by Eoin Colfer
The next office was not quite so salubrious, the dark cubby of a vice president. No city view, and plain metal shelving. Juliet rearranged the shelving to cover the newly excavated entrance. Mulch knelt at the door, his beard hair latching on to the wood.
“Some vibration outside. That’s probably the compressor. Nothing irregular, so no conversation. I’d say we were safe.”
“You could just ask me,” said Foaly, in his helmet earpiece. “I do have footage from every camera in the building. That’s over two thousand, in case you’re interested.”
“Thanks for the update. Well, are we clear?”
“Yes. Remarkably so. Nothing on this floor, except a guard on the lobby desk.”
Juliet took two gray canisters from her backpack. “Okay. This is where I earn my keep. You stay here. This shouldn’t take more than a minute.”
Juliet cracked open the door, creeping along the corridor on rubber-soled boots. Airplane-style lighting strips were inlaid in the carpet; otherwise the only lighting came from exit boxes over the fire escape doors.
The schematic on her wrist computer told her that she had twenty yards to go before reaching the security office. After that, she could only hope that the oxygen rack was unlocked. And why shouldn’t it be? Oxygen canisters were hardly high-risk objects. At least she would have ample warning if any personnel happened to be doing their rounds.
Juliet crept panther like down the corridor, her footfalls muffled by the carpet.
On reaching the final corner, she lay flat, inching her nose around the bend. She could see the floor’s security station. Just as Pex had revealed under the mesmer, the vault guard’s oxygen canisters were slotted in a rack in front of the desk.
There was only one guard on duty, and he was busy watching basketball on a portable television. Juliet inched forward on her stomach until she was directly below the rack. The guard had his back to her, concentrating on the game.
“What the hell?” exclaimed the security man, who was roughly the size of a refrigerator. He had noticed something in a security monitor.
“Move!” hissed Foaly in Juliet’s earpiece.
“What?”
“Move! You’re showing up on the monitors.”
Juliet wiggled her toe. She had forgotten to keep moving. Butler would never have forgotten that.
Over her head, the guard employed the age-old method of rapid repair, slapping the monitor’s plastic casing. The fuzzy figure disappeared.
“Interference,” he muttered. “Stupid satellite TV.”
Juliet felt a bead of sweat run along the bridge of her nose. The younger Butler reached up slowly and slipped two substitute oxygen canisters into the rack. Oxygen canisters was a bit of misnomer, because there was no oxygen in these canisters.
She checked her watch. It might already be too late.
Above the Spiro Needle
Holly hovered twenty feet above the Needle, waiting for the green light. She was not comfortable with this opera-tion. There were too many variables. If this mission wasn’t so vital to the future of the fairy civilization, she would have refused to participate in it altogether.
Her mood did not improve as the night progressed. Team one was proving extremely unprofessional, bickering like a pair of adolescents. Although, to be fair to Juliet, she was barely beyond adolescence. Mulch on the other hand couldn’t have found his childhood with an encyclopedia.
Captain Short followed team one’s progress on her helmet visor, wincing at each new development. Finally, and against all the odds, Juliet managed to switch the canisters.
“Go,” said Mulch, doing his best to sound military. “I say again, we have a go situation on the black op’ code-red thing.”
Holly shut off Mulch’s communication in the middle of the dwarf’s giggling fit. Foaly could open a screen in her visor if there was a crisis.
Below her the Spiro Needle pointed spaceward like the world’s biggest rocket. Low fog gathered around its base, adding to the illusion. Holly set her wings to descend, dropping gently toward the helipad. She called up the video file of Artemis’s entry to the Needle on her visor and slowed it down at the point where Spiro keyed in the ccess code for the rooftop door.
“Thank you, Spiro,” she grinned, punching in the key.
