Perfect Cover (4 page)

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.

“Ix-nay on the ane-Bay,” twin-on-the-left said. I got the feeling that this was as close to speaking in code as she could come. “Split ends much?”

“Tiffany,” Brooke said, her voice surprisingly patient, “we can’t rule out a candidate because of split ends.”

Immediately, twin-on-the-right (who my advanced powers of deduction told me was Brittany) jumped to her sister’s defense. “We already have to deal with her.” Brittany jerked her head toward me. “If we take another neg-soc on, people are going to start getting suspicious.”

“Neg-soc?”

Zee had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. “Despite your special skills,” she said delicately, “you have what we refer to as a…uhhh…a negative social index.”

All things considered, that was probably putting it mildly.

“Okay,” Brooke said. “Bane is out.”

If Brooke’s “we save lives” spiel was to be taken seriously, we were deciding in whose hands we should place the fate of the free world, and a candidate had just been eliminated because of split ends.

“I think we should kick out Hayley Hoffman,” I said, taking a stand. The others looked at me, and I improvised.

“Her bitquo is too high, and we’re already at capacity.”

“Bitquo?” Tara might have been fighting back a smile as she spoke. It was hard to tell.

I looked at Brittany (also known as Miss We-Already-Have-to-Deal-with-Toby-the-Social-Reject) as I answered. “Bitch quotient.”

Needless to say, that comment did not go over terribly well.

“Hayley’s a strong applicant,” Chloe informed me tersely.

“Her social index is in our ideal range, she’s a solid athlete, a leader, and she lies outstandingly well.”

“So Hoffman stays on the list,” Brooke said, not even giving me time to come up with another clever retort.

“What about Courtney Apex?”

She zoomed in on Courtney’s picture, and I recognized her as Bayport High’s own pseudoprominent cosmetics model.

“She’s afraid of fire,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. Apparently, to the too-cheerful (no pun intended) explosives expert, that was a cardinal sin.

“And she may be somewhat recognizable from that toothpaste ad,” Tara added.

“I like her,” Brittany said firmly. “Good bone structure.”

Bubbles shook her head. “Too tall,” she said. “I mean, can you imagine having to toss her over a security wall?”

“Apex is out.” Brooke made the decision, and no one questioned it. “What about Kiki McCall and April Manning?”

For the first time in my life, I found myself cheering for April Manning, Hayley’s second-in-command. Anyone (or, for that matter, anything) was better than Hayley Hoffman.

“April is solid,” Zee said, slipping back into profiler mode. “She’s not as aggressive as Hayley and often lets her take the reins, but doesn’t show any signs of allowing herself to be manipulated. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have any kind of inferiority complex….”

Like that was a problem among the pretty and popular.

“Her body language is very controlled, and most of her actions seem highly strategic. She’s ambitious, but doesn’t have anything to prove.” Zee grinned. “Plus her dad’s totally loaded, even by Bayport standards, and she throws killer parties.”

“And Kiki?” Chloe asked.

“Obedient,” Zee replied immediately. “She’s the only child of an overinvolved mother and a somewhat distant father, leaving her desperate to please on both accounts. We may be able to use the obedience to our advantage if we can coerce her into aligning her loyalties with us, but I can’t guarantee it.”

Brooke frowned. “She
is
a legacy.”

Legacy? Did that mean what I thought it meant?

The others were silent for a long stretch of time, and then Chloe spoke. “Kiki’s out,” she said. “She’s got to be. Are we really willing to risk a people pleaser just because her mom was on a Squad back in the day?” Chloe’s voice hardened. “She’s only passably coordinated, she’s had private lessons out the wazoo and she still can’t tumble, and, correct me if I’m wrong, despite the fact that she was practically raised for it, she has no special skills whatsoever.”

Brooke held Chloe’s gaze for an uncomfortably long time. I might not have been the profiler here, but I was sensing some tension between the captain and Number Two.

Chloe looked away first, and then and only then did Brooke continue. “Zee?”

“I’d say out, Brooke,” Zee said, almost apologetically.

“Out,” Tara echoed.

“Out,” Brittany and Tiffany said in one voice.

Bubbles and Lucy shrugged.

