Perfect Cover

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  We’d saved the day, and quite possibly dozens of lives. That—and the fact that Lucy had sworn never to mention the actual disk-getting methodology—was just going to have to be enough for me. For now.

  When we got back to the gym, I reluctantly handed the disk over to Chloe. I was deluded enough to expect her to say something along the lines of “thank you” or “good job,” but the words out of her mouth didn’t even remotely resemble a compliment.

  “Get dressed. Practice in ten.”

  I severely hoped she was talking about ten hours, because I’d just finished my second classified operation of the day, and I couldn’t forget about the fact that I still had one left to go. I needed some downtime. I needed to change out of this outfit into something that didn’t have the word CHEER embossed across it. I needed to take a shower and burn the memory of Heath Shannon’s tighty whities from my mind. I did not need to deal with herkies and toe touches and hurdlers and handsprings and…

  Even thinking the words had my still-dislocated crotch protesting in vain.

  And yet, I somehow sucked it up enough to trudge into the locker room, where I found another pair of teeny-tiny pants (this pair opted for LIONS! over CHEER in the butt-message department) waiting in my locker. Beside me, Tara changed into her own shorts (no writing—lucky her) silently.

  “Mission went well,” I said. “Find anything interesting in his wallet?”

  “Not really,” Tara said. “Find anything interesting in his underwear?”

  Her voice was so deadpan casual that it took me a minute to register her meaning.

  “Lucy!” I yelled.

  Tara grinned. “Your communicator was on,” she said.

  “You were pretty verbal about your objections.”

  “What objections?” Bubbles asked. I swear, she came out of nowhere.

  “Nothing,” I said, shooting Tara a warning look.

  “Nothing,” Tara agreed.

  “How were things here?” I asked, changing the subject before Bubbles could ask any more questions.

  Bubbles didn’t answer. I elaborated. “Party planning? Banner painting? Whatnot?”

  Bubbles bit her bottom lip.

  “Bubbles?” Tara prodded. “What’s going on?”

  “We were working on some stuff for the party,” Bubbles said, “and our line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead.”

  Tara took off then, running toward the Quad.

  I turned my attention back to Bubbles, to grill her for more specifics, but she was gone. That girl was stealth incarnate.

  When Tara came back five minutes later, I was more than ready for some answers. Whether or not I wanted to be, I was part of this now. This was my squad, my team. Something was going on, and someone was going to tell me what it was, or things were going to get ugly.

  “Tara?” I didn’t say anything more than her name.

  “The line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead shortly after they arrived in Al Jawf,” Tara said. “Approximately half an hour ago.”

  “And that’s bad?” I guessed.

  Tara sat down to put on her athletic shoes. “It wouldn’t be horrible,” she said, her voice eerily devoid of emotion.

  “Sometimes the satellite signal fails; sometimes if you end up underground, the signal doesn’t reach.”

  “Okay,” I said. Tara stared down at her shoes, her face perfectly calm. It was that look that made me ask more. I was noticing more and more that when Tara was perfectly anything, it was a surefire sign that she was hiding something. Perfection was tricky that way.

  “It wouldn’t be horrible,” I said, repeating her words.

  “But?”

  “It wouldn’t be horrible, but right before we lost the signal, April and Bubbles heard gunfire.”

  “Gunfire?”

  “Shots were exchanged.” Tara finished lacing up her shoes. “You’d better put yours on,” she said, handing me an identical pair.

  “Shots were exchanged?” I asked. “SHOTS were EXCHANGED?”

  Tara moved quickly, and before I could prepare myself, she had me pressed up against the locker banks, her face close to mine. “Keep your voice down,” she said.

  I hadn’t realized that my posh partner could sound quite like that. I could have fought her, and I almost did, but after the past forty-eight hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yet.

  “Shots were exchanged?” I whispered.

  She nodded, eased the pressure off my body, and gestured with her head to the shoes. “You’d better put your shoes on,” she said for a second time.

  I looked down at the shoes, but didn’t move to put them on. “Brooke and Zee were shot at, and we haven’t heard from them since?”

  Tara nodded.

  “And you want me to put on my shoes so that we can go practice our halftime routine?”

  Tara nodded again.

  Around me, all of the others were suiting up, preparing themselves to Go, Fight, Win!

  “We’re not going to send in backup?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  Tara shook her head. “Our original orders were really specific. This is a two-person mission. No backup under any circumstances.”

  “And if the Guys Upstairs said it, it must be done,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Forget the fact that they might not actually know everything. Forget the fact that Brooke and Zee might be in danger.” I gave Tara a look that should have pinned her to the wall the way her arms had pinned me.

  “You can’t just leave them there. We’re supposed to be a team.”

  Tara didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t let it go.

  “We can’t just do nothing. What if they’re injured? What if the operative they went to rescue is injured?”

  “I alerted Central when I called in about the disk.” Chloe spoke softly, appearing next to me. “They haven’t heard from Brooke either, but they’ve got tracers on their agent, and he’s on the move. Their statisticians think that, based on movement patterns, it’s likely that Brooke and Zee are with him.”

