When I flipped open the wallet, a completely foreign sight greeted me with sleek metallic sheen. I pulled it out, and my eyes bulged: a gold card. With my name on it. I tried to get Tara’s attention, but failed.
“Next.” The register next to Tara’s opened up.
Going with the flow, I stepped forward, plopped my purchases down on the counter, and held out my card. My gold card. My hopefully government-funded gold card.
I avoided eye contact as the cashier rang up the turquoise thong, but the Mall Gods must have had it in for me, because a microsecond before the thong was in the bag and I was in the clear, the pushy mom from Abercrombie appeared out of nowhere, bounded to my side, and said, loudly enough for the entire store (and possibly a large portion of the rest of North America) to hear, “That is just adorable!”
I cringed.
“Look at those sequins, and that color!”
Please stop. I sent her a silent, telepathic message, but it did no good.
“Where did you get that, Toby? I just have to pick one up for myself.”
I discovered in that moment that there was indeed something far worse than froofy underpants, and it involved someone my mother’s age buying a sequined turquoise thong.
The attendant handed my card back. I stuffed it in my purse, gestured haphazardly across the store in response to the mom’s question, and bolted.
“That woman is everywhere,” I hissed the moment Tara caught up with me.
My partner shrugged, that carefree-yet-divine gesture I’d come to associate with her public persona. “At least you got some new things,” she said, playing around with the last word. She grinned wickedly at me. At first, I thought she was talking about the underwear, but the minidisk took that moment to push against my chest and remind me that our shopping adventure had been about more than just lingerie.
As we slid into the car, I thought about the fact that today was definitely a day of firsts. I’d attended my first cheerleading practice. I’d been recruited to work for my first top-secret agency, I’d had my first makeover, and I’d slapped a hot guy’s butt for the very first time. Add to that new lingerie and the spy sense that hadn’t led me astray, and I was starting to feel like Toby in Wonderland. Or possibly, given the lingerie factor, Toby in Wonderbraland.
Tara started the engine, and I marveled again at its magnificent purr. I wasn’t exactly a Beemer type, but this one was amazing.
“Is this your car?” I asked, thinking of my newly acquired credit card. “Or is it, you know…”
“Squad owned?” Tara supplied. “It’s mine. The Big Guys Upstairs bought it, but people would totally get suspicious if someone else inherited my BMW when I graduate, so it’s mine to keep.”
“I can’t believe you have a BMW,” I said.
“I’m supposed to be the foreign sophisticate,” Tara said.
“They thought it fit the role.” She turned onto the highway and floored it. “Not that I mind.”
The car did fit her image, and her words confirmed exactly what I’d been thinking ever since I’d learned that like me, Tara wasn’t a lifelong cheerleader. She was supposed to be the foreign sophisticate. It was a role she played, like I was learning to play Cheerleader Toby. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and wondered if I’d ever get to see anything but the image.
Tara Leery—who are you really?
“Pop the digi-disk in, and we’ll see what we’ve got,” she said.
I filed away the term for future reference and tried to think of a way of retrieving the disk that didn’t involve reaching my hand down into my bra in a very conspicuous manner.
Luckily for me, Tara pretended not to notice my hesitation and just kept talking. “We’ll need my disk to decode yours,” she said, “but we should be able to get some idea of what’s on it without running through the decode.”
“Yours?” I arched an eyebrow at her. “You have one too?”
Tara zipped into the next lane over. “But of course,” she said. “Want to be a good little Squad trainee and tell me when you think I got it?”
I ran over the events in my mind, playing them back in my memory the way other people might have rewound a taped episode of the trashy reality show du jour.
“Please tell me it had something to do with the hideous pink bra,” I said, taking a shot in the dark based on the fact that I sincerely hoped that I wasn’t trapped in a car with the kind of psychotic person who would have actually wanted that travesty of an undergarment.
“Bingo,” Tara said. “Most of the time, we don’t even bother with disks, but with the frequency of leaks increasing, our superiors thought a handoff was more secure than a direct transfer. The fact that there are two disks is added security—though if they’d thought there was actually a threat of interception, they would have sent the disks to two different locations.”
“So there was no threat of an enemy agent sweeping in and stealing our lingerie?” I asked, only half joking.
Tara offered me a small grin and an answer, in that order. “If they’d thought there was a real chance that the mission would be compromised,” she said, “they probably wouldn’t have given it to a rookie.”
Had any of the other cheerleaders called me a rookie, I would have been offended, but coming from Tara, it sounded like a statement, not an insult. Plus, I had to admit that I was slightly mollified by the fact that our Victoria’s Secret mission hadn’t been a high-stakes operation, because saving the world one gel bra at a time wasn’t exactly what I’d signed up for.
“Digi-disk,” Tara reminded me. “Player.”
I averted my eyes, highly aware of the tiny round disk digging into my right breast. Tara was waiting, and out of the goodness of my heart, I offered her an explanation for the delay. “Digging things out of my bra?” I snorted. “I haven’t had much practice.”
“You should get Bubbles to give you some tips,” Tara advised, “because you will.”
“Will what?”
“Get a lot of practice.”
I ignored her prediction, fished quite unstealthily around in my bra, and held up the digi-disk triumphantly. “Where do I put it?” I asked.
“Media on.”
This time, no cheer-voice was needed. The dashboard, impervious to my grumbling, rearranged itself, and a control panel popped out of the inner console.
“Insert digi-disk,” a highly synthesized female voice commanded.
A small slit in the panel lit up, and I touched the disk to its surface. Immediately, the car swallowed it whole, and above the dashboard, between Tara and me, appeared some sort of 3-D diagram.
“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 cli
ents 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.