We fell back into silence then, and I made a mental list of questions I’d ask my partner once I was in the clear to talk about the more classified aspects of our lives, starting with whether or not she’d ever been injured as an operative, and concluding with how exactly she’d managed to get me from the parking lot to her car, presumably without anyone noticing.
“Toby?”
Tara nudged me when Nora called my name. “Let’s go.”
By the time we were situated in a small exam room, I was half-convinced that I was still dreaming. Just to make sure that I was awake, I looked down to confirm that my clothes had not suddenly disappeared.
Still there.
Tara took a seat on the exam table and I did the same. After a moment, she took an iPod out of her backpack and offered me one earpiece.
“Nora’s great about getting us in quickly,” she said, “but the doctors usually take forever.”
I accepted the earpiece somewhat suspiciously. On the whole, I had not been impressed by the musical preferences of my cheerleading cohorts, and there was at least a five percent chance that she’d make me listen to the words to some new cheer we were getting ready to learn.
Instead, I watched as Tara hit several buttons, and a few seconds later, Brooke’s voice came through our earpieces, loud and clear.
“Took you guys long enough. How’s the security reading on your communicator, Tare?”
“There was a wait,” Tara explained. “And it’s good.”
I processed this conversation and then spoke up myself. I had no idea where the microphone was on this not-really-an-iPod, but I decided to go on the assumption that Brooke would hear my words.
“Yes, I’m okay, Brooke. Thank you for asking. Your concern is sweet, but really, you don’t need to worry about little old me.”
“If you weren’t okay,” Brooke said, “you wouldn’t be in the emergency room.”
Her logic seemed counterintuitive, but given the conversation I’d had earlier with Tara about how procedure was different for serious injuries, Brooke’s words made sense.
“So what’s up?” Tara asked, careful to keep our side of the conversation generic and innocuous enough that if the doctor walked in, he wouldn’t notice anything out of the norm.
“No word yet from the special unit the Big Guys sent in to check out the blast,” Brooke informed us.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even let me look at it!” That was Lucy, speaking from somewhere in the background. “Totally unfair.”
There were few things our weapons expert loved more than a good explosion.
“Sorry, Luce,” Brooke said. “I tried.”
I thought I heard a note of strain in Brooke’s voice and inferred that trying—and failing—wasn’t something Brooke was overly fond of. If she’d tried to get Lucy in on the explosion recon and hadn’t been able to, that meant that the Big Guys had forbidden it, which meant that maybe Brooke wasn’t exactly as in charge of this mission as she had been this morning.
Knowing her as I did, I could imagine just how well that was going over.
“So how did everyone else’s thing go?” Tara asked, still keeping with the quality vagueness.
“You know how when you called in Toby’s injury, you mentioned that you’d found a chip in Kann’s phone?” Brooke asked.
I just loved it when people talked about me like I wasn’t even on the secured, high-tech line.
“Were there more?” Tara asked, her voice even and measured.
I could practically hear Brooke nodding her ponytailed head. “Two of the other phones were also already bugged—Amelia Juarez’s and Anthony Connors-Wright’s.”
“And the third?” I asked, screening my words to make sure they would be opaque to potential eavesdroppers.
“Hector Hassan’s phone was not bugged,” Brooke said.
“We haven’t gotten anything significant from the audio yet, but if Amelia, Jacob, and Anthony were all bugged and Hector wasn’t—”
“Then chances are, he’s the one who…” I tried to censor myself. “Did the phone thing to the others.”
“That’s the current theory,” Brooke said. Then there was a long, significant pause, and I got the distinct feeling that I was missing something. It fell into place the second that the doctor stepped into the room.
If Hassan was the one who’d bugged Jacob Kann’s phone, then there was at least a chance that he was the one who’d planted the bomb. I was suddenly overcome with an urge to jump off the exam table and rush out to kick some TCI a-s-s. Because as it turned out, almost getting blown up? Not nearly as much of a deterrent as one might think.
“Toby Klein?” the doctor said.
I nodded, and Tara subtly hit the pause button, ending our communication with Brooke, before gently taking the earpiece from my ear.
“Sorry,” she said. “We were in the middle of a song.”
The doctor nodded and approached me. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I…uhhhh…got dropped.” I still couldn’t believe that anyone would buy that excuse.
“Prep or full extension?” the doctor asked.
I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that this doctor knew cheerleading terms that I didn’t.
Seeing my confusion, the doctor grinned. “You must be new,” he said. “Let me ask it this way—how high up were you?”
I tried to gauge the right way to answer that question. “Kinda high up?” I answered. “I think I hit pretty hard. I blacked out for a few minutes.”
The doctor shook his head and then took a closer look at the cut on the side of my head. “It’s not deep,” he said. His gentle tone lulled me into a false sense of security, and then his fingers prodded my bruise. “Does this hurt?”
I yelped and let loose an impressive string of expletives.
“Okay,” the doctor inferred, seemingly bemused, “that hurts.”
He pulled a light out from the front pocket of his lab coat and shined it in my eyes. He continued examining me as he ran through a list of questions, some of which Tara had asked me earlier, and some of which she hadn’t. In the end, he said that he didn’t think I had a concussion and that an MRI wouldn’t be necessary this time.
“You got off easy,” he told me. “If you’ll take my advice—and they never do—you’ll get out of this game while you still can.”