Mammoth (34 page)

Anyone with the name of an animal was automatically flagged by the personnel computers at Fuzzyland as a potential security risk, as it was fashionable among the more radical animal rights groups to adopt names like that. But Jack had always told people he was half Apache, reclaiming his racial heritage, and he could pass for it, with his dark skin and black hair. In fact he was no Indian at all, but his claim was passed on during the clearance process by a subprogram from the legal department, which went to great lengths to avoid any accusation of racial discrimination.

Now as he sat at his big, curving console expertly scanning fifty monitors, he thought it might have been better if he had called himself Jack Mole, because that was what he was. And like a mole suddenly thinking about leaving his nice, safe tunnel and emerging into the sunlight, he was nervous. Way beyond nervous; he was seriously thinking about chucking this whole insane project and just getting the hell out of Oregon.

How had it happened? How did he come to be sitting here, minutes away from setting in motion a series of events that could end up in one of the most spectacular kidnappings of all time? But…could you kidnap an animal? Maybe if you held it for ransom. Call it simple theft, then. It still carried a prison term.

And he’d only met Susan once. He had insisted on it, even though they both knew it was a security risk. He had to look in her eyes and know that she had Fuzzy’s best interests at heart, that she wasn’t doing this as part of some personal vendetta against one of the richest men in the world.

Howard Christian.
Jesus!
He was going up against
Howard Christian.
And he knew for a fact that Christian never forgot, and never forgave. Jack Elk chewed on his tenth cherry-flavored Tums of the night and watched the clock.

MATT
was watching the screen that showed the hallway outside Susan’s office door when he saw her open it from the outside, then from the inside. It was a little disorienting. He glanced at the screen showing Fuzzy’s quarters. All the guests had gone; there was nothing to see but the star himself, placidly stuffing trunkfuls of his specially blended fodder into his mouth.

“It’s time,” she said simply, and he stood up. They faced each other for a silent moment, Matt waiting for her to say something else, and he realized she was giving him one last chance to back out. Maybe giving it to herself, too. Her eyes seemed to be pleading with him. It almost looked as if she wanted him to talk her out of it. As for himself, all she had to do was say the word and he was out of there. With her, of course. He didn’t give much of a damn about Fuzzy, and she knew that, and didn’t care, but he knew that her life had revolved around him for five years, and she had undergone a change at least as radical as the one that had overtaken him during his long quest alone. And he knew that he loved her, and would do anything for her. And there was another reason they had to do this, one he hadn’t told her about yet.

So he said, “Let’s do it.” And surrendered himself to Fate.

JACK
Elk saw Susan enter her office. The inside was one of the few places in Fuzzyland that he couldn’t look into, others being the rest rooms and the offices of some of the top management and, of course, Howard Christian’s offices. Earlier he had seen a man enter, keeping his back mostly to the camera, but there was another camera that gave him a better angle and
he had called it up, ran it backward a few seconds, froze a frame that gave him a good three-quarter profile, zoomed in digitally, and enhanced it, just for something to do while he waited. This was what he was good at, skills he had honed in some of the bigger casinos in Las Vegas, where he could spot a pickpocket or a bottom-dealer in a crowd of people as easily as an ornithologist could peg a pelican in a flock of sparrows. He called up the face-recognition program. His own face program, the one he carried around in his brain, was excellent, sharpened by years of BOLOs issued by the casinos concerning card counters and dips and high rollers. This guy’s face was familiar, one of those faces you felt was somebody who had been famous briefly, but maybe quite a while ago. Like that, but older.

The computer found him in three seconds. Matthew Wright.

