Mission Unstoppable (8 page)

“Where?” Coke asked.

“In the United States,” Mya said.

“Can you be more vague?” Coke asked.

“It will be at the site of the largest ball of twine in the world,” said Mya.

“We’re going there!” Pep exclaimed. “Our mother has this weird website called
Amazing but True
, and she’s—”

“We know,” said Bones.

“How do you know?” asked Coke.

“You’d be surprised at how much we know,” Mya replied.

“But that’s crazy!” Pep said. “Who would attack the largest ball of twine in the world?”

“The largest cat in the world?” suggested Coke.

“I didn’t say they’re necessarily going to attack the ball of twine,” Bones told them. “All we know is, there will be an attack at the
site
of the ball of twine.”

“What are they gonna do?” Coke asked.

“We don’t know,” Bones said.

“When are they gonna do it?” Coke asked.

“We don’t know that either,” Bones said.

“How come you know so much about
us
,” Pep asked, “but you don’t know anything about
them
?”

“We know they’re trying to kill you,” Mya said, “and they won’t stop until they’re successful, or until we kill them.”

“So what are our instructions?” Coke asked.

“Simple. Stop the attack,” Bones replied.

“Why can’t
you
stop the attack?” Pep asked.

“We’ll try to get there also,” Mya said, “but there are other Genius Files children we are monitoring. We can’t be everywhere at all times.”

“How are we supposed to stop the attack?” Pep asked. “All we know is where it will be. We don’t know when. We don’t know how—”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Bones interrupted her. “You’re geniuses, right? That’s why you were chosen.”

“We must leave,” Mya said. “Not a word of this to anyone.”

Chapter 13
The Second Cipher

“W
here
were
you kids?” Dr. McDonald asked anxiously when the twins came running back to the RV in the parking lot. “Your mother and I have been looking all over for you.”

Pep turned to her brother.

“We were playing Frisbee,” he explained. “Pep chucked it into the woods, and we had to go look for it. She totally can’t throw.”

“You can’t catch!” his sister complained.

“Can too.”

“Can not.”

Dr. McDonald preferred to avoid arguments, especially the can too–can not variety. He opened his road atlas and flipped to the map of Nevada.

“Well, thank goodness you’re safe!” Mrs. McDonald told the twins, reaching for her purse. “Five more minutes and we were going to call the police. Here, I bought you each a souvenir.”

“Let me guess,” Coke said. “Yo-yos?”

“How did you know?” Mrs. McDonald asked.

“I’m a genius.”

Mrs. McDonald took two new yo-yos out of her purse: a red one for Coke and a blue one for Pep.

“Awesome!” Coke said. “Wanna see me walk the dog?”

“Maybe later,” Mrs. McDonald replied. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

“Mom,” Pep said, “I wish you wouldn’t buy this stuff. You’re wasting your hard-earned money.”

“Yeah, money doesn’t grow on trees, Mom,” Coke said as he tried to duplicate a yo-yo trick he had seen on the video.

“But you’ve
got
to bring home souvenirs!” Mrs. McDonald told them. “That’s part of the fun of traveling!”

She passed around sandwiches she had made while the twins were in the woods. Dr. McDonald started the RV and pulled out of the parking lot. After driving a little Honda for years, he wasn’t used to such a big vehicle, and he backed out carefully.

As he pulled onto Route 70 South, he relaxed a bit and began humming the old Willie Nelson song “On the Road Again.” It wasn’t long before they had merged back onto I-80, heading east.

“I was looking at the map,” Dr. McDonald told the family after they had been on the road for a while. “Lake Tahoe is only about an hour from here. That might be a good place for us to stop for the night. Maybe we can even stay for a day or two. We could go swimming or kayaking. Have some fun, you know? Lake Tahoe is beautiful.”

“No!” Pep shouted.

“We want to go see the largest ball of twine in the world!” shouted Coke.

“Yeah,” Pep added. “Lakes are a big bore.”

Mrs. McDonald turned around in the front seat.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Yesterday everybody was making fun of me for wanting to go see the largest ball of twine in the world. And now you’re all anxious to get there. What’s going on?”

“Yeah,” Dr. McDonald said. “Why are you suddenly so interested in that silly ball of twine?”

As usual, Pep looked to Coke for the answer. She wasn’t about to tell her parents that there would be some sort of attack at the ball of twine and that they had to help stop it.

Coke thought fast.

“We’re twins,” he announced. “And
twine
is
twin
with an
e
at the end. So we want to see it.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Dr. McDonald sputtered. “So instead of swimming and kayaking on a beautiful lake, you want to go look at a ball of twine because it has an
E
in it?”

“Yes!” the twins agreed.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Pep said. “You’re not a twin.”