“Out,” Brooke said finally. “So we’re down to April or Hayley.”

I was about to raise my bitquo argument again when Tara spoke. “Special skills?”

Brooke tapped the arm of her chair, and the girls’ files appeared on the screen behind her. “Both have been in the program since the sixth grade,” she said. “Both are exceptional cheerleaders. Our screenings suggest that Hayley has some aptitude for mountaineering…”

Hayley Hoffman? Mountaineering? Where did they get this stuff?

“…and April is surprisingly good at picking locks.”

“Lock picking,” I said loudly. “Well, that settles it. April’s our girl.”

Anyone but Hayley.

“We haven’t had a climber in a while,” Chloe said slowly.

Climber. Mountains. Hayley.

“This may have escaped your notice,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster, “but Hayley is evil.” The others stared at me. “I know, I know—evil and cheerleading kind of go hand in hand….”

I was getting off track here, and I wasn’t winning any friends.

“But we’re talking about saving the world here, and a person like Hayley? All she cares about is saving herself.” I paused. “Plus she hates me, and as much as that doesn’t hurt my feelings…” I scoffed at the very idea! “…it just wouldn’t be good for Squad morale.”

Silence.

“Uhhh…go team?”

Brooke rolled her eyes, but then she shrugged. “April?” she asked the others.

One by one, they agreed, except for Chloe, who probably wanted to pad the Squad with a few more people who shared her thirst for my blood.

“April’s in,” Brooke said, not sparing Chloe a second glance. “I’ll pass our official recommendation on to my superior, and with any luck, we’ll be cleared to extend April an invitation to join the Squad this afternoon.”

Upon hearing this, I was both surprised and incredibly relieved. The surprise came because I never thought I’d live to see the day when Queen Brooke referred to anyone as her superior. And the relief? That came because if Brooke had superiors who had to approve her recommendations for Squad acceptance, that meant that the fate of the free world wasn’t
entirely
in the hands of my high school’s varsity cheerleaders.

Brooke cleared her throat and tossed her ponytail over her other shoulder. “Next order of business,” she said. “The president called. There’s been another leak.”

CHAPTER 7

Code Word: Thong

“Three minutes until our holos expire. That means T-minus eighteen until showtime, people.”

I stared at Brooke. It was funny—she said these things like I was supposed to have some earthly idea what she was talking about, which I most definitely did not. Between the whole “holo” thing and the half hour I’d just spent listening to a rundown on what appeared to be an information leak from the Pentagon/CIA (not me, I swear), I was more clueless than Alicia Silverstone in the title role.

“Can you do
anything
with her in eighteen minutes?” Brooke’s question was directed at the twins, and it was all too clear to me that I was the “her” in question.

Please God, I thought, let the answer to that question be no.

“The hair’s going to take at least an hour,” Brittany (I think) sniffed. “And that’s if we speed up the dye process with Chloe’s little rearrangey thingy.”

“Electron wave accelerator.”

I took in Chloe’s correction. I wasn’t sure what was more disturbing—the fact that the twins were discussing dyeing my hair, or the fact that they were planning on using an electron wave accelerator to do it.

“We could give her a wig,” Tiffany (?) suggested. “And change the clothes.”

“I like my clothes.”

“Whatever.” Brooke waved that comment aside with a flick of her hand. “Why don’t you guys just work on clothes for now,” she told the twins. “We’ve got to be back in the locker room in sixteen minutes, and Toby still hasn’t seen the rest of the Quad. Tara, finish her preliminary debriefing and take her by weaponry and aesthetics.”

Finally, Brooke turned to address a comment (or, as I could already wager was more likely, an order) to me. “Come back to the gym after sixth period. Starting today, you’ll be excused from seventh for practice.”

No more gym class with a neofascist softball coach yelling in my face? I could learn to live with that.

“Britt, Tiff, you guys can Stage Five her while the rest of us debrief April this afternoon.”

“Stage Five?” This time, I couldn’t keep the question in. If anyone was going to Stage Five me, someone sure as hell was going to tell me what a Stage Five was first.

“A Stage Five makeover,” Brittany said, tossing her too shiny, too long, too gorgeous blond hair over her shoulder.

