Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (19 page)

Juliet nodded appreciatively. “That’s what I would have done.”

“Me too,” said Butler. “Maybe Beckett will end up as Myles’s bodyguard.” The light moment didn’t last long. “Artemis isn’t taking my calls. Imagine that. I think he’s changed his SIM, so I can’t track him.”

“But we are tracking him, right?”

Butler checked his touch-screen phone. “Oh yes. Artemis isn’t the only one with Foaly’s phone number.”

“What did that sneaky centaur give you?”

“An isotope spray. You just spray it on a surface, then track it with one of Foaly’s mi-p’s.”

“Meepees?”

“Mini-programs. Foaly uses it to keep an eye on his kids.”

“Where did you spray it?”

“Artemis’s shoes.”

Juliet giggled. “He does like ’em shiny.”

“Yes, he does.”

“You’re starting to think like a Fowl, brother.”

Mulch Diggums called back from the cockpit. “Gods help us all. That’s what the world needs, more Fowls.”

They all shared a guilty laugh at that.

The mercenary gyro tracked the Gulf Stream north to the coast of Ireland, moving at slightly more than twice the speed ever achieved by the Concorde, then swung in a long northwesterly arc into the North Atlantic as its computer zeroed in on Artemis’s footwear.

“Artemis’s shoes are walking us right to him,” said Mulch, chortling at his own joke. The Butlers did not join in the mirth, not from any loyalty to their employer, who enjoyed the occasional joke, but because Mulch’s mouth was packed with the contents of the shuttle’s cooler box, and they had no idea what he had just said.

“Please yourselves,” said Mulch, spattering the inside of the windshield with chewed sweet corn. “I make the effort to speak in humanese, and you two joke snobs won’t even laugh at my efforts.”

The shuttle rocketed along, six feet above the wave tops, its anti-grav pulses burrowing periodic cylinders into the ocean’s surface. The engine noise was low and could have been mistaken for a whistling wind, and to any smart mammals below who could see through the shields, the shuttle could be mistaken for a very fast humpback with an extra-wide tail and a loading bay.

“We really lucked out with this bucket,” commented Mulch, his mouth mercifully empty. “She’s more or less flying herself. I just put your phone into the dock, opened the mi-p, and off she went.”

The craft behaved a little like a tracker dog, suddenly coming to a dead stop whenever it lost the scent, then casting its prow about furiously until the isotope showed up again. At one point it had plunged into the ocean, burrowing straight down until pressure cracked the fuselage plates, and they lost a square foot of shielding.

“Don’t worry, Mud Men,” Mulch had reassured them. “All fairy craft have sea engines. When you live underground, it makes sense to build watertight ships.”

Juliet had not ceased to worry: from what she remembered, reassurance from Mulch Diggums was about as reliable as a cocktail from the Pittsburgh Poisoner.

Fortunately, the underwater jaunt hadn’t lasted too long, and soon they were flitting across the wave tops once more without incident, except for the time when Mulch forgot his promise not to press mysterious buttons and almost crashed them into the sun-flecked seas by releasing the emergency-brake mini-parachute cluster.

“It was calling me, that button,” he offered as his excuse. “I couldn’t resist.”

The jolting stop had shunted Butler along the bench. He slid the entire length of the fuselage into the cockpit divider. Only his lightning reactions stopped him from getting his head jammed in the railings.

Butler rubbed his crown, which he had clipped on a bar. “Take it easy, or there will be consequences. You said it yourself: we don’t need you to fly the ship.”

Mulch guffawed, giving a nasty view of his cavernous food pipe. “That’s true, Butler, my freakishly large friend. But you certainly need me to land it.”

Juliet’s laugh was high and sweet and seemed to ricochet off the curved metal walls.

“You too, Juliet?” said Butler reproachfully.

“Come on, brother. That was funny. You’ll laugh too when Mulch plays back the video.”

“There’s video?” said Butler, which just set the other two laughing again.

All of this laughing did nothing to delay Butler’s reunion with his principal, Artemis Fowl. A principal who no longer trusted him and who had probably lied to him, sending Butler to another continent and using Juliet to ensure that he would travel.

I believed that my own baby sister was in danger. Artemis, how could you?

