“And you were going to share this with me when?”
“Puh-lease, Toby, no whining right now. I can’t deal with it. I really can’t. We have much bigger problems than this right now.”
Hey! I was not whining.
“What problems might these be?” I asked. “And where are you going?” I hadn’t noticed, because I’d been too busy trying to process Brooke’s rant, but she’d pulled off the highway, and now we were driving through a residential area.
“Home,” Brooke said tersely.
“Home as in your home?” I asked.
Brooke nodded.
“And why are we going there?”
Brooke took a deep breath. “Because that’s where the Big Guys live.”
“Excuse me?” I felt an undying need to start swearing again.
“If you want to get technical,” Brooke said, “that’s where one of the Big Guys lives. She’s one of the smaller Big Guys actually, not based in Washington, not on active duty, but she still calls her share of shots, and right now, all of those are aimed at me.”
Brooke pulled into a driveway and ran a hand angrily through her hair. “Not good,” she muttered. “So not good.”
A second later, someone tapped gently on the driver’s side window, and Brooke, pushing all signs of aggravation off her face, rolled it down.
A woman stood there. She was probably about my mom’s age, maybe a few years younger, but she’d aged well. She was trim and fit, her hair was dark and every bit as thick as Brooke’s, and her eyes were wide set, her lashes long, and her face almost wrinkle-free.
In fact, the only reason that I guessed she was near my mom’s age was the fact that I had a deep and abiding suspicion that this was, in fact, Brooke’s mother.
“Hello, Brookie,” the woman said, a tight nonsmile on her face. “I see you brought a friend.”
“Mom, Toby. Toby, Mom.” Brooke made the introductions, her smiling matching her mother’s exactly.
“Hello, Toby,” Mrs. Camden said. “Won’t you two join me inside?”
She sounded like your average PTA mom—chipper and faux sweet and like she’d have cookies waiting for us in a jar on the counter, but I knew better. Brooke’s mom was one of the Big Guys, and, quite frankly, she scared the hell out of me.
Where were Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail when you needed them?
Brooke rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she told me under her breath. “She’s not going to kill you.” The emphasis on the last word did not escape me, and as I slipped out of the car, I couldn’t help but think of everything Zee had told me about Brooke’s relationship with her mom. I’d known Mrs. Camden was a former Squad member herself, known that she’d groomed Brooke for this and that (according to Zee’s latest spiel), she put a lot of pressure on her, but I’d never realized that Brooke’s mother was actually in on our operation.
First Jack’s uncle and now this. Who was going to be next? The twins’ little sister?
With happy-homemaker efficiency, Mrs. Camden got us settled on the couch in her living room, and she actually did bring us cookies. Neither of us ate them.
“Tell me what happened,” she said simply.
I couldn’t read anything in her tone, but Brooke looked like she’d been slapped.
“We entered the premises on the mark’s invitation and immediately identified the locations of all three nonmark hostiles. We convinced all of them of our cover, and I played decoy while Toby exited the room under the guise of going to the bathroom. The first hostile followed her, but she managed to escape the bathroom through the air duct as planned. The mission progressed accordingly for approximately four and a half minutes…”
“That long?” Brooke’s mother mused. She arched an eyebrow at me. “He didn’t break down the door for four and a half minutes? Impressive.”
I made the executive decision not to illuminate Mrs. Camden on the method I’d used to procure as much time as possible. Somehow, I didn’t think this particular desperate housewife would appreciate it.
“I continued distracting the second hostile and the mark while Toby disabled the third hostile and began searching for the security panel. She located the panel, deactivated the security, and found the target, but unfortunately, the third hostile woke up just as the other two realized that she was not, in fact, in the bathroom. I disabled the mark first as instructed, and engaged in hand-to-hand with the other two until one of them managed to pull a gun. He fired a single shot. I succeeded in diving out of the way, but the second hostile caught me and held me at gunpoint. At that point in time, Toby came into the room, providing enough of a distraction that I was able to disarm the hostiles and render them unconscious. Toby returned to the kitchen while I secured the hostiles and the mark, but the target we were sent to retrieve was gone, presumably taken by an unidentified intruder whose arrival had coincided with the third hostile’s awakening and the others’ discovery that we were not who and what we claimed to be.”
If by unidentified, she meant “almost certainly Amelia Juarez.”
“An unidentified entity, an ‘intruder’ as you so blithely put it, has the weapon you were sent to retrieve?” Mrs. Camden asked, her voice still sickly sweet.
“Yes.” Brooke’s answer was short, and her voice was neutral, but I could feel the tension beneath the surface of her tone.
I expected Mrs. Camden to yell, or to lash out physically, or to do something drastic, but instead, she just sighed.
“Oh, Brookie. What are we going to do with you?”
“It wasn’t her fault,” I surprised myself by saying. “It’s mine. If I’d taken Amel—errr—the intruder out the first time I’d seen her, this wouldn’t have happened.”
That was true enough.
Mrs. Camden considered me, her face the epitome of polish and homemakerly grace. “You’re green,” she said. “And you’ll learn.”
I got the feeling that from her, this was high praise. Beside me, Brooke stiffened.
“Don’t wrinkle your forehead, dear,” Mrs. Camden chided. She must have had incredible eyesight, because as hard as I looked, I couldn’t make out a single wrinkle. “You’ll have worry lines before you’re thirty.” Then, without sparing Brooke so much as another look, she turned her attention back to me. “Why didn’t you disable the intruder?”