by Dan Gutman
Coke turned around to see the school enveloped in flames and firefighters in the distance spraying water on it.
“You speak . . . English?” Pep asked Bones.
“Of course,” he replied.
“We thought you were . . . retarded or something,” Coke explained.
“I believe the politically correct term is mentally challenged,” Bones said. “Listen, you kids need to get out of town right away. Somebody is trying to kill you!”
“Yeah, I think we kinda figured that out,” Coke said.
“Shouldn’t we try to save Mrs. Higgins?” Pep asked. “She might still be in the building somewhere.”
“That wouldn’t be a smart idea,” Bones told them.
“Why?”
“Because I think it might have been Mrs. Higgins who set the fire.”
Chapter 8
In or Out
As soon as they were safely away from the burning school, Bones pulled the twins out of sight, into the woods behind the playground. He tugged at his big bushy beard, and it came off in his hand. He pulled off his mustache. Then he reached under his shirt and tore away a thick piece of foam that had been wrapped around his stomach to make him look like an extremely fat man.
Bones was actually skinny!
“Guess I won’t be needing this stuff anymore,” he said, tossing his disguise aside.
Underneath it all, Bones looked pretty much like a regular guy. It was an amazing transformation.
“You mean to say you’ve been wearing a fat suit and pretending to be a mute the whole school year?” Pep asked him. “Why?”
“Because I knew this day would finally come,” Bones said. “It’s a long story.”
The fire department did its best to get the blaze under control, but it was hopeless. By the time the fire was completely extinguished, there wasn’t much left to save. It didn’t look like there was going to be school come September. Not at West Marin Middle School, anyway.
The police were relieved to find that there were no bodies in the rubble. No students or teachers had been in the building when the fire started. At least that’s what they told the news media. The detectives had no idea that the McDonald twins had been trapped inside the whole time. Mrs. Higgins, the health teacher, was long gone.
Coke and Pep McDonald had a lot of questions for Bones, the first one pretty obvious: “Why would our health teacher try to kill us?”
Bones was evasive. He told the twins he had been keeping an eye on Mrs. Higgins ever since they’d both been hired back in September. He suspected that she was up to something, but he didn’t know what she was going to do or when she was going to do it.
“Are you going to arrest her?” Pep asked.
“She’s probably just a paid assassin,” replied Bones. “I want to find out who’s doing the paying. And besides, I’m not a cop. I can’t arrest anybody.”
“Then who are you?” Coke demanded. “What’s going on? Why is all of this happening to us? We have the right to know. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah,” agreed Pep. “That’s the second time somebody tried to kill us in two days. And it wasn’t Mrs. Higgins the first time. The first time it was some dudes wearing black suits and bowler hats.”
“Come with me,” Bones told the twins. “I’ll tell you as much as I’m allowed.”
They walked around the corner to Bones’s car, an old Ford with a nice variety of dents on the front and back fenders. The guy was either a lousy driver or . . . no, he was just a lousy driver. With some reluctance, Coke and Pep got into the backseat. Individually, neither one of them would have set foot inside that car. Together, they felt safer. If Bones tried anything funny, at least they had him outnumbered.
Bones drove about a mile to a strip mall the twins had been to many times because their favorite Chinese restaurant was there. He pulled the car around to the back where there were some Dumpsters and wooden pallets leaning against the wall. Bones stopped at an unmarked garage door and got out of the car.
“What is this, your supersecret spy headquarters?” Coke asked.
“You might say that,” he replied.
Pep took Coke’s hand so they couldn’t be separated. Bones wasn’t a complete stranger, but all the same she felt uneasy following him around. For all she knew, maybe it was Bones who was actually trying to kill them. Maybe this was all an elaborate trap, and they were walking right into it.
Coke had no such concerns.
“Do you have cool doors that slide open and go whoosh, like in spy movies?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Bones replied.
He reached down and yanked on the old garage door until it opened with a wrenching squeak.
“You oughta oil that thing,” Coke said as he walked inside the garage and looked around.
“Hurry!” Bones urged Pep. “Whoever is trying to kill you may be following us. They may try to burn down the place, just like they burned down the school.”
“All right,” Pep demanded. “What’s going on? We want some answers.”
“Okay. Do the letters T G F mean anything to you?” Bones asked after Pep had stepped inside. He pulled down the door behind her.
“No clue.”
“T G F!” Coke exclaimed. “Yeah! That was the last thing that lady Mya said to us before we jumped off the cliff!”
“That’s right!” Pep said. “And then she got hit by a dart and collapsed.”
“T G F stands for The Genius Files,” Bones began. “It’s a top secret government program. I work for TGF. Mya is one of us. Or was, I should say, before they got to her. Mrs. Higgins used to be with TGF too. Now, it appears, she has a different agenda. She must be working for somebody else.”
Bones told the McDonald twins all about Dr. Herman Warsaw and what had happened to him on 9/11. How he’d stepped outside for a cigarette; and as the plane crashed into the Pentagon, he’d come up with the idea of enlisting the smartest kids in the country to solve the world’s problems. But somewhere along the way, that genius plan seemed to have gone off the tracks.
