‘Is he doing his physiotherapy exercises twice a day?’
Anpeline laughed again, and suddenly Artemis wished he were home.
‘Yes, Grandad. I am making sure of that. Your father says he’ll run the marathon in twelve months.’
‘Good, I’m glad to hear it. Sometimes I think you two would spend your time wandering around the grounds, holding hands, if I didn’t check up on you.’
His mother sighed, a rush of static through the speaker. ‘I’m worried about you, Arty. Someone your age shouldn’t be quite so… responsible. Don’t worry about us, worry about school and friends. Think about what you really want to do. Use that big brain of yours to make yourself and other people happy. Forget the family business, living is the family business now.’
Artemis didn’t know how to reply. Half of him wanted to point out that there really would be no family business if it weren’t for him secretly safeguarding it. The other half of him wanted to get on a plane home and wander the grounds with his family.
His mother sighed again. Artemis hated the fact that just talking to him could make her worry.
‘When will you be home, Arty?’
‘The trip ends in three more days.’
‘I mean, when will you be home for good? I know Saint Bartleby’s is a family tradition, but we want you home with us. Principal Guiney will understand. There are plenty of good day schools locally.’
‘I see,’ said Artemis. Could he do it? he wondered. Just be part of a normal family.
Abandon his criminal enterprises. Was it in him to live an honest life? ‘The holidays are in a couple of weeks. We can talk then,’ he said. Delaying tactics. ‘To be honest, I can’t concentrate now. I’m not feeling very well. I thought I might have food poisoning, but it turns out to be just a twenty-four-hour bug. The local doctor says I will be fine tomorrow.’
‘Poor Arty,’ crooned Angeline. ‘Maybe I should put you on a plane home.’
‘No, Mother. I’m feeling better already. Honestly.’
‘Whatever you like. I know bugs are uncomfortable, but it’s better than a dose of food poisoning. You could have been laid low for weeks. Drink plenty of water, and try to sleep.’
‘I will, Mother.’
‘You’ll be home soon.’
‘Yes. Tell Father I called.’
‘I will, if I can find him. He’s in the gym, I think, on the treadmill.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Bye, Arty, we’ll talk more about this on your return,’ said Angeline, her voice low and slightly sad. Sounding very far away.
Artemis ended the call and immediately replayed it on his computer. Every time he spoke to his mother he felt guilty. Angeline Fowl had a way of awakening his conscience. This was a relatively new development. A year ago he might have felt a tiny pinprick of guilt at lying to his mother, but now even this minor trick he was about to play would haunt his thoughts for weeks.
Artemis watched the sound-wave meter on his computer screen. He was changing, no doubt about it. This kind of self-doubt had been increasing over the past several months… ever since he had discovered mysterious mirrored contact lenses in his own eyes one morning. Butler and Juliet had been wearing the same lenses. They had tried to find out where the lenses came from, but all that Butler’s contact in that field would say was that Artemis himself had paid for them. Curiouser and curiouser.
The lenses remained a mystery. And so did Artemis’s feelings. On the table before him was Herve’s The Fairy Thief, an acquisition that established him as the foremost thief of the age, a status he had longed for since the age of six. But now that his ambition was literally in his grasp, all he could think about was his family.
Is now the time to retire? he thought. Aged fourteen and three months, the best thief in the world. After all, where can I go from here? He replayed a section of the phone conversation: ‘Don’t worry about us, worry about school and friends. Think about what you really want to do. Use that big brain of yours to make yourself and other people happy.’
Maybe his mother was right. He should use his talents to make others happy. But there was a darkness in him, a hard surface in his heart that would not be satisfied with the quiet life. Maybe there were ways to make people happy that only he could achieve.
Ways on the far side of the law. Over the thin blue line.
Artemis rubbed his eyes. He could not come to a conclusion. Perhaps living at home full time would make the decision for him. Best to continue with the job at hand.
Buy some time, and then authenticate the painting. Even though he felt some guilt about stealing the masterpiece, it was not nearly enough to make him give it back.
Especially to Messrs Crane & Sparrow.
