License to Thrill

by Dan Gutman

  “We’re almost home!” Pep said, stretching.

  “Did you sleep well?” Mrs. Higgins asked. “You folks were out.”

  “Like a baby,” said Dr. McDonald.

  Mrs. McDonald noticed a California guidebook on the floor between the two front seats.

  “May I look at this?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Higgins replied.

  “We’re not stopping anywhere, Bridge,” said Dr. McDonald sternly. “Don’t even think about it. No more museums. No more halls of fame. No more roadside tourist traps. We’re going straight home now.”

  “I just want to see what it says about the Golden Gate,” said Mrs. McDonald. “I’ve driven over this bridge so many times, but I really don’t know much about it.”

  In fact, the McDonalds had driven over the Golden Gate Bridge at the start of their trip five weeks earlier. Mrs. McDonald leafed through the guidebook until she found the section about the bridge.

  “Let’s see. It says here that the Golden Gate opened on May 28, 1937 . . .”

  “Nobody cares, Mom,” Pep shouted from the back.

  “Wait a minute,” Coke said to his sister. “Did she say May 28, 1937? Open your notepad!”

  Pep pulled out her notepad and flipped to the page where she had written all the ciphers.

  “That’s the first cipher!” Pep whispered excitedly to her brother. “Maybe May 28, 1937, doesn’t have anything to do with Volkswagen at all! Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the company started the same day the Golden Gate Bridge opened!”

  “What else does that guidebook say about the bridge, Mom?” Coke asked.

  “Let me see . . . ,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Oh, this is interesting. It tells the exact longitude and latitude for the bridge. It’s north 37 degrees, 49 minutes, and 8 seconds. And it’s west 122 degrees, 28 minutes, and 40.5 seconds.”

  “That is interesting,” said Mrs. Higgins.

  Coke and Pep looked at each other. Then they looked at the notepad.

  “The second cipher!” Pep said. “The minutes and seconds didn’t refer to a time! They referred to a location! The location of the Golden Gate Bridge!”

  “Listen to this,” Mrs. McDonald went on. “It says here that they are constantly repainting the bridge. The paint is supplied by Sherwin Williams.”

  “I used their paint on the garage last year,” Dr. McDonald said. “Does it mention what color they use? The bridge isn’t gold. It’s more like a reddish orange.”

  “It says the color code is SW 6328,” said Mrs. McDonald. “It’s called ‘Fireweed.’”

  The twins just about jumped out of their seats.

  “Fireweed?!”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “That’s the third cipher!” Pep whispered to her brother. “Fireweed isn’t the plant! It’s the color of the Golden Gate Bridge!”

  “Here’s something I bet you don’t know,” said Mrs. McDonald. “The hardhat was invented when they were building the bridge.”

  “Hardhat?” asked Mrs. Higgins. “You mean those yellow helmets construction workers wear?”

  “Yeah,” Mrs. McDonald said. “It says here that an American soldier came home after World War One and he designed a hardhat for miners based on the helmet he wore in the army. The guys who worked on bridges back then had stuff falling on them all the time, so this soldier designed a helmet just for them. It was used for the first time when they were building the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “What was the guy’s name?” Coke asked.

  “E. W. Bullard,” his mother replied.

  “Bullard?!”

  “That’s the fourth cipher!” Pep whispered.

  “Mom, does it say anything about the number 8980?” Coke asked.

  Mrs. McDonald scanned the guidebook.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s how long the bridge is. Eight thousand, nine hundred and eighty feet.”

  Both twins slapped their foreheads.

  “All the ciphers have something to do with the Golden Gate Bridge!” Pep whispered. “How could we have been so blind?”

  “It was right under our noses the whole time,” Coke whispered. “Something is going to happen on the bridge.”

  “And it looks like it may be happening right now,” Pep said, pointing in front of them.

  The traffic leading onto the bridge had slowed to a standstill. It appeared as though the police had shut down the bridge in both directions. Drivers were honking their horns in frustration. In the distance, the siren of an ambulance or a fire truck was blaring. Some people had gotten out of their cars to see what was going on up ahead.

