Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “We have no way of knowing if this is a trap.” Chloe kept her voice calm, but I could sense the antagonism coming off of her in waves. “For all we know, Peyton put her up to this to confirm some suspicion they had about you.”

  I couldn’t miss the emphasis on the last word. Amelia had come to me. She had made me. She’d referred to the others, had alluded to our cheerleading outfits, but she hadn’t explicitly identified them.

  “This isn’t a trap,” I said. “And I don’t think Amelia Juarez has ever really worked for anyone other than herself. She knows who we are. She could have gone straight to Peyton with it. She didn’t.” I looked at each person at the table. “And if we play her little game, she won’t.”

  This was it. Either they believed me, or we were screwed.

  “If she’s telling the truth about Connors-Wright having the nanobots—and I think she is—then we can’t afford not to go. Amelia’s playing a dangerous game, and I honestly have no idea what she’ll do with this technology, or who she’ll sell it to, if we don’t beat her to it.”

  Absolute silence greeted my words. If Amelia acquired the nanobots and sold them, then virtually unstoppable assassination technology would be in the hands of terrorists. First they’d study it and attempt to replicate it, but eventually, they’d use it, and somebody important to our national security would die.

  I looked around the table, willing the others to snap out of their horrified states and agree. When they all remained silent, I tried to prod them into talking. “Besides, what do we have to lose?”

  Brooke snorted. “Says the girl who hacked into their system last night,” she said. The message was clear: I didn’t have much to lose. “Do you have any idea how pissed they’re going to be about that?”

  She was totally missing the point. Either we trusted that Amelia would play by the rules of her own sick little game, or we didn’t, and if we didn’t, we were beyond screwed anyway. “The Big Guys are going to be mad I hacked them? Allow me to pretend that I care.” I paused.

  “Not very convincing,” Tara said mildly.

  I shrugged. “That hurts, Tara. Right here.” I tapped my heart, and Tara stifled a giggle.

  “Tell you what, Toby.” Brooke oozed condescension.

  “We’ll look into Connors-Wright’s father. I’d be surprised if he’s even stationed in Bayport right now.”

  “And if he is?” I pressed.

  “If he is, then we’ll see.”

  At least she was saying “we” instead of “you.” That seemed to indicate that she hadn’t mentally kicked me off the Squad. Yet.

  At the head of the table, Brooke typed in a few short commands and brought up the records for operative individuals currently residing in or visiting Bayport, and as the names flashed across the screen, it occurred to me that the elder Connors-Wright wasn’t the only person we should be looking for.

  “Whoever stole our target out from underneath us yesterday was good,” I said. “Operative-level good, and if it’s the same person, they managed to blow up Kann’s car without leaving much of a trail. If it wasn’t one of the TCIs, what are the chances that it was another operative?”

  “A rogue operative?” Brooke was nothing if not skeptical. “You really think there’s a rogue operative in Bayport? And that this rogue operative somehow knew about the weapon, piggybacked on our mission to steal it, and then, out of the goodness of his or her heart, gave it to Anthony Connors-Wright so he could waste it on his father?”

  “You got a better explanation?”

  Brooke stared me down. “Yes. Amelia played you like a fiddle, and for reasons we can’t wrap our minds around, she wants us at that park this afternoon.”

  Her words and tone poked holes in my confidence, but as I replayed the scene with Amelia the day before, I couldn’t deny the fact that I still believed Amelia, one hundred percent. She was crazy and she seriously needed to find a hobby that didn’t involve becoming a criminal mastermind, but she hadn’t lied to me. She hadn’t needed to. Rather than making this argument again, I tried the tactic Amelia had taken with me the night before and went with incontrovertible logic. “What about the fact that Amelia couldn’t have remotely detonated the bomb, that none of the TCIs could have?”

  “We can check that out, too,” Tara volunteered. “We’ll have to go back over our video and audio surveillance. There’s a chance we might not have noticed a remote-detonating mechanism.”