“And you two are a part of TGF too,” Bones explained.
Ordinarily, Coke would have let out a snort and said, “You gotta be kidding me.” In his almost thirteen years, nothing particularly amazing had ever happened to him or his sister. They led completely normal lives filled with video games, pizza, TV, and all the normal things that kids in the suburbs are used to. The idea that they were actually part of a vast government program was inconceivable. But there had been two attempts on their lives now, and it was starting to sink into Coke’s brain that he and his sister were in the middle of something big. Their days as normal kids were over.
“Why were we chosen for TGF?” Pep asked. “We’re not that smart.”
“Speak for yourself,” Coke told her.
“You are extremely smart,” Bones told her. “But I will tell you that when Dr. Warsaw started the program, he wanted to have a few children who could work as a team, and enlisting twins seemed to be a good way to accomplish that. He may have lowered his baseline score a few points in order to include both of you.”
“But why would Mrs. Higgins try to kill us?” Pep asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Bones replied. “Maybe she had a falling out with Dr. Warsaw, and she’s trying to get back at him.”
“Our parents are going to go ballistic when they find out about all this,” Pep said, shaking her head.
“No they won’t,” Bones said, his voice lowering slightly. “You can’t tell them. Ever.”
Bones explained to the twins that it was Dr. Warsaw’s belief, logically enough, that parents would never allow their children to be part of such a dangerous program. It was also Dr. Warsaw’s belief that The Genius Files was so crucial to the security of the United States that parents of the young geniuses must never be informed. The children had to be sworn to secrecy, with the implied threat to their loved ones if word ever got out. And they were stric
tly forbidden to notify the police or other authority figures about any TGF activities.
“Wait a minute,” Pep said. “We never agreed to be part of this Genius Files thing. You can’t force us.”
“You’re already in it,” Bones replied simply. “It was all about standardized test scores. Your names are in the computer. Didn’t your parents receive a letter saying you would be in a special gifted and talented program? It went out months ago.”
“They probably threw it away,” Coke said. “Our parents are kind of spacey.”
“If the letter went out months ago, why did you wait until now to contact us?” Pep asked.
“I wanted to wait until we had a mission for you,” Bones told her. “Now, of course, you have a temporary mission: to stay alive.”
“Let me get this straight,” Coke said. “It doesn’t matter if we agreed to be part of this Genius Files thing or not. Either way, Mrs. Higgins and those bowler dudes are trying to kill us.”
“That’s unfortunate, and true,” Bones said. “I’m sorry you were put in this position. It was out of my control. But I hope you will agree to help us.”
“What do we have to do?” Pep asked.
“I can’t tell you right now, for security reasons,” Bones replied. “Some things are better off not being known. You’ll be contacted in due time.”
“That’s it?” Coke said with some anger in his voice. “That’s all you’re gonna tell us? And you expect us to help with your screwball program? This is bogus. What’s in it for us?”
“A million dollars when you turn twenty-one. . . .”
“A million dollars?” Pep asked.
“Each,” added Bones. “Tax free. Not to mention excitement, travel . . .”
“Travel?” Coke said. “Oh, great. So people will be trying to kill us all over the world? We’ll never live to be twenty-one.”
“. . . and protection,” Bones added. “I might mention that we already saved your lives twice.”
“That’s only because you put us in the position of our lives being threatened!” Coke said. “You almost got us killed twice!”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Okay, so when do we get to meet this famous Dr. Warsaw?” Pep asked.
“Probably never,” Bones told her. “I’ve only met him once myself: the day he hired me. He’s a brilliant man, and also a recluse. I hear he lives on a boat somewhere.”
“Great,” Coke muttered.
“Are there others out there?” Pep asked. “Other TGF kids like us?”
“Yes,” Bones said. “Lots of others. Maybe you’ll get to meet them.”
“I don’t want to meet them,” Pep said. “I just want things to go back to normal.”
“You can forget about that,” Coke grumbled.
“Look,” Bones told the twins, “sometimes people do things for money, or fame, or because their parents tell them to. Other times they do things to look cool or for some superficial, cosmetic reason. And sometimes people want to do something for the good of their country or the good of the world. People have all kinds of motivations for doing what they do. Whatever you decide, I’ll respect your decision. No hard feelings either way. If you decide not to help us, you’ll never hear from me again. I’m not saying Mrs. Higgins and those men in bowler hats who have been after you are going to stop, but I promise you won’t hear from me again. Of course, if you’re in trouble and need help, you won’t hear from me either.”
“How long do we have to decide?” Coke asked.
“Five minutes.”
The twins went off to the corner of the garage to talk things over. The easy solution, they agreed, would be to walk away. Just say no. Common sense said to pretend the whole thing never happened. Go back to their normal lives.
But both of them realized that there was no normal life anymore to be had. Somebody was out to get them, and not just their crazy health teacher, Mrs. Higgins. For all they knew, they would step out of the garage to find a group of assassins aiming machine guns at them. It’s not like these people were going to leave them alone just because they said they weren’t playing the game anymore.
