Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Once the picture had loaded on my phone, Brooke grabbed it out of my hand and passed me hers. While she keyed in the access code for comparing the picture to the Big Guys’ watch list database, I scrolled through the last few messages she’d sent to the teams.

  Team A was at Walford Park with Anthony Connors-Wright. They’d followed orders and kept from engaging, and were currently monitoring him from four different viewpoints. Chloe wanted permission to go in closer, but Brooke had denied the request. No engagement meant no engagement, not even minor physical contact. Nobody on the Squad was so much as going to brush up against a TCI on Brooke’s watch, and her text messages made that abundantly clear in a manner suited to an alpha female.

  Team B was following Amelia Juarez in two different cars, careful to keep the tails as subtle as they could. On Brooke’s orders, the girls fell back a mile and followed the tracker we’d planted on the car rather than the car itself. Brooke had notified the Big Guys’ of her decision, and they’d approved.

  From the way Brooke was playing things, you would have thought No Engagement meant No Risks. For someone who made the rules at our high school, she was awfully hesitant about breaking them elsewhere.

  “I don’t think you guys are a very good match,” Brooke said, handing my phone back. It took me a second to read the meaning in her words: the guy I’d photographed didn’t match anyone in the Big Guys’ database.

  Soon thereafter, I confirmed something they don’t tell you in spy movies. Recon is boring. So boring, in fact, that I might have actually preferred to be doing toe touches. Brooke and I sat there for hours, repeating the same motions over and over again, thinking of new ways to make them look natural. We rotated locations, going from the bench, inside a lingerie store (near the window, of course), then down the street on the other side, and finally, we ended up back on the bench, eating Chinese food for dinner.

  From what I’d been able to glean from Brooke, none of the other teams had noticed anything sketchy, either. Anthony Connors-Wright was still wandering around the park, which might have been a sign of mental instability, since the park wasn’t exactly a hot spot of activity, but probably wasn’t a sign of nefarious activity. He hadn’t actually talked to anyone, other than a hot-dog vendor whose background check had turned out clean when the girls ran his picture through the database.

  Amelia Juarez had spent most of the night shopping, which meant that our second team had been able to camouflage themselves without much effort at all. Given the fact that the girls knew the closest mall inside and out (including all of the potential hand-off locations), they felt that they could say with high levels of certainty that Amelia wasn’t up to much other than biding her time.

  My mind began to construct scenarios, as Brooke and I sat there, talking about nothing over chow mein, just to keep up the appearance of talking. We’d downgraded to talking about celebrities (most of whom I knew absolutely nothing about), their hairstyles, and their misguided relationships.

  Of the scenarios I’d managed to construct, Scenario one went a little something like this: Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray wasn’t at all involved in this biological-weapons scare. Since Jacob Kann was dead and Hector Hassan was in custody, that just left Amelia and Anthony, both of whom were waiting on a call from the biological-arms dealer before moving forward with their plans, whatever those might be.

  Scenario one was my favorite, mostly because it meant that my relationship, or non-relationship, or whatever-it-was with Jack wouldn’t come into spy play. If Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray wasn’t involved, I was in the clear. Scenario one also had the advantage that it would be pretty simple for us to save the day. We’d keep track of the TCIs until the Big Guys identified the seller, and then we’d take him—and the weapon—out of the picture.

  Scenario two was the pessimistic one. In that one, Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray was either responsible for brokering the deal that had brought the TCIs to Bayport in the first place, or they’d noticed the influx the same as we had. Either way, they were now in the center of everything, and at any given moment, one of the most insidious, impenetrable rogue operations in the country would have access to a weapon we still knew nothing about.

  Scenario two had the plus side that it might mean that Brooke and I would eventually see some action, but the Jack factor was enough to make me resign myself to discussing celebrities’ bangs and hoping that the rest of the night would be equally tame. By the time we finished dinner, I didn’t even have to think about working my camera anymore, or checking pictures or license plate numbers against our database, and I’d developed an eerie sense for reading Brooke’s reactions to the news she was getting through her communicator.

  I was also bored enough that I considered using the puppy in my pocket to knock myself out.

  And then, just as I was cursing my own boredom, Brooke abruptly switched topics. “So,” she said. “You and Jack.”

  There was something underneath her tone that I couldn’t quite read. Jealousy? Intensity? Heartbreak? Or maybe it was just that her tone was so painfully neutral that I couldn’t help but read into it all of the above.

  “There is no me and Jack,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to be able to lie better than that,” she informed me blithely.

  “It’s…” I was going to say that my involvement with Jack was just part of the job, but I didn’t. “It’s complicated.”

  That was, quite possibly, the biggest understatement that had ever been uttered.

  “Things with Jack Peyton are always complicated.”

