Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I counted inside my head, imagining how fast I was going and calculating the distance between the kitchen and the bathroom, and finally, I stopped over another vent. There, right below me, was Cottontail.

  He was bigger than either of the guards I’d already seen, and he looked significantly more deadly. Someone who’s had as much martial arts training as I have can spot another master a long way off, and the guy below me was good, no question. Very quietly, I reached for my spirit stick blow gun. I’d been instructed to use it as a last resort, but time was passing, and the only way to ensure that I didn’t engage the enemy was to take him out now. Besides, if Ross wasn’t going to advertise the fact that he’d lost his prototype and acquired a decoy, I doubt he’d take out billboards announcing that one of his guards had fallen asleep on the job.

  As for Cottontail, from what I understood of the darts, he wouldn’t remember a thing.

  Positioned directly above someone this dangerous, I was struck by a momentary fear that he would look up, but just as he began to gaze unwittingly toward me, I heard a voice from the other room.

  “Hey, Merv? You want any cookies?”

  If he said yes, I wouldn’t have to go against orders and dart him. And even if he said no, at least the question distracted him long enough to allow me just enough time to double-check my aim.

  “No,” Merv barked. “No cookies.”

  All right, I thought. One…two…three!

  Pffft. Pffft.

  I shot two darts in close succession, and both of them hit Merv in the side of the neck. He dropped to the floor. I winced at the sound and hoped that they hadn’t heard it in the other room.

  “The lion sensation is taking the nation—blue and gold…let’s go!”

  Brooke’s voice carried and I breathed a sigh of relief. Her cheerleading antics would hopefully keep Mopsy and Ross occupied long enough to let me disarm the security and swap in the decoy.

  I pushed the vent aside and dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch on the floor. First things first, I retrieved the darts from Merv’s neck and checked to make sure there was no visible sign that they’d ever been there.

  Excellent.

  I began sweeping the room. Of all of the aspects of the mission, this one—locating the security panel—was probably the one I was least qualified to do. My basic training had included several sessions on sweeping a room, but I hadn’t done it enough for it to be automatic, and right now, I didn’t have time to think.

  I just had to act.

  If I was a hidden security panel, where would I be? I walked along the length of the walls, looking for a loose panel, uneven paint, or anything that might give me the answer I desperately needed.

  Think of it as a code, I told myself. A giant, living code. Where’s the aberration? Look for natural repetitions in the room and find something that breaks the pattern. Think of everything you know about Ross, about this room.

  I continued searching the room manually and visually with no luck, until I opened the refrigerator. No way should a mad scientist’s fridge have been this neat and tidy. And what was with having multiple kinds of milk in one refrigerator? I reached up to examine the milk, and when I tried to pick one of the containers up, I encountered some resistance. I pulled harder, and with a pop, the back of the refrigerator opened to reveal a security panel.

  In a twisted way, it made sense. If the guy had laser-sensors to protect a safe in his oven, of course the security system would be based in his refrigerator.

  Now that I had access to the security panel, I concentrated on disarming the system. I pulled my black box out of the bag of tricks I’d brought with me. With a little technological ingenuity, I hooked it up to the hardware inside the panel and keyed in what I could ascertain about the make of the system.

  Luckily, the black box came equipped with pictures, and once I narrowed the choices down, it quickly recognized what kind of system we were dealing with, which meant that it knew how many digits the password was. The box heated beneath my hand, and I waited as it accessed a satellite that would hopefully allow it to hack directly into the security provider’s system.

  I looked down at my watch.

  Hurry, I thought. Hurry, hurry, hurry. If Ross had actually invested in a system that was more secure than the black box could hack, I might have to get creative, and for once in my life, I really, really didn’t want to get creative.

  Beep.

  I took in a sharp breath at the sound, but the lights on the system went off, and I breathed out a sigh of relief.

  Black box, I thought, how I love thee, let me count the ways.

  As I moved toward the oven, I spent one second devoutly hoping that the box would pull its last trick—scrambling any remote signals that the system might be sending to the security provider.

  I opened the oven door and stared at it for a second. To say that I’m not familiar with cooking or any of the tools used to do so would be an enormous understatement, so I wasn’t exactly sure if there was anything unusual about this oven, but time was running out, so I strong-armed it, and a back panel popped inward.

  There, just within my grasp, was a small silver box. I grabbed the decoy, which was more of a gray, out of my bag of tricks and moved to swap the two. With any luck, I could make my way back to the bathroom, and Brooke and I could walk out of there with the weapon before anyone realized that Merv was in dreamland.

  Unfortunately, the second before I made the swap, things began falling apart at warp speed.

  I felt Merv behind me before I saw him, and I turned. He was easily three times my size, but he was groggy from the sedatives, and I was quick. I sank a punch to his stomach and kicked the gun out of his hand. He lunged at me, but I dodged and planted a hard kick to his groin, pushing him back. Once I had enough space to move, I steadied myself and then prepared my go-to move.

  I was halfway through the roundhouse when I saw a flash of black and realized that Merv and I weren’t alone. But before I could figure out who our new black-clad friend was, we were interrupted by Flopsy realizing at high volume that I was no longer in the bathroom.

  Seconds later, I registered a male scream, as Brooke attacked either Ross or Mopsy in the foyer.

  Midturn, I appraised the situation without ever slowing down. I had to take Merv out quickly. Brooke was in the other room with Ross and two security goons. That meant at least three guns, and as good as she was, she couldn’t stop a bullet, even though Lucy’s bulletproof push-up bra had been known to stop one or two in the past.

  Ignoring the sounds and sights assaulting my senses, I threw my momentum into finishing my roundhouse, and microseconds after my foot connected with his neck, Merv went down for the count.

  My movement propelled by adrenaline, I zeroed in on the next threat and whipped out my pin/throwing stars, activated them, and starting launching them at the mysterious person in black, but even when I heard them hit, the person—whoever it was—didn’t stop.

  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 bre
ath 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.”