Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(21)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“So there was no threat of an enemy agent sweeping in and stealing our lingerie?” I asked, only half joking.

Tara offered me a small grin and an answer, in that order. “If they’d thought there was a real chance that the mission would be compromised,” she said, “they probably wouldn’t have given it to a rookie.”

Had any of the other cheerleaders called me a rookie, I would have been offended, but coming from Tara, it sounded like a statement, not an insult. Plus, I had to admit that I was slightly mollified by the fact that our Victoria’s Secret mission hadn’t been a high-stakes operation, because saving the world one gel bra at a time wasn’t exactly what I’d signed up for.

“Digi-disk,” Tara reminded me. “Player.”

I averted my eyes, highly aware of the tiny round disk digging into my right breast. Tara was waiting, and out of the goodness of my heart, I offered her an explanation for the delay. “Digging things out of my bra?” I snorted. “I haven’t had much practice.”

“You should get Bubbles to give you some tips,” Tara advised, “because you will.”

“Will what?”

“Get a lot of practice.”

I ignored her prediction, fished quite unstealthily around in my bra, and held up the digi-disk triumphantly. “Where do I put it?” I asked.

“Media on.”

This time, no cheer-voice was needed. The dashboard, impervious to my grumbling, rearranged itself, and a control panel popped out of the inner console.

“Insert digi-disk,” a highly synthesized female voice commanded.

A small slit in the panel lit up, and I touched the disk to its surface. Immediately, the car swallowed it whole, and above the dashboard, between Tara and me, appeared some sort of 3-D diagram.

“Disk data analyzed,” the computerized voice continued.

“Video, audio, and digital data found. Decode needed. Index data available. Play first available index entry?”

Tara checked her rearview mirror and changed lanes. “Index data,” she commanded. “Audio only.”

Instantly, the holographic diagram disappeared, and the car began reading off a list of available files.

“Interaction logs, Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. Updated client list (partial), Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray. September sixth audio, Peyton, Kaufman, and…”

“Sensing a pattern here,” I said, drumming my fingers on my knees. “Who are Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray?”

I was asking Tara, but the car answered me instead.

“Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, formerly Peyton, Peyton, and Gray, formerly Peyton and Peyton. Officially a civil, criminal, and corporate law firm, established in 1932.”

“And unofficially?” I asked.

This time, it was Tara who answered my question. “Unofficially?” she said. “They’re the bad guys. Their client list is a veritable who’s who of über-criminal types. They represent everything from white-collar criminals and nefarious corporations to mobsters, terrorists, and the black market underground.” Tara shook her head. “They all have one thing in common: a lot of money.”

A law firm in Bayport whose clients had a lot of money? Shocking! That said, the whole evil part of the equation was a little more difficult to wrap my mind around. I thought about what Lucy had told me earlier. When the rest of the Squad programs across the country were axed, the Bayport program was expanded, helping the government to keep an eye on a very specific group of people: the bad guys.

“So Peyton, Whatever, and Whatever represent the enemy?” I asked, trying to work my way through it all.

Tara shook her head. “They are the enemy. The law firm is a convenient cover.”

“Evil lawyers,” I said. “Check.” I nodded toward the digi-disk player. “And the disk?”

“Instructions for our Mission,” Tara said, and her tone left no question that it was spelled with a capital M. Picking up the disk had been a baby mission. The instructions that were on the disk were for the real deal. “And, given that our superiors don’t want to risk a direct data transfer from their database to ours, probably most of the information they think we’ll need along the way.”

“So,” I said. “About this Mission.”

“It’s…”

“Classified,” I finished for her. “I know, but I just pulled a disk out of my bra. Personally, I think that earns me some clearance.”

Tara paused for a moment and then shrugged. “You’ll get the full scoop at the debriefing once Brooke’s had a chance to go over the information on the disk, but from what I’ve been able to pick up, the gist of it is that the Big Guys have managed to trace the source of the recent hacks on their system to Bayport, and if someone in Bayport is doing it, then there’s an extremely high likelihood that the Peyton firm is involved. Until a couple of days ago, the Big Guys had a man on the inside at Peyton.” Tara very delicately did not mention what had happened to the man. “He managed to smuggle out some information that might be relevant before he was caught.”

“Do people get…caught often?”

“If by people you mean the string of agents the Big Guys have sent to infiltrate the firm? Yes. If by people you mean cheerleaders at the local high school who could not possibly be involved in anything that could threaten the firm’s security—no.”

I remembered Brooke’s words at that first meeting. We’re smart, we’re pretty, we’re in perfect physical condition, and best of all, we never get caught.

Not to sound like a cheerleader, but go us.

“The Big Guys have a long history of trying to infiltrate Petyon, Kaufman, and Gray,” Tara continued, “but their bugs never last more than a week or so, and their agents don’t even last that long.”

“And when you say they don’t last that long, you mean…”

Tara’s face showed absolutely no emotion as she answered my unasked question. “You don’t want to know.”

Well, that was certainly a sobering thought.

“So what do we do with all of this information?” I asked, half ready to throw myself into supersecret agent mode once more and half thinking that this whole thing had been some kind of giant mistake.

Tara pulled into the school parking lot and immediately into a primo spot. “Whatever they tell us to.”

It was funny—in my mind, when I asked Tara what we were going to do with the information we’d acquired, her response had been “Whatever we want.”