CHAPTER 33 Code Word Fire
Code Word: Fire
Despite my postrealization, postkiss stupor, I made it out the big glass doors and into the elevator before Jack realized what (or rather, who) had hit him.
Thanks to my nimble fingers pressing the “close” button with great fervor, the elevator doors closed just as Jack started to come after me, and I made it out of the building and into the parking garage before I realized that I was completely and utterly screwed.
I hadn’t driven here. Jack had. Jack, whose father was the head of the evil law firm.
Jack, whose uncle was apparently the voice behind our orders.
I shook my head to clear it. What was with me and forgetting about Jack driving?
And I called myself a secret agent. I ran out of the garage, knowing that Jack wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind me.
Jack, who was quite possibly the best kisser known to womankind.
“Need a ride?”
If you’d told me that I would ever, ever, under any circumstances be glad to see Chloe Larson’s little red car, complete with an eye-rolling Chloe in the driver’s seat, I would have suggested you get your head checked.
But there she was, and I wasn’t about to look a gift cheerleader in the mouth.
I ran to the car like a madwoman, flung open the door, and jumped in.
“Go,” I said. “Go, go, go!”
Thrill Driver that she was, Chloe needed no more encouragement, and seconds later, we were flying down the street. Fearing for my life, I grabbed for the seat belt.
“How’d you know?” I asked. Forget what I said about the whole looking the gift cheerleader in the mouth thing.
My mind was doing some quick mental additions, and the fact that Chloe was Cheerleader Ex Number Two on the Jack front had me more than a little suspicious.
Had she been planning on crashing our nondate?
Or had she heard what I’d heard on the answering machine and thought to get me out of there fast?
“And what were you doing so close to Peyton?”
Chloe was silent for a moment, and then she fessed up. “When your video feed went dead, I got a little worried.”
Back up there, Cheer-Girl, I thought. Chloe?
Worried about me? Was this supposed to be one of those “what’s wrong with this picture?
” quizzes I used to do in the waiting room at the dentist’s office?
What had happened to Chloe Your-Mere-Presence-Offends-Me Larson? What had happened to all of her issues?
“And besides,” Chloe continued. “You alone at Peyton with Jack?” She rolled her eyes.
“You couldn’t even handle standing next to him at the party.
In case you haven’t noticed, you’re kind of new to the whole boy thing, and I thought someone needed to be here to do damage control when you had the big meltdown. ”
I read between the lines: ninety percent of Chloe had been here for the Toby-Makes-a-Fool-Out-of-Herself show (and possibly to pick up the Jack pieces after it all went down), and ten percent of her had been vaguely concerned that I might be dead or something because I’d turned off my necklace cam.
At this point, a ninety-ten split with Chloe was about as much as I could possibly ask for.
“I did not have a meltdown,” I grumbled.
Chloe didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t!” I insisted. Sharing an incredibly impassioned kiss with someone and then belting them in the stomach and pulling a runaway bride (minus the bride part) was not a meltdown.
“Did he kiss you?” Chloe’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were just a little bit lethal.
“Ummm … no.” Technically, I had kissed him.
Chloe let out a breath. “Maybe the twins are slipping,” she said. “They were positive that he was going in for the kiss before the feed died.”
I stuck as close to the truth as possible. “I sort of … errr …” I took a deep breath of my own. “I punched him in the stomach.”
“Are you demented?”
I took stock of the situation. I’d just kissed my mark, who happened to be the most eligible bachelor at my high school, the son of an evil lawyer whose name was constantly on the top of CIA watch lists, the nephew of the voice behind our operation, and the ex-boyfriend of not one, but two bloodthirsty varsity cheerleaders.
And then I’d punched him in the stomach and run.
I had to face the facts. For once, Chloe’s insult was right on target: I was obviously completely demented.
To distract her from that oh-so-apparent fact, I turned to the portion of this twisted equation that didn’t have me still going disgustedly weak at the knees.
