The Opal Deception (Artemis Fowl 4)

Artemis put on a set of surgical gloves and teased the painting from the cylinder. It plopped onto the table in a tight roll, but sprung loose almost immediately. It hadn’t been in the tube long enough to retain the shape. Artemis spread the canvas wide, weighing the corners with smooth gel sacs. He knew immediately that this was no fake. His eye for art took in the primary colors and layered brushwork. Hervé’s figures seemed to be composed of light. So beautifully were they painted that the picture seemed to sparkle. It was exquisite. In the picture a swaddled baby slept in its sun-drenched cot near an open window. A fairy with green skin and gossamer wings had alighted on the windowsill and was preparing to snatch the baby from its cradle. Both of the creature’s feet were on the outside of the sill.

“It can’t go inside,” muttered Artemis absently, and was immediately surprised. How did he know that? He didn’t generally voice opinions without some evidence to back them up.

Relax, he told himself. It was simply a guess. Perhaps based on a sliver of information he had picked up on one of his Internet trawls.

Artemis returned his attention to the painting itself. He had done it. The Fairy Thief was his, for the moment at any rate. He selected a surgical scalpel from his kit and scraped the tiniest sliver of paint from the picture’s border. He deposited the sliver in a sample jar and labeled it. This would be sent to the Technical University of Munich, where they had one of the giant spectrometers necessary for carbon dating. Artemis had a contact there. The radiocarbon test would confirm that the painting, or at least the paint, was as old as it was supposed to be.

He called to Butler in the suite’s other room.

“Butler, could you take this sample over to the university now. Remember, give it only to Christiana, and remind her that speed is vital.”

There was no answer for a moment, then Butler came charging through the door, his eyes wide. He did not look like a man coming to collect a paint sample.

“Is there a problem?” asked Artemis.

Two minutes earlier, Butler had been holding his hand to the window, lost in a rare moment of self-absorption. He glared at the hand, almost as if the combination of sunlight and staring would make the skin transparent. He knew that there was something different about him. Something hidden below the skin. He had felt strange this past year. Older. Perhaps the decades of physical hardship were taking their toll on him. Though he was barely forty, his bones ached at night and his chest felt as though he were wearing a Kevlar vest all the time. He was certainly nowhere near as fast as he had been at thirty-five, and even his mind seemed less focused, more inclined to wander. . . . Just as it is doing now, the bodyguard scolded himself silently.

Butler flexed his fingers, straightened his tie, and got back to work. He was not at all happy with the security of the hotel suite. Hotels were a bodyguard’s nightmare. Service elevators, isolated upper floors, and totally inadequate escape routes made the principal’s safety almost impossible to guarantee. The Kronski was luxurious, certainly, and the staff efficient, but that was not what Butler looked for in a hotel. He looked for a ground-floor room with no windows and a six-inch steel door. Needless to say, rooms like this were impossible to find, and even if he could find one, Master Artemis would undoubtedly turn up his nose at it. Butler would have to make do with this third-story suite.

Artemis wasn’t the only one with a case of instruments. Butler opened a chrome briefcase on the coffee table. It was one of a dozen such cases that he held in safe-deposit boxes in the world’s capitals. Each case was full to bursting with surveillance equipment, counter surveillance equipment, and weaponry. Having one in each country meant that he did not have to break customs laws on each overseas trip from Ireland.

He selected a bug sweeper and quickly ran it around the room, searching for listening devices. He concentrated on the electrical appliances: phone, television, fax machine. The electronic waffle from those items could often drown a bug’s signal, but not with this particular sweeper. The Eye Spy was the most advanced sweeper on the market and could detect a pinhole mike half a mile away.

After several minutes he was satisfied, and was on the point of returning the device to the case, when it registered a tiny electrical field. Nothing much, barely a single flickering blue bar on the indicator. The first bar solidified, then turned bright blue. The second bar began to flicker. Something electronic was closing in on them. Most men would have discounted the reading. After all, there were several thousand electronic devices within a square mile of the Kronski Hotel. But normal electronic fields did not register on the Eye Spy, and Butler was not most men. He extended the sweeper’s aerial, and panned the device around the room. The reading spiked when the aerial was pointed at the window. A claw of anxiety tugged at Butler’s intestines. Something airborne was coming closer at high speed.

