Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

Unlike Tara, Chloe didn’t bother turning the microphone in her iPod off when she engaged the mark, and I was treated to every second of the flirt half of her Flirt and Flick.

“Is there any way to turn the volume down on this thing?” I asked Lucy. I fiddled with the controls, and two sharp metal electrodes popped out of the end.

Ooops.

On the other end of our line, Chloe was doing a pretty good imitation of one of the twins. Personally, I thought she was pouring it on a little too thick, and she must have gotten that vibe as well, because she changed methods right around the first time Heath Shannon tried to excuse himself from her presence.

I won’t go into detail about what her next method was, but let’s just say it bore a suspicious resemblance to my FT and leave it at that. For the record, though, Chloe didn’t do sullen and violently intriguing nearly as well as I did.

“Yikes,” Lucy said, glancing down at her watch and sending me the signal that we were on. “It’s getting late. We should probably go. Unless you want one of those Mrs. Claus bras?”

She didn’t have to say anything else. Chloe had somehow managed to get Heath Shannon’s number, but after that, he’d given her the brush-off.

It was now officially time for Plan C.

I headed for the store’s exit, determined to put as much space between me and the Mrs. Claus bras as possible, but Lucy held me back, allowing a very large woman holding a very large package (which I could only assume was filled with very large, disturbingly risqué underwear) to exit in front of us. As we followed the woman out, I realized what Lucy had done.

Underwear Woman was blocking us from the view of any security cameras that may or may not have been surveying the area. We walked for a few more seconds and then slipped out from behind the woman to stand in front of a tanning salon with a smiling sun drawn on the glass windows.

Lucy nodded, first toward a billboard, then toward a post office mailbox, and then toward a Now Opening sign to our right. Based on the calculations we had for Peyton’s surveillance equipment, this was the dead spot, the one place on this two-block stretch of Bayport that the Evil Law Firm of Doom couldn’t monitor.

In other words, this little slice of upscale strip mall was our last shot at completing our mission without risking our covers. If Heath got past us, we’d have to fall back and intercept his car somewhere down the line and hope that he wasn’t going to immediately transfer the files to his black market contacts.

Using the zoom-in sunglasses, I concentrated on appraising Heath Shannon—getting a feel for the length of his stride and trying to gauge what his strengths as a fighter might be. He was easily twice my size, and I had deep and abiding suspicions that he was carrying weapons more deadly than an iPod Taser.

Piece of cake.

I slipped the sunglasses off and handed them to Lucy. She tucked them into her purse, and then hooked one of her arms briefly through mine.

“This,” she said seriously, “is going to be so much fun.”

I counted backward in my head, my brain automatically calculating how much time I had left until the mark was within Tasering range. In any other circumstances, I would have loved nothing more than to bring my roundhouse out to play, but somehow, I didn’t think that was quite subtle enough to fly in public. We didn’t just need to take him out. We needed to take him out quietly.

Have I ever mentioned that quiet is not my strong suit?

Five. Four. Three. As he drew closer and closer, I sank back slightly on my heels, holding the Taser loosely in my hands.

Two, I thought, and then, a second before he was within my range, Lucy let out a high-decibel shriek.

“OMG!” She said. “You’re, like, that guy! Who dated that girl!”

This so wasn’t in the plan. And yet…Heath Shannon slowed his pace and smiled at Lucy. Apparently, in addition to dabbling in evil, he was also a whore for being fawned over by people who considered him a celebrity. I watched, absolutely bewildered, as our mark reached into his pocket to pull out a pen so that he could supply Lucy with the autograph she so clearly (and audibly) desired.

I’d been prepared to take him out. I’d timed it in my head, gotten it down to a precise movement. This, however, was unexpected. He was just standing there, completely distracted, chatting happily away with Lucy, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Tara hadn’t managed to pick his pockets, and Chloe had only halfway seduced him, but Lucy’s open adoration and obvious cheerfulness weren’t running up against any barriers at all.

In a way, it made sense. Tara was sophisticated; Chloe was terrifying. Lucy was Lucy, and I had to admit that were I an international playboy, I never would have considered, even for a second, that she could have been anything else.

Realizing that standing there dumbly staring at the two of them wasn’t the way to go about this, I repositioned my body so that I was standing directly behind the mark. He sensed my movement, but as he glanced over his shoulder to assess the potential threat, I moved closer to his body and in one smooth move, dragged my thumb around the scrolling pad of my iPod, jammed the prongs into his back, and pressed the central button.

The Taser flared purple. I glanced around to see if anyone had seen, but everyone was too busy staring at Lucy, who was very conspicuously trying to rearrange her shirt in a manner that would make it possible to allow Heath Shannon to sign her left boob. I pocketed my Taser, and Heath Shannon went down.

I expected a riot then and wished that Lucy hadn’t drawn so much attention to us, until I realized that that was exactly what she’d meant to do. People rushed toward us from all over. If the baddies at Peyton went back through their tapes and tried to determine who or what had intercepted their operative, they were going to have a great deal of difficulty. A crowd had formed when Lucy had begun shrieking, and when Heath went down, it just got bigger.

It was chaos. Someone from the tanning salon rushed out and asked if they could help, and Lucy nodded.

“Can you take him inside?” she asked. “I think he has low blood sugar.”

That had to be the single lamest excuse I’d ever heard, but the tanning salon employees—some of whom may or may not have been affiliated with our bosses—were ecstatic at the idea of having a hypoglycemic almost-celebrity in their midst, and they carried him inside, at which point in time Lucy somehow convinced them that she was the president of the Heath Shannon Fan Club and that she knew for a fact that he’d been planning to go tanning that day, because he always went tanning on Thursdays, and would it be okay if he used one of their booths?