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. Nothing on this floor, except a guard on the lobby desk.”
Juliet took two gray canisters from her backpack. “Okay. 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. Airplane-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 yards 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, inching her nose around 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 inched 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. Oxygen canisters was a bit of misnomer, because there was no oxygen in these canisters.
She checked her watch. It might already be too late.
Above the Spiro Needle
Holly hovered twenty feet above the Needle, waiting for the green light. She was not comfortable with this opera-tion. There were too many variables. If this mission wasn’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 have found his childhood with an encyclopedia.
Captain Short followed team one’s 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 spaceward like the world’s biggest rocket. Low fog gathered around its base, adding to the illusion. Holly set her wings to descend, dropping gently toward 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 ccess code for the rooftop door.
“Thank you, Spiro,” she grinned, punching in the key.
The door slid open silently. Automatic lights flickered into life along the stairwell. There was a camera every twenty feet. 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 rate. 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 had been 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 elevator doors.
“Artemis is on eighty-four,” said Foaly. “The vault is on eighty-five, and Spiro’s penthouse is on eighty-six, where we are now.”
“How are the walls?”
“According to the spectrometer, mostly Sheetrock, steel studs, and wood paneling in the partition walls.
Except around 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 offense.”
“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 elevator. Holly floated into the metal box and descended to the eighty-fifth floor. The guiding laser led her out of the elevator 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.
Holly 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 Men 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 center, and then took a right-angle turn downward through the floor.
“Let me guess. Artemis is down there.”
“Yes. Asleep, judging by the pictures coming in on 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 AC 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 AC.
“Artemis isn’t the only one with brains around here,” grunted Holly, sweat streaming down her face in spite of he helmet’s climate control.
“The AC stops the fire alarm going off. Very good.”
“Is he awake?” asked Holly, leaving the last inch of a two-foot 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
The Spiro Needle, Artemis Fowl’s cell
Artemis was meditating when the first laser stroke cut through the ceiling. He rose from the lotus position, pulled a sweater over his pajamas 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 Mr. Foaly on our side?” he asked.