“Jack’s uncle.” That was all I got out, all I was able to say.
“What about him?”
If Chloe knew something, she wasn’t telling, but that didn’t enlighten me at all as to whether or not she knew, because even if she did, Chloe would make me dig for it.
“His voice.” Why was it I could only manage two-word sentences? Was this some kind of postkiss affliction?
“What about it?” Chloe wasn’t giving an inch.
This time, I tried for three words. “I recognized it.”
I half expected her to say “what about it?” but she didn’t. Instead, without even looking at me, she said, “No, you didn’t.”
The way she said it made me even more convinced that I had.
“Yes, I did.”
“No.” Chloe’s voice was sharper this time. “You didn’t.”
Sure, I thought. I didn’t recognize the voice, just like I didn’t kiss Jack.
A lie for a lie. When Chloe turned off the highway a second later, I realized that we weren’t headed back to the party, or toward my house.
I couldn’t quite imagine her being all gung ho on girl bonding time given the mounting tension in the car, so I was pretty sure we weren’t going back to her house for a sleepover. That didn’t leave too many options.
“Where are we going?”
Chloe didn’t answer. Now that I’d told her that Jack hadn’t kissed me, and she’d refused to offer me any real answers to the questions I wanted to ask about Jack’s uncle, I had ceased to matter and was more or less invisible.
“Chloe!”
“Where do you think we’re going?” Chloe asked. “While you were flirting—badly, I might add—with Jack Peyton, I was at the party, monitoring your mission and tying up ends on the Infotech case.”
Ends? What ends? If things had gone according to plan, I’d more or less trashed their system. I’d also downloaded all of their encrypted files, so really …
“The files.” My mouth thought faster than my brain did.
“Did you decode them?” If she was looking for a way to distract me from the voice I had most definitely recognized, she’d found it.
I wasn’t sure which answer I was hoping for, but it mattered to me.
A yes meant that we’d be able to know for sure if any other aliases had been compromised.
It would also give me the chance to poke around in whatever program they’d been using to hack the CIA, and the thought had me practically salivating.
On the other hand, a yes might also mean that Chloe had somehow decoded them, and despite the fact that she’d rescued me (however inadvertently) from impending postkiss doom, the thought of Chloe decoding my files made me want to punch something.
If, on the other hand, the answer to my question was a no, I might actually get the chance to decode the files myself.
“The Guys Upstairs took care of the decode,” Chloe said.
The Big Guys. Aka Jack’s freaking uncle. I had to wonder—what did that say about the Big Guys? The law firm was a family business, so much so that Jack had his own key. If one of our superiors was part of that family, why did he need me to go in and plant the bug?
I didn’t mull over the questions; they were so enormous in my mind that they pretty much mulled over me. Chloe whipped her car into a parking space, and we made our way into the school, to which Chloe had her own set of keys.
“The perks of working for the government,” I said, my heart only half in it, as the rest of it was still being mulled.
Chloe smirked. “Our faculty sponsor is Mr. J,” she said. “I told him we needed keys, and he gave them to me and told me not to tell anyone. I swear, that’s one vice-principal who worships cheerleaders.”
That was so totally wrong. There had to be something highly illegal (or at least against school board mandates) about giving keys to the school to teenage cheerleaders.
Then again, this was Bayport, the land of evil law firms and CIA agents with questionable connections and boys I’d kissed who I shouldn’t have. In the scheme of things, everything was relative.
Chloe and I went to the Quad through the locker room, and five minutes later, we were in the main room, and summaries from the decoded files were on the larger-than-life flat-screen.
We sat in silence for a full five minutes, taking in the reports and working them over in our tech-savvy minds.
This was probably the closest Chloe and I would ever come to bonding.
“Huh,” I said finally. “So that’s how they did it.”
“They had an inside tech source with low-security clearance who opened a back door for them, and since they designed the beta version of the security program, they were able to belly up to the rest of the system.” Chloe blew a strand of highlighted hair out of her face. “That’s totally cheating.”
