Killer Spirit (The Squad 2)

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?”