The first task was to deflect any enquiries from the school as to his activities. He would need at least two days to authenticate the painting, as some of the tests would need to be contracted out.
Artemis opened an audio manipulation program on his Powerbook and set about cutting and pasting his mother’s words from the recorded phone call. When he had selected the words he wanted and had put them in the right order, he smoothed the levels to make the speech sound natural.
When Principal Guiney turned on his mobile phone after the visit to Munich’s Olympia Stadion, there would be a new message waiting for him. It would be from Angeline Fowl, and she would not be in a good mood.
Artemis routed the call through Fowl Manor, then sent the edited sound file by infrared to his own mobile phone.
‘Principal Guiney,’ said the voice, unmistakably Angeline Fowl’s, which the caller ID would confirm, ‘I’m worried about Arty. He has a dose ofjood poisoning. His outlook is marvellous, he never complains but we want him home with us. You understand. I put Arty on a plane home. I am surprised he got a dose ojjood poisoning under jour care.
We will talk more on jour return.’
That took care of school for a few days. The dark half of Artemis felt an electric thrill at the subterfuge, but his growing conscience felt a tug of guilt at using his mother’s voice to weave his web of lies.
He banished the guilt. It was a harmless lie. Butler would escort him home, and his education would not suffer through a few days’ absence. As for stealing The Fairy Thief, theft from thieves was not real crime. It was almost justifiable.
Yes, said a voice in his head, unbidden. If you give the painting back to the world.
No, replied his granite-hearted half. This painting is mine until someone can steal it away. That’s the whole point.
Artemis banished his indecision and turned off his mobile phone. He needed to focus completely on the painting and a vibrating phone at the wrong moment could cause his hand to jitter. His natural inclination was to pop the stopper on the perspex tube’s lid. But that could be more than foolish, it could be fatal. There were any number of little gifts that Crane & Sparrow could have left for him.
Artemis took a chromatograph from the rigid suitcase that contained his lab equipment. The instrument would take a sample of the gas inside the tube and process it. He chose a needle nozzle from a selection, screwing it on to the rubber tube protruding from the chromatograph’s flat end. He held the needle carefully in his left hand. Artemis was ambidextrous, but his left hand was slightly steadier. With care, he poked the needle through the tube’s silicone seal into the space round the painting. It was essential that the needle be moved as little as possible so that the container’s gas could not leak out and mingle with the air. The chromatograph siphoned a small sample of gas, sucking it into a heated injection port. Any organic impurities were driven off by heating, and a carrier gas transported the sample through a separation column and into a flame ionization detector. There, individual components were identified. Seconds later, a graph flashed up on the instrument’s digital readout. The percentages of oxygen, hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide matched a sample taken earlier from downtown Munich. There was a five per cent slice of gas that remained unidentified. But that was normal. This was probably caused by complex pollution gases or equipment sensitivity.
Mystery gas aside, Artemis knew that it was perfectly safe to open the tube. He did so, carefully slitting the seal with a craft knife.
Artemis put on a set of surgical gloves, teasing the painting from the cylinder. It plopped on to the table in a tight roll, but sprang 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 colours and the layered brushwork. Herve’s figures seemed to be composed of light. So beautifully were they painted, the picture seemed to sparkle. It was exquisite. In the picture, a swaddled baby slept in its sun-drenched cot inside an open window. A fairy with green skin and gossamer wings had alighted on the window sill 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, scraping the tiniest sliver of paint from the picture’s border. He deposited the sliver in a sample jar and labelled 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, only give it to Christina, 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 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 was 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 lifts, 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 fifteen-centimetre-thick 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-storey 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 safety deposit boxes in some of 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 he 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 pointing 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, ripping the net curtains from their hooks and flinging the window wide open. The winter air was pale blue, with remarkably few clouds. Jet trails criss-crossed the sky like a giant’s game of noughts and crosses. And there, twenty degrees up, a gentle spiralling 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 storeys 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 vapour trail. Whatever this was, it was brand new. Somebody must very badly want Artemis dead.
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 on to 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 seen the century-old oil paint crack, he would have sobbed. But Butler was paid to protect only one thing, and it was not The Fairy Thief.
