Perfect Cover (16 page)

CHAPTER 26

Code Word: Taser

By seventh period, my high from Operation Doublemint had started to fade—in part because adrenaline had finally stopped doing the tango in my bloodstream, and in part because I’d had to spend most of the day focused on keeping the other cheerleaders away from my brother. Once they’d figured out that it was the easiest way to get under my skin, the girls were relentless, and even though I knew that Tara was right—they were teasing me, in a twisted and shockingly friendly way—I was determined to find a way to put a stop to it.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t exactly succeeded. Fortunately, however, the twins—who were far and away the worst offenders—weren’t going to have much opportunity to “tease” me for the next few hours. Operation Playboy was about to commence, and Tara, Lucy, Chloe, and I were the only operatives involved. The rest of the girls were under strict orders to finalize the details for April’s party, check up on Brooke and Zee, and paint some kind of banner for the football players to run through at the beginning of the Saturday game.

Needless to say, getting away from the twins and their “Noah Is Hot” propaganda wasn’t the only reason I was glad that I was going on this mission instead of staying behind.

“We’re going to try to keep this as simple as possible,” Chloe said, looking at me, Lucy, and Tara in turn. “We’re all going in armed, but weapons are a last resort. Ideally, we’d be able to pull this off without engaging the enemy at all. The goal is to get whatever information Peyton has given him. It might be a CD, a portable hard drive, possibly even something similar to the digi-disks we use. Whatever it is, we need it. That’s where you come in, Tara.”

I arched one eyebrow at my partner in an open-ended question, and she gave me an impish look.

“I may or may not have some skill at picking pockets,” she said delicately.

“Don’t let her fool you,” Lucy told me. “She’s the best!”

“If Tara can’t get the data unnoticed, no one can,” Chloe concurred. “In which case, we move on to Plan B.”

I couldn’t help but hope that Plan B involved kicking some international playboy booty. Was that really so much to ask?

“If Tara isn’t successful, we’re going to move on to a Flirt and Flick,” Chloe said.

“A Flirt and Flick?” I was nothing if not skeptical.

“We can’t afford to actually physically engage a Peyton client within a two-block radius of the firm,” Chloe said.

“Peyton has surveillance of its own, and the last thing we need is for them to ID one of us. So if Tara can’t steal the data, we’re going to have to find a way to get Heath Shannon a suitable distance away from Peyton before we try anything else. Since we can’t risk him handing off or transferring the data before we intercept it, one of us is going to have to stay with him at all times. Hence the Flirt and Flick.”

As much as I hated to admit it, the flirting logistics of this equation made perfect sense to me. That said…

“What’s a flick?” I asked.

“Female Liason Indemnifying Against the Possibility of Contact,” Chloe said.

That sounded like a FLIAPC to me, but I wasn’t about to argue the point, because Chloe’s answer still hadn’t cleared things up in my mind. “Translation?” I asked. “Preferably in English.”

I sensed the eye roll coming before I saw it.

“Basically, one of us goes in and interacts with Heath Shannon in a way that makes it impossible for him to immediately contact someone else,” Chloe said. “In this case, it means following him back to his car and convincing him that he wants to take me for a ride more than he wants to transfer the data.”

“You’re going to get into a car with this guy?” I asked. What was next, taking candy from strangers? Running with scissors?

“Worried about me?” Chloe asked.

Was I?

“I’m touched. Really.”

Okay, I most definitely was not worried about her—especially now.

“So what’s Plan C?” Tara interjected, coming in between the two of us.

I latched onto her question. “Plan A is Tara doing the pickpocket thing, Plan B involves you doing a Flirt and FLIAPC….” I changed the acronym just to get under her skin. “If he won’t take you with him, what’s Plan C?”

“Plan C involves the fact that Heath Shannon’s smart enough to know that working with Peyton is dangerous, which means that he won’t be using their parking garage, which means that we stand a slight chance of being able to take advantage of the one weak spot in Peyton’s security coverage of the area.”

Lucy smiled broadly. “Yay! That’s next to the tanning place, right?”

Chloe nodded. “If you can disable him and get him into SunTanz without moving outside the four-foot radius of Peyton’s blind spot, we can drop him off in one of the tanning booths, and the Big Guys will send someone to pick him up later.”

“And we’re supposed to carry an unconscious and internationally infamous playboy into a tanning salon without anyone noticing how?” I asked.

“What? No questions about how to disarm him and knock him out?”

I gave her a look.

“Trust me, Toby,” Chloe said, “if you can take him out, Lucy can handle the rest.”

Lucy smiled serenely, which, given the circumstances, was just a wee bit creepy.

“And there’s a slight chance that we may have some contacts inside the tanning salon. Hopefully, though, it won’t come to that. Like I said before, physically engaging the enemy is a last resort, as are weapons.”

Lucy sighed then, as if it would pain her greatly to holster her weapon of choice. That made me wonder what exactly the weapon of choice was, so I voiced the question.

