Perfect Cover

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  At least she wasn’t Hayley Hoffman.

  “So I see you two have met.” Her tone of voice was so very Chloe that I recognized it right away.

  “Yup,” I said.

  April shrugged.

  “Come on, April,” Chloe said, placing herself between the two of us. “I want to show you some of our more advanced cheers.”

  Chloe spared me a single look as she said the phrase more advanced. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that I belonged in the remedial cheer class.

  April leaned around Chloe. “See you on Saturday?

  I was about to say no, but Tara answered for me. “Of course,” she said.

  Before either of us newbies could say another word, Chloe dragged April away.

  “Let me guess,” I said evenly. “Chloe’s April’s partner?”

  Tara nodded.

  “We’re only going to have to do a Stage One on April, I think,” Brittany piped up suddenly. “Her highlights are gorgeous, but I want to even out her skin tone a little.”

  I nodded. As awkward as I’d felt during our little mall mission, this was a million times worse. Now it wasn’t just me trying to adjust to the Squad: it was me and April. April, who could cheer. April, who Chloe had selected as her Mini-Me. April, who barely needed a makeover at all.

  And then, as if things weren’t already bad enough, the torture started back up again. We went through the routine time after time, until I was the only one messing it up.

  “That’s it for today,” Brooke said. “Let’s hit the showers.”

  “Finally,” I groaned under my breath to Tara as we headed into the locker room. “I feel like my legs are going to secede and wage war on the rest of my body. All I want is to go home, and…”

  I recognized the look on Tara’s face.

  “I don’t get to go home, do I?”

  Tara shook her head.

  “Are we really hitting the showers?” I asked.

  Tara bit her bottom lip and then nodded.

  “Is this going to be anything like when we hit the showers this morning?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, Tara walked from the gym into the locker room, and after casting a single sheepish look over her shoulder, she walked into one of the shower stalls, reached out, and twisted the shower knob. Left, right, and then left again, 180 degrees this time.

  When the shower wall rotated and gave way to a staircase, I wasn’t all that surprised.

  At least, I thought as the shower wall closed behind us, no one is going to tell me to point my toes in the Quad.

  CHAPTER 14

  Code Word: Party!

  I didn’t see Brooke place the digi-disk into any kind of player, but before I could say “Go Lion(esse)s,” the index was up on the screen, and the other girls, sweaty from practice, were taking their seats at the table. Stiff and drenched in the fruits of my cheery labor, I slipped into the last available seat at the table, in between Tara and Zee.

  “Chlo, can you decode?” Brooke asked. “Here’s the second disk.”

  As soon as I heard the word decode, I leaned forward in my seat. I was new to this, but wasn’t decoding supposed to be my area of expertise?

  Chloe tossed her ponytail over her shoulder and held my eyes with her own. “No problem,” she said, reaching forward to take the disk Tara had acquired from Brooke. She pulled something that looked like a makeup compact out of one of her shoes (how had she high-kicked with that in there? how?), and a split second later, she flipped it open, inserted the disk, and lifted a powder puff to reveal a tiny circular keyboard.

  “Chloe’s compact has some basic decoding formulas programmed in. When she puts in the decoder disk, it runs the specifics through the formula and decodes the file,” Tara said.

  “All of that in a makeup thingy?” I could feel my eyebrows rise as I asked the question. Tara might not have realized how complex the type of program she had described was, but believe me, I did, and the very fact that it was programmed into a unit that came with a powder puff was the equivalent of technological blasphemy.

  “Voilà.” Chloe leaned back in her seat, and after another hair flip and another oh-so-pointed look in my general direction, she turned back to Brooke. “Looks like we have something we can work with.”

  In response, Brooke hit a few keys on the arm of her chair, and a thin green line appeared on the middle of the screen. “Play audio,” she said, her voice loud and clear.

  The lights dimmed slightly, and as a voice filled the room, the green line on the screen began to move in sync with the words. I could only infer that whoever our bosses were, they were even bigger drama queens than the girls in this room—which, as you might have guessed, was really saying something.

  “Hello, girls,” the voice said. I had an incredible urge to respond with “Good morning, Charlie,” but somehow, given the sudden seriousness that had settled over my teammates, I doubted anyone would appreciate the reference.

  “As you know, the CIA databases have been accessed by an unknown entity twice in the past week. While neither of the hacks lasted more than thirty seconds, we have reason to believe that the limited window of time allowed the hackers to access highly classified information.”

  The voice didn’t expand on what that information was. I was beginning to hate the word classified.

  “We’ve managed to track the source of the breach to somewhere in Bayport, and have therefore included our most up-to-date analyses of the Peyton firm’s activities this month: financial records, interaction logs, and limited audio surveillance. You’ll want to go over it all with a fine-tooth comb. For the duration of this mission, you should refrain from using your database to access ours. Since there’s no link between the two and no mention of the Squad program in any of our files, your system should be secure.”

  Somehow, I was less than shocked that the CIA didn’t have an electronic paper trail detailing its use of teenage cheerleaders as secret agents. This whole operation had top-secret written all over it.

