Zach and Cammie step onto the dancefloor and immediately they step into ballroom-dancing position. She puts her left hand on his right shoulder and puts her right hand in his left one. He puts his hand on her lower back and begins leading her in a dance to Four Seasons by Vivaldi. Which was ironic, because the song was the exact name of the hotel they were staying at.
"So. Have you found Mrs. Hemlock?" Zach asks in a hushed tone. Whenever his hand on her back added a little pressure, Cammie knew which way to step to keep following his lead.
"Yes. I told her my name was Cameron Goode. I made conversation with her until she gave me the information of her hotel number," Cammie says with a boastful grin. Her pelvis barely grazed Zach's pelvis, like it was supposed to, but their chests weren't smashed against each other because her back was slightly arched.
Zach's eyebrows shoot up. "She actually gave you her room number?"
"Not exactly. I got enough tips out of her to know approximately which one it was. But… she's looking for me," Cammie says with a hint of fear in her voice.
"Right now?" Zach replies, momentarily hesitating before resuming dancing once more.
"No. Definitely not. But right before I left her, she asked me if I knew Cammie Morgan. She said she wanted to 'talk' to me. Although I'm sure that's not the only thing she was planning on doing once she found me," Cammie explains.
"True. Okay, how about we get into her room right now and then we get out of here?" Zach suggests. Cammie nods and he leads her to the edge of the dancefloor, where they keep dancing until the song ends.
"Bex!" Cammie calls out to her friend, who was making conversation with Grant. They both had champagne flutes in their hands. "Zach and I are going to Mrs. Hemlock's room. But we don't know where Mr. Hemlock is."
"He's right over there. The man with the black ponytail standing next to Mrs. Hemlock," Bex answers, nudging her head a little in the direction of Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock.
"You sure that's him?"
"Sure I'm sure," Bex insists.
"Stay in here and be sure they don't leave this room. We'll be back in ten minutes to get you two and then we can all leave," Zach butts in. Bex and Grant nod, mission accepted, and Zach begins walking out of the room.
Cammie and Zach walk back out to the lobby, and Cammie presses the Up button on the elevator. Once the doors open, she steps inside and presses the button for the very top floor. "Are you sure you know her room?" Zach asks.
"Of course. She said she got the best view in the entire hotel, which would obviously be on the top floor," Cammie confirms. Once the doors open on the top floor, she leads the way down the hallway. "Then she said she only picks a room number with all the same numbers, and there are only one of those on each floor."
Cammie stops in front of room number 555, and she motions towards it. "Which would only mean one thing," she continues, "This must be Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock's room."
"Good job, Gallagher girl," Zach compliments with a wondrous grin on his face.
"Yeah, yeah. Now how are we gonna get in?"
"Leave that to me," he replies, brandishing a hotel room key from his breast pocket and using it to open the door. "This is a room card that can open any hotel door. Kinda like a wild card."
They step into a pitch-black apartment, and Cammie snaps on the lightswitch. The hotel looked exactly like their hotel room at the Four Seasons, except this hotel room had less furnishings and was decorated in a navy-and-silver color scheme. "Look for anything remotely suspicious," Zach orders.
They split up, Cammie to the bedroom and Zach to the living room. She searches under the mattress, under the pillows, underneath the bed, and through the sheets. She fixes the bed to erase all traces she was even there.
Next she heads to the bed table, and she searches all the drawers. Everywhere in the drawer, underneath the drawer, behind the table. But there was nothing to find. Cammie had even lifted the little rug in the center of the room, but nothing was there.
She goes into the closet, turning on the light. She ruffles through the clothes, quickly searching all the pockets but turning up empty. On a high shelf was a glass jar full of various coins from different countries. It looked like a haphazard coin collection. As she was reaching past it towards a shoebox, the jar tipped over and several dozen coins spilled onto the hardwood floor. It sounded like hail on a tin roof, and Cammie winced.
