On the eastern side of the house, a series of garage doors opened, and six black BMW four-wheel drives sprang into the courtyard like cougars. One had blacked-out windows.
Artemis studied the situation through binoculars.
“Watch the girl,” he said into the tiny phone in his palm. “The girl is the key. I’m guessing hers is the vehicle with the tinted windows.”
The girl, Minerva, appeared through patio doors, speaking calmly into a walkie-talkie. Her father trailed beside her, dragging a protesting Beau Paradizo by the hand. Billy Kong came last, bending slightly under the weight of a large golf bag.
“Here we go, Holly. Are you ready?”
“Artemis! I’m the field agent here,” came the irritated reply. “Stay off my band unless you have something to contribute.”
“I was just thinking—”
“
I
was just thinking that
you
should change your middle name to
Control Freak
.”
Artemis glanced across at Butler, who was lying beside him and couldn’t help overhearing the entire exchange.
“Control freak? Can you believe that?”
“The nerve of some people,” replied the bodyguard without taking his eyes off the chateau.
To their left, a small patch of earth began to vibrate. Mud grass and insects were thrust upward in a sudden gush, followed by two heads. One dwarf and one pixie.
Doodah climbed over Mulch’s shoulders and collapsed onto the ground.
“You people are crazy,” he panted, plucking a beetle from his shirt pocket. “I should be getting more than amnesty for this. I should be getting a pension.”
“Quiet, little man,” said Butler calmly. “Phase two of the plan is about to start, and I wouldn’t want to miss it because of you.”
Doodah blanched. “Neither would I. Want you to miss it, that is. Because of me.”
Outside the chateau’s garage, Billy Kong popped one of the BMW’s trunks and hefted the golf bag inside. It was the car with the tinted windows.
Artemis opened his mouth to issue an order, then closed it again. Holly probably knew what to do.
She did. The driver’s door clunked open a fraction, apparently all on its own, then closed again. Before Minerva or Billy Kong could do more than blink in surprise, the 4x4 started up and laid down a twenty foot layer of rubber, skidding toward the main gate.
“Perfect,” said Artemis under his breath. “Now, Miss Minerva Paradizo, would-be criminal mastermind, let us see exactly how smart you are. I know what I would do in this situation.”
Minerva Paradizo’s reaction was a bit less dramatic than one might expect from a child who has just had her prize possession stolen. There were no tantrums or foot stamping. Billy Kong defied expectations also. He did not so much as draw a weapon. Instead he squatted on his hunkers, ran his fingers through his manga hair, and lit a cigarette, which Minerva promptly plucked from his lips and squashed underfoot.
Meanwhile, the 4x4 was getting away, barreling toward the main gates. Perhaps Minerva was confident that the reinforced steel barrier would be sufficient to halt the BMW in its tracks. She was wrong. Holly had already weakened the bolts with her Neutrino.
One tap from the vehicle’s grille would be more than sufficient to barge the gates out of the way.
If it got that far. Which it did not. After she had crushed Kong’s cigarette, Minerva took a remote control from her pocket, tapped in a short code, then hit the SEND button. In the BMW’s cab, a tiny charge detonated in the airflow system, releasing a cloud of sevofluorane, a potent sleeping gas. In seconds, the vehicle began to weave, ramping the driveway bushes and cutting a swath through the manicured lawn.
“Problems,” said Butler.
“Hmm,” said Artemis. “A gas device, I would guess. Fast acting. Possibly cyclopropane or sevofluorane.”
Butler knelt, drawing his pistol. “Should I stroll in there and get them?”
“No. You shouldn’t.”
The BMW was careering wildly now, following the dips and slopes of the grounds’ topography. It destroyed a mini-golf green, pulverized a gazebo, and decapitated a centaur statue.
Hundreds of miles belowground, Foaly winced.
The vehicle finally came to rest in a lavender bed, nose down, rear wheels spinning, spitting out hunks of clay and uprooted long-stemmed purple flowers like missiles.
Nice action, thought Mulch, but he kept the notion to himself, fully aware that this might not be the time to stretch Butler’s patience.
Butler was raring to go. His gun was out, and the tendons in his neck were stretched, but Artemis held him back with a touch to the forearm.
“No,” he said. “Not now. I know your impulse is to help, but now is not the time.”
The bodyguard jammed his Sig Sauer handgun back into its holster, scowling. “Are you sure, Artemis?”
“Trust me, old friend.”
And of course, Butler did, even though his instincts were not so sure.
Inside the grounds, a dozen security guards were warily approaching the vehicle, led by Billy Kong. The man moved like a cat, on the balls of his feet.
