Spiro groaned, giving Blunt a nod. Arno reached forward and whacked the pilot’s helmet.
“Shut up, you moron!” snapped Spiro. “Why don’t you give him the blueprints to the building while you’re at it?” He turned to Artemis. “And in case you’re wondering, Arty, there aren’t any blueprints floating around. Anybody who goes looking in City Hall is going to find that file mysteriously missing. I have the only set, so don’t bother getting one of your associates to do an Internet search.”
No surprises there. Artemis had already run several searches himself, although he hadn’t really expected Spiro to be so careless anyway.
They climbed down from the Sikorsky. Artemis was careful to point the iris-cam at any security feature that could be useful later. Butler had often told him that even a seemingly insignificant detail, like the number of steps in a stairwell, could be vital when planning an operation.
An elevator brought them down from the helipad to a key-coded door. Closed-circuit cameras were strategically placed to cover the entire rooftop. Spiro moved ahead to the keypad. Artemis felt a sharp sting in his eye, and suddenly the iris-cam magnified his vision by four. In spite of the distance and shadows, he could easily discern the entry code.
“I hope you got that,” he muttered, feeling the mike vibrating on his throat.
Arno Blunt bent his knees, so his extraordinary teeth were an inch from Artemis’s nose.
“Are you talking to someone?”
“Me?” said Artemis. “Who would I be talking to? We’re eighty floors up, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Blunt grabbed the teenager by the lapels, hoisting him off the tarmac. “Maybe you’re wearing a wire. Maybe you have someone listening to us right now.”
“How could I be wearing a wire, you big oaf? Your miniature hit man hasn’t let me out of his sight for the entire journey. He even accompanied me to the bathroom.”
Spiro cleared his throat noisily. “Hey there, Mr. I-Gotta-Make-My-Point, that kid slips over the side and you might as well throw yourself off, because that boy is worth more to me than an army of bodyguards.”
Blunt set Artemis down.
“You’re not going to be valuable forever, Fowl,” he whispered ominously. “And when your stock falls, I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
They took a mirrored elevator to the eighty-fifth floor, where Dr. Pearson waited along with two more muscle-bound guards. Artemis could tell by the look in their eyes that these two weren’t exactly brain surgeons. In fact, they were as close as you could get to being Rottweilers and still balance on two legs. It was probably handy to have these two around to break things and not ask questions.
Spiro called one of them over.
“Pex, do you know what the Antonellis charge if you lose their personnel?”
Pex had to consider it for a moment. His lips moved as he thought.
“Yeah, wait, I got it. Twenty grand for a metal man and fifteen for a monkey.”
“That’s dead, right?”
“Dead or incapati . . . incatacip . . . broken.”
“Okay,” said Spiro. “I want you and Chips to go over to Carla Frazetti’s and tell her I owe her thirty-five grand for the team. I’ll wire it to her Cayman Islands account in the morning.”
Mulch was understandably curious, and not a little apprehensive.
“Excuse me? Thirty-five grand? But I’m still alive. You only owe twenty grand for Loafers, unless the extra fifteen K is my bonus?”
Spiro sighed with almost convincing regret.
“This is the way it is, Mo,” he said, punching Mulch playfully on the shoulder. “This deal is huge. Mammoth. We’re talking telephone numbers. I can’t afford any loose ends. Maybe you know something, maybe you don’t. But I’m not about to take the chance that you might tip off Phonetix or one of my other competitors. I’m sure you understand.”
Mulch stretched his lips, revealing a row of tombstone teeth.
“I understand all right, Spiro. You’re a backstabbing snake. You know, the kid offered me two million dollars to cut him loose.”
“You should have taken the cash,” said Arno Blunt, propelling Mulch into Pex’s gigantic arms.
The dwarf kept talking, even as he was being dragged down the corridor.
“You better bury me deep, Spiro. You better bury me real deep.”
Spiro’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You heard the man, boys. Before you go to Frazetti’s, bury him deep.”
Dr. Pearson led the party through to the vault room. They had to pass through a small antechamber before entering the main security area.
“Please stand on the scanner pad,” said Pearson. “We wouldn’t want any bugs in here. Especially not the electronic kind.”
Artemis stepped onto the mat. It sank like a sponge beneath his feet, spurting jets of foam over his shoes.
