Mammoth

27

THE panic button rang in several places other than Fuzzyland. The nearest fire station and the local police were alerted and were soon on their way.

It also rang in Warburton's bedroom, waking him from a sound sleep. He sat up and looked at the communications console beside his bed. When you worked as the chief troubleshooter for Howard Christian you were never far from the vast machine that protected Howard and Howard's interests. He saw at a glance that there was trouble at Fuzzyland.

He punched a few buttons, heard a phone ring and go unanswered. He frowned, punched a few more keys. He knew that now, in the security pit in Oregon, every single screen on the huge video wall would be displaying his no-doubt groggy face, rumpled hair, and the collar of his orange pajamas.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Somebody pick up the fucking phone!"

Somebody did. The face of a frightened young man appeared on his screen.

"Who are you?" the kid asked.

"My name is Warburton, and I am Howard Christian's personal assistant. What is going on?"

"Sir!" the kid shouted, and actually stood up and saluted.

"Sit down, your face is out of the picture."

"Sir! The... the, uh... somebody stole the mammoth. Sir!"

"Stole Fuzzy?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Okay, hold on." He punched a few more buttons and heard the phone ring in Howard's

bedroom. Howard answered on the fourth ring. There was no picture.

"Somebody stole Fuzzy," he said. He listened a moment, heard pretty much what he had expected to hear. He brought the kid back onto his screen.

"Get your supervisor, right now." "Sir... he's... uh, he's gone."

"I mean, sir, he got in his car and drove away. Sir."

Of course. She had help. Warburton rubbed his head. This was going to be no fun at all. He'd

catch her, no question, but it wasn't going to be easy.

"What's your name, son?"

"Darryl, sir."

"Listen very carefully, Darryl. Are the police and fire units there yet?"

"No, sir."

"Okay. When they get there, you are going to tell them you hit the button accidentally."

"But, sir, you can't hit the—"

"Listen very carefully, Darryl. I know you're going to look a little foolish. Don't worry about it.

Your job is secure. In fact, you are in for a promotion, starting tomorrow, if you simply tell this harmless little lie. We have the situation under control down here. Darryl, are you still listening?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Tell this little lie, and you are going to be a very, very happy man. You are going to find some money in your bank account. A good deal of money. Okay, Darryl?"

"I understand, sir."

"Good. Now go meet the firemen." Warburton immediately started making more phone calls.

DARRYL hung up the phone and looked at Ed Crane, who had been listening in. "What about me?" Ed said. "You, Ed, are going to back my play, and I know Mr. Warburton will take care of you. It's none

of our business, right?"

"Right."

Darryl grasped the clear plastic cover that had covered the panic button and twisted it off. He dropped the cover into his pocket and headed out to eat crow in front of the firemen, a big smile on his face. THE phone woke Andrea first. Howard could sleep through an earthquake. She shivered. She hated staying over at Howard's apartment in his damn tower, she knew it would fall over in a quake. But he loved it way the hell up here, and she hadn't talked him out of it. Yet. She shoved him once, twice. That particular phone wouldn't ring with that particular tone unless it was very, very important. He snorted, and sat up quickly.

"Warburton wants you." She sat back and watched as he punched the speakerphone button.

"Yeah?"

"Somebody stole Fuzzy."

Later, Andrea thought that most men, ambushed by a statement like that, musty-headed with sleep, would have said, What do you mean, somebody stole Fuzzy? What Howard said, after only a half-second pause, was...

"That bitch!"

Howard kept talking. In fact, he continued to pace the room for the next fifteen minutes, seeing nothing, totally focused on the phone pressed to his ear, pausing only to curse steadily as he dialed another number. Andrea didn't need to hear the other sides of the various conversations. She was fairly good at deduction herself.

She went to the big closet and scanned the clothes inside. They would be returning to Oregon, possibly driving down back roads and/or tramping around in the woods. She slipped out of her nightgown and put on a pair of jeans she had paid four hundred dollars for in Switzerland, even though she knew something very similar could be had for twenty dollars at Target. What was money for if you couldn't enjoy shopping? She found a blouse that looked good on her and would be warm. She put on running shoes. Then she followed Howard around, putting her hand on his shoulder to stop him, prompting him to lift first one foot and then the other so she could slip a pair of jeans over the boxer shorts he always wore to bed. She got a shirt on him in similar fashion. She set out a pair of shoes but didn't try to put them on him yet. Then she rang for the night bodyguard and houseboy, and pointed them to the suitcases that were always kept packed. She told them to carry them to the elevator, and call the helicopter pilot to warm up the chopper.