The door slid open silently. Automatic lights flickered into life along the stairwell. There was a camera every twenty feet. No blind spots. This didn’t matter to Holly, as human cameras could not detect a shielded fairy, unless they were of the type with an extremely high frame-per-second rate. And even then, the frames had to be viewed as stills to catch a glimpse of the fairy folk. Only one human had ever managed to do this. An Irish one, who had been twelve years old at the time.
Holly floated down the stairwell, activating an argon-laser filter on her visor. This entire building could be crisscrossed with laser beams and she wouldn’t know it until she set off an alarm. Even a shielded fairy had mass enough to stop a beam reaching its sensor, if only for a millisecond. The view before her turned a cloudy purple, but there were no beams. She was certain that wouldn’t be the case when they came to the vault.
Holly continued her flight to the brushed-steel elevator doors.
“Artemis is on eighty-four,” said Foaly. “The vault is on eighty-five, and Spiro’s penthouse is on eighty-six, where we are now.”
“How are the walls?”
“According to the spectrometer, mostly Sheetrock, steel studs, and wood paneling in the partition walls.
Except around key rooms, which are reinforced steel.”
“Let me guess; Artemis’s room, the vault, and Spiro’s penthouse.”
“Dead on, Captain. But do not despair. I have plotted the shortest course. I am sending it to your helmet now.”
Holly waited a moment until a quill icon flashed in the corner of her visor, informing her that she had mail.
“Open mail,” she said into the helmet mike, enunciating clearly. A matrix of green lines superimposed themselves in front of her regular vision. Her trail was marked by a thick red line.
“Follow the laser, Holly. Foolproof. No offense.”
“None taken, for now. But if this doesn’t work, I’ll be so offended, you won’t believe it.”
The red laser led straight into the belly of the elevator. Holly floated into the metal box and descended to the eighty-fifth floor. The guiding laser led her out of the elevator and down the corridor.
She tried the door to an office on her left. Locked. Hardly surprising.
“I’m going to have to unshield to pick this lock. Are you sure my pattern is wiped from the video?”
“Of course,” said Foaly. Holly could imagine the childish pout on his lips.
Holly unshielded and took an omnitool from her belt. The omnitool’s sensor would send an X-ray of the lock’s workings to the chip and select the right bit. It even did the turning. Of course, the omnitool only worked on keyhole locks, which, in spite of their unreliability, the Mud Men still used.
In less than five seconds, the door lay open before her.
“Five seconds,” said Holly. “This thing needs a new battery.”
The red line in her visor ran to the office’s center, and then took a right-angle turn downward through the floor.
“Let me guess. Artemis is down there.”
“Yes. Asleep, judging by the pictures coming in on his iris-cam.”
“You said the cell was lined with reinforced steel.”
“True. But no motion sensors in the walls or roof. So all you have to do is burn through.”
Holly drew her Neutrino 2000. “Oh, is that all?”
She chose a spot adjacent to a wall air conditioner and peeled back the carpet. Underneath the floor was dull and metallic.
“No trace, remember?” said Foaly in her earpiece. “That’s vital.”
“I’ll worry about that later,” said Holly, adjusting the AC to EXTRACT. “For now, I need to get him out of there. We’re on
a schedule.”
Holly adjusted the Neutrino’s output, concentrating the beam so it cut through the metal floor. Acrid smoke billowed from the molten gash, and was immediately siphoned off into the Chicago night by the AC.
“Artemis isn’t the only one with brains around here,” grunted Holly, sweat streaming down her face in spite of he helmet’s climate control.
“The AC stops the fire alarm going off. Very good.”
“Is he awake?” asked Holly, leaving the last inch of a two-foot square uncut.
“Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, to use centaurian imagery. A laser carving through the ceiling will do that to a person.”
“Good,” said Captain Short, cutting through the final section. The metal square twisted on a final strand of steel.
“Won’t that make a lot of noise?” asked Foaly.
Holly watched the section fall.
“I doubt it,” she said.
