“Don’t even think it! You know the Watch. They don’t share info. They try to dismantle you. God, but listen. Why does the zoo sound so much worse than it looks?”
Although a few of the security light arrays in the interior of the zoo still raged, after several minutes they had begun to shut down. It was an almost comically worthless energy-saving aspect of the system of motion detectors. Why, after all, would a detector at the zoo ever be triggered in the middle of the night unless a dire occasion had arisen, in which case there could not possibly be a valid reason for such a light, once triggered, to turn off again. Perhaps the zoo’s own security team, run by David Beauchamp, was primarily concerned with theft and vandalism deterrence. (A few of the animals, such as okapi, were reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, though precisely what a burglar would do in England with a two-hundred-pound extinct-in-the-wild forest ungulate from Central Africa seemed hard to fathom.)
Atwell bit her lower lip; she seemed to consider Astrid’s question grave. She said, “I just don’t know. Whatever’s in there—this jumbie or whatever it is—it’s still there.”
“Jumbie?” She giggled. “What’s that then? Oliver Cromwell’s got one, too?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, ‘evil spirit’—or ghost. Guyanese, ma’am. You know—creole.”
“Mmm,” said Astrid. “Island lore?”
“Ha! Guyana’s no island. That’s Britain.” Atwell grinned. “And this zoo, this island of almost-extinct pets in cages. Either a very intelligent animal has broken loose, and let the jackals out, or a very foolish person has broken in. How long for Beauchamp, you suppose?”
“Who knows?” said Astrid. “Oh, how I loathe that man. Sorry to say that, but he really gets on my knob.”
In the firearm training sessions Astrid had helped lead for the zoo team, Beauchamp had rushed her along and acted as if the constabulary’s onetime involvement with the zoo practically contaminated his staff. Beauchamp seemed to have neither particular respect for, nor desire to be addled with, schooling in safety or crisis management.
One of Astrid’s few friends in the zoo reported that he occupied his important job unhappily, with the impatient but apparently plausible hope that he might obtain some administrative position on the ZSL board, which would have carried with it a title of nobility. He scorned the ZSL’s own public relations team and craved WikiNous attention, so much so that the ZSL’s spokespeople steered visiting reporters away from him. Once, during a grim morning training session on the topic of what would happen if an animal needed to be shot, Astrid had tried to lighten things up. She pointed to an anteater in the Moonlight World exhibit, and made a wisecrack about the dangers an escaping “bull aardvark” could pose. Many of the zoo staff members laughed.
“That’s a Bolivian anteater,” Beauchamp had said, seething from the back, wagging his finger. “It’s an important distinction. And it’s a female specimen. And her name is Dinah.” With that, Beauchamp peered into the glass and said with a straight face, “Right, Dinah?”
He was what Astrid considered an animal fanatic. She adored animals—but she wasn’t a nut. Still, Atwell’s point was procedurally correct, she knew. The man knew his specimens.
“I’ve heard he’s difficult,” said Atwell.
“Yes,” said Astrid. “The zoo’s his babs to take care of. But he’s not going to be right chuffed about tonight.”
“I’ve heard he takes the animals very seriously and all.”
There were two torches in the boot of the pandaglider, along with muscle-slowing batons and extra sets of invisible handcuffs (they weren’t actually invisible, but used magnetic force to impel hands or feet together).
Astrid rummaged through them while Atwell used the comm to make sure Beauchamp and his small team were en route. For a moment, Astrid set the cuffs to reverse polarity and “floated” one cuff piece a few inches above her hand, amusing herself. She kept the torches and batons, and put back the cuffs—what was she going to do, lock up the jackals?
When Atwell came around to the back, she said, “I actually spoke to him. He’s coming. He sounded, erm, whipped up. He said we need to move quickly.”
“He’s whipped up all right, I’m sure.”
“He wants to seal off the zoo. He was beside himself, actually, guv. I told him about the man who claimed to be the watchman and he scarcely seemed to hear me. He wanted to know if we’d established a perimeter. He said it was ‘dead urgent.’ He was rather definite about that. I quote, ‘It’s the last line of defense against tragedy.’”
Astrid gritted her teeth. Had things really progressed into such a grand arena as that—tragedy? Wasn’t this more a mishap?
A few new scattered animal noises began coming from the zoo. This time, they sounded like monkeys or apes shrieking hellishly. It unnerved Astrid badly.