There wasn’t really anything to say to that. I had been lying kind of low. I mean, the Girl Scouts? Not exactly my best showing.
“Well, you’re in luck, Toby.” The no-teeth smile was back. “It’s football season, the Squad needs ten members, and our hacker graduated last year.”
“And if I say no?”
Brooke showed her teeth. “You won’t.” She walked over to a nearby conference table, and one by one, the other eight cheerleaders took their places, filling all but two of the seats. Brooke leaned back and hit some buttons on her chair’s arm. The image on the screen changed again.
“Tara Leery,” Brooke said. “Nice picture, by the way, Tare.”
Tara mouthed a silent “Thanks,” and Brooke looked back at the screen.
“British exchange student and linguistic specialist. Fluent in nine languages, functional in twelve others, Tara has aperfect ear for accents. If we come across it, she can learn to speak it.”
Brooke tapped a button with her French-manicured nail, and the picture on the plasma screen changed. “Bubbles Lane, contortionist.”
Brooke didn’t elaborate, but Bubbles did. “I can put my feet behind my head.”
I racked my mind for the proper response to her proud declaration, but the best I could do was a rather unenthusiastic “That’s nice.”
“It’s even nicer when you need someone to fit in a duffel bag,” Chloe said sharply. “Or when the bomb you need to deactivate is hidden in the back of an air duct with laser sensor triggers no normal person could avoid.”
A bomb? Personally, I wasn’t really sure Bubbles could deactivate a washing machine.
“And speaking of bombs …” Brooke paused as the screen changed again. “Lucy Wheeler, explosives and weaponry.”
I thought of Lucy jumping around doing herkies like a four-year-old on reverse Ritalin.
“Explosives?” I swallowed hard. “Weaponry?”
Lucy beamed at me. “IloveTasers.”
I took about five seconds to desperately hope they were joking.
“And right now, I’m working on the coolest bulletproof push-up bra.” Lucy’s smile grew, if possible, even brighter. “It’s to die for.”
Tasers and bulletproof push-up bras. In practically the same sentence. So wrong. So, so wrong.
As I digested the wrongness of it all, Brooke ran throughthe rest of the squad. Apparently party girl Zee was a professional profiler, the twins generally came in handy because there were two of them (Istillmaintained they had a combined IQ lower than that of the average penguin), Chloe was their resident “gadget girl in Gucci,” and Brooke, as far as I could tell, was exactly what she had always appeared to be: a gorgeous, terrifying, manipulative bitch who could lie, cheat, and steal with the best of them.
“The entire squad is, of course, trained in hand-to-hand combat.”
I thought about how close Brooke’s roundhouse had come to taking me down. Could they all fight like that?
“You’re serious about this.” I don’t know why I said it. I mean, the giant plasma screen with the access code for the Pentagon should have been a big clue, but somehow, I couldn’t help asking.
Brooke looked straight through me. “We save lives, Toby. That’s how serious we are.”
I said nothing.
“We also cheer at games,” she continued. “We chant and we yell and we do backflips for the football team so that no one ever suspects we’re up to anything else.”
“And herkies,” Lucy added.
“And we do herkies,” Brooke amended. “Think you can handle it?” She leaned back in her chair, and she must have hit the button again, because all of a sudden, the list of companies I’d hacked into reappeared on the screen.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” I kept my voice even.
Brooke shrugged. “Is it working?”
