Perfect Cover (11 page)

CHAPTER 19

Code Word: Bubbles

Checking your email every fifteen seconds isn’t a healthy habit. I know this, and usually the only reason I check my email is to activate new user accounts through which I can mask my own internet activity, but Chloe had said she’d send the files my way, and as much as she wasn’t exactly the Honest Abe of the cheerleading world, I didn’t think she cared enough about what I thought to lie to my face. At least not about this.

I refreshed my inbox.

“Wow. You get like totally no email.”

I physically jumped in my seat, and Bubbles tilted her head to the side.

“Bubbles,” I said slowly.

“Uh-huh?”

“What are you doing in my room?”

“Watching you check your email.” She tilted her head in the other direction. “You don’t have any.”

I was tempted to thank her for the clarification, but became incredibly distracted when, without any warning, she hooked her hand around one of her ankles and lifted her leg straight up until it nearly hit her ear. To top it off, she just stood there, looking at me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like she hadn’t just contorted herself into a position that was painful to even look at.

“Stop doing that,” I told her.

“Doing what?”

The sad thing was, she was serious.

I gestured to her foot with my head, and when she turned and saw her ankle an inch away from her face, she blinked several times, surprise etched thoroughly into her baby-faced features.

I stared at her, refusing to say another word as she lowered her leg.

“Sometimes I do that without realizing I’m doing it,” she clarified needlessly.

“Bubbles.”

“Uh-huh?”

“What are you doing in my room?”

I could practically see déjà vu replacing the surprise on her face. I swore to myself that if she said a single word about my email, I was going to toss her out of my second-story window.

“I was on my way back from the stakeout thingy,” Bubbles said. “Chloe called, so I went to her house, and she said to give you this.” She thrust out a pink square box.

What was with these girls and pink?

It took me about a second to realize that pink or not, this box in all likelihood held the information I’d asked for. Chloe just hadn’t sent it via email. She’d sent it Ditz Delivery instead.

I opened the box, and inside there was an old-school Britney Spears CD.

“If this doesn’t have phone tones on it,” I told Bubbles, “Chloe is a dead girl.”

Bubbles tilted her head to the side.

I popped the CD into my computer, and prepared myself to immediately turn it off if “Baby One More Time” blared from the speakers. Instead, a password protection window popped up on the screen. Chloe hadn’t included the password in the package.

I smiled. My fingers flew across the keys, trying different combinations. I did some hard-core googling, and within minutes, I’d tried every combination of Chloe’s address, her cell phone number, her birthday, and the words to our halftime cheer.

Bubbles watched, fascinated, until the urge to do a back bend overcame her, and then she bent over backward and out of my peripheral vision.

After about five minutes, I hit on the right password, and logged in.

“Wow,” Bubbles said, standing up straight again.

I shook my head. As much as I would have liked to revel in my own hacking prowess, I had to admit that Chloe was tech-savvy enough that she never would have picked a guessable password unless she’d meant for me to guess it.

“No big deal,” I told Bubbles.

“Uh-huh,” Bubbles said. “But I usually just use my phone.”

“Your phone?”

She pulled a hot pink phone identical to mine out of a purple suede purse and gestured. “You just plug this thing into that thing, and then it does its thing.”

Nobody had told me our cells were equipped with decoding technology. As brightly colored as it was, I had a feeling that my fashiony flip phone was going to be my new best friend. Forget shoes or flowers or chocolate. The way to a girl’s heart was through code-breaking technology, and if my phone had that kind of program, I was officially in love.

“Anything else about this phone I should know?” I asked.

Bubbles thought for a moment. “If you want,” she said seriously, “you can get
American Idol
ringtones.”

I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to respond. I turned back to the computer screen, found the audio files, and plugged in a set of headphones. I didn’t want to chance someone overhearing the audio, and after years of living in the same house with Noah “Su-Underwear-Drawer-Es-Mi-Casa” Klein, I had accepted the fact that privacy was a fictional concept that didn’t exist in real life.

Reluctantly, I held off on opening the files and played hostess to Bubbles. “Anything else?” I grunted. I’d never been a particularly good hostess.

“Chloe also said to give you these,” Bubbles said, and she pulled two more items out of her purple purse. The first appeared to be an iPod of some type (not pink, for once), and the second was a small, unmarked bottle. She handed me the iPod.