“Well, I’m pleased to see you kids are getting into the spirit of the trip,” Mrs. McDonald said. “The twine ball is in Cawker City, Kansas.”

“Then that’s where we want to go,” Coke declared. “We hate swimming and kayaking.”

“Since when?” his father asked. “You used to
love
swimming and kayaking when you were little.”

“Please, please, please, please?” begged Pep.

Dr. McDonald could not resist a child with puppy dog eyes, especially when it was his own. He sighed when the exit for Lake Tahoe appeared on the side of the road, and he drove right by it.

Mrs. McDonald passed her laptop back to the kids so they could see the route to Kansas. The McDonalds would have to drive along I-80 all the way across Nevada, through the top of Utah, across the southern part of Wyoming, and halfway across Nebraska before detouring south into Kansas.

“It says Cawker City is 1,414 miles from here,” Mrs. McDonald informed the family, “and today is June nineteenth. It should take us a few days to get there, depending on how often we stop.”

“Speaking of which, I’m beat,” Dr. McDonald announced. “Let’s start looking for a campground.”

About ten miles from the Nevada border, signs began to appear at the side of the road:
Donner Lake . . . Donner Pass Road . . . Donner Memorial State Park . . . Donner Camp Picnic Area
 . . .

“The Donner Party!” Pep yelled excitedly, almost causing her dad to drive off the road. “This is where they were!”

Ever since she was little, for reasons nobody could quite explain, Pep had been fascinated by the Donner Party. Other girls become obsessed with soccer, dolls, scrapbooking, or some boy band. But Pep loved the Donner Party.

She was probably the only child in America who knew the story. In 1846, George Donner and his brother Jacob, Illinois farmers, set out for the promise of California in covered wagons with several families, including their own. They took a shortcut that turned out to be a longer route, hit bad weather, ran out of food, and resorted to cannibalism (yes, that means eating each other). Only a few members of the party survived.

Some party, huh?

Dr. McDonald spotted a sign for a campground in the town of Truckee, California, so he pulled off the highway.

“Maybe they have a Donner Party museum here,” Pep said hopefully.

“Donner Party museum?” Coke said, snorting. “Are you kidding? Nobody’s gonna make a museum about a bunch of cannibals.”

“Why not?” Pep asked. “Somebody made a museum about a bunch of yo-yos. Somebody made a museum about a bunch of Pez dispensers. Why not a museum devoted to the memory of the Donner Party?”

That’s when they saw a sign at the side of the road.

“See!” Pep hollered. “They
do
have a Donner Party museum! Can we go there? Please, Dad? Please, please, please?”

Dr. McDonald pulled into Donner Memorial State Park and found the museum parking lot.

“It
is
historical, I suppose,” he said.

“I might be able to use this on
Amazing but True
,” Mrs. McDonald added.

“I can imagine the souvenirs they sell in the gift shop,” Coke remarked. “Do you think it has a meat department?”

The exhibit was actually pretty interesting. There was a twenty-five-minute video about the Donner Party and a musket that one of the desperate pioneers had used to shoot an eight-hundred-pound grizzly bear. Outside was a memorial that showed how high the snow had gotten that tragic winter: twenty-two feet.

“I’m not entirely sure that museum was appropriate for children,” Mrs. McDonald said when the family piled back inside the RV.

“The Donner Party were heroes,” Pep said. “They did what they had to do to survive.”

“Yeah, lighten up, Mom,” Coke agreed. “Cannibals are cool.”

“It
was
educational,” Dr. McDonald admitted. “Because of what happened to the Donner Party, Californians sent relief teams with food and water for people who were heading west during the gold rush a couple of years later. So in the long run, they saved a lot of lives.”

After a few wrong turns, the McDonalds found a campground where they could spend the night. They had driven more than two hundred miles, almost all the way across California. Mrs. McDonald baked some freeze-dried chicken in the RV’s little microwave oven, and the family eagerly wolfed it down while sitting at a picnic table next to their campsite.

“Do you want me to do a dump here, Dad?” Coke asked, remembering that his chore for the trip was to empty the holding tank below the toilet.

“No, we can wait a few days for that,” Dr. McDonald replied. “Let the tank fill up a little.”

It was a simple campground. Once the sun went down, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Without any wood to make a campfire, the McDonalds climbed into their four sleeping nooks and curled up with books. One by one, they dropped off to sleep.

Around three o’clock in the morning, a man wearing a black suit and a bowler hat tiptoed over to the RV. He had a piece of paper with him, about three inches by seven inches, which he carefully slipped under the left windshield wiper. Then he crept away silently in the night.

This is what it said on the piece of paper:

JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL

VSEED NTHTU EWNYI TOECO

KOTEA EORIEDPNOITOR