“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.”

“Let me guess,” I said, doing the mental math. “John, Johnny, and John-John, they’re the Peyton in Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray?”

“John was the founder, Johnny was his first partner, and now that they’re gone, John-John is the senior partner.”

So Jack Peyton (whoever that was) was the son of the Big Kahuna of the evil law firm.

“And we’re throwing a party because why?” This time, I asked the question louder, like that would get me an answer. Codes and numbers made sense to me. The Squad way of life did not.

“The easiest way to Peyton is through Jack,” Brooke said.

“Trust me.”

Little warning bells went off in the back of my head at the tone of Brooke’s voice. The bells sounded suspiciously like they were saying “stay away from Brooke’s ex-boyfriend; go near Jack Peyton and die!”

“Jack never misses a party,” Chloe said. “If one of us is going to use him to get into Peyton, we’ll just have to throw one.” She gave me another special Chloe look before turning to smile at April, her perfect little protégée. “Can we move Saturday’s party up to tomorrow night?”

April nodded. “Daddy’s out of town, the pool house is always open, and besides, I have it on very good authority that Thursday is the new Friday.”

“Great,” Chloe said, and she turned back to Brooke.

“You think you can get Jack to take you to Peyton?” It sounded more like a challenge than a question.

Brooke returned Chloe’s smile. “Do you think you can?” she asked sweetly.

Whoa. I might not have been cheerliterate, but I could read between the lines. Somewhere along the way, this Jack guy had dated both Brooke and Chloe. What a player. And, for that matter, what an idiot. You couldn’t pay me enough money to spend time alone with either one of them, and some guy had actually voluntarily dated them both? Clearly, this Jack character had emotional, if not mental, problems.

“Guys, this is serious.” Tara’s voice was louder this time, and sharp enough to cut the silence between Chloe and Brooke. “We don’t have time for some infantile spitting contest.”

Wow. Chalk another one up for the British girl.

In one motion, Brooke and Chloe turned to glare at Tara.

“You know as well as I do that Jack doesn’t like cheerleaders,” Tara said, her voice nice and calm again, despite the fact that I could still actually see the tension in her neck. “He won’t take either of you to Peyton.”

“Classic operant conditioning,” Zee piped up. “He associates cheerleaders with pain and heartache and physical discomfort. He views us as an ontological kind and extends properties freely from one exemplar to another.”

Hmmm. Maybe Jack wasn’t as dumb as I’d thought. We seemed to have the same kinds of beliefs about cheerleaders as a species.

“In short, he hates all of us equally.” Zee diffused the tension between Chloe and Brooke with a single flip of her hair. “I don’t think he can even tell most of us apart.”

I couldn’t help but wonder why exactly Zee kept glancing at me as she spoke.

“If he hates us so much, why does he hang out with us?” Bubbles asked, knotting up her pretty little forehead in what appeared to be genuine and profound confusion.

“Status quo,” Zee said. “Jack was born to rule. It’s been ingrained in him since childhood, and at Bayport, we, my friends, are the ruling class.”

“So he’ll hang out with us, but he won’t date us?” one of the twins asked. “That is like so totally wrong.”

“He has textbook Conditioned Cheerleader Aversion,” Zee said.

He and I both.

And that’s when I got why Zee kept looking at me. Feeling paranoid, I glanced around the room. Brooke and Chloe were looking at Zee looking at me. Tara had her eyes fixed on mine. One by one, the rest of the girls followed suit.

“He likes you,” Zee said frankly. “He thinks you’re different.”