by Eoin Colfer
‘Let’s say I don’t like your terms,’ said Jon Spiro. ‘Let’s say I decide to take your little gadget with me right now.’
Arno Blunt’s chest puffed out another centimetre.
‘Even if you could take the Cube,’ said Artemis, smiling, ‘it would be of little use to you. The technology is beyond anything your engineers have ever seen.’
Spiro gave a thin, mirthless smile. ‘Oh, I’m sure they could figure it out. Even if it took a couple of years, it won’t matter to you. Not where you’re going.’
‘If I go anywhere, then the C Cube’s secrets go with me. Its every function is coded to my voice patterns. It’s quite a clever code.’
Butler bent his knees slightly, ready to spring.
‘I bet we could break that code. I got one helluva team assembled in Fission Chips.’
‘Pardon me if I am unimpressed by your “one helluva team”,’ said Artemis. ‘Thus far you have been trailing several years behind Phonetix.’
Spiro jumped to his feet. He did not like the P word. Phonetix was the only communications company whose stock was higher than Fission Chips’s.
‘OK, kid, you’ve had your fun. Now it’s my turn. I have to go now,
before the satellite beam gets here. But I’m leaving Mister Blunt behind.’
He patted his bodyguard on the shoulder. ‘You know what you have to do.’
Blunt nodded. He knew. He was looking forward to it.
For the first time since the meeting began, Artemis forgot about his lunch and concentrated completely on the situation at hand. This was not going according to plan.
‘Mister Spiro. You cannot be serious. We are in a public place, surrounded by civilians. Your man cannot hope to compete with Butler. If you persist with these ludicrous threats, I will be forced to withdraw my offer, and will release the C Cube immediately.’
Spiro placed his palms on the table. ‘Listen, kid,’ he whispered. ‘I like you. In a couple of years, you could have been just like me. But did you ever put a gun to somebody’s head and pull the trigger?’
Artemis didn’t reply.
‘No?’ grunted Spiro. ‘I didn’t think so. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Guts. And you don’t have them.’
Artemis was at a loss for words. Something that had only happened twice since his fifth birthday. Butler stepped in to fill the silence. Unveiled threats were more his area.
‘Mister Spiro. Don’t try to bluff us. Blunt may be big, but I can snap him like a twig. Then there’s nobody between me and you. And, take my word for it, you don’t want that.’
Spiro’s smile spread across his nicotine-stained teeth like a smear of treacle.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say there’s nobody between us.’
Butler got that sinking feeling. The one you get when there are a dozen laser sights playing across your chest. They had been set up.
Somehow Spiro had outmanoeuvred Artemis.
‘Hey, Fowl?’ said the American. ‘I wonder how come your lunch is taking so long.’
It was at that moment Artemis realized just how much trouble they were in.
It all happened in a heartbeat. Spiro clicked his fingers and every single customer in En Fin drew a weapon from inside his or her coat. The eighty-year-old lady suddenly looked a lot more threatening with a revolver in her bony fist. Two armed waiters emerged from the kitchen wielding folding-stock machine guns. Butler never even had time to draw breath.
Spiro tipped over the salt cellar. ‘Check and mate. My game, kid.’
Artemis tried to concentrate. There must be a way out. There was always a way out. But it wouldn’t come. He had been hoodwinked.
Perhaps fatally. No human had ever outsmarted Artemis Fowl. Then again, it only had to happen once.
‘I’m going now,’ continued Spiro, pocketing the C Cube, ‘before that satellite beam shows up, and those other ones. The LEP, I’ve never heard of that particular agency. And as soon as I get this gizmo working they’re going to wish they never heard of me. It’s been fun doing business with you.’
On his way to the door, Spiro winked at his bodyguard.
‘You got six minutes, Arno. A dream come true, eh? You get to be the guy who took out the great Butler.’ He turned back to Artemis, unable to resist a final jibe.
‘Oh, and by the way — Artemis, isn’t that a girl’s name?’ And he was gone, into the multicultural throngs of tourists on the high street.