CHAPTER 10
FINGERS AND THUMBS
The Spiro Needle, Artemis Fowl’s cell
Artemis was meditating when the first laser stroke cut through the ceiling. He rose from the lotus position, pulled a sweater over his pajamas and arranged some pillows on the floor. Moments later, a square of metal fell to the floor, its impact silenced by the cushions. Holly’s face appeared in the hole.
Artemis pointed at the pillows. “You anticipated me.”
The LEP captain nodded. “Only thirteen, and already predictable.”
“I presume you used the air conditioner to vacuum the smoke?”
“Exactly. I think we’re getting to know one another too well.”
Holly reeled a piton line from her belt, lowering it into the room.
“Make a loop at the bottom with the clamp, and hop aboard. I’ll reel you in.”
Artemis did as he was told, and in seconds he was clambering through the hole.
“Do we have Mr. Foaly on our side?” he asked.
Holly handed Artemis a small cylindrical earpiece. “Ask him yourself.”
Artemis inserted the miracle of nanotechnology.
“Well, Foaly. Astound me.”
Below in Haven City, the centaur rubbed his hands together. Artemis was the only one who actually understood his lectures.
“You’re going to love this, Mud Boy. Not only have I wiped you from the video, not only did I erase the ceiling falling in, but I have created a simulated Artemis.”
Artemis was intrigued. “A sim? Really? How exactly did you do that?”
“Simple really,” said Foaly modestly. “I have hundreds of human movies on file. I borrowed Steve McQueen’s solitary-confinement scene from The Great Escape and altered his clothes.”
“What about the face?”
“I had some digital interrogation footage from your last visit to Haven. I put the two together, and voilà. Our simulated Artemis can do whatever I tell him, whenever I say. At the moment, the sim is asleep, but in half an hour I may just instruct him to go to the bathroom.”
Holly reeled in her piton cord. “The miracle of modern science. The LEP pours millions into your department, Foaly, and all you can do is send Mud Boys to the toilet.”
“You should be nice to me, Holly. I’m doing you a big favor. If Julius knew I was helping you, he’d be extremely angry.”
“Which is exactly why you are doing it.”
Holly moved quietly to the door, opening it a crack. The corridor was clear and silent, but for the drone of panning cameras and the hum of fluorescent lighting. One section of Holly’s visor displayed miniature transparent feeds from Spiro’s security cameras. There were eight guards doing the rounds on the floor.
Holly closed the door.
“Okay. Let’s get going. We need to reach Spiro before the guards change.”
Artemis arranged the carpet over the hole in the floor. “Have you located his apartment?”
“Directly above us. We need to get up there and scan his retina and thumb.”
An expression flashed across Artemis’s face. Just for a second.
“The scans. Yes. The sooner the better.”
Holly had never seen that look on the human boy’s features before. Was it guilt? Could it be?
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she demanded.
The expression vanished, to be replaced by the customary lack of emotion.
“No, Captain Short. Nothing. And do you really think that now is the time for an interrogation?”
Holly wagged a threatening finger. “Artemis. If you mess with me now, in the middle of an operation, I won’t forget it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Artemis wryly. “I will.”
Spiro’s apartment was directly above Artemis’s cell. It would have made sense to reinforce the same block. Unfortunately, Jon Spiro did not like the idea of anyone spying on him, so there were no cameras in his section of the building.
“Typical,” muttered Foaly. “Power-crazed megalomaniacs never like anyone to see their own dirty secrets.”
“I think someone’s in denial,” said Holly, focusing a tight beam from her Neutrino at the ceiling.
A section of floating ceiling melted like ice in a kettle, revealing the steel above. Molten beads of metal ate into the carpet as the laser sliced through the flooring. When the hole was of sufficient diameter, Holly shut down the beam and popped her helmet camera into the space.
Nothing appeared on the screen.
“Switching to infrared.”
A rack of suits sprang into focus. They might have been white.
“The wardrobe. We’re in the wardrobe.”
“Perfect,” said Foaly. “Put him to sleep.”
“He is asleep. It’s twenty-to-five in the morning.”