  “We should also recheck phone records,” Chloe volunteered. “Any of the TCIs could have hired someone to detonate the bomb.”

  Darn them and their logic. Why hadn’t I thought of it the night before? Why hadn’t I poked holes in Amelia’s claims the way the rest of the Squad was poking holes in mine? The only answer I could come up with was that every instinct I had told me that Amelia had been exactly what she’d seemed. Psychotic, but truthful. “Run the data all you want,” I said, “but if it checks out, then we do something about it.”

  As I waited for a response, I brought my hand up to my left shoulder and scratched absentmindedly.

  This really wasn’t my morning: itchy shoulder, no coffee, antagonism aplenty, and nobody believed a word I was saying. I scratched harder.

  “Ummmm…are you okay, Toby?” Lucy asked, her voice tentative. “You look…uncomfortable,” she finished diplomatically.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “My shoulder itches.”

  Beside me, Tara leaned closer. “It’s awfully red,” she said.

  “I’ve been scratching.” This had to be the most inane cheerleading operative conversation that had ever taken place. Before it could move forward at all, I suggested we turn our attention to the flat-screen, and all of us began scanning the list for Connors-Wright’s name.

  Nothing.

  I barely registered the I-told-you-so expression that flitted across Brooke’s face. “Ummmm…Toby?”

  “Ummmm…Lucy?” I answered.

  “Your shoulder is kind of, you know, pink now.”

  Hadn’t we already established this?

  “Like neon pink.”

  I looked down. My shoulder was hot, hot pink. I might have handled that better on a day when I’d had some caffeine, but in retrospect, probably not.

  “What the hell did you two put in that shower gel?” I sent the twins dart eyes.

  “You actually used the shower gel?” Tiffany asked, impressed. “We thought you’d smuggled in some sucky soap or something, because your scent matrix has been kind of…”

  Was she trying to say that I smelled? And, on a related note, did she want me to kill her? These were very important questions, but they weren’t nearly as important as the one I’d just asked.

  “Shoulder,” I prompted. “Pink. Why?”

  “It’s a security thing,” Brittany said. “The shower gel has these special chemical thingies in it, and they react and turn different colors for different things.” She turned to her twin. “What’s pink again?”

  “Something electronic, I think,” Tiff said, wrinkling her nose. “Like maybe a bug?”

  “No,” Brittany said. “Bug is blue, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “It has to be a chip of some kind then, right?”

  They seemed to be approaching this whole conversation with the same solemnity with which they considered fall colors. No more, no less.

  Brooke, however, snapped to attention. “Somebody get a scalpel. Now.”

  If you’ve never heard a cheerleading captain speak these words, then you have never felt true terror. A scalpel? And just what was she planning on scalpeling? Because she had to know that I wasn’t letting her come anywhere near me with something of the sharp and pointy variety.

  Lucy with the knives had been more than enough.

  “Got one!” Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Miss Knives-Are-Interesting had a scalpel handy. I wasn’t going to ask about that. I really didn’t want to know.

  “Who do you want cutting it out?”


  “Cutting what out? There will be no cutting! None. Lucy, step away from the scalpel.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes and handed the scalpel to Tara.

  “You have a chip in your shoulder,” Tara said softly, like she was talking a stray puppy out from underneath a car. “Most likely a tracking chip of some kind, just below the skin. The shower gel reacts to certain alloy metals and electrical currents. That’s why you’re itching, and that’s why your shoulder’s pink. You’ve been tagged.”

  Okay, now this day officially sucked.

  “We have to take it out, Toby. For all we know, someone may be tracking you to the Quad as we speak.”

  I didn’t respond. I was too busy thinking. There was a chip in my shoulder. A chip in my freaking shoulder. A freaking chip in my freaking shoulder. Someone was tracking my movements.

  “Amelia may be tracking you to the Quad as we speak.” Brooke amended her original statement.

  “She never touched me. She never even came close to me. She was across the room the entire time. She couldn’t have done this.”

