by Eoin Colfer
“Listen, boy. The general’s plan may seem wantonly cruel to you, but we have been hunting this treasure for decades. Once the hoard is reclaimed, the Horteknut Seven may retire. My general will have restored the honor of her family.”
“I know all about family honor,” said Myles, “and the price that family members must pay for it.”
Gundred resumed her labors, sending the PIGLET lurching forward. “You wouldn’t understand. You were born into a loving family. I had no one until the general discovered me in the ruins of an ACRONYM facility I had demolished. I was half-buried, half-dead, and mute from shock and asphyxiation. Gveld might have left me to rot, but she risked her life to drag me out and nurse me back to health. The first words I ever heard her say were I could use a hero like you. And now, twenty years later, I am the Horteknut Number Two.”
Myles lowered himself to a Beckettian joke. “Yes, you are certainly Number Two. Murdering pixels and children.”
“That is perhaps not as I would wish it, but Gveld is my general. Now and always.”
Myles disagreed. “Not always, Gundred. Very soon she will be a leader no more. In fact, if you would allow me to make a prediction based on both my knowledge of your plans and my faith in my own abilities, I would say that Gveld Horteknut’s days as a general will be over before the sun comes out tomorrow afternoon.” And as he said this, Myles watched Gundred’s face closely. The dwarf flinched, and the twin knew he was on the right track when her tone became suddenly aggressive.
“If I were you, I would be more concerned with what my comrade Axborn will do to your parents if this does not go how we wish it to go. For although you did not nominate them for your Irish Backstop, your brother involved them by following you to our lair. My general has tasked Axborn to chew his way back to Dalkey Island and contain the situation.”
Myles was concerned but not panicked. Panicking was only of use when all intellectual routes had been exhausted. He would panic if the time came that there was nothing else to do.
Gundred put all her energy into cycling for a long minute until the PIGLET broke through to open water. She cranked the digging rig around to the stern, where it operated as a propeller system, and for once Myles was impressed.
“That explains the angle of the blades,” he said. “This is the first clever thing I’ve seen from you people.”
The PIGLET made lighter work of the new liquid element, and their speed picked up by a rate of knots. Myles watched as the clear tidal water was infiltrated by murky harbor slicks and noted with some scientific interest a luminous weed he could not identify that seemed to be responding to the movement of fish rather than currents.
Gundred stayed silent for several minutes, channeling her anger into the PIGLET controls that she operated with violent gusto, but eventually she had to speak. “You think you’re so clever? By tomorrow afternoon’s sunrise, indeed.”
Myles raised a finger. “Not sunrise. The sun will already be up relative to our position, that is. I meant after the eclipse. The solar eclipse tomorrow. That’s when you Horteknuts plan to make your big move.”
“You’re guessing, Fowl,” snarled Gundred, pedaling as though she were repeatedly stomping on a certain human’s head.
“I am deducing,” corrected Myles. “And if I may say so, it’s an educated deduction. Hardly a deduction at all, really, considering the facts I have in my possession.”
Gundred steered around a tower of partially sunken shopping carts. “My job was to bring you up to speed, then give you your orders.”
“Why don’t you let me bring myself up to speed and you drive the PIGLET?” said Myles. “That way both of us are playing to our strengths.”
Gundred was oh-so-tempted to jettison Myles there and then, but her general’s orders specified no killing humans until the part of the plan that required the killing of humans, so she did not seal off the passenger compartment and flood it. Instead, she imagined the steering wheel was Myles’s throat and squeezed it till the wood cracked.
“Why don’t you do that, Fowl? I’ll just sit here and marvel at your genius.”
“Finally, you are speaking sense, Mademoiselle Gundred,” said Myles, sitting up to deliver his speech. “I believe this entire misadventure was initiated last year, when I hacked the ACRONYM servers. The Horteknut band had probably insinuated a malware worm into their files, and so when I downloaded them, I unwittingly took the worm, too. Correct so far?”
Gundred decided to split hairs. “We don’t call it a worm. We call it a spyder. I created it.”
“A spider?” said Myles. “Oh, I see, you mean spyder, with a Y. How fun. To continue, I downloaded your spyder, and so now it’s in my systems, keeping a close eye on my every keyboard stroke.”
“You had no idea. We’ve been reading your secret journal for nearly a year.”
“And during that year I was mostly concentrating on the ACRONYM sites. Watching as the LEP shut them down one by one.”
“Until…”
“Until they set their sights on the penultimate facility, in Florida.”
“Which was special because…?” Gundred prompted.
“Because that is the most secure building in the world. It’s inside an army base that is surrounded by a swamp and on an island, for heaven’s sake.”
“Impenetrable,” said Gundred, who thought she was agreeing.
Myles corrected her yet again, which he enjoyed. “No. It’s penetrable, but the penetrators would never escape. A one-way trip as it were.”
“The entire facility was rigged to sink rather than expose ACRONYM’s secrets. Which was not a bad idea.”
“Not a bad idea indeed if you are an ACRONYM director,” agreed Myles. “But General Horteknut did not wish this particular site to sink, because then it would be difficult to control the scene. And she needed to control the scene in order to extract ACRONYM’s treasure.”
