First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019

Published in this ebook edition in 2019

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Text copyright © Eoin Colfer 2019

Cover illustration © Petur Antonsson

Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Eoin Colfer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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Source ISBN: 9780008324810

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008324834

Version: 2019-10-03

For my sons, Finn and Seán, who are neither twins nor foul

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1. Meet the Antagonists

2. Mirror Ball

3. Jeronima, not Geronimo

4. Operation Fowl Swoop

5. Doveli

6. Clippers and Lance

7. Who Put the Dam in Amsterdam?

8. Mr Circuits and Whoop

9. Muy Inconveniente

10. Vegas-Era Elvis

11. Night Guard

12. Concierge Level

13. Nos Ipsos Adiuvamos

14. Chomp

15. The Sword and the Pen

16. The Most Powerful Gull in Cornwall

17. Farewell, Friends

18. The Next Crisis

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

Books by Eoin Colfer

About the Publisher

THERE ARE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE world.

Surely you realise that what you know is not everything there is to know. In spite of humankind’s ingenuity, there are shadows too dark for your species to fully illuminate. The very mantle of our planet is one example; the ocean floor is another. And in these shadows we live. The Hidden Ones. The magical creatures who have removed ourselves from the destructive human orbit. Once, we fairies ruled the surface as humans do currently, as bacteria will in the future, but for now we are content for the most part to exist in our underground civilisation. For ten thousand years, fairies have used magic and technology to shield ourselves from prying eyes, and to heal the beleaguered Earth mother, Danu. We fairies have a saying that is writ large in golden tiles on the altar mosaic of the Hey Hey Temple, and the saying is this: WE DIG DEEP AND WE ENDURE.

But there is always one maverick who does not care a fig for fairy mosaics and is hell-bent on reaching the surface. Usually this maverick is a troll. And, specifically in this case, the maverick is a troll who will shortly and for a ridiculous reason be named Whistle Blower.

For here begins the second documented cycle of Fowl Adventures.

THE BADDIE: LORD TEDDY BLEEDHAM-DRYE, THE DUKE OF SCILLY

IF A PERSON WANTS TO MURDER ANY member of a family, then it is very important that the entire family also be done away with, or the distraught survivors might very well decide to take bloody revenge, or at least make a detailed report at the local police station. There is, in fact, an entire chapter on this exact subject in The Criminal Mastermind’s Almanac, an infamous guidebook for aspiring ruthless criminals by Professor Wulf Bane, which was turned down by every reputable publisher but is available on demand from the author. The actual chapter name is ‘Kill Them All. Even the Pets’. A gruesome title that would put most normal people off reading it, but Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, Duke of Scilly, was not a normal person, and the juiciest phrases in his copy of The Criminal Mastermind’s Almanac were marked in pink highlighter, and the book itself was dedicated as follows:

To Teddy

From one criminal mastermind to another

Don’t be a stranger

Wulfy

Lord Bleedham-Drye had dedicated most of his one hundred and fifty-plus years on this green Earth to staying on this green Earth as long as possible, as opposed to being buried beneath it. In television interviews, he credited his youthful appearance to yoga and fish oil, but, in actual fact, Lord Teddy had spent much of his inherited fortune travelling the globe in search of any potions and pills, legal or not, that would extend his lifespan. As a roving ambassador for the Crown, Lord Teddy could easily find an excuse to visit the most far-flung corners of the planet in the name of culture, when in fact he was keeping his eyes open for anything that grew, swam, waddled or crawled that would help him stay alive for even a minute longer than his allotted three score and ten.