The old lady locked the door behind him. The click echoed around the restaurant.
Artemis decided to take the initiative. ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, trying to avoid staring down the black-eyed gun barrels. ‘I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.’
‘Quiet, Artemis!’
It took a moment for Artemis’s brain to process the fact that Butler had ordered him to be silent. Most impertinently in fact.
‘I beg your pardon. .”
Butler clamped a hand over his employer’s mouth.
‘Quiet, Artemis. These people are professionals, not to be bargained with.’
Blunt rotated his skull, cracking the tendons in his neck.
‘You got that right, Butler. We’re here to kill you. As soon as Mister
Spiro got the call we started sending people in. I can’t believe you fell for it, man. You must be getting old.’
Butler couldn’t believe it either. There was a time when he would have staked out any rendezvous site for a week before giving it the thumbs-up. Maybe he was petting old, but there was an excellent chance he wouldn’t be getting any older.
‘OK, Blunt,’ said Butler, stretching out his empty palms before him.
‘You and me. One on one.’
‘Very noble,’ said Blunt. ‘That’s your Asian code of honour, I suppose. Me, I don’t have a code. If you think I’m going to risk you somehow getting out of here, you’re crazy. This is an uncomplicated deal. I shoot you. You die. No face-off, no duel.’
Blunt reached lazily into his waistband. Why hurry? One move from Butler and a dozen bullets would find their mark.
Artemis’s brain seemed to have shut down. The usual stream of ideas had dried up. I’m going to die, he thought. I don’t believe it.
Butler was saying something. Artemis decided he should listen.
‘Richard of York gave battle in vain,’ said the bodyguard, enunciating clearly.
Blunt was screwing a silencer on to the muzzle of his ceramic pistol.
‘What are you saying? What kind of gibberish is that? Don’t say the great Butler is cracking up! Wait till I tell the guys.’
But the old woman looked thoughtful.
‘Richard of York. . I know that.’
Artemis knew it too. It was virtually the entire verbal detonation code for the fairy sonix grenade magnetized to the underside of the table.
One of Butler’s little security devices. All they needed was one more word and the grenade would explode, sending a solid wall of sound charging through the building, blowing out every window and eardrum. There would be no smoke or flames, but anyone within a ten-metre radius not wearing earplugs had about five seconds before severe pain set in. One more word.
The old lady scratched her head with the revolver’s barrel.
‘Richard of York? I remember now, the nuns taught us that in school. Richard of York gave battle in vain. It’s one of those memory tricks. The colours of the rainbow.’
Rainbow. The final word. Artemis remembered — just in time — to slacken his jaw. If his teeth were clenched, the sonic waves would shatter them like sugar glass.
The grenade detonated in a blast of compressed sound, instantaneously hurling eleven people to the furthest extremities of the room, until they came into contact with various walls. The lucky ones hit partitions and went straight through. The unlucky ones collided with cavity block walls. Things broke. Not the blocks.
Artemis was safe in Butler’s bear-hug. The bodyguard had anchored himself against a so
lid door frame, folding the flying boy into his arms.
And they had several other advantages over Spiro’s assassins: their teeth were intact, they did not suffer from any compound fractures and the sonic filter sponges had sealed, saving their eardrums from perforation.
Butler surveyed the room. The assassins were all down, clutching their ears. They wouldn’t be uncrossing their eyes for several days. The manservant drew his Sig Sauer pistol from a shoulder holster.
‘Stay here,’ he commanded. ‘I’m going to check the kitchen.’
Artemis settled back into his chair, drawing several shaky breaths.
All around was a chaos of dust and moans. But once again, Butler had saved them. All was not lost. It was even possible that they could catch
Spiro before he left the country. Butler had a contact in Heathrow Security: Sid Commons, an ex-Green Beret he’d served with on bodyguard duty in Monte Carlo.
A large figure came into view, blocking out the sunlight. It was Butler, returned from his reconnoitre. Artemis breathed deeply, feelingly uncharacteristically emotional.
‘Butler,’ he began. ‘We really must talk regarding your salary. .’
