Susan stood beside Fuzzy on the other side of the heavy fence. Between the two fences was the male assistant handler, an old friend of Susan's, who guarded a gate through which he would let groups of two or three children to a caged enclosure where they could actually reach out and stroke Fuzzy's fur. Most of the children did this in absolute, awed silence, so delicately and tentatively that it was as if they feared their tiny hands could somehow hurt the giant beast. Matt noticed that one of the kids, a girl of about seven, was careful to keep her left side turned away from the people she was with. He glimpsed a hideous burn, and a nose that was in the process of being reconstructed. The look of sheer delight on the undamaged side of the girl's face made the back of Matt's throat burn, and he had to turn away.
What am I doing here? Is this a good idea?
But it was too late for that.
Susan caught his eye, and unobtrusively turned her head and gestured toward a door off to Matt's left. He nodded, trying not to glance too obviously at the cameras set high in the walls of the enclosure. Once inside, he switched on the lights.
This was Susan's office, and it was much like any office anywhere, dominated by various data systems. There were a few old-fashioned filing cabinets, a coffeemaker, and a microwave. He noticed there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling but they hadn't come on. Instead, a series of attractive lamps at each work area gave the room a warmth unusual for a place like this.
One wall facing her desk was a grid of screens displaying various parts of the mammoth compound. On one Matt could see the children still gathering around Fuzzy. On another was a view of Big Mama's quarters. Two attendants were shoveling hay and fruit into her gigantic manger, while another used a machine a little like a Zamboni to muck out the floor, spray and mop it, and spread fresh straw, all in one operation. All three workers seemed to be keeping a wary eye on the irascible old matriarch, though she was securely chained.
He had been coasting along on the pleasurable high he got from watching the circus show, but now the whole improbable plan, which he had been trying not to think about too much, came crashing back into his consciousness.
Could it work?
Well... yes, the first part, anyway. He was dubious about their long-term chances, but there hadn't been time to fill him in on every detail of that part. But the parts Susan had laid out for him seemed well thought out, as he would have expected of her.
Once more he asked himself why he was doing this.
One reason was obvious, and that was his love for Susan. If she wanted to do this, if she thought it was the right thing to do, then that was good enough for him. There was a second reason he thought they might succeed, but he hadn't figured out how to tell her that one yet. In fact, he hadn't had time to reconcile himself to the insanity of the idea.
The third reason was simple. Any robbery of this magnitude could only be carried out with help from the inside. Susan herself was the person with the most unquestioned access to Fuzzy, but even that would not have been enough, alone.
There was another insider.
25
WHILE Matt waited and fretted in Susan's office, a confederate he had never met was seated in a room, waiting and fretting, only a hundred yards away, beneath the circus grandstand seats. His name was Jack Elk, which had almost been a problem when he was hired, six months earlier. He had been born Jack Elkins but had changed his name legally ten years before, at the age of eighteen.
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.
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.
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."