Tiffany subtly pulled her shirt down and her skirt up. “I got lost,” she said, and poor Jimmy melted into another puddle on the floor.
“I’ll take it from here, Jimmy,” Bud said.
Jimmy looked from Tiffany back to the bathroom door. “But … but …”
“Now, Jimmy.”
Jimmy, looking strikingly like a heartbroken puppy in a security guard uniform, started walking back toward the front desk. Bud gestured toward the bathroom door.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Tiffany said. “I didn’t get lost. I just thought you were cuter.”
And then, while Bud, who was easily forty years old andforty pounds overweight, stared at her, she popped into the bathroom.
After straightening each other’s hair and reapplying lip gloss, the twins flushed one of the toilets, and then Brittany exited the bathroom, leaving Tiffany inside, undetected. From the feeds, I could see a newly confident and swaggering Bud escorting Brittany out of the secured area, and once both guards were back at the desk, Tiffany exited the bathroom.
“Doublemint complete,” she said under her breath.
“Good job, Tiff. Now go into the corner office and place the magnifier under the desk.” Chloe checked the satellite feed from the infrared scanner. Either that, or she was reading her text messages. From the backseat, it was kind of hard to tell. “One of the guards is in the kitchenette. The other is making his loop. He just passed the southmost corner office. Give it five seconds, and then head in. You should have about two minutes before he loops back by.”
Tiffany headed for the office. It was predictably locked, but another piece of gum (cherry this time) fixed that little problem, and Tiffany slipped the magnifier out of her bra and placed it on the bottom of the desk with the stealth of someone well used to sticking (nonexplosive) bubble gum to the bottom of the tables in chemistry lab.
With a murmur to Chloe indicating her success, Tiff slipped back out of the office, closed the door behind her, and practically skipped back down the hallway.
“Hey!”
I heard the voice from the audio feed, but didn’t see its owner until Tiffany turned around.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the guard said.
“Cohoon,” Chloe hissed. I had no idea what she was talking about, but luckily, Tiffany spoke fluent Chloe.
“Mr. Cohoon told me to meet him here,” she said. “I’m Jill. I temp downstairs, and Mr. Cohoon wanted to …” Tiffany gave the guard a look. “Go over some briefs.”
The guard apologized, and Tiff managed to sneak out without Bud or Jimmy noticing, because Brittany was showing them how she could “totally do a back bend.”
“Britt, Tiff is clear. Move out.”
With no warning, Brittany popped up from the back bend, blew kisses to the security guys, and breezed out the door.
I didn’t need Chloe to tell me that this stage of the operation was officially complete. The twins, who had spent a good twenty minutes impressing upon me the Ten Commandments of Cuticle Management the day before, had just managed to infiltrate a secured site and plant a high-tech device on an executive’s computer with no one the wiser. Maybe there was more to Zee’s statistical tests and profiles than even I’d thought possible.
“Who’s Cohoon?” I asked, not even bothering to sound unimpressed.
“One of their executives,” Chloe said. “He often conducts ‘special meetings’ with interns. It seemed like a plausible excuse.” She rolled her eyes at the way my jaw dropped open. “And, hello! Shouldn’t you be doing your oh-so-special hacker thing right now? Because there’s no telling what they’ll do when they discover the lock on the office was blown. Wasting time? Not a luxury we have right now, To-bee.”
I opened my Squad-issued laptop (which was, by the way, somewhat glittery—complete technology sacrilege), booted up, accessed the now-magnified wireless signal, and set about showing nose-in-the-air, pain-in-the-ass Chloe that when it came to hacking, I was oh-so-special indeed.
CHAPTER 24
Code Word: Evil
You know when you were five or six, and you went to a new playground for the first time, and it turned out that they had a twisty slide, a tire swing,anda merry-go-round? That’s sort of what I’m like the first time I access a new system. The adrenaline starts pumping, my heart jumps with joy at the technological twisty slides: firewalls, encryption, passwords, security blockers, antihacker detection programs … just thinking about it made me giddy, and there I was, fingers flying across the laptop keys, working my way around this barrier and that with the grace and artistic precision of an Olympic figure skater.
Of all the things I’ve ever done, hacking is seriously the only one that could even possibly make me think in skating metaphors.
“What’s that do?” Bubbles asked, leaning toward me and scrunching her nose up at the screen.
“That” was my refiguring the security settings on the wireless network. They’d set it up with double-sided protection—you weren’t supposed to be able to file share, and you definitely weren’t supposed to be able to poke around someone else’s hard drive, but after I’d convinced the system that I, and not someone whose username was GSeymor5, was the network administrator, those settings were easily changed. I turned on some quality one-way file sharing, meaning that all of the computers could share information with me, but I couldn’t share with any of the others, and none of them could share with each other.
