Never Say Genius (16 page)

“We better find Mom and Dad,” Pep said.

Coke reached for his cell phone and instantly realized it was dead. You can’t soak a cell phone in ice cream, hot fudge sauce, and water and expect it to keep working.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald spotted them in the distance.

“What are you going to tell them?” Pep asked her brother.

“The truth,” he said, “like I always do.”

Their parents rushed over to greet the twins and saw that they were soaking wet.

“What happened to you two?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“We were kidnapped by an evil Mister Softee,” Coke explained. “He tried to induce hypothermia by covering our bodies with ice cream.”

“Ha, ha!” Dr. McDonald said. “That’s a good one. You kids crack me up.”

“Why didn’t you call us?” asked their mother. “Why do you think we got you cell phones?”

“They got wet,” Coke explained, holding up his useless phone.

“You went for a swim with your cell phone in your pocket?” Mrs. McDonald asked. “Are you out of your minds?”

Dr. McDonald didn’t like conflict. He tried to avoid it whenever possible.

“We’ll get them new cell phones, honey,” he said. “It’s no big deal. So, what do you say, how about we get some ice cream?”

“No!”

C
oke and Pep were still in a state of shocked disbelief as the RV pulled out of the huge Cedar Point parking lot. Mya and Bones had told them they would be safe until they got to Washington. And then
this
happened.

Every time they let down their guard, Coke thought, every time they took a deep breath and relaxed a little, something terrible happened. Maybe they would
never
be safe. Maybe these lunatics would be chasing them for the rest of their lives.

“So how were the roller coasters?” Mrs. McDonald asked excitedly. “Did you have an awesome time?”

“Yeah,” Coke replied without enthusiasm. “Awesome.”

“Awesome,” mumbled Pepsi.

Their parents were disappointed. They had devoted the whole day to doing something just for the kids, but it didn’t seem to have made the kids happy. They just sat in the back of the RV, silently. Dr. McDonald figured that after riding a dozen roller coasters and being dropped, flipped, spun, and thrown every which way, maybe the twins’ brains were a little out of whack.

It was getting past dinnertime. Dr. McDonald pulled into Cedar Point Camper Village, a few miles away in Sandusky. The campground featured a shuffleboard court, a game room, and an outdoor pool. But all Coke and Pep wanted to do was sleep. They didn’t even want dinner. Their parents went to the snack bar to get something for themselves.

Having gone to bed so early, Coke woke up at five a.m., before anyone else in the family. He pulled on a pair of jeans and wandered outside. The campground was quiet. It was peaceful. Nobody else was awake. The only thing open was the game room, so Coke went in.

It was a tiny room, with just three arcade games in it—a shoot-’em-up called Kill Them All, a driving game called Pedal to the Metal, and an old Ms. Pac-Man machine. Despite the hour, the games were plugged in and turned on, playing their “attract mode.” That’s the screen display that is shown when nobody is playing an arcade game. The idea is to
attract
the next player. Or, more specifically, the next quarter.

Kill Them All looked interesting. The screen showed guys in camouflage blowing away an army of zombies with machine guns.
INSERT COIN
flashed in the middle of the screen. Coke stepped up to the console and reached into his pocket. He didn’t have any money with him. The coin return was empty. He pushed the start button for the heck of it, on the off chance that the last player had walked away in the middle of a game. Instantly, this flashed on the screen:

EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC

Well, it didn’t take an encryption expert—or his sister—to figure out that EKOC was COKE backward. And Coke was pretty sure those letters were not referring to the soft drink. In a few seconds they were replaced by this message, in bright blue glowing letters:

WBUAOHYY

It flashed just once and disappeared in a simulated puff of smoke, but Coke had already memorized it. He ran back to the RV and woke up his sister.

“I think we got another cipher,” he whispered in her ear.

“Where?” Pep asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“On the screen of a video game in the game room.”

Coke took Pep’s notebook and wrote the letters out.

WBUAOHYY

Quietly, so they wouldn’t wake their parents, the twins tiptoed outside to sit at the picnic table next to their RV.

“It looks a little like the call letters of a radio station,” Pep said as she examined the message.

“Too many letters,” Coke told her. “Radio stations are always WHYY or WCBS, stuff like that.”

“You say you saw this on an arcade game screen?” Pep asked. “How do you know it isn’t the name of the person who has the high score, or something like that?”

“Before it flashed this message,” Coke told her, “it was flashing E-K-O-C over and over again. My name backward. I know it’s a message for me.”

