AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The second Brooke and I were in the car, and she’d turned it on and set the radio to the faux station that was programmed to run an automatic check for listening devices, Brooke leaned her head back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and sat that way for several seconds.
“Brooke?”
Her eyes snapped open, and it was suddenly like nothing had ever happened. Team B hadn’t lost the tail on Amelia Juarez. The Big Guys hadn’t told the two of us to leave. A crazy driver hadn’t almost turned me into a Toby pancake.
“What?” Brooke’s tone was high and clear and absolutely brittle.
“What just happened back there?” I’d gotten the general gist of the Big Guys’ orders, but I wanted specifics.
“We went shopping,” Brooke said, playing dumb. “We ate ice cream and Chinese food and talked about boys. It was fun.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Just drop it, Toby.”
I snorted. If she thought that was going to work, she wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d given her credit for being.
“Are the Big Guys sending a team in?” I decided to try my luck with a very specific question.
“No.” Brooke’s answer surprised me. She didn’t elaborate.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? An individual who we think is in Bayport to purchase a biological weapon just went into the evil law firm of destruction and doom, and the Big Guys don’t think this merits a team?”
For a split second, I found myself doubting the conclusion I’d reached about the CIA knowing about Alan Peyton’s connection to the firm. What if they didn’t? What if he was a double agent and nobody realized it but me? What if the people calling the shots on our mission were working for the enemy? What if…
“Amelia doesn’t have the weapon.” Brooke finally imparted some useful information in my general direction, and it stopped my what if–ing in its tracks. “Our superiors have ID’d the seller, and whatever the bioweapon is, he still has it. The deal isn’t going down until later this week.”
Well, that was the first piece of good news we’d had all day. Incidentally, it also made me feel like an idiot for every ridiculous question I’d let enter my mind. Lest Brooke sense that I was silently berating myself for that, I pressed on.
“And?” I prompted her for more information.
“And what?”
“That’s not all they told you.” Somehow, I was sure of this fact.
Brooke blew a wisp of hair out of her face and took the car around a corner a little faster than was strictly necessary. “Do the math, Toby. If Amelia doesn’t have the weapon, why would we stop her from meeting with Peyton? We still have an audio feed in one of their offices. The signal’s scrambled, but some intel is better than none.”
I felt every bit as stupid as Brooke’s tone said I was for not making the connection earlier. I was the one who’d planted the bug at Peyton. This was our chance to use it.
“What about the weapon?” I asked. This was about as far into “sharing” mode as Brooke got, and since the two of us were stuck in a car together anyway, I was going to press her for as much information as I could, even if her glare suggested that this course of action might not be in my best interest healthwise.
“After they ID’d the seller, the nature of the weapon became apparent.”
“And?”
Brooke slammed on the brakes as we came to a stoplight. “And apparently,” she said, her voice full of false cheer, “we’ll be debriefed in the morning.”
The Big Guys knew what the weapon was and who had it, and they expected us to wait until morning? No wonder Brooke was in such fine form.
“So what now?” I asked as Brooke pulled into her parking spot at the school.
“Now?” Brooke said. “Now I try to figure out how Amelia Juarez, whose only claim to fame is her family’s crime empire, managed to lose not one, but two of our tails, and dismantle our tracking chip, and you go home.”
“Go home?” I was getting the strangest sense of déjà vu.
“Be back for practice tomorrow morning.” Brooke eyeballed me. “And this time, don’t be late.”
And with that, she slid out of the car, shut the door without slamming it, and walked into the gym like she wasn’t a moving ball of stress and fury. I considered following her, but ultimately decided that I liked my head right where it was—on my shoulders, with my ponytail intact. So for the second night in a row, I followed Brooke’s orders and drove home.
I didn’t realize how tired I was until I walked through my front door, and then something in my mind clicked, and staying vertical suddenly became very difficult. Who would have thought sitting around all day, doing nothing, was so exhausting?
“How was your day?” My mom accosted me in the front hallway. If she noticed the zombielike glaze that had settled over my eyes, she said nothing.
How was my day? I considered my response. I’d spent the morning getting debriefed by our contact at the CIA, followed immediately by flaming the gossip fires by kissing Jack in the hallway, had watched my brother have a “moment” with a cheerleader, had discovered that Jack actually knew how to create a password I couldn’t crack, had girl-talked with Brooke while staking out Jack’s father’s law firm, had discovered that the Big Guys knew more than they were telling, and to top it all off, I’d nearly been hit by a car.
“Fine,” I grumbled.
“That’s nice, dear,” my mother said. “Now, you wouldn’t happen to know why your brother’s email stopped working, would you?”
Noah was such a tattletale.
“Not a clue,” I deadpanned, and then, before my mother could say another word, I climbed the steps and headed for my room, stopping only long enough to hear Noah on the phone.
“We’ve got to go bigger. We’ve got to be inventive. My friends, it’s time to think outside the box. It’s time for…” Noah pitched his voice lower, like a TV announcer.
“Homecoming: the next generation. This is an all-new frontier of advertising, gentlemen. So ask yourselves this question: are you ready?”
As soon as I developed the strength, I was going to short-circuit my brother’s telephone line. For now, however, all I wanted was to fall asleep, because the sooner I slept, the sooner morning would come.
CHAPTER 20
Code Word: Flat
