Perfect Cover (13 page)

Bubbles, Chloe, April, Tara, and I stayed at the table, staring at each other. The second Brooke was out of sight, Chloe sat up a little straighter, tossed her perfect hair over one shoulder, and took the bull by the balls (or, in cheerleading terms, took the pom by its handle).

“If the actual exchange is taking place inside the firm, I think we can assume that we’re not getting in, which means that our best bet to stop the transaction from going through is to take Heath Shannon out after he picks up the data, but before he can send it to his clients.”

“What if it’s an online transaction?” I said. “I know the Big Guys seem to think it’s going to be a physical exchange, but what if Heath delivers the money and then Peyton just sends the info electronically?” With the speed of modern internet connections, we wouldn’t stand a chance at intercepting the information before it made its way into enemy hands.

“Peyton’s system is secure,” Chloe said. “Annoyingly so, but one of the reasons we haven’t been able to pin anything on them over the years is that they don’t leave a paper trail of any kind. Witnesses disappear. Data self-destructs, and when it comes to stuff like this, they don’t risk exposure online.”

“So we’re looking for what? A flash drive?”

Chloe nodded. “Something like that.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “We’ll want to keep our numbers down,” she said. “Sending agents anywhere near Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray is risky, and we can’t take the chance of exposure. We’ll go in undercover.”

“Define
we,
” Tara said. I noticed a marked change in her. Ever since Libya had come up, most of the tension in her body had melted away until all that was left was the cool exterior the school knew and loved. I didn’t need Zee’s PhD to infer that Tara’s parents were probably not stationed in Al Jawf.

“You’re in on this one, Tare,” Chloe said. “I’m going, obviously, and Lucy, since we might need some weapons analysis.” Chloe stopped talking and had to actually force herself to continue. “And I guess you.” She was absolutely thrilled to be talking to me, but since we were talking about a mission that involved data technology and hand-to-hand interaction with a very dangerous guy, the black belt/ hacker of the group was an obvious choice. So obvious that even Chloe had to make it, despite how much it obviously pained her to do so. “I’ll have the specifics by seventh period.” Chloe tossed her hair over her shoulder, a motion I interpreted as indicative of how drunk on power she currently was. “For now, we need to concentrate on the Infotech hack.

“I got some basic surveillance reports on Infotech off the disk our superiors sent,” she said. “According to the reports, Infotech operates under two different wireless units. The first is broader range and could feasibly be accessed from the street in front of the building. The second is confined to the executive wing, and the general wireless more or less serves to insulate that area from outside interference.”

Translation: to hack into the executive database, I didn’t just need to be inside the building; I needed to be inside the executive wing.

“Security?” Tara asked.

“Lax on the rest of the building, tight on the executive wing,” Chloe replied.

“Methinks I sense a pattern,” I said.

“You thinks?” Chloe asked. I didn’t know which was more deadly: her smile, or her tone.

“Our best bet into their system is to plant a device that magnifies the wireless signal and transmits it to our receiver,” Chloe said.

“Can you do that?” I asked.

“Duh,” Bubbles said. “Chloe can do anything.”

“Unwhelmable,” Tara coughed under her breath, and I smiled.

“So how do we get the device thingy into the executive whatever?” Bubbles asked.

My mind produced no sarcastic reply to this comment. It was just too easy.

“I think our best bet is to Doublemint it,” Chloe said.

“We send one of the twins in as a decoy, and the other can plant the device.”

“That works?” I asked.

Chloe smirked. “It has the last eight times we used it,” she said. “Brittany can be very distracting.” Chloe let the word hang in the air a moment before continuing. “As long as security doesn’t figure out there are two of them, we can sneak the second one in without anyone noticing.

“And if that doesn’t work, we’ll Plan B it,” Chloe said.

I refused to ask her to clarify.

“Ohhhhh!” Bubbles said. “If we Plan B it can I plant the thingamawhatsit?”

Tara scrawled a quick note on a piece of paper and slid it toward me without anyone noticing. I read it, and understood within seconds what Plan B was. If twin # 2 couldn’t get in unnoticed, she joined her sister at distracting the guards while a third, slightly more stealthy operative did the dirty work.

If one of the twins was distracting, two was more or less a three-ring (four-breasted) circus. After having gone to school with Brittany and Tiffany for a year and a half, I’d gotten a firm hold on the mathematical property known only as the Exponential Hotness of Twinness. Each twin, by virtue of the fact that there were two of them, became infinitely more attractive to the average male than either of them would have been on their own. Since neither of the twins was exactly a dog to begin with, the resulting attention when they were together was usually astronomical in proportions.