Whoa! Of course. He was the guy who went back into the past with Susan. Did this change anything? Jack wondered. He glanced at the box on his screen labeled
THREAT LEVEL
. This was an innovation of Christian’s, who had designed parts of the security programs, and a fairly dumb one, Jack thought. Christian was a hands-on sort of boss, especially when it came to computers, which to Jack translated as “interfering horse’s ass.” He was liable to show up at any time with some lame suggestion to “improve” systems that had been fine-tuned by generations of Nevada’s most devious minds. Howard’s threat levels ran from green to red. Green people were “Perfectly okay” and red people were “Do not admit under any circumstances.” Trouble was, nobody but Christian seemed to be entirely sure what threat levels blue, yellow, and orange meant. You might get a blue rating if you had ever served time in jail. Orange seemed to mean “Keep an eye on him.”

Matt was listed as threat level yellow. Near as Jack could figure out, that meant Howard just didn’t like the son of a bitch. Of course, since he was working with Susan, Jack would have let him slide even if he was red…unless the reason for the red rating was that he might be a danger to Fuzzy.

Would he be? Of course not, not if he was with Susan. Right?

He was drawn away from his thoughts by the sight of
Susan and Matt coming out of her office. She stared right into Jack’s camera and gave a slow nod. The operation was ready to start.

Jack wiped his palms on his jeans and got to work.

“SO
what’s the deal with this guy you’re working with?” Matt asked, simply for something to say to take his mind off the weak feeling in his knees. “Jack…”

“Elk. When I first decided to do this, six months ago, I reached out—very cautiously, through a couple hidden Internet accounts—to people I thought might be willing to help. There’s an underground network out there and it’s not easy to get into. Animal rights fanatics, antifur people, eco-extremists, some of them involved in some very nasty stuff, so naturally they’re cautious. But I had somebody I felt pretty sure would talk to me, at least give me a hearing…I’ll tell you about him later. We’re here.”

They had been walking down wide, tall, brightly lit corridors, more than big enough to accommodate a herd of elephants, which was exactly what they were for. A few zigs and a couple of zags that Matt had paid little attention to, a few doors that had opened to a key card Susan carried on a chain attached to a belt loop, and now they were in a very large open room with almost no light at all. Large shapes loomed around them. Susan took a flashlight from a hip pocket and clicked it on, then swept it around the room.

The first thing the flashlight beam encountered was a full-grown giant ground sloth, rearing twenty feet above them, standing absolutely still. The thing was missing its left arm at the elbow, and from there to the shoulder the bare metal of gears and tubing of hydraulics stuck out.

“Repair shop,” Susan whispered. It made no sense at all to be whispering, of course, because if anybody was in the room with them they were totally screwed, but he understood perfectly why she was doing it.

“Howard has the biggest toys of anybody on the block, that’s for sure,” Matt whispered back. She giggled, and it delighted him inordinately that he had made her laugh. How many times in the last few years had he had to simply put out
of his mind all the little things he loved about her? That, or go crazy. Now, if they could pull off this thing, maybe they could be together forever.

Or serve separate prison terms.

No use thinking like that. He followed her down winding paths between mechanical prehistoric beasts and was amazed, first, at how many of them there were, and second, how many were in for repairs or maintenance. Getting a colossus like a mechanical mammoth to walk realistically, something a baby mammoth could do within an hour of birth, was still a challenging problem in cybernetics and robotics. Howard’s tech people were the best in the world, except maybe for the loyal old guard he hadn’t been able to hire away from Disney, but there was a lot to go wrong.

Susan led him through the creatures. Matt was taken back to a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York when he was very young. Many of the rooms had held massive skeletons, but newer ones had lifelike mock-ups made of rubber and plastic and fake fur, many of which moved their heads or opened their mouths. Very primitive stuff, compared to this, but an unforgettable experience for a child. They reached a second set of doors and Susan’s flashlight revealed a prominent sign on it:

“Research and development,” Susan said. She carded the door and turned the handle, which opened easily with no alarm.

“You’re an E clearance, obviously,” Matt said.

“Wouldn’t have done me any good if Jack wasn’t working with me. Somebody else would have noticed this door was being opened, but Jack should be covering that. Did you know that when Disneyland opened, you bought ticket books, and the E tickets were for the best rides?”