He dashed to the window, ripped the net curtains from their hooks, and flung open the window. The winter air was pale blue with remarkably few clouds. Jet trails crisscrossed the sky like a giant’s game of tic-tac-toe. And there, twenty degrees up—a gentle spiraling curve— was a tear-shaped rocket of blue metal. A red light winked on its nose, and white-hot flames billowed from its rear end. The rocket was heading for the Kronski, no doubt about it.

It’s a smart bomb, Butler said to himself without one iota of doubt. And Master Artemis is the target.

Butler’s brain began flicking through his list of alternatives. It was a short list. There were only two choices, really: get out or die. It was how to get out that was the problem. They were three stories up with the exit on the wrong side. He spared a moment to take one last look at the approaching missile. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Even the emission was different from conventional weapons, with hardly any vapor trail. Whatever this was, it was brand new. Somebody must want Artemis dead very badly.

Butler turned from the window and barged into Artemis’s bedroom. The young master was busy conducting his tests on The Fairy Thief.

“Is there a problem?” asked Artemis.

Butler did not reply because he didn’t have time. Instead he grabbed the teenager by the scruff of the neck and hoisted him onto his own back.

“The painting!” Artemis managed to shout, his voice muffled by the bodyguard’s jacket.

Butler grabbed the picture, unceremoniously stuffing the priceless masterpiece into his jacket pocket. If Artemis had been able to see the century-old oil paint crack, he would have sobbed. But Butler was only paid to protect one thing, and it was not The Fairy Thief.

“Hang on extremely tightly,” advised the massive bodyguard, hefting a king-size mattress from the bed.

Artemis held on tight as he’d been told, trying not to think. Unfortunately his brilliant brain automatically analyzed the available data: Butler had entered the room at speed and without knocking; therefore, there was danger of some kind. His refusal to answer questions meant that the danger was imminent. And the fact that Artemis was on Butler’s back, hanging on tightly, indicated that they would not be escaping the aforementioned danger through conventional exit routes. The mattress would indicate that some cushioning would be needed.

“Butler,” gasped Artemis. “You do know that we’re three stories up?”

Butler might have answered, but his employer did not hear him, because by then the giant bodyguard had propelled them through the open double windows and over the balcony railing.

For a fraction of a second, before the inevitable fall, the air currents spun the mattress around, and Artemis could see back into his own bedroom. In that splinter of a moment, he saw a strange missile corkscrew through the bedroom door and come to a complete halt directly over the empty Perspex tube. There was some kind of tracker in the tube, said the tiny portion of his brain that wasn’t panicking. Someone wants me dead.

Then came the inevitable fall. Thirty feet. Straight down.

Butler automatically spread his limbs in a skydiving X, bearing down on the four corners of the mattress

to stop it from flipping. The trapped air below the mattress slowed their fall slightly, but not much. The pair went straight down, fast, G-force increasing their speed with every inch.

Sky and ground seemed to stretch and drip like oil paints on a canvas, and nothing seemed solid anymore. This impression came to an abrupt halt when they slammed into the extremely solid tiled roof of a maintenance shed at the hotel’s rear. The tiles seemed to almost explode under the impact, though the roof timbers held—barely. Butler felt as though his bones had been liquidized, but he knew that he would be okay after a few moments of unconsciousness. He had been in worse collisions before.

His last impression before his senses deserted him was the feel of Master Artemis’s heartbeat through his jacket. Alive, then. They had both survived. But for how long? If their assassin had seen his attempt fail, then maybe he would try again.

Artemis’s impact was cushioned by Butler and the mattress. Without them he certainly would have been killed. As it was, the bodyguard’s muscle-bound frame was dense enough to break two of his ribs. Artemis bounced a full three feet into the air before coming to rest on the unconscious bodyguard’s back, facing the sky.

Each breath was short and painful, and two nubs of bone rose like knuckles from his chest. Sixth and seventh rib, he guessed.

Overhead, a block of iridescent blue light flashed from his hotel window. It lit the sky for a split second, its belly busy with even brighter blue flares that wriggled like hooked worms. No one would pay much attention; the light could easily have been from an oversized camera flash. But Artemis knew better.

Bio-bomb, he thought. Now, how do I know that?