20 A Lost World

Chapter 20 A LOST WORLD When he woke up on the morning of July 16, Coke felt sore all over, but a little better in his head. There's something about getting a good night's sleep that helps to put yesterday behind you. The McDonald family got back on the road. Route 180 headed east and merged with I-20. From there, it was a straight shot south on I-35 all the way to Waco, Texas. It doesn't sound like much, but it was a long drive, over two hours. Most drives in Texas are long drives. It takes about twelve hours to cross the state. That's with no rest stops. About 740 miles. Do you know how long it takes to drive the highway across the middle of New Jersey? Forty-five minutes. About forty miles. Don't believe me?

Look it up. Of course, the speed limit in some parts of Texas is over eighty miles per hour. And forget about driving the speed limit. If you drive the speed limit in Texas, the other cars will be all over your back bumper like cheese on macaroni. Dr. McDonald liked driving fast, and now he had a car that liked it just as much as he did. Pep pulled out her notepad to work on the latest cipher. She felt a renewed urgency now. Somebody was out to get them. Her brother's skills were effective, but they weren't enough. She would have to use her wits to survive. Solving the cipher could be the key. While their parents were flipping around the radio stations in the front seat, Pep took the letters QBUXPOXKDBO and did just about everything she could do to crack the code. She looked at the letters backward. Upside-down. Sideways. QBUXPOXKDBO

"Oh man!" Coke said as he looked over her shoulder. "That looks impossible." "You're intimidated by the Q and the Xs," Pep told him. "It doesn't matter what the letters are. They just represent other letters. Let's break it down. Eleven letters. This is probably two words, maybe three." "So?" "The only letters that appear twice are the two Xs and two Bs, see?" she continued. "So they very possibly represent E and A." "Why do you say that?" Coke asked. "Because E and A are two of the most commonly used letters," Pep replied. She studied the cipher for a long time, occasionally furrowing her brow or wrinkling up her nose as she worked on it silently. "I can almost see the wheels turning in your head," Coke said as he watched her. Pep stopped for a moment. "That gives me an idea!" she said as she turned to a clean page in her notepad and drew

a circle. "This could be a shift cipher." "Shift cipher?" her brother asked. "What does that mean?" Pep didn't bother answering. Instead, she wrote the letters of the alphabet around the circle, going clockwise. "You shift all the letters of the alphabet by a fixed amount," Pep explained. "Back in Roman times, that's what Julius Caesar did to keep his messages secret." "How can you possibly know that?" Coke

asked his sister. "I know some stuff, and you know some stuff," Pep replied. "Look. Let's say the two Bs are actually Es. That would mean that all the letters have been shifted counterclockwise by two. And if that's true, the two Xs are As." Pep wrote the cipher out again, with the new letters. QEUAPOAKDEO "That doesn't help much," Coke remarked. "No," Pep said, "but it might if we shift all the letters counterclockwise by two." With that logic, the Q became a T, the U became an X, and the P became an S. Pep wrote them down. "Texas!" Coke said. "QBUXP is Texas!" "And OXKDBO is Pep said as she tackled the rest of the letters one at a time, "RA- N-G-E-R! Texas Ranger! That's a baseball team, right?" "It's also a law enforcement agency," Coke told her. "They investigate crime and stuff. But

what does that have to do with the other clues we got—the piece of the Blarney Stone, or Hub City, or anything?" "Beats me," Pep admitted glumly. "Can't help you there." Dutifully, she wrote out the clues they had so far: 1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO 2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE 3. HUB CITY 4. TEXAS RANGER The Ferrari approached the outskirts of Waco. The city is on the Brazos River and was first settled by the Huaco Indians. You would not call it a small town. The population is over 124,000. "Did you know that Dr Pepper was invented in Waco in 1885?" Mrs. McDonald reported from the front seat. "Oh no," Coke grumbled. "Please don't tell