“Ran through the school in his boxers, walked around wearing a sandwich board with my face on it, sent out mass emails to the whole student body, and pretended to be a pirate in the middle of the cafeteria.”

My mom showed no signs of surprise, but she did let out a single giggle.

“Mom!”

“Toby, you have to admit, the pirate thing is just a little bit funny.”

I most certainly did not have to admit that, and I didn’t have to stand there and take the abuse, either.

“Just consider yourself lucky that he didn’t open a kissing booth to raise money for your campaign fund,” my mom said. “I’d be surprised if the idea hasn’t crossed his mind.”

As we have already established, my mother is never surprised, which led me to conclude that Noah had, in all likelihood, considered the idea. And if Noah had considered the idea, he probably wouldn’t have had the foresight to decide against it.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I stuck my head into the living room. “Noah?”

“Yes?”

“How much money did the kissing booth make?”

“It’s not really the amount of money per se that determines the success of a booth,” Noah opined. “It’s the number of girls I managed to kiss before some…errrr…angry young men shut down my operation.”

“And what is that number?” I asked.

Noah grinned. “Two.”

That was it. Absolutely it. The twins had to be stopped, whatever the cost. I’d beg if I had to, and if that didn’t work, well, I still had my second bobby-sock grenade, and it had even more firepower than the first.

CHAPTER 26

Code Word: Rebel

That night, I sat in front of my computer for a long time thinking about exactly two things. The first involved Brooke, her aversion to guns, and Zee’s insistence that I could find out on my own, and the second was peripherally related to the fact that when I was little, and report cards were made up totally of S (for satisfactory) and N (for not satisfactory), I’d always gotten an N in two areas—plays well with others, and, more importantly, follows directions when they are given.

I had a healthy disrespect for authority, and for as long as I can remember, when someone said “don’t do that,” what I heard was something more along the lines of “doing that would probably be fun.”

Based on our interaction with Brooke’s mom, and the way she’d told Brooke to concentrate on homecoming and not worry at all about the biotechnological weapon now in the hands of some anonymous independent operative, I could only conclude that we’d been given the official (if subtle) cease and desist that Brooke had seen coming.

I didn’t feel much like ceasing or desisting. If I’d managed to take the operative down and still saved Brooke, we wouldn’t have been taken off the case. If I hadn’t almost gotten blown up the first day, the Big Guys wouldn’t have been watching this particular mission so closely to begin with. We’d been pulled off this case because of me, and I felt vaguely like Brooke’s mom and her superiors were dangling all of the answers just out of reach, doing the covert version of “nanny nanny boo boo!”

The fact that the phrase nanny nanny boo boo had just crossed my mind made me briefly question my own sanity, but that didn’t change the feeling in my gut. I’d been told to stay away from this case, and what I heard was “diving into this case headfirst would rock your world.”

I didn’t really care if the Big Guys Upstairs gave me an N on my espionage report card. I didn’t even care if I was, as Brooke had so sweetly put it earlier that day, “replaceable.” I wanted answers. I wanted to know if anyone else had even come to the same conclusion Brooke and I had about the identity of our faceless intruder. I wanted to know where Amelia Juarez was. I wanted to know if the Big Guys had a tail on her. I wanted to know when she was going to give the weapon to the firm, and what could be done to stop her. And while I was at it, I wanted to know what the CIA knew about Alan Peyton.

After I figured all that out, I wanted to stop the bad guys, save the day, and flip Brooke’s mom the metaphorical bird.

What can I say? I’d tried being a good little girl who didn’t hack into government databases, but that just wasn’t me. This was. I organized my plan into steps. Step One: Access Squad database. Step Two: Hack the Big Guys’ database to see what they were holding out on us. Step Three: Victorious evil laughter.

Okay, so Step Three wasn’t exactly a step, but I figured that planning too far ahead was a waste of time. The name of the game was improvisation, and sometimes, plans just got in the way.

“Okay,” I said. “How to access the Squad’s database…” I pondered out loud. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone up to the school. I could get into the Quad—I had the entry codes and my own key to the school, courtesy of Mr. J’s lack of foresight and natural trust of girls in uniform. But I didn’t want to go back up to the school. I was tired, and on the off chance that I had been the target of the original bomb, I didn’t think traipsing around Bayport by myself at night was the world’s best idea.

And they say I have no impulse control, I thought wryly.

That left me with exactly two options. I could try to hack into the system blind, which would be time-consuming and possibly futile, or I could call Chloe to see if she’d built a remote-access mechanism into my Squad-issued cell phone.

Let’s see, I thought. Hundreds of hours worth of work, or thirty seconds on the phone with Chloe? It was a tough call and would have been even tougher if I’d thought for even a second that Chloe might turn me in. Given that she’d done some illicit hacking of her own that afternoon, I wasn’t too worried, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to this particular phone call.

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?”