Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Someone’s been practicing.” Tara’s eyes danced with barely restrained mirth.

  “Shut up.”

  Sticking things inside my bra made me feel like a stripper, but after a couple of tutorials from Bubbles, I could finally manage a pseudostealth bra tuck without looking like I was groping myself. All things considered, that was a definite plus, even if I didn’t actually feel less conspicuous.

  As we crossed the street and headed for the hotel, something occurred to me. “Should we have changed out of our uniforms?” I asked. “If we get caught, the ginormous BHS on our chests will make it pretty easy for someone to track us down.”

  “We won’t get caught,” Tara said, “and all anyone will remember was that we were cheerleaders.”

  That was the thing about the uniforms—people never looked past them. Anyone who saw us would just remember seeing two cheerleaders. They’d probably think we were hot, but our faces and our identifying features wouldn’t be nearly as salient in their minds as the length of our skirts, and even if they did remember seeing two cheerleaders, no one in their right minds would see us as any kind of threat.

  “Besides,” Tara added, “we won’t be wearing the uniforms for long.”

  I didn’t exactly follow her logic there, but Tara didn’t give me the chance to ask any more questions.

  “Whatever you do,” she said, as the two of us crossed the hotel parking lot and entered the lobby. “Smile.”

  I followed Tara through the lobby and into the elevator, a smile plastered to my face. She hit the fourth floor, and then when a man and a woman hopped on at the last second, she hit several more buttons.

  The couple looked at us oddly, but we just stared back, wide-eyed. After a few moments, the man’s expression turned from questioning to something slightly more lascivious, but a sharp elbow to his gut (his wife’s doing, not mine) snapped him out of it. A few seconds after that lovely exchange, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, but following Tara’s lead, I stayed put. The door closed. The couple got off at the sixth floor, and we rode the elevator up to the seventh.

  I was a quick enough study that I didn’t have to ask Tara what the deal was with our extracurricular elevator riding. Stealth was the name of the game. Even though we existed beneath the veil of the cheerleading stereotype, getting off on Jacob Kann’s floor in front of witnesses might have been pushing things, especially if the worst happened and someone figured out that we’d broken into the room.

  We took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and once there, Tara zeroed in on a maid cart. She glanced around for the cart’s owner, and seeing that he was suitably occupied, Tara grabbed two towels and a trash bag off the cart, and then unceremoniously jerked me back into the stairwell.

  “Tell me if anyone’s coming,” she said, and before I knew what was happening, she’d wrapped one of the towels around her body, and underneath the towel, she began taking off her clothes.

  Within seconds, Tara had stripped completely and the only thing standing in between her and being naked was the skimpy hotel towel. She folded her uniform, stuck it in the trash bag, and stashed the bag just out of sight, behind a potted plant.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  “My what?” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Because if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you might want to invest in some kind of straitjacket. Maybe a padded cell. Some electroshock therapy…”

  “You can stay here if you really want to,” Tara said sweetly, “but I thought you might want to take a quick stab at his computer.”

  She was playing dirty, and she knew it. A guy with terrorist connections up to no good probably had some hard-core security on his laptop, and there was absolutely nothing I loved more in this world than poking around in systems specifically designed to keep me out.

  Tara handed me a towel, and I flashed back to her telling me that we wouldn’t be wearing our uniforms for long.

  “Is there a reason we have to do this naked?” I grumbled.

  Tara shrugged. “The other options are hacking into the hotel computer system and programming our own cards….”

  Ooooh, that sounded like fun.

  “Which we would have had to do from Chloe’s lab, where our keycard programming equipment is—”

  Drat.

  “And finding a way into one of the other rooms, going out the window, and crawling on a fourth-story ledge over to Jacob’s room.”

  I glanced at the towel and then back at Tara. “Let’s do that one.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Our intel says the maid for this floor is a guy,” she said. “I guarantee you he has keys to all of the rooms.”

  The and I guarantee you he won’t be able to deny two towel-clad cheerleaders their heart’s desire went unspoken. I may have been new at this, but I wasn’t stupid. I saw where the whole towel thing was going.

  “Are we sure Kann isn’t in his room?” I asked, making one last effort at avoiding the inevitable.

  Tara smiled. “He’s in the hotel bar. We passed him on the way in, and he’d just ordered a fresh drink.”

  Sometimes, the observation skills of cheerleaders amazed me. These very skills also tended to force me to do things that I really didn’t want to do, like strip in the stairwell of a local hotel, but there are some forms of logic that you just can’t argue with.

  “For the record,” I said, resigning myself to my fate and wrapping the towel around my body, “when I said I’d rather walk around naked than wear this stupid uniform, I was being facetious.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Code Word: Come Hither

  Getting into the room was a snap. Julius, the male housekeeper, took one look at our towels and lost any and all verbal ability he might have once had. Ever seen one of those cartoons where the guy’s eyes literally pop out of his sockets, and he goes, “Owwwwoooooga, owwwooooooga”? That was Julius, except for the fact that the poor guy couldn’t even manage a sound. Luckily, despite the fact that his mouth didn’t seem to be working, his all-access keycard proved itself fully functional. He opened the door to Kann’s room, and gestured incomprehensibly with one hand.

