Had Chloe and I missed something on those tapes? Was there something we were supposed to find?
Who was the “Charlie” who’d given us our instructions and then gone on to wish us good luck for our game? Would I hear his voice again? Five years from now, or ten, or twenty, would I be a Charlie, handing out orders to a squadron of teenage girls? Was that what the Squad prepared you for? And if not, where did our “superiors” come from, anyway?
Why had Tara reacted so violently to this mission? Did she take every life-and-death situation with that same clammy, forced calm?
Sitting perfectly still, I turned my mind from questions and let it wander freely again. This time, I surpassed scenes and spoken words and went into the zone. Numbers flitted in and out—codes I’d broken, patterns I’d noticed in everything from the daily paper to the rhyme scheme of our halftime routine.
“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
The tune came to me: six tones strung together at an even pace.
“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
Why did that sound so familiar? I tilted my head back and came dangerously close to getting water up my nose.
“The audio.” As soon as I said the words, I knew where I’d heard that particular series of notes before. When the lawyer at Peyton had programmed the number into his phone, I’d written it off as inconsequential, but here, with water beating at my body and my mind free to wander, I conjured up the sound it had made as he’d entered the number.
I tore myself away from the water and forced myself to stand up. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
Part of our objective in listening to the audio had been to figure out who Infotech was passing the information along to. A phone number wasn’t exactly the guy’s name and Social Security number, but it was a start, right?
I finished my shower in record time considering my limbs weren’t really cooperating with the rest of my body. I wrapped the towel back around my body and headed straight for my room, or more specifically, straight for the designer bag on my floor.
Straight for my hot pink, limited-edition cell phone.
Too physically and emotionally drained to think angry thoughts about its color and trendy nature, I picked the phone up, flipped it open, and started playing with the keys. Systematically, I pressed each number, listening carefully to its tone.
“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
I hummed the first tone, and hit each of the keys. It wasn’t a two. It wasn’t a six.
It was a slow, painful process, but bit by bit, I sorted it out.
024106.
Wait a minute. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
I went over the rhythm again and again in my head, but it stayed exactly the same. There were only six numbers. This wasn’t a phone number, and if it wasn’t a phone number…
“024106.” I ran over the numbers again and again in my head. I scrambled them, rearranged them into every possible permutation. Did they stand for letters? Maybe it was a payment amount. I tried to remember everything the lawyer guys had said. Gray had realized that the younger lawyer had a meeting with an anonymous client, and he’d delivered a phone number with only six digits, in case the client was running late.
I considered calling someone with the information, but then I realized that (a) the last thing I wanted to do right now was talk to anyone who’d even once said the phrase Go Lions/Lionesses and (b) all I had was six numbers. Six lousy numbers and a body that was killing me.
And yet, I had to know. I’d always been that way with numbers. Give me a six-digit phone number, or one of those puzzles where numbers stood for letters, or a mathematical sequence whose pattern was a mystery, and it would eat my brain from the inside out until I’d unraveled it. For that reason (and that reason alone), I did the unthinkable. I sucked it up and scrolled through the address book in my peppy little phone. After I’d passed the numbers for Abercrombie & Fitch, Barney’s, and a couple of others that had for some unfathomable reason been programmed in, I found Chloe’s number.
She answered on the third ring.
“This is Chloe.”
“The phone number only has six digits.” I laid it out there, no preamble.
“Say what?” To her credit, she didn’t waste time insulting me.
“The phone number that Gray gave to Hayes. It only has six digits.” I paused and stated the obvious. “It’s not a phone number.”
Chloe sighed. “You couldn’t have noticed this an hour ago?”
“Can you just get me the files? If there are any more of these numbers, I need them.”
I don’t know what made me ask for the files, or what made me think there might be more to the number set than I already had. Maybe it was the sixth sense that always came into play when there was a code to break, or maybe it was the fact that I knew asking for the data would annoy Chloe, and annoying Chloe was quite possibly one of the only pleasures I could still wring out of my pathetic existence on this planet.
“If you give me a few minutes, I can scan for phone tones on the tape. I’ll isolate two minutes on either side of every tone sequence, and send it to you when I’m done.”
What was this? Chloe…being helpful? Chloe having a civil conversation with me? For that matter, the fact that Chloe Larson could scan audio tracks for a particular sound and isolate the relevant areas all in a matter of minutes was almost as remarkable as the fact that she’d gone off auto-bitch to do it for me. I thought of everything Zee had told me: chubby little Chloe, the Star Wars fanatic. Brooke saving her from her own dorkdom. The two of them fighting over Jack. Me representing everything that Chloe wanted to forget. It was times like this that I really didn’t appreciate having a profiler take it upon herself to enlighten me. This was exactly what Zee had been aiming for. I couldn’t just disregard Chloe as Chloe. She was an actual person.
“Chloe,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.
“Thanks.”
No response. I made a face at the phone, and when a few more seconds of silence went by, I rolled my eyes. “It’s customary to say you’re welcome,” I said dryly.
No response.
“Chloe?”
As quick as I’d been to figure out the six-digit telephone number thing, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Chloe had hung up on me. Gritting my teeth, I redialed her number and got sent immediately to voice mail.
“Hey, this is Chloe. I’m probably screening your call, and I probably won’t call you back. Isn’t life a bitch?” Beeeeeeeep.