Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

“What’s your real name?” I asked her curiously.

“Bubbles,” she said immediately. “Why?”

“Is it a…uhhhh…family name?”

“No,” Bubbles said, mystified as to why I considered her name even the least bit odd. “It’s Bubbles. You know, like bubbles?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Zee might have technically been Dr. Zee, Tara might not have been one-hundred-percent foreign sophisticate, and Chloe might have secretly been more tech than chic, but Bubbles, the contortionist, was just…Bubbles. You know, like bubbles.

Thinking of Tara made me want to quit wasting time and give in to the seductive lure of the numbers in my mind. The faux Britney CD held the rest of a code, and even though Tara had only begged me to do the Jack thing, everything Squad-related, including seducing Jack Peyton and breaking this code, had gotten tied up in one giant neural ball labeled cheerspionage in my mind.

As all of this passed through my mind, Bubbles passed through my room and was halfway out my window before I realized she’d moved at all. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was fast. And stealthy. No wonder I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Hey, Bubbles?” I stopped her before she’d disappeared entirely.

“Yeah-huh?” Only the top half of her body was still visible, but she turned back to look at me.

I asked one of the questions I’d stopped dwelling on once I’d started concentrating on the numbers. “Why does Tara care so much about this case?”

I don’t know if I asked the question because I was thinking about Tara, or because I had a feeling that Bubbles would answer me more honestly than anyone else on the Squad.

“I dunno,” Bubbles said thoughtfully. “I mean, there are what? About a bazillion foreign agents? And her parents are only like two of them.” Bubbles shrugged. “Maybe she’s homesick.”

I sat there, frozen to my seat. Tara was British, and yet somehow, she’d ended up at an American high school. She spoke nine languages fluently, and her cover act was so perfect that even after having seen her this afternoon, I still bought it. When Lucy had explained Tara’s transfer status to me, she’d mentioned that Tara’s parents were “really into the Squad thing,” and Tara had started freaking out the moment she’d realized that the information leaks had involved the aliases and locations of individual foreign operatives, to the point that Brooke had taken her off the case altogether.

I’d barely gotten over the fact that people’s lives were in our hands, and now I had to deal with the fact that the people in question might be Tara’s parents. And I’d bitched and moaned about having to hit on Jack Peyton. Tara’s parents could already be dead, and I’d felt sorry for myself because my butt said CHEER and my hair was picture perfect.

“Toby?” Bubbles brought me out of my guiltfest. “Can I go now?”

Since she had the answer to one of my remaining shower questions, I decided to ask the other. “You know the guy who gave us our orders today?”

“Yeah-huh.”

“Who is he?”

Bubbles looked at me like I was very simple. “He’s the guy who sometimes gives us our orders,” she said sagely.

“Yeah, I get that, but who is he?”

Bubbles was one-hundred-percent solemnity when she answered. “Nobody knows.” I almost expected eerie mood music to start playing in the background as she continued, but her next sentence entirely ruined the effect. “I call him Bob.”

“Bob?”

“Yup.” If Bubbles found it at all ridiculous that she called the mysterious voice, the head of our operations, Bob, she didn’t show any signs of it. Instead, she shifted her weight and tilted her head to one side. “Hey, Toby? Can I go now?”

I nodded, and just as she was about to descend from my window, the door to my bedroom flew open.

“I knew I heard girls in here,” Noah said triumphantly.

Bubbles flashed him a grin, and a second later, maneuvered down the side of the house and out of sight.

Noah stared at me, a tortured look on his face.

I turned back to my computer and put my headphones on, but he just came to stand closer, his expression almost comically anguished.

I sighed. “What is it?” I asked, leaving the headphones in place.

“You had Bubbles Lane in your room and you didn’t even tell me,” he said.

Woe is Noah, I thought, but I knew from experience that talking could do no good at a time like this.

“If you loved me, you would have told me,” Noah said.

“And you would have loaned her your whipped cream.”

I searched my desk for projectiles. I was way too tired to get up and chase after him, but I had a hell of an arm, and as soon as I found something worthy of throwing…

Noah read the look on my face perfectly and made quick work of ducking out of range, but on his way out the door, he turned back to play the Hormone Martyr one more time. “Life is so not fair,” he said. “If either of us is going to have cheerleaders sneaking in the window, it should be me.”

CHAPTER 20

Code Word: Bayport

Thanks to Chloe’s audio-editing skills, it only took me three hours to listen to all of the phone sequences and decode the tones into numbers. We’d caught thirteen other dialing instances on tape, which was impressive considering the secretary’s cubicle was outside the range of the bug. Of the thirteen, one was the tone from my head, exactly as I’d remembered it. Just to be safe, I compared the number I’d ended up with and the sound of the number on the tape.

“024106,” I sang the number in tune with the tones, and it matched up exactly. I paused the audio just long enough to type the number into my pink phone again, checking and double-checking that I’d recorded it right.

Of the other twelve phone tone sequences on the CD, eleven had either seven digits (local number), ten digits (long distance), or eleven digits (given the fact that Mr. Hayes sounded somewhat sexually frustrated, probably a 1-900 number). The single remaining number had six digits.

“Hmmm hmmm hem hmm hmmm hem.”

I could tell from the sound that it was a different number than before, and this time, my fingers flew across the phone pad at warp speed as I sounded out the number. 023243.

I listened to the entire CD again. And again. And two hours later, I still had nothing except two six-digit numbers: 024106 and 023243. They both started with zero and contained a four and at least one two. They both had more even than odd digits. Neither of them was prime.