“We just want to disable him,” Lucy said. “We don’t want to hurt him, so we should probably each take a Taser and some knockout patches. If things get sticky, one of us should have a gun.”

Lucy and Chloe looked at Tara, who inclined her head slightly. I, for one, was grateful that if any varsity cheerleader was going to be packing, it was Tara. Despite Lucy’s expertise, she was just bouncy enough that the idea of her holding a firearm was a little bit scary, and needless to say, I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of giving Chloe any literal ammunition. As for me, I didn’t want a gun. I’d never been a fan of weapons—I preferred to fight hand to hand.

“Are the Tasers in the guidepost?” Chloe asked Lucy.

Lucy nodded. “They look like those teeny-tiny iPods,” she said, “but if you use the scrolling function, the pointy things will pop out, and all you have to do to activate the charge is press the central button once the pointy things, you know, puncture the skin and stuff.”

Lucy smiled again, and I found myself thinking about how right Zee had been. There was something oddly endearing about Lucy’s earnest sweetness—and about the fact that she’d designed faux iPods that doubled as Tasers, “pointy things” and all.

“We’ll take two cars,” Chloe said. “Park them at least four blocks away from Peyton, preferably in separate directions. We’ll rendezvous back here once the mission is over. Lucy, would I be correct in assuming that the Tasers have built-in communication devices?”

Lucy nodded. “In the headphones,” she said. “That’s why I picked the little iPod design—that and the fact that they come in colors.”

“Are they pink?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question.

“Nope.” Lucy punctuated her answer with a shake of her head. “They’re purple.”

“I’m driving,” Chloe said, not giving me the chance to mentally lament the color of my Taser. “Who else wants to drive?”

Before I could speak up, Lucy offered to drive, and Tara volunteered to ride with Chloe, shooting me a look that spoke volumes about the fact that I owed her one.

Five minutes later, I was in Lucy’s car, listening to her music and wondering if I’d have been better off taking my chances with Chloe’s manic driving.

“You don’t like Kelly Clarkson?” Lucy asked, wide eyed.

I didn’t answer.

“What about something old school?” she asked, eager to please.

“Old school? Like Cat Stevens? The Clash?”

“Weeelllllll…” Lucy dragged out the word and I read between the lines.

“You’re not talking about ‘old school’ as in *NSYNC, are you?” I asked suspiciously.

“Spice Girls?” Lucy suggested hopefully. “Or maybe Ashlee Simpson’s first album?”

“She has more than one album?” The thought was depressing.

“Or we could listen to the radio,” Lucy said. “Or we don’t have to listen to music at all. We could just talk.”

“Let’s talk.” Those were definitely words I never thought I’d say, especially to a fellow cheerleader, but I was getting used to the fact that all of my preconceptions about my life, my future, and my teammates were turning out to be wrong.

“What do you want to talk about?” Lucy asked, and then she let out a preemptive giggle. “Noah?”

“Not funny, Lucy,” I said.

Lucy just grinned. “He’s just so…”

“Annoying? Deluded? Insane?”

“…happy,” Lucy finished. “He just seems really happy, you know?”

“You’re one to talk,” I said. “You’re Miss Happy.”

Lucy shifted lanes. “But it’s like he doesn’t even have to try. I mean, he almost got thumped at lunch, and he was grinning like crazy.”

“Key word: crazy.”

Lucy grinned wistfully. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Crazy.”

First the twins and now Lucy? The truly disturbing thing was that I couldn’t decide whether she was teasing me or she was serious. At least with Brittany and Tiffany, I was relatively sure that they didn’t actually find Noah studlike in the least.

“So,” I said, more than ready to change the subject.

“How about those Spice Girls?”

CHAPTER 27

Code Word: Ta-tas

In general, I think it’s safe to say that people vastly underestimate the amount of time the average spy spends standing around doing nothing. We arrived in the general vicinity of Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray approximately a half hour before the transaction was supposedly going down, and Heath Shannon didn’t actually show up until a full hour after that.

Lucy and I spent most of this time hanging out in the ice cream shop next door to the tanning salon—Lucy’s idea, not mine. But since I have never in my life objected to a banana split, it wasn’t a horrible way to pass the time—especially considering that on the other side of the tanning salon, there was a lingerie store that made Victoria’s Secret look like Baby Gap. Sparkly underwear was bad enough; I wasn’t about to brave teeny-tiny nighties that looked vaguely like they belonged in a Madonna video—or worse.

Lucy stirred her ice cream absentmindedly. She was on her third cup of rainbow sherbet, topped with marshmallow fluff and rainbow sprinkles. I would have been impressed with her metabolism were it not for the facts that (a) I had a pretty great one myself, and (b) she actually only ate about a third of each cup, because by the time she got done stirring it up and twirling her spoon absentmindedly in the resulting goop, most of the ice cream had melted.

“We have visual contact.”

It took me a second to realize that the voice in my ears was Chloe’s. I’d been so distracted by Lucy’s ice cream shenanigans and the enthusiasm with which she had been explaining the CW’s fall lineup to me that I’d forgotten that I was wearing headphones.

