License to Thrill (10 page)

Pep got to work. First, she stared at the cipher to see if there were any obvious patterns. . . .

NEZVES YZTRIH TNEETEN ZINHTH GIEYTZ NEWZTYAM

She copied the letters again, this time closing them up. Spaces between words, she knew, are often put in there just to throw you off.

NEZVESYZTRIHTNEETENZINHTHGIEYTZNEWZTYAM

“See anything?” Coke whispered, looking over her shoulder.

“Not yet,” she whispered back. “NEETEN pops out, but it's probably just some random letters that look like a word.”

She copied the cipher once again, this time writing it backward.

MAYTZWENZTYEIGHTHNIZNETEENTHIRTZYSEVZEN

“Wait a minute!” she said. “I think there are nulls in there.”

“You mean fake letters?” Coke asked.

“Yeah, probably
Z
.”

She crossed out all the
Z
s, and this is what was left . . .

MAYTWENTYEIGHTHNINETEENTHIRTYSEVEN

“That's
it
!” Coke said, a little too loud. “You're a genius! Add the spaces!”

She didn't have to. It was obvious now.

MAY TWENTY EIGHTH NINETEEN THIRTY SEVEN

“May 28, 1937!” Pep said.

“What do you think
that
could mean?” Coke asked his sister.

“How should I know?” Pep replied. “
You're
the one who remembers everything. Something important must have happened on that date.”

“What are you two whispering about back there?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“Yeah,” said their dad. “What mischief are you up to?”

“Oh, we're just playing a word game,” Coke told his parents.

“Sounds like fun,” said Mrs. McDonald. “Can
we
play, too?”

“No!” said both twins.

The twins looked at each other. They knew they would have to wait a few minutes after being snotty before they could ask a favor of their parents. It was sort of like waiting an hour after you eat before going swimming. Finally, they determined that enough time had passed.

“Hey,
you
guys are old,” Coke called up to the front seat. “What does the date May 28, 1937, mean to you?”

“I'm not
that
old,” said Dr. McDonald. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering,” Coke lied.

“Well, 1937 was shortly before World War Two broke out, if that helps,” said Dr. McDonald.

It didn't. Both twins realized that this was too serious for guessing games. Dr. Warsaw was working on a nuclear bomb. From now on, Coke and Pep would have to stop relying on their parents' knowledge to help them figure out these clues. No more fooling around. No more mistakes. Lives could be at stake.

“Google it,” Coke said to his sister.

She borrowed her mother's laptop computer and tapped the date into the box. . . .

There were 345,000 results. Pep paged through the
top choices looking for something significant. One thing kept popping up. . . .

MAY 28, 1937: VOLKSWAGEN IS FOUNDED

“That's gotta be it!” Coke whispered. “Volkswagen was Hitler's pet project. I saw that in a book. He wanted a car that average people in Germany could afford to buy. The word
Volkswagen
means ‘The People's Car Company.'”

“But what could Volkswagen have to do with
us
?” Pep asked.

“We know Hitler was trying to build an atomic bomb, right?” Coke said. “Well, Dr. Warsaw is trying to build an atomic bomb, too. Maybe they're connected. Maybe Dr. Warsaw is driving a Volkswagen. Maybe we need to go to a Volkswagen factory. Who knows?”

Up to this point, the answers to the ciphers had always led the twins to something
big
. It was never obvious in the beginning, but eventually, all the clues would tie together in some way.

Pep found a clean page in her notepad and wrote this at the top. . . .

CIPHER #1: MAY 28, 1937, VOLKSWAGEN IS FOUNDED

The twins had been working so hard on the cipher, they hadn't noticed that they were suddenly driving past stores, apartments, and gas stations. They weren't in the desert anymore. Coke looked out the window to see the Albuquerque Plaza Office Tower, the tallest building in New Mexico. It was nice to be in a big city again. Back in civilization.

“So what does the guidebook say about Albuquerque?” Dr. McDonald asked his wife.

“Let's see,” she said. “Do you guys want to go to the Turquoise Museum?”

“They have a museum devoted to a
color
?” Pep asked.

“Not a color, you dope,” her brother said. “Turquoise is a mineral.”

“Don't call your sister a dope,” warned Dr. McDonald.

“We already went to the Bauxite Museum,” Coke recalled. “I don't want to look at more rocks.”

“There's the Meteorite Museum . . .”

“No!”

“How about the International Balloon Museum?” suggested Mrs. McDonald. “Maybe we could take a ride in a hot air balloon.”

“I don't like heights,” Pep said. “Is there a Volkswagen museum in Albuquerque?”

“No, but there's the American International Rattlesnake Museum.”

“Cool!” Pep said. “Let's go there! We learned all about snakes in Girl Scouts. I even got to hold one.”

“I don't like snakes,” Coke said.