“After we plant the device,” Chloe said, looking slightly to my left as she addressed me, “it’ll be up to you to break through their safeguards and find what we’re looking for. Locate the program they’re using to hack, download any files pertaining to information that they’ve already acquired or sold, and fry their system.”

Even for someone with as much recreational hacking under her belt as me, that was a pretty tall order. I was practically giddy with techie anticipation. Or maybe that wasn’t giddiness—maybe it was dizziness, pure and simple, based on the fact that my mind was swimming with dictates and schedules and master plans. This morning: hack Infotech. This afternoon: take down Heath Shannon. Tonight: plant a bug in the evil law firm.

Tomorrow: the world.

“So,” I said, “are we ready to move out?”

Chloe rolled her eyes, like she didn’t use jargon like “move out” all the time. “No,” she said. “We’re ready to go upstairs and hang out with everyone else in the cafeteria before first period. We have to make up for the fact that we’re going to be missing half of the school day. Appearance is everything, and making appearances is key.”

“Besides,” Tara said, “somebody’s going to have to explain to the vice-principal why Brooke and Zee won’t be at school today, and why the rest of us are skipping our first four classes.”

“Like that’s going to be hard,” Bubbles said, rolling her eyes and bringing her feet into the chair next to her so that she could hook her elbows under her knees.

“Spirit conference, do you think?” Tara asked, arching one eyebrow.

“Nah,” Chloe said. “We used that one last time. Mental health day?”

“Didn’t we use that for the, like, thing with the thing?” Bubbles asked.

Chloe and Tara nodded contemplatively. Apparently, they weren’t having any of my difficulties understanding Bubbles’s meaning.

Chloe smiled then. “I know,” she said. “I’ll tell him it’s initiation, and that you guys have to, like…sign the spirit book and take the spirit oath and receive your Bayport Code training.”

Spirit book? Oaths and training?

“You actually think Mr. J is going to buy that?” I asked. “Are we talking about the same guy here? Vice-principal? Loves handing out detention so much that he does it with a smile on his face?”

I had nothing against Mr. J—after all, he’d gotten me out of Corkin’s detention the day before, but still, the guy was the high school’s disciplinarian. It was what he did for a living. There was no way he was going to buy “cheerleader initiation” as an excuse for missing class.

“Mr. J,” Tara said, her voice quite serious, “would buy anything, so long as a varsity cheerleader says it.”

“Totally,” Bubbles agreed. “He loves us!”

I thought of the fact that Mr. J had excused me from detention just so that I could attend a cheerleading meeting.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously,” the others said, all in one voice.

“Okay,” Chloe said, back in vice-captain or cocaptain or whatever mode. “I’ll go make nice with the administration. The rest of you guys put in an appearance at the cafeteria. Come down here as soon as first period starts. Hopefully, by then, Lucy and the twins will be ready to go for the hack, and we can move out.” Chloe paused, just slightly, when none of us moved. “Dismissed.”

She actually said it that way, like she was some army colonel and we were her soldiers. For the first time, I found myself grateful that Brooke was the cheerleading captain.

“You ready for this?” Tara asked me as we made our way out of the Quad.

“Toby?” Tara nudged me.

“I’m ready,” I said, even though secretly, I wasn’t so sure. Yesterday, I’d been dealing with hot guys and Victoria’s Secret, and today, I was dealing with secured databases and freelance agents known to be deadly.

Talk about a baptism by fire.

CHAPTER 22

Code Word: A-list

On the way to the cafeteria, we stopped in the locker room to give ourselves a once-over in the mirror. Or, at least, Tara, April, Bubbles, and Chloe gave themselves once-overs. Since the twins were busy preparing outfits for Brooke and Zee’s mission, I took the opportunity to tug on the end of my skirt, forcing it to cover at least a small portion of my upper thigh, and I meticulously plucked the rhinestones off my tank top.

Tara watched me. “Ten-to-one odds it’s back in your closet, re-jeweled, tomorrow,” she said.

I frowned.

“And double or nothing says that next time, the jewels are pink,” Tara added.

I continued de-jeweling my shirt. I would have ditched the necklace, too, but even I had to admit the sonar thing was cool. “You seem to be feeling better,” I told Tara. She turned her face away from me slightly. I kept going. I’d had too many years of practice resisting subtle snubs to be put off by something as benign as a head turn. “The people in Al Jawf, they’re not your parents, are they?”

If Tara was surprised that I knew about her parents being foreign operatives, she didn’t show it. “I don’t know, actually,” she said, her accent crisper than I’d heard it in a while. “Their contact information is classified—even from me, but my mother’s very fair-skinned, and my father doesn’t speak any of the relevant languages terribly well.”

That was as close as Tara would come to saying that the chances that either of her parents was stationed in Al Jawf were slim to none.

