Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code af-3

by Eoin Colfer

  ‘Well?’ asked Juliet.

  Mulch sat up, checking the camera’s ion stream through his visor.

  ‘Lucky,’ he breathed. ‘Very lucky. We have a path straight through.’

  He slapped shut his smoking bum-flap. ‘It’s been a while since I launched a torpedo.’

  Juliet took the video clip from her pocket, waving it in front of her wrist computer so Foaly could see it.

  ‘So, I just wind this round any old cable? Is that it?’

  ‘No, Mud Maid,’ sighed Foaly, comfortable in his familiar role as unappreciated genius. ‘That is a complex piece of nanotechnology, complete with microfilaments that act as receivers, broadcasters and clamps. Naturally it leeches its power from the Mud People’s own system.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Mulch, trying to keep his eyes open.

  ‘You need to ensure that it is firmly clamped to one of the video cables. Luckily, its multi-sensor does not have to be in contact with all the wires, just one.’

  ‘And which ones are the video wires?’

  ‘Well. . all of them.’

  Juliet groaned. ‘So I just wind it round any old cable?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ admitted the centaur. ‘But wind it tightly. All the filaments have to penetrate.’

  Juliet reached up, selected a wire at random and wound the clip round it.

  ‘OK?’

  There was a moment’s pause while Foaly waited for reception.

  Below the surface, picture-in-picture screens began popping up on the centaur’s plasma screen.

  ‘Perfect. We have eyes and ears.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ said Juliet impatiently. ‘Start the loop.’

  Foaly wasted a minute delivering another lecture. ‘This is much more than a loop, young lady. I am about to completely wipe moving patterns from the surveillance footage. In other words, the pictures they see in the surveillance booth will be exactly as they should be, except you won’t be in them. Just be careful never to stand still or you’ll become visible. Keep something moving, even if it’s only your little finger.’

  Juliet checked the digital clock on the computer face. ‘Four thirty. We need to hurry.’

  ‘OK. The security centre is one corridor over. We take the shortest route.’

  Juliet projected the schematic into the air. ‘Down this corridor here, two rights and there we are.’

  Mulch strode past her to the wall.

  ‘I said the shortest route, Mud Girl. Think laterally.’

  The office was an executive suite, with a skyline view and floor-to-ceiling pine shelving. Mulch hauled back a section of the pine and knocked on the wall behind it.

  ‘Plasterboard,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  Juliet closed the panel behind them. ‘No debris, dwarf. Artemis said we weren’t to leave any trace.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a messy eater.’

  Mulch unhinged his jaw, expanding his oral cavity to basketball proportions. He opened his mouth to an incredible one hundred and seventy degrees, and took a whopping bite out of the wall. A ring of tombstone teeth soon reduced the wall to dust.

  ‘A bi’ dry,’ he commented. ‘Har’ oo shwallow.’

  Three bites later they were through. Mulch climbed into the next office without a crumb dropping from his lips. Juliet followed, pulling the pine shelving across to cover the hole.

  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. No one in the immediate vicinity, except a guard at the lobby desk.’

  Juliet took two grey canisters from her backpack. ‘OK. 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. Aeroplane-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 metres 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 and inched her nose round 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 moved 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. Although ‘oxygen canisters’ was a bit of a misnomer, because it wasn’t oxygen in these canisters.

  She checked her watch. It might already be too late.

  TEAM TWO, ABOVE THE SPIRO NEEDLE

  Holly hovered six metres above the Needle, waiting for the green light. She was not comfortable with this operation. There were too many variables. If this mission weren’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 find his childhood with an encyclopaedia.

  Captain Short followed their 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 spacewards like the world’s biggest rocket. Low fog gathered around its base, adding to the illusion.

  Holly set her wings to descend, dropping gently towards 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 access code for the rooftop door.

  ‘Thank you, Spiro,’ she said, grinning, as she punched in the code.

  The door slid open pneumatically. Automatic lights flickered into life along the stairwell. There was a camera every six metres. 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 ra
te. 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 was 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 lift doors.

  ‘Artemis is on eighty-four,’ said Foaly. ‘The vault is on eighty-five; Spiro’s penthouse is on eighty-six, where we are now.’

  ‘How are the walls?’

  ‘According to the spectrometer, mostly plaster and wood in the partition walls. Except round 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 offence.’

  ‘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 lift. Holly floated into the metal box and descended to the eighty-fifth floor. The guiding laser led her out of the lift 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. She 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 People 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 centre, and then took a right-angle turn downwards, through the floor.

  ‘Let me guess. Artemis is down there?’

  ‘Yes. Asleep, judging by the pictures coming in from 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 air con 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 air con.

  ‘Artemis isn’t the only one with brains around here,’ grunted Holly, sweat streaming down her face in spite of the helmet’s climate control.

  ‘The air con stops the fire alarm going off. Very good.’

  ‘Is he awake?’ asked Holly, leaving the last centimetre of a half-metre 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

  ARTEMIS FOWL’S CELL, THE SPIRO HEEDLE

  Artemis was meditating when the first laser-stroke cut through the ceiling. He rose from the lotus position, pulled his sweater back on 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 Mister 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 voilа. 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 favour. 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 six guards doing the rounds on the floor.

  Holly closed the door.

  ‘OK. 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 two floors directly above Artemis’s cell. It 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 ten 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. Brainwaves.’

  Artemis was intrigued. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Basically it scans for brainwave patterns, then replicates them.

  Anyone in the vicinity stays in the state they’re in until the capsule dissolves.

  ‘No trace?’

  ‘None. And no after-effects. Whatever they’re paying me, it isn’t enough.’

  Holly counted off a minute on her visor clock.

  ‘OK. He’s out, providing he wasn’t awake when the Sleeper Deeper went in. Let’s go.’