Perfect Cover by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
I listened to the entire CD again. And again. And two hours later, I still had nothing except two six-digit numbers: 024106 and 023243. They both started with zero and contained a four and at least one two. They both had more even than odd digits. Neither of them was prime.
I tried translating the numbers to letters. Using the phone keys as a guide, 2 was either A, B, or C. 4 was G, H, or I. 1 and 0 didn’t have corresponding letters, and 6 was either M, N, or O. I closed my eyes and let the different combinations play over the backs of my eyelids. ABC/GHI/ MNO. Bin. Ago. Bio. Cho.
Cho. That was a name, wasn’t it?
I tried the other number. ABC/DEF/ABC/GHI/DEF. More letters this time meant more combinations, and more nonsense. Ceche. Adaif. Beaid.
In other words, a whole lot of nothing.
I scrambled the letters in the second word set, looking for new combinations and still came up absolutely blank.
023243. 024106.
I sat there until my eyes watered. My foot fell asleep beneath me. My butt was as numb as the endless strings of possible decodes had made my mind. I was tempted to take another shower, thinking the steam might loosen up something inside my brain, but when I looked at my watch, it was already two in the morning.
Just another half hour, I promised myself. If I don’t get it in another half hour, I’ll sleep on it. Sleeping was almost as good as steam for unlocking an answer dormant in my own mind. As I sat there, staring straight ahead and willing the answer to come to me, I reached absentmindedly for the iPod Bubbles had given me. I traded my computer headphones for the iPod ones, and the iPod in question immediately began playing a preselected playlist, and I couldn’t get it to go back to the main menu.
“Ready, OKAY! B to the A to the Y to the Port, Bayport Lions take the court! L to the I to the O-N-S; when we leave, you’ll be a mess. Go, fight, win. You’ll see us again. BAYPORT!”
Oh no.
“Bay-port Li-ons! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap) Bay-port Lions! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap)…”
Please, for the love of all things good and right in this world, I thought, please don’t let them have made MP3s of their cheers.
“B to the A to the Y to the Port…”
No wonder Bubbles had instructed me to listen to this while I slept. I’d be cheering in my sleep—literally. As the very thought of this made my skin crawl, I turned the iPod off. I couldn’t think about numbers and cheers at the same time. It was scientifically impossible.
My phone picked that moment to ring (not anything from American Idol, thank God), and for a moment, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Did the others have me under constant surveillance? Did they know I’d turned the iPod off? I picked up the phone, but when I flipped it open, it turned out to be a text message, which was (all things considered) both a good thing and a bad thing.
It was a good thing because it meant that I didn’t have to talk to anyone whose voice I’d just heard on the “Best of Bayport Spirit Squad” mix.
It was a bad thing because it meant that my regular ring (and not just the text message sound) might still be one of any number of pop songs I abhorred. It was also a bad thing because although the text message did not in any way suggest that I was under constant Squad surveillance, it did inform me of a rather unfortunate circumstance.
Practice gym. 5:30. Tomorrow morning.
It didn’t take me long to do the quick mental math. If I crawled into bed this second, and if I actually managed to fall asleep and not, for instance, spend the next three hours trying to get the chorus of “Bay-port Li-ons” out of my head, then I’d get a full three hours of sleep before my whole torturous existence began again the next morning. And that was assuming that I could actually tear myself away from the code long enough to concentrate on the whole going-to-sleep thing.
As it turned out, after I made it to my bed (minor miracle #1), I didn’t fall straight to sleep, but I didn’t lie there staring up at the ceiling and thinking about numbers or cheers, either (minor miracle #2). Instead, I thought about Tara and the foreign operatives who probably weren’t Tara’s parents. Even if they weren’t, the operatives weren’t nearly as anonymous and unreal as they’d been before I’d found out that in my partner’s case, a tendency toward espionage was as hereditary as good skin.
Superslowly, my body still aching with the day’s cheer-capades, I fell asleep.
024106. 02-41-06. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.
I stand in front of my locker, turning the dial. Left, then right, then left again. My body turns sideways, and I turn the dial up and down, then down and up. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.
The lock opens, and with sweaty palms, I rip it off the locker. This is it. This is the answer. Somewhere in the background, a dark-haired boy floats by. And then a giant slice of cheese.
But I’m concentrating on the locker. My hands are so sweaty, and the latch keeps slipping. I don’t have time. I have to open it. My fingernails are growing as I’m groping at the locker door. The nails grow longer and longer, until even my sweaty fingertips aren’t touching the locker latch. I fumble with it again, my long nails (hot pink, of course) doing the dirty work, and finally, it pops open.
Bubbles is sitting inside my locker, her feet behind her head. “Surprise!”
I bolted straight up in bed. Talk about nightmares. The sad thing was, Bubbles ending up in my locker wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. From what they’d said in our original meeting, fitting into tiny spaces was more or less her forte.
“Surprise!”
“AAAAGGGGK!”
Someone slapped a hand over my mouth and I stopped screaming. Tiffany (I was getting better at telling the twins apart) leaned forward. “Shhhh,” she said. “It’s like five in the morning. You don’t want to wake your brother and parents up.”
