Barking Up the Wrong Lead - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Number of girls who had made the CoveOps cut: 10

Number of minutes those girls spent surveying the grounds: 37

Number of times Operative Anderson complained about having a full bladder: 16

Number of times Operative Anderson ran into the woods to empty her bladder: 1

Number of security cameras that the operatives had to dodge: 567

Number of unsecure or otherwise penetrable entrances found: 0

Number of times Operative Goode wondered what Woods was up to: too many to count.

"If we ever make it in there, remind me to kill her," Alice said as we scanned our assigned section of the perimeter.

"When," I corrected. "When we make it in there."

I need covert operations—not just the class, but the actual art. I need to feel the power in my veins and the mystery in the air. If I didn't have it, I would just be skin and bone. A cat without a mouse to chase. I needed CoveOps, but for the past month, I had needed it just a little bit more, I think, and now that Woods had handed it to me, it was an all-or-nothing kind of deal. The girl in me could hide away for as long as she wanted because the spy in me had taken over and the spy didn't cry about her mother.

"What is this place anyways?" Alice wondered as she took note of the sixteenth security camera we'd passed in the last five minutes. "Maybe it's too much to ask, but if I'm going to be charged with breaking and entering, I'd at least like to know where I'm breaking into."

"Probably some old warehouse," I said, watching as the camera rotated to it's opposite side.

She rolled her eyes at me in a very Alice-y way. "A warehouse with a dozen different brands of security cameras and a wall that could protect a small island nation? Get real, Mags."

"It didn't seem so ridiculous to you during our exam last semester," I pointed out, remembering the day when my team pinned our teachers to the wall with forklifts. Good times.

She crouched down, slowly making her way into the cover of another bush. "That was last semester," she said with a dismissive wave. "This is now. Woods wouldn't have us break into another warehouse. Where would be the fun in that? I'm telling you, Mags. We're here for a reason."

I knew Alice was right. To tell you the truth, she usually is. Professor Woods didn't waste time. She never repeated herself. Whatever this was, it was this way for a reason.

"But it'd be real freakin' nice if I knew what that reason is," she muttered to no one in particular.

I had to agree with her. I wasn't feeling this whole blindly-following-orders thing that we had going on, but I knew that the only way to find out what was on the inside, was to actually get inside. Except I had no idea how we were supposed to do that. All ten of us had been searching the grounds for a better part of an hour and we had yet to find any sort of way in. All we needed was one leak. A hole. Something that would allow us to get past the wall without triggering the highly sensitive alarms—and when I say highly sensitive, I mean it. Seriously. I'm pretty sure that you have to be above a certain clearance level to even see some of those camera models.

But maybe seeing was the problem. After all, I had never been one to see an exceptional number of oddities. My talents lied with listening.

I closed my eyes and let my ears explore, trying to hunt down something—anything that could get us in. The wind getting caught in a hole or a car driving through a set of rear gates. That particular night at that particular moment, I heard running water. "Do you hear that?"