  “I don’t feel good about this,” Pep said.

  A helicopter was hovering on the side of the bridge. The famous prison island, Alcatraz, could be seen in the distance. In the water, a coast guard boat bobbed up and down. A group of guys in white hazmat suits ran by. Whatever was happening, it was too far in front to see.

  “It must be an accident,” said Dr. McDonald. “We could be stuck here for hours.”

  The twins were not about to wait around.

  “Let’s go!” Pep said as she grabbed her Frisbee and climbed over her father to scamper out the side door of the minivan. Coke was right behind her on the other side.

  “Where are you kids going?” Dr. McDonald shouted after them. “Come back here! It’s not your business.”

  “Oh, yes it is,” Coke said as he ran after his sister.

  The grown-ups had no choice. All three of them took off their seat belts and got out of the car. Mrs. Higgins was in the lead, but the twins had run way ahead.

  The Golden Gate Bridge is a little less than two miles long. It’s a suspension bridge, which means the roadway is suspended from wire cables that curve gracefully over the tall towers and are anchored at both ends. To hold up the Golden Gate when it was built in the 1930s, the designers used 80,000 miles of cable.

  None of the cars on the bridge were moving. Coke and Pep dashed around a few of them and then scaled the four-foot fence that separates the roadway from the pedestrian walkway alongside it. The walkway is about ten feet wide, and it was jammed with people who were walking or bicycling over the bridge.

  “Excuse us!” Pep shouted as she weaved and elbowed her way through the crowd.

  As the twins got closer to the middle of the bridge, they could see a man in a rumpled brown business suit and carrying a briefcase who had climbed up the main cable at its lowest point. He was standing on the cable, about twenty feet above the roadway. Several policemen and others were trying to talk him down.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” one of the cops bellowed into a bullhorn. “You might feel like you’re alone, but you’re not. Let us help you. Tell us your name.”

  Pep stopped in her tracks when she got close enough to see the man’s face.

  “It’s Dr. Warsaw!”

  “He wanted us to come here,” Coke said. “That’s what all those ciphers were about.”

  Dr. Warsaw lit a cigarette with one hand and tossed his previous one away. It sailed a long way down into the water. Warsaw had a squinty-eyed smile on his face as he hollered down at the policemen.

  “Soon, you’ll all know my name,” he shouted. “Everyone in the world will know my name after today.”

  “Think of your family,” the cop hollered, trying to form rapport or find an emotional chord that might touch the deranged man.

  “Shut up!” Dr. Warsaw shouted down.

  The policeman holding the bullhorn passed it over to another cop, who had more training in suicide prevention.

  “You don’t want to do this, buddy,” the second cop said. “It’s two hundred and forty-five feet down. After falling four seconds, you’ll be going seventy-five miles per hour when you hit the water. That’s gonna hurt. Hurt bad. Tough way to die.”

  “I said shut up!” Dr. Warsaw shouted down at the cop. “I don’t need a freshman physics lesson from you!”

  “I know you’re
frustrated, sir,” the cop yelled. “But if you do this, you’ll be dead on impact, or you’ll drown, or you’ll die from hypothermia in minutes. The water down there is forty-seven degrees, sir. Best case scenario, you survive and you’ll be crippled for life. Do you have a loved one you want to talk this over with? We can get them on the phone.”

  Dr. Warsaw ignored the cop and started climbing unsteadily up the cable. By that time, Mrs. Higgins had pushed her way through the crowd.

  “Do you know that man?” one of the policemen asked her.

  “I sure do,” she replied, and then she shouted up to Dr. Warsaw. “Don’t do it, Herman! Jumping won’t solve anything! We’ll get you help!”

  “I’m not going to kill myself, you idiot!” Dr. Warsaw shouted back. “I’m going to kill all of us! There are more than twenty-seven thousand wires inside the cable I’m standing on. Once it snaps, the whole bridge comes down. Everybody dies!”

  “He’s got a bomb!” Coke hollered. “In the briefcase! You’ve got to stop him!”

  The cops, who had been treating this as a “jumper job,” suddenly switched into antiterrorism mode. They reached for their guns and pointed them up at Dr. Warsaw.

