A slender silver tube poked from the shadows on the opposite side of the theater. There was a small pop, and a dart sped from the tube’s mouth. Artemis did not need to follow the dart’s path. He knew that it was headed straight into the creature’s leg. The leg would be best. A good target, but unlikely to be fatal. A silver tip with some kind of knockout cocktail.
The creature was trying to communicate now, and making wild gestures. Artemis heard a few gasps from the audience as patrons noticed the shape inside the light.
Very well. You have anchored it. Now you need a distraction. Something flashy and loud, but not particularly dangerous. If somebody gets hurt, there will be an investigation.
Artemis switched his gaze to the demon. Solid now in the shadows. Around him the opera steamrolled toward act four’s crescendo. The soprano lamented hysterically, and every eye in the theater was riveted on her. Almost every eye. But there are always a few bored audience members at an opera, especially by the time act four comes along. Those particular eyes would be wandering around the hall, searching for something, anything, interesting to watch. Those eyes would land on the little demon downstage right, unless they were distracted.
Right on cue, a large stage lamp broke free of its clamp in the rigging and swung on its cable into the back canvas. The impact was both flashy and loud. The bulb exploded, showering the stage and orchestra pit with glass fragments. The bulb’s filament glowed with a magnesium glare, temporarily blinding everyone staring at it. Which was almost the entire audience.
Glass rained down on the orchestra, and the musicians panicked, fleeing en masse toward the greenroom, dragging their instruments behind them. A cacophony of squealing strings and overturned percussion instruments shattered any echoes of Bellini’s masterpiece.
Nice, thought Artemis appreciatively. The clamp and the filament were rigged. The stampeding orchestra is a lucky bonus.
Artemis noted all of this out of the corner of his eye. His main focus was the diminutive demon, lost in the shadows behind a canvas flat.
Now, if it were me, thought the Irish teenager, I would have Butler drop a black sack over that little creature and whisk him out the stage door into a four-wheel drive. We could be on the ferry before the theater crew got the bulb changed.
What actually happened was slightly different. A stage trapdoor opened beneath the demon, and the creature disappeared on a hydraulic platform.
Artemis shook his head in admiration. Fabulous. His mysterious adversaries must have hijacked the theater computer system. And when the demon appeared, they simply sent a command to open the appropriate trapdoor panel. Doubtless there was someone waiting below to transfer the sleeping demon to an idling vehicle outside.
Artemis leaned over the railing, gazing into the audience below. As the houselights were brought up, the theater patrons rubbed their dazzled eyes and spoke in the sheepish tones that follow shock. There was no talk of demons. No pointing and screaming. Artemis had just witnessed the perfect execution of a perfect plan.
He gazed across to the box on the far side of the stage. The three occupants stood calmly. They were simply leaving. The show was over and it was time to go. Artemis recognized the pretty girl from Barcelona and her two guardians. The thin man seemed to have recovered from his leg injury, as his crutches were now tucked underneath one arm.
The girl wore a self-satisfied smile, the kind that usually decorated Artemis’s own face after a successful mission.
It’s the girl, Artemis realized with some surprise. She is the brains here.
This girl’s smile, a reflection of his own, rankled Artemis. He was not accustomed to being two steps behind. No doubt she believed that victory was hers. She may have won this battle, but the campaign was far from over.
It’s time, he thought, that this girl know she has an opponent.
He brought his hands together in a slow hand clap.
“Brava,” he called. “Brava, ragazza!”
His voice carried easily above the heads of the audience. The girl’s smile froze on her lips and her eyes searched for the source of this compliment. In seconds she located the Irish teenager, and their eyes locked.
If Artemis had been expecting the girl to quail and tremble at the sight of him and his bodyguard, then he was disappointed. True, a shadow of surprise flitted across her brow, but then she accepted the applause with a nod and royal wave. The girl said two words before she left. The distance was too great for Artemis to actually hear them, but even if he hadn’t long since trained himself to lipread, it would have been easy to guess what they were.
“Artemis Fowl,” she said. Nothing more. There was a game beginning here. No doubt about it. How intriguing.
Then a funny thing happened. Artemis’s clapping hands were joined by a scattering of others from various spots in the theater. The applause grew from hesitant beginnings to a crescendo. Soon the patrons were on their feet and the bewildered singers were forced to take several curtain calls.
On his way through the lobby minutes later, Artemis was highly amused to overhear several audience members gushing over the unorthodox direction of the opera’s final scene. The exploding lamp, mused one buff, was doubtless a metaphor for Norma’s own falling star. But no, argued a second. The lamp was obviously a modernistic interpretation of the burning stake that Norma was about to face.
Or perhaps, thought Artemis as he pushed through the crowd to find a light Sicilian mist falling on his forehead, the exploding lamp was simply an exploding lamp.
CHAPTER 5
IMPRISONED
Captain Holly Short of Section 8 followed the abductors to a Land Rover Discovery, and from there to the ferry. Their captive had been transferred from a canvas sack into a stout golf bag, which was then topped off with the heads of several clubs. It was a very slick operation. Three adult male humans and one teenage female. Holly was only mildly surprised to see that a young girl was involved. After all, Artemis Fowl was little more than a child, and he managed to involve himself in far more complex plots than this.
