Mission Unstoppable (7 page)

Pep carefully examined the slip of paper. Just before the explosion at the garage, Bones had told them that someone connected with The Genius Files would be contacting them. This message could be important.

KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI

Pep was good at word games. Whenever the family played Boggle or Scrabble, she would beat them all. She could finish most crossword puzzles in minutes.

She searched for a pattern in the letters. Her concentration was so intense that she didn’t notice the music in the background, the family conversation, or the miles going by. The RV rolled through the hilly streets of San Francisco and past San Francisco International Airport.

The letters of the message seemed entirely random. She was stumped.

“We’re here!” Mrs. McDonald suddenly shouted as the RV rolled to a stop.

“What?” Pep asked, looking up. “We’re in Kansas
already
?”

“Where’s the world’s largest ball of twine?” asked Coke.

“Not Kansas, silly!” Mrs. McDonald said. “We’re in Burlingame, California.”

Burlingame? The kids knew Burlingame. It’s only twenty minutes south of San Francisco.

“What are we doing
here
?” Pep asked. “I thought we were going cross-country.”

Then she saw the little sign:

“Pez?” Pep asked. “Who’s Pez?”

“Not who,” Mrs. McDonald said. “
What
.”

“You really don’t know what Pez is?” Coke asked his sister. “Are you from another planet? Pez is that candy you put in a little plastic holder, and when you move the head back, a piece of the candy pops out of the thing’s neck.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Pep said as they climbed out of the RV. “They actually have a museum about that stuff?”

In fact, they do. Mrs. McDonald had heard about the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia from one of her web readers, who email her tips all the time. She thought it would be the perfect place to feature on
Amazing but True.

Coke, of course, knew just about everything anybody would ever want to know about Pez. He had read a magazine article about it in the dentist’s office and remembered every word of it.

Pez, he told the others, was invented in 1927 by an Austrian businessman named Eduard Haas. He got the name by abbreviating
pfefferminz
—the German word for
peppermint
.

Mrs. McDonald grabbed her laptop computer and led the rest of the family into the museum. For a real “Pezhead,” this must be what heaven is like. The museum had 683 different Pez dispensers, including some vintage ones from the 1950s and the “extremely rare” Pez pineapple wearing sunglasses.

Even Coke learned a thing or two he didn’t know. Pez, for instance, was originally sold as a mint to people who were trying to quit smoking.

In one room was the world’s largest Pez dispenser. It was almost eight feet tall and looked sort of like a skinny snowman.

“Isn’t this cool?” Mrs. McDonald asked, taking a photo to put on
Amazing but True.

“Oh yeah, Mom,” Pep said. “
Totally
.”

Actually, it
was
pretty cool, but Pep wasn’t about to admit it. Things are cool when parents think they
aren’t
cool. If parents think something is cool, then, by definition, it can’t be. Any kid knows that.

Dr. McDonald looked over the array of Pez memorabilia, shaking his head the whole time. He had spent the last twenty years of his life teaching and writing scholarly articles about American history. He could be visiting Valley Forge. He could be visiting Lexington and Concord. But here he was, staring at the largest Pez dispenser in the world. He sighed. These are the sacrifices grown-ups make for marriage, he figured.

“I don’t get it,” Dr. McDonald mumbled. “What’s the dispenser for? Why can’t you just eat the candy without putting it in a dispenser?”

“The dispenser is cool, Dad,” Coke informed him. “The candy tastes better when it comes out of Mr. Spock’s neck.”

The Pez museum also had a section devoted to classic toys such as Tinkertoy, Colorforms, View-Master, and Lincoln Logs. The McDonald family spent a few minutes looking over the watches and T-shirts in the gift shop before piling out the door and back into the RV. Mrs. McDonald bought a Pez dispenser for each of the twins as a souvenir. A Coke Pez for Coke, and a Pepsi Pez for Pep.

“Ben, you left the keys sitting in the RV with the window open!” Mrs. McDonald complained. “
Anybody
could have come along and driven this thing off.”

“Sorry!” Dr. McDonald replied. And he was. He had a habit of forgetting to lock his car and take the keys.

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Pep pulled out her pad and returned to the cipher.

KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI

The short break proved to be a good thing. It allowed Pep to take a fresh look at the cipher. Now she was seeing hidden words such as
core
,
tan
,
heat
, and
tea
. But she still couldn’t put them together into a coherent sentence. Coke leaned over his sister’s shoulder to check her progress.

Maybe the spaces between the words are just decoys, Pep thought as she took a piece of paper and a pencil out of her backpack. The spaces make it look as though those are separate words, but they may have been inserted within the letters to make it harder to decipher the message.

She rewrote the message, closing up the spaces.

KCAOREHTANAOEASUOHEAHTNIAUOAYTEAEMLLIAWI

It didn’t make it any clearer.

