24 The Secret Formula

Chapter 24 THE SECRET FORMULA "Oh, this one's a piece of cake," Pep said to her brother after they were back on the road. "I'll bet even you can solve it." While their parents blasted an oldies station in the front seats, Coke examined the new cipher, which his sister had written down in her notebook. 20–12–7–12–7–19–22–11–12–12–15–9–12–12–14 To Coke, it looked like a meaningless string of numbers. There were a bunch of twelves in there, and they repeated. But his brain was only good at storing and accumulating vast quantities of information. It simply wasn't hard-wired to

organize and process data. He handed the notebook back to his sister. "Look, it's simple," she told him. "First you write out the alphabet...." "Then you put a number below each letter...." "The first number in the cipher is 20, so that must be a T," she said. "Then comes the number 12, and that's an L. After that is 7, which is the letter G. And then another L …" "T-L-G-L?" Coke said. "That doesn't mean anything." Pep did it again in her head, just to make sure she hadn't made a mistake. Coke was right. The message couldn't be TLGL. She thought about it for a moment, and then

brightened. "Oh, I got it!" she said. "You need to put the numbers backward!" Pep crossed out the first line of numbers and wrote it again, this time putting the number 1 below the letter Z and working back until the number 26 was below the A. Then she plugged in the corresponding letters to the numbers. GOTOTHEPOOLROOM "Go to the pool room!" Coke said, almost loud enough for his parents to hear. "What's that supposed to mean?" "He wants us to go to a house or something," Pep replied. She added the new message to the list they had received so far. 1. Go to the living room 2. Go to the TV room 3. Go to the pool room She looked to her brother, and all he could do was shrug his shoulders.

It was just eight miles on Dekalb Avenue from the Waffle House into Atlanta, the capital of Georgia. The McDonalds had not been to a big city since Washington, D.C. Coke and Pep craned their necks to look up at the tall buildings as they entered downtown Atlanta. Dr. McDonald drove past Georgia State University and CNN headquarters on Marietta Street before turning right toward Centennial Olympic Park, the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. The Georgia Aquarium was on their left. "Is this the special place you said you were taking us to today?" Pep asked. "Are we going to the aquarium?" "No …," Mrs. McDonald said as they drove along the north side of the park. "This is the special place we're going to today." Across the street was a huge modern building, with the words WORLD OF COCA-COLA written on it.

"We took you to the Birthplace of Pepsi in North Carolina," said Dr. McDonald as he looked around for a parking lot. "So we figured it was only fair to take you to the birthplace of Coke too." "This is way bigger than that lame Pepsi place," marveled Coke. Pep wrinkled up her nose. She knew her brother was right, and she also remembered what had happened to her back at the Birthplace of Pepsi. They parked the RV. Coke grabbed his backpack, and Pep grabbed her Frisbee grenade, just in case.

"Again with the backpack?" complained Dr. McDonald. "What do you keep in there, anyway?" "My private stuff," Coke replied. "I like to have it with me in case somebody breaks into the RV." "Nobody's going to break into the RV," his mother argued. "I want it, okay?" Coke said. Seeing as how they came to the World of Coke just for him, Coke's parents dropped the argument right there and started walking toward the building. "Did you know that only two people in the world know the secret formula to Coke?" said Dr. McDonald. "Really?" Pep said. "Yeah. I read about it somewhere. In fact, those two guys aren't even allowed to fly in the same plane together." "Why not?" Coke asked. "Because if the plane crashed and they both