That sounded like a FLIAPC to me, but I wasn’t about to argue the point, because Chloe’s answer still hadn’t cleared things up in my mind. “Translation?” I asked. “Preferably in English.”

I sensed the eye roll coming before I saw it.

“Basically, one of us goes in and interacts with Heath Shannon in a way that makes it impossible for him to immediately contact someone else,” Chloe said. “In this case, it means following him back to his car and convincing him that he wants to take me for a ride more than he wants to transfer the data.”

“You’re going to get into a car with this guy?” I asked. What was next, taking candy from strangers? Running with scissors?

“Worried about me?” Chloe asked.

Was I?

“I’m touched. Really.”

Okay, I most definitely was not worried about her—especially now.

“So what’s Plan C?” Tara interjected, coming in between the two of us.

I latched onto her question. “Plan A is Tara doing the pickpocket thing, Plan B involves you doing a Flirt and FLIAPC….” I changed the acronym just to get under her skin. “If he won’t take you with him, what’s Plan C?”

“Plan C involves the fact that Heath Shannon’s smart enough to know that working with Peyton is dangerous, which means that he won’t be using their parking garage, which means that we stand a slight chance of being able to take advantage of the one weak spot in Peyton’s security coverage of the area.”

Lucy smiled broadly. “Yay! That’s next to the tanning place, right?”

Chloe nodded. “If you can disable him and get him into SunTanz without moving outside the four-foot radius of Peyton’s blind spot, we can drop him off in one of the tanning booths, and the Big Guys will send someone to pick him up later.”

“And we’re supposed to carry an unconscious and internationally infamous playboy into a tanning salon without anyone noticing how?” I asked.

“What? No questions about how to disarm him and knock him out?”

I gave her a look.

“Trust me, Toby,” Chloe said, “if you can take him out, Lucy can handle the rest.”

Lucy smiled serenely, which, given the circumstances, was just a wee bit creepy.

“And there’s a slight chance that we may have some contacts inside the tanning salon. Hopefully, though, it won’t come to that. Like I said before, physically engaging the enemy is a last resort, as are weapons.”

Lucy sighed then, as if it would pain her greatly to holster her weapon of choice. That made me wonder what exactly the weapon of choice was, so I voiced the question.

“We just want to disable him,” Lucy said. “We don’t want to hurt him, so we should probably each take a Taser and some knockout patches. If things get sticky, one of us should have a gun.”

Lucy and Chloe looked at Tara, who inclined her head slightly. I, for one, was grateful that if any varsity cheerleader was going to be packing, it was Tara. Despite Lucy’s expertise, she was just bouncy enough that the idea of her holding a firearm was a little bit scary, and needless to say, I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of giving Chloe any literal ammunition. As for me, I didn’t want a gun. I’d never been a fan of weapons—I preferred to fight hand to hand.

“Are the Tasers in the guidepost?” Chloe asked Lucy.

Lucy nodded. “They look like those teeny-tiny iPods,” she said, “but if you use the scrolling function, the pointy things will pop out, and all you have to do to activate the charge is press the central button once the pointy things, you know, puncture the skin and stuff.”

Lucy smiled again, and I found myself thinking about how right Zee had been. There was something oddly endearing about Lucy’s earnest sweetness—and about the fact that she’d designed faux iPods that doubled as Tasers, “pointy things” and all.

“We’ll take two cars,” Chloe said. “Park them at least four blocks away from Peyton, preferably in separate directions. We’ll rendezvous back here once the mission is over. Lucy, would I be correct in assuming that the Tasers have built-in communication devices?”

Lucy nodded. “In the headphones,” she said. “That’s why I picked the little iPod design—that and the fact that they come in colors.”

“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.