Killer Spirit (The Squad 2)

Beyond that, the only information I immediately gleaned from our database was the fact that the Big Guys had actually sent us an official electronic cease and desist order. If they thought that would in any way deter me, they clearly weren’t paying their profilers enough.

I scanned through the rest of our files, looking for anything that might tip me off to what Amelia Juarez planned to do next. I read Amelia’s profile again and again, looking for a clue about who exactly Amelia was and wishing that I had Zee’s uncanny ability to make outlandish, but accurate, predictions based only on personality indices, body language, facial expressions, and what she referred to as an individual’s background/environmental matrix.

As I read over Amelia’s files, I kept coming to the same conclusions over and over again. She was smart. She came from a dangerous family. She wanted to prove that she was more than just the baby and the only girl. And somehow, that had led her to Bayport, to working for Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, and—if she really was the one who’d crashed our last mission—to stealing a top-secret, high-tech biological weapon. I tried my best to convert the facts into numbers, to solve the equation that would tell me where to find her and how to stop her, but again and again, I came up with a whole lot of nothing.

Oh well, I thought with a wicked grin. On to Step Two.

Hacking the United States government was so much fun.

A mere forty-five minutes later, I was in. I’d like to claim that I’m a genius—and I am—but if I’m being perfectly honest, it didn’t hurt that I still had access to the Squad’s mainframe and that the mainframe and the Big Guys’ systems were configured to file-share, even if there were some major firewalls in place on their side of things. With a flick of my wrist, the sweat of my brow, and what I can only describe as the hacking hokeypokey, I managed to locate the exact system portal that I needed to hack. After that, it was just a matter of using a few of my pet programs—all of which I’d designed myself—to force my way into a system that should have been impenetrable.

It was almost as if the Big Guys wanted me to hack them.

Since I had the distinct feeling that my presence wouldn’t go undetected for long, I set several of my decrypt-and-search programs to looking at once, and before I got booted out of the system, I managed to access their file on the current case (shockingly easy—perhaps because they’d originally planned on sharing it with us to begin with?). I wasn’t entirely sure that the files weren’t encrypted with something that would crash my computer, but luckily, Bessie (my laptop) was a tough old girl.

She and I had a lot in common.

As I read through the files I’d managed to borrow (steal is such an ugly word), I came to a disturbing conclusion. High school cheerleaders are much better at writing intelligible reports than government operatives are. Reading the government files was like trying to read a book with the plot of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (worst book ever, and one of the English department’s faves) that just happened to be written by a dyslexic Viking writing in iambic pentameter.

In other words, it was worse than trying to read Ross’s dissertation, and this time, I didn’t have Chloe to translate. Piece by piece, bit by bit, I managed to parse what I was reading into something more manageable, and slowly, what the Big Guys had been up to since we’d been pulled off the case became clear.

They’d apprehended Ross, as well as the three security goons, run interference with the local cops to prevent a formal investigation, and confirmed through interviews and a variety of anonymous sources that no one had made a connection between the chaos and any cookie-peddling cheerleaders in the near vicinity. Ross and his cohorts were being interrogated, and they were slated to later have their memories chemically altered. By the time the Big Guys were finished, nobody would remember that Brooke and I had been in Ross’s office, except for the mysterious figure in black who’d caught me red-handed.

The Big Guys hadn’t yet positively ID’d the intruder, but the dominant theory did seem to be that it was Amelia Juarez, working on behalf of Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. The firm was under constant surveillance, with upward of eight teams ready to swarm in the second Amelia appeared within a five-mile radius of the “hot zone.”

Additionally, the Big Guys were working on “minimizing the threat” posed by the “loss” of the biotechnology. Their motto was more or less “Contain! Contain! Contain!” They wanted this threat contained to Bayport, and they wanted it done yesterday. As such, they were keeping a close watch on all of the airports and bus stations, and they’d set up roadblocks on the way out of town.

“Okay,” I said out loud, “you’re making sure Amelia can’t get through to Peyton and that she doesn’t get out of town, but where is she now?”

The most disturbing thing about reading the Big Guys’ files wasn’t the complete lack of writing skills; it was the fact that they didn’t have an answer to my question. They knew Amelia wasn’t at Peyton, and they knew she hadn’t skipped town, but beyond that, they weren’t even looking.

In my twisted mind, all of this information led clearly to a single conclusion, a solution as clear as 4 to 2 + 2. The Big Guys could watch Peyton. They could contain! contain! contain! to their hearts’ content. That wasn’t enough for me. The costs of this mission had been huge. Too much had happened for me to just shrug it off. Somebody had killed Jacob Kann. Somebody had stolen a weapon I’d been sent to retrieve. Between the explosion, the car last night, and the security gorilla with a gun this afternoon, I’d had not one, not two, but three near-death experiences while on this case.

I didn’t want to contain the threat. I wanted to eliminate it, and that meant finding Amelia Juarez, even if I had to do it myself.

“Somehow, I pictured you being bigger.”

The voice shocked me out of my almost meditative state of thought. It was light and female and coming from directly behind me.

Please, I thought, let that be Bubbles.

I swiveled around in my chair, and a girl—no, a woman—with dark, glossy hair and even brown eyes stared back at me.

For a single instant, I stopped breathing, and my mind refused to process what I was seeing. Soon, though, it became perfectly clear. I didn’t need to find Amelia Juarez. She’d found me.

“What are you doing here?” I kept my voice low, lest Noah burst into my room and attempt to flirt with someone who would in all likelihood kill him for the effort.