  “And ‘likely’ is good enough for you?”

  Personally, I was ready to take a little visit to Libya myself. It was totally and completely bizarre, but the feeling bubbling up inside of me was eerily similar to the one that made me bail Noah out of trouble again and again. Ginormous football players, international terrorists…what was the difference? Somebody was messing with something that was mine. That “loyalty” thing Zee had made such a big deal of was forcing me into action. Zee and Brooke were on my Squad. They were my… okay, maybe we weren’t exactly friends, but maybe we could have been. Or maybe we would be, but right now, that didn’t matter. I was ready to kick some butt.

  “If Central hasn’t heard from them by tonight, they’ll send in some agents from the surrounding areas.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but Tara lifted a hand to touch my arm.

  “They’d be able to reach them before we could,” she said.

  “And if something happened to Brooke and Zee, our cover’s pretty much blown there. If they’ve captured two teenage operatives, none of us are going to be any less suspicious than Average Joe Spy.”

  “So we just stay here and do nothing?” I asked. I hated doing nothing.

  “No,” Tara said. “We cheer.”

  Whether or not cheering was preferable to doing nothing was a matter of some debate. On the one hand, practice would distract me from my insane urge to hijack a helicopter and fly it to Libya. On the other, I hated our halftime routine with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns. It was a toss-up, really.

  “B to the A to the Y to the Port, Bayport Lions take the court! L to the I to the O-N-S; when we leave you’ll be a mess!”

  My voice was loud and clear—and distinctly pissed off, but at least this time, I was getting the words right.

  “Bay-port Li-ons.” I clapped my hands five times like a good little cheerleading newbie. “Bay-port Li-ons.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

>   By the time we got to the end of the routine the first time, my hands had gone numb from all the clapping, and they were turning a nice shade of borderline purple.

  “It’s called cheerleading,” Chloe told me, rolling her eyes. “Not ‘angry punks with self-mutilating tendencies.’”

  “Don’t clap so hard,” Lucy translated. “Cup your hands like this.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. She demonstrated.

  “See?”

  “And smile,” Bubbles said. “Then you won’t sound so angry.”

  “But I am angry.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” April said. She might have been as new to the secret agent game as I was, but she was a veteran cheerleader. “It doesn’t matter if you just broke up with your boyfriend or if you’re fighting with someone else on your squad or if you’re cheering on a sprained ankle. When you perform, you smile. You’re loud, you’re proud, you’re in charge, and you’re on top of the world. Your team is the best. You’re the best, and while you’re cheering, that’s all that matters.”

  Apparently, cheerleaders were supposed to be able to turn on the happy at the sound of a single “Ready? Okay!” Before I’d become one, it had never actually occurred to me that their smiles might be fake. They were on the top of the social chain. They were pretty and popular, and they had nothing to worry about except what color bloomers to wear under their cheer-skirts, and so they smiled. For the first time, I understood what Lucy had meant when she’d told me that cheerleaders were predisposed to being good spies. I could even understand why the Squad program might have been initiated in the first place. If you were the government, and you were looking for a group of athletic, beautiful teenage girls who were generally thought to be morons, but who were actually masters at manipulating their own emotions and showing the world (or the crowd, as the case may be) what they wanted it to see, there was a certain kind of person who fit the bill.

  The kind who cheered.

  “Let’s try it again,” Chloe said. “Without the anger management issues.” She paused and then said the words that, as captain, Brooke would normally have yelled to start us off. “Ready? Okay!”

  I forced myself to think of this as practicing in a different way. I wasn’t practicing a halftime routine. I was practicing the innocent, ditzy look I’d give to an enemy operative before I clocked him with a seventy-mile-an-hour roundhouse. I was practicing keeping my emotions off my face and out of my voice. I was perfecting my cover, so that someday, I could be the one rescuing Brooke and Zee. Or Lucy. Or Tara, or any of the others.

  “B to the A to the Y to the Port…”

  Scarily enough, when I thought about things that way, I was good. My smile was broad, my eyes were bright, and my voice was nothing short of peppy.

  Wherever Brooke and Zee were, I was just going to have to trust that they were okay. After all, when it came to the art of deception, I only had to look at the beaming faces around the room to come to the conclusion that I was completely surrounded by masters.

  CHAPTER 29

  Code Word: Sexy

  After practice, I miraculously convinced the twins that I could handle my own hair and makeup for the party. They made me swear to exfoliate, and I had to sit through a tutorial on foundation, but it was a small price to pay for a little space and some time with my own laptop. After booting it up, I updated a few of my programs with bits and pieces that I’d picked up from the sparkly Squad laptop. Then I thumbed through my decrypting programs and wondered if there was anything potentially useful that the Big Guys, whoever they were, might not have access to.

  And then I went to CNN’s website and searched for any articles about shots exchanged in Al Jawf, Libya, earlier that day.

  Nothing.

  I was in the process of using the mother of all search engines to do the same thing when I sensed a presence in my room. I turned, half expecting it to be Bubbles with some kind of cream for my hair or gel for my eyes, but instead, it was Noah. He was wearing a collared shirt. The collar was popped.

