“The jet is at your disposal, naturally,” said Artemis, who then frowned, unhappy with the sentence. “Hopefully this entire thing is nothing but a . . . goose chase.”
Butler glanced sharply at his young charge. Something was wrong with the boy, he felt sure of it, but at the moment there was only room for Juliet in the concern for others corner of his brain.
“This is no goose chase,” he said softly, then with considerably more force: “And whoever caused this message to be sent will regret it.” To drive this point home, Butler allowed his big-brother side to surface for a moment and punched a training mannequin so hard that its wooden head flew off and spun on the practice mat like a top.
Artemis picked up the head and tapped the crown half a dozen times, or thereabouts.
“I imagine they already do,” he said, his voice the rustle of dry leaves.
So now Butler was making agonizingly slow progress through the late-night Cancún traffic, head and shoulders squashed flat against the Fiat’s roof. He had neglected to reserve a car, and so had been forced to accept whatever the Hertz lady had left in the lot. A Fiat 500. Très cool if you were a single teen on the way to the spa, but not so suitable for a two-hundred-twenty-pound hulk.
An unarmed two-hundred-twenty-pound hulk, Butler realized. Generally the bodyguard managed to bring a few weapons with him to whatever party he was about to break up, but in this case public transport was actually quicker than the Fowl jet, so Butler had been forced to leave his arsenal at home, even his beloved Sig Sauer, which had almost drawn a tear. He had connected through Atlanta, and the marines at customs would not have taken kindly to anyone smuggling hardware into the U.S., especially someone who looked like he could probably breach the White House with a few belts of ammunition.
Butler had been at something of a loose end since leaving Artemis’s side. For more than fifteen years he had spent the vast bulk of his time engaged in Artemis-related activities. Finding himself virtually alone in business class on a transatlantic flight with several hours of enforced downtime, he could not sleep for worrying about his sister, and so his mind naturally drifted to Artemis.
His charge had changed recently—there was no doubt about it. Since his return from saving endangered species in Morocco last year, there had been a definite mood swing. Artemis seemed less open than usual, and usually he was about as open as a Swiss vault at night. Also, Butler had noticed that Artemis seemed obsessed with the placement of objects, something Butler himself was very alert to, as he was trained to see everything in a building as a potential weapon or shrapnel fragment. Often Artemis would enter a room that his bodyguard had already swept and cleared and start moving things back to where they had been. And Artemis’s speech seemed off somehow. Artemis generally spoke in sentences that were almost poetic, but lately he seemed to care less about what he said than how many words it took to say it.
As the Boeing began its descent into Atlanta, Butler decided that he would go to Artemis Senior as soon as he made it back to Fowl Manor and make a clean breast of his concerns. While it was undeniably his job to protect Artemis from danger, it was difficult to do that when the danger came from Artemis himself.
I have protected Artemis from trolls, goblins, demons, dwarf gas, and even humans, but I cannot guarantee that my skill set will save him from his own mind. Which makes it imperative that I find Juliet and bring her home as soon as possible.
Butler eventually grew tired of the traffic’s crawl down Cancún’s main strip and decided that he would make better time on foot. He pulled over sharply into a taxi lane and, ignoring the indignant cries of the drivers, set off past the rows of five-star hotels at a brisk jog.
Locating Juliet would not be difficult: her face was splashed all over dozens of downtown banners.
LUCHASLAM! FOR ONE WEEK ONLY AT THE GRAND THEATER.
Butler did not much care for Juliet’s picture on the banners. The artist had twisted her pretty face to make his sister seem more aggressive, and her stance was obviously just for show. It might look good on a poster, but it was all wrong, and left her wide open for a hook to the kidneys.
Juliet would never approach an adversary in that way.
His sister was the best natural fighter he had ever seen, and too proud to ask for help unless there was no other option available to her, which was why her message was so worrying.
Butler jogged two miles without breaking a sweat, weaving through throngs of revelers, until he arrived at the glass-and-stucco façade of the Grand Theater. A dozen or so red-jacketed doormen clustered around the automatic doors, nodding and smiling at the crowd hurrying in for the main event.
Around the back, he decided. The story of my life.
Butler skirted the building, thinking that it would be nice, just once, to go in the front door. Maybe he would in another lifetime, when he got too old for this business.
How old do I have to be? he wondered. Come to think of it, with all the time travel and fairy healings, I’m not even sure how old I actually am anymore.
As soon as Butler reached the back door, he put all other thoughts from his mind, apart from the job at hand. Get to Juliet, find out what trouble she was in, and extricate her with minimal collateral damage. There were still ten minutes before the show was scheduled to start, so with a little luck he could nab his sister before the room got too crowded.
