Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Based on our interaction with Brooke’s mom, and the way she’d told Brooke to concentrate on homecoming and not worry at all about the biotechnological weapon now in the hands of some anonymous independent operative, I could only conclude that we’d been given the official (if subtle) cease and desist that Brooke had seen coming.

  I didn’t feel much like ceasing or desisting. If I’d managed to take the operative down and still saved Brooke, we wouldn’t have been taken off the case. If I hadn’t almost gotten blown up the first day, the Big Guys wouldn’t have been watching this particular mission so closely to begin with. We’d been pulled off this case because of me, and I felt vaguely like Brooke’s mom and her superiors were dangling all of the answers just out of reach, doing the covert version of “nanny nanny boo boo!”

  The fact that the phrase nanny nanny boo boo had just crossed my mind made me briefly question my own sanity, but that didn’t change the feeling in my gut. I’d been told to stay away from this case, and what I heard was “diving into this case headfirst would rock your world.”

  I didn’t really care if the Big Guys Upstairs gave me an N on my espionage report card. I didn’t even care if I was, as Brooke had so sweetly put it earlier that day, “replaceable.” I wanted answers. I wanted to know if anyone else had even come to the same conclusion Brooke and I had about the identity of our faceless intruder. I wanted to know where Amelia Juarez was. I wanted to know if the Big Guys had a tail on her. I wanted to know when she was going to give the weapon to the firm, and what could be done to stop her. And while I was at it, I wanted to know what the CIA knew about Alan Peyton.

  After I figured all that out, I wanted to stop the bad guys, save the day, and flip Brooke’s mom the metaphorical bird.

  What can I say? I’d tried being a good little girl who didn’t hack into government databases, but that just wasn’t me. This was. I organized my plan into steps. Step One: Access Squad database. Step Two: Hack the Big Guys’ database to see what they were holding out on us. Step Three: Victorious evil laughter.

  Okay, so Step Three wasn’t exactly a step, but I figured that planning too far ahead was a waste of time. The name of the game was improvisation, and sometimes, plans just got in the way.

  “Okay,” I said. “How to access the Squad’s database…” I pondered out loud. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone up to the school. I could get into the Quad—I had the entry codes and my own key to the school, courtesy of Mr. J’s lack of foresight and natural trust of girls in uniform. But I didn’t want to go back up to the school. I was tired, and on the off chance that I had been the target of the original bomb, I didn’t think traipsing around Bayport by myself at night was the world’s best idea.

  And they say I have no impulse control, I thought wryly.

  That left me with exactly two options. I could try to hack into the system blind, which would be time-consuming and possibly futile, or I could call Chloe to see if she’d built a remote-access mechanism into my Squad-issued cell phone.

  Let’s see, I thought. Hundreds of hours worth of work, or thirty seconds on the phone with Chloe? It was a tough call and would have been even tougher if I’d thought for even a second that Chloe might turn me in. Given that she’d done some illicit hacking of her own that afternoon, I wasn’t too worried, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to this particular phone call.

  While I mulled over my choices, I pulled up a search engine and typed in Brooke’s name. And then I typed in the word gun. And then I almost hit enter, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I wasn’t really sure why. Maybe it was something about the way Zee had sounded on the phone, or maybe it was the depths of the undercurrents I’d sensed between Brooke and her mom on that particular topic. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t imagine Brooke Bow-Down-and-Worship-Me Camden being afraid of anything, let alone a weapon she’d probably been exposed to from a very young age.

  Or maybe I was just crazy. That could have been it. After all, here I was planning to hack into one of the U.S. government’s most secure databases on a whim. Again. The first time had gotten me recruited to the Squad. The second time could get me kicked off.

  Nanny nanny boo boo, I thought. And then I picked up the phone and called Chloe.

  “If you’re not calling to tell me that you’ve been horribly disfigured or had a sex-change operation, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You know, Chloe,” I said. “Most people just opt for ‘hello.’”

  She didn’t dignify that comment with a response.

  “Have you heard from Brooke?” I asked her.

  Silence. I took that as a no. I knew something that she didn’t, which just added to the resentment I could practically hear from her side of the telephone.

  “The mission didn’t go well,” I said. “We lost the weapon to an intruder—probably Amelia Juarez—and the Big Guys took us off the case.”

  I actually heard Chloe take in a sharp breath.

  “Brooke’s mom is unhappy,” I said simply.

  “I’ll call her,” Chloe said quietly. “Not her mom. Brooke.”

  Some days, it was easy to forget that the two of them were best friends, as well as rivals. Between the tone in Chloe’s voice now, and the way she’d leveled with me before our mission, today wasn’t one of those days. The two of them had been through a lot together, and if anyone understood the relationship between Brooke and her mom better than Zee, it was probably Chloe, who’d been along for the ride since she and Brooke were eleven years old.

  “You should,” I agreed. “Now, I’m going to ask you a hypothetical question.” I paused. “Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to access Squad files remotely from my room, would my cell have some kind of technology that helped me to do that?”

  “Hypothetically speaking,” Chloe said, “you’re crazy, but if you hypothetically wanted to do that, you’d set your phone to D mode, type in your passcode, and flip the switch on the very top of the phone to the far right.”

  “What’s my passcode?”

  “If I told you that,” Chloe replied, “you might actually start to think I like you. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re the hacker. Figure it out your hypothetical self.”

  She was a hypothetical bee-yotch, but she’d answered my first question, and she was going to call Brooke, and that was going to have to be enough for me.

  “Goodbye, Chloe.” I didn’t wait for a response before I hung up the phone. I followed Chloe’s instructions and immediately set about figuring out the passcode. It took me two and a half hours, and by the time I hit on the correct one, I was ready to upgrade Chloe’s status from hypothetical bee-yotch to actual to enormously huge.

  I funneled my energy into the work, selecting the files I wanted the phone to download. A warning popped up on my phone’s screen, letting me know that these files would self-destruct within two hours of download, and that I wouldn’t be able to access them from this phone again. As far as security measures went, it was a must, but in terms of my difficulties with speed-reading late at night, it was unfortunate.

  I finished selecting the pertinent files, hit the send button, and entered my passcode again. The phone started downloading, and as it did, I turned my attention back to the open window on my computer.

  Brooke Camden. Gun.

  I hit enter. The search returned too many hits, and I narrowed it down by adding one last parameter.

  Bayport.

  And there it was. A small news blurb, and below that, an obituary. I opened the blurb first, and somehow, I knew exactly what to expect.

  Christopher Camden, age thirty-two, died on Friday at Bayport General after suffering three gunshot wounds to the chest. The circumstances surrounding his death are somewhat unclear, and the BPD has no leads at this time. Camden is survived by his wife, Karen Madden Camden, and a daughter, Brooke, age four.

  The obituary was simple and sweet and said on
ly that Brooke’s father would be missed. A second news article mentioned, albeit briefly, that there had been one witness to the shooting. One guess who.

  It was no wonder that Brooke had an “aversion” to guns. I probably would have found them pretty averse if I’d seen my father killed with one, too. And her mother! How could she just sit there and act like it was something Brooke should just magically be over by now?

  If I hadn’t already decided to stick it to Brooke’s mom and the whole damn system by solving this thing myself, reading these articles would have been enough to push me in that direction. As it was, it made me view Brooke, her relationship with her mom, and her domination of our school in a whole different way.

  Mainly, though, it made me realize that if Brooke didn’t win homecoming queen because of Noah’s rare and annoyingly undiagnosable personality disorder, I’d deport him myself.

  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 se
eing. 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.”