  In the privacy of my own mind, I came up with an alternative theory. Not one, but two of the missions I’d gone on in the past two days had gone badly, both times because of the presence of a third party. Someone had blown up Kann’s car, and someone had stolen the nanobots. I’d wondered how the intruder could possibly be an unknown player, how they could have known to come to Ross’s lab, and now I knew.

  Whoever the figure in black was, I’d led them straight to the TCIs. Straight to the weapon. Some independent operative had tagged me to piggyback on our operation, and now that person had some seriously scary technology. And, to add salt to the wound, if I’d used the twins’ stupid shower gel before now, we might have discovered this fact before we’d lost the nanobots and before the aforementioned figure had sold them to Anthony Connors-Wright.

  “Got it.” Tara’s words snapped me back to reality, and I realized that she’d already made a small incision in my skin, so small that it barely bled and didn’t hurt until I realized that it should have.

  “Chloe.” Brooke didn’t say more than Chloe’s name, but our gadget girl snapped into motion, and carefully bagged the chip, leading me to question whether or not she typically carried evidence bags around in her sports bra.

  “I’m on it,” Chloe said. “I’ll have the sample analyzed by lunchtime at the latest.” She smiled half of an ironic grin. “Guess our stunting technique is going to have to wait.”

  “Our stunting technique is already flawless,” Brooke said. “Right now, we have other priorities.”

  Sure, I thought. I got blackmailed by a TCI, and Brooke was all about practicing our cradles, but the moment it turned out that I had a tracker chip in my shoulder, she admitted that we’d already outpracticed ourselves. It figured.

  Everyone else was so concentrated on the chip that I was the only one who noticed when the data on the screen in front of us changed. A second, automatic search had just revealed that Anthony Connors-Wright’s father was in Bayport, protecting a senator who was scheduled to speak at four that afternoon.

  Without a word, Chloe set about examining the chip from my shoulder, and the others went back over our files, looking for evidence that Amelia had led me astray.

  Then one by one, they reported back, confirming everything Amelia had told me.

  I took in the information and came to my own conclusion. “Game on.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Code Word: Issues

  I’d finally talked the others into stepping up and accepting Amelia’s challenge, but nothing I’d said could dissuade Brooke from trying to get authorization to do so. As she pointed out, Amelia had said that we couldn’t tell our superiors what she’d told us, or what we were doing. She never said we couldn’t make up a reason why we needed to be reinstated on the case.

  “Hi…Mom? It’s me. Listen, there’s been a development on the thing.” Brooke paused, and walked away from the rest of us a little. “You know, the thing thing.”

  I could hear the voice from the other end of the phone, but couldn’t make out the words. Based on whatever Mrs. Camden said, Brooke dropped the cheer-tone in her voice and switched over to operative mode without so much as a bat of her eyelashes. “We’ve reanalyzed all of the data we collected during the course of this case, and we have reason to believe that somebody should still be keeping an eye on—”

  This time, the voice from the other end was louder, and I wondered what exactly it was that finally got a verbal rise out of Brooke’s mother, despite her I’m-just-a-sweet-PTA-mom façade.

  “We think there may be more to this weapon than previously realized, and that it would behoove us to have as much surveillance on the TCIs as possible until…”

  Brooke frowned as she listened to the other end. “What do I want you to do? I want you to get us back on this, or short of that, to tell your bosses that we could be looking at something major here.”

  Hearing Brooke talk to her mother that way cheered me up significantly. She’d just lain down and taken it the day before. At least now she was arguing.

  “Yes, I’m aware that the votes for homecoming are cast tomorrow, Moth-er.” Brooke broke the last word down into two syllables. “But—”

  More talking from the other end of the line.

  “What’s wrong with my hair?” Brooke asked plaintively. Then she let out a breath. “What about the extra security?” she asked. “Can you at least…no, I’m not going to hire a bunch of freshman boys to pretend to be pirates. I don’t care how effective you think that would be. Are you even listening to me?”

  I think everyone present knew the answer to that question was a resounding no.