I had to agree—with a freebie entry into part of the system and knowledge of the way the whole thing was set up, breaking the newer codes wasn’t that impressive. Hacking is like finding your way through a labyrinth, and those Infotech weasels had a tour guide and a map.
I found myself looking at Chloe out of the corners of my eyes. First the bonding, and now complete Toby-Chloe agreement. What was the world coming to?
“So what now?” I asked.
Chloe shrugged. “Now we let the big guys do what they do.”
“And that would be …?”
That was the exact moment when the techie bonding ended. “What do you think?” she said. “They’ll make some arrests, reconfigure the security system, and try to figure out a way to implicate Peyton as the conduit between Heath Shannon and Infotech.”
From the way Chloe said the word try, I got the feeling that pinning anything on the law firm might prove difficult. It more or less figured. I mean, every group of cheerleading superspies has to have their archenemy, right?
If only I hadn’t kissed the archenemy’s heir apparent. Or punched him in the stomach. Or led Chloe to believe that my lips had never touched his. Or found out that our archenemy and our big boss might be one and the same.
If only, I thought, I hadn’t enjoyed doing almost all of the above.
“Are we done here?” I asked. Our case was over—the operatives were safe, Heath Shannon was in custody, and Infotech had been shut down indefinitely.
Add to that the fact that I’d just bugged Peyton and ignore what I’d discovered about the Voice, and I was going to go out on a limb and call this operation a success.
That said, I, for one, had no burning desire to spend any more time than necessary inside Bayport High.
For most of my high school existence, I’d made it my mission in life to spend as little time inside these hallowed halls as possible. Go Bayport.
“Got someplace better to be?” Chloe asked.
“It’s been a long night,” I said, unimpressed by her scoffing. “Need I remind you that I xeroxed my butt to plant the bug at Peyton?” I gave Chloe a look of my own. “Or that for some godforsaken reason, I’m wearing a thong?”
Oh, the indignity of it all.
“Trust me,” I said. “You do not want to mess with me right now.”
Chloe, showing a remarkable amount of restraint, turned off the television, locked down the Quad, and drove me home. In a move worthy of an evil genius, she exacted her revenge for my “don’t mess with me” spiel by playing bubblegum pop music full blast the entire way.
Point, Chloe.
As she pulled up to my house, she smiled sweetly. “Don’t forget,” she said. “Tomorrow’s a game day. You should probably listen to the playlist tonight. You don’t want to look completely uncoordinated on the field.”
I translated her tone to mean that looking partially uncoordinated was the most I could hope for. Anxious to get away from both Chloe and the “music” in the car, I reached for the door, but Chloe spoke again.
“Oh, and by the way,” she said. “Your little brother said to tell you that you greatly underestimate his incredible appeal to the fairer sex. I think the twins were putting ideas in his head.”
I was going to kill Noah. And the twins. And possibly Chloe. It would be therapeutic, really.
I opened the car door.
“Sweet dreams,” Chloe said.
I came this close to telling her I’d made out with Jack, but I didn’t. I was almost positive I could take her in the catfight that would ensue, but then we’d be one short for our halftime performance, and my head was going to explode if I had to memorize a new formation.
I walked up to my front door, and when I reached for the doorknob, the door flew inward. Noah stood there, smiling at me.
“Ask me how my night was,” he said.
I looked over my shoulder. Chloe was gone, but wherever she was, I was positive she was smirking in victory.
“Toby, just ask me,” Noah ordered. “Or better yet, touch me.”
“Noah, I’m not going to—”
“Just touch me.”
I reached my hand out to thwap some sense into him, but he jumped back. “Careful,” he said. “Don’t burn yourself, ’cause I’m on fiiiiiiiiiiire!”
And then he broke into a victory dance, moonwalk and all.
When I got my hands on them, Brittany and Tiffany were dead girls.