Perfect Cover (7 page)

CHAPTER 12

Code Word: Gel Bra

“So…where to now?”

Tara hadn’t said a word about whether or not my butt-slapping performance, which she’d somehow “transmitted” to our superiors, had passed Squad scrutiny. This was my not-so-subtle attempt to see if we were ready for our real mission, or if I was about to be fired for sexual harassment.

Tara stirred her iced mocha (with caramel swirl) with one hand and looked down at her watch. “It’s time,” she said. She stood up, neatly tucked a wayward strand of dark hair behind her left ear, and picked up the mocha to leave.

“Time for what?” I kept my voice low. This was the mall, and who knew what kind of bizarre and twisted enemy forces were lurking around every corner.

Yeah, right.

Tara took another sip of her mocha and then threw it into the trash can, still half-f. I crumpled my empty cup into a ball and tossed it in after hers. She gave me a look, and I got the impression that cup crumpling wasn’t a preap-proved cheer girl course of action.

“Come on,” Tara said. I followed her.

“Time for what?” I asked again.

Tara’s eyes flitted to the side, and I got the distinct feeling that she was checking our surroundings.

“Time to get to work,” she said, like
that
wasn’t vague.

“Work,” I repeated. By this time, we’d left the food court, and she was a girl on a mission. Literally.

When she stopped in front of a lingerie store, I gave her a look of my own.

“Victoria’s Secret?” I asked dryly. “Really?”

Tara smiled, and her eyes told me not to argue. “Shop for underwear now,” she told me. “Ask questions later.”

“Blink once if there’s a purpose to all of this.”

I was expecting another look, but instead, I got a smile and a slow, deliberate blink.

“Okay then,” I said. “Underwear shopping. Lucky me.”

Five minutes later, I couldn’t even manage a sarcastic yay. There are certain things that should never be stuck onto underclothes. The list (and believe me, it’s extensive) includes, but is not limited to: bows, chains, rhinestones, ribbons, ruffles, feathers, and anything that spells out the words
kiss me.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like my underpants plain and simple. And sometimes I like to call them underpants, but that’s beside the point.

My arms full of offending articles, I trudged toward the dressing room. As soon as we got back to the Quad, I was going to kill Tara.

“Cheer up, Tobe,” the traitor in question said. The double meaning behind her words wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to put a little more pep in my step.

I’d no sooner shut myself into one of the dressing rooms and unloaded my booty (no pun intended) when someone knocked on the door. “Is everything all right in there?”

I know the salesgirl was just trying to be helpful, but what did she think could have possibly gone wrong in the past five seconds?

“Everything’s fitting? You don’t need any other sizes? A consultation?”

Consultation? I thought. It was underwear, not rocket science.

Or was it? A little alarm bell went off in the back of my brain. What if “consultation” was code for “information transfer” or something?

“Actually…I could use a consultation. Hold on just a second, let me…”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence before the salesgirl flung open the door and barged into the room. Before I could manage a single word, she’d whipped out a tape measure and was halfway to wrapping it around my chest.

I’d like to clarify for a moment that I do not have personal space issues. I interact with others normally on a day-to-day basis, and I’m not one of those people who gets huffy when someone stands a little too close, but she was actually touching my boobs, and call me crazy, but that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time.

“Thirty-two inches.” She surveyed my breasts through my shirt. “And an A by the looks of it.” She gave me a sympathetic look. It was like someone had died.

“Is that…bad?” I asked, thinking of my failed flirtation with Abercrombie boy.

“No, no, of course not.” She was somewhat less than convincing.

“So, is the consultation over?” I asked. For a split second, I’d thought that maybe this was part of the mission, that the girl measuring my breasts was a fellow operative, out to do whatever secret agents did (I was still a little vague on that point), but clearly, my sixth sense, the spy sense, was completely deficient.

“Let me just grab you a few things real quick,” the girl said brightly, as if I hadn’t asked her a question at all.

“Thirty-two A…”

I couldn’t tell whether that last part was a musing or whether she was actually addressing me by my cup size. I didn’t have any time to ponder the question, though, because she was back in record time with a half-dozen bras. For one horrifying moment, I thought she was going to demand to stay in the dressing room with me while I tried things on, but she demurely stepped back, allowing me to close the door.

