Perfect Cover (10 page)

CHAPTER 17

Code Word: Gossip

The Quad was a frigging labyrinth. Even after Chloe haughtily pointed out the exit, I’d still somehow managed to get turned around. But I was not, repeat NOT, going to go back and ask for a clarification of her directions. I wasn’t an idiot, and I wasn’t about to risk feeding Chloe’s obvious superiority complex any more than I already had.

“You’re pissed at Chloe. And lost.”

Years of training had me whirling around to face the owner of the voice. As I turned, I shifted my weight back on my heels, sinking into a ready position.

Zee lifted her hands up and arched an eyebrow at me. “I come in peace.”

Feeling more than a little stupid, I rose out of my position and shifted my weight to the balls of my feet. “I’m not lost,” I grumbled. “Chloe just gives really crappy directions.”

“Which brings me back to my original point,” Zee said.

“You’re pissed at Chloe. What’d she do this time?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you asking as a PhD or as the resident Gossip Girl?”

Zee shrugged delicately. “Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.”

I was less than amused. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a stakeout?”

Zee shrugged. “Brooke decided I should stay here and work on profiling Heath Shannon. She took April with her instead.”

It just figured—I was here listening to audio clips with Chloe, and April got to go on a stakeout at the evil law firm.

Zee put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got some stuff you should probably see.”

I didn’t move.

“Seriously, Toby. I swear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with lipstick, pore-reducing cleanser, or whatever else has your panties in a twist.”

“Panties in a twist,”
I said. “Is that a technical term?”

Zee rolled her eyes. “So what? Just because I have a PhD, I have to be smart all the time? A person can be more than one thing, Toby. I can be smart and a cheerleader and incredibly knowledgeable about celebrity marriages, all at the same time.”

“A girl of many talents,” I said.

Zee grinned. “Damn straight. Now, are you coming or aren’t you?”

She turned around and started walking off. Since I had exactly two options, Chloe or Zee, I chose Zee. Chloe was predictable (or, at least, predictably witchy). Zee was something of an enigma.

I followed her up a staircase, and after two security checkpoints (one that scanned our fingerprints, and one that scanned our retinas), found myself in a small room with a desk, a large filing cabinet, a computer, and a television.

“Your office?” I guessed. Zee nodded. It occurred to me that I should probably demand my own computer lab/office setup—Lucy and Chloe had labs; the twins had the salon; Zee had an office. Judging from her demeanor, I could only guess that Brooke probably ruled over a small country somewhere in the Quad. The least they could give me was an office with the world’s fastest computer.

“I’m sure it can be arranged,” Zee said, making me wonder if she was psychic. “But give it a few weeks. The rest of the girls are still adjusting to the new group dynamics.”

The way Zee switched from one mode to another, sounding like one of
those girls
one minute and full of psychobabble the next, freaked me out. Then again, wasn’t that what the Squad was all about?

“So what did you want to show me?”

The sooner she showed it to me, the sooner I could go home, eat, shower, and pass out. In that order.

“Have a seat.” Zee gestured, and I sat. Post–herkie torture, my body was fundamentally opposed to standing for any extended period of time.

When Zee sat down behind her desk, her eyes watched me carefully, and I frowned. “I am so not in the mood to be psychoanalyzed,” I told her.

Zee flipped her glossy black ponytail over her shoulder. “Been there,” she said. “Done that. You’re not that interesting.”

I folded my arms across my chest and waited.

“Actually, I thought you might want the rundown on everyone else.”

“Say what?”

“Let’s face it. You’re not exactly Miss Sociable. You didn’t know any of the girls this time last week, and I’m pretty sure you hated all of us anyway. Now you’re a part of the Squad, and, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve decided that Tara is tolerable, and you’re trying awfully hard not to like Lucy. You still haven’t forgiven the twins for the Stage Six, you’re mildly threatened by April, you think Bubbles has the IQ of a doorstop, you’ve already created a mental list of dictators whose personalities resemble Brooke’s, you can’t understand what Chloe’s problem is, and my PhD freaks the hell out of you.”