And, of course, a million dollars was a million dollars.
Being the younger of the two (by three minutes), Pep would generally defer to her brother when it came to tough decisions. She said she was torn and would leave the final decision up to him.
Coke had a crazy, delusional thought running through his head. There was one thing he didn’t get a lot of in his ordinary suburban life. There was one thing that every kid wants more of. It wasn’t money, or straight As, or a cool ringtone. It was attention.
“When this thing is over,” he said to himself, “we might be on every talk show and every magazine cover. There will be fan clubs and websites devoted to us. The girls will be crazy for me. I’ll be signing autographs for my adoring fans. When this is all over, I’ll be so famous that I might have to wear a disguise in public so people won’t mob me. I’ll be like a rock star.”
That is, if he was still alive. It would be a gamble.
After five minutes, Bones asked for an answer using a one-word question.
“So?”
Coke took a deep breath.
“We’re in,” he replied.
Chapter 9
Welcome to the Family
“Congratulations,” Bones said as he shook hands with each twin enthusiastically. “Welcome to the GF family.”
Pep wrinkled her nose. She had enough problems with her own family. She didn’t need another one, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be part of this one.
Bones pulled aside a large piece of cardboard on the floor of the garage. There was a wooden door underneath. He yanked it open, revealing stairs that went down. Bones climbed into the hole and beckoned the twins to follow.
“So this is where you keep the real spy stuff, eh?” Coke said, looking around. There were cameras, tools, and all kinds of equipment lining the shelves of the walls in the cramped room.
“You might say that.”
Coke picked up two staple guns.
“What do these shoot,” he asked, “laser beams?”
“Put those down!” Bones said sternly.
“They shoot staples, you idiot!” Pep told her brother.
“Okay, okay, relax.”
“We have a very short, uh . . . initiation ceremony that all new recruits have to go through,” Bones told them. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s no big deal.”
“It doesn’t involve jumping off a cliff or setting our school on fire, does it?” Pep asked nervously.
“No, no! Nothing like that,” said Bones. “All you have to do is turn around to face the wall and make the sound of the letter Z with your throats.”
“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” the twins said.
While they were making the sound, Bones picked up the two staple guns Coke had been fooling with. He placed them gently against the back of the children’s heads and pulled the triggers.
“Owwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Are you crazy?” Coke said after spinning around to see Bones holding both staple guns. “What is your problem, man?”
“You stapled my head!” Pep shouted. “I can’t believe you would do that!”
“I did not staple your head,” Bones explained calmly. “I implanted tiny GPS devices in your scalps. They’re harmless. Now we can track you more easily.”
“Why do you need to track us?” Pep asked.
“It’s for your safety,” Bones explained. “If you’re in trouble anywhere in the world, we’ll be able to find you. This GPS is accurate within three feet. Dr. Warsaw designed it personally. Someday everyone will have one.”
“Great,” Coke said glumly, rubbing the back of his head.
“Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?” Pep asked.
“Strictly speaking, I suppose it is,” Bones admitted. “But we feel the advantages outweigh the dis-advantages.”
“Hey, why did you tell us to make
the Z sound?” Coke asked.
“So you wouldn’t notice the staple guns,” Bones said. “Listen, before I send you home, I want to give you something. A small token of our appreciation.”
“You already implanted a small token of your appreciation in each of our heads,” Pep said.
Bones went over to a shelf and came back with a shopping bag.
“What is it?” Coke asked. “Some kind of a gun that’s hidden inside a candy bar or something?”
“Goodness no,” Bones said. “We can’t be handing out guns to children, now can we?”
He pulled a Frisbee out of the bag. It said TGF FLYING HIGH on it.
“You’re giving us a Frisbee?” Pep asked, puzzled.
“We had some left over from the company picnic,” Bones explained.
“You have company picnics!?” Pep asked. “I thought this was a top secret organization?”
“It was a top secret picnic,” said Bones.
“It’s not a Frisbee, you dope!” said Coke. “That lady Mya had one of these up on the cliff. Remember? It’s a Frisbee grenade! We can throw this sucker at bad guys and totally waste them.”
“Mya’s Frisbee grenade was a prototype,” Bones told them. “They cost fifty thousand dollars each. We could never afford to hand them out casually. Budget cuts, you know. And they’re very dangerous, too. You haven’t been trained to use them.”
“Then I’ll bet the Frisbee shoots lasers, huh?” Coke said. “Like, you throw it and it zaps everything within fifty feet. That is cool! Where’s the on-off switch?”
“It doesn’t shoot lasers,” Bones said. “It doesn’t turn on or off.”
“Then it must give off a magnetic force field or something, right?” Coke asked. “Or when you throw it, it sprays some vile stuff like a skunk does.”
“It doesn’t give off a force field,” Bones said. “It doesn’t spray anything. You just fling it.”
“I get it,” Coke guessed. “After you chuck it, razor blades pop out of the sides. When it reaches the victim, it can slice a man’s head off like a knife going through a hunk of cheese. That is awesome!”