  “In that case,” Brooke said tersely, “I have to go. First period’s getting ready to start, and I have to look my best.”

  And with those words, Brooke hung up the phone. “She wouldn’t listen to a word I said, and apparently, all of their resources have been relocated to the airport. They got an anonymous tip this morning.”

  I was willing to bet a lot of money the tip in question had come from Amelia herself. This was her game, and she was making damn sure that we played it her way.

  “So they wouldn’t even sign off on us tailing a TCI they think is harmless?”

  Brooke shook her head.

  “Can’t you go over her head on this?” I asked. “I mean, we could contact the real Big Guys.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to think of Brooke’s mom as the end-all-be-all of the Big Guy decision task force. She and Brooke had so many mommy-daughter issues clouding their relationship that it was practically raining passive aggression.

  “I could,” Brooke said, “but if we go over her head and it turns out to be nothing…” She trailed off. “And besides, if I were to officially report in, I’d probably have to clue them in to the fact that your position has been compromised. Twice.”

  Once by Amelia, once by whoever had tagged me. When she put it that way, I decided that contacting the Really Big Guys probably wasn’t a good idea. Brooke had refrained from mentioning the chip literally in my shoulder to her mother, probably as a subtle way of avenging her hair against her mother’s criticism. Eventually, she’d tell someone about it, but I knew enough about the way this system worked to know that it would be in my best interest if no one knew that I’d been tagged until after we’d isolated the person who’d seen past my cover, which was now next on my To Do list after taking down Connors-Wright and Amelia, in that order.

  Otherwise, I might not have to worry about revisiting all of my homecoming issues by the time prom rolled around, because if my cover was permanently blown, I wouldn’t still be on the Squad. If there even was a Squad.

  “Even if we take Amelia down, if we don’t find the person who stole the weapon in the first place, I’m screwed.” There wasn’t a person in the room who hadn’t already come to this realization, which was saying something, since Bubbles and the twins perpetually had t
heir heads in the clouds. “And the only lead we have on that person is the bomb, the list of operatives in Bayport, and the fact that there aren’t many people in this world who can touch me and walk away in one piece.”

  “We’ll deal with that later. Right now, we have to concentrate on Amelia,” Chloe said, “because if the unthinkable happens and it turns out that you actually aren’t an idiot and Amelia was being straight with you, then we really don’t have a choice. The Big Guys aren’t going to stop Connors-Wright from using the weapon, and they’re not going to stop Amelia from stealing it. Besides, if Amelia steals the weapon, who’s to say Connors-Wright won’t go ahead with his plan anyway and just shoot somebody?”

  The others nodded in agreement—every single one of them. I chose to believe that they were agreeing with Chloe’s general assessment, and not the tone with which it was delivered. No one on the Squad wanted to see what would happen if Anthony worked out his Daddy Issues in a very public, very violent way. It went against the unspoken moral code of cheerleading operatives. Rumor mongering? Morally acceptable. Murder and mayhem—not so much.

  “We have to do something.” Brooke said the words quietly, as if she wished she wasn’t saying them. Despite the fact that she’d tried to stand up to her mother, this was taking Brooke Independence to a completely unprecedented degree. If things went badly, it was her head on the chopping block, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than knowing that your own mother would be the executioner.

  Brooke breathed out heavily, and then she seemed to realize that she was breaking her own rule and showing way more weakness (if by weakness, you meant actual feeling) than she ever had before. “New plan,” she said. “Zee and I are going after Connors-Wright. Amelia said we couldn’t take him down until three. She didn’t say anything about tailing him. Chloe, you find out whatever you can about the chip, and we’ll keep you on constant radio contact. Britt and Tiff, I want you two to get as close as you can to the politician Connors-Wright’s father is guarding. A bodyguard will never be far away from his charge, and the good senator doesn’t have any public appearances scheduled before the press conference. I’m sure he’ll make an exception for his local fan club, especially when the fan club is…” Brooke just gestured to the twins.