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 the hacker spaz thing right about 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 anything but a spaz.

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, and a 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.

I could tell you how I did this, but then I’d have to kill you.

Honestly, though, I lie—I probably couldn’t tell you how I did this. I just did. I was in the zone. I was unstoppable. I ran a scan on each of the four hard drives belonging to Infotech executives, searching for encrypted files and the type of program they would have needed to hack a secure government database. Not that I was intimately familiar with that kind of program or anything. I certainly hadn’t written several of my own.

I concentrated on what I had to do. I’d had it banged into my head over and over again—first by the Big Guys, then by Brooke, and at least five times by Chloe on the way here: find the program Infotech had used to implement the hacks, confirming the Big Guys’ hypothesis that they were the guilty party; get copies of any and all files they’d managed to steal; and then do everything I could to completely and utterly cripple their system. It was a three-pronged attack, and in my own special Toby way, I was multitasking and laying the groundwork for all three prongs at once. I could have done it faster with my own computer, but despite the fact that it had a glittery finish, the Squad-issued laptop came equipped with a variety of hacking programs almost as good as ones I’d written myself.

Apparently, the previous hacker, whoever she was, hadn’t been a complete imbecile.

The computer made a happy beeping sound as it located a program that fit the parameters I’d been searching for. It was impossible to tell anything about it at first glance, but based on file size and the basic configuration, all of my hacker instincts were telling me that this was the evidence I’d been looking for. I convinced the computer to scan for encrypted files tagged with the program-specific document tag, and a few minutes later, the results came absolutely pouring in.

“Bingo.” As the names of the encrypted files started popping up on my computer, I couldn’t help but gloat audibly.

Find the program used to initiate the hack? Check.

Locate any and all files related to the information acquired in the hacks? Check.

Download those files? It would take some time, but I was willing to give myself a preemptive check on that one, too.

“Bingo!” Lucy echoed my victory cry. Then she turned around and cocked her head to one side. “What bingo?”

“Encrypted files,” I said. “Tons of them, actually.”

I paused. I hadn’t counted on there being this many. As the file names piled up, I bit the inside of my lip. Depending on whether or not they used a different encryption on each file, this could take some serious time to go through. What if I was wrong? What if the program I’d identified had nothing to do with the hack? What if…

“Problem?” Chloe asked.

Normally, I might have taken offense at the tone, but I was still in hacker mode. My mind was racing to find solutions, not paying any mind to Chloe’s bitquo.

“There could be a problem,” I said. “But I’ve got it covered. I’m widening my download to include all of the encrypted files, on the assumption that if these guys have been stealing classified information, they’re not going to leave it in their system unprotected.”

Unfortunately, from what I was reading on the screen, it looked like nearly all of the system’s files were encrypted. Not surprising given that these guys secured websites for a living, but still a pain in my butt. “There are hundreds of files here,” I said.

Faster now, more and more names appeared on the list.

“Maybe thousands.”

“Can you tell if any of them are the files we’re looking for?”

“I could start decoding,” I said. “Maybe screen for files that include imported data or encrypted applications, but…”

“But with that many files, decryption would still take forever and a day.”

Unfortunately, yes. My mind buzzed, working the problem over and over again. I typed in some parameters and narrowed down the possible files of interest, and looking at them made me salivate to start decoding, but…

ACCESS DENIED.

I stared at the words.

USERNAME/PASSWORD INVALID.

“Problem?” Chloe asked.

My mouth responded while the rest of me went into hyperdrive. “They’ve switched the security settings. They might use a roaming administrator or…” I hit five keys in quick succession. “Or,” I continued, “they might know I’m here.”