“I don’t like him,” I told Tara.

She remained silent, but allowed the edges of her lips to twitch slightly.

“You suck.” I wasn’t feeling very forgiving of twitchy lips and half smiles.

“It’s not that bad, Toby,” she said. “If it wasn’t Jack, it would be somebody else. You knew coming into this what it would entail. When you become one of those girls, those guys start asking you out, and to stay one of those girls, you have to say yes.”

The idea of saying yes to Chip or any of his followers (who I liked to think of as Chiplings) made me want to swallow my tongue in a fit of loathing. In comparison, going to homecoming with Jack was significantly less nauseating.

“And for all we know,” Tara said, continuing her logical assessment of my situation, “Peyton might not have anything to do with the TCI influx, in which case, your date with Jack can be just that: a date.”

I had to marvel at the fact that Tara was more or less lifting my objections to the homecoming situation right out of my head. It was scary how well she knew me—and my thought process. Being on the Squad was a lot like going to summer camp—after a few weeks, you start to feel like you’ve known the other campers for years. The ten of us spent so much time together—mornings before school, lunch, practice (of both the cheerleading and operative varieties) after school. The Squad wasn’t just an activity. It was a way of life.

“Toby?” In response to Tara’s prodding, I shrugged. A large part of me still wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that I’d gone from being a loner to spending most of my waking hours around nine other girls. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about how I felt about it, because I probably should have hated it more than I did.

“You want the hotel room or the car?” I asked Tara, changing the subject. Our plan of action was pretty simple. We needed to break into Jacob’s hotel room to plant a series of bugs so that we could monitor his phone and in-room conversations, and we needed to plant a tracking device on his car so that we could track his location, and, if necessary, tail him tomorrow.

“I’ll take point on the room,” Tara said. “You can come with, though.”

I knew instinctively that coming from Tara, “you can come with” translated directly to “I’ll show you general procedure for breaking into hotel rooms.” If she’d been any of the other girls, she probably would have come out and said it, but Tara was nothing if not subtle.

“And I’ll take point on the car?” I was relatively new to the spy gig, but planting a microtracker on the bottom of a Bentley with license plate number Z1X459 seemed pretty straightforward, and I was a big fan of learning by doing. I’d spent enough time in the past couple of weeks training. I was ready for some real action.

“You’ll take point on the car,” Tara confirmed as she pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot across the street from the hotel. She was careful to park the car so that it was obscured from the view of anyone inside the restaurant by a conveniently placed drive-through menu, and without pausing, the two of us slipped out of the car. Right before I closed the door, I remembered to pick up the tracking device. I moved to put it in my pocket before I remembered that my cheerleading uniform didn’t have pockets, and then, only mildly mortified, I slipped it into my bra.

“Someone’s been practicing.” Tara’s eyes danced with barely restrained mirth.

“Shut up.”

Sticking things inside my bra made me feel like a stripper, but after a couple of tutorials from Bubbles, I could finally manage a pseudostealth bra tuck without looking like I was groping myself. All things considered, that was a definite plus, even if I didn’t actually feel less conspicuous.

As we crossed the street and headed for the hotel, something occurred to me. “Should we have changed out of our uniforms?” I asked. “If we get caught, the ginormous BHS on our chests will make it pretty easy for someone to track us down.”

“We won’t get caught,” Tara said, “and all anyone will remember was that we were cheerleaders.”

That was the thing about the uniforms—people never looked past them. Anyone who saw us would just remember seeing two cheerleaders. They’d probably think we were hot, but our faces and our identifying features wouldn’t be nearly as salient in their minds as the length of our skirts, and even if they did remember seeing two cheerleaders, no one in their right minds would see us as any kind of threat.

“Besides,” Tara added, “we won’t be wearing the uniforms for long.”

I didn’t exactly follow her logic there, but Tara didn’t give me the chance to ask any more questions.

“Whatever you do,” she said, as the two of us crossed the hotel parking lot and entered the lobby. “Smile.”

I followed Tara through the lobby and into the elevator, a smile plastered to my face. She hit the fourth floor, and then when a man and a woman hopped on at the last second, she hit several more buttons.

The couple looked at us oddly, but we just stared back, wide-eyed. After a few moments, the man’s expression turned from questioning to something slightly more lascivious, but a sharp elbow to his gut (his wife’s doing, not mine) snapped him out of it. A few seconds after that lovely exchange, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, but following Tara’s lead, I stayed put. The door closed. The couple got off at the sixth floor, and we rode the elevator up to the seventh.

I was a quick enough study that I didn’t have to ask Tara what the deal was with our extracurricular elevator riding. Stealth was the name of the game. Even though we existed beneath the veil of the cheerleading stereotype, getting off on Jacob Kann’s floor in front of witnesses might have been pushing things, especially if the worst happened and someone figured out that we’d broken into the room.

We took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and once there, Tara zeroed in on a maid cart. She glanced around for the cart’s owner, and seeing that he was suitably occupied, Tara grabbed two towels and a trash bag off the cart, and then unceremoniously jerked me back into the stairwell.

“Tell me if anyone’s coming,” she said, and before I knew what was happening, she’d wrapped one of the towels around her body, and underneath the towel, she began taking off her clothes.

Within seconds, Tara had stripped completely and the only thing standing in between her and being naked was the skimpy hotel towel. She folded her uniform, stuck it in the trash bag, and stashed the bag just out of sight, behind a potted plant.

“Your turn,” she said.

“My what?” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Because if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you might want to invest in some kind of straitjacket. Maybe a padded cell. Some electroshock therapy…”

“You can stay here if you really want to,” Tara said sweetly, “but I thought you might want to take a quick stab at his computer.”

She was playing dirty, and she knew it. A guy with terrorist connections up to no good probably had some hard-core security on his laptop, and there was absolutely nothing I loved more in this world than poking around in systems specifically designed to keep me out.

Tara handed me a towel, and I flashed back to her telling me that we wouldn’t be wearing our uniforms for long.

“Is there a reason we have to do this naked?” I grumbled.

Tara shrugged. “The other options are hacking into the hotel computer system and programming our own cards….”

Ooooh, that sounded like fun.

“Which we would have had to do from Chloe’s lab, where our keycard programming equipment is—”

Drat.

“And finding a way into one of the other rooms, going out the window, and crawling on a fourth-story ledge over to Jacob’s room.”

I glanced at the towel and then back at Tara. “Let’s do that one.”

She rolled her eyes. “Our intel says the maid for this floor is a guy,” she said. “I guarantee you he has keys to all of the rooms.”

The and I guarantee you he won’t be able to deny two towel-clad cheerleaders their heart’s desire went unspoken. I may have been new at this, but I wasn’t stupid. I saw where the whole towel thing was going.