So far in his quest, Lord Teddy had tried every so-called eternal-youth therapy for which there was even the flimsiest of supporting evidence. He had, among other things, ingested tonnes of willow-bark extract, swallowed millions of antioxidant tablets, slurped litres of therapeutic arsenic, injected the cerebrospinal fluid of the endangered Madagascan lemur, devoured countless helpings of Southeast Asian liver-fluke spaghetti, and spent almost a month suspended over an active volcanic rift in Iceland, funnelling the restorative volcanic gas up the leg holes of his linen shorts. These and other extreme practices – never, ever to be tried at home – had indeed kept Bleedham-Drye breathing and vital thus far, but there had been side-effects. The lemur fluid had caused his forearms to elongate so that his hands dangled below his knees. The arsenic had paralysed the left corner of his mouth so that it was forever curled in a sardonic sneer, and the volcanic embers had scalded his bottom, forcing Teddy to walk in a slightly bow-legged manner as though trying to keep his balance in rough seas. Bleedham-Drye considered these secondary effects a small price to pay for his wrinkle-free complexion, luxuriant mane of hair and spade of black beard, and of course the vigour that helped him endure lengthy treks and safaris in the hunt for any rumoured life-extenders.

But Lord Teddy was all too aware that he had yet to hit the jackpot, therapeutically speaking, in regards to his quest for an unreasonably extended life. It was true that he had eked out a few extra decades, but what was that in the face of eternity? There were jellyfish that, as a matter of course, lived longer than he had. Jellyfish! They didn’t even have brains, for heaven’s sake.

Teddy found himself frustrated, which he hated, because stress gave a fellow wrinkles.

A new direction was called for.

No more small-stakes half measures, cribbing a year here and a season there.

I must find the fountain of youth, he resolved one evening while lying in his brass tub of electric eels, which he had heard did wonders for a chap’s circulation.

As it turned out, Lord Bleedham-Drye did find the fountain of youth, but it was not a fountain in the traditional sense of the word, as the life-giving liquid was contained in the venom of a mythological creature. And the family he would possibly have to murder to access it was none other than the Fowls of Dublin, Ireland, who were not overly fond of being murdered.

* * *

This is how the entire regrettable episode kicked off:

Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye reasoned that the time-honoured way of doing a thing was to ask the fellows who had already done the thing how they had managed to do it, and so he set out to interview the oldest people on Earth. This was not as easy as it might sound, even in the era of worldwide-webbery and marvellous miniature communication devices, for many aged folks do not advertise the fact that they have passed the century mark lest they be plagued by health-magazine journalists or telegrams from various queens. But nevertheless, over the course of five years, Lord Teddy managed to track down several of these elusive oldsters, finding them all to be either tediously virtuous, which was of little use to him, or lucky, which could neither be counted on nor stolen. And such was the way of it until he located an Irish monk who was working in an elephant sanctuary in California, of all places, having long since given up on helping humans. Brother Colman looked not a day over fifty, and was, in fact, in remarkable shape for a man who claimed to be almost five hundred years old.

Once Lord Teddy had slipped a liberal dose of sodium pentothal into the Irishman’s tea, Brother Colman told a very interesting story of how the holy well on Dalkey Island had come by its healing waters when he was a monk there in the sixteenth century.

Teddy did not believe a word of it, but the name Dalkey did sound an alarm bell somewhere in the back of his mind. A bell he muted for the present.

The fool is raving, he thought. I gave him too much truth serum.

With the so-called monk in a chemical daze, Bleedham-Drye performed a couple of simple verification checks, not really expecting anything exciting.

First, he unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and found to his surprise that Brother Colman’s chest was latticed with ugly scars, which would be consistent with the man’s story but was not exactly proof.

The idiot might have been gored by one of his own elephants, Teddy realised. But Lord Bleedham-Drye had seen many wounds in his time and never anything this dreadful on a living body.

There ain’t no fooling my second test, thought Teddy, and with a flash of his pruning shears he snipped off Brother Colman’s left pinky. After all, radiocarbon dating never lied.