“Maybe it’s in another language,” Coke whispered. “It looks like it might be Hawaiian or something.”

“Or it could be a transposition cipher,” Pep mumbled to herself.

She wrote out the cipher again, but this time in reverse order.

I WAILL MEAET YAOU AIN THAE HOUSAE OAN ATHE ROACK

“There must be a mistake in there somewhere,” Coke whispered.

“No!” Pep said. “Wait a minute! It must have nulls in it.”

“Nulls?” Coke asked. “What’s a null?”

“A fake letter,” she told him. “A letter that doesn’t mean anything.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“I just do,” she replied. “I’ll take out all the
A
s and see what happens.”

Pep rewrote the message:

I WILL MEET YOU IN THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK

Chapter 12
Ups and Downs

I WILL MEET YOU IN THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK

What the heck was
that
supposed to mean?

Pep looked at the words she had written.

“I never heard of a house on a rock,” she whispered to her brother.

“There are probably
thousands
of houses that are built on rocks,” Coke replied. “Maybe it’s another secret message that means something completely different.”

“These Genius Files people are so
annoying
,” Pep complained. “Why don’t they just tell us what’s going on? Why do they have to make us figure it out?”

“The message didn’t necessarily come from
them
, y’know,” Coke said. “It could have come from anybody.”

“Then who are we supposed to meet in the house on the rock?” Pep asked, knowing she wasn’t going to get an answer. “And when? This message doesn’t tell us anything.”

“We’ll just have to keep our eyes open,” Coke said, ending the discussion.

Dr. McDonald hopped on Route 101 North through the city and picked up Interstate 80 East as the RV crossed over the San Francisco
–
Oakland Bay Bridge. They were on their way now. If they wanted to, they could just stay on I-80 all the way across the country.

“Just fifteen hundred and forty-seven miles until we get to the largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald said excitedly after punching the data into her laptop. “And twenty-seven hundred and sixty-two miles to Washington.”

Pep did a quick mental calculation. If they averaged sixty-five miles per hour, it would take them more than forty-two hours to drive to Washington. That would be without stopping, of course. Once you add in sleeping, eating, stopping for gas, and just getting out to stretch their legs, it would be closer to . . . Oh, she didn’t want to think about it.

And then, after they got to Washington and went to the wedding, they would have to drive that whole way back home, too.

It was going to be a
long
summer.

Pep was already bored, and the trip had just begun. Coke turned on his iPod and got lost in the music as he mindlessly shuffled the deck of playing cards Bones had given them.

The McDonalds were cruising along I-80 for a little more than fifty miles when they started to see signs for Leisure Town and Nut Tree Airport. Dr. McDonald pulled onto Interstate 505 North.

“Where are you going, Dad?” Coke asked. “Why did you get off I-80?”

“Ask your mother,” Dr. McDonald grumbled.

“We’re going to the National Yo-Yo Museum!” Mrs. McDonald exclaimed. “It’s only about two hours from here!”

“We’re driving two hours out of our way to look at some
yo-yos
?” Coke asked, slapping himself on the forehead.

Not just
some
yo-yos.
Hundreds
of yo-yos. Glow-in-the-dark yo-yos. See-through yo-yos. Flintstone yo-yos and
Star Wars
yo-yos. The National Yo-Yo Museum has everything from antique 1920s yo-yos to today’s metal alloy yo-yos with a centrifugal clutch transaxle, whatever
that
is.

Mrs. McDonald gasped as the family walked inside The Bird in Hand, an educational toy store in Chico, California, where the National Yo-Yo Museum is located. This was her kind of place.

“Feast your eyes, kids,” Mrs. McDonald said, pulling out her camera to document the majesty of it all. “You’re standing in front of the world’s largest wooden yo-yo!”

It was a monster of a thing. 256 pounds. The string, unrolled, was seventy-five feet long. A little plaque on the floor said that “Big-Yo” was only used a few times. Once it was dropped off a crane over San Francisco Bay.

“The world’s largest Pez dispenser is bigger,” Coke said, unimpressed.

He knew all about yo-yos, of course, having once seen an article about them while he was bagging up the newspapers for recycling. He told the family that the yo-yo was invented in China, and the Greeks had them way back in 500 BCE.

“Fascinating,” Dr. McDonald said sarcastically. “I hope this ‘museum’ doesn’t get any government funding.”

“This is real history, Dad!” Coke told his father. “Y’know, legend has it that Filipino hunters would hide in trees and hunt animals by bonking them on their heads with yo-yos from above. And during the French Revolution, people who were about to be guillotined would ease their tension by playing with yo-yos.”

“I know that if they were about to chop off
my
head,” Dr. McDonald replied, “I would want to use that time to play with a toy on a string.”

The kids watched videos of people doing insane yo-yo tricks. There were some sample yo-yos on display, and Coke and Pep tried to do the tricks—with limited success.