But it wasn’t Butler. It was Arno Blunt. He had something in each hand. On his left palm, two tiny cones of yellow foam.
‘Ear plugs,’ he spat through broken teeth. ‘I always wear ‘em before a fire fight. Good thing too, eh?’
In his right hand, Blunt held a silenced pistol.
‘You first,’ he said. ‘Then the ape.’
Arno Blunt cocked the gun, took aim briefly and fired.
Chapter 2: Lockdown
HAVEN CITY, THE LOWER ELEMENTS
Though Artemis did not intend it, the Cube’s scan for surveillance beams was to have far-reaching repercussions. The search parameters were so vague that the Cube sent probes into deep space and, of course, deep underground.
Below the surface, the Lower Elements Police were stretched to their limits following the recent goblin revolution. Three months after the attempted goblin takeover, most of the major players were in custody.
But there were still isolated pockets of the B’wa Kell triad loping around Haven’s tunnels with illegal Softnose lasers.
Every available LEP officer had been drafted in to help with Operation Mop-Up before the tourist season got started. The last thing the city Council wanted was tourists spending their leisure gold in Atlantis because Haven’s pedestrianized central plaza was not safe to wander through. Tourism, after all, accounted for eighteen per cent of the capital’s revenue.
Captain Holly Short was on loan from the Reconnaissance squad.
Generally, her job was to fly to the surface on the trail of fairies who had ventured above ground without a visa. If even one renegade fairy got himself captured by the Mud People, then Haven ceased to be a haven.
So until every gang goblin was licking his eyeballs in Howler’s Peak correctional facility, Holly’s duties were the same as every other LEP officer: rapid response to any B’wa Kell alert.
Today she was escorting four rowdy goblin hoods to Police Plaza for processing. They had been found asleep in an insect delicatessen, stomachs distended after a night of gluttony. It was lucky for them that
Holly had arrived when she did, because the deli’s dwarf owner was on the point of lowering the scaly foursome into the deep-fat fryer.
Holly’s ride-along for Operation Mop-Up was Corporal Grub Kelp,
little brother to the famous Captain Trouble Kelp, one of the LEP’s most decorated officers. Grub, however, did not share his brother’s stoic personality.
‘I got a hangnail cuffing that last goblin,’ said the junior officer, chewing on his thumb.
‘Painful,’ said Holly, trying to sound interested.
They were driving along a magnastrip to Police Plaza, with the perpetrators manacled in the rear of their LEP wagon. It wasn’t actually a regulation wagon. The B’wa Kell had managed to burn out so many police vehicles during their short-lived revolution that the LEP had been forced to commandeer anything with an engine and room in the back for a few prisoners. In reality, Holly was piloting a curry van with the LEP acorn symbol spray-painted on the side. The motor-pool gnomes had simply bolted the serving hatch and removed the ovens. A pity they couldn’t remove the smell.
Grub studied his wounded thumb. ‘Those cuffs have sharp edges. I should lodge a complaint.’
Holly concentrated on the road, though the magnastrip did the steering for her. If Grub did lodge a complaint, it wouldn’t be his first, or even his twentieth. Trouble’s little brother found fault with everything, except himself. In this instance he was completely wrong: there were no sharp edges on the perspex vacuum cuffs. If there had been, a goblin might think to poke a hole in the other mitt and allow oxygen to reach his hand, and nobody wanted goblins hurling fireballs in the back of their vehicles.
‘I know it sounds petty to lodge a complaint over hangnails, but no one could accuse me of being petty.’
‘You! Petty! Perish the thought.’
Grub puffed up his chest. ‘After all, I am the only member of LEPretrieval One to have faced down the human, Butler.’
Holly groaned loudly. This, she fervently hoped, would dissuade Grub from telling his Artemis Fowl war story yet again. It grew longer and more fantastical each time. In reality, Butler had let him go, as a fisherman would a minnow.
But Grub was not about to take a hint.
‘I remember it well,’ he began melodramatically. ‘It was a dark night.’