  “Are you wearing cologne?” I sniffed the air suspiciously and minimized the search window on my computer. “Scratch that. Are you wearing an absurd amount of cologne?”

  “Why? You like?” Noah leaned against my bedroom wall.

  “No. I don’t like.” I paused. “Do I even want to know why you’re wearing cologne?”

  Noah smiled then, and I knew I was in trouble. It was one of his crazy, charming, happy-puppy grins.

  “Noah…”

  Grin still in place, he inclined his head slightly toward me. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready right about now?”

  The word that ran through my head at that moment was a combination of about five words that I probably shouldn’t repeat, but believe me, it involved an impressive number of interjections.

  “Who told you about the party?” I asked Noah humorlessly.

  “Toby, Toby, Toby…” Noah placed a hand on my shoulder. “Who didn’t tell me about the party?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Who invited you to the party?”

  This time, the smile was less crazy, more hopeful. “You did.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Come on, Tobe. I’ll be good. I promise. You won’t have to save me even once. There’ll be so many girls there that at least one of them will be dying for a piece of The Noah. I won’t have to resort to working my magic on the so-called unavailable ones.”

  “The Noah?” He had to be kidding me. Between the title and the popped collar, I was starting to think I’d spent too much time growing up defending Noah, and not nearly enough beating sense into him.

  “Just let me come with you. Please? Pretty please?”

  I should have said no. I was going to the party for one reason and one reason alone, and that was the fact that if Brooke and Zee could put themselves in the line of fire for this mission, I could show up at a party and flirt with Bayport’s Most Eligible Bachelor. I could convince him to take me to his dad’s office. I could plant a new listening device (which Chloe had given me), and while I was at it, I could download information from at least one of the computers. I hadn’t exactly been authorized to do the latter, but meh. Authorization, shmauthorization.

  “Toby?”

  “Fine.”

  Noah beamed at me.

  “But let’s get two things straight. One—I’m not bailing you out of anything. If you come home with a black eye or somehow dismembered, don’t come crying to me.”

  “Deal.”

  Noah was eager to accept my terms, but he hadn’t heard them all yet. “Two—you say nothing about whatever I end up doing tonight. You don’t mention it to Mom and Dad. You don’t tell your friends—who, by the way, aren’t coming—and you don’t even mention it to me. Capisce?”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  I wished that I’d told him no, but of all the girls on the planet, I was the only one who was a sucker for Noah’s hopeful face.

  “Get lost,” I told him. “If we’re going to this thing, I need to get dressed.”

  I was less than surprised a few minutes later when I abandoned my laptop and opened my closet door to find that at some point during the day, my outfit had been selected for me. Sometimes it seemed like there were four of the twins instead of two. Except for the time I’d spent in class and working on Operation Playboy, I’d been with them for most of the day, and yet somehow at least one of them had made it back here at some point to play personal stylist.

  For the first time since I’d joined the Squad, the selected outfit wasn’t a skirt and a glitzy top—it was a pair of white jeans that looked dangerously low cut and uncomfortably tight. And a glitzy top. There was a note on the jeans (“wear thick blue belt with rhinestone buckle”), a note on the top (“wear with gel bra”), and a pair of high-heeled blue designer cowboy boots, with (shocker of shockers) a note attached. I read the last note and crumpled it. Apparently, the twins had decided that boots were my “trademark item” and they’d put out a fashio
n APB on new boot styles. They were expecting deliveries more or less daily.

  Though I shuddered at a future filled with fashion boots, I couldn’t help but think that it could be worse. I mean, they could have decided that a Chihuahua was my trademark item, and then I’d be stuck carrying a rat-dog around all the time.

  Pushing the thought out of my mind, I carried my clothes into the bathroom and stripped. I showered quickly, dried my hair with a supersonic blow dryer that had magically appeared in my bathroom, and tried to apply my foundation. After the tutorial I had been given, I couldn’t help but feel that one wrong move with one of these face sponge thingies, and I was going to somehow destroy the free world.

  I skipped the mascara and eye gunk, but applied a small amount of lip gloss to minimize the chances of a drive-by glossing. Eyeing the white pants distrustfully, I began to put on the outfit: the glitzy turquoise thong I’d bought at Victoria’s Secret, the bewildering gel bra, the glitzy blue top, and finally, the white pants. They were made of a really thick denim that must have had at least some spandex in it, based on the way they stretched to grip my butt like a glove.

  I checked my back half out in the mirror, just to make sure that the underwear wasn’t showing through, and not at all because I was interested in what my butt would look like in the aforementioned stretchy pants.

  Moving made me realize that something was off, and when I wedged my hand into the right front pocket of the pants, I pulled out a small piece of paper and a white choker with a blue gem on the end. The piece of paper was completely blank, but when I dampened it with the edge of my towel, bubble letters appeared on the page.

  Choker = video/audio feed.

  Whichever twin had written that message had signed it simply with a heart. My eyes scanned to the bottom of the page, and I saw the postscript.