“You’re supposed to listen to the playlist tonight while you sleep,” she said.

As I tried to process that information, I turned my attention to the bottle. “What’s that?” I asked. The truth serum I’d been promised, but never gotten? Some form of mild explosive from Lucy? A magnetic-based lotion that would scramble any hard drive it came in contact with?

“It’s an aloe-based avocado mask,” Bubbles said. “Chloe said to tell you it’s good for your pores.”

Touché, Chloe, I thought. Touché.

“Thanks, Bubbles.”

If Bubbles caught the dry note in my voice, her face didn’t give it away. I tried to remind myself that based on the test scores Zee had shown me, there had to be more to Bubbles than surface appearances. After all, if the biggest partier in the senior class had a PhD in forensic psychology, anything was possible. Besides, looking at Bubbles, I almost couldn’t believe that anyone could be that clueless.

“What’s your real name?” I asked her curiously.

“Bubbles,” she said immediately. “Why?”

“Is it a…uhhhh…family name?”

“No,” Bubbles said, mystified as to why I considered her name even the least bit odd. “It’s Bubbles. You know, like bubbles?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Zee might have technically been Dr. Zee, Tara might not have been one-hundred-percent foreign sophisticate, and Chloe might have secretly been more tech than chic, but Bubbles, the contortionist, was just…Bubbles. You know, like bubbles.

Thinking of Tara made me want to quit wasting time and give in to the seductive lure of the numbers in my mind. The faux Britney CD held the rest of a code, and even though Tara had only begged me to do the Jack thing, everything Squad-related, including seducing Jack Peyton and breaking this code, had gotten tied up in one giant neural ball labeled
cheerspionage
in my mind.

As all of this passed through my mind, Bubbles passed through my room and was halfway out my window before I realized she’d moved at all. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was fast. And stealthy. No wonder I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Hey, Bubbles?” I stopped her before she’d disappeared entirely.

“Yeah-huh?” Only the top half of her body was still visible, but she turned back to look at me.

I asked one of the questions I’d stopped dwelling on once I’d started concentrating on the numbers. “Why does Tara care so much about this case?”

I don’t know if I asked the question because I was thinking about Tara, or because I had a feeling that Bubbles would answer me more honestly than anyone else on the Squad.

“I dunno,” Bubbles said thoughtfully. “I mean, there are what? About a bazillion foreign agents? And her parents are only like two of them.” Bubbles shrugged. “Maybe she’s homesick.”

I sat there, frozen to my seat. Tara was British, and yet somehow, she’d ended up at an American high school. She spoke nine languages fluently, and her cover act was so perfect that even after having seen her this afternoon, I still bought it. When Lucy had explained Tara’s transfer status to me, she’d mentioned that Tara’s parents were “really into the Squad thing,” and Tara had started freaking out the moment she’d realized that the information leaks had involved the aliases and locations of individual foreign operatives, to the point that Brooke had taken her off the case altogether.

I’d barely gotten over the fact that people’s lives were in our hands, and now I had to deal with the fact that the people in question might be Tara’s parents. And I’d bitched and moaned about having to hit on Jack Peyton. Tara’s parents could already be dead, and I’d felt sorry for myself because my butt said
CHEER
and my hair was picture perfect.

“Toby?” Bubbles brought me out of my guiltfest. “Can I go now?”

Since she had the answer to one of my remaining shower questions, I decided to ask the other. “You know the guy who gave us our orders today?”

“Yeah-huh.”

“Who is he?”

Bubbles looked at me like I was very simple. “He’s the guy who sometimes gives us our orders,” she said sagely.

“Yeah, I get that, but who is he?”

Bubbles was one-hundred-percent solemnity when she answered. “Nobody knows.” I almost expected eerie mood music to start playing in the background as she continued, but her next sentence entirely ruined the effect. “I call him Bob.”

“Bob?”

“Yup.” If Bubbles found it at all ridiculous that she called the mysterious voice, the head of our operations, Bob, she didn’t show any signs of it. Instead, she shifted her weight and tilted her head to one side. “Hey, Toby? Can I go now?”

I nodded, and just as she was about to descend from my window, the door to my bedroom flew open.

