Never Say Genius (22 page)

“Two checkerboards!” hollered the waitress.

“And butter, please.”

“With cow paste!”

“And a glass of milk.”

“One moo juice!”

“And what about you, hon?” she asked Coke.

“Do you have any cold cereal?” he asked.

“Sorry, sugar,” the waitress replied. “We’re fresh out.”

“Then I’ll have soft-boiled eggs.”

“Drown the kids!” hollered the waitress.

“Do you have rye toast?” asked Coke.

“Whiskey down!”

“And a glass of orange juice too,” Coke added.

“Hug one!” the waitress hollered. “Anything else?”

Dr. McDonald had been staring at the waitress ever since they came in.

“Say, haven’t I met you somewhere before?” he asked. “You look familiar to me.”

“’Fraid not, hon,” she said. “I’m sure I woulda remembered a handsome fella like
you
.”

Pep kicked Coke under the table again. When he looked at her angrily, she was mouthing the word “Mya.”

Coke looked at the waitress, and she winked at him. Pep was right. Under that blond wig and all that makeup, it
was
Mya!

“I’ll be back in a jiff with your grub,” the waitress—that is, Mya—said.

“I gotta … go to the bathroom,” Coke said.

“Me too,” said Pep, getting up.

The twins slid out of the booth and hustled over to a hallway where the restrooms were located. Mya was waiting for them, with open arms.

“What are you doing here?” Pep asked as they hugged.

“Right now, I’m serving breakfast,” she said. Her Southern accent was gone.

The short-order cook came over from the kitchen, and when he got close enough, it was obvious that it was Bones.

“How did you know we were going to stop at this diner?” Coke asked.

“We
always
know where you are,” Bones replied seriously. “Listen, we need to make this quick. We’ve intercepted a message. Something bad is going to happen in Washington on the Fourth of July.”

“That’s the day after tomorrow,” Mya said. “It’s going to be something big.”

“Are you sure it’s not the
third
of July?” Pep asked.

“No, it’s the fourth,” Bones replied.

“Our aunt is getting married on the Fourth of July,” Pep said. “We’re going to be there. What’s going to happen?”

“We have reason to believe there’s going to be some kind of a robbery,” said Bones.

“You mean somebody’s going to try to steal, like, the Declaration of Independence or something?” Coke asked.

“It could be the Declaration, it could be the doorknob to the White House, or it could be the president’s dog,” Bones said. “It could be anything. We don’t know yet. There’s a lot worth stealing in Washington.”

“Chances are, it will be a symbol of America,” Mya added. “That’s what these creeps want.”

“What should we do?” Coke asked.

“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Bones advised.

“You know what these people are capable of,” Mya said ominously.

“They tried to kill us in Chicago, in Cleveland, and at an amusement park,” Pep said. “They used poison gas on my brother at a rest stop in Pennsylvania yesterday.”

“Yeah, where were
you
?” Coke asked. “We could have used your help at all those places.”

“We had another mission,” Bones said mysteriously. “But we’ll have your back in Washington. I promise.”

“Hey, where’s my food?” a guy shouted in the background. “I’ve been waiting for half an hour.”

“Comin’ right up, sugar!” Mya yelled back.

“We have to go back to work,” Bones said. “See you in D.C.”

The twins went back to their table, where their parents were looking over the travel brochures they had picked up.

“The world’s largest rubber band ball is in Chevy Chase, Maryland,” Mrs. McDonald said. “It weighs over three thousand pounds, and it’s fifteen feet in circumference.”

“Actually, Mom, that
used to be
the world’s largest rubber band ball,” Coke informed her. “A guy in Southern California made one that’s even bigger.”

“How do you know that?” Pep asked, incredulously.

“Doesn’t everybody know that?” Coke replied. “I thought it was common knowledge.”

“There’s a giant fiberglass pineapple in Baltimore,” Mrs. McDonald said. “That could be interesting to see.”

“How about we skip all that stuff and go straight to Washington this afternoon?” suggested Dr. McDonald. “I mean, which would you rather see, the Wright Brothers’ first plane at the National Air and Space Museum, or a rubber band ball?”

The family debated that question for several minutes, until Mya came roller-skating back to the table carrying a big tray full of food.

“Enjoy, y’all!” she said with a wink.

Everyone dug into their breakfast. Coke tapped his egg with a spoon to crack the shell. When he peeled off the top of it, this was printed in blue on the surface of the egg:

“Oh no,” Coke said involuntarily.

“What’s the matter, dear?” asked his mother.

“Oh, uh … nothing,” Coke replied. “I think my eggs might be hard boiled.”

“We could send them back.”

“Forget it.”

Coke kicked Pep under the table and turned the egg slightly so she could see the letters that were printed on it. Her eyes widened.

Some ciphers take days, weeks, or even months to figure out. Others can be deciphered almost instantly by someone who knows what they’re doing. Pep took one look at this one and knew the solution right away. It was simple.

