Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

“But I am angry.”

“Doesn’t matter,” April said. She might have been as new to the secret agent game as I was, but she was a veteran cheerleader. “It doesn’t matter if you just broke up with your boyfriend or if you’re fighting with someone else on your squad or if you’re cheering on a sprained ankle. When you perform, you smile. You’re loud, you’re proud, you’re in charge, and you’re on top of the world. Your team is the best. You’re the best, and while you’re cheering, that’s all that matters.”

Apparently, cheerleaders were supposed to be able to turn on the happy at the sound of a single “Ready? Okay!” Before I’d become one, it had never actually occurred to me that their smiles might be fake. They were on the top of the social chain. They were pretty and popular, and they had nothing to worry about except what color bloomers to wear under their cheer-skirts, and so they smiled. For the first time, I understood what Lucy had meant when she’d told me that cheerleaders were predisposed to being good spies. I could even understand why the Squad program might have been initiated in the first place. If you were the government, and you were looking for a group of athletic, beautiful teenage girls who were generally thought to be morons, but who were actually masters at manipulating their own emotions and showing the world (or the crowd, as the case may be) what they wanted it to see, there was a certain kind of person who fit the bill.

The kind who cheered.

“Let’s try it again,” Chloe said. “Without the anger management issues.” She paused and then said the words that, as captain, Brooke would normally have yelled to start us off. “Ready? Okay!”

I forced myself to think of this as practicing in a different way. I wasn’t practicing a halftime routine. I was practicing the innocent, ditzy look I’d give to an enemy operative before I clocked him with a seventy-mile-an-hour roundhouse. I was practicing keeping my emotions off my face and out of my voice. I was perfecting my cover, so that someday, I could be the one rescuing Brooke and Zee. Or Lucy. Or Tara, or any of the others.

“B to the A to the Y to the Port…”

Scarily enough, when I thought about things that way, I was good. My smile was broad, my eyes were bright, and my voice was nothing short of peppy.

Wherever Brooke and Zee were, I was just going to have to trust that they were okay. After all, when it came to the art of deception, I only had to look at the beaming faces around the room to come to the conclusion that I was completely surrounded by masters.

CHAPTER 29

Code Word: Sexy

After practice, I miraculously convinced the twins that I could handle my own hair and makeup for the party. They made me swear to exfoliate, and I had to sit through a tutorial on foundation, but it was a small price to pay for a little space and some time with my own laptop. After booting it up, I updated a few of my programs with bits and pieces that I’d picked up from the sparkly Squad laptop. Then I thumbed through my decrypting programs and wondered if there was anything potentially useful that the Big Guys, whoever they were, might not have access to.

And then I went to CNN’s website and searched for any articles about shots exchanged in Al Jawf, Libya, earlier that day.

Nothing.

I was in the process of using the mother of all search engines to do the same thing when I sensed a presence in my room. I turned, half expecting it to be Bubbles with some kind of cream for my hair or gel for my eyes, but instead, it was Noah. He was wearing a collared shirt. The collar was popped.

“Are you wearing cologne?” I sniffed the air suspiciously and minimized the search window on my computer. “Scratch that. Are you wearing an absurd amount of cologne?”

“Why? You like?” Noah leaned against my bedroom wall.

“No. I don’t like.” I paused. “Do I even want to know why you’re wearing cologne?”

Noah smiled then, and I knew I was in trouble. It was one of his crazy, charming, happy-puppy grins.

“Noah…”

Grin still in place, he inclined his head slightly toward me. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready right about now?”

The word that ran through my head at that moment was a combination of about five words that I probably shouldn’t repeat, but believe me, it involved an impressive number of interjections.

“Who told you about the party?” I asked Noah humorlessly.

“Toby, Toby, Toby…” Noah placed a hand on my shoulder. “Who didn’t tell me about the party?”

I rolled my eyes. “Who invited you to the party?”

This time, the smile was less crazy, more hopeful. “You did.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Come on, Tobe. I’ll be good. I promise. You won’t have to save me even once. There’ll be so many girls there that at least one of them will be dying for a piece of The Noah. I won’t have to resort to working my magic on the so-called unavailable ones.”

“The Noah?” He had to be kidding me. Between the title and the popped collar, I was starting to think I’d spent too much time growing up defending Noah, and not nearly enough beating sense into him.

“Just let me come with you. Please? Pretty please?”

I should have said no. I was going to the party for one reason and one reason alone, and that was the fact that if Brooke and Zee could put themselves in the line of fire for this mission, I could show up at a party and flirt with Bayport’s Most Eligible Bachelor. I could convince him to take me to his dad’s office. I could plant a new listening device (which Chloe had given me), and while I was at it, I could download information from at least one of the computers. I hadn’t exactly been authorized to do the latter, but meh. Authorization, shmauthorization.

“Toby?”

“Fine.”

Noah beamed at me.

“But let’s get two things straight. One—I’m not bailing you out of anything. If you come home with a black eye or somehow dismembered, don’t come crying to me.”

“Deal.”

Noah was eager to accept my terms, but he hadn’t heard them all yet. “Two—you say nothing about whatever I end up doing tonight. You don’t mention it to Mom and Dad. You don’t tell your friends—who, by the way, aren’t coming—and you don’t even mention it to me. Capisce?”

“Your wish is my command.”

I wished that I’d told him no, but of all the girls on the planet, I was the only one who was a sucker for Noah’s hopeful face.