“I knew I heard girls in here,” Noah said triumphantly.

Bubbles flashed him a grin, and a second later, maneuvered down the side of the house and out of sight.

Noah stared at me, a tortured look on his face.

I turned back to my computer and put my headphones on, but he just came to stand closer, his expression almost comically anguished.

I sighed. “What is it?” I asked, leaving the headphones in place.

“You had Bubbles Lane in your room and you didn’t even tell me,” he said.

Woe is Noah, I thought, but I knew from experience that talking could do no good at a time like this.

“If you loved me, you would have told me,” Noah said.

“And you would have loaned her your whipped cream.”

I searched my desk for projectiles. I was way too tired to get up and chase after him, but I had a hell of an arm, and as soon as I found something worthy of throwing…

Noah read the look on my face perfectly and made quick work of ducking out of range, but on his way out the door, he turned back to play the Hormone Martyr one more time. “Life is so not fair,” he said. “If either of us is going to have cheerleaders sneaking in the window, it should be me.”

CHAPTER 20

Code Word: Bayport

Thanks to Chloe’s audio-editing skills, it only took me three hours to listen to all of the phone sequences and decode the tones into numbers. We’d caught thirteen other dialing instances on tape, which was impressive considering the secretary’s cubicle was outside the range of the bug. Of the thirteen, one was the tone from my head, exactly as I’d remembered it. Just to be safe, I compared the number I’d ended up with and the sound of the number on the tape.

“024106,” I sang the number in tune with the tones, and it matched up exactly. I paused the audio just long enough to type the number into my pink phone again, checking and double-checking that I’d recorded it right.

Of the other twelve phone tone sequences on the CD, eleven had either seven digits (local number), ten digits (long distance), or eleven digits (given the fact that Mr. Hayes sounded somewhat sexually frustrated, probably a 1-900 number). The single remaining number had six digits.

“Hmmm hmmm hem hmm hmmm hem.”

I could tell from the sound that it was a different number than before, and this time, my fingers flew across the phone pad at warp speed as I sounded out the number. 023243.

I listened to the entire CD again. And again. And two hours later, I still had nothing except two six-digit numbers: 024106 and 023243. They both started with zero and contained a four and at least one two. They both had more even than odd digits. Neither of them was prime.

I tried translating the numbers to letters. Using the phone keys as a guide, 2 was either
A, B,
or
C.
4 was
G, H,
or
I.
1 and 0 didn’t have corresponding letters, and 6 was either
M, N,
or
O.
I closed my eyes and let the different combinations play over the backs of my eyelids.
ABC/GHI/ MNO.
Bin. Ago. Bio. Cho.

Cho. That was a name, wasn’t it?

I tried the other number.
ABC/DEF/ABC/GHI/DEF.
More letters this time meant more combinations, and more nonsense. Ceche. Adaif. Beaid.

In other words, a whole lot of nothing.

I scrambled the letters in the second word set, looking for new combinations and still came up absolutely blank.

023243. 024106.

I sat there until my eyes watered. My foot fell asleep beneath me. My butt was as numb as the endless strings of possible decodes had made my mind. I was tempted to take another shower, thinking the steam might loosen up something inside my brain, but when I looked at my watch, it was already two in the morning.

Just another half hour, I promised myself. If I don’t get it in another half hour, I’ll sleep on it. Sleeping was almost as good as steam for unlocking an answer dormant in my own mind. As I sat there, staring straight ahead and willing the answer to come to me, I reached absentmindedly for the iPod Bubbles had given me. I traded my computer headphones for the iPod ones, and the iPod in question immediately began playing a preselected playlist, and I couldn’t get it to go back to the main menu.

“Ready, OKAY! 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. Go, fight, win. You’ll see us again. BAYPORT!”

Oh no.

“Bay-port Li-ons! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap) Bay-port Lions! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap)…”

Please, for the love of all things good and right in this world, I thought, please don’t let them have made MP3s of their cheers.

“B to the A to the Y to the Port…”

No wonder Bubbles had instructed me to listen to this while I slept. I’d be cheering in my sleep—literally. As the very thought of this made my skin crawl, I turned the iPod off. I couldn’t think about numbers and cheers at the same time. It was scientifically impossible.

