Perfect Cover (8 page)

“Disk data analyzed,” the computerized voice continued.

“Video, audio, and digital data found. Decode needed. Index data available. Play first available index entry?”

Tara checked her rearview mirror and changed lanes. “Index data,” she commanded. “Audio only.”

Instantly, the holographic diagram disappeared, and the car began reading off a list of available files.

“Interaction logs, Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. Updated client list (partial), Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. September sixth audio, Peyton, Kaufman, and…”

“Sensing a pattern here,” I said, drumming my fingers on my knees. “Who are Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray?”

I was asking Tara, but the car answered me instead.

“Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, formerly Peyton, Peyton, and Gray, formerly Peyton and Peyton. Officially a civil, criminal, and corporate law firm, established in 1932.”

“And unofficially?” I asked.

This time, it was Tara who answered my question. “Unofficially?” she said. “They’re the bad guys. Their client list is a veritable who’s who of über-criminal types. They represent everything from white-collar criminals and nefarious corporations to mobsters, terrorists, and the black market underground.” Tara shook her head. “They all have one thing in common: a lot of money.”

A law firm in Bayport whose clients had a lot of money? Shocking! That said, the whole evil part of the equation was a little more difficult to wrap my mind around. I thought about what Lucy had told me earlier. When the rest of the Squad programs across the country were axed, the Bayport program was expanded, helping the government to keep an eye on a very specific group of people: the bad guys.

“So Peyton, Whatever, and Whatever represent the enemy?” I asked, trying to work my way through it all.

Tara shook her head. “They
are
the enemy. The law firm is a convenient cover.”

“Evil lawyers,” I said. “Check.” I nodded toward the digi-disk player. “And the disk?”

“Instructions for our Mission,” Tara said, and her tone left no question that it was spelled with a capital
M.
Picking up the disk had been a baby mission. The instructions that were on the disk were for the real deal. “And, given that our superiors don’t want to risk a direct data transfer from their database to ours, probably most of the information they think we’ll need along the way.”

“So,” I said. “About this Mission.”

“It’s…”

“Classified,” I finished for her. “I know, but I just pulled a disk out of my bra. Personally, I think that earns me some clearance.”

Tara paused for a moment and then shrugged. “You’ll get the full scoop at the debriefing once Brooke’s had a chance to go over the information on the disk, but from what I’ve been able to pick up, the gist of it is that the Big Guys have managed to trace the source of the recent hacks on their system to Bayport, and if someone in Bayport is doing it, then there’s an extremely high likelihood that the Peyton firm is involved. Until a couple of days ago, the Big Guys had a man on the inside at Peyton.” Tara very delicately did not mention what had happened to the man. “He managed to smuggle out some information that might be relevant before he was caught.”

“Do people get…
caught
often?”

“If by people you mean the string of agents the Big Guys have sent to infiltrate the firm? Yes. If by people you mean cheerleaders at the local high school who could not possibly be involved in anything that could threaten the firm’s security—no.”

I remembered Brooke’s words at that first meeting.
We’re smart, we’re pretty, we’re in perfect physical condition, and best of all, we never get caught.

Not to sound like a cheerleader, but go us.

“The Big Guys have a long history of trying to infiltrate Petyon, Kaufman, and Gray,” Tara continued, “but their bugs never last more than a week or so, and their agents don’t even last that long.”

“And when you say they don’t last that long, you mean…”

Tara’s face showed absolutely no emotion as she answered my unasked question. “You don’t want to know.”

Well, that was certainly a sobering thought.

“So what do we do with all of this information?” I asked, half ready to throw myself into supersecret agent mode once more and half thinking that this whole thing had been some kind of giant mistake.

Tara pulled into the school parking lot and immediately into a primo spot. “Whatever they tell us to.”

It was funny—in my mind, when I asked Tara what we were going to do with the information we’d acquired, her response had been “Whatever we want.”

CHAPTER 13

Code Word: Cheer Shorts

“F-A-B-U! L-O-U-S! Bayport Lions, fab-u-lous!”

I heard the rest of the Squad before I saw them. As we wrapped around to the practice gym, their shouts echoed down the hallway. Tara pushed the door to the gym open, and I spent about five seconds devoutly praying that the cheering girls in front of me were a hologram. Because if they weren’t…

“Last time,” Brooke called out, meeting my eyes, and a few seconds later, all of the girls struck poses, cheesy grins plastered to their made-up faces.

Brooke pushed a stray piece of hair out of her face, and I noticed that she’d worked up a sweat. So much for my hologram theory, I thought. Somehow, I doubted cheerleader illusions had holographic sweat.

“You guys get what you were looking for?” Brooke asked Tara.

Tara nodded. “Totally.”

Brooke smiled. “Awesome.”

