Perfect Cover by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
I tore myself away from the water and forced myself to stand up. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
Part of our objective in listening to the audio had been to figure out who Infotech was passing the information along to. A phone number wasn’t exactly the guy’s name and Social Security number, but it was a start, right?
I finished my shower in record time considering my limbs weren’t really cooperating with the rest of my body. I wrapped the towel back around my body and headed straight for my room, or more specifically, straight for the designer bag on my floor.
Straight for my hot pink, limited-edition cell phone.
Too physically and emotionally drained to think angry thoughts about its color and trendy nature, I picked the phone up, flipped it open, and started playing with the keys. Systematically, I pressed each number, listening carefully to its tone.
“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
I hummed the first tone, and hit each of the keys. It wasn’t a two. It wasn’t a six.
It was a slow, painful process, but bit by bit, I sorted it out.
024106.
Wait a minute. “Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hum.”
I went over the rhythm again and again in my head, but it stayed exactly the same. There were only six numbers. This wasn’t a phone number, and if it wasn’t a phone number…
“024106.” I ran over the numbers again and again in my head. I scrambled them, rearranged them into every possible permutation. Did they stand for letters? Maybe it was a payment amount. I tried to remember everything the lawyer guys had said. Gray had realized that the younger lawyer had a meeting with an anonymous client, and he’d delivered a phone number with only six digits, in case the client was running late.
I considered calling someone with the information, but then I realized that (a) the last thing I wanted to do right now was talk to anyone who’d even once said the phrase Go Lions/Lionesses and (b) all I had was six numbers. Six lousy numbers and a body that was killing me.
And yet, I had to know. I’d always been that way with numbers. Give me a six-digit phone number, or one of those puzzles where numbers stood for letters, or a mathematical sequence whose pattern was a mystery, and it would eat my brain from the inside out until I’d unraveled it. For that reason (and that reason alone), I did the unthinkable. I sucked it up and scrolled through the address book in my peppy little phone. After I’d passed the numbers for Abercrombie & Fitch, Barney’s, and a couple of others that had for some unfathomable reason been programmed in, I found Chloe’s number.
She answered on the third ring.
“This is Chloe.”
“The phone number only has six digits.” I laid it out there, no preamble.
“Say what?” To her credit, she didn’t waste time insulting me.
“The phone number that Gray gave to Hayes. It only has six digits.” I paused and stated the obvious. “It’s not a phone number.”
Chloe sighed. “You couldn’t have noticed this an hour ago?”
“Can you just get me the files? If there are any more of these numbers, I need them.”
I don’t know what made me ask for the files, or what made me think there might be more to the number set than I already had. Maybe it was the sixth sense that always came into play when there was a code to break, or maybe it was the fact that I knew asking for the data would annoy Chloe, and annoying Chloe was quite possibly one of the only pleasures I could still wring out of my pathetic existence on this planet.
“If you give me a few minutes, I can scan for phone tones on the tape. I’ll isolate two minutes on either side of every tone sequence, and send it to you when I’m done.”
What was this? Chloe…being helpful? Chloe having a civil conversation with me? For that matter, the fact that Chloe Larson could scan audio tracks for a particular sound and isolate the relevant areas all in a matter of minutes was almost as remarkable as the fact that she’d gone off auto-bitch to do it for me. I thought of everything Zee had told me: chubby little Chloe, the Star Wars fanatic. Brooke saving her from her own dorkdom. The two of them fighting over Jack. Me representing everything that Chloe wanted to forget. It was times like this that I really didn’t appreciate having a profiler take it upon herself to enlighten me. This was exactly what Zee had been aiming for. I couldn’t just disregard Chloe as Chloe. She was an actual person.
“Chloe,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.
“Thanks.”
No response. I made a face at the phone, and when a few more seconds of silence went by, I rolled my eyes. “It’s customary to say you’re welcome,” I said dryly.
No response.
“Chloe?”
As quick as I’d been to figure out the six-digit telephone number thing, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Chloe had hung up on me. Gritting my teeth, I redialed her number and got sent immediately to voice mail.
“Hey, this is Chloe. I’m probably screening your call, and I probably won’t call you back. Isn’t life a bitch?” Beeeeeeeep.
To my credit (and possibly because of my little psycho-session with Zee), there wasn’t a single obscenity in the message I left in response. “Hey, this is Toby. You’re probably screening my call, and you probably won’t call me back.”
As this was an exercise in complete futility, I hung up the phone. I opened my mouth to curse Chloe, but then I thought of the whole hopeless dork/light saber thing, and couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Darn Zee.
CHAPTER 19
Code Word: Bubbles
Checking your email every fifteen seconds isn’t a healthy habit. I know this, and usually the only reason I check my email is to activate new user accounts through which I can mask my own internet activity, but Chloe had said she’d send the files my way, and as much as she wasn’t exactly the Honest Abe of the cheerleading world, I didn’t think she cared enough about what I thought to lie to my face. At least not about this.
I refreshed my inbox.