The only security on the back door was a single surveillance camera. Luckily, the Grand was a straight theater and not the convention room of a resort hotel, or there would have been a cluster of pools at the back door, along with crowds of tourists, a salsa band, and possibly half a dozen undercover private cops. As it was, Butler slid unnoticed into the theater and simply waved at the camera on the way in, effectively covering his face.
Butler did not meet a shred of opposition on his way through the theater’s backstage area. He passed a couple of costumed wrestlers sharing an electrolytic drink, but they barely spared him a glance, probably assuming he was one of them. Big and dumb, by the look of him—the bad guy.
Like most theaters, the Grand had miles of corridors and back passages that had not shown up on the blueprints Butler had downloaded on his smartphone from Artemis’s interpedia, which had a dedicated blueprint site containing any plans that had ever been uploaded and quite a few that Artemis had stolen and uploaded himself. After several wrong turns, even Butler’s excellent sense of direction was failing him, and the big bodyguard was tempted to simply punch through walls and create the shortest route to where he wanted to go: the performers’ dressing room.
Butler finally arrived at the dressing room door just in time to see the tail end of the wrestling squad winding their way through to the stage, looking like sections of a Chinese dragon in all their Lycra and silk. After the last wrestler slipped through, a barrier of meat and muscle in the shape of two enormous bouncers closed across the backstage doors.
I could take them, thought Butler. That would not be a problem, but it would only leave me seconds to find Juliet and get her out of here, and, knowing my sister, she will want to conduct a complicated and ultimately meaningless conversation before she’s ready to go. I need to think like Artemis, like the Artemis of old, and play this calmly. Blundering in is likely to get both of us killed.
Butler heard the howls and whoops of the crowd as the wrestlers entered. The noise was muffled through the double doors, but clearer from the dressing room. He poked his head inside and saw a monitor bracketed to the wall, displaying the action in the ring. Convenient.
Butler stepped close to the screen and searched for his sister. There she was, at the corner of the ring, performing some ostentatious warm-ups that were more for show than actual effect. If Butler could have seen his own normally taciturn features at that moment, he would have been surprised by the fond, almost sleepy, smile that lingered on his face.
It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, little sister.
Juliet did not seem to be in any immedia
te danger; in fact, she appeared to be relishing the crowd’s attention, raising her arms for more applause and whipping the jade ring on her ponytail around in figures of eight. The crowd loved her too. Several young men waved banners bearing Juliet’s image, and a few were bold enough to shower her with confetti hearts. Butler frowned. He would definitely be keeping an eye on those particular young gentlemen.
Butler allowed himself to relax a little, a loosening of the fingers, which perhaps five people in the world would have noticed. He was still on high alert, but could admit to himself now that his darkest fear had always been that he would arrive too late.
Juliet is alive. And healthy. Whatever the problem is, we can solve it between us.
He decided then that the most prudent course of action would be to observe from this vantage point. He had a clear view of the wrestling ring, and, if necessary, he could be by his sister’s side in seconds.
The opening match was started by an old-fashioned ringside bell, and Juliet leaped high, landing catlike on the top rope.
“Princesa! Princesa!” chanted the audience.
A favorite with the crowd, thought Butler. Of course she is.
Juliet’s opponent was obviously the villain of the piece. A humongous woman with buzz-cut bleached hair and a costume of bloodred Lycra.
“Boo!” called the crowd.
Like most wrestlers on the luchador circuit, the huge newcomer wore a mask that covered her eyes and nose and was tied at the back with some nasty-looking barbed wire, which Butler suspected was actually plastic.
Juliet seemed like a doll in comparison, apparently outmatched. A little of the cockiness drained from her masked face, and she appealed to her corner for assistance, but was met with shrugged shoulders from a stereotypical flat-capped trainer who could have been recruited from the set of a wrestling movie. This match is all scripted, Butler realized. There’s no danger here.
He pulled a chair up to the screen and settled to watch his sister.
The first round was gentle enough on Butler’s nerves. Then, in the second round, Juliet strayed a little close to her opponent and was pounced on with surprising speed.
“Oooh,” cried most of the crowd. “Snap her in two, Samsonetta!” called a few less charitable observers.
Samsonetta, thought Butler. It suits her.
He was not worried at this point. There were at least a dozen ways for Juliet to break Samsonetta’s hold, as far as he could see. Most she could do without even using her hands. One would be theoretically possible by combining a fake sneeze with a sudden drop.
Butler started to worry when he noticed a dozen men in trench coats sidling along the far wall toward the ring.
Trench coats? In Cancún? Why would anyone wear a trench coat in Mexico unless they were concealing something?
The picture was too grainy for Butler to garner much detail, but there was something about these guys and the way they moved. Purposeful, devious, sticking to the shadows.
I’ve got time, Butler reasoned, already putting together his plan. This could be nothing, but it could be everything. I can’t take chances with Juliet’s life at stake.