There would be tough questions asked when he finally caught up with Artemis. And the answers had better be good or, for the first time in the history of their families’ centuries-long relationship, a Butler might just walk away from his duties.

Artemis is ill, Butler rationalized. He’s not responsible.

Maybe Artemis was not responsible. But he soon would be.

The mercenaries’ shuttle finally jerked to a halt over a spot of open ocean just above the sixtieth parallel. It was a spot that seemed no different than the square gray miles that stretched away on all sides, until the anti-grav pillar plowed through six feet of water below, revealing the arrowhead escape pod.

“I love this ship,” Mulch crowed. “It makes me look smarter-er than I am.”

The surrounding waters churned and boiled as the invisible pulses tested the surface and compacted the waves enough to keep the ship hovering in place. Down below, the pulses would sound like bell clappers on the pod’s skin.

“Hello,” called Mulch. “We’re up here.”

Butler stuck his head and shoulders into the cockpit, which was about all of him that could fit.

“Can’t we radio them?”

“Radio?” said the dwarf. “You don’t know much about being a fugitive, do you? The first thing you do when you steal an LEP ship is strip out anything that could carry a signal to Police Plaza. Every wire, every fuse, every lens. All gone. I’ve known guys who got caught because they left the sound system in. That’s an old Foaly trick. He knows bad boys love their loud music, so he installs a set of speakers to kill for in every LEP bird, each one loaded with tracer gel. There’s hardly any tech left in here.”

“So?”

“So what?” said Mulch, as if he had no idea what they were talking about.

“So how do we communicate with that ship down there?”

“You have a phone, don’t you?”

Butler’s eyes dropped to the floor. “Artemis is not taking my calls. He’s not himself.”

“That’s terrible,” said Mulch. “But do you think they have food? Some of those escape pods have emergency rations. A little chewy, but okay with a nice bottle of beer.”

Butler was wondering whether this change of subject warranted a clip on the ear, when his phone rang.

“It’s Artemis,” he said, seeming a little more shocked than when he’d been surrounded by
luchador
zombies.

“Butler?” said Artemis’s voice.

“Yes, Artemis.”

“We need to talk.”

“You’d better make it good,” said Butler, and severed the connection.

It took mere moments to winch down a bucket seat to the pod below, and another few minutes for the pod’s occupants to clamber into the mercenaries’ shuttle. Holly was the last up as she pulled the scuttle cord and opened the escape pod’s ballast tanks wide before she left, sinking the craft.

As soon as her elbow crabbed over the doorway’s lip, Holly began giving orders.

“Monitor LEP channels on the radio,” she barked. “We need to find out how the investigation is proceeding.”

Mulch grinned from the pilot’s chair. “Aha, you see that might be a problem, this being a stolen ship and all. Not much in the way of communications. And hello, by the way. I’m fine, still alive, and all that. Happy to be able to save your life. Also, what investigation are we talking about?”

Holly pulled herself all the way inside, glancing regretfully down at the sinking pod with its—until recently— functional communications array.

“Ah well,” she sighed. “You work with whatever limited resources you have.”

“Thanks a bunch,” said Mulch, miffed. “Did you bring any food? I haven’t eaten for, wow, it must be minutes.”

“No, no food,” said Holly. She hugged Mulch tightly, one of perhaps four people in the world who would voluntarily touch the dwarf, then pushed him out of the pilot’s chair, taking his place. “That will have to do for niceties. I’ll buy you an entire barbecue hamper later.”

“With real meat?”

Holly shuddered. “Of course not. Don’t be disgusting.”

Butler sat up and spared a moment to nod at Holly, then turned his full attention on Artemis, who carried himself like the Artemis of old but without the customary cockiness.

“Well?” said Butler, the single syllable laden with implication.
If I do not like what I hear, it could be the end of the road for us.

Artemis knew that the situation merited at least a hug, and some day in the future, after years of meditation, he might feel comfortable spontaneously hugging people, but at this moment it was all he could do to lay a hand on Juliet’s shoulder and another on Butler’s forearm.

“I am so sorry, my friends, to have lied to you.”

Juliet covered the hand with her own, for that was her nature, but Butler raised his as though he were being arrested.