She took the first letter of the first word—
D
—then the first letter of the second word—
U
. DU. Then she took the second letter of the first word—
M
—and the second letter of the second word—
B
. DUMB.

Pep looked at the egg and continued like that, remembering the letters in her head. It wasn’t long before she had the whole message:

DUMBO THE FLYING ELEPHANT

“Did anybody ever hear of Dumbo the flying elephant?” Pep asked the family as she ate her waffles.

“
Dumbo
was an old Disney movie,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Pep said. “It just popped into my head.”

“I never saw that movie,” Dr. McDonald said, “but I seem to recall that Dumbo could fly by flapping his ears or something.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Coke said.

“Me too.”

“What, again?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

The twins got up and rushed over to the bathrooms. Pep caught Mya’s eye and signaled for her to come over.

“Did you or Bones hide a secret message in my brother’s egg?” Pep asked her.

“What? No, of course not. Why?”

“Somebody has been sending us these messages—John Bull, the Star-Spangled Banner, Greensboro lunch counter, and now Dumbo the flying elephant.”

“Don’t forget the one that said July third, two o’clock,” added Coke. “That’s tomorrow.”

“I assure you that Bones and I have nothing to do with any of these messages,” Mya said. “But all of them must tie in with each other somehow.”

“What could they possibly have in common?” Pep asked her. “What could Dumbo the flying elephant possibly have in common with
anything
?”

“Somebody’s playing games with you,” Mya said. “But we’re going to figure out who, and we’re going to stop them. What concerns me is that our information says something will happen on July Fourth, and your information says July third. You kids better go back. Your parents will be suspicious.”

Coke and Pep hurried back to their table and finished their breakfast quietly. When their parents went to pay the check, Coke examined his eggshell one more time. There was no writing on the shell itself.

“Hey, how is it possible to write on the
inside
of an egg without leaving a mark on the shell?” he whispered to his sister.

“It
isn’t
possible,” Pep told him. “But it is possible to write on the shell with special invisible ink that seeps through to the inside. It’s an old trick that spies use.”

“How do you know that?”

“Doesn’t everybody know that?” she replied. “I thought it was common knowledge.”

Dr. McDonald got back on Route 270 South and drove about thirty-three miles until he reached the exit for I-495—the capital beltway. From there, it was just eleven miles to Cherry Hill Park, a campground in College Park, Maryland.

“This is it, guys,” Dr. McDonald said. “The end of the line.”

“What do you mean, Dad?” Pep asked.

“We’ve driven all the way across the country,” he told her. “We did it! Welcome to Washington, D.C.!”

“This doesn’t look like Washington,” Coke said, looking out the window. Some kids were playing shuffleboard.

“We’re ten miles outside of the city,” Mrs. McDonald explained. “It will be hard to park the RV in D.C. We’ll park it here and take the Washington subway into the city.”

“So, we’ll have all afternoon in the nation’s capital,” Dr. McDonald said, clapping his hands. “What do you want to see? The Washington Monument? The Air and Space Museum? Ford’s Theatre? The Spy Museum?”

“The Spy Museum!” Pep shouted. “The Spy Museum!”

C
herry Hill Park is the closest—and the coolest—campground to Washington, D.C. It has two swimming pools, a hot tub, sauna, game room, miniature golf, and a playground. But after they checked in, none of the McDonalds wanted to hang around Cherry Hill Park. Everyone—and especially Pep—wanted to go into the city and spend the afternoon at the Spy Museum.

The Washington subway system is called the Metro, and the Greenbelt stop at the end of the Green line is right near Cherry Hill Park. Dr. McDonald had been to Washington many times to do research, so he knew his way around. The family took the Metro ten stops and got out when the train reached Gallery Place–Chinatown.

“This is the heart of Washington,” Dr. McDonald said as they emerged from the station. They walked a short way down Seventh Street and made a right on F Street. “The White House is about seven blocks
that
way. The Capitol is about seven blocks the other way. And Ford’s Theatre is right around the corner from here. That’s where Abraham Lincoln was shot, you know.”

“We know,” said Coke, who knew just about everything, and didn’t particularly enjoy hearing things he already knew.

The Spy Museum is directly across the street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After they paid their admission, the McDonalds were taken by elevator—along with a bunch of other people—to a little room. There, they were instructed to choose a cover identity from a bunch of choices displayed on the walls. Just like real spies, the McDonalds had to memorize important details of their fake lives—like their names, where they were born, what they did for a living, and where they were going. After that, visitors were free to roam around the exhibits.

If you ever go to Washington, you
have
to go to the Spy Museum. It’s the only public museum in the United States that is solely dedicated to espionage, and it covers the history of spying from biblical times to the present day.

There are exhibits devoted to concealment devices, sabotage weapons, intelligence gathering, audio surveillance, threat analysis, maintaining one’s cover, and dead drops. A dead drop is a place—like a hole in a tree—where a spy will leave something for another spy to pick up. That’s as opposed to a live drop, in which two spies will pass something—like a briefcase—from one to the other in person.