Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door once more.

I stared at the disk. “Yeah,” I called back. “I think I did.”

“Gel bra?” Tara continued conversationally, like we weren’t shouting over dressing room doors.

Still somewhat enchanted by the tiny disk, I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Gel bra. Whatever.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was standing at the checkout, lingerie in hand, the minidisk hidden securely in my own sports bra. Tara surveyed my purchases: the befuddling gel bra, five pairs of multicolored, cotton bikini-style bottoms, and at her insistence, a turquoise thong with teeny-tiny sequins on it.

I didn’t even care about the underwear. Thongs? Sure! Sequins? What could be wrong with a little sparkle? I’d found the disk. I was on top of the world.

“Next.”

At the cashier’s call, Tara stepped forward. She sat her selections on the counter and held up a lime-green bra. “Do you have this in pink?”

The cashier looked at the bra, glanced at Tara, and then took the green monstrosity with her into the back room. She emerged a moment later with an identical pink bra, and handed it to Tara. “Is that all?” she asked.

Tara nodded.

When her total appeared on the cash register, I came off my minidisk high. How could something composed of so little fabric be so expensive? Not wanting to blow things at this stage in the game, I slipped my wallet out of the purse the twins had forced me to carry, wondering if I had enough cash to cover an expenditure of this magnitude. I so didn’t want to have to explain the appearance of a Victoria’s Secret purchase on my emergency-only credit card.

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.”