“Juliet could have died, Artemis. We were forced to fight off a horde of
mesmerized
wrestling fans and a ship-load of dwarf mercenaries. We were both in grave danger.”

Artemis pulled away, the moment of emotion past. “Real danger? Then someone has been spying on me. Someone who knew our movements. Possibly the same someone who sent the probe to kill Vinyáya and target Atlantis.”

Over the next few minutes, while Holly ran a systems check and plotted a course for the crash site, Artemis brought Butler and Juliet up to speed, saving the diagnosis of his own illness for last.

“I have a disorder which the fairies call an Atlantis Complex. It is similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder but also manifests as delusional dementia and even multiple personality.” Butler nodded slowly. “I see. So when you sent me away, you were in the grips of this Atlantis Complex.”

“Exactly. I was in stage one, which involves a large dose of paranoia as one of its symptoms. You missed stage two.”

“Lucky for you,” Holly called back from the cockpit. “That Orion guy was a little too friendly.”

“My subconscious built the Orion personality as my alter ego. Artemis, I’m sure you remember, was the goddess of the hunt, and legend has it that Orion was Artemis’s mortal enemy, so she sent a scorpion to kill him. In my mind Orion was free from the guilt I harbored from my various schemes, especially the guilt of
mesmerizing
my parents, kidnapping Holly, and, crucially, seeing my mother possessed by Opal. Perhaps had I not dabbled in magic I might have developed a slight personality disorder, maybe even Child Genius Syndrome, but with my neural pathways coated with stolen magic I know now that it was inevitable I would succumb to Atlantis.” Artemis dropped his eyes. “What I did was shameful. I was weak and I will carry regret for the rest of my life.”

Butler’s face softened. “Are you well now? Did the electrocution do the trick?”

Foaly was getting a little tired of Artemis doing all the lecturing, so he cleared his throat and volunteered some information. “According to my phone’s mi-p almanac, shock treatment is an archaic treatment and rarely permanent. Atlantis Complex can be cured, but only through extended therapy and the careful use of psychoactive drugs. Soon, Artemis’s compulsions will return and he will feel an irresistible urge to complete his mission, to number things, and to avoid the number four, which I believe sounds like the Chinese word for death.”

“So, Artemis is not cured?”

Artemis was suddenly glad that there were five other people in the shuttle. A good omen for success.

“No. I am not cured yet.”

Omens? It begins again.

Artemis actually wrung his hands, a physical sign of his determination.

I will not be beaten by this so soon.

And to prove it, he deliberately composed a sentence with four words.

“I will be fine.”

“Oooh,” said Mulch, who always had trouble grasping the gravity of situations. “Four. Scary.”

The first thing was to get them down to the crash site, as it seemed obvious to everyone except Mulch that the space probe did not navigate its way through the atmosphere with pinpoint accuracy just to accidentally crash into a prison shuttle. With Holly at the controls, the stolen ship was soon slicing through the Atlantic depths, trailing intertwining streams of air bubbles.

“There’s something afoot here,” mused Artemis, gripping the fingers of his left hand tightly to stop them from shaking. “Vinyáya was taken out to hobble the LEP, then the probe gives up its own position, and someone phones in a tip allowing the Atlantis authorities just enough time to evacuate, and then the probe lands on a shuttle. Bad luck for the occupants?”

“Is that one of those rhetorical questions?” wondered Mulch. “I can never get the hang of those. Also, while we’re on the subject, what’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile?”

Holly snapped her fingers. “Somebody wanted everybody in the shuttle dead.”

“Somebody wanted us to
think
that everyone in the shuttle was dead,” corrected Artemis. “What a way to fake your own death. It will be months before the LEP can put the pieces together, if ever. That’s a nice head start for a fugitive.”

Holly turned to Foaly. “I need to know who was on that prison shuttle. Do you have an inside guy in Police Plaza?”

Butler was surprised. “Inside guy? I thought you guys were the inside guys.”

“We’re a little on the outside at the moment,” admitted Holly. “I’m supposed to be detaining Artemis.”

Juliet clapped her hands. “Have you ever actually obeyed an order?”

“It was kind of a non-order, and anyway I only obey orders when they are sound. In this case, it would be ridiculous to sit around for an hour in a burned-out pod while our enemy, whoever it is, gets on with phase two.”