“Wow. You get like totally no email.”
I physically jumped in my seat, and Bubbles tilted her head to the side.
“Bubbles,” I said slowly.
“Uh-huh?”
“What are you doing in my room?”
“Watching you check your email.” She tilted her head in the other direction. “You don’t have any.”
I was tempted to thank her for the clarification, but became incredibly distracted when, without any warning, she hooked her hand around one of her ankles and lifted her leg straight up until it nearly hit her ear. To top it off, she just stood there, looking at me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like she hadn’t just contorted herself into a position that was painful to even look at.
“Stop doing that,” I told her.
“Doing what?”
The sad thing was, she was serious.
I gestured to her foot with my head, and when she turned and saw her ankle an inch away from her face, she blinked several times, surprise etched thoroughly into her baby-faced features.
I stared at her, refusing to say another word as she lowered her leg.
“Sometimes I do that without realizing I’m doing it,” she clarified needlessly.
“Bubbles.”
“Uh-huh?”
“What are you doing in my room?”
I could practically see déjà vu replacing the surprise on her face. I swore to myself that if she said a single word about my email, I was going to toss her out of my second-story window.
“I was on my way back from the stakeout thingy,” Bubbles said. “Chloe called, so I went to her house, and she said to give you this.” She thrust out a pink square box.
What was with these girls and pink?
It took me about a second to realize that pink or not, this box in all likelihood held the information I’d asked for. Chloe just hadn’t sent it via email. She’d sent it Ditz Delivery instead.
I opened the box, and inside there was an old-school Britne
“If this doesn’t have phone tones on it,” I told Bubbles, “Chloe is a dead girl.”
Bubbles tilted her head to the side.
I popped the CD into my computer, and prepared myself to immediately turn it off if “Baby One More Time” blared from the speakers. Instead, a password protection window popped up on the screen. Chloe hadn’t included the password in the package.
I smiled. My fingers flew across the keys, trying different combinations. I did some hard-core googling, and within minutes, I’d tried every combination of Chloe’s address, her cell phone number, her birthday, and the words to our halftime cheer.
Bubbles watched, fascinated, until the urge to do a back bend overcame her, and then she bent over backward and out of my peripheral vision.
After about five minutes, I hit on the right password, and logged in.
“Wow,” Bubbles said, standing up straight again.
I shook my head. As much as I would have liked to revel in my own hacking prowess, I had to admit that Chloe was tech-savvy enough that she never would have picked a guessable password unless she’d meant for me to guess it.
“No big deal,” I told Bubbles.
“Uh-huh,” Bubbles said. “But I usually just use my phone.”
“Your phone?”
She pulled a hot pink phone identical to mine out of a purple suede purse and gestured. “You just plug this thing into that thing, and then it does its thing.”
Nobody had told me our cells were equipped with decoding technology. As brightly colored as it was, I had a feeling that my fashiony flip phone was going to be my new best friend. Forget shoes or flowers or chocolate. The way to a girl’s heart was through code-breaking technology, and if my phone had that kind of program, I was officially in love.
“Anything else about this phone I should know?” I asked.
Bubbles thought for a moment. “If you want,” she said seriously, “you can get American Idol ringtones.”
I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to respond. I turned back to the computer screen, found the audio files, and plugged in a set of headphones. I didn’t want to chance someone overhearing the audio, and after years of living in the same house with Noah “Su-Underwear-Drawer-Es-Mi-Casa” Klein, I had accepted the fact that privacy was a fictional concept that didn’t exist in real life.
Reluctantly, I held off on opening the files and played hostess to Bubbles. “Anything else?” I grunted. I’d never been a particularly good hostess.
“Chloe also said to give you these,” Bubbles said, and she pulled two more items out of her purple purse. The first appeared to be an iPod of some type (not pink, for once), and the second was a small, unmarked bottle. She handed me the iPod.
“You’re supposed to listen to the playlist tonight while you sleep,” she said.
As I tried to process that information, I turned my attention to the bottle. “What’s that?” I asked. The truth serum I’d been promised, but never gotten? Some form of mild explosive from Lucy? A magnetic-based lotion that would scramble any hard drive it came in contact with?
“It’s an aloe-based avocado mask,” Bubbles said. “Chloe said to tell you it’s good for your pores.”
Touché, Chloe, I thought. Touché.
“Thanks, Bubbles.”
If Bubbles caught the dry note in my voice, her face didn’t give it away. I tried to remind myself that based on the test scores Zee had shown me, there had to be more to Bubbles than surface appearances. After all, if the biggest partier in the senior class had a PhD in forensic psychology, anything was possible. Besides, looking at Bubbles, I almost couldn’t believe that anyone could be that clueless.
“What’s your real name?” I asked her curiously.
“Bubbles,” she said immediately. “Why?”
“Is it a…uhhhh…family name?”