  Without warning, the green line on the screen was replaced with a picture of a guy I vaguely recognized as an international playboy who had recently broken up with a celebutante heiress who shall remain nameless.

  “Girls, this is Heath Shannon.”

  There were a couple of girly sighs in the room, and my resultant eye roll was nothing short of reflexive.

  “According to our surveillance, his contact with Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray has increased significantly since the first leak earlier this week. Whatever information the firm has managed to acquire, they’ll be looking for a buyer, and right now, Heath Shannon is our best lead. We have reason to believe that he has contacts on the information black market who would be more than willing to pay for the kind of information accessed during the leaks.”

  The picture changed, this time to reveal an office building nestled in between a Starbucks and a bookstore. It could have been anywhere, but I was going to go out on a limb and guess it was in Bayport.

  “This is the office building for Infotech Limited,” the voice continued. “A privately owned technology company, specializing in internet security, virus protection, and advanced TWD.”

  “Technological weapons defense.” Tara whispered the clarification in my left ear.

  “Infotech’s Pentagon contract was terminated in 2004. Our systems have changed some since then, but of all of Peyton’s clients, they’re the most likely suspects in the breach.”

  Everyone seemed awfully sure that these leaks were tied to the law firm. It made me wonder just how evil these lawyers were.

  A third picture flashed up on the screen—a map. As the voice continued talking, bright dots of light appeared all over the map, which covered most of the globe. “The illuminated points on this map represent our operatives worldwide,” the voice said. “Take a good, long look at the numbers here, girls. This is what’s at stake. Our latest analysis of the leaks suggests that the information accessed includes the names an
d aliases of some of our overseas operatives. We don’t know which ones, and we don’t know how many, but we do know that Peyton has started the ball rolling on brokering a deal with Heath Shannon’s terrorist contacts. This must not come to pass. The lives of these operatives—and our national security—are in your hands.”

  Again, I thought, with the melodrama. But then I glanced at Tara, who was sitting beside me, and I noticed how very pale she’d gone. I found myself staring at my partner instead of the screen. I didn’t know much about Tara, but I did know she was a professional. Tara was cool, calm, and collected. So why did she look like she’d been hit in the face with a very large, very heavy fish?

  I wasn’t a profiler like Zee. I wasn’t even a people person, but I could tell, just by looking at her, that something was wrong. To Tara, this wasn’t just a case. This was personal.

  I looked back at the thousands and thousands of dots on the map and thought about the way that operatives caught at Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray had a tendency to disappear. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine foreign governments or terrorist organizations being any more forgiving. Maybe Tara had it right. Life and death, even represented by dots on a map, had to be personal. And just like that, this Mission was real, and everything I’d thought and joked about at the mall seemed a thousand miles away.

  “Your mission is threefold,” the voice said, leaving the map on the screen so that not one of us could forget what was at stake. “First and foremost, we have to shut down the leaks. Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray cannot be allowed to access any more of our operatives’ locations. Penetrate Infotech’s system, disable it, and acquire any and all files that relate to information they may have already forwarded on to the firm. That leads me to your second initiative. We need to know what information Peyton has access to and how much—if any—of it has already been sold. To do that, you’ll need to reinstate our surveillance inside Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. Our organization is not in a position to send another agent in unnoticed, so we’re going to have to go with a stealth bug, and one of you is going to have to plant it.”

  My mind organized the information that the voice was imparting, even as I sat there, pinned to my seat with some kind of horrific fascination. The gears in my mind turned and spun, coming to the logical conclusions, as if this whole situation were just another piece of code to be puzzled out in the nooks and crannies of my brain.

  The government had a leak. Like a person with a nasty virus, it was sick, and we were the lucky ones who got to play doctor. First, we had to attack the metaphorical virus, which meant eliminating the leak before it could wreak any more havoc on our national security. And then, we had to assess the damage that had already been done. To do that, we needed to bug the nefarious law firm. As my mind processed all of this, in the span of seconds, I knew exactly what our third task was going to be. You stop the virus, you assess the damage, and then you do what you can to treat the symptoms that already exist.

  “Finally, we need you to put a tail on Heath Shannon. You girls can blend in a way that our agents can’t, and sooner or later, Shannon is going to go back to Peyton to finalize the deal for whatever information they’ve already acquired.”

  And by information, he meant sensitive data that could and would be deadly if we didn’t stop its transfer. Finding out what the leak entailed wasn’t enough. That was damage control; it wasn’t a solution.

  “We believe that the information trade will be physical, rather than electronic, so your orders are to wait until after Shannon leaves the firm to take him down and retrieve the data before it falls into enemy hands.”

  Just listening to the instructions made my heart pound a little faster. Hacking into secured systems and messing with their files? Taking down an international playboy who doubled as a freelance baddie? Even with the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t push down the thought that this was the stuff that dreams were made of.

  “And girls?” the voice added.

  Yes, Charlie? I thought.

  I expected him to tell us to be careful, but instead, he said, “Good luck at your game on Saturday. I’m sure you’ll be great.”