“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door.

“Dead girl,” I called back, matching my tone to hers.

“You’re a dead girl.”

I eschewed the underwear Tara had forced into my hands in favor of the bras the salesgirl had given me. I slipped off my own sports bra and reached blindly for a test subject. My hands closed around a flesh-colored bra, and I put it on, fastened it, and turned to the mirror. I moved back and forth, and the bra wiggled and jumped as I did.

“Tara,” I said flatly. “It’s moving.” I poked it. “What is this thing?”

“I’m not certain, but I think you’re probably wearing a gel bra.”

I poked it again. Weird, and yet, as much as I hated to admit it, comfortable. Feeling a little less daunted by the task at hand, I threw the gel bra aside and picked up the next one. I slipped into it, but the moment I did, something poked into my skin. I eased back out of the bra. It looked perfectly normal, but when I ran my hand along the inside of the cup, my fingertips caught on a tiny, uneven bump. I prodded the bump with my fingers, and as if by magic, the fabric parted, and out came a tiny, round disk, no bigger than a nickel.

“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door once more.

I stared at the disk. “Yeah,” I called back. “I think I did.”

“Gel bra?” Tara continued conversationally, like we weren’t shouting over dressing room doors.

Still somewhat enchanted by the tiny disk, I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Gel bra. Whatever.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was standing at the checkout, lingerie in hand, the minidisk hidden securely in my own sports bra. Tara surveyed my purchases: the befuddling gel bra, five pairs of multicolored, cotton bikini-style bottoms, and at her insistence, a turquoise thong with teeny-tiny sequins on it.

I didn’t even care about the underwear. Thongs? Sure! Sequins? What could be wrong with a little sparkle? I’d found the disk. I was on top of the world.

“Next.”

At the cashier’s call, Tara stepped forward. She sat her selections on the counter and held up a lime-green bra. “Do you have this in pink?”

The cashier looked at the bra, glanced at Tara, and then took the green monstrosity with her into the back room. She emerged a moment later with an identical pink bra, and handed it to Tara. “Is that all?” she asked.

Tara nodded.

When her total appeared on the cash register, I came off my minidisk high. How could something composed of so little fabric be so expensive? Not wanting to blow things at this stage in the game, I slipped my wallet out of the purse the twins had forced me to carry, wondering if I had enough cash to cover an expenditure of this magnitude. I so didn’t want to have to explain the appearance of a Victoria’s Secret purchase on my emergency-only credit card.

When I flipped open the wallet, a completely foreign sight greeted me with sleek metallic sheen. I pulled it out, and my eyes bulged: a gold card. With my name on it. I tried to get Tara’s attention, but failed.

“Next.” The register next to Tara’s opened up.

Going with the flow, I stepped forward, plopped my purchases down on the counter, and held out my card. My gold card. My hopefully government-funded gold card.

I avoided eye contact as the cashier rang up the turquoise thong, but the Mall Gods must have had it in for me, because a microsecond before the thong was in the bag and I was in the clear, the pushy mom from Abercrombie appeared out of nowhere, bounded to my side, and said, loudly enough for the entire store (and possibly a large portion of the rest of North America) to hear, “That is just adorable!”

I cringed.

“Look at those sequins, and that color!”

Please stop. I sent her a silent, telepathic message, but it did no good.

“Where did you get that, Toby? I just have to pick one up for myself.”

I discovered in that moment that there was indeed something far worse than froofy underpants, and it involved someone my mother’s age buying a sequined turquoise thong.

The attendant handed my card back. I stuffed it in my purse, gestured haphazardly across the store in response to the mom’s question, and bolted.

“That woman is everywhere,” I hissed the moment Tara caught up with me.

My partner shrugged, that carefree-yet-divine gesture I’d come to associate with her public persona. “At least you got some new things,” she said, playing around with the last word. She grinned wickedly at me. At first, I thought she was talking about the underwear, but the minidisk took that moment to push against my chest and remind me that our shopping adventure had been about more than just lingerie.

