I closed the door behind me, walked over to my bed, and screamed into my pillow for approximately thirty-seven seconds. I threw down the ginormous purse I had carried home under protest. While I’d been having fun one-on-one time with Chloe, one of the twins had swiped my backpack and upgraded it to some kind of designer purse big enough to carry a small country in the side pouch. I took out the papers Chloe had given me, glared at them, and threw them on my floor. I then ripped off the cheer shorts, and they joined the papers.
Two minutes later, I was standing there in nothing but my underwear (no sequins—thank God). I wrapped a towel around my body and headed for the shower, where I turned the water on and let the entire room steam up.
Malibu Toby watched me from the mirror, her hair miraculously perfect even after the hissy fit I’d just thrown in my room.
Looking at the stranger in the mirror, I had to remind myself—this was me now. I was a perfect-bodied, perfect-haired, perfectly tanned cheerleader. I carried a designer bag, wore designer clothes, and had a limited-edition designer phone. And somewhere, on the other side of the globe, nameless, faceless government operatives were counting on me to hack into a system I didn’t know the first thing about. There was only one thing to do at a time like this.
I climbed into the shower and curled into a small ball on the floor, letting the water hit my perfect hair. Droplets dripped down my face and into my eyes, but I just sat there, my body aching and my skin rebelling against the heat of the water.
I breathed in and out, thinking back on my day, watching as scenes flashed one after another in my mind and things I’d heard repeated themselves on a loop. More often than not, showering brought me answers. In fact, had water heaters of today’s caliber been invented way back when, I would have placed a large amount of money on a wager that Einstein’s theory of relativity had first come to him while he was doing what I was now. But today, the steam wasn’t giving me any answers, and I just kept coming back to the same questions, over and over again.
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? WouldI 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 alongto. 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 aphone 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 phraseGo Lions/Lionessesand (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.