  And then just like that, the audio feed switched off, and the screen flashed back to the index that Tara and I had examined in the car. For a split second, there was silence, and then, I just couldn’t restrain myself.

  “Is it always like this?” I asked. “With the messages and the melodrama and a faceless voice telling us what to do?”

  “Actually,” Chloe said brightly, her voice somehow sugary sweet and acerbic at the same time, “usually, our superiors tell Brooke what to do, and she tells us.” Chloe paused.

  “Which leads me to wonder…” She brought her eyes to meet Brooke’s. “What do you know that we don’t?”

  I didn’t need Zee’s PhD to figure out that Chloe won the Most Likely to Start a Cheer Coup title hands down.

  Brooke met Chloe’s eyes, her voice equally pleasant. “Chlo,” she said, “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

  “Can we concentrate here?” Tara bit in, and the tone of her voice surprised me. I’d been under the impression that as far as cheerleaders went, she was relatively docile. When Brooke told her to do a cheer jump, Tara asked how high. So why was my partner suddenly Miss Dominant? And what exactly did her personality transplant have to do with the information we’d just learned? I filed these questions alongside others in my mind, namely, when exactly I’d wake up from this crazy dream and why it was the CIA felt that it was too dangerous to send an agent to infiltrate the Law Firm of Doom, but somehow expected a bunch of varsity cheerleaders to do the same.

  “I mean it,” Tara said. “We’ve got a job to do. There are lives at stake. Some things are just more important than your petty rivalries.” Tara’s words and demeanor pierced the Brooke/Chloe tension bubble, and almost instantly, Chloe began to look vaguely like she’d been hit in the face with a Kate Whatshername purse. Brooke, in contrast, didn’t visibly respond, but when she spoke again, her voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. Not exactly how I would have predicted her responding to direct insubordination.

  “We’ll get this thing, Tare,” our captain promised. “We’ll knock out the Infotech hack, we’ll figure out what damage has already been done, and we’ll bring Heath Shannon down before he has a chance to do any more. Nobody is going to get hurt.” She narrowed her eyes, her voice still soft and gentle, with just the slightest traces of something scarier. “Nobody is going to get hurt,” she repeated, “and everybody is going to follow orders. Am I clear?”

  Contrary to common belief among my cheerleading cohorts, I wasn’t an idiot. Or if I was, I was definitely an idiot savant, what with the near-photographic memory and intuitive understanding of all things encrypted. So why was it that the subtext between these girls was a complete mystery to me? I could follow Brooke’s game plan and see the logic in the three tiers of our mission without a problem, but the sympathy in her eyes even as she laid down the cheer law and the way Tara was responding were, quite simply, beyond my grasp.

  “So,” Brooke said, switching modes without waiting for Tara’s response, her voice louder and full of perky authority. “As far as planning goes, let’s start with the easy one. We need to infiltrate Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.”

  That was the easy one?

  “You know what that means,” Zee said, and I waited for our expert profiler to impart some kind of psychological wisdom. Instead, the twins squealed in unison.

  “Party!”

  CHAPTER 15

  Code Word: Hottie

  “Help me out here,” I said to the room at large. “We need to place surveillance on an evil law firm that probably has so much security that we couldn’t sneeze in front of their building without someone handcuffing us to a large metal object, and we’re throwing a party because why?”

  Brittany leaned forward, her lips spreading into the smile of a girl who was about to spread a particularly juicy bit of gossip. “Jack.”

&
nbsp; “Jack?”

  “Oooohhhhh! Jack!” Lucy clapped her hands in front of her face.

  “Jack Peyton,” April said, and again, I felt like the dumb stepcousin or something. April turned to Chloe. “Are you telling me that Jack Peyton, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Good-Looking himself, is somehow tied up in this?”

  “His name’s actually John Peyton,” Brooke said. “John Peyton the Fourth. His great-grandfather was John, his grandfather was Johnny, his father is John-John, and he’s Jack.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, doing the mental math. “John, Johnny, and John-John, they’re the Peyton in Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray?”

  “John was the founder, Johnny was his first partner, and now that they’re gone, John-John is the senior partner.”

  So Jack Peyton (whoever that was) was the son of the Big Kahuna of the evil law firm.

  “And we’re throwing a party because why?” This time, I asked the question louder, like that would get me an answer. Codes and numbers made sense to me. The Squad way of life did not.

  “The easiest way to Peyton is through Jack,” Brooke said.

  “Trust me.”

  Little warning bells went off in the back of my head at the tone of Brooke’s voice. The bells sounded suspiciously like they were saying “stay away from Brooke’s ex-boyfriend; go near Jack Peyton and die!”

  “Jack never misses a party,” Chloe said. “If one of us is going to use him to get into Peyton, we’ll just have to throw one.” She gave me another special Chloe look before turning to smile at April, her perfect little protégée. “Can we move Saturday’s party up to tomorrow night?”

  April nodded. “Daddy’s out of town, the pool house is always open, and besides, I have it on very good authority that Thursday is the new Friday.”

  “Great,” Chloe said, and she turned back to Brooke.

  “You think you can get Jack to take you to Peyton?” It sounded more like a challenge than a question.