I smiled. I’d almost forgotten about that.
“You’re a novice computer hacker.”
I narrowed my eyes. Who was she calling novice?
“Next.” At her one-word command, the image on the screen changed (thank God), and I found myself looking at an extensive list of company names and dates.
“Look familiar?”
I skimmed the list: Freemont Electronics, Conley Anti-Virus, Semi-National Bank and Trust, the Girl Scouts of America…
“Vaguely familiar,” I replied before she could continue.
“It’s a list of every secure system you’ve breached in the last twenty-six months,” Brooke said, and for the first time, I caught something that might have sounded like respect in her pretty-girl voice.
“Impressed?” I asked.
Chloe scoffed on Brooke’s behalf. “Get over yourself, hacker spaz.”
Apparently, a simple “computer geek” was too passé.
“Impressed?” Brooke repeated. “Puh-lease. This is kiddie play.”
Hey! I was deeply insulted. That bank and trust one hadn’t exactly been a piece of cake.
“What is impressive,” Brooke continued, “is what you did twenty-six months ago.” She turned her attention back to the screen. “Next.”
I recognized the code the moment I saw it. “Oh,” I said. “That.”
“Yes. That.”
Before I explain what “that” was, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that when I’d weaseled my way past the firewalls and hijacked one of the user IDs, I thought the site was fake, one of those things that a hacker will put up on the Net just to see if there’s anyone better out there. I figured that if it was legit, I wouldn’t break through, as simple as that—only not, because it was legit and I did break through. My bad.
“The Pentagon,” Brooke said. “Not bad for a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“I was almost fourteen.” I glanced away.
“Four months later, your dad was transferred here,” Brooke said. “And you’ve been lying low ever since.”
There wasn’t really anything to say to that. I had been lying kind of low. I mean, the Girl Scouts? Not exactly my best showing.
“Well, you’re in luck, Toby.” The no-teeth smile was back. “It’s football season, the Squad needs ten members, and our hacker graduated last year.”
“And if I say no?”
Brooke showed her teeth. “You won’t.” She walked over to a nearby conference table, and one by one, the other eight cheerleaders took their places, filling all but two of the seats. Brooke leaned back and hit some buttons on her chair’s arm. The image on the screen changed again.
“Tara Leery,” Brooke said. “Nice picture, by the way, Tare.”
Tara mouthed a silent “Thanks,” and Brooke looked back at the screen.
“British exchange student and linguistic specialist. Fluent in nine languages, functional in twelve others, Tara has a perfect ear for accents. If we come across it, she can learn to speak it.”
Brooke tapped a button with her French-manicured nail, and the picture on the plasma screen changed. “Bubbles Lane, contortionist.”
Brooke didn’t elaborate, but Bubbles did. “I can put my feet behind my head.”
I racked my mind for the proper response to her proud declaration, but the best I could do was a rather unenthusiastic “That’s nice.”
“It’s even nicer when you need someone to fit in a duffel bag,” Chloe said sharply. “Or when the bomb you need to deactivate is hidden in the back of an air duct with laser sensor triggers no normal person could avoid.”
A bomb? Personally, I wasn’t really sure Bubbles could deactivate a washing machine.
“And speaking of bombs…” Brooke paused as the screen changed again. “Lucy Wheeler, explosives and weaponry.”
I thought of Lucy jumping around doing herkies like a four-year-old on reverse Ritalin.
“Explosives?” I swallowed hard. “Weaponry?”
Lucy beamed at me. “I love Tasers.”
I took about five seconds to desperately hope they were joking.
“And right now, I’m working on the coolest bulletproof push-up bra.” Lucy’s smile grew, if possible, even brighter.
“It’s to die for.”
Tasers and bulletproof push-up bras. In practically the same sentence. So wrong. So, so wrong.
As I digested the wrongness of it all, Brooke ran through the rest of the squad. Apparently party girl Zee was a professional profiler, the twins generally came in handy because there were two of them (I still maintained they had a combined IQ lower than that of the average penguin), Chloe was their resident “gadget girl in Gucci,” and Brooke, as far as I could tell, was exactly what she had always appeared to be: a gorgeous, terrifying, manipulative bitch who could lie, cheat, and steal with the best of them.
“The entire squad is, of course, trained in hand-to-hand combat.”
I thought about how close Brooke’s roundhouse had come to taking me down. Could they all fight like that?
“You’re serious about this.” I don’t know why I said it. I mean, the giant plasma screen with the access code for the Pentagon should have been a big clue, but somehow, I couldn’t help asking.
Brooke looked straight through me. “We save lives, Toby. That’s how serious we are.”
I said nothing.
“We also cheer at games,” she continued. “We chant and we yell and we do backflips for the football team so that no one ever suspects we’re up to anything else.”
“And herkies,” Lucy added.
“And we do herkies,” Brooke amended. “Think you can handle it?” She leaned back in her chair, and she must have hit the button again, because all of a sudden, the list of companies I’d hacked into reappeared on the screen.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” I kept my voice even.
Brooke shrugged. “Is it working?”
I closed my eyes for a long moment and then opened them again. “Maybe.”
Tasting victory, Brooke leaned forward. “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” she said. Like that was original. “If you’re with us, you’ll learn how to break into any building, how to lie your way into or out of any situation, how to look like one person one minute and another the next. You’ll go undercover, you’ll have limitless access to highly classified technology, and if you make it through your first two years, by your eighteenth birthday, you’ll be a fully authorized CIA operative. Sooner or later, you’ll probably save the world.” She paused. “Plus you’re like totally guaranteed to be on homecoming court.”