Pep looked at the letters more closely. Obviously, they didn’t mean anything spelled backward. It didn’t seem to be an anagram. Every second, third, or fourth letter meant nothing. The consecutive
Y
s made her think “why why” could be part of the message, but nothing else seemed to fit. She tried all the usual codes she knew, but none of them worked. This was a tough one.

The sun was peeking through the trees. People were starting to emerge from their tents and RVs to begin their day.

And suddenly, Pep got it.

“It’s simple!” she said excitedly. “This is a half-reversed alphabet!”

Pep took the pen from her brother and wrote out the alphabet in two lines.

ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ

“I don’t get it,” Coke said.

Pep drew a line under the cipher: WBUAOHYY.

“If you break the twenty-six letters of the alphabet into two lines of thirteen letters,” Pep said, “each letter is directly above or below another letter. The
W
is below the
J
, so the first letter of the message could be
J
.”

“If that’s true,” Coke said, “the second letter of the message would have to be
O
, because
B
is above
O
.”

“Right,” Pep said. “And the third letter is…
H
. And the fourth letter is…
N
.”

“John!” Coke exclaimed.

So WBUA probably meant JOHN. They continued.
O
was directly below
B
, so the next letter was
B
.
H
was above
U
.
Y
was below
L
. So OHYY meant BULL.

JOHN BULL.

WBUAOHYY meant JOHN BULL.

“You’re really good at this, y’know,” Coke admitted.

His sister beamed. It wasn’t often that she received a compliment from her brother.

“Everybody’s good at something,” she replied modestly.

“The question becomes,” Coke asked, “who is John Bull?”

The door to their RV opened, and Dr. McDonald came out in his pajamas and slippers.

“You two are certainly up early,” he said.

Pep hid her notebook behind her back.

“Hey, Dad,” said Coke. “Did you ever hear of anybody named John Bull?”

“John Bull?” Dr. McDonald said, searching his memory. “Yeah, but John Bull isn’t a person.”

“Okay,
what
is John Bull?” Coke asked.

“John Bull is a train,” Dr. McDonald replied. “It was one of the first steam locomotives in the world. It was built in the 1830s, I think.”

He was right. Dr. McDonald taught American history at San Francisco State University, and it was hard to stump him on anything about the Industrial Revolution. He had written books on the subject.

Coke and Pep glanced at each other, puzzled expressions on their faces. Neither of them could fathom why they would receive a secret message about a train.

“Why do you want to know about John Bull?” their father asked.

“I received a mysterious coded message from a video game in the game room,” Coke replied. “It says ‘John Bull.’”

“Ha! You kids never cease to amaze me,” said Dr. McDonald, shaking his head. Then he went back inside the RV to brush his teeth and get dressed.

Pep turned to the previous page in her notebook and added to her list.

• July 3, two
P.M.

• Greensboro lunch counter

• John Bull

“There must be some connection between the Greensboro lunch counter and that train,” she said to her brother.

“But what?”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait for the next cipher.”

“How far are we from Washington now?” Pep asked as they pulled out of the campground and got back on the road.

Mrs. McDonald looked it up on the GPS.

“Four hundred twenty-three miles,” she said. “We’re getting there.”

“So where are we going today?” asked Coke.

“The coolest place in the world,” his father said mysteriously.

He slipped a Rolling Stones CD into the slot and drove a little over forty miles, mostly on Route 2 East, following the contour of Lake Erie. And then, quite suddenly, there was a sign that travelers of a certain mind-set find hard to resist:

“Ben, stop the RV!” Mrs. McDonald shouted. “Pull over!”

The RV screeched to a halt. The refrigerator door flew open, and a jar of Smucker’s strawberry jam fell out and hit the floor.

“You gotta be kidding me!” Coke said, throwing up his hands. “
This
is the coolest place in the world? Do we have to go to a museum devoted to
duct tape
?”

As the RV sat on the shoulder of the road, Mrs. McDonald leafed through her Ohio guidebook.

“Relax,” she said, when she found the page she was looking for. “They don’t have a duct tape museum here. That would be ridiculous.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Pep said.

“But they have duct tape sculptures,” Mrs. McDonald said excitedly, “a duct tape parade, a duct tape fashion show, and a mascot called Duct Tape Duck. Doesn’t that sound cool?”

“No,” the twins agreed in unison, although, to be completely honest, it did sound pretty cool.