  “Thanks,” Tara and I chorused in unison. I can only conclude that as the door closed behind us, poor Julius in all likelihood fainted dead away on the floor.

  Pushing thoughts of unconscious housekeeping staff out of my head, I glanced around the room. It was a pretty sweet setup: foyer, bedroom with king-sized bed, bathroom with enormous Jacuzzi, and a fully stocked bar. Apparently, having parents who ran their own mafialike operation really paid off.

  Beside me, Tara surveyed the room. I got the distinct feeling that her assessment had less to do with how posh the accommodations were, and more to do with identifying secondary exits and analyzing in-room acoustics.

  “The window would suffice in a pinch,” Tara said finally, “but if by any chance Kann does happen to catch us here, our best bet is probably to pretend we saw him at the bar and decided to seduce him.”

  “WHAT?”

  “We won’t actually seduce him,” she assured me. I was less than comforted. The words come hither weren’t even in my vocabulary, and I had no interest whatsoever in playing the seduction card to get out of a mess, even if there was nothing physical involved. Ew.

  Instead of elaborating on the nonseduction and comforting me further, Tara began a careful sweep of the room, looking for any security devices or wires that might already be in place. “This room’s clean,” she said, and in a movement so casual I barely even noticed it, she pulled a listening device out of her bra and placed it underneath the desk.

  About that time, I realized that Tara wasn’t actually wearing a bra, and I spent a good forty-five seconds wondering how she’d managed to keep the bugs in place on her chest. Since I wasn’t quite up to her level, I’d opted for actually holding on to the tracking chip. It may not have been stealth, but it was secure.

  Tara moved quickly and efficiently, violating several laws of boob physics
as she bugged the bathroom and moved toward the telephone. After fiddling with the receiver for a moment, she frowned.

  “What?” I said.

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she pulled a bobby pin out of her ponytail, and with a few highly precise movements, she removed a small, round chip from the phone.

  “The phone’s already wired?” I mouthed.

  Tara nodded and began resweeping the rest of the room, making doubly sure that she hadn’t missed any other listening devices the first time. Finally, she spoke. “We aren’t the only ones keeping track of Jacob Kann.”

  “One of the other TCIs?” I guessed. It wasn’t that much of a stretch to think that one minor-league bad guy might be bugging another. Were I a bad guy, I would have wanted to keep an eye on the competition, too. The real question was, competition for what?

  “We’ll bring the bug back to the lab,” Tara said. “We’ll be able to see if it matches anything in our files, trace its origin. Plus Chloe can continue to feed them audio tracks so that they don’t realize we’ve disabled it.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, Chloe did have her uses.

  Tara carefully traded the bug she’d found for one of our own, and I scanned the room again until I found what I was looking for: a fifteen-inch Mac laptop. Excellent.

  Waltzing over to it, I could already feel the juices starting to flow. I booted up the computer, and in under three minutes, I guessed Kann’s log-on password using nothing more than the information I’d read in his file and my own code-savvy mind. Most people choose passwords that mean something to them, and Kann wasn’t an exception, though at least he mixed things up a bit. He probably thought he was pretty swift, using his middle name backward, followed by the year he was born.

  Simpleton.

  Ready to really dig my teeth into something juicy, I searched the hard drive for compressed or encrypted files, and while the computer made happy thinking noises, I leaned back in my chair.

  “I’m going to go grab our clothes.” Tara was finished with the bug and already thinking about our exit, which, it appeared, would be clothed.

  Five minutes earlier, those words would have been music to my ears. Now, I was too deep in Happy Hacker Land to care.

  It quickly became apparent that Jacob Kann didn’t have much of interest on his computer. All of his files were boring (also known as not encrypted). That said, just because there wasn’t anything fun for me to play with on his computer didn’t mean that there wasn’t any valuable information there; it just meant that nothing he had would be much of a challenge on the decoding front.

  Still hoping to come up with something cool, I launched Kann’s internet browser, and while it booted up, I reached up and undid the clasp around my neck. The twins were big on accessories, an obsession I would have lamented were it not for the fact that all Squad accessories came equipped with something extra. This particular necklace doubled as a portable hard drive with a ridiculously large amount of memory. I slid the charm off the chain and pressed gently on one side, revealing a USB plug. I inserted it into Kann’s computer, and with a few more commands, the computer began copying the entire contents of its hard drive to mine.

  Meanwhile, the internet was up and running, so I checked our mark’s browsing history, which led me directly to his primary email account. He had his computer set to remember his username, and the password was—you guessed it—his middle name backward, followed by the year he was born.

  Seriously, I thought, did this guy flunk out of wannabe terrorist school? What kind of TCI used the same password for all of his accounts? I knew fourth graders who realized that was a bad idea.

  Not that I was complaining, only I kind of wanted to, because when it came to hacking, I lived for the challenge, and this was kid stuff.

  I’d just opened Kann’s inbox when Tara knocked at the door. I probably would have been more paranoid about whether or not it was indeed Tara, except for the fact that she knocked to the rhythm of “Clap Your Hands.” Smart girl.