My phone picked that moment to ring (not anything from
American Idol,
thank God), and for a moment, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Did the others have me under constant surveillance? Did they know I’d turned the iPod off? I picked up the phone, but when I flipped it open, it turned out to be a text message, which was (all things considered) both a good thing and a bad thing.

It was a good thing because it meant that I didn’t have to talk to anyone whose voice I’d just heard on the “Best of Bayport Spirit Squad” mix.

It was a bad thing because it meant that my regular ring (and not just the text message sound) might still be one of any number of pop songs I abhorred. It was also a bad thing because although the text message did not in any way suggest that I was under constant Squad surveillance, it did inform me of a rather unfortunate circumstance.

Practice gym. 5:30. Tomorrow morning.

It didn’t take me long to do the quick mental math. If I crawled into bed this second, and if I actually managed to fall asleep and not, for instance, spend the next three hours trying to get the chorus of “Bay-port Li-ons” out of my head, then I’d get a full three hours of sleep before my whole torturous existence began again the next morning. And that was assuming that I could actually tear myself away from the code long enough to concentrate on the whole going-to-sleep thing.

As it turned out, after I made it to my bed (minor miracle #1), I didn’t fall straight to sleep, but I didn’t lie there staring up at the ceiling and thinking about numbers or cheers, either (minor miracle #2). Instead, I thought about Tara and the foreign operatives who probably weren’t Tara’s parents. Even if they weren’t, the operatives weren’t nearly as anonymous and unreal as they’d been before I’d found out that in my partner’s case, a tendency toward espionage was as hereditary as good skin.

Superslowly, my body still aching with the day’s cheer-capades, I fell asleep.

024106. 02-41-06. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.

I stand in front of my locker, turning the dial. Left, then right, then left again. My body turns sideways, and I turn the dial up and down, then down and up. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.

The lock opens, and with sweaty palms, I rip it off the locker. This is it. This is the answer. Somewhere in the background, a dark-haired boy floats by. And then a giant slice of cheese.

But I’m concentrating on the locker. My hands are so sweaty, and the latch keeps slipping. I don’t have time. I have to open it. My fingernails are growing as I’m groping at the locker door. The nails grow longer and longer, until even my sweaty fingertips aren’t touching the locker latch. I fumble with it again, my long nails (hot pink, of course) doing the dirty work, and finally, it pops open.

Bubbles is sitting inside my locker, her feet behind her head. “Surprise!”

I bolted straight up in bed. Talk about nightmares. The sad thing was, Bubbles ending up in my locker wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. From what they’d said in our original meeting, fitting into tiny spaces was more or less her forte.

“Surprise!”

“AAAAGGGGK!”

Someone slapped a hand over my mouth and I stopped screaming. Tiffany (I was getting better at telling the twins apart) leaned forward. “Shhhh,” she said. “It’s like five in the morning. You don’t want to wake your brother and parents up.”

I glanced past Tiffany, because I’d yet to see one of the twins without the other, and sure enough, Brittany was on the other side of the room, rifling through my closet. She had an enormous trash bag (suspiciously full), and even from this distance, I could see that my closet was now home to an obscene number of sparkly items and a disproportionate amount of pink and superbright blue.

“We totally forgot about the rest of your wardrobe yesterday,” Tiffany said. “And, hello! It’s called Stage Six for a reason, right?”

Only one thing kept me from screaming then, and it wasn’t the fact that Tiffany had very wisely kept her hand over my mouth. I quite simply could not risk waking Noah. If he’d freaked out about Bubbles hanging out my window, I somehow doubted he’d be okay with the twins reorganizing my closet, especially since they were wearing what appeared to be a combined total of eighteen square inches of clothing apiece.

“What time is it?” I asked, but since Tiffany’s hand was still firmly in place over my mouth, it came out sounding more like a meow/lawn mower hybrid than actual English words.

“I can’t understand you,” Tiffany said.

I removed her hand from my mouth—and there’s a slight chance that I used more brute force than was entirely necessary, but, hey, I never claimed to be a morning person.

“I asked what time it was,” I said.

Tiffany rubbed her hand. “Sheesh. Touchy much?” she huffed.

I didn’t dignify that comment with a response.

“It’s five-oh-five,” Brittany said, answering my question in a voice that can only be described as chipper. “And if you touch my sister again, I’ll make Lucy lend me one of her Tasers.”