“Well, make sure he doesn’t wake up then.”
Holly replaced the camera in its groove. She plucked a silver capsule from her belt and inserted it into the hole.
Foaly supplied the commentary for Artemis.
“The capsule is a Sleeper Deeper, in case you’re wondering.”
“Gaseous?”
“No. Brain waves.”
Artemis was intrigued. “Go on.”
“Basically it scans for brain-wave patterns, then replicates them. Anyone in the vicinity stays in the state they’re in until the capsule dissolves.”
“No trace?”
“None. And no aftereffects. Whatever they’re paying me, it isn’t enough.”
Holly counted off a minute on her visor clock.
“Okay. He’s out, providing he wasn’t awake when the Sleeper Deeper went in. Let’s go.”
Spiro’s bedroom was as white as his suits, except for the charred hole in the wardrobe. Holly and Artemis climbed through onto a white shag carpet. They stepped through the doors of the closet into a room that glowed in the dark. Futuristic furniture: white, of course. White spotlights and white drapes.
Holly took a moment to study a painting that dominated one wall.
“Oh, give me a break,” she said.
The picture was in oils. Completely white. There was a brass plaque beneath. It read, Snow Ghost.
Spiro lay in the center of a huge futon, lost in the dunes of its silk sheets. Holly pulled back the covers, rolling Jon Spiro onto his back. Even in sleep the man’s face was malevolent, as though his dreams were every bit as despicable as his waking thoughts.
“Nice guy,” said Holly, using her thumb to raise Spiro’s left eyelid. Her helmet camera scanned the eye, storing the information on its chip. It would be a simple matter to project the file onto the vault’s scanner and fool the security computer.
The thumb scan would not be so simple. Because the device was a gel scanner, the tiny sensors would be searching for the actual ridges and whorls of Spiro’s thumb. A projection would not do. It had to be 3-D. Artemis had come up with the idea of using a latex memory bandage, standard issue in any LEP first-aid kit—the same latex used to glue the microphone to his throat. All they had to do was wrap
Spiro’s thumb in a bandage for a moment and they would have a mold of the digit. Holly spooled a bandage from her belt, tearing off a six-inch strip.
“It won’t work,” said Artemis.
Holly’s heart sank. This was it. The thing that Artemis hadn’t told her.
“What won’t work?”
“The memory latex. It won’t fool the gel scanner.”
Holly climbed off the futon. “I don’t have time for this, Artemis. We don’t have time for it. The memory latex will make a perfect copy, right down to the last molecule.”
Artemis’s eyes were downcast. “A perfect model, true, but in reverse. Like a photo negative. Ridges where there should be grooves.”
“D’Arvit!” swore Holly. The Mud Boy was right. Of course he was. The scanner would read the latex as a completely different thumbprint. Her cheeks glowed red behind the visor.
“You knew this, Mud Boy. You knew it all along.”
Artemis didn’t bother denying it. “I’m amazed no one else spotted it.”
“So why lie?”
Artemis walked around to the far side of the bed, grasping Spiro’s right hand. “Because there is no way to fool the gel scanner. It has to see the real thumb.”
Holly snorted. “What do you want me to do? Cut it off and take it with us?”
Artemis silence was response enough.
“What? You want me to cut off his thumb? Are you insane?”
Artemis waited patiently for the outburst to pass.
“Listen to me, Captain. It’s only a temporary measure. The thumb can be reattached. True?”
Holly raised her palms. “Just shut up, Artemis. Just close your mouth. And I thought you’d changed. The commander was right. There’s no changing human nature.”
“Four minutes,” persisted Artemis. “We have four minutes to crack the vault and get back. Spiro won’t feel a thing.”
Holly felt as though her helmet were shrinking.
“Artemis, I’ll stun you, so help me.”
“Think, Holly. I had no choice but to lie about my plan. Would you have agreed if I had told you earlier?”
“No. And I’m not agreeing now!”