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 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.
At the bottom someone had written in cursive, with a pen, Piece of cake!
And now it was time.
He looked around the room, which had fifteen stations similar to his, which was raised and behind the others, as befitted a shift manager. All the stations faced a long wall with every inch covered in surveillance screens, able to display almost every camera in Fuzzyland at one time. The pictures were constantly changing. There was no earthly reason for such a thing, Jack knew, since each operator looked only at his own twenty-four screens, but display screens were cheap and it made impressive wallpaper to show off to big shots getting a behind-the-scenes tour. It looked like a Hollywood version of a high-security installation. People expected it.
In Vegas, all the stations would be manned 24/7, covering every square inch of public area. At Fuzzyland, after the park closed, there was no need for anything like that level of paranoia. Most of the park had coverage, and every inch of Fuzzy's compound, but there was no need to monitor every camera all the time. Most of them showed nothing but cleaning crews, and after about one A.M. even those guys would go home. Motion detectors would key in a particular camera if something larger than a cat moved anywhere in the park, and Jack or one of his two assistants would take a look and deal with the situation. It was very boring work on the night shift, and boredom is the bane of any security system.
He glanced at his two companions for the night, seated at consoles directly in front of him and just below. To work this shift they didn't exactly have to be the two sharpest pencils in the cup, and they weren't. Security work tended to attract two types: retired cops, and guys who liked to wear police-style uniforms and hoped to one day get a job that would let them carry a gun.
Ed Crane was a perfect example of the first type, a veteran patrolman from the Beaverton force, sixtyish, thick around the middle, more than happy to find a job that let him sit in a soft chair all night and exercise his remarkable ability to sleep soundly with his eyes wide open. Darryl Mosely was the wanna-be: a gangly redhead with bad skin who never failed to show up in the crisply pressed khakis his position entitled him to wear, even though the guys in the pit, including Jack, usually wore street clothes. Darryl was a new hire, had worked there for only a week, and clearly had his eye on bigger things, working his way up in the organization. He was earnest and hard-working, and Jack sort of hated to do this to him. If Susan pulled this off, Darryl was forever going to be one of the guys who let a mammoth be stolen right out from under his nose.
"Got a camera glitch here, chief!"
Jack looked up slowly—It's no big deal, it's just a little problem; we get one every night, don't act strange!—and saw that one of Darryl's twenty-four screens was black.
"Ah... try keying it in again." What the hell was going on?
Darryl did as instructed, and for good measure, flicked the screen a few times with his fingernail on the well-established principle that giving a balky machine a whack or two was apt to fix it. But it didn't.
"Camera's in Fuzzy's compound," Darryl said. "Other two in there look okay, though. Critter's eatin' his way through another bale of hay."
Jack could see that on his own screens.
"How about I go down there and take a look?"
"No!" Jack said, a little too loudly. "Uh... you know we aren't supposed to disturb the big boy unless it's an emergency. He's got his night keeper watching him." He realized he was explaining too much. "Let me see if I can do anything from here."
Do something, do something.
Following a corollary of the same principle Darryl had used earlier, Jack pressed his thumb against each of the nine cards he had replaced... and felt a click on number 9.
"Oops! There we are, back on line," Darryl said.
Jack let his breath out very slowly. He hadn't realized he had been holding it.
"TELL me about this Jack guy," Matt said. "Why's he doing this?"
"Isn't the better question why am I doing this?"
"I've got a feeling that's a much longer story. I just asked because when my mouth is moving my
teeth can't chatter." "I know what you mean." Susan was at a desk, opening and shutting drawers. She found what she needed—one of the ubiquitous plastic cards that a few years ago would have been a CD and a few years before that a floppy disk, and a cobbled-together thing that looked as if it had started out as a remote control for a model airplane—and they went back to the first Fuzzy. Excuse me, Fuxxy. Fuxxy Mark Two, according to Susan.
"Never entered my mind." It hadn't. Matt had wondered, from time to time, if Susan had had any male companionship during his long absence. It would only have been reasonable and natural, and he really didn't care and didn't want to know unless she wanted to tell him. He had only cared if she would take him back, and she had. No, he knew she hadn't gone to bed with Jack because she had said she had only met him once, and it wasn't in her nature to use people that way, to get something from a guy with sex. If she had screwed Jack, it would have been because she liked him, not to enlist him.
"Jack Elk is a lurker around the edges of the animal rights movement. He's a member of the Audubon Society and several other middle-of-the-road animal and conservation groups... pretty much like me. When he was young he went to a few protest marches and such, he was offered the chance to help 'liberate' some minks from a fur farm and declined—which was a good decision, because most of them got arrested and one had a finger bitten off. He's not a joiner and not an activist, at heart."
She lifted the amazingly realistic flap of one of Fuxxy Mark Two's ears and found a slot there to insert the card. When it was in you couldn't even see the slot.
"He is anticircus and antifur and antizoo and a vegetarian, but he's never done much about it, and we were very lucky to find him, because if he'd joined any of the more radical groups he'd never have got past the security checks here. Now hang on a minute here, I only saw this demonstrated once, and I don't want us to get trampled by a mechanical mammoth."
She concentrated on the controller. A green light came on. She punched a few buttons... and Fuxxy Mark Two began to breathe.
I swear it, if it wasn't too late already I'd run to my car and not stop driving until I got to the Nevada state line.