Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(48)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“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.”