“Our treasure,” snapped Gundred. “The remaining ingots of the Horteknut hoard. ACRONYM has been using it for hundreds of years to fund their operations against the People. It is sacrilege that our own gold is used against us. Soon it will be returned to its rightful home.”
Myles tapped his teeth. “In Gveld’s mouth?”
Gundred bristled. “Her grill was made from recovered ACRONYM gold. My general wears it as a reminder of her mission.”
“She really shouldn’t,” noted Myles. “ACRONYM tags its gold with radiation. It’s in the files.”
Gundred released a water-cam from the PIGLET’s roof panel; it floated to the surface and broadcast a live feed to the craft’s left porthole. Myles immediately recognized the industrial end of Dublin’s docklands with its unusual mixture of cruisers and cargo ships tied up on the far shore.
“The general’s mouth is the general’s business,” said Gundred as they passed below the East Link Bridge. “Tell me what you know of our plan if you wish to see your brother ever again.”
“The general’s plan was both elementary and ingenious, which the best plans often are,” said Myles. “Gveld used her missile over Florida to trigger ACRONYM’s contingency plan, which was to move the treasure to their backup facility in Dublin if Florida ever came under attack. I imagine you already tried to raid this facility and failed, so now you need me to try again.”
“We tried from underground but were thwarted,” said Gundred. “Now we must try from the surface.”
Myles nodded. “And I have no doubt you will use your previous position to fake a small earthquake.”
Gundred grunted an affirmative. There was no harm in confirming the boy’s theories. In fact, he needed all available information if he was to succeed in his mission.
“We evacuated after the last attempt,” she said. “But we left ourselves a way back in. Vigor and the two warriors your brother somehow incapacitated will take their positions in the sub-basement. Those two are most eager to make up for their shortcomings.”
“The ideal time to mount the assault would b
e tomorrow during the solar eclipse,” noted Myles. “When most of the city will be distracted and extremely photosensitive dwarves will not be in danger from the sun’s rays. Before the sun comes out tomorrow afternoon.” Myles tapped his chin. “But the big question is, why do you need me?”
“That’s what I keep asking myself,” said Gundred, steering the PIGLET starboard toward the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
“I understand why you tried to kill us,” said Myles without emotion. “You realized that I was studying the Florida site and planning a reconnaissance flyover. It was perfect. All you had to do was strap Lazuli to a missile you had already planned to fire, and the wreckage would reveal both Fowl and fairy corpses. ACRONYM would lose their minds, thinking the facility was both compromised and under international scrutiny. And the LEP would quite reasonably believe that we Fowl boys had turned Specialist Heitz to our side and all this was some kind of botched Fowl scheme. In the end, the Horteknut band would get rid of their competition. But your plan to murder us failed, so you had to snatch me from the island instead.”
“And replace you with a clone to fool your parents,” said Gundred, eager to provide the Fowl boy with information he might be unaware of.
“I imagine it is a copy rather than a clone,” said Myles. “Clones take a long time to grow. A copy can be printed up in a day.”
As Myles casually displayed his brainpower, Gundred began to realize why they did in fact need the boy.
“And the only possible reason for the switch would be that there is an unforeseen problem that only I can help you with.”
Gundred nudged the PIGLET into a cavity in the quay wall under the bridge and turned yet another crank, ratcheting out two stability clamps to hold the craft in place.
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me what our problem is, Myles Fowl?”
“If you like,” said Myles. “It’s urgent, of course, if you are to stick to your new eclipse timetable. Since you apparently need a human to solve this problem, it must involve interaction with humans. If you need me in particular, then it is by nature a problem of the intellect, as Beckett would be the better choice for physical or dexterous work of any kind. And since we find ourselves moored here beside the Convention Centre Dublin, which is indeed a convention center, but also the top two floors are the ACRONYM field office that now houses the famous Horteknut hoard, I deduce that the problem is here and it is most likely an issue of access. How am I doing, Number Two?”
“Not bad,” admitted Gundred.
“In conclusion, I would say that the only mystery here is why you have made me wait until now to reveal the specifics of your access issue, as my not-inconsiderable brain could have been working on the problem since we left the lair. It is almost as if you don’t want me to succeed.”
“Almost,” agreed Gundred, and she mirrored a video from her communicator on the porthole screen. “But I’d prefer that you do.”
“Ah,” said Myles when the video was over. “I see. That is a problem.”
The Convention Centre Dublin
Gveld and her band had been surveilling Dublin’s convention center for months, ever since ACRONYM had realized, as had Myles, that their facilities were being shut down by mysterious raids or natural-looking disasters. The shadowy intergovernmental organization had also realized that it was only a matter of time before Florida came under attack, too, and when that happened, they would need a fallback base of operations. Florida had been the last stand, secure as it was, but whoever was infiltrating the isolated and fortified facilities seemed to relish the isolation and somehow glide through fortifications like they weren’t even there. It made sense to the powers-that-be at ACRONYM that the whoever in question was probably the magical group they had been hunting for centuries, i.e., fairies.