On his signal, the men rushed the car, reclaiming the golf bag and hauling an unconscious Holly from the front seat. The elf was cuffed with plastic ties and hauled across the garden to where Minerva Paradizo and her father stood waiting.
Minerva removed Holly’s helmet and knelt to examine her pointed ears. Through his binocular lenses, Artemis could clearly see that Minerva was smiling.
It had been a trap. All a trap
.
Minerva tucked the helmet under her arm, then walked briskly back toward the house. Halfway there, she stopped and turned. Shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare, she scanned the shadows and peaks of the surrounding hillsides.
“What’s she looking for?” Butler speculated aloud.
Artemis did not wonder. He knew exactly what this surprising girl was after.
“She’s looking for us, old friend. If that were your chateau, perhaps you might wonder where a spy would conceal himself.”
“Of course. And that’s why I picked this spot. The ideal location would have been farther up the hill, in that cluster of rocks, but that would also have been the first spot any security expert would booby-trap. This would be my second choice, and so, my first choice.”
Minerva’s gaze swept past the rock cluster and rested on the line of bushes where they were hiding. She couldn’t possibly see them, but her intellect told her that they were there.
Artemis focused on the girl’s pretty face. It amazed him that he could appreciate Minerva’s features even as his friend was being hauled into captivity. Puberty was a powerful force.
Minerva was smiling. Her eyes were bright and they taunted Artemis across the distance between them. She spoke to them in English. Artemis and Butler, both expert lip-readers had no difficulty interpreting her short sentence.
“Did you get that, Artemis?” asked Butler.
“I got it. And she got us.”
Your move, Artemis Fowl
, Minerva had said.
Butler sat back in the ditch, slapping mud from his elbows.
“I thought you were one of a kind, Artemis, but that girl is a smart one.”
“Yes,” said Artemis, musing. “She’s a regular juvenile criminal mastermind.”
Belowground, in Section 8 headquarters, Foaly groaned into his microphone.
“Great,” he said. “Now there are two of you.”
CHAPTER 8
N
o
1 was having a lovely dream. In the dream, his mother was holding a surprise party for him, in honor of his graduation from warlock college. The food was scrumptious. The dishes were cooked, and most of the meat was already dead.
He was reaching for a beautifully presented basted pheasant in a basket of woven herb bread ropes, just like the one described in three of
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
, when suddenly the vision retreated into the far distance, as though reality itself were being stretched.
N
o
1 tried to follow the feast, but it drew farther and farther away, and now his legs wouldn’t work, and N
o
1 couldn’t understand why. He looked down and saw to his horror that everything from his armpits down had turned to stone. The stone virus was spreading upward across his chest and along his neck. N
o
1 felt the urge to scream, and he was suddenly terrified that his mouth would turn to stone before he could. To be petrified forever and hold that scream inside would be the ultimate horror.
N
o
1 opened his mouth and screamed.
Billy Kong, who had been lounging on a chair, watching, snapped his fingers at a camera on the ceiling.
“The ugly one is awake,” he said. “And I think it wants its mother.”
N
o
1 stopped screaming when his breath ran out. It was a bit of an anticlimax, really, starting out with a lusty howl and petering off to a reedy whine.
Okay, thought N
o
1. I am alive and in the land of men. Time to open my eyes and find out just how deep in the pig dung I actually am.
N
o
1 cracked his eyes open warily, as though he might see something big and hard heading for his face at high speed. What he did see was that he was in a small bare room. There were rectangular lights on the ceiling that threw out the light of a thousand candles, and most of one wall was taken up by a mirror. There was a human, possibly a child, perhaps a female, with a ridiculous mane of blond curls and an extra finger on each hand. The creature was wearing a ludicrously impractical toga-type arrangement and spongy-soled shoes with lightning bolts embossed on the sides. There was another person in the room. A slouching, leering, thin man, who tapped a staccato rhythm on his leg. N
o
1’s eyes were drawn to the second human’s hair. There were at least half a dozen colors in there. The man was a peacock.
N
o
1 decided that perhaps he should raise his empty hands to show that he wasn’t carrying a weapon, but it’s difficult to do that when you are tied to a chair.
“I’m tied to a chair,” he said apologetically, as though it were his fault. Unfortunately, he said this in Gnommish and in the demon dialect. To the humans it sounded like he was trying to dislodge a particularly annoying blockage from his throat.
N
o
1 resolved not to talk again. Doubtless, he would say the wrong thing, and the humans would have to ritually execute him. Thankfully, the female seemed eager to chat.
“Hello, I am Minerva Paradizo, and this man is Mr. Kong,” she said. “Can you understand me?”
It was all gibberish to N
o
1. Not a single recognizable word from the text of
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
.