After a short time, the kids had enough yo-yoing. They went out to the parking lot looking for something to do while Mrs. McDonald conducted her yo-yo research for
Amazing but True
. Their dad had left the RV door unlocked, as usual, so Coke went in and grabbed the Frisbee that Bones had given him. He held it out to Pep.

“I don’t want to,” Pep told her brother. “I don’t know how.”

“In a few days, you’re gonna be thirteen years old,” Coke told his sister. “It’s about time you learned how to throw a Frisbee. It’s a life skill everybody should have.”

He handed her the disc, backed up ten yards, and urged her to give it a try. She flung it wildly, of course, curving it off to the side and almost hitting a parked car.

“Hold it
level
,” Coke instructed as he ran off to retrieve the Frisbee. “Don’t just use your arm. Put your whole body into it. And snap your wrist. Like
this
.”

He made a perfect return toss, which Pep dropped.

“One more time,” he encouraged her.

Pep tried to do as her brother said, and proceeded to fling the Frisbee high into a grove of trees next to the parking lot.

“You are totally pathetic, you know that?” Coke told his sister. “C’mon, help me find it.”

They ran into the woods and started poking around. A white Frisbee should not be hard to find in a grove of green trees. But it wasn’t there. Or, at least, it wasn’t within sight.

“It’s got to be right
here
,” Pep said. “I saw it go into the trees.”

“You owe me ten bucks to get a new one,” Coke told her.

“I do not,” she replied. “You didn’t pay for that Frisbee. Bones gave it to you.”

At that moment, the twins walked around a thick maple tree. There was a rustling noise from above and then suddenly everything went dark. Something had fallen on their heads.

“What the—”

It was a large plastic tarp, the kind that people put under their tent when they go camping. Somebody grabbed them and wrapped two big arms around the tarp to prevent them from getting away.

“Shhhh! Quiet!” a man’s voice warned.

“Help!” Pep tried to yell, but the sound was muffled by the tarp over her face.

“Keep your mouths shut and you won’t be hurt,” the man barked.

The twins struggled for a few seconds, but soon it became obvious that it was hopeless, and they stopped fighting. That’s when their assailant pulled the tarp up over their heads and revealed himself.

It was Bones.

The McDonald twins gasped.

“Is
this
what you were looking for?” a woman’s voice said.

The twins gasped a second time when they saw who was standing behind Bones with a Frisbee in her hand. It was Mya, the woman in red who had saved their lives when they were being chased on the cliff by the men in golf carts!

“You’re . . . alive?” Pep asked, her eyes wide with wonder.

“We thought you died when the building exploded!” Coke told Bones.

“I was down in the basement,” Bones said. “All I got was a flesh wound.”

“Aren’t all wounds flesh wounds?” Coke asked. “What else would you wound besides flesh?”

“We thought that dart killed you, Mya!” Pep said, hugging her. “We thought you died in our arms!”

“The poison wore off in a few minutes,” Mya informed them. “I was fine. I returned your backpacks to school for you.”

Pep thought back and remembered what had happened at the cliff moments after Mya collapsed. Suddenly, she turned around and punched her brother in the stomach.

“Oooof!”
Coke exclaimed. “Are you crazy? What did you do
that
for?”

“Because you pushed me off that cliff!” his sister yelled.

“I was trying to save your life!” Coke yelled back at her.

“Even if they hit me with one of those dart things, I would have survived!” Pep yelled again. “Mya survived! You didn’t have to push me! We didn’t have to go over that cliff!”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry!” Coke said, rubbing his sore stomach. “How was I supposed to know that? She looked pretty dead to me. I had to make a snap decision. Give me a break!”

Bones stepped between the angry twins.

“You did the right thing pushing your sister off the cliff,” he told Coke. “If you two had been captured up there, you would not be alive today. I’m quite sure of that.”

“Look, we don’t have time for pleasantries,” Mya interrupted. “I’m sure your parents are wondering where you are. We have important information for you.”

“Is it about a house on a rock?”

“What?” Bones replied. “What house on a rock?”

“Didn’t you put an envelope under my pillow last night with a coded message about meeting you in a house on a rock?” Coke asked.

“No,” Bones replied. “You must be confusing me with the tooth fairy.”

“Listen carefully,” Mya said. “We found something out that is crucial to your survival. Some of the people who were involved in The Genius Files have abandoned our cause and now actively oppose us and the program that Dr. Warsaw created. Your health teacher, Mrs. Higgins, is one of them. There are others.”

“Those bowler dudes,” Pep said.

“Right,” said Mya. “We don’t know why these people are trying to kill you. But we’re going to find out.”

“How about finding out
fast
?” Coke said. “Before they actually
do
kill us?”

“We’re trying our hardest,” Bones told him. “In the meantime, we have your first mission. We intercepted a text message late last night. There is going to be a terrorist attack.”