It would be several weeks before the results came back from the Advanced Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory, and by that time Teddy was back in England once again, lounging dejectedly in his bath of electric eels in the family seat: Childerblaine House, on the island of St George in the Scilly Isles. Interestingly enough, the island had been so named because, in one of the various versions of the St George legend, the beheaded dragon’s body had been dumped into Cornish waters and drifted out to the Scilly Isles, where it settled on a submerged rock and fossilised, which provided a romantic explanation for the small island’s curved spine of ridges.

When Lord Teddy came upon the envelope from AAMSL in his pile of mail, he sliced it open listlessly, fully expecting that the Brother Colman excursion had been a bally waste of precious time and shrinking fortune.

But the results on that single page made Teddy sit up so quickly that several eels were slopped from the tub.

‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, his halo of dark hair curled and vibrating from the eel charge. ‘I’m off to Dalkey Island, begorra.’

The laboratory report was brief and cursory in the way of scientists:

The supplied specimen, it read, is in the four-hundred- to five-hundred-year-old age range.

Lord Teddy outfitted himself in his standard apparel of high boots, riding breeches, and a tweed hunting jacket, all topped off with his old commando beret. And he loaded up his wooden speedboat for what the police these days like to call a stakeout. It was only when he was halfway across the Irish Sea in the Juventas that Lord Teddy realised why the name Dalkey sounded so familiar. The Fowl fellow hung his hat there.

Artemis Fowl.

A force to be reckoned with. Teddy had heard a few stories about Artemis Fowl, and even more about his son Artemis the Second.

Rumours, he told himself. Rumours, hearsay and balderdash.

And, even if the stories were true, the Duke of Scilly’s determination never wavered.

I shall have that troll’s venom, he thought, opening the V-12 throttles wide. And I shall live forever.

THE GOODIES (RELATIVELY SPEAKING)
DALKEY ISLAND, DUBLIN, IRELAND
THREE WEEKS LATER

Behold Myles and Beckett Fowl, passing a late summer evening on the family’s private beach. If you look past the superficial differences – wardrobe, spectacles, hairstyles and so on – you notice that the boys’ facial features are very similar but not absolutely identical. This is because they are dizygotic twins, and were, in fact, the first recorded non-identical twins to be born conjoined, albeit only from wrist to little finger. The attending surgeon separated them with a flash of her scalpel, and neither twin suffered any ill effects, apart from matching pink scars that ran along the outside of their palms. Myles and Beckett often touched scars to comfort each other. It was their version of a high five, which they called a wrist bump. This habit was both touching and slightly gross.

Apart from their features, the fraternal twins were, as one tutor noted, ‘very different animals’. Myles had an IQ of 170 and was fanatically neat, while Beckett’s IQ was a mystery, because he chewed the test into pulpy blobs from which he made a sculpture of a hamster in a bad mood, which he titled Angry Hamster.

Also, Beckett was far from neat. In fact, his parents were forced to take up Mindfulness just to calm themselves down whenever they attempted to put some order on his catastrophically untidy side of the bedroom.

It was obvious from their early days in a double cradle that the twins did not share similar personalities. When they were teething, Beckett would chew dummies ragged, while Myles chose to nibble thoughtfully on the eraser end of a pencil. As a toddler, Myles liked to emulate his big brother, Artemis, by wearing tiny black suits that had to be custom-made. Beckett preferred to run free as nature intended, and, when he finally did agree to wear something, it was plastic training pants, in which he stored supplies, including his pet goldfish, Gloop (named for the sound it made, or at least the sound the goldfish was blamed for).

As the brothers grew older, the differences between them became more obvious. Myles grew ever more fastidious, 3-D-printing a fresh suit every day and taming his wild jet-black Fowl hair with a seaweed-based gel that both moisturised the scalp and nourished the brain, while Beckett made zero attempt to tame the blond curls that he had inherited from his mother’s side of the family, and continued to sulk when he was forced to wear any clothes, with the exception of the only article he never removed – a golden necktie that had once been Gloop. Myles had cured and laminated the goldfish when it passed away, and Beckett wore it always as a keepsake. This habit was both touching and extremely gross.