How many other times had I overheard the cheerleaders talking like this? Had they always been talking in cheer code? Like I’d assumed that they were talking about some guy or MAC lip gloss or an outfit at the mall, and they’d actually been communicating on a completely different level? I was supposed to be the hacker. I broke codes without even meaning to, but all it had taken was one too many
awesomes
from them, and I’d assumed they were idiots.

Such was the brilliance of the Squad.

“Ready for practice?” Brooke asked.

I wonder what we would be practicing. Martial arts? Disguise and surprise strategies? Misdirection?

“You guys get changed. We’re getting ready to go over Saturday’s halftime routine.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that I seriously hoped she wasn’t talking about what I thought she was talking about, but Tara reached over and pressed gently on my chin, forcing it back up.

“Come on,” she directed. “Let’s get changed.”

And then before I could so much as audibly lament my dismal situation, she dragged me into the girls’ locker room.

“You have to learn to cheer eventually,” Tara told me.

“The sooner, the better, and side note, Brooke can get kind of ugly when she’s mad, so trust me when I say it’s not worth arguing with her over this.”

“I could take her,” I grumbled. Part of me wanted a rematch with Brooke on solid ground.

“Maybe you could,” Tara said, “but I couldn’t, and you’re my partner, which means…”

“I’m your responsibility?” I asked.

Tara shrugged. “Something like that.”

I whistled under my breath. “Man, they must really hate you.”

“Nah.” Tara shook her head as she stripped off her shirt and slipped into a sports bra. “It was either Chloe or me, and Chlo…”

“Hates me,” I finished.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Tara said. “She just doesn’t like what you represent.” Tara opened a locker and tossed me an extra set of workout clothes. I took one look at the teeny-tiny gym shorts, which had the word
CHEER
written across the butt, and gave Tara a look.

“It’s all part of the game,” she reminded me, and because I liked Tara and felt bad that she’d gotten the short end of the spirit stick and ended up with permanent Toby Duty, I changed clothes with only a minor level of grumbling.

“So what do I represent to Chloe?” I asked.

Tara bent down to tie her shoes, and she didn’t look at me as she answered. “What she used to be.”

“You’re kidding me.” Lucy had said that Chloe was a transfer—that she’d registered her first patent when she was ten, and it
had
occurred to me that the average child inventor wasn’t exactly Chloe-esque, but still…I had a hard time picturing a younger Chloe as me. In fact, I was more apt to believe that she’d been a watermelon in a former life than that we’d ever been anything alike.

“You ready?” Tara asked. I got the message: she was done talking about Chloe.

I deliberately took my time tying the sneakers she’d given me.

“Toby.”

“Fine.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. “Ready.” As we walked toward the door, I stopped. “Remind me again why we have to do this instead of downloading all of the information on the disks.” I paused. “And where are the disks?”

“We have a game on Saturday,” Tara said, answering the first part of my question. “If we don’t take ourselves seriously as cheerleaders, no one else will either. Hence, practice.”

I considered emphasizing the fact that the very phrase
taking cheerleaders seriously
was somewhat oxymoronic, but Tara didn’t give me the chance.

“As for the disks, I gave them to Brooke. She’s in direct contact with our superiors—she’d know if it was urgent, and if she says we practice first, then we practice first.” Tara didn’t wait for me to ask how she’d managed to give both disks to Brooke without me seeing it. Instead, she walked out the door, and I had no choice but to follow.

I don’t particularly care to relive that practice, but I’ll tell you one thing: cheerleading is hard, and not just because it should be illegal to be that happy about anything. It’s actually, physically hard. Everything hurts. You kick your leg up high next to your face, and even if you’re used to kicking karate-style, that doesn’t do much for you when you’re high-kicking like the freaking Energizer Bunny on uppers. Then there’s all these little nuances that the cheerleading Gestapo expect you to get right the first time. Point your toes! Pop your motions! Straighten your legs! Donut holes are bad, and hyperextension is good. It’s like they speak a whole other language.

By the time we took a water break, my voice was hoarse, my legs were killing me, and I felt like a complete and utter imbecile because I kept switching the words
win
and
again
in the halftime cheer.

“You’re not nearly as horrendous as we thought you were going to be,” one of the twins told me brightly.

I was too busy chugging water like a desert camel to respond.

“So,” another voice said. “You’re Toby Klein.”

I looked up from the water fountain. “Yeah,” I said. “And you’re April.”

I was the transfer. She was the regular recruit. I was a lifelong hacker. She was a lifelong cheerleader. For me, this whole cheer gig was a cover. For her, it was a way of life.

“There’s a party at my place on Saturday after the game,” April said, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Daddy’s out of town, and we’ll have the whole house to ourselves.”

I remembered Zee’s analysis of April: independent, charming, intelligent, rich.

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 and 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!”