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While I mulled over my choices, I pulled up a search engine and typed in Brooke’s name. And then I typed in the word gun. And then I almost hit enter, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I wasn’t really sure why. Maybe it was something about the way Zee had sounded on the phone, or maybe it was the depths of the undercurrents I’d sensed between Brooke and her mom on that particular topic. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t imagine Brooke Bow-Down-and-Worship-Me Camden being afraid of anything, let alone a weapon she’d probably been exposed to from a very young age.
Or maybe I was just crazy. That could have been it. After all, here I was planning to hack into one of the U.S. government’s most secure databases on a whim. Again. The first time had gotten me recruited to the Squad. The second time could get me kicked off.
Nanny nanny boo boo, I thought. And then I picked up the phone and called Chloe.
“If you’re not calling to tell me that you’ve been horribly disfigured or had a sex-change operation, I don’t want to hear it.”
“You know, Chloe,” I said. “Most people just opt for ‘hello.’”
She didn’t dignify that comment with a response.
“Have you heard from Brooke?” I asked her.
Silence. I took that as a no. I knew something that she didn’t, which just added to the resentment I could practically hear from her side of the telephone.
“The mission didn’t go well,” I said. “We lost the weapon to an intruder—probably Amelia Juarez—and the Big Guys took us off the case.”
I actually heard Chloe take in a sharp breath.
“Brooke’s mom is unhappy,” I said simply.
“I’ll call her,” Chloe said quietly. “Not her mom. Brooke.”
Some days, it was easy to forget that the two of them were best friends, as well as rivals. Between the tone in Chloe’s voice now, and the way she’d leveled with me before our mission, today wasn’t one of those days. The two of them had been through a lot together, and if anyone understood the relationship between Brooke and her mom better than Zee, it was probably Chloe, who’d been along for the ride since she and Brooke were eleven years old.
“You should,” I agreed. “Now, I’m going to ask you a hypothetical question.” I paused. “Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to access Squad files remotely from my room, would my cell have some kind of technology that helped me to do that?”
“Hypothetically speaking,” Chloe said, “you’re crazy, but if you hypothetically wanted to do that, you’d set your phone to D mode, type in your passcode, and flip the switch on the very top of the phone to the far right.”
“What’s my passcode?”
“If I told you that,” Chloe replied, “you might actually start to think I like you. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You’re the hacker. Figure it out your hypothetical self.”
She was a hypothetical bee-yotch, but she’d answered my first question, and she was going to call Brooke, and that was going to have to be enough for me.
“Goodbye, Chloe.” I didn’t wait for a response before I hung up the phone. I followed Chloe’s instructions and immediately set about figuring out the passcode. It took me two and a half hours, and by the time I hit on the correct one, I was ready to upgrade Chloe’s status from hypothetical bee-yotch to actual to enormously huge.
I funneled my energy into the work, selecting the files I wanted the phone to download. A warning popped up on my phone’s screen, letting me know that these files would self-destruct within two hours of download, and that I wouldn’t be able to access them from this phone again. As far as security measures went, it was a must, but in terms of my difficulties with speed-reading late at night, it was unfortunate.
I finished selecting the pertinent files, hit the send button, and entered my passcode again. The phone started downloading, and as it did, I turned my attention back to the open window on my computer.
Brooke Camden. Gun.
I hit enter. The search returned too many hits, and I narrowed it down by adding one last parameter.
Bayport.
And there it was. A small news blurb, and below that, an obituary. I opened the blurb first, and somehow, I knew exactly what to expect.
Christopher Camden, age thirty-two, died on Friday at Bayport General after suffering three gunshot wounds to the chest. The circumstances surrounding his death are somewhat unclear, and the BPD has no leads at this time. Camden is survived by his wife, Karen Madden Camden, and a daughter, Brooke, age four.
The obituary was simple and sweet and said only that Brooke’s father would be missed. A second news article mentioned, albeit briefly, that there had been one witness to the shooting. One guess who.
It was no wonder that Brooke had an “aversion” to guns. I probably would have found them pretty averse if I’d seen my father killed with one, too. And her mother! How could she just sit there and act like it was something Brooke should just magically be over by now?
If I hadn’t already decided to stick it to Brooke’s mom and the whole damn system by solving this thing myself, reading these articles would have been enough to push me in that direction. As it was, it made me view Brooke, her relationship with her mom, and her domination of our school in a whole different way.
Mainly, though, it made me realize that if Brooke didn’t win homecoming queen because of Noah’s rare and annoyingly undiagnosable personality disorder, I’d deport him myself.
CHAPTER 27
Code Word: Girly
Remotely accessing the Squad’s database didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. We still had data coming in on Anthony Connors-Wright’s location. He’d apparently been at the park again that afternoon, while the figure in black (*cough* Amelia *cough cough*) had been stealing our target. Since this officially eliminated him as a suspect, I wasn’t any more interested in what he’d done with the rest of his day than I was, for example, in Chip’s philosophical ponderings on the topic of love. Ross had been taken into custody for his mad scientist hijinks, and with no one around to sell him weapons, Anthony posed no threat as a buyer. Whoever had Ross’s nanobots now (and I could only hope that the answer to that question wasn’t Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray) would be looking to deal with much bigger fish than an intelligence brat with a chip on his shoulder. Anthony could go to the park to his heart’s content, and neither I nor the government particularly cared.
