Killer Spirit
Page 17

Desperate to protect myself from the scent of the treatment, I wrapped a towel around my head and went back into my room in search of a distraction. Out of habit, I ended up at my computer, but instead of launching an internet browser, I pulled up a Word document I’d been working on for the last few weeks and added a new line of text.
The twins don’t know anything.
“And,” I said under my breath, unable to ignore the tingling in my nostrils, “they might be trying to kill me.”
As I skimmed the rest of the file, I wondered why I was even reading it again. I knew what it said. I’d written every word myself, and I thought about it almost every day. This document—not even a half-page long—contained everything I’d managed to find out about Jack’s uncle. His name was Alan Peyton. He’d grown up in Bayport and was a year older than Jack’s dad. He wasn’t listed in any of the Peyton firm’s official annual reports. Chloe acted sketchy when I hinted that I’d figured something out. None of the other girls had reacted at all.
And that was it. Given that I was part of an elite operative team, I probably should have been able to find out more, but short of hacking into the Big Guys’ mainframe (which I was pretty sure would be frowned upon), there wasn’t much I could do besides talk to the others and run a Google search on the name. It wasn’t like I needed to know; I just wanted to. I wasn’t concerned about the connection. If I’d figured it out, there was pretty much zero chance that it had somehow evaded the CIA’s notice. I mean, good old Uncle Alan left messages on the firm’s answering machines. That wasn’t exactly lying low.
Since I wasn’t worried about the connection, I could only conclude that my fascination with it was based on two things. The first was the fact that I viewed the world in terms of patterns, and the inner workings of this particular family tree didn’t fit any I’d ever seen. This whole situation just did not compute. If Jack’s dad had been older, and the uncle had been younger, then maybe I could have made sense of it, but I just couldn’t figure out why the heir to the family business would dedicate his life to tearing it down. The second factor in my fascination, as much as I hated to admit it, had to do with Jack, and the way that on some level, I couldn’t help but wonder where he would fall on the family tree. Figure out the pattern, figure out Jack.
I’d officially spent way too much time around Zee, because before I’d joined the Squad, I hadn’t analyzed my own motives nearly this much. I shut the Word document and pushed all thoughts of Jack out of my mind.
Great, I thought, now I need a distraction from my distraction. I got up from my desk and started looking for something that wouldn’t have me analyzing my subconscious desires, and I found it under my bed.
It was a plain, vanilla-colored notebook, with no title and no decoration on the cover. Of everything that the Squad had given me, this book was the lone item that wasn’t sparkly, lacy, or ridiculously brightly colored. For the first time since Lucy had handed it to me, I opened the book.
It was supposed to be some kind of history of the Squad program, but since Lucy had provided me with the Cliffs-Notes version, I’d never read it for myself. As I flipped through the pages, I smiled. If I’d realized the book was written in code, I probably would have paid a lot more attention to it a lot earlier.
On the surface, the scrapbook seemed straightforward enough: pictures and pieces of fabric and neatly written paragraphs about games, halftime routines, and private jokes. It was at least twenty-five or thirty years old, and as I flipped the pages, I couldn’t help but notice how cheer fashions had changed over the years. The skirts were significantly shorter now, and half of our tops revealed midriff. Our plethora of cheer uniforms (because we wore our uniforms every game day and couldn’t repeat outfits in a given week) boasted more eclectic styles, too.
I paused, wondering if Zee could somehow reverse the fashion programming the twins had obviously crammed into my head somewhere along the way.
“Look at the code,” I told myself sternly. “Not the clothes.”
I scanned through all of the written material, looking for letters that were bolded or tilted or written in a slightly different script than the others. That was the Squad low-maintenance encoding technique of choice.
I found nothing.
Okay, I thought. This could get interesting.
I tried looking for words that felt out of place in context with the others on the page. If I could identify at least one word that had been chosen for a property other than its meaning, I might be able to pick up on some pattern or trick to it. The third letter of the third word on the third page, combined with the fourth letter on the fourth page, or something like that.
Ten minutes later, all I’d managed to pull from the book using that method was sweet taco, which I seriously doubted had any meaning relevant to the history of the Squad program.
I went through all of the numbers mentioned, and substituted in their alphabet and reverse alphabet correlates, but came up with nothing but garbage.
“Hmmmmm.” I actually made the sound out loud, knowing that it was ridiculous to do so and not really caring.
There was a chance that the code required a second text. Most good codes did. That way, you couldn’t decode one unless you had both, decreasing the likelihood that someone who wasn’t supposed to would break it. But, I told myself, I was supposed to be able to break this one. Lucy had given it to me. If I’d needed a second source to sort out the code, she would have said something, or at the very least given me the second source in one form or another.
Since the only thing other than the book that Lucy had given me in recent memory was a throwing knife barreling toward my face, I dismissed my “multiple sources” theory and flipped through the pages again. Absentmindedly, I reached up and touched the towel around my head, and in the back of my mind, I wondered how much longer I was supposed to leave the conditioner in.
How long were Laguna Beach episodes anyway?
As I mussed with the towel, a single piece of hair fell out of its hold, and a drop of water fell onto the book. I haphazardly shoved the hair back under the towel, and stared at the wet mark, half expecting for some cheerleading or espionage deity to descend from the heavens and smite me for desecrating ye olde sacred history of the Squad.
The drop dried soon enough though, and I escaped any smitings that might have been heading my way.
And then, just like that, I knew.
“It’s not encoded,” I murmured. “It’s invisible.”
The girls on the Squad were almost as fond of invisible ink as they were of sparkly gel pens. I just had to figure out what the trigger to visibility was, and then I’d be set. It obviously wasn’t water, which was the only trigger I’d run across before. A specific chemical combination was possible, but unless it was the chemicals involved in powdered blush or something like that, it didn’t seem entirely likely. That left heat and light.
I grabbed the lamp off my desk, and positioned it so that I could hold a single page of the book directly above the lightbulb. At first, nothing happened, but then, as the pages heated up, the words written behind the visible script popped to the surface, and I read.
And read.
And read.
For the most part, there was nothing that I hadn’t been told before. The program had been created because, at the height of the Cold War, the government had secretly decided to begin training younger and younger agents, and while select boarding schools and military academies provided male trainees, they’d had difficulty locating a group of females who consistently and predictably fulfilled their requirements. The special task force assigned to recruitment was looking for girls who were beautiful and able to use their looks to their advantage, girls who were smart but didn’t seem on the surface to be much of a mental threat. Girls who were athletic, manipulative, and capable of keeping their true identity a secret.
And somewhere along the way, someone had suggested cheerleaders.
It was a miracle that person hadn’t been laughed right out of Washington, but they hadn’t been, and a handful of pilot programs were started at select schools across the country. Trainees were chosen based on a complex algorithm of requirements, ranging from IQ to athletic prowess and psychological fitness. Upon graduation, they were given tests and some of the girls were offered positions at Quantico or within the CIA, Secret Service, or some kind of covert ops division I didn’t quite understand.