Zach ran into the closet, tie ruffled. "What happened?" he asks quickly, but once he sees the mess, he shuts his mouth.
Both Cammie and Zach bend down and begin picking up the coins. In minutes, all of them were picked up. But Cammie looks around on her hands and knees to be sure they didn't miss anything. A glint of silver peeks out from under a vanity, just like the one in her closet at their hotel. Cammie picks up the silver half-dollar, but gasps as it completely breaks in half; each side of the coin was separate, showing a hollowed-out center.
"Ohmygod," Cammie breathes. There was a neon-blue computer chip hidden in the hollowed-out center. She takes out the chip and puts the half-dollar back together. She stands up, returns the coin to the jar, and snaps off the light.
Zach was back in the living room, searching the couch cushions. "Look at what was hidden in a hollowed-out half-dollar," Cammie gushes, holding out the computer chip.
"Wow. Good thing you knocked over that jar, then, right?" Zach says, taking the chip and turning it over and over in his hands. "This must be it. But even if its not, we should get going. We've been in here long enough, and we have no way for Bex or Grant to contact us if Mr. or Mrs. Hemlock leaves the lounge."
Cammie takes the computer chip and sticks it in her purse. They leave the hotel room, shutting off all the lights. They retreat back down the elevator, and sign back into the party with the lady with the clipboard. "There they are," Cammie points out Grant and Bex, who were dancing together.
As they approach their friends-slash-subordinates, Bex and Grant stop dancing, ready to leave the party. Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock were a few yards away, talking to a group of women their age. "Cammie, you ready to go?" Bex asks, looping an arm through Cammie's.
"Bex," Cammie hisses, eyes flickering over to Mrs. Hemlock, who snaps her head over to Cammie and her friends. Mrs. Hemlock grabs Mr. Hemlock's arm, pulling him through the crowd.
"Cammie," Zach utters, grabbing her wrist and pulling her away from Bex.
"Bex! Grant! Keep Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock away from us as long as possible," Cammie hurries to explain, "They're after me."
"We have to go," Zach commands, pulling Cammie through the crowd and away from the Hemlocks. Behind them, she hears a waitress' cry and the crash of dozens of drink glasses shattering on the floor. Cammie looks over her shoulder and sees Mrs. Hemlock skidding to a stop in front of a pool of glass shards and liquor on the floor. Bex was apologizing profusely to the waitress for her "accident."
Zach and Cammie ran out of the lobby and outside of the hotel to the valet tent. The sun was down, and a full moon was spilling white light across the blacktop. "Zachary Goode," he barks at the attendant, who sorts through the rings of car keys. Once the attendant holds it in the air and opens his mouth to talk, Zach snatches the keys from his hands and continues, "We'll get our own car, thanks."
Zach pulls on Cammie's arm, nearly yanking it out of the socket. She hobble-sprints behind him in her high heels, running on tip-toe so as to not break a heel. He presses the lights on the key ring and the Lamborghini flashes its headlights at the far corner of the parking lot.
Cammie looks behind and Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock were just running out of the doors of the hotel. They immediately spotted them in the still parking lot. "They're coming!" she reports.
"Then we'll just have to outrun them, won't we?" Zach replies.
They finally make it to the car, and they throw the doors open, climb inside, and slam the doors shut all at once. Zach thrusts the key into the ignition and twists it so hard Cammie was sure the key would snap. The engine roars to life, and the headlights automatically turn on, illuminating the parking lot in front of them. He snaps off the headlights, leaving them in the dark, and he presses down on the gas pedal.
The Lamborghini shoots forward, and Cammie's body is pressed against the seat from the speed as Zach drives out of the parking lot and onto the road winding away from the hotel. Suddenly, bright white headlights shine through the back window and illuminate the interior of the Lamborghini.
Cammie turns around in her seat and Zach checks the rearview mirror. It was Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock, tailing them in a black Ferrari Enzo, one of only 399 in the world. Suddenly, the metallic shots of a gun was heard behind them. "Get down!" Zach commands tersely, glancing at Cammie. She slumps down in her seat to block herself from being shot.
