Killer Spirit (The Squad 2)

I followed Tara through the lobby and into the elevator, a smile plastered to my face. She hit the fourth floor, and then when a man and a woman hopped on at the last second, she hit several more buttons.

The couple looked at us oddly, but we just stared back, wide-eyed. After a few moments, the man’s expression turned from questioning to something slightly more lascivious, but a sharp elbow to his gut (his wife’s doing, not mine) snapped him out of it. A few seconds after that lovely exchange, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, but following Tara’s lead, I stayed put. The door closed. The couple got off at the sixth floor, and we rode the elevator up to the seventh.

I was a quick enough study that I didn’t have to ask Tara what the deal was with our extracurricular elevator riding. Stealth was the name of the game. Even though we existed beneath the veil of the cheerleading stereotype, getting off on Jacob Kann’s floor in front of witnesses might have been pushing things, especially if the worst happened and someone figured out that we’d broken into the room.

We took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and once there, Tara zeroed in on a maid cart. She glanced around for the cart’s owner, and seeing that he was suitably occupied, Tara grabbed two towels and a trash bag off the cart, and then unceremoniously jerked me back into the stairwell.

“Tell me if anyone’s coming,” she said, and before I knew what was happening, she’d wrapped one of the towels around her body, and underneath the towel, she began taking off her clothes.

Within seconds, Tara had stripped completely and the only thing standing in between her and being naked was the skimpy hotel towel. She folded her uniform, stuck it in the trash bag, and stashed the bag just out of sight, behind a potted plant.

“Your turn,” she said.

“My what?” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Because if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you might want to invest in some kind of straitjacket. Maybe a padded cell. Some electroshock therapy…”

“You can stay here if you really want to,” Tara said sweetly, “but I thought you might want to take a quick stab at his computer.”

She was playing dirty, and she knew it. A guy with terrorist connections up to no good probably had some hard-core security on his laptop, and there was absolutely nothing I loved more in this world than poking around in systems specifically designed to keep me out.

Tara handed me a towel, and I flashed back to her telling me that we wouldn’t be wearing our uniforms for long.

“Is there a reason we have to do this naked?” I grumbled.

Tara shrugged. “The other options are hacking into the hotel computer system and programming our own cards….”

Ooooh, that sounded like fun.

“Which we would have had to do from Chloe’s lab, where our keycard programming equipment is—”

Drat.

“And finding a way into one of the other rooms, going out the window, and crawling on a fourth-story ledge over to Jacob’s room.”

I glanced at the towel and then back at Tara. “Let’s do that one.”

She rolled her eyes. “Our intel says the maid for this floor is a guy,” she said. “I guarantee you he has keys to all of the rooms.”

The and I guarantee you he won’t be able to deny two towel-clad cheerleaders their heart’s desire went unspoken. I may have been new at this, but I wasn’t stupid. I saw where the whole towel thing was going.

“Are we sure Kann isn’t in his room?” I asked, making one last effort at avoiding the inevitable.

Tara smiled. “He’s in the hotel bar. We passed him on the way in, and he’d just ordered a fresh drink.”

Sometimes, the observation skills of cheerleaders amazed me. These very skills also tended to force me to do things that I really didn’t want to do, like strip in the stairwell of a local hotel, but there are some forms of logic that you just can’t argue with.

“For the record,” I said, resigning myself to my fate and wrapping the towel around my body, “when I said I’d rather walk around naked than wear this stupid uniform, I was being facetious.”

CHAPTER 8

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.