The Land Rover was returned to a Hertz rental agency in Italy, and from there the group took a first-class sleeper carriage on an overnight bullet train along the western coast. It made sense to travel by train. There was no need to pass the golf bag through an X-ray machine.
Holly didn’t need to worry about X-ray machines, or indeed any form of human security device. Wearing her Section 8 Shimmer Suit, she was invisible to any kind of ray the border police could throw at her. The only way to find a shielded fairy was to accidentally hit one with a stone, and even then you would probably only get an invisible smack on the ear for your trouble.
Holly slipped into the sleeper carriage and deposited herself on an unused luggage rack over the girl’s head. Below her, the three humans propped the golf bag against the table and stared at it as if . . . as if there were a demon inside.
Three men and one girl. It would be easy to take them. She could knock them out with her Neutrino, then get Foaly to send in some techs to do mindwipes. Holly was itching to free the poor demon. It would take mere seconds. The only thing stopping her were the voices in her head.
One of those voices belonged to Foaly, the other to Artemis.
“Hold your position, Captain Short,” advised Foaly. “We need to see how far this goes.”
Section 8 had become very interested in Holly’s mission since the demon abduction. Foaly was keeping a dedicated line to her helmet open.
Holly’s helmet was soundproof, yet she was still nervous talking in such close proximity to the targets. The trick in this situation is to train oneself to speak without any of the usual accompanying gestures. This is harder than it sounds.
“That poor demon will be terrified,” said Holly, lying perfectly still. “I have to get it out of there.”
“No,” said Artemis sharply. “You have to see the bigger picture, Holly. We have no idea how big this organization is, or how much they know about the Fairy People.?
??
“Not as much as you. Demons don’t carry the fairy Book. They’re not much for rules.”
“At least you have something in common,” said Butler.
“I could use the mesmer on them,” Holly offered. The mesmer was one of the tricks in every fairy’s magical bag. It was a siren’s song that could have any human happily spilling his guts. “That would make them tell me what they know.”
“And only what they know,” Artemis pointed out. “If I were running this organization, everyone would be told only what they needed to know. Nobody would know everything, except me, of course.”
Holly resisted the urge to thump something in frus-tration. Artemis was right, of course. She had to hang back and see how this situation played out. They needed to spread their net as wide as possible in order to catch all the members of this group.
“I’ll need backup,” Holly whispered. “How many agents can Section Eight spare?”
Foaly cleared his throat but didn’t answer.
“What is it, Foaly? What’s going on down there?”
“Ark Sool caught wind of the abduction.”
The mere mention of that gnome’s name drove Holly’s blood pressure up a few points. Commander Ark Sool was the reason she had quit the LEP in the first place.
“Sool! How did he find out about it so quickly?”
“He’s got a source somewhere in Section Eight. He called in Vinyáya. She had no option but to hand over all the facts.”
Holly groaned. Sool was the king of red tape. As the dwarfs said, He couldn’t make a decision if he was holding a jug of water and his bum-flap was on fire.
“What’s the word?”
“Sool is going for damage limitation. The blast walls are up, and aboveground missions have been canceled. No further action pending a meeting of the Council. If the manure hits the air circulator, Sool isn’t going to be the one taking the blame. Not on his own.”
“Politics,” spat Holly. “Sool only cares about his precious career. So you can’t send me anyone?”
Foaly chose his words carefully. “Not officially. And no one official. I mean, it would be impossible for anyone, a consultant, say, to get past the blast walls carrying something you might need, if you see what I mean.”
Holly understood exactly what Foaly was trying to tell her.
“Ten four, Foaly. I’m on my own. Officially.”
“Exactly. As far as Commander Sool knows, you are simply shadowing the suspects. You are only to take action if they decide to go public. In that case your orders are, and I’m quoting Sool here, to ‘take the least complicated and most permanent course of action.’”
“He means vaporize the demon?”
“Sool didn’t say that, but that’s what he wants.”
Holly despised Sool more with every heartbeat. “He can’t order me to do that. Killing a fairy goes against every law in the Book. I won’t do it.”
“Sool knows he can’t officially order you to use terminal force on a fairy. What he’s doing here is making an unofficial recommendation. The kind that could have a major effect on your career. It’s a tricky one, Holly. Best-case scenario, this all blows over somehow.”
Artemis voiced the opinion that they all held. “That’s not going to happen. This is no opportunistic snatch. We are dealing with an organized group that knew what they were after. These people were at Barcelona and now here. They have an agenda for their demon, and unless they’re military, I would bet it involves going public for large amounts of money. This will be bigger than the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, and the yeti all rolled into one.”
Foaly sighed. “You’re in a fix, Holly. The best thing that could happen for you right now would be a nice nonlethal injury to take you out of the game.”
Holly remembered her old mentor’s words. It’s not about what’s best for us, Julius Root had told her nce. It’s about what’s best for the People.
“Sometimes it’s not about us, Foaly. I’ll figure this out somehow. I do have help, right?”
