“Some of the girls who dig me got nominated for homecoming queen,” Noah said, heeding my warning and choosing to talk about the other nominees instead. “But, of course, the real competition will be which one of the lovely ladies gets to go as my date. I can only hope there will be no bloodshed and a minimum of tears.”

Now do you see why the twins really didn’t need to encourage him? Noah was basically a puppy, the kind who’s always chewing on shoes and jumping up on people and wanting them to rub his belly (metaphorically speaking, I hope). My brother was one hundred percent unabashed energy, and for reasons that continue to elude me to this day, he was confident in his appeal to the fairer sex, even though he’d never actually succeeded in convincing a girl to go out with him.

“Toe.” Chuck tried to say something, but didn’t quite succeed. To put things mildly, good old Chuck didn’t exactly have Noah’s confidence.

“Toe?” my mom prodded.

“Toby got nominated, too,” Chuck blurted out, and I realized that I’d been wasting my dart eyes on the wrong freshman.

“Nominated for what?” my father asked, just now tuning in to the conversation.

“Homecoming court,” my mom said, her voice devoid of any emotion resembling surprise, shock, or outrage.

“What?” my dad repeated, wrinkling his forehead and blinking several times.

“Homecoming court,” Noah repeated, flashing me a victorious grin. “I’m her campaign manager.”

“No, you’re not,” I told him, my voice and my expression equally dark.

Noah leaned in and spoke in a stage whisper. “We’re going to have to work on your people skills.”

Noah wasn’t actually a ladies’ man, and he didn’t have my aptitudes for physical competition or mathematical thinking, but when it came to being able to press my buttons, he was nothing short of a prodigy.

In fact, that was the one thing that Noah and the twins had in common.

In order to survive the rest of the cozy family dinner, I checked out mentally and let my mind wander. I ran Jacob Kann’s file over and over again in my mind, and then walked back through our mission, step by step, looking for anything we might have missed the first time around, any clue that Kann’s hours were, from the moment we stepped into his hotel room, severely numbered.

I started with what I knew about him personally. Jacob Kann was single, young, and wanted to prove himself to his mafiaesque family with some insanely big gesture, like bringing in a ton of money from some well-connected terrorist groups. He’d been in Bayport for two days. When we’d arrived at the hotel, he’d been hanging out in the bar, and while we were casing his hotel room, he’d come storming in, obviously in a bad mood.

I let my mind dwell there for a moment, trying to create possible scenarios in my mind. Why had Kann left his car keys in his room? Had he just forgotten them, or had he not planned on needing them at all? Why had he suddenly been in such a hurry to leave the hotel bar?

And, I thought, my mind pulling up a question that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, why was he in the hotel bar in the first place? His room, the very definition of lush, had come equipped with its own bar. So why was he drinking in the lobby? Was he meeting someone? Hoping to pick up some girls? Had he left because a woman had rejected him? Or because a meeting had gone sour?

There were too many possibilities, too many questions that we might not ever get the answers to. One thing was for sure. Jacob Kann wasn’t going to be answering them any time soon.

I switched the scene in my mind and concentrated on the few seconds that I’d been under Kann’s car. Had I seen anything out of the ordinary? Had the bomb been there, staring me in the face the whole time? How had it been triggered to explode when Kann opened the door? And why did someone want him dead in the first place?

Then there was the bug in Kann’s phone. Was Hector Hassan—the only TCI who hadn’t been bugged himself—really the one responsible for bugging the others? And if he was, did that mean that he’d been the one to plant the bomb? Or had that been someone else altogether?

Occam’s razor, I thought. With a physicist for a father, I’d heard enough bouts of random science babble to know exactly what Occam’s razor—a scientific and philosophical principle—said. Given two equally plausible explanations, the simplest one is most often correct. In this case, the simplest explanation was that the person who’d bugged Jacob Kann and the person who’d planted the bomb were one and the same. Someone was keeping tabs on three out of the four TCIs, and for whatever reason, that someone had wanted one of them dead.

But why? And who? Why were the TCIs here? What were they after? And why kill Kann and not the others? For that matter, why bug only three out of the four?

“I really think you’re on the right track here, Toby.” Noah’s voice cut into my thoughts. “Going to homecoming with Jack Peyton will do wonders for your image. It just screams homecoming quee—”

Noah didn’t get to finish his sentence before I closed my fingers around his throat, cutting off the words.

“Toby,” my mother said mildly, “don’t strangle your brother.”

I let go of Noah’s throat, and he dared a taunting grin.

If Noah knew that I was going to homecoming with Jack, there was a decent chance that the entire school knew. I hated it that my business was automatically everyone else’s, just because I sat at the “right” table at lunch. And how in the world had the news spread so fast?

Thinking about Jack and homecoming made me consider that perhaps Occam’s razor wasn’t the principle of reasoning to use to figure out what had happened this afternoon. In a single day, I’d been nominated for homecoming queen and had a simple surveillance maneuver end with a sonic boom. Maybe this whole situation boiled down to a different kind of philosophy: Murphy’s Law.

Anything that can go wrong will.

CHAPTER 12

Code Word: Hair Products

An hour and a half later, I was sitting on my bathroom floor, trying to decipher the instructions Brittany and Tiffany had left me regarding my conditioning regime. Between their use of nonwords like fantabulous and bodylicious, their proclivities toward measuring time relative to teen television, and my subpar hair vocabulary, decoding the note they’d left me was easier said than done.

I turned the bottle over in my hands, hoping for instructions. No such luck. The fact that the superconditioner was in an unmarked container didn’t surprise me. Half of the twins’ hair products were acquired on some kind of beauty black market that I tried not to ask too many questions about. Really, it was better that I didn’t know.

“Okay,” I told myself by way of a pep talk. “You can do this.” I’d been drafted for the Squad because of my ability to deal with codes of both the electronic and written variety. Pseudo-incomprehensible conditioning instructions should have been a piece of cake.

After about five more minutes, I gave up hope of deciphering the third line of the instructions and decided that my best bet was to wet my hair, slap the goop on it, leave it there for “three episodes of Laguna Beach on DVD,” and then rinse it out.

I stood up, stuck my head in the sink and turned on the faucet. The water was warm on my head, and as I soaked my hair, I couldn’t help but think that it didn’t feel like my hair. It was soft and smelled like flowers instead of generic all-in-one shampoo/conditioner. In short, this really wasn’t my hair, despite the seemingly contradictory fact that it happened to be growing out of my head.

Once my hair was soaked, I turned off the faucet, sat back down, and counted backward from three as I unscrewed the top to the bottle.

“Three, two, one…here goes nothing.”

The conditioner smelled strongly of mint, and just breathing it in had me blinking back tears. That was some potent stuff. I briefly considered the possibility that the twins were experimenting on me, and then decided against it. Of all of the cheerleaders, I was the one most likely to voluntarily shave my head, and the twins were responsible for making sure that I didn’t commit hair felonies. Anything they gave me was guaranteed to make me girlier and more starletesque, so the chances of the two of them experimenting on me were really slim to none.