Tiffany leaned forward to examine my eyebrows. “Better make that a Stage Six.”

Tara reached out and lightly touched my shoulder just in time to keep me from leaping at Tiff. I’d had just about enough of the criticism twins. “Fourteen minutes,” Tara said. “We’d better get going.” With the ease of a skilled diplomat, she steered me away from the table, the twins, and Brooke’s mouth, which was already issuing new orders at top speed and high volume.

“You’ll get used to it,” Tara promised.

“The twins or
Mein Kampf
Barbie?” I nodded toward Brooke.

“Both.”

I followed her lead and we approached one of the far walls.

Tara gestured to a small, squarish panel. “This is a touch pad,” she said. “You place your hand on it, like this.” She pressed her palm firmly against the square. A small flash of light rose from the bottom of the panel to the top, like a wave of concentrated laser beams.

“Let me guess,” I said. “It scans your fingerprints?”

Tara nodded. “Among other things.”

“What other things?”

The door slid itself open, and Tara stepped through it. “You’ll see,” she told me. Tentatively, I followed her through to another large room, trying to prepare myself for everything from nuclear warheads to spirit sticks.

Instead, all I saw was another large, mostly bare white room.

“This is the guidepost,” Tara said, walking to stand in the center of the room. “From here, you can go any direction. The girls’ locker room is directly above us. Cars and bikes are downstairs. Tunnel on the left leads to the helipad. Tunnel on the right will take you out to the woods.”

“Bayport High has a helipad?”

Tara smiled a real smile for the first time since I’d met her. “There isn’t much that Bayport High doesn’t have,” she said. “Most people think we have ridiculously wonderful facilities because we’re such a wealthy school district, but really, you’d be surprised what having a secret government project housed beneath your school does for funding.”

“And no one thinks it’s strange that we have a helipad?” I asked.

Tara answered my question with a question. “Does anyone think it’s strange that we have four gyms, an Olympicsized training pool, a near-gourmet cafeteria, the biggest theater in a hundred-mile radius, and one of the most comprehensive library collections in the state?”

“Point taken.” Because now that she mentioned it, Bayport’s facilities were pretty extreme, even for a school district as wealthy as this one. If I hadn’t ever questioned that, there was a decent chance that no one did.

“The guidepost also serves as a loading center,” Tara said, smoothly moving on.

I looked around and didn’t see anything to load. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

“WEAPONS, OKAY!” Tara switched into cheerleader drive so fast I almost choked on my own spit. Her yell was loud and singsongy, and there was no mistaking the cheesy grin plastered to her face: she was one “Go Lions” away from a halftime show.

“
What
was that?” I asked, but the sound of my words was completely drowned out by the whirring of the shifting walls. Panels flipped, walls moved, and an instant after Tara had spoken (or rather, cheered), the entire left side of the room was filled with rows and rows of guns, knives, and…

“Bobby socks?”

“We rarely carry traditional weapons,” Tara said. “You’d be surprised how many ways you can incapacitate a grown man using a pair of bobby socks.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bobby sock grenades, bobby sock handcuffs, chloroform bobby socks…”

“You know that you people are seriously sick, right?”

Tara shrugged. “You know that you’re one of us now, right?” she countered.

“Is this it?” I asked, scanning the weapons on the wall and avoiding her question. “Guns, knives, bobby socks, ribbons, lip gloss…I don’t even want to know what that thong is for.”

“Don’t worry,” Tara retorted lightly. “That information is classified.”

The sad thing was, I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not.

“As for the other part of your question,” she continued, “we have entire storerooms and laboratories dedicated to equipment and weaponry, but if you need it for a mission, you’ll find it here before you leave.” She paused, and her eyes held mine. “Lucy and Chloe are better at their jobs than you probably think.”

“It wouldn’t be hard.” The words left my mouth, and though she didn’t glare at my cheerleader-directed animosity the way any of the others would have, I was briefly overcome by the realization that she probably knew eighteen ways to kill a person involving a bright orange thong. Showing more discretion than usual, I changed the subject. “How’d you get the weapons to appear?”