Until that moment, I’d forgotten about Lucy and the Tasers, and though I wasn’t the least bit intimidated by Brittany’s threat, I was (despite all of Zee’s test-score mumbo jumbo) disturbed all over again that either twin had access to anything with more voltage than a hair dryer.

“Here,” Brittany continued, keeping her voice low. “Wear this.”

I didn’t intend to make puking sounds when she shoved the outfit at me, but again—not a morning person.

“You know, for someone as fashion delayed as you are, this room isn’t bad,” Tiffany said. She’d finally gotten over pouting about her hand.

Tiffany meant the comment as a compliment, but I took it as an indication that letting my mom decorate my room because I was too lazy to deal with yet another new room in yet another new house was a big mistake.

“We don’t have all day,” Brittany told me, crossing her arms over her chest. “Put on the outfit. I’ll even let you choose the accessories.”

“Accessories?” I asked darkly. She nodded toward my desk, which now appeared to be housing a very large item which may or may not have been called a Caboodle in some circles. I’m not exactly up to speed on my Caboodle knowledge.

“Toby? Accessories?” Tiffany prodded me on her twin’s behalf, and I wished that I hadn’t woken up. I mean, having Bubbles in my locker wasn’t exactly my idea of a great time, but it beat having to pick out accessories at five in the morning.

“Do any of them have sonar?” I asked. I didn’t mean the question seriously, but Brittany, impervious to sarcasm, daintily handed me a silver necklace with a blue-green butterfly charm.

“Sonar?” I asked. “Really?”

The twins nodded in unison.

I opened my mouth and closed it again, not wanting to admit to Buffy and Muffy, the social scene twins, that I had no idea how to use sonar or what I’d go about using it for.

Five minutes later, I was dressed (a denim miniskirt, a white tank top trimmed with silver rhinestones, and high-heeled boots the color of the butterfly charm) and only feeling slightly homicidal.

“Kate Spade or Louis Vuitton?” Brittany asked Tiffany. Somehow, I got the feeling that they weren’t talking about enemy agents, and my suspicions were confirmed when they handed me another oversized designer purse.

I might have at least registered a complaint, but when Tiff handed me my phone to put in the purse, I thought of the code, and of Tara’s parents, and of my realization that maybe my transformation into Suzy High School was by some freakish twist of fate for the greater good. With that in mind, I walked over to my desk and picked up my notes on the numbers I’d pulled off of the audio track the night before, as well as the papers Chloe had given me on Infotech.

Unfortunately, the whole “greater good” thing didn’t make walking in blue-green high-heeled boots any easier, and on my way back across the room, I fell flat on my face. To their credit, the twins said absolutely nothing. I got back to my feet and threw the few schoolbooks I’d actually brought home back into my bag.

“What are those?” Brittany asked, looking at the books the way that normal people looked at dog feces.

“Books,” I said. “For school.” The twins stared at me blankly. “Homework. Ring any bells?”

“You actually do your homework?” Brittany asked.

Actually, doing my homework wasn’t exactly one of my strong suits, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Yeah, with your GPA, we figured…” Tiffany broke off when Brittany elbowed her in the middle of her exposed midriff.

“Well, I definitely didn’t get any homework done last night,” I said. “I was too busy messing with this code, and—”

“Code shmode.” Britt dismissed it with a wave of one highly manicured hand. “And don’t stress about the homework—we’ll just put in an order with HWA this morning.”

Dare I even ask? I wondered.

“HWA?” I dared.

“Homework Assistance. They keep a database of our assignments, and if we’re too busy doing Squad stuff, we just put in an order, and they print it out for us.”

“‘They’ as in the Big Guys Upstairs?” I asked, marveling at this new development. “And isn’t that cheating?”

“‘They’ as in the Big Guys who give Brooke her orders and the rest of us our supplies,” Tiffany confirmed.

“C’mon,” Brittany said, deftly eluding my “cheating” question. “We’d better get going. Brooke hates it when we’re late.”

I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed her out of the room, my attention divided equally between hoping I didn’t fall and praying that Noah wouldn’t wake up to see the twins leaving my room.

It was 5:17 a.m., and sonar necklace and HWA aside, I was still not a morning person.