“You ready?” Lucy asked, taking one last bite of her sherbet.

I nodded, and the two of us went to throw away our trash.

“I’m going in.” This time, it was Tara’s voice in my ear.

Lucy pulled me out of the ice cream shop, and—much to my dismay—down the street and into the lingerie store.

“We’ll have a better view in here,” she explained, gesturing out a side window. Sure enough, I could just barely make out the outline of Tara down the block. She was walking briskly, her arms full of shopping bags (no idea where she’d gotten them), and as we watched, she ran smack into a man-shaped object that I deeply suspected was Heath Shannon, even though it was kind of hard to tell from this distance.

“Here,” Lucy said, digging into her purse and handing me a pair of white sunglasses with rainbow rhinestones embedded in the sides. “Try these on.”

I did as instructed, and immediately noticed the change. I might as well have been standing a foot away from Tara. Whatever these lenses were made of, they were damn powerful binoculars. They also compromised my peripheral vision enough that I didn’t have to worry about the large selection of holiday-themed bras to my left.

As Tara collided with Heath Shannon, he temporarily lost his balance, and she dropped her packages. He regained his footing, and as he helped her pick up her bags, I watched the way she used every excuse she could to touch his body, to move hers subtly against his. Had I been the average observer, I would have marked her for a high school Lolita, but with the glasses and my insider information, I concluded that she was stealthily slipping her hands in and out of his pockets with every soft touch.

The two of them finished gathering the packages and talked for several seconds before they continued on their respective ways: Heath toward us, and Tara in the opposite direction.

“I’ve got his wallet,” Tara said a few seconds later, her British accent crisp in my headphones. “But no portable hard drive. No disk. If the Big Guys are right and this transfer was physical, he’s still got the data.”

“In that case,” Chloe said, “he’s all mine. Lucy, you guys should get into position, just in case. If I succeed on the Flick, fall back and use the tracker in my phone to follow us in case I need backup.”

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?

The guy in charge must have been on the Big Guys’ payroll, because he didn’t offer a single objection to Lucy’s desire to drag an unconscious Heath Shannon into one of the tanning rooms. Once we got him alone, Lucy made quick work of checking his pockets, but came up with nothing.

She sighed. “I guess we’ll have to strip him.”

“What?” I seriously hoped she was joking.

She answered me by pulling off one of his shoes, and within ten minutes, she’d gotten down to his tighty whities, and we still hadn’t found a disk of any kind.

“Ummmm…Toby?” Lucy’s voice was small.

“Yes?” I was careful not to look at our unconscious mark. He might have been an international heartthrob, but there was such a thing as oversharing, and this definitely qualified, even if he was unconscious.

“Could you maybe check the underwear?” Lucy said.

“I’m kind of…wellll…” She searched for the right word.

“Shy.”

“Shy?” I repeated. This, coming from the girl who’d practically begged him to sign her boob. Lucy “Never-Met-a-Stranger” Wheeler.

“About things like this,” Lucy hedged. “Guys in underwear. It makes me…shy.”

I opened my mouth, but when she offered me an apologetic smile, I couldn’t refuse. Forty seconds later, we had the disk. I’d elaborate on how exactly we got the disk, but that information is classified. For the record, however, Lucy
really
owed me one.

Proving herself to be surprisingly scrappy and strong for her size, Lucy managed to hoist Heath Shannon’s body into a tanning bed. She closed the lid, and together, the two of us used some ultrathin steel cables (which Lucy just
happened
to be wearing in her hair) to bind the bed shut, locking our mark inside.

When the Big Guys showed up (and I had a feeling it wouldn’t take them long), they’d find Heath Shannon incapacitated and—more likely than not—just a little bit tanner.

“High five!” Lucy said. Glad that she hadn’t demanded we herkie to celebrate, I obliged. By the time I’d settled into the passenger seat of Lucy’s car, I was starting to feel like I’d been cheated out of the adventure of a lifetime. In my mind, I’d imagined that taking down Heath Shannon would involve a lot fewer theatrics and a lot more of me kicking ass. It was bad enough that I hadn’t actually gotten to fight the guy, but the fact that the success of our operation was due in large part to Lucy’s ability to convince celebrities to sign her boobs? Talk about disillusionment.

“What happened back there?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to draw a crowd?”

Lucy glanced at me as she started the car, truly bewildered. “I thought you knew. It’s standard procedure—if it’s public enough that people are going to notice the mark going down, you draw enough of a crowd to mask the fact that you’re the ones behind it. Peyton will probably run checks on everybody who entered the area, but since you Tasered him in the blind spot, they won’t be able to connect it back to us, so they’ll have a long list of suspects, and once they figure out we go to school with Jack and have for years, we’ll be in the clear.

“Besides,” she said, “what cheerleader wouldn’t ask a guy like Heath Shannon to sign her breast?”

“My kind?” I suggested.

Lucy’s face broke into a broad grin. “Did you just admit that you’re a cheerleader?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. After the thing with the underwear, I owe you one.”