“Security?” Tara asked.

“Lax on the rest of the building, tight on the executive wing,” Chloe replied.

“Methinks I sense a pattern,” I said.

“You thinks?” Chloe asked. I didn’t know which was more deadly: her smile, or her tone.

“Our best bet into their system is to plant a device that magnifies the wireless signal and transmits it to our receiver,” Chloe said.

“Can you do that?” I asked.

“Duh,” Bubbles said. “Chloe can do anything.”

“Unwhelmable,” Tara coughed under her breath, and I smiled.

“So how do we get the device thingy into the executive whatever?” Bubbles asked.

My mind produced no sarcastic reply to this comment. It was just too easy.

“I think our best bet is to Doublemint it,” Chloe said.

“We send one of the twins in as a decoy, and the other can plant the device.”

“That works?” I asked.

Chloe smirked. “It has the last eight times we used it,” she said. “Brittany can be very distracting.” Chloe let the word hang in the air a moment before continuing. “As long as security doesn’t figure out there are two of them, we can sneak the second one in without anyone noticing.

“And if that doesn’t work, we’ll Plan B it,” Chloe said.

I refused to ask her to clarify.

“Ohhhhh!” Bubbles said. “If we Plan B it can I plant the thingamawhatsit?”

Tara scrawled a quick note on a piece of paper and slid it toward me without anyone noticing. I read it, and understood within seconds what Plan B was. If twin # 2 couldn’t get in unnoticed, she joined her sister at distracting the guards while a third, slightly more stealthy operative did the dirty work.

If one of the twins was distracting, two was more or less a three-ring (four-breasted) circus. After having gone to school with Brittany and Tiffany for a year and a half, I’d gotten a firm hold on the mathematical property known only as the Exponential Hotness of Twinness. Each twin, by virtue of the fact that there were two of them, became infinitely more attractive to the average male than either of them would have been on their own. Since neither of the twins was exactly a dog to begin with, the resulting attention when they were together was usually astronomical in proportions.

“After we plant the device,” Chloe said, looking slightly to my left as she addressed me, “it’ll be up to you to break through their safeguards and find what we’re looking for. Locate the program they’re using to hack, download any files pertaining to information that they’ve already acquired or sold, and fry their system.”

Even for someone with as much recreational hacking under her belt as me, that was a pretty tall order. I was practically giddy with techie anticipation. Or maybe that wasn’t giddiness—maybe it was dizziness, pure and simple, based on the fact that my mind was swimming with dictates and schedules and master plans. This morning: hack Infotech. This afternoon: take down Heath Shannon. Tonight: plant a bug in the evil law firm.

Tomorrow: the world.

“So,” I said, “are we ready to move out?”

Chloe rolled her eyes, like she didn’t use jargon like “move out” all the time. “No,” she said. “We’re ready to go upstairs and hang out with everyone else in the cafeteria before first period. We have to make up for the fact that we’re going to be missing half of the school day. Appearance is everything, and making appearances is key.”

“Besides,” Tara said, “somebody’s going to have to explain to the vice-principal why Brooke and Zee won’t be at school today, and why the rest of us are skipping our first four classes.”

“Like that’s going to be hard,” Bubbles said, rolling her eyes and bringing her feet into the chair next to her so that she could hook her elbows under her knees.

“Spirit conference, do you think?” Tara asked, arching one eyebrow.

“Nah,” Chloe said. “We used that one last time. Mental health day?”

“Didn’t we use that for the, like, thing with the thing?” Bubbles asked.

Chloe and Tara nodded contemplatively. Apparently, they weren’t having any of my difficulties understanding Bubbles’s meaning.

Chloe smiled then. “I know,” she said. “I’ll tell him it’s initiation, and that you guys have to, like…sign the spirit book and take the spirit oath and receive your Bayport Code training.”

Spirit book? Oaths and training?

“You actually think Mr. J is going to buy that?” I asked. “Are we talking about the same guy here? Vice-principal? Loves handing out detention so much that he does it with a smile on his face?”

I had nothing against Mr. J—after all, he’d gotten me out of Corkin’s detention the day before, but still, the guy was the high school’s disciplinarian. It was what he did for a living. There was no way he was going to buy “cheerleader initiation” as an excuse for missing class.

“Mr. J,” Tara said, her voice quite serious, “would buy anything, so long as a varsity cheerleader says it.”

“Totally,” Bubbles agreed. “He loves us!”

I thought of the fact that Mr. J had excused me from detention just so that I could attend a cheerleading meeting.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously,” the others said, all in one voice.

“Okay,” Chloe said, back in vice-captain or cocaptain or whatever mode. “I’ll go make nice with the administration. The rest of you guys put in an appearance at the cafeteria. Come down here as soon as first period starts. Hopefully, by then, Lucy and the twins will be ready to go for the hack, and we can move out.” Chloe paused, just slightly, when none of us moved. “Dismissed.”

She actually said it that way, like she was some army colonel and we were her soldiers. For the first time, I found myself grateful that Brooke was the cheerleading captain.

“You ready for this?” Tara asked me as we made our way out of the Quad.

“Toby?” Tara nudged me.

“I’m ready,” I said, even though secretly, I wasn’t so sure. Yesterday, I’d been dealing with hot guys and Victoria’s Secret, and today, I was dealing with secured databases and freelance agents known to be deadly.

Talk about a baptism by fire.

CHAPTER 22

Code Word: A-list

On the way to the cafeteria, we stopped in the locker room to give ourselves a once-over in the mirror. Or, at least, Tara, April, Bubbles, and Chloe gave themselves once-overs. Since the twins were busy preparing outfits for Brooke and Zee’s mission, I took the opportunity to tug on the end of my skirt, forcing it to cover at least a small portion of my upper thigh, and I meticulously plucked the rhinestones off my tank top.

Tara watched me. “Ten-to-one odds it’s back in your closet, re-jeweled, tomorrow,” she said.

I frowned.

“And double or nothing says that next time, the jewels are pink,” Tara added.

I continued de-jeweling my shirt. I would have ditched the necklace, too, but even I had to admit the sonar thing was cool. “You seem to be feeling better,” I told Tara. She turned her face away from me slightly. I kept going. I’d had too many years of practice resisting subtle snubs to be put off by something as benign as a head turn. “The people in Al Jawf, they’re not your parents, are they?”

If Tara was surprised that I knew about her parents being foreign operatives, she didn’t show it. “I don’t know, actually,” she said, her accent crisper than I’d heard it in a while. “Their contact information is classified—even from me, but my mother’s very fair-skinned, and my father doesn’t speak any of the relevant languages terribly well.”

That was as close as Tara would come to saying that the chances that either of her parents was stationed in Al Jawf were slim to none.

“Are they the reason that you do this?” I asked, gesturing to the locker room and its contents (a half-dozen cheerleaders, plus me). “Did you join the Squad because you’re a legacy?”

Tara turned back to look at me. “I’m not a legacy,” she said, her mouth pulling into a half smile at the thought. “I’m just an intelligence brat.”