“One second burst. Fire.” Nothing happened, so Foaly swore briefly, turned on his microphone, and tried it again.
“One second burst. Fire.”
This time, a red beam pulsed from the pencil’s tip, and the lock melted into metallic mush.
Always good to have the equipment switched on, thought Foaly, glad that no one had witnessed his mistake, especially Artemis Fowl.
Foaly targeted a desktop computer at the far side of the office with a glare and three blinks.
“Compute bounce,” he ordered the helmet, and almost immediately an animated dotted arrow appeared on the screen, dipping once to the floor and then rising to the computer desk.
“Execute bounce,” said Foaly, and smiled as his creation rolled into life. The helmet hit the floor with a basketball ping, then bounced across the room, directly onto the computer desk.
“Perfect, you genius,” said Foaly, congratulating himself. Sometimes his own achievements brought a tear to his eye.
I wish Caballine could have seen that, he thought. And then, Wow, I must be getting serious about this girl.
Caballine was a centaur he had bumped into at a gallery downtown. She was a researcher with PPTV by day and a sculptor by night. A very smart lady, and she knew all about Foaly. Apparently, Caballine was a big fan of the mood blanket, a multi-sensor massage and homeopathic garment designed by Foaly specifically for centaurs. So they talked about that for a half hour. One thing led to another, and now he found himself jogging with her every evening. Whenever there wasn’t an emergency.
Which there is now! he reminded himself, turning his attention back to work.
The helmet was sitting next to the human computer keyboard, with its omnisensor pointed directly at the hard drive.
Foaly stared at the hard drive and blinked three times, selecting it on the screen.
“Download all files from this and any networked computers,” instructed the centaur, and the helmet immediately began to suck information from the Apple Mac.
After several seconds, an animated bottle on the V-goggles screen was filled to the brim, and burped. Transfer completed. Now they could find out exactly how much information these humans had, and where they were getting it from. But there was still the matter of back-up files. This group could have burned their information onto CDs, or even sent it by e-mail or stored it on the Internet.
Foaly used the virtual keyboard to open a data-charge folder and send a virus into the human computer. The charge would completely wipe out any computers on the network, but before that, it would run along any Internet pathways explored by these humans and completely burn the sites. Foaly would have liked to have been a bit more delicate about it, and just erase fairy-related files, but he couldn’t afford to take chances with this mysterious group. The mere fact that they had avoided detection for so long was proof that they were not to be trifled with.
This was a major virus to lob into a human system. It would probably crash thousands of sites, including Google and Yahoo, but Foaly didn’t see that he had a choice.
On Foaly’s screen, the data charge appeared as a red flickering flame that chuckled nastily as it dived into the omnisensor’s data stream. In five minutes, the Paradizo’s hard drives would be burned beyond repair. And as an added bonus, the charge would also attach itself to any storage devices within the sensor’s range that bore the network’s signature. So any information stored on CDs or flash drives would disintegrate as soon as someone tried to load them. It was potent stuff, and there wasn’t a firewall or antivirus that could stop it.
Artemis’s voice issued from two gel speakers in jars on the desk, interrupting his concentration.
“There’s a wall safe in the office. It’s where Minerva keeps her notes. You need to burn anything inside it.”
“Wall safe,” replied Foaly. “Let’s see.”
The centaur ran an X-ray scan on the room and found the safe behind a row of shelving. Given the time, he would have liked to have scanned all the contents, but he had a rendezvous to keep. He sent a concentrated laser beam the width of a length of fishing line into the belly of the safe, reducing the contents to ash. Hopefully he was destroying more than the family jewels.
The X-ray scan revealed nothing else promising, so Foaly sent the helmet beads spinning, toppling Holly’s helmet off the desk. In a display of keyboard virtuosity, Foaly used the laser to carve a section from the base of the office door while the helmet was in midair. In two choreographed bounces, the helmet was through the section and into the corridor outside.
Foaly grinned, satisfied.
“Never even touched the wood,” he said.
The centaur called up a blueprint for the Chateau Paradizo and superimposed it over a grid on his screen. There were two dots on the grid. One was the helmet, and the other was Holly. It was time the two were reunited.
As he worked, Foaly unconsciously sang a verse of the Riverbend dirge.
“When my lucky numbers run out of luck,
When I’m stuck in the hole I tumbled into,
When my favorite dawg gets squashed by a truck,
That’s when I think me some thoughts of you.”
On the planet’s surface, Artemis winced as the song twanged through his tiny phone and along his thumb.
“Please, Foaly,” he said in pained tones. “I’m trying to negotiate on the other line.”
Foaly whinnied, surprised. He’d forgotten about Artemis.
“Some people ain’t got no Riverbend in their souls,” he said, switching off his microphone.
Billy Kong decided that he’d have a little word with the new prisoner. The female. If indeed she was female. How was he supposed to know for sure what class of a creature it was? It looked like a girl, but maybe demon girls weren’t the same as human ones. So Billy Kong thought he might ask it what exactly it was, among other things. If the creature decided not to answer, Kong didn’t mind. There were ways to persuade people to talk. Asking them nicely was one way. Giving them candy was another. But Billy Kong preferred torture.
Back in the early eighties, when Billy Kong was still plain old Jonah Lee, he had lived in the California beach town of Malibu with his mother, Annie, and big brother, Eric.
Annie worked two jobs to keep her boys in sneakers, so Jonah got left with Eric in the evenings. That should have worked out fine. Eric was sixteen and old enough to look after his kid brother. But like most sixteen-year-olds, he had more on his mind than little brothers. In fact, babysitting Jonah was seriously interfering with his social life.
The problem was, as Eric saw it, t
hat Jonah was an outdoorsy kind of boy. As soon as Eric took off to hang out with his friends, Jonah would ignore his big brother’s orders and head out into the California evening. And outdoors in the city was no place for an eight-year-old. So what Eric needed to do was devise a scheme that kept Jonah indoors, and allowed Eric to roam free.
He came upon the perfect strategy quite by accident one night, returning home after a late-night argument with his girlfriend’s other boyfriend and his brothers.
For once, Jonah had not ventured out, and was plonked in front of the TV, watching a horror show on hacked cable. Eric, who had always been impulsive and reckless, had taken to sneaking around with the girlfriend of a local gangster. Now word had leaked out, and the gang was after him. They had roughed him up a bit already, but he had gotten away. He was bloody and tired, but still kind of enjoying himself.
“Lock the doors,” he’d called to his little brother, startling him out of his TV stupor.
Jonah jumped to his feet, eyes widening as he noticed Eric’s bloodied nose and lip.
“What happened to you?”
Eric grinned. He was that kind of person—exhausted, battered, but buzzing with adrenaline.
“I got . . . There was this bunch of . . .”
And then he stopped, because the spark of an idea was ricocheting around in his head. He must look pretty beat up. Maybe he could use this to keep little Jonah indoors while Mom was working.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, dragging a smear of blood across his face with one sleeve. “I’ve sworn an oath. Just bolt the doors and close the shutters.”
Usually Jonah didn’t have time for his brother’s theatrics, but tonight there was blood and horror on the TV, and he could hear footsteps pounding up the driveway.
“Dammit, they’ve found me,” swore Eric, peeking through a shutter.
Little Jonah grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “Who’s found you, Eric? You gotta tell me.”