“The door!” Maybeck whispered.
Willa raced to the door and quietly spun the lock.
The people in the hall ran past. She looked at Maybeck and rolled her eyes: that had been too close.
As she rejoined Maybeck, he followed the painted network line to where it had been run along the underside of the bottom shelf. Together they traced it and three others to the interior wall, and along this wall and another set of shelves to where a small hole had been drilled through some plasterboard. A door stood immediately to Maybeck’s right where a wall jutted out. He tried the doorknob.
Locked.
Willa pointed to a small sign that identified the door: JANITOR.
“That’s perfect!” Maybeck said. “It’s certain to have a drain—which is how Philby says they run the wires around the Park.”
“I need something the size of a credit card,” Willa said.
Maybeck looked at her curiously.
“I have brothers who are constantly trying to lock me out of the bathroom. They think it’s funny.”
She found a metal plate on a workbench. She slid it into the crack next to the doorjamb, and the dark room popped open.
“Sometimes I hate being an only child,” Maybeck quipped.
The room was a pile of junk—a neglected storeroom. It took him a minute, but Maybeck located the server mounted beneath a photo-developing bench—a blue-and-silver Dell that looked a lot like a piece of a home stereo.
If they were right, this small box controlled all the holograms of the animals they’d battled, and it possessed the power to erase them all.
“What now?” she asked.
“We don’t just pull the plug. I know that much.”
“A magnet,” she said. “We need a magnet!”
Together, the two returned to the workshop and began searching for anything magnetic. Willa found a couple of small magnets, but they both agreed they wouldn’t be powerful enough to do any real damage. They needed to rearrange all the magnetic information on the hard disk. It was going to take something…
“There!” Maybeck said too loudly.
At that very moment, another line of footfalls had been coming down the hallway. The noise stopped just outside the door. A fist banged on the door.
“Block it!” he hissed, instructing Willa.
For what he’d spotted was currently up near the ceiling. It was a very large device with two metal plates connected by wires; it hung from the end of a hydraulic arm and was clearly meant to raise and lower heavy pieces of the dinosaurs that were under construction or repair.
Willa rolled a tool chest in front of the door and then locked the wheels.
Maybeck threw a switch and worked the hydraulic arm, attaching the magnet to the end of it. He found the power switch and tried it: a wrench and three screwdrivers jumped off a workbench and stuck to the magnet. He’d gotten it too close to the workbench, but he’d proven his point.
He flipped off the switch, and the tools dropped to the floor in a cacophony of banging metal.
Now the people on the other side of the door tried all the harder.
Maybeck wrestled with a giant cotter pin that held the magnet to the arm. He got the magnet free, extended the wire connecting it, and was able to stretch it to all the way inside the dark room. The thing was massive. He knew it had to be right on top of the server to corrupt the hard drive. It took most of his strength to lift the magnet and all his strength to hold it under the counter and against the hidden server.
“Throw the switch!” he called out.
“I’m a little busy here,” Willa said, having dragged a leg of a tyrannosaurus to block the door.
“I…can’t…hold…it,” Maybeck gasped. “Throw the freaking switch.” Only he didn’t say “freaking.”
Willa abandoned the door and ran to the controls. She threw the switch.
The magnet leaped out of Maybeck’s hands and glued itself to the server. A small, green LED on the front—meant to indicate hard-drive activity—turned to amber, then flashed red. Next, all the lights on the server failed completely, and there was an electrical smell in the air.
The second server was dead.
Maybeck and Willa hugged, only to realize what they were doing. Then Willa pushed him away and said, “Don’t disgust me!”
Maybeck brushed off his clothes and quickly changed the subject. “I probably should have checked with Philby before doing that. I hope it doesn’t mess things up.”
The workroom door banged open an inch, the tool carrier sliding on the concrete floor.
Two inches.
Then five.
“What now?” she asked, her voice tight.
Maybeck glanced overhead: it was a drop ceiling, maybe a foot or two lower than the one out in the hallway.