Mission Unstoppable (3 page)

Both twins shuddered at the thought.

“Maybe,” Coke said. “I remember what she said right after that dart hit her on the neck—
T-G-F
.”

“Oh yeah. What do you think that means?”

“Thank God it’s Friday?” Coke guessed.

“Today is Thursday,” Pep told him. “It has to mean something else.”

“Beats me,” he replied. “It’s probably nothing. Those bowler dudes in the golf carts probably weren’t even after us. Maybe they were trying to get somebody else.”

Pep added detergent to the dishwasher and turned it on.

“Y’know,” she told her brother, “I don’t really want to go cross-country, but now I think this is a good time for us to go on a long trip.”

“Why?”

“Because I have the feeling that somebody out there is trying to kill us.”

Chapter 5
Dr. Herman Warsaw and The Genius Files

S
omebody certainly
was
trying to kill the McDonald twins. And this somebody would prove to be amazingly persistent.

We need to rewind the story a bit here. Back to September 11, 2001. A century from now when kids learn about American history in school, it will probably be divided into everything that happened
before
9/11 and everything that happened
after
9/11.

It was on that tragic day that Dr. Herman Warsaw decided to take a cigarette break. This decision would change his life. In fact, this decision would ultimately change a
lot
of lives.

Born in Poland, Dr. Warsaw was a brilliant man, and one whose brain examined the world differently from the rest of us. As an amateur inventor, he had made a small fortune creating a GPS that people could have implanted under the skin of their dog or cat so that if the pet ran away, it could be tracked down easily.

With the royalties he earned from his invention, Dr. Warsaw didn’t have to work for the rest of his life. But he offered his services as a consultant for one dollar a year at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. America had been good to him. He wanted to give something back.

Dr. Warsaw was an odd-looking sort. He was young at the time—barely thirty—but he had the look of an old man. He wore baggy brown suits and a fedora as if he had stepped out of a 1940s gangster movie. He was rail thin and slightly bent over. He had the squinty-eyed look of a man who spent too much of his short life staring at computer screens instead of interacting with people in the real world.

Smoking two packs of cigarettes a day didn’t help any. Oh, Dr. Warsaw had tried to quit. Lots of times. He tried hypnosis and acupuncture and patches and gums and just about every over-the-counter cure-all on the market. But nothing worked. He had to have a cigarette in his hand at all times, even if he wasn’t smoking it.

Lucky for
him
. It was the pull of that addiction that made Dr. Warsaw step out of his Pentagon office at 9:38 a.m. on September 11, take the elevator down from the third floor, and walk outside into the parking lot for a quick smoke.

He had just flicked his Bic when the horrible roar of jet engines caused him to jerk his head upward. That sound was
way
too close. Planes weren’t permitted to fly anywhere near the airspace above the Pentagon, the Capitol, the White House, or any top-level government building in Washington. But there it was, a plane diving out of the sky and heading toward him.

One second later, American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles Airport—a Boeing 757—clipped a light pole at 350 miles per hour and slammed into the Pentagon less than fifty yards from where he was standing.

He covered his eyes to shield them from the light and heat. It was terrifying. The plane hit the building with such force that it was literally swallowed up by the Pentagon itself. It entered so cleanly that for years afterward conspiracy theorists were claiming that no plane had even struck the building. They said it had to be an inside job: the government must have purposely set off a bomb.

But Dr. Warsaw knew what happened, because he saw it with his own eyes. The nose of the plane tore right through his office. If he had been sitting at his desk at that moment, he would have been dead instantly.

A huge fireball erupted, and the Pentagon was in flames. One hundred and twenty-six people in the building died that day, plus sixty-four people on the plane. Less than an hour earlier, two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City. If there were still any doubts that America was under attack, they were gone. In a few short minutes, history would have to be rewritten.

Dr. Warsaw sank to his knees involuntarily and looked at the cigarette in his hand. His life had been spared. It was at that moment that he made a firm commitment to devote the rest of it to his country.

As the sirens began to wail and the fire trucks pulled up outside the Pentagon, an idea flashed through Dr. Warsaw’s brain. It was fleeting, one of those ideas that could have been lost in a moment if he had been distracted. But it was an idea that would change the world.