  “Don’t shoot him!” Mrs. Higgins begged. “Let me talk to him. Please!”

  Dr. and Mrs. McDonald, huffing and puffing, finally made their way past all the gawkers. They rushed over and wrapped their arms protectively around Coke and Pep.

  “Go ahead, lady,” the policeman with the bullhorn said to Mrs. Higgins. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to talk to him before we take him out.”

  He handed her the bullhorn.

  “Herman, don’t do this!” Mrs. Higgins shouted. “You’re a brilliant scientist and inventor! You don’t want to kill all these innocent people!”

  “Maybe I like killing innocent people!” Dr. Warsaw shouted down at her. “I’m tired of incompetent underlings such as yourself screwing up over and over again. If you want to get a job done right, do it yourself. That’s what I say. So I’m doing this myself.”

  “You could do so much good for the world, Herman!” Mrs. Higgins shouted.

  “I tried to do something good for the world, Audrey. That’s what The Genius Files program was all about. But those bratty kids ruined everything. I’m done doing good things for the world.”

  “We’re gonna have to take him out, boys,” one of the cops said.

  All the other cops cocked the hammers of their pistols.

  “But he’s not sane!” Mrs. Higgins pleaded. “He’s not responsible for his actions!”

  “That’s not my biggest concern, ma’am,” the cop told her. “I’m not going to let some nut destroy this bridge and all the people on it.”

  The gawkers pushed forward on the roadway. Dozens of people had left their cars and come over to take cell phone pictures of the crazy man on the bridge. There were a few familiar faces in the crowd. John Pain was there. Mya and Bones had come across from the other side of the bridge. Even the bowler dudes had shown up.

  “I reckon you’re done for, Doc,” said John Pain. “It was nice workin’ fer ya.”

  “Go ahead and shoot me,” Dr. Warsaw warned the police. “I programmed this briefcase to detonate at the sound of a gunshot. When the bridge comes down, it will be your fault.”

  The cops looked at each other.

  “He’s bluffing,” one of them said. “Ready . . .”

  “No, he’s not!” screamed Mrs. Higgins. “He’s a genius! He is fully capable of building a nuclear device.”

  “Jump!” shouted the bowler dudes, cackling like the morons they are.

  “. . . aim . . .”

  Dr. Warsaw scanned the crowd below him, a crazed look in his eyes. Those eyes seemed to harden when his gaze fell upon the twins.

  “Wait!” Dr. Warsaw shouted. “There are only two people I’m willing to negotiate with. Those two!”

  He pointed down at Coke and Pep.

  “Hold your fire, men!” one of the cops shouted.

  Everyone turned to look at the twins. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald held them tighter.

  “You know that man?” their mother asked Coke and Pep.

  “We sure do,” they said simultaneously.

  Coke and Pep tore themselves away from their parents’ grasp and rushed forward to the edge of the pedestrian walkway. The police cleared a path for them. Pep was leading the way, but her brother grabbed her elbow.

  “I want to do this,” Coke whispered in his sister’s ear.

  “Are you sure?” Pep replied. “I mean . . .”

  “I’m sure,” Coke said. “He’s mine. Be my backup. You know what to do.”

  For a brief instant, Coke and Pep stared into each other’s eyes, communicating silently as only twins can.

  “Yes! Those two spoiled brats!” Dr. Warsaw shouted down. “Coke and Pepsi McDonald. They drove me to do this. They ruined my life. When this bridge comes down and all you people die, it will be on their heads!”

  “Why don’t you come down here and we’ll talk it over?” Coke shouted.

  “If you want to talk to me, come up here, you little punk!”

  Coke took a running leap on the fence and carefully put his foot on the smaller cable that was attached to the round, main cable that held the bridge up. He wrapped his arms and legs around the main cable to make sure he wouldn’t fall off.

  “Get down from there, Coke!” Dr. McDonald shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  Both parents tried to rush forward and grab the twins, but the police held them back.

  Coke stood up on the main cable, holding the two wires on either side of it for balance. He was about twenty feet from Dr. Warsaw.

  “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” Coke told him. “Don’t do this.”

