Perfect Cover
Page 6

“And if I say no?”
Brooke showed her teeth. “You won’t.” She walked over to a nearby conference table, and one by one, the other eight cheerleaders took their places, filling all but two of the seats. Brooke leaned back and hit some buttons on her chair’s arm. The image on the screen changed again.
“Tara Leery,” Brooke said. “Nice picture, by the way, Tare.”
Tara mouthed a silent “Thanks,” and Brooke looked back at the screen.
“British exchange student and linguistic specialist. Fluent in nine languages, functional in twelve others, Tara has a perfect ear for accents. If we come across it, she can learn to speak it.”
Brooke tapped a button with her French-manicured nail, and the picture on the plasma screen changed. “Bubbles Lane, contortionist.”
Brooke didn’t elaborate, but Bubbles did. “I can put my feet behind my head.”
I racked my mind for the proper response to her proud declaration, but the best I could do was a rather unenthusiastic “That’s nice.”
“It’s even nicer when you need someone to fit in a duffel bag,” Chloe said sharply. “Or when the bomb you need to deactivate is hidden in the back of an air duct with laser sensor triggers no normal person could avoid.”
A bomb? Personally, I wasn’t really sure Bubbles could deactivate a washing machine.
“And speaking of bombs…” Brooke paused as the screen changed again. “Lucy Wheeler, explosives and weaponry.”
I thought of Lucy jumping around doing herkies like a four-year-old on reverse Ritalin.
“Explosives?” I swallowed hard. “Weaponry?”
Lucy beamed at me. “I love Tasers.”
I took about five seconds to desperately hope they were joking.
“And right now, I’m working on the coolest bulletproof push-up bra.” Lucy’s smile grew, if possible, even brighter.
“It’s to die for.”
Tasers and bulletproof push-up bras. In practically the same sentence. So wrong. So, so wrong.
As I digested the wrongness of it all, Brooke ran through the rest of the squad. Apparently party girl Zee was a professional profiler, the twins generally came in handy because there were two of them (I still maintained they had a combined IQ lower than that of the average penguin), Chloe was their resident “gadget girl in Gucci,” and Brooke, as far as I could tell, was exactly what she had always appeared to be: a gorgeous, terrifying, manipulative bitch who could lie, cheat, and steal with the best of them.
“The entire squad is, of course, trained in hand-to-hand combat.”
I thought about how close Brooke’s roundhouse had come to taking me down. Could they all fight like that?
“You’re serious about this.” I don’t know why I said it. I mean, the giant plasma screen with the access code for the Pentagon should have been a big clue, but somehow, I couldn’t help asking.
Brooke looked straight through me. “We save lives, Toby. That’s how serious we are.”
I said nothing.
“We also cheer at games,” she continued. “We chant and we yell and we do backflips for the football team so that no one ever suspects we’re up to anything else.”
“And herkies,” Lucy added.
“And we do herkies,” Brooke amended. “Think you can handle it?” She leaned back in her chair, and she must have hit the button again, because all of a sudden, the list of companies I’d hacked into reappeared on the screen.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” I kept my voice even.
Brooke shrugged. “Is it working?”
I closed my eyes for a long moment and then opened them again. “Maybe.”
Tasting victory, Brooke leaned forward. “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” she said. Like that was original. “If you’re with us, you’ll learn how to break into any building, how to lie your way into or out of any situation, how to look like one person one minute and another the next. You’ll go undercover, you’ll have limitless access to highly classified technology, and if you make it through your first two years, by your eighteenth birthday, you’ll be a fully authorized CIA operative. Sooner or later, you’ll probably save the world.” She paused. “Plus you’re like totally guaranteed to be on homecoming court.”
Yippee, I thought, glancing back up at the screen. Brooke hadn’t mentioned what would happen if I was against them, but I could guess. Hacking wasn’t exactly a legal hobby, especially when the Pentagon was involved.
“I’m sure you’ll even come up against codes you can’t crack,” Brooke added offhandedly.
And that’s when I knew I was going to say yes. After all, I was the girl who’d never met a code she couldn’t crack, and I wasn’t about to let some cheerleader tell me otherwise.
“I’m in,” I said, “but I am not wearing one of those stupid skirts.”
CHAPTER 6
Code Word: Bitquo
“You’ll need to get outfitted,” Brooke told me. “And not just for the uniform.”
Apparently, my skirt stipulation had fallen on completely deaf ears.
“Chloe, you’ll set her up with the basics?” Brooke asked.
Chloe nodded. “Earpiece, communicator, digi-disk, truth serum…”
“And for the love of all things good and popular, get her some accessories.” Brooke spared me another glance.
“Those boots are going to have to go.” I opened my mouth, but she continued spitting out orders like I didn’t even exist. “Tiff, you and Britt are on makeover detail. Lucy, minor explosives only, please, and Tara?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll be her partner.”
That was the best news I’d heard all day. It was almost enough to make me forget that the phrase makeover detail had ever exited Brooke’s mouth.
“Tara will give you the 411,” the totalitarian captain told me, “but first, we have a few Squad matters to discuss.” Brooke glanced from me to one of the empty chairs at the table and back again. I gritted my teeth, but took a seat. I waited for Brooke to begin another long soliloquy on the cheerleading spy business, but instead, she turned to Zee, who nodded.
“I added the most recent body language indices to our files,” Zee said, “and ran another set of statistical analyses on the remaining candidates. Hate to break it to you guys, but Stephanie Stanton is out. She’s too jittery, too nervous, and in combination with what we already know about her susceptibility to subliminal suggestion, she’s too big of a liability.”
Stephanie Stanton. Why did that name sound familiar?
“But…but…” One of the twins tried to object.
“I know, I know,” Zee said. “Her brother is hot, but she’d totally crack under the pressure. She’s a double blinker, and they can’t keep secrets worth a damn.”
“A double blinker?” I asked.
Unlike Chloe, Zee answered my question in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “She blinks twice as often when you look directly at her.”
Okay, I thought, trying to keep up. Double blinkers = bad secret keepers. And this from one of the single biggest gossip-mongers at my high school.
“And the subliminal suggestion part?” I asked.
“Messages on the bathroom stalls,” Brooke replied. “The Big Guys Upstairs engineer them, and we implant them as part of our screening process.”
It was then that everything they were saying clicked into place, and I remembered who Stephanie Stanton was. She wasn’t some enemy agent with a thick foreign accent. She was the pretty sophomore who’d sat next to me at the meeting—the one with the newly single, hot older brother.
Brooke had said that the squad needed ten members. Counting me, we currently numbered nine.
“So who’s still in?” Brooke asked.
Zee looked through her notes.
“Hayley Hoffman, April Manning, Kiki McCall…”
JV cheerleaders: my very favorite people.
“…Courtney Apex, and Sarasota Bane.”
The last two were names that, being the social butterfly I was, I didn’t quite recognize, but when their pictures flashed across the screen, I vaguely recalled having seen them at the meeting.