He smiled encouragingly to show he appreciated the effort.
“Do you speak French?” asked the blond girl, then switched languages. “How about English?”
N
o
1 sat up. That last bit was familiar. Strange inflections, surely, but the words themselves were from the book.
“English?” he repeated.
This was the language of Lady Heatherington Smythe. Learned at her mother’s knee. Explored in the lecture halls of Oxford. Used to profess her undying love for Professor Rupert Smythe. N
o
1 loved the book. He sometimes believed that he was the only one who did. Even Abbot didn’t seem to appreciate the romantic bits.
“Yes,”said Minerva.“English. The last one spoke it well enough. French, too.”
Manners must be appreciated somewhere outside a book, N
o
1 had always thought, so he decided to give them a go.
He growled, which was the polite demon way of asking to speak in front of your betters. This must not be how humans interpreted it, because the skinny human jumped to his feet, pulling out a knife.
“No, kind sir,” said N
o
1 hurriedly, cobbling together a couple of sentences from Lady Heatherington. “Prithee sheath thine weapon. I bring joyous tidings only.”
The skinny human was confounded. He spoke English as well as the next American, but this little runt was spouting some kind of medieval nonsense.
Kong straddled N
o
1, holding the knife to his throat.
“Talk straight, ugly,” said the man, deciding to give Taiwanese a go.
“I wish I could understand,” said N
o
1, shaking. Unfortunately, he said this in Gnommish. “What I . . . eh ...meanest to say is ...”
It was no good. Quotes from Lady Heatherington that he could generally shoehorn into any occasion just weren’t coming under pressure.
“Talk straight or die!” shrieked the human into his face.
N
o
1 shrieked right back at him. “How can I talk straight, you son of a three-legged dog? I don’t speak Taiwanese!”
All of this was said in perfect Taiwanese. N
o
1 was stunned. The gift of tongues was not one demons possessed. Except the warlocks. More proof.
He intended to ponder this development for a few moments, now that the knife-wielding human had backed off, but suddenly the beauty of language exploded inside his brain. Even his own tongue, Gnommish, had been severely culled by the demons. There were thousands of words that had been dropped from regular use on the basis that they did not relate to killing things or eating them, and not necessarily in that order.
“Cappuccino!” shouted N
o
1, surprising everyone.
“Excuse me?” said Minerva.
“What a lovely word. And ‘maneuver.’And ‘balloon.’”
The skinny man pocketed his knife. “Now he’s talking.
If he’s anything like the videos you showed me of the other one, we’ll never get him to shut up.”
“‘Pink!’” exclaimed N
o
1 delightedly. “We don’t have a word for that color in the demon commonspeak. Pink is considered undemonlike, so we ignore it. It’s such a relief to be able to say pink!”
“Pink,” said Minerva. “Fabulous.”
“Tell me,” said N
o
1. “What is a cotton candy? I know the words, and it sounds . . . scrumptious . . . but the picture in my head cannot be accurate.”
The girl seemed pleased that N
o
1 could talk, but slightly miffed that he had forgotten his situation.
“We can talk about cotton candy later, little demon. There are more important things to discuss.”
“Yes,” agreed Kong. “The demon invasion, for example.”
N
o
1 rolled the sentence around in his head. “Sorry, my gifts must not be fully developed. The only meaning I have for ‘invasion’ is a hostile entry of an armed force into a territory.”
“That’s the one I mean, you little toad.”
“Again, I’m a little confused. My new vocabulary is telling me that a toad is a froglike creature. . . .” N
o
1’s face fell. “Oh. I see, you’re insulting me.”
Kong scowled at Minerva. “I think I preferred him when he spoke like an old movie.”
“I was quoting scripture,” explained N
o
1, enjoying the shape of these new words in his mouth. “From the acred book
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
.”
Minerva frowned, looking at the ceiling as she thought back in time. “Lady Heatherington Smythe. Why is that familiar?”
“
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
is the source of all our human knowledge. Lord Abbot brought it back to us.” N
o
1 bit his lip, shutting off his own babbling. He had said too much already. These humans were the enemy, and he had given them the blueprint to Abbot’s plans.
Blueprint
. Nice word.
Minerva clapped her hands once sharply. She had found the memory she was looking for.
“Lady Heatherington Smythe. My goodness, that ridiculous romance! Remember, Mr. Kong?”
Kong shrugged. “I don’t read fiction. Manuals mostly.”
“No, remember the video footage of the other demon. We let him have a book; he carried it around like a security blanket.”
“Ah, yes. I remember that. Stupid little goat. Always toting around that stupid book.”