  “Oh, you and your sister down there are the cause of all my troubles,” Dr. Warsaw said. “The two of you destroyed my iJolt invention when we first met back in Wisconsin. Remember that? Then, you killed my young protégé, Archie, in Washington. He was the son I never had. He was going to carry on my work when I’m gone.”

  “He tried to kill us!” Coke shouted back, but Dr. Warsaw wasn’t in a mood to listen.

  “For years I labored to build the perfect robotic clone of myself,” Warsaw continued. “It was my life’s work, and you destroyed that, too, at the amusement park in Texas. And worst of all, you killed my dear wife, Judy, your own blood relative, and the only woman I ever loved.”

  Mrs. McDonald gasped. She never knew what had happened to her sister, Judy, after she disappeared.

  “That was an accident!” Pep shouted up from the roadway. “She set our RV on fire!”

  “Too many accidents!” Dr. Warsaw hollered angrily. “Don’t tell me you kids are innocent. I’ve chased you two all the way across the country and back. You’ve evaded me long enough. Remember what I told you? Sometimes you can’t fix things. You have to replace them. Well, this is one of those times. They’re going to have to replace everything, starting with this bridge. This won’t be an accident.”

  He started fiddling with some buttons near the handle of his briefcase.

  “Now, Pep!” Coke shouted.

  Pep steadied herself, got into position, and took careful aim. Then she reared back and flung her Frisbee up at Dr. Warsaw. It hit him squarely on the back of his right wrist.

  “Owww!” he yelled as he released his grasp. “What the—”

  He flailed at it, but his reflexes were too slow. The briefcase dropped from his hand and fell over the side of the bridge. Four seconds later, it landed with a splash in the choppy water below.

  “Nice toss, Pep!” Coke shouted.

  Dr. Warsaw looked around, realizing he had lost his bargaining chip. Below, the cops raised their guns again and trained them on him.

  “Now it’s just you and me, Warsaw,” Coke said.

  “I’ll kill you with my bare hands if I have to,” Dr. Warsaw replied, enraged. “You’re no match for me.”

&
nbsp; “Ready . . . ,” shouted the lead policeman, “aim . . .”

  Dr. Warsaw rushed at Coke and grabbed him at the shoulders.

  “Don’t shoot!” a policeman shouted. “They’re too close together! You might hit the boy!”

  Coke and Dr. Warsaw grabbed hold of each other and started wrestling on the cable. One slip, they both knew, and one or both of them would fall to their death.

  “Watch out!” Pep shouted.

  “Be careful, Coke!” hollered Mrs. McDonald.

  “I’m warning you,” Coke told Dr. Warsaw. “I studied karate for five years. I have a brown belt.”

  “Oh, so you flunked your black belt test, eh?” Dr. Warsaw said, taunting the boy.

  In fact, Coke had flunked his black belt test. Twice. And he wasn’t happy about it. Angered, he shoved Dr. Warsaw away to give himself a couple of feet of space.

  “Meet the Inflictor!” Coke shouted.

  Then he spun around, swept his right leg sideways, and kicked Dr. Warsaw’s legs out from under him. The older man screamed as his butt slammed against the main cable. He reached out and grabbed for something to hold on to, but the surface of the cable was smooth.

  “Nooooooooo!” he screamed as he slid off and dropped out of sight.

  Dr. Warsaw was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  They never heard the splash. By the time everyone had rushed to the railing and peered down into the murky water, it was too late. Dr. Warsaw’s body did not come back to the surface. They never found it. It may have washed out to sea or been eaten by sharks.

  Some people on the bridge that day cried. Those were the people who didn’t know Dr. Warsaw and all the evil things he had done. Those who did know him just felt a sense of relief. It was better this way. A quick but painful death had to be preferable to spending the rest of his life in prison.

  Nobody felt more relieved than Coke and Pep. Their summer-long cross-country nightmare was finally over. When Coke climbed down off the cable, there was no applause or cheering from the crowd. A man had died. Pep embraced Coke and their parents held on to the two of them like they would never let go. When they finally did, Mya and Bones came over for a group hug.