"Well, I think they have something to be guilty about," Zach says casually, steadily pushing the gas pedal down more and more.
"What was your first guess? Them chasing after us, or them trying to shoot at us?" Cammie asks sarcastically. Zach just smirks at her and spins the steering wheel, careening them around a sharp corner. Cammie buckles her seatbelt with shaking hands and clings to her armrests.
They speed down the road, and Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock slowly get smaller and smaller behind them. Zach avoids all the heavily-trafficked Miami streets. He sticks to the small suburb roads, taking thoughtless turns around sudden corners and ramping the speed up to blurring speeds.
"He's used to life in the fast lane.
He travels all over the world,
risks his life racing at over 200 miles an hour,
and seems to be handy with a gun."
- Mata Hari
"Okay, I know you're trying to lose our tail and all, but do you have to be so reckless?" Cammie demands.
"It's called evasive driving, sweetheart," Zach replies. He was sitting straight in the driver's seat, feet expertly navigating the pedals. His black tie was loosened and his dark hair was ruffled. He takes one hand off the wheel and casually drapes his arm over Cammie's headrest. She turns around and peers out the back window, over his forearm. There was no sign of Mr. or Mrs. Hemlock.
"So… where are we going? We obviously can't turn around and start heading back to the Four Seasons… we might accidentally run into Mr. or Mrs. Hemlock," Cammie asks.
"I know. And we're not. We're staying at Grant's apartment on the other side of town. We've pre-planned to meet there if anything bad happened during the mission. Which, it has. So Bex will probably be there too," Zach explains. His Blackberry vibrates in his pocket, and he withdraws his arm from her headrest to bring it up to his ear. "Hey, Grant."
Zach is silent for a while as Grant says something, then Zach replies with, "Yeah, we just lost them. We're on our way over there." He's silent for a few more seconds, and Cammie can hear Grant's muffled voice coming from the phone, but she can't make out the words. Zach continues, "I know, I know. We can talk once we get there. And we have to look at the chip Cammie found in the hotel room. Listen, we're just a few blocks away. I'll see ya soon."
Zach hangs up on his friend and tucks his phone back into his pocket. Cammie opens her purse and looks at the bright blue computer chip sitting at the very bottom, between a tube of lipgloss and her hotel key. "Do you really think that this is all the information from the disk that was stolen? That this mission is pretty much over?" Cammie thinks out-loud.
"Oh, it's far from over. The disk stolen is an actual computer disk, which means that the original copy is still out there. So we'd have to find Mr. or Mrs. Hemlock and interrogate them until they tell us who else is on their side. Which may take up to a whole week, depending on how stubborn they are," Zach informs her.
He turns the car into a dark alley and parallel-parks between two dumpsters. Cammie looks up at the ominous-looking apartment building next to them. "Grant lives here?"
"Nah, I just couldn't park in front of his actual apartment building in case the Hemlocks are driving around looking for our car. His apartment is just a block away from here," Zach explains. They step out of the car and lock the doors. Zach leads the way out of the alley and down the sidewalk. Eventually they get to a large brick building with flower boxes at the windows, though most of the flower boxes were empty with a few stray cigarette butts.
They walk into the front door and into the overly air-conditioned foyer. Zach presses a few buttons on a speaker on the wall and Grant's distinct deep voice answers, "Yeah?"
"Hey, Grant. We're coming up now," Zach speaks into the speaker. Cammie presses the button on an elevator next to her, and the hum from the elevator echoes through the foyer.
"Kay, see ya soon. The door will be unlocked when you get here." The elevator's doors open right as Zach drops his finger from the button on the speaker. They stepped into the elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor. On the sixth floor, Zach went up to the room right to the left of the elevator and opened the door.
