I ripped the bobby sock off my left foot and launched it toward the person in front of me, hoping that it would be enough to slow him or her down (but not enough to release the nanobots themselves) and then I ran toward the sound of the gunshots. Toward Brooke.
As I ran down the hallway and into the reception area, an explosion sounded behind me, but I barely heard it, because the situation in front of me demanded every ounce of attention I could muster. Brooke had managed to take Ross out, and he was lying in an unconscious heap on the floor, but the guards were a different story. One of them had a gun pressed to her temple. As my breath caught in my throat, the hired goons took their eyes off Brooke just long enough to look at me, and Brooke jabbed a spirit stick into Mopsy’s leg. She must have somehow triggered the release of the darts, because the oversized guard crumpled to the floor, and then it was just me, Brooke, and one guy with a gun.
I leapt toward him, not heeding the obvious danger, and as he swung his gun to aim it at me, Brooke went for his legs. The gun went off, but missed us both, and within seconds, Brooke had managed to grab his head between her feet, and with some pretty fancy footwork, she executed a perfectly flawless standing back tuck and came damn near close to breaking his neck.
As his eyes rolled back in his head, Brooke knelt down next to him to check for a pulse.
“Alive,” she said. “Did you acquire the target?”
And then I remembered the person in the kitchen and took off running without offering Brooke any kind of verbal answer to her question.
The kitchen was in shambles when I got there, scorched and burning as a result of my bobby sock grenade, but the black-clad figure, the silver box and the dangers contained within were nowhere to be found.
I swore. And swore. And swore.
“The hostiles are secured,” Brooke told me, coming into the room on my heels. “The backup team will have registered the gunfire and should be here any moment.” She broke off, processing for the first time the obscenities currently pouring from my mouth. Then she noticed the decoy, which had fallen to the floor.
“There was someone else,” the explanation flew from my mouth like projectile word-vomit. “They made it through a half dozen throwing stars and a grenade, and they moved…” I thought back over the other person’s motions. “They moved like one of us.”
Brooke and I came immediately to the same conclusion. “Amelia.”
We’d underestimated her once, and she’d reconfigured our tracking chip. Then a figure in black showed up here and stole the biotechnology Peyton had hired her to acquire. The aforementioned figure wasn’t nearly big enough to be Anthony, the only other TCI at large, and I had serious doubts that Anthony could have pulled something like this off in the first place.
The math was simple. Amelia Juarez had DNA-wiping technology, and for all we knew, she was on her way to Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray as we spoke.
This time, Brooke was the one who swore—long, hard, and in ways that struck even me as disturbingly creative.
When the backup team arrived to clean up the mess and take Ross and his guards into custody, Brooke and I disappeared back into the building, which, because of the layout and thickness of the walls of these offices, remained blissfully unaware of the chaos in Ross’s lab.
As hard as it was for either of us to act even the least bit normal, Brooke and I did the only thing we could to maintain our cover and exculpate ourselves from any and all suspicion in the Ross affair.
“Hi! We’re members of the Bayport Varsity Spirit Squad, and we’re selling Cheer Scout cookies!”
“The Go, Fight, Cinnamon are to die for.”
CHAPTER 24
Code Word: Mommy Dearest
“That’s it,” Brooke said finally. It was the first thing one of us had said that wasn’t (a) something that would have had to be bleeped out on most major broadcasting networks, or (b) a pitch for our cookies.
Shortly after we’d returned to “selling” our cookies, the police had arrived and ushered out all of the occupants of the building. We told them we didn’t know anything, and either because they took one look at our faces and were apt to believe that we indeed knew nothing at all or because the Feds were secretly pulling their strings, we were quickly and quietly allowed to leave. Now the two of us were in Brooke’s car, presumably driving back to the school to lick our wounds and further obsess over our failure.
“That’s it.” I repeated Brooke’s words.
“We lost the one object we couldn’t afford to lose. We caused a huge disturbance. If you’d detonated your right sock instead of your left one, we might have taken down part of the building.”
So now she tells me that one grenade had more firepower than the other.
Brooke, oblivious to my train of thought, continued emotionlessly recapping our experience. “Shots were fired, and we both could have been killed.”
I considered her words. “Yup. That about sums it up.”
“You don’t get it,” Brooke said, heat entering her tone for the first time. “We were supposed to try to avoid actual danger. The weapons were for the worst-case scenario, and that scenario happened. They sent us in to get a weapon without being noticed, and we almost blew up the building and lost the weapon to the one person we were trying to keep it away from.”
“That’s bad.”
“There are no words for how bad this is.”
“Okay, so we do damage control,” I said. “We find Amelia and take her down before she can give the weapon to the firm.”
Brooke actually laughed then, and it was a brittle, brutal sound. “You think they’re going to let us do that?” she snorted.
I’m not sure what gave her the impression that I intended on asking.
“This isn’t just an over-eighteen case now, Toby. This isn’t just a Do Not Engage. I can guarantee you that this is no longer a Squad operation. Now it’s up to the professionals, and we’ll be lucky to see action again before I graduate.”
“We could—” I started to say, but Brooke cut me off.
“We can’t do anything. They won’t let us. God, talk about disasters. I’m never going to hear the end of this.” Sensing that I was going to interrupt her the way she’d interrupted me, Brooke plowed on, not giving me the chance. “They didn’t even want us on this case after the explosion. They had to be talked into it, but I told them I could handle it. I promised them I could handle it. I even told them you could handle it.”