It was like she had me in some kind of freaky cheerleading mind meld!

With another hair flip, Zee crossed her arms over her chest, matching her posture to my own. “How’d I do?”

I didn’t answer.

“I take it that means I did well? Know you better than you know yourself, et cetera, et cetera?”

“Didn’t you have something to show me?” I asked.

“Sure,” Zee said. She pushed a folder across the desk, and I picked it up. Not sure what to expect, I opened it.

The first thing I saw was the numbers. I got numbers. They were comfort food for my brain. I read the labels, examined the axes of the graphs, and flipped through the pages.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Ideal profile for an operative,” Zee said. “Aptitude tests, IQ, EI, personality diagnostics. The works.”

Then Zee slid another folder across the desk.

I opened it, and as I digested the data in front of me, Zee explained.

“That’s the breakdown for the Squad,” she said. “I didn’t label the different individuals, but you get the drift. There’s some EI/IQ tradeoff, and the personalities vary, but they’re all good at keeping secrets, they all know how to command a situation, they’re all incredibly intuitive about the strengths and weaknesses of others, and they’re all extraordinarily loyal.”

Without a word, Zee slid another folder across the table. Unable to help myself, I opened it.

A little girl with dark hair, glasses, and a serious expression on her face stared back at me.

“That was taken the day I graduated from high school,” Zee said. “I was eight.” She shuddered. “I know, I know, the bangs are hideous, and it’s more than obvious that my mother was still picking out my clothes….”

She trailed off. “I didn’t start picking out my own clothes until grad school, you know? And I never hung out with people my own age. I think that’s why I was so into psychology. I always thought that if I could understand what it meant to be normal, I could just sort of fake it. And then one day, someone comes along and offers to pay me to do it all over again. They styled my hair, they made me over, they gave me a car, and they put me on a cheerleading squad with nine other teenage girls.”

Zee paused. “And those nine other girls? They would have died for me. A couple of times, some of them almost have.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Without a word, Zee handed me another folder. I opened it, and Lucy stared back at me.

“She’s a perfectionist,” Zee said. “She’s got this really incredible drive to be good and nice and sweet and happy, and she doesn’t do anything unless she can be the best at it. She had an older sister, but the sister died in a car wreck when she was nine. Lucy being Lucy is pretty much the only thing that kept her family together.”

Zee pushed another folder across the desk. I didn’t open it.

“That one’s Chloe,” Zee said. “You gonna open it?”

I thought about it and then shook my head. “You going to give me the Cliff’s Notes anyway?”

“But of course.” Zee twirled her hair absentmindedly as she spoke. “Chloe was, in layman’s terms, the world’s biggest dork. Kind of chubby, socially awkward, really into
Star Wars.
”

As Zee dished, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the Gossip Girl/profiler pairing made sense. I mean, wasn’t a profiler just someone who knew everything about everyone to the point that they could practically see inside their heads? And wasn’t a gossip queen pretty much the exact same thing?

“
Star Wars
?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“She’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this, but yeah.
Star Wars.
She spent the majority of fourth grade building a functioning light saber.”

The next time Chloe made a computer geek comment, she was so incredibly toast.

“Chloe moved to Bayport when she was eleven,” Zee continued, “and she was drafted to the program immediately.”

“She joined the Squad when she was
eleven
?”

“No,” Zee said. “She was befriended by a cheerleader who more or less Stage Sixed her all by herself. This girl strong-armed Chloe into joining the cheerleading squad and molded her into the Chloe we all know and love. Four years later, both girls made varsity. Now they have this sibling love/hate thing going on.”

Zee paused then, and I got the feeling that she was waiting for me to catch up.

“Brooke?” I guessed.

Zee nodded. “Brooke. She’s been in the program longer than anyone. She was raised for it, and she’s been slated for Squad captain since she was like nine. Brooke turned Chloe into her own little Brookeling, and ever since the whole Jack Peyton thing, Chlo’s been gunning for the captain spot.”