I glanced past Tiffany, because I’d yet to see one of the twins without the other, and sure enough, Brittany was on the other side of the room, rifling through my closet. She had an enormous trash bag (suspiciously full), and even from this distance, I could see that my closet was now home to an obscene number of sparkly items and a disproportionate amount of pink and superbright blue.
“We totally forgot about the rest of your wardrobe yesterday,” Tiffany said. “And, hello! It’s called Stage Six for a reason, right?”
Only one thing kept me from screaming then, and it wasn’t the fact that Tiffany had very wisely kept her hand over my mouth. I quite simply could not risk waking Noah. If he’d freaked out about Bubbles hanging out my window, I somehow doubted he’d be okay with the twins reorganizing my closet, especially since they were wearing what appeared to be a combined total of eighteen square inches of clothing apiece.
“What time is it?” I asked, but since Tiffany’s hand was still firmly in place over my mouth, it came out sounding more like a meow/lawn mower hybrid than actual English words.
“I can’t understand you,” Tiffany said.
I removed her hand from my mouth—and there’s a slight chance that I used more brute force than was entirely necessary, but, hey, I never claimed to be a morning person.
“I asked what time it was,” I said.
Tiffany rubbed her hand. “Sheesh. Touchy much?” she huffed.
I didn’t dignify that comment with a response.
“It’s five-oh-five,” Brittany said, answering my question in a voice that can only be described as chipper. “And if you touch my sister again, I’ll make Lucy lend me one of her Tasers.”
Until that moment, I’d forgotten about Lucy and the Tasers, and though I wasn’t the least bit intimidated by Brittany’s threat, I was (despite all of Zee’s test-score mumbo jumbo) disturbed all over again that either twin had access to anything with more voltage than a hair dryer.
“Here,” Brittany continued, keeping her voice low. “Wear this.”
I didn’t intend to make puking sounds when she shoved the outfit at me, but again—not a morning person.
“You know,
Tiffany meant the comment as a compliment, but I took it as an indication that letting my mom decorate my room because I was too lazy to deal with yet another new room in yet another new house was a big mistake.
“We don’t have all day,” Brittany told me, crossing her arms over her chest. “Put on the outfit. I’ll even let you choose the accessories.”
“Accessories?” I asked darkly. She nodded toward my desk, which now appeared to be housing a very large item which may or may not have been called a Caboodle in some circles. I’m not exactly up to speed on my Caboodle knowledge.
“Toby? Accessories?” Tiffany prodded me on her twin’s behalf, and I wished that I hadn’t woken up. I mean, having Bubbles in my locker wasn’t exactly my idea of a great time, but it beat having to pick out accessories at five in the morning.
“Do any of them have sonar?” I asked. I didn’t mean the question seriously, but Brittany, impervious to sarcasm, daintily handed me a silver necklace with a blue-green butterfly charm.
“Sonar?” I asked. “Really?”
The twins nodded in unison.
I opened my mouth and closed it again, not wanting to admit to Buffy and Muffy, the social scene twins, that I had no idea how to use sonar or what I’d go about using it for.
Five minutes later, I was dressed (a denim miniskirt, a white tank top trimmed with silver rhinestones, and high-heeled boots the color of the butterfly charm) and only feeling slightly homicidal.
“Kate Spade or Louis Vuitton?” Brittany asked Tiffany. Somehow, I got the feeling that they weren’t talking about enemy agents, and my suspicions were confirmed when they handed me another oversized designer purse.
I might have at least registered a complaint, but when Tiff handed me my phone to put in the purse, I thought of the code, and of Tara’s parents, and of my realization that maybe my transformation into Suzy High School was by some freakish twist of fate for the greater good. With that in mind, I walked over to my desk and picked up my notes on the numbers I’d pulled off of the audio track the night before, as well as the papers Chloe had given me on Infotech.
Unfortunately, the whole “greater good” thing didn’t make walking in blue-green high-heeled boots any easier, and on my way back across the room, I fell flat on my face. To their credit, the twins said absolutely nothing. I got back to my feet and threw the few schoolbooks I’d actually brought home back into my bag.
“What are those?” Brittany asked, looking at the books the way that normal people looked at dog feces.
“Books,” I said. “For school.” The twins stared at me blankly. “Homework. Ring any bells?”
“You actually do your homework?” Brittany asked.
Actually, doing my homework wasn’t exactly one of my strong suits, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Yeah, with your GPA, we figured…” Tiffany broke off when Brittany elbowed her in the middle of her exposed midriff.
“Well, I definitely didn’t get any homework done last night,” I said. “I was too busy messing with this code, and—”
“Code shmode.” Britt dismissed it with a wave of one highly manicured hand. “And don’t stress about the homework—we’ll just put in an order with HWA this morning.”
Dare I even ask? I wondered.
“HWA?” I dared.
“Homework Assistance. They keep a database of our assignments, and if we’re too busy doing Squad stuff, we just put in an order, and they print it out for us.”
“‘They’ as in the Big Guys Upstairs?” I asked, marveling at this new development. “And isn’t that cheating?”
