Perfect Cover
Page 29

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’s anxious, 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 to guess”—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.”
“The only name I could get out of the numbers was Cho,” I said. “I’ve got some other combinations, but nothing that looked familiar.” I slid them across to her. “If you think you can do better, knock yourself out.”
Tara touched my arm softly, Zee cleared her throat, and I shut my mouth.
“Locations,” Lucy mused. “So we’re talking what? City names? Addresses? Map coordinates?”
An image of the map the Big Guys had shown us during our debriefing popped into my mind, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of the possibility that the numbers were coordinates before now.
“Map coordinates.” Our mighty captain latched onto the last possibility immediately—apparently, I wasn’t the only one who saw the logic. “Computer,” she said loudly, “locate 02-32-43.” She paused for a moment. “North, south, west, or east?” she wondered.
“We’re talking Europe, Asia, or Africa,” Tara said. “Possibly South America, but more likely not.”
“Show grid for 02-32-43 east,” Brooke said.
I paid no attention to her words, as I was caught halfway between berating myself for not thinking of the map coordinates thing (I mean location, duh) and giving in to the itchy feeling in my brain. As a map popped up on the plasma TV, with a vertical region highlighted, I gave in to the itch and let my mind go where it wanted to go.
023243. 024106. I didn’t like that both numbers started with a zero. Why “02” instead of just “2”? I mentally scratched the zeros off the end as Brooke ran a cross-reference analysis of the highlighted portion of the map with the information that may have been compromised on the (not so) secure CIA database.
(0)23243. (0)24106.
I shook my head, completely dissatisfied. It just felt wrong. Going on a whim (I like even numbers better than odd), I threw out the last digits as well, making the numbers(0)2324(3) and (0)2410(6).
“Two degrees, thirty-two minutes, and forty-three seconds east…no matches found.” The computer sounded distinctly peppy, but I barely noticed. Somewhere, in my subconscious, I registered the fact that the coordinates Brooke had tried hadn’t worked. There was no 02-32-43 east, at least not one that mattered.
East. The word echoed in my head, complete with peppy computer voice. East. East. E.
E = 3.
It came to me more like a splash of water in the face than a lightning bolt. On the telephone, the letter E was on the number 3, and the number 6 was the letters M, N, and O.
0-23-24 E, 0-24-10 N.
I scribbled the numbers down and handed them to Brooke. “Try these,” I said. Miracle of miracles, she did, and even more remarkably, it actually worked.
“Al Jawf, Libya.”
My eyes went immediately to Tara’s, but she gave no sign of whether this was good news or bad news.
“How many operatives in Al Jawf?” I asked, hoping the answer would be “none” even though I knew in the pit of my stomach that we’d gotten the code right.
“I don’t know,” Brooke admitted, “but I’m getting ready to find out.” She picked up her cell phone and dialed. We couldn’t risk uploading anything to our superiors’ breached database, but a secure phone call was a different beast altogether.
On the other end of the phone line, someone answered, and Brooke didn’t spend any significant amount of time beating around the bush.
“Al Jawf, Libya,” she said clearly. Then she paused, and about fifteen seconds later, she hung up.
“There are three operatives in the area. They’re alerting two of them. The third is in too deep.” Brooke tilted her head slightly and her hair (pulled into a high, glossy ponytail) fell to one side. “The primary assessment is that younger operatives will stand a better chance of moving in undetected, especially since our covers aren’t at risk from the leak.” She paused. “We’ve been authorized to send in a team of post-eighteens.” From her demeanor, she might as well have been talking about a sale on capri pants (still no idea what those were) at the mall.