Of course fairies would prefer to operate in isolated spots, and naturally their superior technology rendered any human defenses useless, so some months previously ACRONYM had gone down a different route and chosen as their fallback site the Convention Centre Dublin. They hung on to their defenses but chose a site in the middle of the city where people were encouraged to congregate on the lower floors so there would be no sneaking in for fairies.
This was not the problem, because:
1. The Reclaimers were used to blending in with humans.
And…
2. They didn’t need to go any farther than the elevators anyway.
The problem was that someone at the fairy-hunting agency must have recognized that the fairy folk knew every play in the ACRONYM book. So this person had gone off book and old-school.
Up until the previous week the open-plan lower floors had been leased to a thriving 24/7 e-storage solution company by the name of Flash, which guaranteed constant activity in the center. Now, though, the company had completely vanished, leaving nothing behind but their oversized red FLASH signage. So instead of weaving their way through a crowded shop floor, any disguised dwarves would have to cross an open atrium under the watchful eyes of a highly visible security detail on the middle balcony and possibly a highly invisible detail somewhere else.
“When did this happen?” Myles asked.
“We’re not certain,” said Gundred. “Recently. They just kicked them out, which messes with our Plan B. They know we’re coming and maybe the boss here decided to ignore the main office and get rid of distractions.”
“And your original plan cannot be salvaged?”
“No,” said Gundred. “ACRONYM didn’t send in the gold by truck as we’d thought they would. They helicoptered it in from the airport. Our guys were sitting downstairs like dummies while the humans tucked the gold away in the safe.”
“I see, but surely you have another strategy.”
“Of course we do. In the event of a seismic occurrence, the treasure is shunted automatically into the executive elevator. That elevator is built to withstand the entire building collapsing.”
“So what do you need from me?”
“I need you to get Gveld and me into that central elevator.”
“And then what?”
“And then we fake a small earthquake and the gold is transferred to the elevator. You wanted an Irish Backstop? This is your Irish Backstop. Get us into that elevator during the eclipse. You have one hour to come up with a plan. After that, the torturing begins, and just to be clear, you die last.”
Myles spoke without thinking, which was unlike him. “If I were you, I’d kill me first, because, in all modesty, I am the most dangerous of your opponents.”
Gundred nodded slowly, taking this advice to heart at least. “Do you know something, human? I just might see what I can do about that.”
Truth be told, Myles had already put together a plan for what he would do should ACRONYM decide to switch up their procedures. Myles prided himself on plotting for all eventualities, not just Plan A and Plan B, and in this situation, he had calculated that there were six probable variations in procedure and thirty improbable ones. Most clandestine agencies remained in the shadows by being unpredictable, and ACRONYM was more shadowy than most, but what had happened here was straight out of the middle-management-mutiny handbook. The regional boss must have completely freaked out when major responsibility came his way and decided to ignore orders from Florida—he was the ranking officer on the ground in Dublin, and he was going to run security the way he saw fit. And he saw fit to double the guard and land the gold on the roof. Middle-management mutiny was number five on Myles’s list and landing the gold on the roof was number six. So, the situation here was a combination of five and six with added improbable variation fourteen, which was boot out the tenants.
The solution to this was highly unusual but also already in place, and it only took Myles a couple of minutes to set it in motion on the PIGLET’s smart screen.
He pointed a finger at the screen. “Look, Mademoiselle Gundred,” he said. “All done.”
Gundred took her time reading. “So, this will happen before the eclipse?”
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“An hour before,” confirmed Myles. “It’s all right there.”
“It’s ‘all right there’ in theory. Are you sure these people will answer the call?”
Myles was sure. “I am aware that human reaction seems like a variable in this equation, but trust me, it’s a constant. It happens every day. More and more, in fact.”
Myles resisted the urge to lecture his captor, as he had no desire to antagonize her any further, especially with Beck and Lazuli in mortal danger, but it seemed to him that Gundred was taking an age to read through a plan that was already in motion.
We could be on the way back to that basement in Dalkey, he thought. We didn’t need to waste time coming out here in the first place.
Myles tried to distract himself by looking around. He had never seen Dublin’s port from this vantage and was surprised by how many access steps there were from the seawall to the dockside above.
From the age of barges, he supposed.
He also noticed how few of the pedestrians who hurried past, seemingly conversing with thin air, actually looked down at the water.
Too busy on their ear pods, he realized. And even if people had glanced downward, all they would have seen was yet another discarded shopping cart that had been tossed into the river.
And there is very little danger of anyone actually fishing it out.
After several minutes of Gundred checking through his plan, Myles let out a mildly irritated groan, which prompted her to ask, “Am I keeping you, Mud Boy? Do you have somewhere to be?”
Before Myles could answer, Gundred thrust her communicator into his hand. “Here, take this. There’s a call for you.”
Myles instinctively knew where this call was coming from, and he steeled himself for what he was about to see.
Stay in control, Dr. Fowl, he told himself. Emotion is the enemy of intellect.
Myles looked at the screen and saw his parents in Villa Éco’s safe room. They were not holding a communicator, which meant that someone was pointing a camera at them. That someone was Axborn, Myles guessed. The dwarf with the funny bow beard.