Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

Yippee, I thought, glancing back up at the screen. Brooke hadn’t mentioned what would happen if I was against them, but I could guess. Hacking wasn’t exactly a legal hobby, especially when the Pentagon was involved.

“I’m sure you’ll even come up against codes you can’t crack,” Brooke added offhandedly.

And that’s when I knew I was going to say yes. After all, I was the girl who’d never met a code she couldn’t crack, and I wasn’t about to let some cheerleader tell me otherwise.

“I’m in,” I said, “but I am not wearing one of those stupid skirts.”

CHAPTER 6

Code Word: Bitquo

“You’ll need to get outfitted,” Brooke told me. “And not just for the uniform.”

Apparently, my skirt stipulation had fallen on completely deaf ears.

“Chloe, you’ll set her up with the basics?” Brooke asked.

Chloe nodded. “Earpiece, communicator, digi-disk, truth serum…”

“And for the love of all things good and popular, get her some accessories.” Brooke spared me another glance.

“Those boots are going to have to go.” I opened my mouth, but she continued spitting out orders like I didn’t even exist. “Tiff, you and Britt are on makeover detail. Lucy, minor explosives only, please, and Tara?”

“Yes?”

“You’ll be her partner.”

That was the best news I’d heard all day. It was almost enough to make me forget that the phrase makeover detail had ever exited Brooke’s mouth.

“Tara will give you the 411,” the totalitarian captain told me, “but first, we have a few Squad matters to discuss.” Brooke glanced from me to one of the empty chairs at the table and back again. I gritted my teeth, but took a seat. I waited for Brooke to begin another long soliloquy on the cheerleading spy business, but instead, she turned to Zee, who nodded.

“I added the most recent body language indices to our files,” Zee said, “and ran another set of statistical analyses on the remaining candidates. Hate to break it to you guys, but Stephanie Stanton is out. She’s too jittery, too nervous, and in combination with what we already know about her susceptibility to subliminal suggestion, she’s too big of a liability.”

Stephanie Stanton. Why did that name sound familiar?

“But…but…” One of the twins tried to object.

“I know, I know,” Zee said. “Her brother is hot, but she’d totally crack under the pressure. She’s a double blinker, and they can’t keep secrets worth a damn.”

“A double blinker?” I asked.

Unlike Chloe, Zee answered my question in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “She blinks twice as often when you look directly at her.”

Okay, I thought, trying to keep up. Double blinkers = bad secret keepers. And this from one of the single biggest gossip-mongers at my high school.

“And the subliminal suggestion part?” I asked.

“Messages on the bathroom stalls,” Brooke replied. “The Big Guys Upstairs engineer them, and we implant them as part of our screening process.”

It was then that everything they were saying clicked into place, and I remembered who Stephanie Stanton was. She wasn’t some enemy agent with a thick foreign accent. She was the pretty sophomore who’d sat next to me at the meeting—the one with the newly single, hot older brother.

Brooke had said that the squad needed ten members. Counting me, we currently numbered nine.

“So who’s still in?” Brooke asked.

Zee looked through her notes.

“Hayley Hoffman, April Manning, Kiki McCall…”

JV cheerleaders: my very favorite people.

“…Courtney Apex, and Sarasota Bane.”

The last two were names that, being the social butterfly I was, I didn’t quite recognize, but when their pictures flashed across the screen, I vaguely recalled having seen them at the meeting.

“Ix-nay on the ane-Bay,” twin-on-the-left said. I got the feeling that this was as close to speaking in code as she could come. “Split ends much?”

“Tiffany,” Brooke said, her voice surprisingly patient, “we can’t rule out a candidate because of split ends.”

Immediately, twin-on-the-right (who my advanced powers of deduction told me was Brittany) jumped to her sister’s defense. “We already have to deal with her.” Brittany jerked her head toward me. “If we take another neg-soc on, people are going to start getting suspicious.”

“Neg-soc?”

Zee had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. “Despite your special skills,” she said delicately, “you have what we refer to as a…uhhh…a negative social index.”

All things considered, that was probably putting it mildly.

“Okay,” Brooke said. “Bane is out.”

If Brooke’s “we save lives” spiel was to be taken seriously, we were deciding in whose hands we should place the fate of the free world, and a candidate had just been eliminated because of split ends.

“I think we should kick out Hayley Hoffman,” I said, taking a stand. The others looked at me, and I improvised.

“Her bitquo is too high, and we’re already at capacity.”

“Bitquo?” Tara might have been fighting back a smile as she spoke. It was hard to tell.

I looked at Brittany (also known as Miss We-Already-Have-to-Deal-with-Toby-the-Social-Reject) as I answered. “Bitch quotient.”

Needless to say, that comment did not go over terribly well.

“Hayley’s a strong applicant,” Chloe informed me tersely.

“Her social index is in our ideal range, she’s a solid athlete, a leader, and she lies outstandingly well.”

“So Hoffman stays on the list,” Brooke said, not even giving me time to come up with another clever retort.

“What about Courtney Apex?”

She zoomed in on Courtney’s picture, and I recognized her as Bayport High’s own pseudoprominent cosmetics model.

“She’s afraid of fire,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. Apparently, to the too-cheerful (no pun intended) explosives expert, that was a cardinal sin.

“And she may be somewhat recognizable from that toothpaste ad,” Tara added.

“I like her,” Brittany said firmly. “Good bone structure.”

Bubbles shook her head. “Too tall,” she said. “I mean, can you imagine having to toss her over a security wall?”