“Are we sure Kann isn’t in his room?” I asked, making one last effort at avoiding the inevitable.

Tara smiled. “He’s in the hotel bar. We passed him on the way in, and he’d just ordered a fresh drink.”

Sometimes, the observation skills of cheerleaders amazed me. These very skills also tended to force me to do things that I really didn’t want to do, like strip in the stairwell of a local hotel, but there are some forms of logic that you just can’t argue with.

“For the record,” I said, resigning myself to my fate and wrapping the towel around my body, “when I said I’d rather walk around naked than wear this stupid uniform, I was being facetious.”

CHAPTER 8

Code Word: Come Hither

Getting into the room was a snap. Julius, the male housekeeper, took one look at our towels and lost any and all verbal ability he might have once had. Ever seen one of those cartoons where the guy’s eyes literally pop out of his sockets, and he goes, “Owwwwoooooga, owwwooooooga”? That was Julius, except for the fact that the poor guy couldn’t even manage a sound. Luckily, despite the fact that his mouth didn’t seem to be working, his all-access keycard proved itself fully functional. He opened the door to Kann’s room, and gestured incomprehensibly with one hand.

“Thanks,” Tara and I chorused in unison. I can only conclude that as the door closed behind us, poor Julius in all likelihood fainted dead away on the floor.

Pushing thoughts of unconscious housekeeping staff out of my head, I glanced around the room. It was a pretty sweet setup: foyer, bedroom with king-sized bed, bathroom with enormous Jacuzzi, and a fully stocked bar. Apparently, having parents who ran their own mafialike operation really paid off.

Beside me, Tara surveyed the room. I got the distinct feeling that her assessment had less to do with how posh the accommodations were, and more to do with identifying secondary exits and analyzing in-room acoustics.

“The window would suffice in a pinch,” Tara said finally, “but if by any chance Kann does happen to catch us here, our best bet is probably to pretend we saw him at the bar and decided to seduce him.”

“WHAT?”

“We won’t actually seduce him,” she assured me. I was less than comforted. The words come hither weren’t even in my vocabulary, and I had no interest whatsoever in playing the seduction card to get out of a mess, even if there was nothing physical involved. Ew.

Instead of elaborating on the nonseduction and comforting me further, Tara began a careful sweep of the room, looking for any security devices or wires that might already be in place. “This room’s clean,” she said, and in a movement so casual I barely even noticed it, she pulled a listening device out of her bra and placed it underneath the desk.

About that time, I realized that Tara wasn’t actually wearing a bra, and I spent a good forty-five seconds wondering how she’d managed to keep the bugs in place on her chest. Since I wasn’t quite up to her level, I’d opted for actually holding on to the tracking chip. It may not have been stealth, but it was secure.

Tara moved quickly and efficiently, violating several laws of boob physics as she bugged the bathroom and moved toward the telephone. After fiddling with the receiver for a moment, she frowned.

“What?” I said.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she pulled a bobby pin out of her ponytail, and with a few highly precise movements, she removed a small, round chip from the phone.

“The phone’s already wired?” I mouthed.

Tara nodded and began resweeping the rest of the room, making doubly sure that she hadn’t missed any other listening devices the first time. Finally, she spoke. “We aren’t the only ones keeping track of Jacob Kann.”

“One of the other TCIs?” I guessed. It wasn’t that much of a stretch to think that one minor-league bad guy might be bugging another. Were I a bad guy, I would have wanted to keep an eye on the competition, too. The real question was, competition for what?

“We’ll bring the bug back to the lab,” Tara said. “We’ll be able to see if it matches anything in our files, trace its origin. Plus Chloe can continue to feed them audio tracks so that they don’t realize we’ve disabled it.”

As much as I hated to admit it, Chloe did have her uses.

Tara carefully traded the bug she’d found for one of our own, and I scanned the room again until I found what I was looking for: a fifteen-inch Mac laptop. Excellent.

Waltzing over to it, I could already feel the juices starting to flow. I booted up the computer, and in under three minutes, I guessed Kann’s log-on password using nothing more than the information I’d read in his file and my own code-savvy mind. Most people choose passwords that mean something to them, and Kann wasn’t an exception, though at least he mixed things up a bit. He probably thought he was pretty swift, using his middle name backward, followed by the year he was born.

Simpleton.

Ready to really dig my teeth into something juicy, I searched the hard drive for compressed or encrypted files, and while the computer made happy thinking noises, I leaned back in my chair.

“I’m going to go grab our clothes.” Tara was finished with the bug and already thinking about our exit, which, it appeared, would be clothed.

Five minutes earlier, those words would have been music to my ears. Now, I was too deep in Happy Hacker Land to care.

It quickly became apparent that Jacob Kann didn’t have much of interest on his computer. All of his files were boring (also known as not encrypted). That said, just because there wasn’t anything fun for me to play with on his computer didn’t mean that there wasn’t any valuable information there; it just meant that nothing he had would be much of a challenge on the decoding front.

Still hoping to come up with something cool, I launched Kann’s internet browser, and while it booted up, I reached up and undid the clasp around my neck. The twins were big on accessories, an obsession I would have lamented were it not for the fact that all Squad accessories came equipped with something extra. This particular necklace doubled as a portable hard drive with a ridiculously large amount of memory. I slid the charm off the chain and pressed gently on one side, revealing a USB plug. I inserted it into Kann’s computer, and with a few more commands, the computer began copying the entire contents of its hard drive to mine.

Meanwhile, the internet was up and running, so I checked our mark’s browsing history, which led me directly to his primary email account. He had his computer set to remember his username, and the password was—you guessed it—his middle name backward, followed by the year he was born.

Seriously, I thought, did this guy flunk out of wannabe terrorist school? What kind of TCI used the same password for all of his accounts? I knew fourth graders who realized that was a bad idea.

Not that I was complaining, only I kind of wanted to, because when it came to hacking, I lived for the challenge, and this was kid stuff.

I’d just opened Kann’s inbox when Tara knocked at the door. I probably would have been more paranoid about whether or not it was indeed Tara, except for the fact that she knocked to the rhythm of “Clap Your Hands.” Smart girl.

After setting Kann’s inbox, sent mail, and address book to copy over to my drive, I got up and walked over to the door. I peeked out the peephole, just to be on the safe side, and then let Tara in.

“Finished?” she asked me.

I glanced back over at the laptop. “Five minutes, tops.”

“We only have three.”

Get in and get out—that was the Squad motto, and there was a decent chance that we’d already been here too long.

“Three minutes,” I agreed. “Can I have my clothes?”

Tara tossed them to me, and content that the computer was doing its thing, I went to the bathroom to change. I’d just zipped my skirt up the side and stuck the tracking chip back in my bra when I heard the door to the room slam open and then slam shut.

Uh-oh, I thought. Tara didn’t slam doors. Ever. And the sound of the slamming did not in any way sound like one of our cheers. No matter which way I approached the situation, one thing was clear: there was somebody else in the room, and that was a very, very bad thing.