  This was my opportunity to ask her about Alan Peyton and his involvement with our organization. Unfortunately, I couldn’t risk it. Not in public. Not so close to the firm. Instead, looking at the expression on her face, I found myself wondering for the first time if Brooke or Chloe had ever really liked Jack. Chloe’s jealousy wasn’t enough to convince me that she had, and most days, Brooke didn’t even show any emotion—including jealousy—unless she wanted other people to see it. I’d always just sort of assumed that the other girls had used Jack to get to his father and the firm. Brooke was all Squad, all the time, half cheerleader/half agent, and nothing left for anything else, and Chloe was basically the wannabe Brooke. They’d dated Jack because he was popular, and because he was the easiest way to the firm.

  But technically, those were the reasons I was dating Jack, too. Only I wasn’t dating Jack. I’d decided not to date him. Homecoming was simply an unavoidable fluke.

  “You like him.” Brooke spoke the words carefully, enunciating each one.

  “No, I don’t.” My first reaction was always to argue, especially when I didn’t want to consider the fact that Brooke was absolutely right.

  “Yes,” Brooke gritted out. “You do. And you’re not supposed to, and it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.”

  So much for the two of us pretending to be friends. We couldn’t even keep up appearances for a few hours before things went to heck in a pom bag.

  Then, without warning, Brooke began cursing, quietly and possibly in more than one language.

  I guess she felt more strongly about this Jack thing than I’d realized.

  “You know that thing Tara and Zee were doing?” Brooke said.

  I nodded.

  “Well, they kinda lost it.”

  Lost it? As in lost their mark? As in a TCI was out there, completely unsupervised, quite possibly acquiring a weapon we really didn’t want her to have?

  “Yeah,” Brooke said, her voice conveying so much pissed-offedness that I got the feeling that the safest thing to do would be to back away slowly. “They lost it.”

  I didn’t have to ask if the twins had lost Amelia as well. Despite Brooke’s calm outward appearance, she was freaking out, and that meant that things were bad.

  Brooke’s fingers flew across the keys of her cell, and I wondered if she was giving instructions to the others, or if she was reporting the situation to the Big Guys. I wondered that right up
until I saw a green sedan pulling into the parking garage across the street.

  “Brooke,” I said, throwing caution to the wind. “What color is You Know Who’s car?”

  Hopefully, if anyone was listening to me, they’d be up on their Harry Potter slang and think I was talking about Voldemort.

  “Green,” Brooke said, and then she followed my gaze.

  I recognized the license plate. My memory for numbers never failed me, and I knew even before Brooke confirmed it that something completely unexpected had happened. The other teams had lost their TCI, and we’d found her.

  At Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.

  CHAPTER 19

  Code Word: Fun, Fun, Fun

  My first instinct was to bolt across the street and fling myself at Amelia Juarez the second she stepped out of her car, hence preventing her from entering the Peyton building and bringing this entire mission to a crashing halt. Brooke’s first instinct was to make sure that I didn’t engage in mine. She grabbed onto my ponytail in the stealthiest of all possible ways and literally held me back. She didn’t say a word, she just stood there, holding my hair like a leash and silently compelling me to heel, while she listened to the audio feed coming in through the earpiece in her right ear. Then her cell phone rang, and she quickly traded the communicator for another type of secure line—one that would allow her to talk back.

  “Hello?” She said, tightening her grip on my ponytail with one hand as she flipped her ringing phone open with the other. “Hey! OMG, I haven’t talked to you in so long. What’s up?”

  If I hadn’t been almost positive that she was talking to our bosses, I would have been completely fooled by the tone and content of her words. “Really? That’s like so awesome. You must be so psyched!”

  I tried to imagine what listening to both sides of this conversation would have been like, Uncle Alan or one of his colleagues imparting crucial information in an overly serious tone, and Brooke responding like a Valley girl, heavy on the Valley.

  “Do you want me to call him for you? Ask him if he’s interested? Because I can totally do that for you. It’s not a proble—” Brooke stopped talking abruptly. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I get it. You don’t need my help on this one. That’s cool.”

  Brooke loosened her hold on my hair, but I curtailed my ongoing impulse to dive into the action headfirst for two reasons. First, Amelia Juarez was no longer in my sight and was, in all likelihood, already inside. And second, unless I was reading too much into Brooke’s side of this conversation, there was a distinct chance that we’d been called off this case.

  Brooke flipped her cell shut and confirmed what I’d suspected. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride back to the school.”

  Just like that? We’d been staked out here all day, and now that something had finally happened, we were leaving?

  Recon sucked.

  Brooke picked up what was left of her Chinese carryout and threw it in the closest garbage can. I followed suit. If this had been the movies, we would have been passing on some secret information in the remains of our chow mein, but this was life, and trash was just trash. If anyone happened to suspect that we were more than what we seemed and came to check up on it, all they would have found was a bunch of half-eaten noodles and a fortune cookie that promised me an exciting future.

  Apparently, the fortune cookie lied.

  Brooke and I gathered our bags, and I couldn’t help but cast a longing glance over my shoulder. I’d nearly made my way onto the casualty list working this case. Didn’t that buy me anything with the Big Guys? Brooke and I could have stopped Amelia from going to that meeting. We could have prevented it.

  “Toby, just let it go. We’re cheerleaders. That’s all.”

