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  She rang the little bell she kept in the kitchen, and the rest of the family charged down from the second floor. Spaghetti was on the table.

  Any anger Mrs. McDonald had had about the children coming home late from school was gone. She heaped meatballs on everyone’s plates.

  “Are you kids excited about our trip?” she asked after they had dug into the food. “We should be somewhere in the Midwest next week for your birthday, and you know we’ve got to get to Washington, D.C., by July Fourth for Aunt Judy’s wedding.”

  In all the excitement, Coke and Pep had almost forgotten—in two days, after school let out for the summer, they would be leaving for a driving vacation that would take them nearly three thousand miles across the United States and then back.

  “I can’t wait!” Pep gushed, with just a bit more enthusiasm than was necessary. In fact, she dreaded the trip. At home, there were new clothes that needed to be tried on, texts from her friends that needed to be replied to, videos and TV shows that needed to be watched, and web sites that needed to be surfed.

  “It will be good for you kids to see Mount Rushmore, the great national parks, and the Lincoln Memorial,” said Dr. McDonald. “All those things you learn about in school but never see with your own eyes.”

  “Oh, that reminds me!” Mrs. McDonald said. “You’ll never believe what I found out today. Do you know what they have in Cawker City, Kansas?”

  “What?” everybody said.

  “The largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald told the family. “Some guy spent years rolling twine in his garage to create this ball, and now it’s gigantic. We can go see it on our way east!”

  Coke glanced over at Pep to see if she was giggling. Their mom always got excited when she heard about some new oddball place that she could put on Amazing but True. Pep avoided making eye contact with her brother, because she knew it would crack her up.

  Dr. McDonald just rolled his eyes.

  “It’s just a silly ball of twine, Bridge!” he said. (He had shortened Bridget to “Bridge” on their first date and had been calling his wife that ever since.)

  “It’s not just any ball of twine, Ben,” Mrs. McDonald shot back. “It’s the biggest one in the world!”

  “It’s twine!” Dr. McDonald argued, even though he knew from experience that arguing with his wife was a waste of time. “It’s not the bloody Grand Canyon. It’s not Mount Everest. It’s a ball of string!”

  “I must see it with my own eyes,” she replied simply.

  And that was the end of the discussion. Dr. McDonald shook his head. One of the things that attracted him to his wife in the first place was their mutual interest in history. Only later did he realize that she was interested in the history of nonsense. Weird places. Meaningless facts. Strange people. Enormous balls of twine.

  Coke knew about the ball of twine in Kansas. In second grade, he had read about it in Weekly Reader. He remembered that it was almost nine tons!

  I should probably mention here that, in fact, Coke McDonald remembered just about everything he had ever seen or experienced. The school psychologist tested him and told Coke he had an eidetic, or photographic, memory. In his mind, he could “see” just about any image he had ever seen with his eyes. In second grade, Coke had memorized the periodic table of elements, all the way to lawrencium. And he did it without trying.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll go see the silly ball of twine, if that will make you happy,” Dr. McDonald said grumpily.

  Coke had a theory to explain grown-ups, as he did for most things in life. In his view, babies are born with a specific number of brain cells, which waste away and die off as people get older. So by the time they reach thirty—and certainly by the time they reach forty—most of their brain cells are gone. This explains why grown-ups do and say the things they do.

  To back up his theory, in third grade Coke did a school research project involving music. He made a list of the greatest composers in history, from Beethoven to the Beatles. Then he tracked when they wrote their best music.

  Irving Berlin wrote his first hit song—“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—when he was just twenty-three years old. The Beatles made Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their most innovative album, when John Lennon was twenty-seven and Paul McCartney was twenty-five. Beethoven started going deaf at thirty-one. Mozart was composing minuets at age five and was dead at thirty-five.

  Almost as a rule, composers created their finest work in their twenties. There was a severe drop after the age of thirty. This, to Coke, was proof that the human brain deteriorates by the time people become parents. Which explains why parents are so weird. They’re essentially operating with an empty skull filled with dead brain cells.

  The spaghetti hit the spot. The rest of the dinner conversation was all about the cross-country trip. They would be heading out in two days, after the last day of school.

  It was Dr. McDonald’s view that all Americans should travel cross-country at least once in their lives.

  “You can’t see America by flying over it,” he told the family. “You’ve got to hit the open road, breathe in the fresh air, explore the country like the pioneers did. We’ll be like a modern-day Lewis and Clark expedition.”

  “Did Lewis and Clark have an RV?” asked Coke, smirking.

  “Maybe we’ll be like a modern-day Donner Party,” Pep remarked.

  “Very funny,” said Mrs. McDonald.

  The Donner Party consisted of a group of families from Illinois who tried to get to California in 1846. They got caught in early winter snowstorms, ran out of food, and were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. Pep found the Donner Party fascinating.

  “If we had to eat one of us,” she said as she held up a meatball with her fork, “which one of us would you eat?”

  “I’d eat Dad,” Coke replied. “He weighs the most, so he’s got the most meat on him.”

  “But it’s mostly fat,” Pep countered. “Mom would be more tender.”

  “Are you calling me fat?” asked Dr. McDonald.

  “That’s sick,” Mrs. McDonald said. “No Donner Party talk over dinner.”

  The dishes were cleared away and the table sponged off. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald went upstairs to begin packing for the trip, leaving the twins to load the dishwasher.

  “Remember that lady in the red suit we met at the top of the cliff?” Pep asked her brother.

  “Yeah,” Coke recalled. “Her name was Mya,”

  “Do you think she’s . . . dead?”

  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

  Somebody 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.
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  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 conclusion, civilization in the early 21st century is facing multiple serious problems. We’ve got international terrorism, global climate change, economic meltdown, dependence on unstable oil supplies, a failing education system, senseless wars, loose nukes, insane dictators, drugs, hunger, obesity, cancer, dwindling water and oil supplies, poverty, unemployment, racism, and overpopulation.

  Our nation is divided, making these problems seem insolvable. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, young and old, North and South, rich and poor can’t agree on anything. And that’s not even taking into account the various races, ethnic groups, and religions, each with their own worldview and self-interest.

  Nothing ever seems to get done to solve these problems. Our society is overwhelmed by the complexity of our situation. The problems are simply too complicated and entrenched for the current generation of leaders. They’re paralyzed.

  It is time to start over. With children.

  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

  The 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.