Dr. Warsaw pulled out the little digital recorder he kept in his pocket just for odd moments like this when inspiration struck. As smoke and flame spewed out of the ruins of the Pentagon, he pushed the
RECORD
button and started to make some quick, clipped, verbal notes. . . .

“. . . nation under attack . . . multiple problems . . . nation divided . . . unsolvable . . . no agreement . . . society overwhelmed with complexity . . . cannot see forest for trees . . . older generation inflexible, stagnant . . . kids are moldable . . . figure out solutions . . . start over . . . geniuses . . . standardized test scores . . . find them . . .”

These ramblings would have sounded like gibberish to anyone who happened to be listening. But later, Dr. Warsaw would sit down and synthesize his shorthand audio notes into a 434-page manifesto titled “The Only Way Out: The Simple Solution to America’s Most Pressing Problems of the 21st Century.”

No, you can’t find it at Barnes & Noble. Don’t bother looking it up on Amazon.com. “The Only Way Out” was a top secret document that was written for, and distributed to, a very small group of government officials.

It would come to be known around Washington as The Genius Files.

It would be impossible to reproduce Dr. Warsaw’s entire document here. It would also bore you to tears if you had to read it word for word. But here’s the summary on the final page . . .

In Dr. Warsaw’s view, the grown-ups of the world were too set in their ways to change and solve the complex problems they created. The only way to solve the problems would be for the United States government to seek out the smartest young people in the country and enlist them as problem solvers.

“Sometimes you can’t fix things,” he liked to say. “You have to replace them.”

In other words, America would have to start over from scratch with young geniuses. And these geniuses needed to be identified from the earliest age possible in order to cultivate and use their skills over the long term.

How? It would be simple, really. In fact, the mechanism was already in place: the standardized tests routinely given each year to every American child in public school. All that was needed was to pick out the best and the brightest and recruit them to solve the nation’s problems.

As you might expect, this revolutionary idea was met with skepticism by the powers that be in Washington. Expecting
kids
to accomplish what the smartest adult minds in the world could not seemed outrageous to many. Some adults were, frankly, threatened by the idea. It would take a few years and a change in presidents for Dr. Warsaw’s plan to get approval and funding. It appeared as a tiny earmark in the economic stimulus package that was signed into law in early 2009. And when the disgruntled senators were finished bickering over it, the funding was sliced in half.

But finally, in the spring of 2009, after every child in America had been tested and retested during the school year, a very select group of children were chosen to be the first group of YAGs: Young American Geniuses.

Proud parents all over the country received letters in the mail informing them that their children were among the smartest children in America. These special kids were more than simply “gifted and talented.” They would be enrolled in special advanced placement classes and enriched extracurricular activities the next school year. They would be put on the fast track to eventual college scholarships. They were touted as the leaders of tomorrow.

What the parents were
not
told was that their children were being secretly recruited to carry out some of the government’s most important—and dangerous—missions. Their kids would be like unmanned drones, assigned to solve the problems that could not be solved by adults.

These children were guinea pigs, and they came from all over the country. Small towns and big cities. White kids, black kids. It was like the old Armour hot dog jingle: “Big kids, little kids, kids who climb on rocks. Fat kids, skinny kids, even kids with chicken pox.”

Kids like Coke and Pep McDonald.

Chapter 6
Detention

T
he McDonald twins didn’t know they had been selected to be part of a special program for gifted and talented students. A letter informing their parents of that fact
had
arrived at their house two months earlier, back in April. But unfortunately, Dr. McDonald assumed the letter was just another school fund-raiser and threw it in the trash without opening the envelope.

Now it was June 18, the last day of school, and nobody was paying attention in class. How could you? West Marin Middle School was air-conditioned; but for some mysterious reason, in June, the temperature in half of the classrooms was up over ninety degrees and in the other half you felt as if you were going to school in an igloo.

Early that morning when the teachers arrived at school, one of them found two backpacks labeled
MCDONALD
leaning against the front door. These were the backpacks that Coke and Pep had abandoned at the top of the cliff the day before. There was no note, no explanation of who had dropped them off. They were returned to the twins during homeroom.

“Later,” Jimmy Erdman said to Coke in the hallway after sixth period.