  That was probably the biggest lie any member of the Squad had ever told, but I tried to dig through the crap to get to Brooke’s meaning. The best I could come up with was the fact that the firm couldn’t ever know we were more than cheerleaders. If we blew our cover to the one enemy our operation was maintained to watch, the Squad would be demoted to mere cheerleaderdom in a heartbeat.

  In retrospect, it was probably a good thing Brooke had held onto my hair.

  Given the amount of mental processing I was doing, there is a slight chance that I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was going, and as Brooke and I crossed the street, I found myself stepping out onto the road, in front of oncoming traffic. I jumped back, startled into paying attention, but almost instantly, a minivan barreling down the road swerved toward me. I stood there on the sidewalk, in complete denial that the van was no longer on the road, and the nanosecond before I would have jumped out of the way myself, Brooke flying tackled me, pushing me out of the car’s path. The two of us fell, a tangled mess of limbs on the ground, but at least this time, I didn’t hit my head.

  “You okay?” Brooke asked me.

  I nodded, and as we stood up, I glanced down the street.

  The van was gone.

  “Let’s go.” Brooke didn’t seem to be quite as affected by my second brush with death in as many days as I was.

  “That person almost hit me. I was on the sidewalk, and they almost hit me.”

  “Probably a drunk driver,” Brooke said, “though don’t ask me who hits the bottle on a Wednesday at nine.”

  As we walked to Brooke’s car, I kept seeing the van speeding at me, kept feeling myself freezing, and for some reason, the part of the experience that my brain insisted on dwelling on the most was the fact that I’d now been flying tackled by other members of the Squad twice. I was well on my way to getting sacked more often than any of our Neanderthal football players.

  The second Brooke and I were in the car, and she’d turned it on and set the radio to the faux station that was programmed to run an automatic check for listening devices, Brooke leaned her head back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and sat that way for several seconds.

  “Brooke?”

  Her eyes snapped open, and it was suddenly like nothing had ever happened. Team B hadn’t lost the tail on Amelia Juarez. The Big Guys hadn’t told the two of us to leave. A crazy driver hadn’t almost turned me into a Toby pancake.

  “What?” Brooke’s tone was high and clear and absolutely brittle.

  “What just happened back there?” I’d gotten the general gist of the Big Guys’ orders, but I wanted specifics.

  “We went shopping,” Brooke said, playing dumb. “We ate ice cream and Chinese food and talked about boys. It was fun.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “Just drop it, Toby.”

  I snorted. If she thought that was going to work, she wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d given her credit for being.

  “Are the Big Guys sending a team in?” I decided to try my luck with a very specific question.

  “No.” Brooke’s answer surprised me. She didn’t elaborate.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? An individual who we think is in Bayport to purchase a biological weapon just went into the evil law firm of destruction and doom, and the Big Guys don’t think this merits a team?”

  For a split second, I found myself doubting the conclusion I’d reached about the CIA knowing about Alan Peyton’s connection to the firm. What if they didn’t? What if he was a double agent and nobody realized it but me? What if the people calling the shots on our mission were working for the enemy? What if…

  “Amelia doesn’t have the weapon.” Brooke finally imparted some useful information in my general direction, and it stopped my what if–ing in its tracks. “Our superiors have ID’d the seller, and whatever the bioweapon is, he still has it. The deal isn’t going down until later this week.”

  Well, that was the first piece of good news we’d had all day. Incidentally, it also made me feel like an idiot for every ridiculous question I’d let enter my mind. Lest Brooke sense that I was silently berating myself for that, I pressed on.

  “And?” I prompted her for more information.

  “And what?”r />
  “That’s not all they told you.” Somehow, I was sure of this fact.

  Brooke blew a wisp of hair out of her face and took the car around a corner a little faster than was strictly necessary. “Do the math, Toby. If Amelia doesn’t have the weapon, why would we stop her from meeting with Peyton? We still have an audio feed in one of their offices. The signal’s scrambled, but some intel is better than none.”

  I felt every bit as stupid as Brooke’s tone said I was for not making the connection earlier. I was the one who’d planted the bug at Peyton. This was our chance to use it.

  “What about the weapon?” I asked. This was about as far into “sharing” mode as Brooke got, and since the two of us were stuck in a car together anyway, I was going to press her for as much information as I could, even if her glare suggested that this course of action might not be in my best interest healthwise.

  “After they ID’d the seller, the nature of the weapon became apparent.”

  “And?”

  Brooke slammed on the brakes as we came to a stoplight. “And apparently,” she said, her voice full of false cheer, “we’ll be debriefed in the morning.”

  The Big Guys knew what the weapon was and who had it, and they expected us to wait until morning? No wonder Brooke was in such fine form.

  “So what now?” I asked as Brooke pulled into her parking spot at the school.

  “Now?” Brooke said. “Now I try to figure out how Amelia Juarez, whose only claim to fame is her family’s crime empire, managed to lose not one, but two of our tails, and dismantle our tracking chip, and you go home.”

  “Go home?” I was getting the strangest sense of déjà vu.

  “Be back for practice tomorrow morning.” Brooke eyeballed me. “And this time, don’t be late.”