“You know, you’re repeating yourself,” said N
o
1, chattering nervously. “There are other words for
stupid
. ‘Dim,’ ‘dense,’ ‘slow,’ ‘thick,’ just to name a few. I can do Taiwanese if you prefer.”
A knife appeared in Kong’s hand as if from nowhere.
“Wow,” said N
o
1. “That’s a real talent. A ‘bravura,’ in fact.”
Kong ignored the compliment, flipping the knife so he was holding the blade.
“Just shut up, creature. Or this goes between your eyes. I don’t care how valuable you are to Miss Paradizo. To me, you and your kind are simply something to be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Minerva folded her arms. “I will thank you, Mr. Kong, not to threaten our guest. You work for my father, and you will do what my father tells you to do. And I am pretty sure my father told you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”
Minerva Paradizo may have been a precocious talent in many areas, but because of her age, she had limited experience. From her studies, she knew how to read body language, but she did not know that a skilled martial artist can train himself to control his body so that his real feelings are hidden. A true disciple of the discipline would have noted the subtle tightening of the tendons in Billy Kong’s neck. This was a man holding himself in check.
Not yet
, his stance said.
Not yet
.
Minerva returned her attention to N
o
1.
“
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
, you say?”
N
o
1 nodded. He was afraid to speak in case his runaway mouth leaked any more information than it already had.
Minerva spoke now to the large mirror. “You remember that one, Papa? The most ridiculous fluffy romance you are ever likely to avoid like the plague. I loved it when I was six. It’s all about a nineteenth-century English aristocrat. Oh, who’s the author . . . Carter Cooper Barbison. The Canadian girl. She was eighteen when she wrote it. Did absolutely no research. She had nineteenth-century nobles speaking like they were from the fifteen hundreds. Absolute trash, so obviously a worldwide hit. Well, it seems our old friend Abbot brought it home with him. The cheeky devil has managed to sell it as gospel truth. It seems he has the rest of the demons spouting Cooper Barbison as though she were an evangelist.”
N
o
1 broke his no-speaking vow. “Abbot? Abbot was here?”
“Mais oui,”
said Minerva, resting her palms on her knees. “How do you think we knew where to find you. Abbot told us everything.”
A voice boomed through a wall-mounted speaker. “Not everything. His figures were flawed. But my young genius Minerva figured it out. I’ll get you a pony for this, darling. Whatever color you like.”
Minerva waved at the mirror. “Thank you, Papa. You should know by now that I don’t like ponies. Or ballet.”
The speaker laughed.“That’s my little girl. What about a trip to Disneyland Paris? You could dress as a princess.”
“Perhaps after the selection committee,” said Minerva with a smile. The smile was slightly forced, though. She did not have time for Disney dreams at the moment. “After I am sure of the Nobel nomination. We have less than a week to question our subjects and organize secure travel to the Royal Academy in Stockholm.”
N
o
1 had another important question. “And
Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow
? It’s not true?”
Minerva laughed delightedly. “True? My dear little fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. That book is a cringe-worthy testament to teenage hormonal fabrication.”
N
o
1 was stunned. “But I studied that book. For hours. I acted out scenes. I made costumes. Are you telling me that there is no Heatherington Hall?”
“No Heatherington Hall.”
“And no evil Prince Karloz?”
“Fiction.”
N
o
1 remembered something. “But Abbot came back with a crossbow, just like in the book. That’s evidence.”
Kong joined the discussion; after all, this was his area of expertise. “Crossbows? Ancient history, toad. We use things like these now.” Billy Kong drew a black ceramic handgun from a holster tucked in his armpit. “This little beauty shoots fire and death. We’ve got much bigger ones, too. We fly around the world in our metal birds and rain down exploding eggs on our enemies.”
N
o
1 snorted. “That little thing shoots fire and death? Flying metal birds? And I suppose you eat lead and blow golden bubbles, too.”
Kong did not respond well to cynicism, especially from a little reptilian creature. In one fluid motion he flicked the safety off his weapon and fired three shots, blowing apart the headrest of N
o
1’s seat. The imp’s face was showered with sparks and splinters, and the sound of the shots echoed like thunder in the confined space.
Minerva was furious. She began screaming long before anyone could hear her.
“Get out of here, Kong. Out!”
She kept screaming this, or words to this effect, until their ears stopped ringing. When Minerva realized that Billy Kong was ignoring her commands, she switched to Taiwanese.
“I told my father not to employ you. You are an impulsive and violent man. We are conducting a scientific experiment here. This demon is of no use to me if he is dead, do you understand, you reckless man? I need to communicate with our guest, so you must leave because you obviously terrify him. Go now, I warn you, or your contract will be terminated.”