“Simple,” Tara answered evenly, and then without warning, she let out another cheer-yell. “WEAPONS, LAST TIME!”

More whirring, and the panels rotated and moved until the room settled back into its normal configuration.

“So ‘weapons, okay’ brings them out, and ‘weapons, last time’ puts them away?” It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Tara answered it anyway.

“No,” she said patiently. “‘WEAPONS, OKAY!’ takes them out.” Sure enough, at her call, the whirring began again. “‘Weapons, okay’ won’t do anything.”

“You have to yell it?” I asked.

Tara shook her head. “You have to
cheer
it. The voice recognition software is programmed to read both your voice identification and a combination of your tone, volume, and cadence. It’s an added security measure. It’s hard to cheer under duress. This way, if someone’s trying to force you to reveal our weapons supply, you probably couldn’t do it even if you tried.” She tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear. “Your turn. And remember, don’t just say the words. Cheer them.”

“You’re telling me that this room knows whether I’m cheering or not?”

Tara said nothing. A few seconds of silence later, she looked at her watch.

I got the point. “Weapons, last time.” I did my best to sound less angry than usual. Nothing happened. Tara kept staring, so I tried again. “WEAPONS, LAST TIME.” I settled for loud instead of peppy, and still, nothing happened.

“WEAPONS, LAST TIME.” I put a little lilt in my voice, but the panels remained completely immobile.

“Smile,” Tara advised.

I glared at her.

“The holos have been gone for twelve minutes,” she said.

“T-minus three minutes left.”

“Holos?”

“Holograms. If anyone had happened to look in the door to the practice gym in the past hour and a half, they would have seen a very good facsimile of the cheerleading team practicing a pyramid. The technology is light-years ahead of anything currently on the market, but basically, imagine going to see a 3-D movie, minus the glasses, plus an absurd number of projection points too small for the eye to see, and you’ve got completely realistic-looking holograms. We keep the doors locked during practices, so no one has a chance to interact with them, and they’re configured with each of the possible outside vantage points—the windows on the doors and the ones on the north and south ends of the gym—in mind.”

My mind ran through the angles from which a viewer could potentially view the holograms, calculated the density of light needed, and went into overload when I started thinking of rendering real-time motion with that kind of quality. So this was where those hefty taxes my parents paid went to. Secret high-tech cheerleading holograms. Of course.

Tara, sensing my wonderment, patted me on the shoulder, but then continued talking in a tone so no-nonsense that I couldn’t have disbelieved her if I’d tried. “A little over twelve minutes ago, the holos went into the locker room. The showers are on timers. We have to be back before they turn off.” She glanced down at her watch.

“T-minus two minutes?” It was half guess, half sarcasm on my part. “And you want me to cheer.”

“Smile,” she told me, and I tried miserably to heed the advice. “You have to yell and bob your head a little and smile, and you have to mean it.”

I sighed, but considering the fact that if I didn’t smile and mean it, the Pentagon was probably going to swoop down and arrest me any second now, I had no choice but to give it a shot. “I feel so stupid.”

Tara patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, her lips pulling up on the ends. “If you don’t feel stupid, you’re not doing it right.”

“WEAPONS, LAST TIME!”

As the weapons disappeared, I couldn’t help but think that my life had now officially hit an all-time low.

We walked back to the center of the room, and Tara handed me a towel.

“What’s this for?” I asked suspiciously. With my luck, it was probably one of Lucy’s explosives.

Tara opened her mouth to answer, but was cut off when the ground beneath us began to move. I looked down and realized that we were standing on another emblem—this one containing a shield embossed with a sixteen-point compass star and an eagle—and that this circular emblem, five feet wide to the other’s twelve, was rising slowly off the ground.

“Squad version of an elevator?” I guessed.

The ceiling’s panels spread apart, allowing our Squad-evator to deposit us in one of the locker-room showers. A shower which happened to be turned on, full blast. Tara jumped quickly out of the way, but I got the “refreshing” benefits of the spray, straight in the face. Within seconds, the shower turned off, and I stood there, fully clothed and sopping wet.

“Tara?” I said calmly.

“Yes?” She bit back a smile, which I met with a glare.

“I think I know what the towel is for.”