There was nothing in the suitcases or in the closet suitable for the conditions they might be encountering. She would make some calls herself, once they were in the jet, get somebody to have parkas and Gore-Tex coats and warm wool socks and good hiking boots in their sizes waiting for them when they landed at PDX. It was a little more than two hours to Portland; that ought to be enough time.

She tried not to smile. She had to admit she was glad for the excuse to get back out of this terrorist magnet, this needle on the world's largest seismograph, this damn Resurrection Tower. And she liked an adventure. I'm amazed at you, Susan, she thought. She liked the woman, and she had just made the biggest mistake of her life, other than carrying a torch for that hopeless nerd Matt Wright. But look who's talking, she told herself. She watched affectionately as Howard, supernerd himself, paced the room.

And he worshipped her. She was used to that. Millions worshipped her, and it didn't mean much to her anymore. At first, sure, but now she was devoted to her art, and to her causes. She would do anything for those two things, and for Howard.

Howard felt the same about her, and about Fuzzy.

Poor Susan.

And yet, in a part of her mind, she had to admit she was... what? Pulling for her? No, certainly not that, if Susan got away with this it would devastate Howard.

But she felt admiration for this incredible stunt. Damn it, the girl had guts.

MICHAEL Bartlett sat in his rented truck in the parking lot of a Goodwill store in the town of Sandy, Oregon, a town that had grown hugely in the last few years because it was just down the road from Fuzzyland. His driver's license was good, there were no warrants on him. He had led a very clean life for the last two years... not that it had done him any good. Before, he had not been good at waiting. He always wanted to be moving, always wanted some action. Now, he was an expert at waiting. Three years in jail did that to you. You learned to wait patiently, or you went crazy.

He had waited a long time for this moment. Many times he had despaired that it would ever come—the man was just too powerful, too unreachable. He had imagined a dozen ways to kill him, and he thought a few of them might actually work—the man's security was good but he was often careless. But he didn't want to kill Howard Christian, not really, he didn't think of himself as a killer, only as an avenger, a righter of wrongs, a liberator of the oppressed.

No, what he had been waiting for was the opportunity to kick Howard Christian in the balls, very, very, very hard. Michael Bartlett, in what by now seemed almost like a previous life, had once gone by the nom de guerre of Python.

Oddly enough, he was never charged with the destruction he had helped to bring about at the warehouse in Santa Monica. Every shred of evidence had been hurled into the past. The site was excavated but not even a piece of foundation was found. Sometime in the intervening ten to fifteen thousand years the whole structure must have been washed away in a flood or a series of them, buried, and eventually covered by the metropolis. Christian didn't want to prosecute, anyway, he didn't need the possible bad publicity, the demonstrations by animal rights and antiabortion nuts.

He came from an upper-middle-class family but his parents were dead, he had spent his small inheritance, and he didn't have much money of his own. He had a college degree but hadn't worked in his field for some years, devoting himself to the cause of animal liberation. He came out of the joint determined to stay away from any criminal activity whatsoever, for all time, end of story, though he intended to keep in contact with old friends from the Movement. But no more action, no more conspiracy. He was well and truly rehabilitated.

Then he found out he couldn't get a job. No, that wasn't quite right. He got hired several times, once went as long as two weeks before being inexplicably fired. No explanation, sorry, man, it just turns out we don't need you after all. Here's your paycheck and there's the door.

At the last place he was fired the boss relented a little. "It was Howard Christian," he admitted. "Somebody working for him. Some... pressure was brought to bear. Sorry, Michael, I can't afford to piss that man off. Good luck."

Good fucking luck. He thought about bringing a lawsuit, contact the Equal Opportunity Commission or whatever it was, but knew instinctively there was very little chance, and he had no money. Money talks, and apparently Howard Christian was willing to spend significant money to make Michael Bartlett's life hell.

Shortly after he realized that, he was kicked out of his small apartment.

