Betrayal Codes

Chapter 3: Libby

"Why'd you do that?" Shay hisses at Cleo once they're seated again.

"Because I recognized them. Plus, wouldn't they be the perfect guys to have fun with while we're here?" Cleo suggests. Taylor chuckles into her coffee cup.

"Um, what?"

"I'm just saying!" She smiles innocently. I can see the boys out of the corner of my eye. I recognized one from the woods last night but not the other. And where is Hazel Eyes?

The one from last night is watching me. So, bravely, I turn my full attention to him and stare right back. Just as I suspected yesterday, he has deep, dark brown eyes. For those eyes to be that deep, they must hold a lot of secrets.

On the surface, he looks happy, maybe even amused. If you look harder, you can see the haunted look behind his eyes. His bold features were worn down with something. Guilt? Hate? Sorrow? A mix of them all? This thought intrigues me. A regular guy with tons of secrets — dark secrets. Hmm...

He tilts his head and blinks, breaking me from my thoughts. Quickly, I study him: tall, athletic build, warm skin, tousled light brown hair, fitted black t-shirt and jeans before scowling and turning back to my friends. "Find anything you like?" Taylor teases.

"Yes, actually. The chocolate croissant looks tasty. I wonder how it measures up to the ones in France."

"Is that code for something scandalous?"

"No!" I exclaim. "I'm talking about the actual food. An honest-to-god chocolate croissant!"

"Okay!" She holds up her hands in mock surrender. The others are hiding smiles at my outburst. I didn't expect to get that offended, either. "Topic change! So, please enlighten me, what in the world are we doing? All you guys talk about is catching Peter but how are we going to do it? What is he even doing here? How will we know where he is? How will we get suppl–?"

"Ohmigod, Tay. Chill out," Cleo interrupts. "And lower your voice!" I peek behind me to see if the boys heard our conversation. It doesn't seem like it because they're having a fierce, hushed conversation. Hazel Eyes is sitting with them now, looking more irritated than he was last night. I read curses flying off his lips, mentions of "the girls," and the names "Cole" and "Tucker." That must be the other boys' names.

"You know," I turned around. "We really don't know where he is. We don't know how we'll know where he is. We don't know how we'll 'catch' him." Taylor looks frightened like she just grasped the fact that she walked into a mission with no plan or true direction to follow. "All we know is that he's here, in this town, and we need to bring him back to the Agency."

"So no trackers on him, no messages from Jess, no nothing?" Taylor is frantic now, close to bolting out the door and hoping on the next flight home.

"Yep."

"Libby, could you please be more positive?" Cleo scolds. "Taylor, it seems Lib was misinformed. Yes, he's in this town. Yes, we need to bring him home. No, Jess and the team aren't sending messages. But he is." That's new. "You know how the team found that message about him leaving his fortress and coming here?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it wasn't just him. He brought minions with him. So obviously, he's going to be sending them messages. Right before we left, Jess gave me this device," Cleo pulls out a palm-sized iPad. We gaze at it in wonder. "Jess and the team will send us any intercepted codes from the Band through a secure messaging app programmed into our phones," she explains and we all whip out our phones to check for the app, "and then we put the code into this device like so." She demonstrates by typing random letters into the device. "This device will then decode it as it has the codebook programmed into it–"