could identify at least one word that had been chosen for a property other than its meaning, I might be able to pick up on some pattern or trick to it. The third letter of the third word on the third page, combined with the fourth letter on the fourth page, or something like that.

  Ten minutes later, all I’d managed to pull from the book using that method was sweet taco, which I seriously doubted had any meaning relevant to the history of the Squad program.

  I went through all of the numbers mentioned, and substituted in their alphabet and reverse alphabet correlates, but came up with nothing but garbage.

  “Hmmmmm.” I actually made the sound out loud, knowing that it was ridiculous to do so and not really caring.

  There was a chance that the code required a second text. Most good codes did. That way, you couldn’t decode one unless you had both, decreasing the likelihood that someone who wasn’t supposed to would break it. But, I told myself, I was supposed to be able to break this one. Lucy had given it to me. If I’d needed a second source to sort out the code, she would have said something, or at the very least given me the second source in one form or another.

  Since the only thing other than the book that Lucy had given me in recent memory was a throwing knife barreling toward my face, I dismissed my “multiple sources” theory and flipped through the pages again. Absentmindedly, I reached up and touched the towel around my head, and in the back of my mind, I wondered how much longer I was supposed to leave the conditioner in.

  How long were Laguna Beach episodes anyway?

  As I mussed with the towel, a single piece of hair fell out of its hold, and a drop of water fell onto the book. I haphazardly shoved the hair back under the towel, and stared at the wet mark, half expecting for some cheerleading or espionage deity to descend from the heavens and smite me for desecrating ye olde sacred history of the Squad.

  The drop dried soon enough though, and I escaped any smitings that might have been heading my way.

  And then, just like that, I knew.

  “It’s not encoded,” I murmured. “It’s invisible.”

  The girls on the Squad were almost as fond of invisible ink as they were of sparkly gel pens. I just had to figure out what the trigger to visibility was, and then I’d be set. It obviously wasn’t water, which was the only trigger I’d run across before. A specific chemical combination was possible, but unless it was the chemicals involved in powdered blush or something like that, it didn’t seem entirely likely. That left heat and light.

  I grabbed the lamp off my desk, and positioned it so that I could hold a single page of the book directly above the lightbulb. At first, nothing happened, but then, as the pages heated up, the words written behind the visible script popped to the surface, and I read.

  And read.

  And read.

  For the most part, there was nothing that I hadn’t been told before. The program had been created because, at the height of the Cold War, the government had secretly decided to begin training younger and younger agents, and while select boarding schools and military academies provided male trainees, they’d had difficulty locating a group of females who consistently and predictably fulfilled their requirements. The special task force assigned to recruitment was looking for girls who were beautiful and able to use their looks to their advantage, girls who were smart but didn’t seem on the surface to be much of a mental threat. Girls who were athletic, manipulative, and capable of keeping their true identity a secret.

  And somewhere along the way, someone had suggested cheerleaders.

  It was a miracle that person hadn’t been laughed right out of Washington, but they hadn’t been, and a handful of pilot programs were started at select schools across the country. Trainees were chosen based on a complex algorithm of requirements, ranging from IQ to athletic prowess and psychological fitness. Upon graduation, they were given tests and some of the girls were offered positions at Quantico or within the CIA, Secret Service, or some kind of covert ops division I didn’t quite understand.

  Caught up in what I was reading, I turned the page, but didn’t pay enough attention to what I was doing, and was soon bombarded with the smell of scorching paper. I jumped, pulling the book back, and considered the notion that perhaps people should refrain from giving me things that they didn’t want wet, burned, or o
therwise destroyed.

  Even though the pages hadn’t caught on fire (yet), I blew on them for good measure and then plopped down on the floor.

  What had I been looking for in the book? The question hit me as I blew. I knew how the program had started, I knew that if I kept on reading, I’d get to the part of the history where the program was disbanded in the early nineties, with the exception of a single Squad, located conveniently near a law firm that the government wanted to keep a particularly close eye on. Our Squad was operational, far more so than any of our predecessors, and when we graduated, we didn’t have to deal with more training; we got our choice of assignments.

  Even though the invisible letters were once again hidden from my eyes, I glanced down at the book, as if the pages themselves should somehow provide the answers to whatever questions I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask. What was I thinking? Did I really expect the book to have anything to say about my current predicament? Like maybe a previous Squad member had written down everything she’d learned the hard way about dating the heir to an evil empire. Or maybe I subconsciously thought that the book held the secrets to making a homecoming nomination disappear, or the answer to the many questions about our case that I’d asked myself at dinner. Better yet, I might have even expected it to contain some insight on how exactly somebody could go from Son of Evil to Force of Good overnight.

  At this point, I’d even settle for something that advised me on how best to procure detention.

  Yeah, right.

  I stared down at the picture on the page in front of me, and I couldn’t help but wonder who the smiling girls in this book, the original Squad trainees, had really been. The captions only included their initials, and the pictures made them look more or less like either Marcia Brady or Farrah Fawcett clones, depending on the angle. Same smiles, same hair, flipped out at the ends, same self-confident looks in each of their eyes.

  Was “KM” really just a cheerleader? What about JP or MC or the other girls on the page? Were they the people they pretended to be?