This was, in some horrible, sick way, fascinating. I think the way I felt listening to Zee was the way most people feel watching soap operas. You know, on some level at least, that you shouldn’t want to watch it, but you just can’t help yourself.

“And then you come along,” Zee said. “And all of a sudden, there’s another techie girl on the scene, and Chloe’s feeling a little bit threatened. Add to that the fact that your makeover reminds Chloe of what Brooke did for her, and the fact that you’re the only one Jack is currently interested in, and voilà, you’ve got Chloe.”

When Zee put it that way, it all made sense: what Tara had said about me reminding Chloe of who she used to be, the cheer-coup vibes I’d caught Chloe shooting in Brooke’s direction, the way Brooke was Captain with a capital
C.

“You can go now,” Zee said. “If you want to. I just thought you should know. Chloe can be a bitch, but she’s not a bad person. The twins may be shallow, but they’re not idiots. And Brooke’s bossiness personified, but she really can’t help it.” Zee paused. “And whether you believe it or not, they’d all risk their lives for you. You’re part of the Squad now, Toby, and that means something.” She gestured at the first folder she’d handed me. “One of the traits we look for is a sense of loyalty, an ability to put the good of the Squad before your own interest. All of us have it, and whether you know it yet or not, I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that you’d risk your life for them, too.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Zee stopped me.

“If someone made Lucy cry,” she said, “what would you do?”

My answer? Odd, but probably the same thing I did when someone threatened Noah.

“When Tara asked you to seduce Jack, what did you say?”

I’d said yes.

“And if you heard gunshots in Chloe’s lab right now, what would you do?”

I looked away. “Point taken.”

Zee stood up. “Come on. I’ll walk you out. And ooohhh, by the way, did you hear that Mary Pierce and Bronson Lenning were caught all horizontal in the girls’ bathroom?”

From zero to gossipmonger in point-two seconds.

And yet, thinking of Zee, the eight-year-old prodigy with bad bangs and a mom-chosen outfit, I couldn’t hold it against her.

“As in…
completely
horizontal?”

CHAPTER 18

Code Word: Bee-yotch

By the time I got home, all I wanted to do was inhale fifteen pounds of edible matter while submerging myself in steaming hot water. My mind was full of Zee’s psychobabble and gossip and thoughts about stakeouts and evil law firms and plans of action so complex that there was a distinct chance that my eyeballs were going to explode from the sheer number of unanswered questions in my mind. Plus my shoulders were killing me. My back was killing me. My legs were pretty much already dead, and there was a distinct chance that I’d dislocated my crotch.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to make good on my gorge-myself-and-shower plan, because the second I stepped into my house, three freshman-shaped blobs popped out of nowhere and screamed, “Surprise!”

I’ll hand it to Noah—I was surprised. And, I might add, not amused. I counted slowly backward from ten in my mind and tried to appraise the situation without losing my temper. There was a handwritten banner hung across the sofa that screamed “Congratulations, Toby!” in bright pink letters. Bubblegum pop blared from the living room speakers, and someone had baked a cake and decorated it with what appeared to be a stick figure doing a high kick.

About a microsecond before I destroyed my brother, his partners in crime, and what was left of their manhood, Noah thrust a gift sack into my hand.

“We got you something,” he said, giving me his most adorable puppy-dog smile.

I looked down at the gift sack and then back up at the boys. They were wearing party hats. As I stared humorlessly at the three of them, Noah’s friend Brad actually threw confetti into the air.

“Where’s Mom?” I demanded.

“What? You don’t like? The boys and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion….”

“C-c-congrats, Toby.” Chuck Percy was sweating and stuttering, and let me tell you, it was a winning combination. He’d been that way in my precheerleading days. It was a miracle the poor kid had managed to say anything without spontaneously combusting given my current postmakeover state.

“Wow.” Noah appraised my appearance. “You’re wearing the shorts!”

I smacked him in the side with the gift bag, sat it calmly on the ground, and walked up the stairs toward my room, literally growling under my breath. It figured—I made the cheerleading squad, and the freshman goof brigade threw a party celebrating their own good fortune. From the sound the bag had made as it connected lightly with Noah’s body, I was going to go out on a limb and guess it was a can of whipped cream.

