They left the building, the door rumbled back down (silently, to Jack), and the unlikely trio headed out across the parking lot to where Susan had parked her big pickup and monster fifth-wheel trailer. Before they even reached it the tailgate was coming down. From his angle Jack couldn't see inside, but he knew there was a dune buggy parked in the garage in back. Susan had been parking the rig there every Sunday night for months now so she could get an early start for the Oregon Dunes near Florence, or some other off-roading destination to spend Monday, her only day off.
The next part was tricky. Jack couldn't see most of it because of the angle, but it seemed to go smoothly. In fifteen minutes Susan climbed into the driver's seat of the pickup, started the engine, and pulled away.
As soon as she was out of camera range Jack punched nine buttons, ejected nine cards into his hands, and replaced them with the proper ones. There wasn't even a flicker on the screens as the recorded views were replaced by the real ones. The Unknown Hacker's magic was still working. SUSAN pulled the truck up beside the security booth and braked gently to a stop. Harry, the night guard, left his booth smiling. He liked Susan. He wouldn't after tonight, but there was nothing she could do about that.
"Getting a late start," Susan said. "Probably head east a bit, there's a good place around Bend."
"Don't break your fool neck, okay?" Harry noticed Matt sitting on the other side.
"He's my guest," Susan said.
"Sir, could you give me your visitor card?"
Matt handed it over, and Harry swiped it through a device that agreed that Matt had been legitimately allowed entrance. Susan opened the door and Harry stepped back to let her out. He followed her around back, and Susan keyed the ramp to come down.
"Damn stupid, having to search this damn thing, Miss Morgan, but you know how it is. Rules are rules."
"I don't mind a bit."
Harry stepped onto the ramp and walked up to the dune buggy parked in the back. There was room to walk around it and into the kitchen and living area. He shone his flashlight around, all the way to a narrow hallway where the bathroom was, and three steps leading up to the bedroom. If Susan was stealing office supplies or circus costumes or even computers she could have concealed a lot of them in this place, but why on earth would she? It would be insulting to Miss Morgan to do a thorough search of this rolling Hilton every Sunday night, and nobody had ever asked him to. He was supposed to make sure nobody in a large vehicle absconded with one of the bigger robotic creatures, and there sure as shit wasn't enough room to hide any of them in here.
And Fuzzy, of course. Harry chuckled at that idea. He closed the door, edged around the buggy, and jumped down to the ground beside Susan.
"Wagons ho!" he said. "Head 'er out!"
"Good-bye, Harry," Susan said. She got back in the cab and drove away.
NOT far down the road Susan pulled onto the shoulder, leaped from the cab, bent over, and threw up. Matt came around the front of the cab but she waved him away until she was through. After a moment, she stood up and gestured to the cab.
"You drive. I've only ever driven it from Portland once and to and from work. I hate driving this thing."
Matt thought about telling her that he didn't have all that much experience towing, himself, but knew she didn't need to hear that. And he had pulled a trailer, on the very day that his life had changed forever on his great Trout-Fishing Adventure, when Warburton came down in a helicopter and tempted him into the clutches of Howard Christian. It hadn't been that tough.
26
"DID you know Houdini made an elephant disappear on stage?" Matt asked.
"Damn right I do. What he did, he led an elephant into a big box, closed it up, had stagehands turn it ninety degrees, and then raised curtains in the front and back. There were two big holes in the box, it seemed like you could look through it and see the back of the stage. No way an elephant could be in there. The thing is, he did it with mirrors. I couldn't figure out a way to make that work with Harry going inside. Take this exit."
They were barreling through the night at a perfectly legal fifty-five miles per hour. The freeway was straight and nearly empty. It was half an hour since Matt had taken over and they were passing through the community of Troutdale. Matt eased the truck onto the exit ramp and followed a city street up and over a railroad track.
They had discussed this leg of the journey. "You're the mathematician," Susan had said, "you figure the odds." It was a complex equation.
Howard Christian would discover his most prized possession was missing by about six at the latest, three hours away. That would happen when Fuzzy's morning attendants arrived for work and found the woman they were supposed to relieve, the graveyard watcher, had not been there all night. ("Of course Howard would never leave Fuzzy unattended, not even for a minute," Susan had said when Matt asked. "That was the easiest part of this whole deal. There are two girls who work that shift, and I told each of them the other was on duty tonight.") By then they could be almost to their goal.
Almost. If they kept moving they would avoid the morning rush hour in Portland, but would probably encounter a lot of traffic later on.
Was it better to travel at night, when they were conspicuous, or during the day, when they were one of thousands of big RVs roaring through the scenic Pacific Northwest? Keep moving, and moving fast, or lay low for a bit and lose yourself on the maze of roads that connected I-84 to I-5 to... well, to anywhere.
It all hinged, of course, on Howard.
"Turn in there," Susan said.
Taking it slow and easy, Matt turned into a small parking lot and drove up to a sliding chain-link gate next to a small building with a sign reading TROUTDALE MINI-STORAGE. Susan handed him a card and he swiped it through a security device, and the gate slowly rolled back. "Just up the hill there, turn left. Unit 142."
Susan sat in the dune buggy, released the parking brake, and let it roll backward and down the ramp. She hopped out and steered with one hand as she and Matt rolled it into the garage.
"Nasty thing," she muttered. "I'm glad to see the end of it."
"Did you ever actually drive it?"
"Once. Just so I could talk about the joys of off-roading, if I had to. Let me tell you, it's vastly overrated as well as being environmentally harmful. Come on."
They got into the trailer and Susan released a hidden catch. They struggled to lift the false floor... and there was Fuzzy, lying on his side, his big, horny feet toward the rear, his head scrunched up against the top of a wheel well. He was in a space that he fit into almost as snugly as a guitar fit into a guitar case.
"God, I'm glad this part is over. He loves to go bye-bye—don't you, sweetie?" Susan patted his hairy cheek. "But I was afraid this would take him back to that box they put him in to transfer him from the truck to the zoo compound... never mind. The tranquilizer I gave him did the trick."
Matt had been amazed at how quietly Fuzzy had stood as Susan stuck a big needle in a vein in his ear and injected the drug, and how obediently he had gone down on his side. There was something unnatural-looking about an elephant or mammoth lying on his side, but he knew it was a natural behavior for them. And the space he was in... well, Matt was a mathematician and if you had asked him to walk around the trailer and look in the open back door he would have strongly doubted a seven-foot, two-ton mammoth could fit where he was. Susan had had the trailer specially adapted—by a customizer who probably thought she was planning to smuggle a lot of pot somewhere—the floor and sides beefed up, the trap door disguised, extra shocks installed.