Howard didn't bother him when he got a job washing dishes or mopping floors, and never approached the landlords of the rattrap single-room-occupancy hotels he stayed at. But he knew that somewhere in the vast Christian organization there was an employee tasked with keeping an eye on Michael Bartlett and making damn sure he was never far from homelessness and hunger. He had, in fact, experienced both of those things several times in a year and a half, before Susan Morgan contacted him.

Yes, sir, just one good, hard kick in the nuts...

Headlights turned into the parking lot. Bartlett watched the guy kill his lights and hurry from the car.

"I was supposed to ask you for a code word," the guy said.

"Python," Bartlett replied. "What's wrong? You weren't supposed to be here for three hours."

"Never mind, it all blew up. Let's get the fuck out of here."

"What about Fuzzy? Did they get away with Fuzzy?"

"Yeah, for all the good it'll do them." Python smiled, and started the engine.

"What's she like?"

She smiled at him. "You're a fan?"

"Who isn't? Actually, I've only seen a couple of her movies, but I thought she was pretty good."

Outside the sun was probably coming up, though they hadn't looked. The cars would be creeping along on I-84. There was no point in moving until nine o'clock. They hadn't talked a lot because the plan was now set and there was no point in hashing it all out again unless one of them had a new thought, and neither of them had. Both were too buzzed to sleep or make love—besides, Fuzzy would be watching, it wouldn't feel right.

Matt thought he could really get to resent Fuzzy, if he let himself.

Of course, they had a lot of catching up to do, much they had to tell each other, but each was a little worried about getting into that.

"I like her," Susan said. "Mostly. I'm not sure if I've ever seen the real Andrea; I'm not sure, in a way, if there is a real Andrea, if you know what I mean. I think she's played the part of Andrea for a long time. I can't imagine what she sees in Howard, and yet they are two of a kind, in a way. I've seen little flashes of something..."

"Of what?"

"Something that tells me that I wouldn't want to be between her and something she really wants. But I think she's basically a good person. One of the reasons is this guy, this 'Python,' Michael Bartlett. We were talking one day—she likes to come by and visit Fuzzy when she can, sometimes without Howard. We were talking about Howard—she likes to do that, and I try to pretend we don't hate each other, but I don't think I fool her very much—and she admitted he has his failings. He is capable of acting like a big spoiled baby when he doesn't get his way. God, do I ever know that."

"He kept firing you."

"Until he finally conceded Fuzzy won't respond to anybody but me. But he'll always resent me, because I stand between him and his favorite toy. Anyway, she was trying to talk Howard out of this... hell, it's almost like a Sicilian vendetta, except Howard isn't a killer. Whenever Bartlett finds work, Howard gets him fired. He once bought an apartment building just so he could kick Bartlett out of it."

"Can he do that? What about tenants' rights?"

"Sure, if he's going to tear the building down, which is what he did. He'll end up making a profit on the deal, can you believe it? Anyway, Andrea thought she about had Howard convinced to let the poor bastard alone. Next she was going to get Howard to tell Bartlett about it, shout 'olly-olly-oxen-free,' like a kid on a playground, so he can get back to his life. Right now, Bartlett doesn't even try to get a job."

"I've only seen him once, the same time you did; he was the handcuffed guy with the bloody face. Not the one who was praying; the other one. I've only contacted him by email. Anyway, he was the one who found the hacker who let us get around the security system, and he was supposed to help Jack get away, switching cars in case the police started looking for Jack's. He's made some other arrangements." She paused, and looked at Matt's face in the odd light cast by the Coleman electric lantern on the floor in front of them. "What you're asking is, do I like him, right?"

"Swear to god, Susan, I'm not jealous."

"No, I don't think you are. In his emails, he comes across as a sanctimonious jerk. Maybe what you're asking me is, what's come over me? What made me do this? Have I turned into an animal rights fanatic?"

Matt grinned. "Yeah, I guess that's what I must have been asking."

She punched his shoulder, then rubbed her thigh. He had seen the deep scar tissue there. She had quivered when he first touched it but he had remained firm and she had slowly relaxed. In the course of their lovemaking he had kissed it once, lightly.

"It started when Big Mama almost killed me. My fault. You never, never forget for a moment that an elephant—let alone a mammoth—is a big, powerful, sometimes willful animal. I turned my back on her, and she dug her tusk into my leg and flipped me twenty feet across the stall. I blacked out almost at once, but they tell me she was straining on her leg chain. She would have killed me if she could have reached me."

