When we got to the gym, everyone else was stretching, and Brooke was staring at her watch.
“Sorry!” the twins chirped together.
Brooke turned to look at me.
I returned the favor. “I stayed up almost all night working on a code,” I said, “my feet may have to be amputated because of these boots, and quite frankly, I don’t give a flying buttkiss about whether you glare at me or not.”
There was absolute silence, and even though I didn’t show any visible signs of it, I tensed my body, preparing myself in case Brooke should launch some sort of physical attack.
Instead, she flipped her hair. “Whatever,” she said.
I glanced around the room, trying to figure out from the others’ responses whether or not I’d won this battle of wills. I was, in fact, so busy looking around that I didn’t notice when the floor began moving under us, and I wasn’t exactly ready to drop three stories onto the trampoline. I managed to landon my feet, but it wasn’t pretty. Or graceful. And it definitely didn’t involve any flipping whatsoever.
This time, I maneuvered my way off the trampoline ASAP, and soon, all ten of us were seated at the conference table at the center of the Quad. For a few seconds, there was silence, and then Lucy started babbling.
“Bubbles and I hung out at the coffee shop across the street from Infotech for like six hours, and logged every person who came into the buildings into our phones. Then I came back here and cross-referenced the pictures we’d taken and our timetables with the system’s files on Peyton’s operatives, and came up with nothing.”
Brooke nodded. “Anything else?”
“I got three phone numbers,” Bubbles volunteered.
“Four,” Lucy corrected.
“Oh yeah. Four.”
Brooke nodded again, as if this, too, was the kind of information she expected us to report. “April and I staked out Peyton, and luckily for us, we weren’t the only ones doing it. Heath Shannon—”
The twins sighed identical girly sighs at the thought of the international playboy.
“—cased out the place, but kept his distance. We took video feed and Zee analyzed. Zee?”
“He’s careful,” she said. “And on the surface, very calm, but he’s getting a buzz from this. I analyzed the video on a frame-by-frame basis, and even though he’s good at concealing his emotions, when you break facial expressions down to small enough units of time, something comes through. He’sanxious, which tells me that the Big Guys were at least partially right—whatever deal he’s brokering hasn’t gone down yet, but there’s a level of self-satisfied smugness there that makes me think he’s well on his way. If I was toguess”—she stressed the word—“I would guess that at his earlier meetings with Peyton, he acquired some information from them to pass on to his client or clients. He’s probably received a beginning payment, but not his full commission, which means that Peyton still has information that Heath Shannon and whatever terrorist organization he’s working for do not.”
“Add to that the fact that he was casing the firm, looking for potential escapes, drawing up mental plans …” Brooke left it to us to fill in the blank, and I obliged.
“The meeting the Voice talked about is going to happen soon,” I said. Everyone stared at me. “What? I can’t connect the dots?” I asked. I felt oddly compelled to start defending my dot-connecting ability, but refrained.
“There’s going to be a meeting soon,” Brooke confirmed. “Our best time estimates place it at four this afternoon.”
I opened my mouth to ask how exactly they’d made that estimate based on facial expressions and a very limited amount of video footage, but I didn’t get the chance, because Brooke turned the tables on me.
“What have you got?” she asked.
With all the talk of stakeouts and meetings and international playboys who doubled as terrorist liaisons, I’d forgotten that I had anything at all.
“Chloe said you found a code,” Tara prodded me, good partner that she was.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Two six-digit numbers. One of the senior partners gave it to another lawyer in preparation for some meeting a couple of days ago.”
More silence.
“I pulled the numbers off of an audio track containing phone tones,” I said. “Since six digits won’t do you any good as a phone number, there has to be something more to it.” I dug around in my bag and pulled out the slip of paper on which I’d written the numbers. “Here they are. I tried looking for a number-to-letter code, but couldn’t come up with anything. I worked the numbers over, looking for patterns, and came up with nothing. I tried running them through a few search engines—nada.”
“Six digits,” Zee mused. “What has six digits?”
“Locker combinations.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until after I heard and processed my own words. “If you break the numbers up into a sequence of three two-digit numbers, it could be a locker combination.”
“And Peyton would be dealing with lockers why?” With a tone like that, I didn’t need to see her glossy lips moving to know that Chloe was the one speaking. “They’re passing on top-secret information. And if this is actually the information, and not some random payment scheme, then chances are it’s either the names of the operatives’ aliases, or their locations.”