“Really?”

“Howard enjoys touches like that. Come on.”

They entered the R&D facility, which was as dark and deserted as the repair shop. All they needed to have the thing blow up in their faces was some nerd working late, but Susan said it wasn’t a problem, and he supposed the mysterious Jack knew the whereabouts of anyone with access to this room.

The first thing he saw in the flashlight beam was Fuzzy. The second thing he saw was another Fuzzy. They could be identical twins. Just beyond them was a third mechanical mammoth, the same size and shape but naked, like an elephant, and with a service hatch in its side open. And just beyond that was another automaton with no skin, just metal bones and wires and a maze of tubes.

“Matt,” Susan said, “meet Fuxxy.”

THERE
was no turning back now, Jack knew. He had taken steps that he could conceal for some hours, but not forever. A record of his actions would be stored somewhere in computer memory, and he had no idea where, or how to get at it, or how to alter it, if it could be altered at all. He supposed a computer genius could do it, given enough time, but maybe not. Because, of course, one of the biggest weaknesses of any security system was the watchers themselves. They had to be watched, and at Fuzzyland that was done, as in Las Vegas, by the computers. And Jack Elk, though one of the best in the business at operating top-of-the-line security systems, was no computer genius at all.

When the call had gone out over the underground network for a sympathizer with experience and, most importantly, spotless credentials in his particular field, it would have been too much to hope for that the person they turned up would have any hacking skills. Susan had felt incredibly lucky to find any such man at all, and twice blessed to see by his resume that he was one of the tops in his field. Such men were much in demand, and when he quit his job as shift manager of the Eyes-in-the-Sky team (known to the dealers as the Fink Squad) at the Mirage and moved to Oregon, the Fuzzyland chief of security was happy to get him, and started him off, as per union seniority rules, on the night shift, which was just where he needed to be. He quickly learned the system and settled in peacefully.

Meanwhile, the network was searched for a man who didn’t have to be anywhere near as clean as Jack Elk, and who
was
a first-rate computer genius. That man was located (and
turned out to be a woman, though Jack would never know that), and given the problem of getting into the Fuzzyland security computers.

Jack spent the next three months carrying a credit card-sized digicam in his pocket, snapping pictures of the layout as well as the inputs and outputs and, wherever possible, the internal wiring of the security system. He wrote down the manufacturer and model number of every piece of equipment he could get close to. He took his time, never took chances. He sent the results through the U.S. Mail and a few weeks later got back a two-inch square clear plastic chip and detailed instructions about what to do with it. A week later, in the wee-est of the wee hours of the morning, he plugged the chip into the machine where he had been told to plug it in. A red light flashed briefly on his panel, then quickly went out. He waited one minute, then removed the crystal memory chip, pocketed it, and on the way home put it in an envelope and dropped it in the first mailbox he passed on his way home as eagerly as he would have rid himself of a pound of plutonium.

Then he sat back and waited, doing his job.

Several things could have happened next.

The presence of the tiny spy could have been detected, though it was supposed to protect itself against that. In that case there would have been an investigation which may or may not have led back to Jack Elk. If it did, he would have been quietly dismissed. Nobody noises it around that there has been an attempted breach of their security.

The second possibility was that the hacker genius would be stymied, that the Fuzzyland computers were too well protected for this stunt. Jack could hang around a month or so, then go back to Vegas with his conscience clear: he had done all he could for the Cause.

The third possibility was what had actually happened. He received in the mail a small parcel with nine two-inch plastic cards exactly like the one he had plugged in before, which had explored the system and diagnosed the proper course of action. Each card was clearly numbered with a grease pencil, one through nine. With it was a short list of instructions,
telling him where to remove the appropriate recording cards and plug in the new ones.
When the operation has been accomplished
, said the last part of the printed instructions,
replace these cards with the originals, and there will be no evidence left in the system of just what was done, or how.