And, as though his very words carried immeasurable magic, every light in the city went out.
Not only that, but the magnastrip’s power failed, leaving them stranded in the middle lane of a frozen highway.
‘I didn’t do that, did I?’ whispered Grub.
Holly didn’t answer, already halfway out of the wagon door.
Overhead, the sun strips that replicated surface light were fading to black.
In the last moments of half-light Holly squinted towards the Northern
Tunnel and, sure enough, the door was sliding down, emergency lights revolving along its lower edge. Sixty metres of solid steel separating Haven from the outside world. Similar doors were dropping at strategic arches all over the city. Lockdown. There were only three reasons why the Council would initiate a city-wide lockdown: flood, quarantine, or discovery by the humans.
Holly looked around her. Nobody was drowning; nobody was sick.
So the Mud People were coming. Finally, every fairy’s worst nightmare was coming true.
Emergency lights flickered on overhead, the sun strips’ soft white glow replaced by an eerie orange. Official vehicles would receive a burst of power from the magnastrip, enough to get them to the nearest depot.
Ordinary citizens were not so lucky; they would have to walk.
Hundreds stumbled from their automobiles, too scared to pro test. That would come later.
‘Captain Short! Holly!’
It was Grub. No doubt he would be lodging a complaint with someone.
‘Corporal,’ she said, turning back to the vehicle. ‘This is no time for panic. We need to set an example. .’
The lecture petered out in her throat when she saw what was happening to the wagon. All LEP vehicles would have by now received the regulation ten-minute burst of power from the magnastrip to get them and their cargo to safety. This power would also keep the perspex cuffs vacuumed. Of course, as they weren’t using an official LEP vehicle they hadn’t been cleared for emergency power — something the goblins obviously realized, because they were trying to burn their way out of the wagon.
Grub stumbled from the cab, his helmet blackened by soot.
‘The cuffs have popped open, so now they’ve started blasting the doors,’ he panted, retreating to a safe distance. Goblins. Evolution’s little joke. Pick the dumbest creatures on the planet and give them the ability to conjure fire. If the goblins didn’t stop blasting the wagon’
s reinforced interior they would soon be encased in molten metal. Not a nice way to go, even if you were fireproof. Holly activated the amplifier in her LEP helmet. ‘You there, in the wagon. Cease fire. The vehicle will collapse and you will be trapped.’
For several moments, smoke billowed from the vents. Then the vehicle settled on its axles. A face appeared at the grille, forked tongue slithering through the mesh.
‘You think we’re stupid, elf? We’re gonna burn clean through this pile of junk.’
Holly stepped closer, turning up the speakers. ‘Listen to me, goblin.
You are stupid, let’s just accept that and move on. If you continue to fireball that vehicle, the roof will melt and fall on you like shells from a human gun. You may be fireproof, but are you bulletproof?’ The goblin licked his lidless eyes, thinking it over. ‘You lie, elf! We will blow a hole right through this prison. You will be next.’
The wagon’s panels began to lurch and buckle as the goblins renewed their attack.
‘Not to worry,’ said Grub, from a safe distance. ‘The fire extinguishers will get them.’
‘They would,’ corrected Holly, ‘if the fire extinguishers weren’t connected to the main power grid, which is shut down.’
A mobile food-preparation wagon such as this one would have to adhere to the strictest fire regulations before setting one magna wheel on the strip. In this case, several foam-packed extinguishers, which could submerge the entire interior in flame-retardant foam in a matter of seconds. The nice thing about the flame foam was that it hardened on contact with air, but the not-so-nice thing about flame foam was that the trip switch was connected to the magna strip. No power. No foam.
Holly drew her Neutrino 2000 from its holster. ‘I’ll just have to trip this switch myself.’
Captain Short sealed her helmet and climbed into the wagon’s cab.
She avoided touching metal wherever possible, because even though microfilaments in her LEP jumpsuit were designed to disperse extra heat, microfilaments didn’t always do what they were designed to do.
The goblins were on their backs, pumping fireball after fireball into the roof panels.