“Anti-infection foam,” explained Pearson. “Kills any virus you might have picked up. We’re keeping some biotechnology experiments in the vault at the moment. Very susceptible to disease. The foam has the added advantage of shorting out any surveillance devices in your shoes.”
Overhead, a mobile scanner bathed Artemis’s shoes framed in purple light.
“One of my own inventions,” said Pearson. “A combination scanner. I have incorporated thermal, X-ray, and metal-detector beams. The beam basically breaks your body down into its elements and displays them on this screen here.”
Artemis saw a 3-D replica of himself being traced out on the small plasma screen. He held his breath, praying that Foaly’s equipment was as clever as the centaur thought it was.
On screen, a red light pulsed on Artemis’s jacket front.
“Aha,” said Dr. Pearson, plucking off a button. “What have we here?” He cracked the button open, revealing a tiny chip, mike, and power source.
“Very clever. A micro bug. Our young friend was attempting to spy on us, Mr. Spiro.”
Jon Spiro was not angry, in fact he was delighted to have the opportunity to gloat.
“You see, kid. You may be some kind of genius, but surveillance and espionage are my business. You can’t slip anything past me. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can get this thing over with.”
Artemis stepped off the pad. The decoy had worked, but the real bugs hadn’t caused a blip in the system. Pearson was smart, but Foaly was smarter.
Artemis made sure to have a good look around the antechamber. There was more here. Every square inch of the metal surface contained a security or surveillance device. From what Artemis could see, an invisible ant would have trouble sneaking in here. Not to mention two humans, an elf, and a dwarf. Providing the dwarf had survived Pex and Chips.
The vault door itself was impressive. Most corporate vaults looked impressive, plenty of chrome and keypads, but that was just to make an impression on stockholders. In Spiro’s vault there wasn’t a tumbler out of place. Artemis spotted the very latest computer lock on the face of titanium double doors. Spiro keyed in another complicated series of numbers, and the meter-thick doors slid back to reveal another barrier. The secondary door.
“Imagine you were a thief,” said Spiro, as if he were an actor introducing a play. “And you somehow get into the building, past the electronic eyes and the locked doors. Then, imagine you somehow cheat the sensor pad and open the first vault door, an impossible feat by the way. And while we’re imagining all this, let’s pretend you disable the half dozen cameras, and even then, e
ven after all that, would you be able to do this?”
Spiro stood on a small red plate painted on the floor in front of the door. He placed a thumb on a gel-print scanner, held his left eyelid open, and enunciated clearly.
“Jon Spiro. I am the boss, so open up quick.”
Four things happened. A retinal scanner filmed his left eye and fed the image into the computer. A print plate scanned his right thumb, and a vocal analyzer scrutinized Spiro’s accent, timbre, and intonation. Once the computer had verified all this information, the alarms were deactivated and the secondary door slid open, revealing an expansive vault.
In the very center, in the middle of a custom-made steel column, rested the C Cube. It was encased in a Plexiglas box with at least six cameras focused on its various planes. Two burly guards stood back-to-back, forming a human barrier in front of the fairy technology.
Spiro could not resist a gibe. “Unlike you,” he said. “I look after my technology. This is the only vault of its kind in the world.”
“Live security in an airtight room. Interesting.”
“These guys are trained at high altitude. Also, we change the guards on the hour, and they all carry oxygen cylinders to keep them going. What did you think? I was going to put air vents into a vault?”
Artemis scowled. “No need to show off, Spiro. I’m here, you win. So can we get on with it?”
Spiro punched a final number sequence into the column’s keypad and the Plexiglas panes retracted. He took the Cube from its foam nest.
“Overkill, don’t you think?” commented Artemis. “All of this is hardly necessary.”
“You never know. Some crooked businessman could attempt to relieve me of my prize.”
Artemis took a chance on some calculated sarcasm. “Really, Spiro. Did you think I would attempt a break-in? Perhaps you thought I would fly in here with my fairy friends and magic your box away?”
Spiro laughed. “You can bring all the fairy friends you like, Arty-boy. Short of a miracle that Cube is staying right where it is.”
Juliet was an American citizen by birth, even though her brother had been born on the other side of the world. She was glad to be back in her home country. The discord of Chicago’s traffic and the constant chorus of multicultural voices made her feel at home. She loved the skyscrapers and the steam vents and the affectionate sarcasm of the street vendors. If she ever got the chance to settle down, it would be in the U.S. On the West Coast though, somewhere with sun.