Jimmy Erdman was not part of the YAG program. He wasn’t gifted or talented. Far from it. He was barely passing. Jimmy and Coke didn’t have a whole lot in common. Jimmy had no interest in books, learning, science, or anything that involved too much thinking. He had little intellectual curiosity. But the two had known each other since first grade.

Most people tend to drift away from their childhood pals as they de- velop new interests and new friends. But Coke and Jimmy never did. There was a comfort level there. It’s easy to trust somebody you’ve known all your life.

“Later,” Coke replied, and headed down the hall to the health room.

The health teacher, Mrs. Audrey Higgins, had that look on her face. It was the look that said she hated her job, she hated her life, and she hated the kids she had to teach. And they hated her right back.

“Today we’re going to learn how to brush our teeth,
correctly
,” Mrs. Higgins informed the class.

Coke groaned, and Mrs. Higgins probably heard it. He found it inconceivable that sixth graders had to be taught how to brush their teeth or that precious class time would be wasted on something so commonsensical. He looked around to see if anybody else in the class saw the ridiculousness of it all. They just stared back at him blankly.
Zombies
.

Mrs. Higgins was a tall woman with short hair. She squirted a dollop of hand sanitizer, which she always kept on her desk, and rubbed the stuff into her palms. Then she picked up a toothbrush.

“Grasp the handle firmly,” Mrs. Higgins told the class, “and always brush up and down. Never side to side.”

Coke had no real problem with Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique. But he did have an interest in busting chops, especially when it came to grown-ups.

“What’s wrong with brushing from side to side, Mrs. Higgins?” he asked politely.

Mrs. Higgins stopped for a moment to look at Coke. She was used to kids like him: bored, supersmart know-it-alls who amused themselves by asking dumb questions.

“If you brush from side to side,” she explained slowly, as if he was developmentally challenged, “your teeth will grow in crooked. That should be self-evident, Mr. McDonald.”

It also should have been the end of the discussion, but Coke couldn’t let it drop.

“Why would they grow in crooked?” Coke asked. “If you put an equal amount of pressure on the teeth as you brush to the left and an equal amount of pressure as you brush to the right, the pressure on both sides would be equal; and the teeth would have no reason to grow in anything but straight. Unless, of course, you’re claiming that Newton’s third law of motion is incorrect. That is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

A few of the boys in the back snickered. They had no idea what Coke was talking about, but they could tell he was giving Mrs. Higgins a hard time. She looked at Coke wearily. She’d had enough of him and his attention-getting devices.

“That’s detention for you, McDonald.”

“What?” Coke shouted. “What did I do? You’re gonna give me detention because I questioned you about how to brush
teeth
? Are you kidding me? It’s the last day of school! I was just exercising my freedom of speech.”

“Your freedom of speech ends at my ears,” Mrs. Higgins said.

“This is child abuse; that’s what it is!”

She ignored him. The bell rang, and everybody pushed through the front door chanting the chorus of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” Coke trudged to the detention room.

It was a depressing, windowless room in the basement of the school. On the whiteboard, somebody had scrawled:
PAY ATTENTION AND AVOID DETENTION
. Coke was surprised to see one other student in the room, sitting in the second row: his sister.

“What are you in for?” she asked Coke. “Armed robbery?”

“I questioned the philosophy behind Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique,” he replied. “And you?”

“Chewing gum,” Pep said.

“Nice move,” Coke said. “Got a piece for me?”

Pep opened her mouth to show him the only piece of gum she had.

It just might be a long afternoon. Coke took a seat and opened his dog-eared copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
. He hadn’t read a children’s book since first grade when he decided they were too easy.

“This is totally unfair,” Pep complained. “What kind of teacher gives detention on the last day of school? We’re probably the only ones left in the whole building. Everybody else is gone for the summer.”

A minute later, Mrs. Higgins came into the room. She was wearing white gloves. All the West Marin Middle School kids knew that Mrs. Higgins was germ phobic and obsessive-compulsive about personal hygiene. That was probably why she became a health teacher in the first place. When she was feeling particularly paranoid, Mrs. Higgins would put on her gloves. Kids would make fun of her behind her back.

When she saw Pep and Coke sitting there, she smirked. Coke refused to give her the satisfaction of eye contact.

“How long will this be?” Pep asked Mrs. Higgins.

“As long as it takes,” the teacher replied.