“Are they the reason that you do this?” I asked, gesturing to the locker room and its contents (a half-dozen cheerleaders, plus me). “Did you join the Squad because you’re a legacy?”

Tara turned back to look at me. “I’m not a legacy,” she said, her mouth pulling into a half smile at the thought. “I’m just an intelligence brat.”

“There’s a difference?” I asked.

Tara lowered her voice. “Brooke is a legacy,” she said, the other half of her mouth completing the smile. “Her mom was on one of the original Squads. There’s a big, big difference.” Then she pressed her lips together, and I knew as well as if she’d told me that I wasn’t going to get another piece of information out of her.

“HWAs, anyone?” Bubbles popped out of nowhere to stand by my side. Tara reached past me to grab some papers from the tiny, peppy one, who then turned to me. “Here are yours,” she said. “History, math, chemistry, Spanish, and computer science.” She paused. “Didn’t you do any homework last night?” she asked.

It was freaky—Bubbles Lane, two parts contortionist, one part professional airhead, sounded bizarrely like my mother.

“I was busy,” I replied, pulling the last rhinestone off my shirt with my free hand. Then I thumbed through the papers she’d handed me. “Number three’s wrong,” I said, scanning over my math homework. “And how in the world did they match my handwriting so well?” Even the chicken scratch in the margins was identical to my own.

“You have a ninety-seven in math,” Tara said (did everyone on the Squad know my GPA?), and then she nodded toward the papers in my hand. “Number three is wrong because if you get number three wrong, you’ll get a ninety-seven on that assignment.”

I wondered if this meant my history homework was going to be yet another C-.

“The HWA program is designed to let you keep your current average. It doesn’t help you or hurt you. It keeps things the same.”

I gave Tara a look of mock dismay. “Are you trying to tell me I’m not going to be on the honor roll?”

Tara rolled her eyes back at me. The exchange felt normal—more normal than I would ever have imagined any Toby–God Squad exchange capable of being, and definitely more normal than my interactions with Tara before she’d worked it out in her mind that the agents in danger probably weren’t her parents.

But, I reminded myself, the operatives were still someone’s family, and their lives were in the hands of Brooke Camden and Zee Kim. I had to work to remind myself that Zee was more or less a teen prodigy when it came to the human mind, and that Brooke, according to what Tara had just told me, was a legacy. She was born for this, she was bred for this, she was raised for this. She
was
this.

“Come on, people,” Chloe said. “Need I rehash my ‘appearance is everything, appearances are important’ speech? Cafeteria. Now.”

“Power trip,” I coughed into my hands. Tara stifled a smile and elbowed me in the stomach.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s head up.” Bubbles and April followed. Less than a minute later, the four of us were in the high school cafeteria, which, for reasons that continue to elude me to this day, was
the
place to hang out before first period, assuming you weren’t otherwise occupied with “cheerleading practice.” The moment we walked into the room, the entire school turned to look at us. It was like they’d choreographed it or something. In deference to our superior social status, a few of the wiser and more observant JV cheerleaders excused themselves from the central table.

Our table.

I hung back as the others went to take their seats. How much did I want to be skulking in the shadows right now? A lot.

“Well, I heard that she’s totally loaded, and before she came here, she dated Paris Hilton’s ex.”

At least in the shadows, I might have had a chance at avoiding the rumors that were still making their way through the student body detailing the supposed reasons I’d been chosen for the varsity cheerleading squad.

“Really? Which ex?”

When no one answered this question, I was overcome with an insane urge to say “That information is classified.”

“Well, I heard that she’s a complete lezbo who’s sleeping with one of the other girls on the squad. Can you say
casting couch
?”

I had to hand it to Hayley Hoffman. She was creative, and she must have had an excellent command of acoustics, because she pitched her voice just loud enough so that I could hear her, but not loud enough that Tara, Bubbles, or April could. I thought about just sucking it up and taking my place at the center table, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to turn the other cheek, because the fact that Hayley was using that particular term as an insult meant that her words weren’t just insulting me. With that in mind, I walked toward the JV table, ready to draw blood, metaphorically speaking. Probably.

I leaned toward the mass of chattering girls. “Well,” I said. “I heard that April Manning’s having a party and that people who start small-minded rumors about the other girls on the Squad aren’t invited.”

I’ve never seen mouths snap shut that quickly.

“Then again, April’s your friend, so you already knew that, right, Hayley?”

I could tell from the look on her face that she’d known nothing about the party. I should have felt sorry for her then—she and April had been friends for years, and the moment April had made varsity cheerleading, she had quite willingly left Hayley in the dust. Yup, I should have felt sorry for Hayley, at least a little.

Oh well.