I didn’t even want to know what Noah expected the God Squad to do with a can of whipped cream.

I couldn’t decide which part of this experience was more mortifying: the fact that Noah had accepted this cheerleading thing no questions asked, or the fact that my butt said
CHEER
on it in big blue letters.

“Toby. You’re home.” My mom gave me the once-over: mahogany hair with honeysuckle highlights, perfectly tanned skin, plucked eyebrows, cheer shorts. “Did you have a good day at school?”

Nothing fazed my mom. Nothing.

I stomped toward my room. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I closed the door behind me, walked over to my bed, and screamed into my pillow for approximately thirty-seven seconds. I threw down the ginormous purse I had carried home under protest. While I’d been having fun one-on-one time with Chloe, one of the twins had swiped my backpack and upgraded it to some kind of designer purse big enough to carry a small country in the side pouch. I took out the papers Chloe had given me, glared at them, and threw them on my floor. I then ripped off the cheer shorts, and they joined the papers.

Two minutes later, I was standing there in nothing but my underwear (no sequins—thank God). I wrapped a towel around my body and headed for the shower, where I turned the water on and let the entire room steam up.

Malibu Toby watched me from the mirror, her hair miraculously perfect even after the hissy fit I’d just thrown in my room.

Looking at the stranger in the mirror, I had to remind myself—this was me now. I was a perfect-bodied, perfect-haired, perfectly tanned cheerleader. I carried a designer bag, wore designer clothes, and had a limited-edition designer phone. And somewhere, on the other side of the globe, nameless, faceless government operatives were counting on me to hack into a system I didn’t know the first thing about. There was only one thing to do at a time like this.

I climbed into the shower and curled into a small ball on the floor, letting the water hit my perfect hair. Droplets dripped down my face and into my eyes, but I just sat there, my body aching and my skin rebelling against the heat of the water.

I breathed in and out, thinking back on my day, watching as scenes flashed one after another in my mind and things I’d heard repeated themselves on a loop. More often than not, showering brought me answers. In fact, had water heaters of today’s caliber been invented way back when, I would have placed a large amount of money on a wager that Einstein’s theory of relativity had first come to him while he was doing what I was now. But today, the steam wasn’t giving me any answers, and I just kept coming back to the same questions, over and over again.

Had Chloe and I missed something on those tapes? Was there something we were supposed to find?

Who was the “Charlie” who’d given us our instructions and then gone on to wish us good luck for our game? Would I hear his voice again? Five years from now, or ten, or twenty, would I be a Charlie, handing out orders to a squadron of teenage girls? Was that what the Squad prepared you for? And if not, where did our “superiors” come from, anyway?

Why had Tara reacted so violently to this mission? Did she take every life-and-death situation with that same clammy, forced calm?

Sitting perfectly still, I turned my mind from questions and let it wander freely again. This time, I surpassed scenes and spoken words and went into the zone. Numbers flitted in and out—codes I’d broken, patterns I’d noticed in everything from the daily paper to the rhyme scheme of our halftime routine.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”

The tune came to me: six tones strung together at an even pace.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”

Why did that sound so familiar? I tilted my head back and came dangerously close to getting water up my nose.

“The audio.” As soon as I said the words, I knew where I’d heard that particular series of notes before. When the lawyer at Peyton had programmed the number into his phone, I’d written it off as inconsequential, but here, with water beating at my body and my mind free to wander, I conjured up the sound it had made as he’d entered the number.

I tore myself away from the water and forced myself to stand up. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”

Part of our objective in listening to the audio had been to figure out who Infotech was passing the information along to. A phone number wasn’t exactly the guy’s name and Social Security number, but it was a start, right?

I finished my shower in record time considering my limbs weren’t really cooperating with the rest of my body. I wrapped the towel back around my body and headed straight for my room, or more specifically, straight for the designer bag on my floor.

Straight for my hot pink, limited-edition cell phone.