“No,” Bubbles said, mystified as to why I considered her name even the least bit odd. “It’s Bubbles. You know, like bubbles?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Zee might have technically been Dr. Zee, Tara might not have been one-hundred-percent foreign sophisticate, and Chloe might have secretly been more tech than chic, but Bubbles, the contortionist, was just…Bubbles. You know, like bubbles.
Thinking of Tara made me want to quit wasting time and give in to the seductive lure of the numbers in my mind. The faux Britney CD held the rest of a code, and even though Tara had only begged me to do the Jack thing, everything Squad-related, including seducing Jack Peyton and breaking this code, had gotten tied up in one giant neural ball labeled cheerspionage in my mind.
As all of this passed through my mind, Bubbles passed through my room and was halfway out my window before I realized she’d moved at all. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was fast. And stealthy. No wonder I hadn’t heard her come in.
“Hey, Bubbles?” I stopped her before she’d disappeared entirely.
“Yeah-huh?” Only the top half of her body was still visible, but she turned back to look at me.
I asked one of the questions I’d stopped dwelling on once I’d started concentrating on the numbers. “Why does Tara care so much about this case?”
I don’t know if I asked the question because I was thinking about Tara, or because I had a feeling that Bubbles would answer me more honestly than anyone else on the Squad.
“I dunno,” Bubbles said thoughtfully. “I mean, there are what? About a bazillion foreign agents? And her parents are only like two of them.” Bubbles shrugged. “Maybe she’s homesick.”
I sat there, frozen to my seat. Tara was British, and yet somehow, she’d ended up at an American high school. She spoke nine languages fluently, and her cover act was so perfect that even after having seen her this afternoon, I still bought it. When Lucy had explained Tara’s transfer status to me, she’d mentioned that Tara’s parents were “really into the Squad thing,” and Tara had started freaking out the moment she’d realized that the information leaks had involved the aliases and locations of individual foreign operatives, to the point that Brooke had taken her off the case altogether.
I’d barely gotten over the fact that people’s lives were in our hands, and now I had to deal with the fact that the people in question might be Tara’s parents. And I’d bitched and moaned about having to hit on Jack Peyton. Tara’s parents could already be dead, and I’d felt sorry for myself because my butt said CHEER and my hair was picture perfect.
“Toby?” Bubbles brought me out of my guiltfest. “Can I go now?”
Since she had the answer to one of my remaining shower questions, I decided to ask the other. “You know the guy who gave us our orders today?”
“Yeah-huh.”
“Who is he?”
Bubbles looked at me like I was very simple. “He’s the guy who sometimes gives us our orders,” she said sagely.
“Yeah, I get that, but who is he?”
Bubbles was one-hundred-percent solemnity when she answered. “Nobody knows.” I almost expected eerie mood music to start playing in the background as she continued, but her next sentence entirely ruined the effect. “I call him Bob.”
“Bob?”
“Yup.” If Bubbles found it at all ridiculous that she called the mysterious voice, the head of our operations, Bob, she didn’t show any signs of it. Instead, she shifted her weight and tilted her head to one side. “Hey, Toby? Can I go now?”
I nodded, and just as she was about to descend from my window, the door to my bedroom flew open.
“I knew I heard girls in here,” Noah said triumphantly.
Bubbles flashed him a grin, and a second later, maneuvered down the side of the house and out of sight.
Noah stared at me, a tortured look on his face.
I turned back to my computer and put my headphones on, but he just came to stand closer, his expression almost comically anguished.
I sighed. “What is it?” I asked, leaving the headphones in place.
“You had Bu
Woe is Noah, I thought, but I knew from experience that talking could do no good at a time like this.
“If you loved me, you would have told me,” Noah said.
“And you would have loaned her your whipped cream.”
I searched my desk for projectiles. I was way too tired to get up and chase after him, but I had a hell of an arm, and as soon as I found something worthy of throwing…
Noah read the look on my face perfectly and made quick work of ducking out of range, but on his way out the door, he turned back to play the Hormone Martyr one more time. “Life is so not fair,” he said. “If either of us is going to have cheerleaders sneaking in the window, it should be me.”
CHAPTER 20
Code Word: Bayport
Thanks to Chloe’s audio-editing skills, it only took me three hours to listen to all of the phone sequences and decode the tones into numbers. We’d caught thirteen other dialing instances on tape, which was impressive considering the secretary’s cubicle was outside the range of the bug. Of the thirteen, one was the tone from my head, exactly as I’d remembered it. Just to be safe, I compared the number I’d ended up with and the sound of the number on the tape.
“024106,” I sang the number in tune with the tones, and it matched up exactly. I paused the audio just long enough to type the number into my pink phone again, checking and double-checking that I’d recorded it right.
Of the other twelve phone tone sequences on the CD, eleven had either seven digits (local number), ten digits (long distance), or eleven digits (given the fact that Mr. Hayes sounded somewhat sexually frustrated, probably a 1-900 number). The single remaining number had six digits.
“Hmmm hmmm hem hmm hmmm hem.”
I could tell from the sound that it was a different number than before, and this time, my fingers flew across the phone pad at warp speed as I sounded out the number. 023243.