Pep slumped in her seat and looked at the door. It was wooden, with a thin sliver of window in it just a few inches wide. The school janitor, Mr. Rochford, walked by pushing a broom. He glanced inside as he passed.

Mr. Rochford was a creepy-looking, extremely obese man with a big, bushy beard and mustache. As far as the students knew, he had never said a word to anybody, which led to all sorts of speculations and rumors about him. Some said he was ashamed because he couldn’t speak English. Others insisted he was a deaf mute. The conspiracy crowd claimed he had his tongue ripped while serving time in a Bolivian prison. Everybody called him Bones because he was so fat.

Her cell phone rang, and Mrs. Higgins rushed to open her pocketbook. She said hello on the third ring, but the call was dropped.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

Mrs. Higgins went out into the hallway. The door closed behind her.

Coke thought briefly about just picking up and walking out of there. What could Mrs. Higgins do, suspend him? It was the last day of school.

But then the lock on the door clicked. There was no escape.

“What do you think janitors do over the summer?” Pep asked her brother. She had a way of caring about people in whom most other kids couldn’t be less interested. “How do they support themselves?”

“Bones is probably a part-time brain surgeon,” Coke said. “Sweeping the floor and cleaning up kids’ puke is his hobby.”

“Funny,” his sister commented.

“Actually, I think he might be retarded,” said Coke.

“You’re not supposed to say
retarded
,” Pep told her brother. “You’re supposed to say
mentally challenged
.”

“Whatever.”

Coke went back to
The Catcher in the Rye
. He didn’t feel like debating the point.

“Do you think Bones could have been one of those guys who tried to kill us yesterday?” Pep asked.

Coke looked up from his book and thought for a moment. His brain was stuffed with so much data, he had nearly forgotten that twenty-four hours earlier he and his sister had jumped off a cliff after being chased by lunatics in golf carts wearing bowler hats and armed with blowguns. A photographic memory only goes so far.

“That’s ridiculous,” Coke said, looking back down at his book. “Janitors don’t kill people.”

“Do you smell smoke?” Pep suddenly asked.

“No,” Coke replied, clearly annoyed with his sister. “Don’t you have a book or something to read?”

“I smell something,” Pep insisted.

“You’re having an olfactory hallucination.”

“Women have a stronger sense of smell than men do, y’know,” Pep told him.

Coke knew it was true. In third grade, he’d done a science project in which he had males and females sniff various substances to determine which gender was more sensitive to smell. The girls won easily. The project was written up in the local paper and even mentioned in a national science magazine.

“So maybe the school will burn down, and we can get out of here,” Coke remarked.

“You shouldn’t even joke about things like that.”

A few minutes passed, and Coke suddenly looked up from his book.

“Something’s burning!” he said, alarmed.

“I
told
you I smelled smoke!” Pep replied.

They jumped up and saw puffs of smoke coming out of the vent in the back of the room.

“We gotta get outta here!” Coke said.

“Where’s Mrs. Higgins?” Pep asked.

“Who cares about her?” Coke said with a snort. “Let’s worry about
us
.”

“She’s the only one who can open the door for us!” said Pep. She ran to the door and turned the knob. The door was locked. Coke tried to yank it open. Nothing. The door was made of thick wood. It felt warm to the touch. Smoke could be seen through the narrow slit of a window.

“The dead bolt is locked from the other side!” Coke said.

Smoke was pouring out of the vent now. It was starting to fill the room. The roaring sound of a fire could be heard, too.

“Help!” Pep hollered. “Mrs. Higgins! We’re locked up in here!”

“She probably ran out of the building to save herself,” Coke said. “She doesn’t care about us. She hates kids.”

Pep was getting frantic. She let out a scream in a frequency that only girls can produce—another advantage females have over males.

“Stop that!” Coke yelled, putting his hands over his ears.

“We’re gonna suffocate in here!” Pep yelled at him. “I’m gonna call Mom and Dad on the cell!”

“You can’t get a good signal in this room,” Coke told her. “I’ve tried plenty of times. I’m gonna break down the door. It’s the only way out.”

Pep rolled her eyes as Coke paced off ten steps and prepared to take a running leap at the door.

“If you do your famous Inflictor move, you’re gonna break your leg again,” she said as she stepped aside to give him some running room.