Grant and Bex were sitting on a brown leather couch in front of a big screen TV. The Miami local news was on, and a lady with bleached hair was shuffling a stack of papers behind a large desk. Her neon-pink lips were moving rapidly, but the TV was muted and they couldn't hear anything. "Cammie!" Bex explains, leaping off the couch. She was still in her creamy-white dress from the party, which made her tan skin look even darker. "Thank god you're finally here. Grant and I heard something on the news that you aren't going to believe."
"What is it?" Cammie asks.
"The people who stole the disk from the Pentagon? They sent a ransom note to the people at the Pentagon. It said that they were almost done collecting the parts for the nuclear weapon, and if all spies weren't withdrawn from their duties trying to steal back the blueprints, then they would actually build and use the weapon to attack the Pentagon and then Washington D.C.," Bex blurts, not taking one breath the whole time. She finally gasps in air and waits for Cammie's reaction.
"So… the government finally released to the public what happened at the Pentagon?" she asks.
"Not exactly," Bex answers, "They just said that a mysterious Radical terror group threatened to bomb the Pentagon and the White House with a nuclear weapon unless the government removes all spies from their missions. The government didn't include anything about how the blueprints for the nuclear weapon were stolen from the Pentagon in the first place, or else that would show insufficient security that would worry the public."
"Interesting," Zach comments. "Did Solomon call and say if we were removed from the mission?"
"Actually, yeah, he did," Grant replies, "He says that the government publicly took all spies away from their missions in order to convince the enemies that they shouldn't use the weapon. We'll be the only spies still on our mission to stop the bombers. But if Mr. or Mrs. Hemlock get back to their leaders or comrades or whatever and tell them about us, then they'll know that not all the spies were relieved from their duties and the Pentagon and the White House will be bombed, which is why it's so necessary for us not to be caught."
"Damn," Zach murmurs. He raises his eyes to the ceiling like he was thinking, then he drops his gaze and scans his comrade's faces. "Okay, first thing tomorrow, we're gonna get out and go find Mr. and Mrs. Hemlock. We have to make it so that there is no possible way their information can get back to whoever they're working for. Liz and Jonas will come along too, because, according to their files, they work best on computers so tracking the Hemlocks should be easy."
"Sounds good, dude," Grant says. "Alright, Cammie, I understand you're the one with the computer chip?"
"Yeah, its right in my purse," she replies, taking out the chip and handing it to Grant.
"Hmm. It might have been handy to have Jonas here right now," grant murmurs, turning the chip in his hands before finally plugging it into the laptop on the coffee table in front of the couch.
"Or Liz. She could get it done practically immediately," Bex boasts.
"Too bad neither Jonas or Liz will be in Miami until tomorrow, which was when I told them to get here," Zach says grimly, watching over Grant's back as file after file downloaded on the laptop. He stood with his arms crossed across his broad chest, his green eyes steadily watching the computer screen, and his square jaw firmly clenched. Along with the tuxedo, his looks made Cammie feel faint.
"How long could this take to open the file?" Cammie asks.
"I don't know, a few more minutes, maybe?" Grant answers. Turns out, they all had mediocre computer skills, and it took two more hours of opening random files, accepting download attachments, exiting out of JPEG pop-ups, and sluggish loading until the blueprints were finally brought up onto the screen.
"I know you like to keep an eye on me.
Keep an eye on me, but if you want it got to let it be.
Lipstick's on, stockings up.
Skirt's short, heels are high.
Take your time, buckle up.
Close your eyes and enjoy the ride."
- Spy by Shakira
(Author's Note: Sorry this took me so long. I couldn't find a good stopping place, and I didn't want to end this chapter too short either. So… yeah. Ugh, I say that way too much! 'So… yeah.' I need a new catch-phrase. Something like… Holy cleavage, Batman! Jayyykayyy. Lol. But I heard somebody say that when our slutty dance team at school was dancing during our assembly today. It was mucho hilarioso. Anyway, review! The more reviews I get, the faster I'll update! Promise.)