“Come on,” his sister urged him. “Don't be such a baby.”

Now reader, I know what you're thinking—somehow, the twins will find themselves confronted by poisonous rattlesnakes. But as I promised in the last chapter, that's not going to happen. So relax. Nothing to worry about.

“Hey, guess what!” Mrs. McDonald said. “The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is right here in Albuquerque. Ben, we could gather some information for that novel you're planning to write about the Trinity Site.”

“Bo-ring!”

Dr. McDonald pulled over to the curb, stopped the car, and turned around to face the twins. They braced for a stern lecture. But their father didn't look angry.

“Look,” he said, “you kids are thirteen now. You've
matured a lot on this trip. I can see it. You don't have to be with Mommy and Daddy
all
the time. Your mother and I are going to the Nuclear Science and History Museum. You can come with us, or you can go to the Rattlesnake Museum, or do whatever you want. It's up to you. But I don't want to hear any whining in the backseat.”

Coke and Pep looked at each other, communicating silently, as only twins can.

“We'll go to the Rattlesnake Museum,” Pep said.

Their parents gave them some money and dropped them off on San Felipe Street, right near the main square in the Old Town section of Albuquerque.

The sign on the little adobe building read
RATTLESNAKE MUSEUM AND GIFT SHOP
. It's a tiny, three-room, mom-and-pop sort of place, but it's packed floor-to-ceiling with the largest collection of live rattlesnakes in the world. Western diamondbacks, black-tails, Mexican lance-headed rattlesnakes, you name it. There are also glass cases filled with tarantulas, scorpions, turtles, and Gila monsters.

Coke took a step back after walking in the door.

“This place is not for herpetophobes,” he said. Pep refused to give her brother the satisfaction of explaining what a herpetophobe was.

“Okay, I get it,” she said. “You don't like snakes.”

In addition to the live specimens, the Rattlesnake Museum also has snake-related artwork, toys, games, jewelry, clothing, sculptures, videos, license plates, and posters for movies like
Cobra Woman
.

“Let's check out the gift shop,” Coke said after a few minutes of watching the creepy live snakes.

He opened a door with a
GIFT SHOP
sign over it and held it for Pep to walk through first. It was a dark, empty room, about the size of a small bedroom.

“This can't be right,” Pep said.

When the twins turned around to go back inside the museum, the door closed with a loud
click
.

“Hey, this doesn't look like a . . .”

The door was locked. There was no way out.

At that moment, an engine started up and the
“room” they had walked into began to move.

“What's happening?” Pep shouted, almost falling over.

“It's a trap!” Coke yelled as he struggled to make his way to the wall. “We walked right into it!”

It didn't take long to figure out they were in the back of a truck. Somebody was driving them somewhere. But they didn't know who, and they didn't know where.

“Let us
out
!” Pep screamed, banging on the walls with her fists.

The truck drove a mile or so, and then pulled off to the side of a gravel road. It backed up a few feet and stopped, and then the twins felt the floor under them was starting to tilt. One side was rising up.

“It's some kind of a dump truck!” Pep shouted. “They're dumping us!”

Coke tried to brace himself along the wall to avoid sliding down to the bottom. Pep did the same.

“Hold on!” Coke shouted.

The floor reached a forty-five-degree angle and stopped. Then there was a loud
clunk
and the end of the truck—the lower side—fell away. The twins looked down. All they could see was dirt.

“I can't hold on any longer!” Pep shouted.

A few seconds later she let go, sliding across the
floor, out of the opening, and into a pit. It was a little larger than a grave. Coke followed, nearly landing on top of his sister. Neither of them was hurt, but that was a small consolation. They were trapped. The walls of the pit were almost five feet high. There was no way to climb out.

“Well, howdy, partners.”

Coke and Pep looked up to see a man standing at the edge of the pit. He must have been driving the truck. The man was dressed like a cowboy, with the hat, boots, jeans—the works. In one hand he held a canvas sack.

“Who are
you
?” Pep asked breathlessly.

“Jonathan Pain's the name. You can call me John.”

“John Wayne?” Pep asked. “Like that old movie star?”

“Not Wayne.
Pain
,” sneered John Pain. “Because that's what I inflict on people. No need to remember my name. You can just call me your worst nightmare.”

Coke looked around frantically for a way out of the pit.

“Oh, don't bother trying to leave just yet, young feller,” said John Pain. “You ain't goin' nowhere till I'm
good and ready to let you go.”

“Why are you doing this?” Pep asked. “We never did anything to you.”

“Never said you did,” John Pain drawled. “But I got two jobs to do this week. The first one is to get some uranium for my employer. I think you may know him. Dr. Herman Warsaw?”

“So he
is
working on a bomb!” Coke said.

It wasn't just some rumor. It was for real.

“What's your other job?” asked Pep.

“Oh. To kill you.”