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“Brooke doesn’t know, does she?” I asked the question in a voice every bit as quiet as the one Chloe had used a moment before.
“I just told you that she can’t know about this,” Chloe snapped.
“Not about this,” I said. “About Jack’s uncle. She doesn’t know.”
I’d assumed that when it came to the Squad what Chloe knew Brooke knew, but the way Chloe’s lips tightened at my question was enough of an answer to tell me that I’d assumed wrong.
Brooke didn’t have a clue that one of the Big Guys was a Peyton. Apparently, Uncle Alan’s identity was an even bigger secret than I’d thought.
“There you guys are!” Bubbles popped out of the woodwork. I hadn’t even heard her come into the lab. “Brooke’s looking for you guys. You missed the debriefy thingy! We’re ready to go on Operation Cheer Scout, and you guys still need to hit the salon.”
If Bubbles had heard Chloe’s monologue, she didn’t give any indication of it. She tilted her head to the side and wrinkled her nose, looking almost comically quizzical. “What are you guys doing up here anyway?”
The intensity that had been clear on Chloe’s face seconds before melted away, and she smirked at me and then provided Bubbles with a cover story that wasn’t amusing in the least.
“Toby begged me to give her some tips on SDA.”
CHAPTER 22
Code Word: Crazy!
After leaving the twins’ beauty lab, I had confirmed my lurking suspicions that I preferred the makeunder to its high-ponytailed, perky, extra-highlights-in-my-hair, paw-print-drawn-on-my-cheek counterpart. I also discovered that this uniform, which showed a substantial portion of my midriff, was even more uncomfortable than the one I’d worn for the pep rally.
My mind, however, didn’t have time to dwell on either of those decisions. When you’re getting ready to break into a high-security lab to steal a technobiological weapon that could mangle your DNA and kill you where you stood, polyester, paw prints, and ponytails just can’t compare.
“You missed the debriefing.” Brooke was markedly displeased with me, but she never stopped smiling. “This is the most dangerous, most important mission you’ve ever gone on and will ever go on until you’re actually old enough to be doing over-eighteens in the first place, and you missed the debriefing.”
I mimicked Brooke’s forced smile. “My bad.”
She handed me a small, pearly pink Game Boy that someone had meticulously covered in rhinestones. “This contains a copy of the floor plan to the building as a whole, and to Ross’s lab. It’s set up like a conventional office space, with the actual laboratory in the back, and offices, a copy room, and reception in the front. The biggest area of interest, however, is the small kitchen, situated just off the lab.”
“The kitchen?” Somehow, I doubted Ross was keeping his potentially lethal technology in the refrigerator.
“An infrared scan of the building revealed increased concentration of heat and light in that area.”
I fiddled with the buttons on the Game Boy, and it zeroed in on the kitchen for me.
“Lasers,” Brooke said. “They’re located in the oven, which we believe is nonfunctional and concealing some kind of safe. You’re going to need to dismantle the security, which will mean finding the control panel. We believe it’s in the kitchen, but if it’s not, you may have to improvise.”
First killer nanobots, and now lasers. My life had definitely become a James Bond movie.
As if sensing my thoughts, Brooke leaned over, took control of the Game Boy, and suddenly, I was looking at a diagram of the air ducts in the office.
“Lucky for us,” she said. “You’re small.”
Yet another reason cheerleaders made for good secret agents: most of us were tiny, though some of us had smaller chests than others.
“Let’s go. We’ve got a tight time frame to work with here. I’ve got your goody bag from Lucy, and we’ll go over the exact plan on the way. If you’ve memorized the floor plans, you can leave the Game Boy here.”
I did as instructed. My memory was close to photographic, and floor plans were close enough to geometry that my mind immediately absorbed the numbers and angles in question.
Still, as Brooke and I made our way out to her convertible, I had to wonder how exactly it had escaped her notice that this whole plan was insane. The Big Guys were insane. Our cover story was insane. And the fact that I was supposed to crawl through air ducts in a uniform this tight?
Stretchy fabric aside, still insane.
Fortunately, sanity has never exactly been my strong point, and even now, the adrenaline was pumping through my veins, telling me that we could do this, that I had to do this.
Besides, even if things got dicey, Ross wouldn’t murder two cheerleaders in broad daylight, and even if he tried, I was pretty sure I could take him. The nerds of the world don’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of black belts armed to the hilt.
Speaking of which…
I waited until Brooke started her car and raised the convertible’s top before I asked the question on the tip of my tongue. “What’s in Lucy’s goody bag?”
“Weapons are a last resort,” Brooke told me. “Ideally, we won’t have to use them at all. We get in, we get the bots, we get out. Remember, we were assigned this case because Peyton won’t suspect us of anything. If we break out the weapons, our superiors will have to send in backup.”
I was somewhat comforted to know that if things got truly dicey, the Big Guys would have our backs. Then again, these were the guys who’d kept us in the dark about the fact that the weapon we’d been instructed to retrieve could kill us, so it wasn’t like I had a great deal of trust that they had our best interests at heart.
“If they have to send in a cleanup team, we won’t worry about replacing the target with a decoy. Our main agenda then is to get the target, and preserve our covers. If the Big Guys send a team in, Peyton will know that something is up, and we’ll need to ensure that they don’t realize that that something involves us.”
She was throwing so much information in my direction that I almost forgot what I was waiting for. “Weapons.”
“Last resort,” Brooke said again.
“Gimme.”
With a roll of her eyes, Brooke handed me a small gift sack. Lucy considered “weapons” and “prezzies” to be synonymous.
I reached into the sack and withdrew a small baggie filled with pins that had words embossed across them. GO! one declared. FIGHT! WIN!
