“Hypothetically speaking,” Chloe said, “you’re crazy, but if you hypothetically wanted to do that, you’d set your phone to D mode, type in your passcode, and flip the switch on the very top of the phone to the far right.”

“What’s my passcode?”

“If I told you that,” Chloe replied, “you might actually start to think I like you. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You’re the hacker. Figure it out your hypothetical self.”

She was a hypothetical bee-yotch, but she’d answered my first question, and she was going to call Brooke, and that was going to have to be enough for me.

“Goodbye, Chloe.” I didn’t wait for a response before I hung up the phone. I followed Chloe’s instructions and immediately set about figuring out the passcode. It took me two and a half hours, and by the time I hit on the correct one, I was ready to upgrade Chloe’s status from hypothetical bee-yotch to actual to enormously huge.

I funneled my energy into the work, selecting the files I wanted the phone to download. A warning popped up on my phone’s screen, letting me know that these files would self-destruct within two hours of download, and that I wouldn’t be able to access them from this phone again. As far as security measures went, it was a must, but in terms of my difficulties with speed-reading late at night, it was unfortunate.

I finished selecting the pertinent files, hit the send button, and entered my passcode again. The phone started downloading, and as it did, I turned my attention back to the open window on my computer.

Brooke Camden. Gun.

I hit enter. The search returned too many hits, and I narrowed it down by adding one last parameter.

Bayport.

And there it was. A small news blurb, and below that, an obituary. I opened the blurb first, and somehow, I knew exactly what to expect.

Christopher Camden, age thirty-two, died on Friday at Bayport General after suffering three gunshot wounds to the chest. The circumstances surrounding his death are somewhat unclear, and the BPD has no leads at this time. Camden is survived by his wife, Karen Madden Camden, and a daughter, Brooke, age four.

The obituary was simple and sweet and said only that Brooke’s father would be missed. A second news article mentioned, albeit briefly, that there had been one witness to the shooting. One guess who.

It was no wonder that Brooke had an “aversion” to guns. I probably would have found them pretty averse if I’d seen my father killed with one, too. And her mother! How could she just sit there and act like it was something Brooke should just magically be over by now?

If I hadn’t already decided to stick it to Brooke’s mom and the whole damn system by solving this thing myself, reading these articles would have been enough to push me in that direction. As it was, it made me view Brooke, her relationship with her mom, and her domination of our school in a whole different way.

Mainly, though, it made me realize that if Brooke didn’t win homecoming queen because of Noah’s rare and annoyingly undiagnosable personality disorder, I’d deport him myself.

CHAPTER 27

Code Word: Girly

Remotely accessing the Squad’s database didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. We still had data coming in on Anthony Connors-Wright’s location. He’d apparently been at the park again that afternoon, while the figure in black (*cough* Amelia *cough cough*) had been stealing our target. Since this officially eliminated him as a suspect, I wasn’t any more interested in what he’d done with the rest of his day than I was, for example, in Chip’s philosophical ponderings on the topic of love. Ross had been taken into custody for his mad scientist hijinks, and with no one around to sell him weapons, Anthony posed no threat as a buyer. Whoever had Ross’s nanobots now (and I could only hope that the answer to that question wasn’t Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray) would be looking to deal with much bigger fish than an intelligence brat with a chip on his shoulder. Anthony could go to the park to his heart’s content, and neither I nor the government particularly cared.

Beyond that, the only information I immediately gleaned from our database was the fact that the Big Guys had actually sent us an official electronic cease and desist order. If they thought that would in any way deter me, they clearly weren’t paying their profilers enough.

I scanned through the rest of our files, looking for anything that might tip me off to what Amelia Juarez planned to do next. I read Amelia’s profile again and again, looking for a clue about who exactly Amelia was and wishing that I had Zee’s uncanny ability to make outlandish, but accurate, predictions based only on personality indices, body language, facial expressions, and what she referred to as an individual’s background/environmental matrix.

As I read over Amelia’s files, I kept coming to the same conclusions over and over again. She was smart. She came from a dangerous family. She wanted to prove that she was more than just the baby and the only girl. And somehow, that had led her to Bayport, to working for Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, and—if she really was the one who’d crashed our last mission—to stealing a top-secret, high-tech biological weapon. I tried my best to convert the facts into numbers, to solve the equation that would tell me where to find her and how to stop her, but again and again, I came up with a whole lot of nothing.

Oh well, I thought with a wicked grin. On to Step Two.

Hacking the United States government was so much fun.

A mere forty-five minutes later, I was in. I’d like to claim that I’m a genius—and I am—but if I’m being perfectly honest, it didn’t hurt that I still had access to the Squad’s mainframe and that the mainframe and the Big Guys’ systems were configured to file-share, even if there were some major firewalls in place on their side of things. With a flick of my wrist, the sweat of my brow, and what I can only describe as the hacking hokeypokey, I managed to locate the exact system portal that I needed to hack. After that, it was just a matter of using a few of my pet programs—all of which I’d designed myself—to force my way into a system that should have been impenetrable.

It was almost as if the Big Guys wanted me to hack them.

Since I had the distinct feeling that my presence wouldn’t go undetected for long, I set several of my decrypt-and-search programs to looking at once, and before I got booted out of the system, I managed to access their file on the current case (shockingly easy—perhaps because they’d originally planned on sharing it with us to begin with?). I wasn’t entirely sure that the files weren’t encrypted with something that would crash my computer, but luckily, Bessie (my laptop) was a tough old girl.

She and I had a lot in common.

As I read through the files I’d managed to borrow (steal is such an ugly word), I came to a disturbing conclusion. High school cheerleaders are much better at writing intelligible reports than government operatives are. Reading the government files was like trying to read a book with the plot of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (worst book ever, and one of the English department’s faves) that just happened to be written by a dyslexic Viking writing in iambic pentameter.

In other words, it was worse than trying to read Ross’s dissertation, and this time, I didn’t have Chloe to translate. Piece by piece, bit by bit, I managed to parse what I was reading into something more manageable, and slowly, what the Big Guys had been up to since we’d been pulled off the case became clear.

They’d apprehended Ross, as well as the three security goons, run interference with the local cops to prevent a formal investigation, and confirmed through interviews and a variety of anonymous sources that no one had made a connection between the chaos and any cookie-peddling cheerleaders in the near vicinity. Ross and his cohorts were being interrogated, and they were slated to later have their memories chemically altered. By the time the Big Guys were finished, nobody would remember that Brooke and I had been in Ross’s office, except for the mysterious figure in black who’d caught me red-handed.

The Big Guys hadn’t yet positively ID’d the intruder, but the dominant theory did seem to be that it was Amelia Juarez, working on behalf of Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. The firm was under constant surveillance, with upward of eight teams ready to swarm in the second Amelia appeared within a five-mile radius of the “hot zone.”