CHAPTER 8 Code Word Come Hither
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 senior 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.