Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

The twins, still moving in synchrony, fiddled expertly with their identical necklaces. Chloe adjusted one of the car’s cup holders, pulled out a keyboard, and typed some form of command in. Instantly, a large screen came down from the ceiling, and with some more nimble finger aerobics on Chloe’s part, the feed from the twins’ necklaces showed up on the screen.

“Audio.” I was unsure at first whether Chloe was giving an audio command to the car, or issuing an order to the twins.

“It should be on,” Britt said, ever the spokesperson for her twin. “We’ll do a quick check on our way to the building.”

Since we’d parked a good two blocks away, that seemed safe.

Chloe nodded. “Proceed as planned,” she said. “If any alterations need to be made in this initiative, I’ll make them from here.”

Alterations in the initiative…It wasn’t that I’d expected gadget guru Chloe to have a ditz-sized vocabulary, but still, it was an incredible jump from “Beat the Bobcats!”

“Ready?” Chloe asked.

“Ready,” the twins answered.

“Ready,” Bubbles and Lucy chorused from the front seat, where Bubbles, for some unfathomable reason, had placed her feet behind her head.

Chloe cleared her throat and turned around to give me a pointed look.

“Oh,” I said, my brain still dedicated to wondering how a person would go about contorting themselves into a pretzel shape and why exactly they might feel compelled to do so.

“Ready.”

“Ready,” all of the others said again, and I recognized the cheer-tone in their voices. “Okay!”

Unfortunately, my mind took that as a cue to launch into a mental rendition of our halftime routine as Tiffany and Brittany slipped out of the car and Bubbles (feet now a safe distance from her head) wiggled her way into the backseat.

A few minutes later, the twins’ audio clicked on. “Bangs.”

“Out.”

“Pointy-toed boots.”

“Depends on the color.”

“Designers whose last names are hard to spell.”

“In.”

“Heiresses.”

“Out.”

“Celebrity children.”

“In. When Angelina Jolie’s little boy grows up, he’s going to be a total babe.”

“Guys, we have audio.” Chloe took that moment to cut in on their game of “In or Out,” for which I was grateful.

“When you get within a quarter-block of the building, hold back, Tiff. Give Brittany a ninety-second head start.”

“Uh-huh,” Tiffany said.

“Awesome,” her twin agreed.

I watched the plasma screen as the two visual feeds split. From the one on the left, I could see the back of Brittany’s head as Tiffany fell back, giving her sister a lead. On the right side of the screen, the other feed showed us a clear image of the building as Brittany approached.

As Chloe’s surveillance reports had predicted, security on the bottom level was relatively lax. There was a single guard, and if it hadn’t been for the length (or lack thereof) of Brittany’s skirt, he probably wouldn’t have looked up from his computer, which I was about eighty percent certain he was using to look at a website whose name I totally didn’t want to know.

When a flash of real, live cheerleader leg caught his eye, he turned his full attention to Brittany. “Can I help you?” he asked, the question coming out noticeably too fast.

Brittany leaned forward. “I’m looking for a bathroom,” she said.

“Tiffany, move to flank position,” Chloe said. “Brittany, you’re a go.”

Tiffany approached the building and held her position just outside the double-door entrance.

After the security guard stuttered out directions to the nearest bathroom, Brittany flounced off. Two minutes later, Tiffany made her way to the desk. “Which way did you say that bathroom was?” she asked. “I get lost really easily.”

This time, the guard just pointed.

They hit the stairs then, Brittany taking the lead. If I hadn’t been forced to endure the Cheerleading Practice from Hell the day before, I would have been surprised at their stamina, but now I knew better. To someone who could do two hours of kicking, jumping, and shouting out annoying rhymes without ever losing her larger-than-life cheer-smile, eight flights of stairs was nothing.

The door at the top of the stairs was locked, and for the first time, it occurred to me that April, who’d stayed back with Tara to party plan, might have actually come in handy. After all, her “special skill” was lock-picking.

As it turned out, though, the twins didn’t need April.

“Tell them to use the grape-flavored one,” Lucy said brightly. Chloe nodded.

“Guys? Use the grape-flavored one.”

From Brittany’s video feed, I could see Tiffany reach into her bra and pull out what appeared to be a single piece of bubble gum. All business, Tiff unwrapped it and folded it in two. Then she bent down and smushed it between the door and the wall, even with the doorknob.

“Stand clear,” Chloe said, and the twins backed up a few steps.

The next thing I saw from the video feeds was a small spark of light, a single tendril of smoke, and an open door.

“Bubble-gum bombs?” I asked.

Lucy nodded. “Coolies, huh?”

Coolies wasn’t the word I would have chosen to describe that particular explosive, but if I had one soft spot on the Squad outside of my partner, it was Lucy, so I let it slide. Without so much as a single sarcastic comment, I turned my attention back to the screen. The twins were no longer together, and Brittany was approaching a second security desk. There were two guards at the desk, and a quick infrared scan of the building, courtesy of Chloe’s cell phone, showed two more around the perimeter of the offices Chloe had identified as our primary target.

I expected Chloe to dish out some more directions, but instead, she just let Brittany do her thing.

Britt slinked toward the security desk. To their credit, these security guys weren’t looking at porn on their computers, but they were just as fascinated with Brittany as the guy on the first floor had been.

“Hi,” Brittany said, shooting them a slow, sultry smile.

“This isn’t the bathroom.”

“Hell-lo,” one of the guards said. The other one gave her a stern look.

“No, miss,” he said. “This isn’t the bathroom. This is a secured wing, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”