“‘They’ as in the Big Guys who give Brooke her orders and the rest of us our supplies,” Tiffany confirmed.
“C’mon,” Brittany said, deftly eluding my “cheating” question. “We’d better get going. Brooke hates it when we’re late.”
I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed her out of the room, my attention divided equally between hoping I didn’t fall and praying that Noah wouldn’t wake up to see the twins leaving my room.
It was 5:17 a.m., and sonar necklace and HWA aside, I was still not a morning person.
CHAPTER 21
Code Word: Warm-up
When we got to the gym, everyone else was stretching, and Brooke was staring at her watch.
“Sorry!” the twins chirped together.
Brooke turned to look at me.
I returned the favor. “I stayed up almost all night working on a code,” I said, “my feet may have to be amputated because of these boots, and quite frankly, I don’t give a flying buttkiss about whether you glare at me or not.”
There was absolute silence, and even though I didn’t show any visible signs of it, I tensed my body, preparing myself in case Brooke should launch some sort of physical attack.
Instead, she flipped her hair. “Whatever,” she said.
I glanced around the room, trying to figure out from the others’ responses whether or not I’d won this battle of wills. I was, in fact, so busy looking around that I didn’t notice when the floor began moving under us, and I wasn’t exactly ready to drop three stories onto the trampoline. I managed to land on my feet, but it wasn’t pretty. Or graceful. And it definitely didn’t involve any flipping whatsoever.
This time, I maneuvered my way off the trampoline ASAP, and soon, all ten of us were seated at the conference table at the center of the Quad. For a few seconds, there was silence, and then Lucy started babbling.
“Bubbles and I hung out at the coffee shop across the street from Infotech for like six hours, and logged every person who came into the buildings into our phones. Then I came back here and cross-referenced the pictures we’d taken and our timetables with the system’s files on Peyton’s operatives, and came up with nothing.”
Brooke nodded. “Anything else?”
“I got three phone numbers,” Bubbles volunteered.
“Four,” Lucy corrected.
“Oh yeah. Four.”
Brooke nodded again, as if this, too, was the kind of information she expected us to report. “April and I staked out Peyton, and luckily for us, we weren’t the only ones doing it. Heath Shannon—”
The twins sighed identical girly sighs at the thought of the international playboy.
“—cased out the place, but kept his distance. We took video feed and Zee analyzed. Zee?”
“He’s careful,” she said. “And on the surface, very calm, but he’s getting a buzz from this. I analyzed the video on a frame-by-frame basis, and even though he’s good at concealing his emotions, when you break facial expressions down to small enough units of time, something comes through. He’s anxious, which tells me that the Big Guys were at least partially right—whatever deal he’s brokering hasn’t gone down yet, but there’s a level of self-satisfied smugness there that makes me think he’s well on his way. If I was to guess”—she stressed the word—“I would guess that at his earlier meetings with Peyton, he acquired some information from them to pass on to his client or clients. He’s probably received a beginning payment, but not his full commission, which means that Peyton still has information that Heath Shannon and whatever terrorist organization he’s working for do not.”
“Add to that the fact that he was casing the firm, looking for potential escapes, drawing up mental plans…” Brooke left it to us to fill in the blank, and I obliged.
“The meeting the Voice talked about is going to happen soon,” I said. Everyone stared at me. “What? I can’t connect the dots?” I asked. I felt oddly compelled to start defending my dot-connecting ability, but refrained.
“There’s going to be a meeting soon,” Brooke confirmed. “Our best time estimates place it at four this afternoon.”
I opened my mouth to ask how exactly they’d made that estimate based on facial expressions and a very limited amount of video footag
“What have you got?” she asked.
With all the talk of stakeouts and meetings and international playboys who doubled as terrorist liaisons, I’d forgotten that I had anything at all.
“Chloe said you found a code,” Tara prodded me, good partner that she was.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Two six-digit numbers. One of the senior partners gave it to another lawyer in preparation for some meeting a couple of days ago.”
More silence.
“I pulled the numbers off of an audio track containing phone tones,” I said. “Since six digits won’t do you any good as a phone number, there has to be something more to it.” I dug around in my bag and pulled out the slip of paper on which I’d written the numbers. “Here they are. I tried looking for a number-to-letter code, but couldn’t come up with anything. I worked the numbers over, looking for patterns, and came up with nothing. I tried running them through a few search engines—nada.”
“Six digits,” Zee mused. “What has six digits?”
“Locker combinations.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until after I heard and processed my own words. “If you break the numbers up into a sequence of three two-digit numbers, it could be a locker combination.”
“And Peyton would be dealing with lockers why?” With a tone like that, I didn’t need to see her glossy lips moving to know that Chloe was the one speaking. “They’re passing on top-secret information. And if this is actually the information, and not some random payment scheme, then chances are it’s either the names of the operatives’ aliases, or their locations.”
“The only name I could get out of the numbers was Cho,” I said. “I’ve got some other combinations, but nothing that looked familiar.” I slid them across to her. “If you think you can do better, knock yourself out.”
Tara touched my arm softly, Zee cleared her throat, and I shut my mouth.