“That’s right,” confirmed the centaur. “It’s not as if it’s the first time we’ve saved the fairy world.”
Foaly’s confident tone made Holly feel better, even if he was hundreds of miles underground.
Artemis interrupted them. “You two can swap war stories later. We can’t afford to miss a word that these people say. If we can beat them to their destination, it could be an advantage.”
Artemis was right. This was not a time for drifting. Holly ran a quick systems check on her helmet instruments, then pointed her visor at the humans below.
“You getting this, Foaly?” she asked.
“Clear as crystal. Did I tell you about my new gas screens?”
Artemis’s sigh rattled through the speakers.
“Yes, you did. Now be quiet, centaur. We’re on a mission, remember.”
“Whatever you say, Mud Boy. Hey, look—your girlfriend is saying something.”
Artemis had a vast mental reserve of scathing comebacks at his disposal, but none of them covered girlfriend insults. He wasn’t even sure if it was an insult. And if it was, who was being insulted? Him or the girl?
* * *
The girl spoke French as only a native could.
“Technically,” she said, “the only crime we are guilty of is fare-dodging, and perhaps not even that. Legally speaking, how can you kidnap something that is not supposed to exist? I doubt anyone ever accused Murray Gell-Mann of kidnapping a quark, even though he knowingly carried a billion of them around in his pocket.” The girl chuckled gently, causing her glasses to slip down again.
No one else laughed, except an eavesdropping Irish boy two hundred miles away at Fontanarossa International Airport, about to board the last Alitalia flight to Rome. Rome, Artemis reasoned, would be a lot more central than Sicily. Wherever the demon was headed, Artemis could get there faster if he flew from Rome.
“That wasn’t bad,” Artemis commented, then relayed the joke to Butler. “Obviously there are differences in the scenarios, but it’s a joke, not a quantum physics lecture.”
Butler’s left eyebrow cranked up like a drawbridge. “Differences in the scenarios, that’s just what I was thinking.”
Back on board the bullet train, one of the men, the one with the miraculously healed leg, shifted on the leatherette upholstery.
“What time do we get into Nice, Minerva?” he said.
This single sentence was a goldmine of information for the listening Artemis. Firstly, the girl’s name was Minerva, presumably named for the Roman goddess of wisdom. So far, a very apt name indeed. Secondly, their destination was Nice, in the South of France. And thirdly, this girl seemed to be in charge. Extraordinary.
The girl, who had been smiling still at her quark joke, switched to irritated mode.
“No names, remember? There are ears everywhere. If a single person uncovers a single detail of our plan, everything we have worked for could be ruined.”
Too late, Mud Girl, thought Captain Holly Short, from her luggage rack. Artemis Fowl already knows too much about you. Not to mention my own little guardian angel, Foaly.
Holly snapped a close-up of the girl’s face.
“We have a mug shot and a first name, Foaly. Is that enough for you?”
“Should be,” replied the centaur. “I got stills of the males too. Give me a while to run them through my database.”
Below her, the second man from Barcelona unzipped the fake top from the golf bag.
“I should check on my clubs,” he said. “See if they’re settled okay. If they’ve started to move about, I might put in something to keep them still.”
All of which would have been perfectly acceptable code had there not been a camera pointed right at them.
The man reached into the bag, and after a moment’s feeling around, pulled out a small arm and checked the pulse.
“Fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Good,” said Minerva. “Now, you should get some
sleep. We have a long journey ahead of us. I will stay awake for a while because I feel like reading. The next person can read in four hours.”
The three men nodded, but nobody lay down. They just sat there, staring at the golf bag as if there were a demon in it.
Artemis and Butler picked up a lucky connection to Nice with Air France, and by ten they had checked into the Hotel Negresco and were enjoying coffee and croissants on the Promenade des Anglais.
Holly was not so lucky. She was still perched on a luggage rack on board a train. Not the same luggage rack. This was her third rack, all together. First they’d had to change in Rome, then again in Monte Carlo, and now finally they were headed for Nice.
Artemis was speaking into his little finger, which transmitted the vibrations to the fairy phone in his palm.
“Any hints as to the exact final destination?”
“Nothing yet,” replied a tired and irritated Holly. “This girl is controlling the adults with a rod of iron. They’re afraid to say anything. I am sick of lying on this rack. I feel like I have been lying on racks for a year. What are you two doing?”
Artemis put his decaf cappuccino down gently, so as not to rattle the saucer. “We’re at the Nice Library trying to dig up anything on this Minerva person. Perhaps we can find out if she has a villa near here.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Holly. “I had visions of you two drinking tea at the beach while I sweat it out here.”
Twenty yards from where Artemis was sitting, waves swirled along the beach like emerald paint poured from a bucket.
“Tea? At the beach? No time for luxuries, Holly. There is important work to be done.” He winked at Butler.
“Are you sure you’re at the library? I thought I heard water.”
Artemis smiled, enjoying the exchange. “Water? Surely not. The only thing flowing here is information.”
“Are you grinning, Artemis? For some reason I get the feeling that you’re wearing that smug smile of yours.”
Foaly cut into the line. “Pay dirt, Holly. It took a while, but we tracked down our mystery girl.”