Too physically and emotionally drained to think angry thoughts about its color and trendy nature, I picked the phone up, flipped it open, and started playing with the keys. Systematically, I pressed each number, listening carefully to its tone.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”

I hummed the first tone, and hit each of the keys. It wasn’t a two. It wasn’t a six.

It was a slow, painful process, but bit by bit, I sorted it out.

024106.

Wait a minute. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”

I went over the rhythm again and again in my head, but it stayed exactly the same. There were only six numbers. This wasn’t a phone number, and if it wasn’t a phone number…

“024106.” I ran over the numbers again and again in my head. I scrambled them, rearranged them into every possible permutation. Did they stand for letters? Maybe it was a payment amount. I tried to remember everything the lawyer guys had said. Gray had realized that the younger lawyer had a meeting with an anonymous client, and he’d delivered a phone number with only six digits, in case the client was running late.

I considered calling someone with the information, but then I realized that (a) the last thing I wanted to do right now was talk to anyone who’d even once said the phrase
Go Lions/Lionesses
and (b) all I had was six numbers. Six lousy numbers and a body that was killing me.

And yet, I had to know. I’d always been that way with numbers. Give me a six-digit phone number, or one of those puzzles where numbers stood for letters, or a mathematical sequence whose pattern was a mystery, and it would eat my brain from the inside out until I’d unraveled it. For that reason (and that reason alone), I did the unthinkable. I sucked it up and scrolled through the address book in my peppy little phone. After I’d passed the numbers for Abercrombie & Fitch, Barney’s, and a couple of others that had for some unfathomable reason been programmed in, I found Chloe’s number.

She answered on the third ring.

“This is Chloe.”

“The phone number only has six digits.” I laid it out there, no preamble.

“Say what?” To her credit, she didn’t waste time insulting me.

“The phone number that Gray gave to Hayes. It only has six digits.” I paused and stated the obvious. “It’s not a phone number.”

Chloe sighed. “You couldn’t have noticed this an hour ago?”

“Can you just get me the files? If there are any more of these numbers, I need them.”

I don’t know what made me ask for the files, or what made me think there might be more to the number set than I already had. Maybe it was the sixth sense that always came into play when there was a code to break, or maybe it was the fact that I knew asking for the data would annoy Chloe, and annoying Chloe was quite possibly one of the only pleasures I could still wring out of my pathetic existence on this planet.

“If you give me a few minutes, I can scan for phone tones on the tape. I’ll isolate two minutes on either side of every tone sequence, and send it to you when I’m done.”

What was this? Chloe…being helpful? Chloe having a civil conversation with me? For that matter, the fact that Chloe Larson could scan audio tracks for a particular sound and isolate the relevant areas all in a matter of minutes was almost as remarkable as the fact that she’d gone off auto-bitch to do it for me. I thought of everything Zee had told me: chubby little Chloe, the
Star Wars
fanatic. Brooke saving her from her own dorkdom. The two of them fighting over Jack. Me representing everything that Chloe wanted to forget. It was times like this that I really didn’t appreciate having a profiler take it upon herself to enlighten me. This was exactly what Zee had been aiming for. I couldn’t just disregard Chloe as Chloe. She was an actual person.

“Chloe,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.

“Thanks.”

No response. I made a face at the phone, and when a few more seconds of silence went by, I rolled my eyes. “It’s customary to say you’re welcome,” I said dryly.

No response.

“Chloe?”

As quick as I’d been to figure out the six-digit telephone number thing, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Chloe had hung up on me. Gritting my teeth, I redialed her number and got sent immediately to voice mail.

“Hey, this is Chloe. I’m probably screening your call, and I probably won’t call you back. Isn’t life a bitch?” Beeeeeeeep.

To my credit (and possibly because of my little psycho-session with Zee), there wasn’t a single obscenity in the message I left in response. “Hey, this is Toby. You’re probably screening my call, and you probably won’t call me back.”

As this was an exercise in complete futility, I hung up the phone. I opened my mouth to curse Chloe, but then I thought of the whole hopeless dork/light saber thing, and couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Darn Zee.