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I guess she felt more strongly about this Jack thing than I’d realized.
“You know that thing Tara and Zee were doing?” Brooke said.
I nodded.
“Well, they kinda lost it.”
Lost it? As in lost their mark? As in a TCI was out there, completely unsupervised, quite possibly acquiring a weapon we really didn’t want her to have?
“Yeah,” Brooke said, her voice conveying so much pissed-offedness that I got the feeling that the safest thing to do would be to back away slowly. “They lost it.”
I didn’t have to ask if the twins had lost Amelia as well. Despite Brooke’s calm outward appearance, she was freaking out, and that meant that things were bad.
Brooke’s fingers flew across the keys of her cell, and I wondered if she was giving instructions to the others, or if she was reporting the situation to the Big Guys. I wondered that right up until I saw a green sedan pulling into the parking garage across the street.
“Brooke,” I said, throwing caution to the wind. “What color is You Know Who’s car?”
Hopefully, if anyone was listening to me, they’d be up on their Harry Potter slang and think I was talking about Voldemort.
“Green,” Brooke said, and then she followed my gaze.
I recognized the license plate. My memory for numbers never failed me, and I knew even before Brooke confirmed it that something completely unexpected had happened. The other teams had lost their TCI, and we’d found her.
At Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.
CHAPTER 19
Code Word: Fun, Fun, Fun
My first instinct was to bolt across the street and fling myself at Amelia Juarez the second she stepped out of her car, hence preventing her from entering the Peyton building and bringing this entire mission to a crashing halt. Brooke’s first instinct was to make sure that I didn’t engage in mine. She grabbed onto my ponytail in the stealthiest of all possible ways and literally held me back. She didn’t say a word, she just stood there, holding my hair like a leash and silently compelling me to heel, while she listened to the audio feed coming in through the earpiece in her right ear. Then her cell phone rang, and she quickly traded the communicator for another type of secure line—one that would allow her to talk back.
“Hello?” She said, tightening her grip on my ponytail with one hand as she flipped her ringing phone open with the other. “Hey! OMG, I haven’t talked to you in so long. What’s up?”
If I hadn’t been almost positive that she was talking to our bosses, I would have been completely fooled by the tone and content of her words. “Really? That’s like so awesome. You must be so psyched!”
I tried to imagine what listening to both sides of this conversation would have been like, Uncle Alan or one of his colleagues imparting crucial information in an overly serious tone, and Brooke responding like a Valley girl, heavy on the Valley.
“Do you want me to call him for you? Ask him if he’s interested? Because I can totally do that for you. It’s not a proble—” Brooke stopped talking abruptly. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I get it. You don’t need my help on this one. That’s cool.”
Brooke loosened her hold on my hair, but I curtailed my ongoing impulse to dive into the action headfirst for two reasons. First, Amelia Juarez was no longer in my sight and was, in all likelihood, already inside. And second, unless I was reading too much into Brooke’s side of this conversation, there was a distinct chance that we’d been called off this case.
Brooke flipped her cell shut and confirmed what I’d suspected. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride back to the school.”
Just like that? We’d been staked out here all day, and now that something had finally happened, we were leaving?
Recon sucked.
Brooke picked up what was left of her Chinese carryout and threw it in the closest garbage can. I followed suit. If this had been the movies, we would have been passing on some secret information in the remains of our chow mein, but this was life, and trash was just trash. If anyone happened to suspect that we were more than what we seemed and came to check up on it, all they would have found was a bunch of half-eaten noodles and a fortune cookie that promised me an exciting future.
Apparently, the fortune cookie lied.
Brooke and I gathered our bags, and I couldn’t help but cast a longing glance over my shoulder. I’d nearly made my way onto the casualty list working this case. Didn’t that buy me anything with the Big Guys? Brooke and I could have stopped Amelia from going to that meeting. We could have prevented it.
“Toby, just let it go. We’re cheerleaders. That’s all.”
That was probably the biggest lie any member of the Squad had ever told, but I tried to dig through the crap to get to Brooke’s meaning. The best I could come up with was the fact that the firm couldn’t ever know we were more than cheerleaders. If we blew our cover to the one enemy our operation was maintained to watch, the Squad would be demoted to mere cheerleaderdom in a heartbeat.
In retrospect, it was probably a good thing Brooke had held onto my hair.
Given the amount of mental processing I was doing, there is a slight chance that I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was going, and as Brooke and I crossed the street, I found myself stepping out onto the road, in front of oncoming traffic. I jumped back, startled into paying attention, but almost instantly, a minivan barreling down the road swerved toward me. I stood there on the sidewalk, in complete denial that the van was no longer on the road, and the nanosecond before I would have jumped out of the way myself, Brooke flying tackled me, pushing me out of the car’s path. The two of us fell, a tangled mess of limbs on the ground, but at least this time, I didn’t hit my head.
“You okay?” Brooke asked me.
I nodded, and as we stood up, I glanced down the street.
The van was gone.
“Let’s go.” Brooke didn’t seem to be quite as affected by my second brush with death in as many days as I was.
“That person almost hit me. I was on the sidewalk, and they almost hit me.”
“Probably a drunk driver,” Brooke said, “though don’t ask me who hits the bottle on a Wednesday at nine.”
As we walked to Brooke’s car, I kept seeing the van speeding at me, kept feeling myself freezing, and for some reason, the part of the experience that my brain insisted on dwelling on the most was the fact that I’d now been flying tackled by other members of the Squad twice. I was well on my way to getting sacked more often than any of our Neanderthal football players.