  After setting Kann’s inbox, sent mail, and address book to copy over to my drive, I got up and walked over to the door. I peeked out the peephole, just to be on the safe side, and then let Tara in.

  “Finished?” she asked me.

  I glanced back over at the laptop. “Five minutes, tops.”

  “We only have three.”

  Get in and get out—that was the Squad motto, and there was a decent chance that we’d already been here too long.

  “Three minutes,” I agreed. “Can I have my clothes?”

  Tara tossed them to me, and content that the computer was doing its thing, I went to the bathroom to change. I’d just zipped my skirt up the side and stuck the tracking chip back in my bra when I heard the door to the room slam open and then slam shut.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Tara didn’t slam doors. Ever. And the sound of the slamming did not in any way sound like one of our cheers. No matter which way I approached the situation, one thing was clear: there was somebody else in the room, and that was a very, very bad thing.

  Moving as silently as I could, I leapt into the Jacuzzi and pressed myself against the bottom, using the side to obscure myself from view as best I could. I spent exactly three seconds seriously hoping that Kann—assuming that he was the one who’d crashed our spy party—wouldn’t come into the bathroom, and another two hoping that Tara had opted for hiding herself over attempting to seduce our mark.

  Despite the fact that their threat levels weren’t that high, the TCIs were on the Watch List for a reason. Jacob Kann was dangerous, and as I thought of my partner out there with him, I had to push down the urge to go charging out of the bathroom, half-dressed, and take him down. Only the incessant training that had been drilled into my head over the past month—do not physically engage a mark unless specifically instructed to do so; protect your cover and trust your partner to protect herself—kept me from doing just that, and the training only held me off for an additional six seconds. Luckily, in that time, Jacob Kann muttered several curses about females under his breath, grabbed what sounded like a set of keys off of a dresser, and stomped back out the door.

  Cautiously, I stuck my head out of the bathroom and saw Tara maneuvering back through the window.

  “Hang from the ledge?” I asked her.

  “Dove into the bathtub?” she returned.

  I threw my top on instead of responding, and she grabbed my hard drive out of the computer. “Lucky for us, Kann is oblivious,” she said, tossing it to me with one hand and hitting the computer’s power button with the other. “Ready to run?”

  I caught the hard drive and slipped it back onto the chain around my neck. “Run?”

  Tara shrugged, seemingly nonplussed by our brush with getting busted. “He came up here to pick up his car keys,” she said, “and we still need to tag his car.” With that, she ducked back out the window, and I followed, a little bewildered, but in too much of a hurry to ask.

  “Fire escape,” I noted as we started taking the stairs down two at a time.

  “Leads directly to the parking lot.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  “Fast,” Tara said, her tone completely conversational.

  “We may have to jump the last flight if we want to beat Kann to his car.”

  “Like I said,” I told her. “Convenient.”

  After that, we just ran. Most people vastly underestimate the amount of conditioning done by the average cheerleader. I was in the best shape of my life, and it wasn’t because of the spy half of our gig. Moving in perfect synchrony, Tara and I reached the top of the last flight, and in the interest of saving time, we flipped ourselves off the side, braced and ready for impact. Like the good cheer girls we were, we stuck our landings. I met Tara’s eyes for a split second, and she nodded toward my chest—and the tracking chip that was somehow, miraculously, still in my bra.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll run interference if you need more time.”

  She was the sen
ior partner, and that was an order. I didn’t question it, I didn’t resent it. I just followed it. I slipped the chip out of my bra, and still moving at warp speed, scanned the parking lot and zeroed in on covered parking. Given his luxury digs, our mark definitely seemed the type to shell out a few extra bucks in order to park in the shade. After that, the Bentley wasn’t hard to find.

  Within seconds, I was under the car, fastening the chip into place. Working with the last of my momentum, I rolled out the other side just as Tara intercepted our mark several cars down.

  “Have you seen a blue ribbon?” I heard her ask, and even from under the car, I could make out the sexy pout in her voice. “My friend seems to have lost hers.”

  Realizing that Tara had given me the perfect excuse for being on the ground near Kann’s car, which probably would have appeared somewhat sketchy in most situations, I ripped the ribbon out of my hair and then popped to my feet.

  “Found it!” I held the ribbon up triumphantly and hoped that it never occurred to Kann that I might have been up to something other than ribbon chasing.

  One look at our mark’s face told me that he wasn’t the type to go gaga for cheerleaders. In fact, all evidence suggested that he was the type to roll his eyes and dismiss their missing ribbons out of hand.

  Perfect.

  I started walking away from Kann’s car, and he brushed past me to get to the driver’s-side door. My back to the car, I walked toward Tara. Behind me, I could hear Kann’s keyless entry beeping, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him reaching for the door handle.

  And in that moment, that single quarter of a second before Kann pulled the door open, I remember wondering why I’d looked back. And then the moment was over, Kann opened the door, and with a sonic boom, the entire thing exploded into flames.

  Tara reacted faster than I did. She dove on top of me, forcing me to the ground and out of the way of flying debris. My head hit the pavement, and the last thing I remember thinking before losing consciousness was that if Tara had been a second slower, or if I’d been any closer to the car, I’d be dead.