Matt had been alarmed, years ago, when he was doing some reading on elephants so as to be better able to talk to her, to discover that the occupation of elephant keeper was one of the most hazardous professions in the world, right up there with test pilot. Susan had once told him that the question when working with elephants was not if you would get hurt, but when, and how bad.

"In the hospital I had a lot of time to think. Did you ever see King Kong? The original, 1933 or something like that?"

"Yeah. Pretty amazing for its time, I guess."

"I saw it when I was four or five. And sure, it looks phony today, didn't scare me a bit, but it made me cry. I watched it again from my hospital bed. The guy who brings Kong to New York, he walks out on the stage with the poor beast in chains, and he says—and I memorized these lines, he says: 'He was a king and a god in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, a show to gratify your curiosity.'

"Can you think of a better description of Big Mama? She was the matriarch of the herd. She ruled everything, as far as her world extended. She was a queen and a goddess in the world she knew. Now she is trotted out into a show ring twice a day in chains. Mondays off. Wouldn't you be pissed?"

"I started questioning my life. And no, I haven't joined any radical animal rights groups. I don't think animals can have 'rights,' as I understand the word. I'm against cruelty. I don't like fur farms or trapping, I could never be a hunter, but I'm not against it. I don't like medical research on primates but I try not to think about it too much. I don't eat a lot of red meat but I wear leather shoes and I eat fish and fowl.

"I guess what I feel so strongly now is, there is a difference between domesticated animals and wild animals. I still favor zoos for species survival. But I realized I no longer felt it was right to 'tame' wild animals and make them perform. Working elephants in Burma is one thing, it's not much different from using a horse to pull a carriage. But putting them in show business... it's beneath their dignity. And that came very hard to me, Matt, because I grew up in show business, and I'm at the top of the heap right now. And I realized I just can't do it anymore. End of sermon. The congregation will now sing hymn number fifty-two, 'Born Free.' "

Matt had been so fascinated just watching her face as she told the story that it took him a moment to realize she was waiting for a response. Anxiously.

"Amen, sister," he said. "I admit I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but that all sounded right to me. I wince when I see those pictures of rabbits with cosmetics being tested on their eyes, but I don't much care what they do to a lab rat. And I've eaten rabbit. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, I don't know."

They both looked at Fuzzy, who was swaying happily and slowly chewing a mouthful of hay in that peculiar back-and-forth jaw motion that worked like a grindstone.

"I'm so glad he's so good-natured," Susan said. "You know, he hasn't seen sunshine or breathed open air for three years?"

"That seems stupid."

"The last time he was outdoors was the day some nut flew over in one of those ultralight airplanes and started shooting at him."

You're kidding seemed an idiotic thing to say, so Matt said nothing.

"We were just lucky it was so windy that day he couldn't aim straight, or maybe he was just a miserable shot. The security guard was better. He put a round into the engine and brought the guy down. He was cheerful about the whole thing. Said he wanted to be the only man alive to bag an actual mammoth. Maybe he thought we'd let him have the head, I don't know. He said he didn't mind going to jail. What were we going to charge him with, murder?"

"World's full of nuts."

"That's what Howard said, too. From then on Fuzzy got his exercise running around in a big covered yard with me on his back. I suspect the shooter is living on the streets of skid row in Portland now. I mean, considering what Howard did to Michael Bartlett, what do you think he thought up for that asshole?"

"Matt, do you think the plan is stupid? Is this all pointless? Can I ever get Fuzzy to a place where he can roam around outdoors?"

Matt knew a lie wouldn't do.

"Fuzzy can never live a 'normal' mammoth life," he said, slowly.

"I don't mean that, I know that's impossible. Mammoths are social, they live in herds—at least until they reach sexual maturity, if they're male, and if they're like elephants, which I think they are. No... I mean..."

Matt took her hand.

"The plan is not idiotic. If it works, it'll get Fuzzy nearer to a normal life than anything I could think of. So it's not pointless. Obviously, I can't tell you if it'll work or not. But I think we have a

chance."

"You do?"

"I do."

"That's all I ask for."

She leaned her head on his shoulder and they didn't say anything for a long time.