My mind organized the information that the voice was imparting, even as I sat there, pinned to my seat with some kind of horrific fascination. The gears in my mind turned and spun, coming to the logical conclusions, as if this whole situation were just another piece of code to be puzzled out in the nooks and crannies of my brain.
The government had a leak. Like a person with a nasty virus, it was sick, and we were the lucky ones who got to play doctor. First, we had to attack the metaphorical virus, which meant eliminating the leak before it could wreak any more havoc on our national security. And then, we had to assess the damage that had already been done. To do that, we needed to bug the nefarious law firm. As my mind processed all of this, in the span of seconds, I knew exactly what our third task was going to be. You stop the virus, you assess the damage, and then you do what you can to treat the symptoms that already exist.
“Finally, we need you to put a tail on Heath Shannon. You girls can blend in a way that our agents can’t, and sooner or later, Shannon is going to go back to Peyton to finalize the deal for whatever information they’ve already acquired.”
And by information, he meant sensitive data that could and would be deadly if we didn’t stop its transfer. Finding out what the leak entailed wasn’t enough. That was damage control; it wasn’t a solution.
“We believe that the information trade will be physical, rather than electronic, so your orders are to wait until after Shannon leaves the firm to take him down and retrieve the data before it falls into enemy hands.”
Just listening to the instructions made my heart pound a little faster. Hacking into secured systems and messing with their files? Taking down an international playboy who doubled as a freelance baddie? Even with the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t push down the thought that this was the stuff that dreams were made of.
“And girls?” the voice added.
Yes, Charlie? I thought.
I expected him to tell us to be careful, but instead, he said, “Good luck at your game on Saturday. I’m sure you’ll be great.”
And then just like that, the audio feed switched off, and the screen flashed back to the index that Tara and I had examined in the car. For a split second, there was silence, and then, I just couldn’t restrain myself.
“Is it always like this?” I asked. “With the messages and the melodrama and a faceless voice telling us what to do?”
“Actually,” Chloe said brightly, her voice somehow sugary sweet and acerbic at the same time, “usually, our superiors tell Brooke what to do, and she tells us.” Chloe paused.
“Which leads me to wonder…” She brought her eyes to meet Brooke’s. “What do you know that we don’t?”
I didn’t need Zee’s PhD to figure out that Chloe won the Most Likely to Start a Cheer Coup title hands down.
Brooke met Chloe’s eyes, her voice equally pleasant. “Chlo,” she said, “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”
“Can we concentrate here?” Tara bit in, and the tone of her voice surprised me. I’d been under the impression that as far as cheerleaders went, she was relatively docile. When Brooke told her to do a cheer jump, Tara asked how high. So why was my partner suddenly Miss Dominant? And what exactly did her personality transplant have to do with the information we’d just learned? I filed these questions alongside others in my mind, namely, when exactly I’d wake up from this crazy dream and why it was the CIA felt that it was too dangerous to send an agent to infiltrate the Law Firm of Doom, but somehow expected a bunch of varsity cheerleaders to do the same.
“I mean it,” Tara said. “We’ve got a job to do. There are lives at stake. Some things are just more important than your petty rivalries.” Tara’s words and demeanor pierced the Brooke/Chloe tension bubble, and almost instantly, Chloe began to look vaguely like she’d been hit in the face with a Kate Whatshername purse. Brooke, in contrast, didn’t visibly respond, but when she spoke again, her voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. Not exactly how I would have predicted her responding to direct insubordination.
“We’ll get this thing, Tare,” our captain promised. “We’ll knock out the Infotech hack, we’ll figure out what damage has already been done, and we’ll bring Heath Shannon down before he has a chance to do any more. Nobody is going to get hurt.” She narrowed her eyes, her voice still soft and gentle, with just the slightest traces of something scarier. “Nobody is going to get hurt,” she repeated, “and everybody is going to follow orders. Am I clear?”
Contrary to common belief among my cheerleading cohorts, I wasn’t an idiot. Or if I was, I was definitely an idiot savant, what with the near-photographic memory and intuitive understanding of all things encrypted. So why was it that the subtext between these girls was a complete mystery to me? I could follow Brooke’s game plan and see the logic in the three tiers of our mission without a problem, but the sympathy in her eyes even as she laid down the cheer law and the way Tara was responding were, quite simply, beyond my grasp.
“So,” Brooke said, switching modes without waiting for Tara’s response, her voice louder and full of perky authority. “As far as planning goes, let’s start with the easy one. We need to infiltrate Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.”
That was the easy one?
“You know what that means,” Zee said, and I waited for our expert profiler to impart some kind of psychological wisdom. Instead, the twins squealed in unison.
“Party!”
CHAPTER 15
Code Word: Hottie
“Help me out here,” I said to the room at large. “We need to place surveillance on an evil law firm that probably has so much security that we couldn’t sneeze in front of their building without someone handcuffing us to a large metal object, and we’re throwing a party because why?”
Brittany leaned forward, her lips spreading into the smile of a girl who was about to spread a particularly juicy bit of gossip. “Jack.”
“Jack?”
“Oooohhhhh! Jack!” Lucy clapped her hands in front of her face.
“Jack Peyton,” April said, and again, I felt like the dumb stepcousin or something. April turned to Chloe. “Are you telling me that Jack Peyton, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Good-Looking himself, is somehow tied up in this?”
“His name’s actually John Peyton,” Brooke said. “John Peyton the Fourth. His great-grandfather was John, his grandfather was Johnny, his father is John-John, and he’s Jack.”