As we slid into the car, I thought about the fact that today was definitely a day of firsts. I’d attended my first cheerleading practice. I’d been recruited to work for my first top-secret agency, I’d had my first makeover, and I’d slapped a hot guy’s butt for the very first time. Add to that new lingerie and the spy sense that hadn’t led me astray, and I was starting to feel like Toby in Wonderland. Or possibly, given the lingerie factor, Toby in Wonder
bra
land.

Tara started the engine, and I marveled again at its magnificent purr. I wasn’t exactly a Beemer type, but this one was amazing.

“Is this your car?” I asked, thinking of my newly acquired credit card. “Or is it, you know…”

“Squad owned?” Tara supplied. “It’s mine. The Big Guys Upstairs bought it, but people would totally get suspicious if someone else inherited my BMW when I graduate, so it’s mine to keep.”

“I can’t believe you have a BMW,” I said.

“I’m supposed to be the foreign sophisticate,” Tara said.

“They thought it fit the role.” She turned onto the highway and floored it. “Not that I mind.”

The car did fit her image, and her words confirmed exactly what I’d been thinking ever since I’d learned that like me, Tara wasn’t a lifelong cheerleader. She was supposed to be the foreign sophisticate. It was a role she played, like I was learning to play Cheerleader Toby. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and wondered if I’d ever get to see anything but the image.

Tara Leery—who are you really?

“Pop the digi-disk in, and we’ll see what we’ve got,” she said.

I filed away the term for future reference and tried to think of a way of retrieving the disk that didn’t involve reaching my hand down into my bra in a very conspicuous manner.

Luckily for me, Tara pretended not to notice my hesitation and just kept talking. “We’ll need my disk to decode yours,” she said, “but we should be able to get some idea of what’s on it without running through the decode.”

“Yours?” I arched an eyebrow at her. “You have one too?”

Tara zipped into the next lane over. “But of course,” she said. “Want to be a good little Squad trainee and tell me when you think I got it?”

I ran over the events in my mind, playing them back in my memory the way other people might have rewound a taped episode of the trashy reality show du jour.

“Please tell me it had something to do with the hideous pink bra,” I said, taking a shot in the dark based on the fact that I sincerely hoped that I wasn’t trapped in a car with the kind of psychotic person who would have actually wanted that travesty of an undergarment.

“Bingo,” Tara said. “Most of the time, we don’t even bother with disks, but with the frequency of leaks increasing, our superiors thought a handoff was more secure than a direct transfer. The fact that there are two disks is added security—though if they’d thought there was actually a threat of interception, they would have sent the disks to two different locations.”

“So there was no threat of an enemy agent sweeping in and stealing our lingerie?” I asked, only half joking.

Tara offered me a small grin and an answer, in that order. “If they’d thought there was a real chance that the mission would be compromised,” she said, “they probably wouldn’t have given it to a rookie.”

Had any of the other cheerleaders called me a rookie, I would have been offended, but coming from Tara, it sounded like a statement, not an insult. Plus, I had to admit that I was slightly mollified by the fact that our Victoria’s Secret mission hadn’t been a high-stakes operation, because saving the world one gel bra at a time wasn’t exactly what I’d signed up for.

“Digi-disk,” Tara reminded me. “Player.”

I averted my eyes, highly aware of the tiny round disk digging into my right breast. Tara was waiting, and out of the goodness of my heart, I offered her an explanation for the delay. “Digging things out of my bra?” I snorted. “I haven’t had much practice.”

“You should get Bubbles to give you some tips,” Tara advised, “because you will.”

“Will what?”

“Get a lot of practice.”

I ignored her prediction, fished quite unstealthily around in my bra, and held up the digi-disk triumphantly. “Where do I put it?” I asked.

“Media on.”

This time, no cheer-voice was needed. The dashboard, impervious to my grumbling, rearranged itself, and a control panel popped out of the inner console.

“Insert digi-disk,” a highly synthesized female voice commanded.

A small slit in the panel lit up, and I touched the disk to its surface. Immediately, the car swallowed it whole, and above the dashboard, between Tara and me, appeared some sort of 3-D diagram.