“Toby,” one of the other girls said. “I love your boots. You always have the best boots.”

I purposely didn’t look down at the blue-green atrocities on my feet, half because my feet hurt more when I paid attention to them, and half because I couldn’t stomach the idea that anyone would compare my combat boots to something with a heel this high. Driven by my desire to get off my feet, I turned and walked back toward the central table, and with one last deep breath, I sat down, taking my place between Bubbles and Tara.

I retreated inside my head, careful to keep a smile on my lips and a vacant expression in my eyes. In less than half an hour, I’d be well on my way to my first official Squad-sponsored hack. Chloe would provide the technology, the twins and Bubbles would plant it, and I would do my thang.

I snapped out of it like that. I’d been on the Squad for just over twenty-four hours, and I’d actually thought the word
thang.
That was worse than
pizzazz.
It was even worse than
Caboodle.
At that exact moment, a handful of guys joined us, and I remembered that Infotech was only one-third of this mission. Another third of the mission had just sat down at my table. He was six foot three, his hair was a deep chocolatey brown, and it fell in his face just enough to give his chiseled features something of an edge.

Jack Peyton. School heartthrob. Former boyfriend to not one, but two cheerleaders. Fourth-generation scumbag.

“Well, if it isn’t Everybody-Knows-Toby.”

Well, I thought, if it isn’t Smirky McJerkface.

Out loud, I censored myself. A little. “Well, if it isn’t…you.”

“It is indeed me,” he said.

I couldn’t stand the look on his face. “Congratulations,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “It must be a great honor.”

He broke into a grin then, and it changed his face in a way that I had to admit wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

Jack milked that gorgeous smile for all it was worth. “You going to the God Squad party tonight, Ev?”

Ev. Short, I had to assume, for Everybody-Knows-Toby.

“Of course she’s going,” Lucy answered on my behalf, her voice as bright and bubbly as ever. “She’s on the squad.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and the thought of the party—loud music, low-cut jeans and lower-cut tops, alcoholic beverages served from large and suspect containers that I wouldn’t touch with an eighty-foot pole—made me physically grimace.

“You’ll be there under protest.” Jack interpreted my scowl.

“Why would I protest?” I asked dryly. “I’m a cheerleader, aren’t I?”

Jack raked his eyes up and down my body. “That shirt used to have sparkly things on it, didn’t it?” he asked, amusement playing around the corners of his mouth.

Postmakeover, I might have looked like Malibu Toby, but Jack Peyton saw straight through it.

At least somebody did.

Jack took my silence as an admission of guilt, and he grinned again. “You know, Ev,” he said, “a little sparkle never hurt a girl.”

“Bite me, Peyton.”

“Love to,” he said. “Does that mean we’re on for tonight?”

The other girls gawked at me. I’d done more or less nothing but insult him, and he’d asked me out. I was a little suspicious that my new look might have had something to do with it—I’d been insulting (not to mention physically assaulting) guys my entire life, and none of them had ever asked me out, with the not-so-notable exception of Noah’s friend Chuck.

I was too busy pondering this turn of events to answer Jack, and someone (my money was on one of the twins, who’d arrived just in time to put in an appearance and pick up on the fact that I’d defaced my shirt) kicked me sharply under the table.

“Ow!” I shrieked.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Jack said. “Pick you up at seven.”

With that, he stood up and ambled away from our table. As soon as he was gone, four other guys leaned in my direction, and one of them moved his hand toward me. Given the look on his face and the current trajectory of the aforementioned hand, I inferred that for some incomprehensible reason, he was moving to rest his hand on my thigh.

Calmly, I reached for a fork someone must have left on the table the day before and held it, poised for action, as I met Thigh Guy’s eyes. “Word of advice,” I told him. “Don’t go there.”

He must have read the intention to draw blood in my eyes, because he quickly pulled his hand back.

“Everybody-Knows-Toby,” Thigh Guy said, giving me an awed look without ever completely removing his gaze from the deadly fork in my hand. “No wonder.”

And that was the exact moment when threatening bodily harm became acceptable flirting practice at Bayport High. Overnight, I had become one of
those girls,
and the rest of the girls at our school had begun taking their cues from me.

“Chip, if you try to look down my shirt one more time, I’m going to have to hurt you.”

Chip, student body president and generic hottie, grinned. “Would you please?” he asked. The rest of the guys grinned lecherously at Chip’s wit.

What was a girl to do? I kicked him in the shin, and not one of the other cheerleaders glared at me. They were too busy trying to figure out how I’d managed to get a date with Jack “Unattainable” Peyton in under two minutes.

Chip grabbed his smarting shin, the rest of the guys started laughing, and I grinned. As much as I hated to admit it, a girl could get used to this.