Perhaps you have heard of the Fowl family of Ireland? They are quite notorious in certain shadowy circles. The twins’ father was once the world’s preeminent crime lord, but he had a change of heart and reinvented himself as a champion of the environment. Myles and Beckett’s older brother, Artemis the Second, had also been quite the criminal virtuoso, hatching schemes involving massive amounts of gold bullion, fairy police forces and time travel, to name but a few. Fortunately for more or less everyone except aliens, Artemis had recently turned his attention to outer space, and was currently six months into a five-year mission to Mars in a revolutionary self-winding rocket ship that he had built in the family barn. By the time the world’s various authorities, including NASA, APSCO, ALR, CNSA and UKSA, had caught wind of the project and begun to marshal their objections, Artemis had already passed the moon.

The twins themselves were to have many adventures, some of which would kill them (though not permanently), but this particular episode began a week after their eleventh birthday. Myles and Beckett were walking along the stony beach of a small island off the picturesque coast of South Dublin, where the Fowl family had recently moved to Villa Éco, a newly built, state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly house. The twins’ father had donated Fowl Manor, their rambling ancestral home, to a cooperative of organic farmers, declaring, ‘It is time for the Fowls to embrace planet Earth.’

Villa Éco was a stunning achievement, not least because of all the hoops the county council had made Artemis Senior jump through just for planning permission. Indeed, the Fowl patriarch had on several occasions considered using a few of his old criminal-mastermind methods of persuasion just to cut through the miles of red tape, but eventually he managed to satisfy the local councillors and push ahead with the building.

And what a building it was. Totally self-sufficient, thanks to super-efficient solar panels and a dozen geothermal screws that not only extracted power from the earth but also acted as the building’s foundation. The frame was built from the recycled steel yielded by six compacted cars and had already withstood a hurricane during construction. The cast-in-place concrete walls were insulated by layers of plant-based polyurethane rigid foam. The windows were bulletproof, naturally, and coated with metallic oxide to keep the heat where it should be throughout the seasons. The design was modern but utilitarian, with a nod to the island’s monastic heritage in the curved walls of its outbuildings, which were constructed with straw bales.

But the real marvels of Villa Éco were discreetly hidden until they were called upon. Artemis Senior, Artemis Junior and Myles Fowl had collaborated on a security system that would bamboozle even the most technically minded home invader, and an array of defence mechanisms that could repel a small army.

There was, however, an Achilles heel in this system, as the twins were about to discover. This Achilles heel was the twins’ own decency and their reluctance to unleash the villa’s defences on anyone.

On this summer evening, the twins’ mother was delivering a lecture at New York University with her husband in attendance. Some years previously, Angeline had suffered from what Shakespeare called ‘the grief that does not speak’, and, in an effort to understand her depression, had completed a mental-health doctorate at Trinity College and now spoke at conferences around the world. The twins were being watched over by the house itself, which had an Artemis-designed Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system, or NANNI, to keep an electronic eye on them.

Myles was collecting seaweed for his homemade-hair-gel fermentation silo, and Beckett was attempting to learn seal language from a dolphin just offshore.

‘We must be away, brother,’ Myles said. ‘Bedtime. Our young bodies require ten hours of sleep to ensure proper brain development.’

Beckett lay on a rock and clapped his hands. ‘Arf,’ he said. ‘Arf.’

Myles tugged at his suit jacket and frowned behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses. ‘Beck, are you attempting to speak in seal language?’

‘Arf,’ said Beckett, who was wearing knee-length cargo shorts and his gold necktie.

‘That is not even a seal. That is a dolphin.’

‘Dolphins are smart,’ said Beckett. ‘They know things.’

‘That is true, brother, but a dolphin’s vocal cords make it impossible for them to speak in the language of a seal. Why don’t you simply learn the dolphin’s language?’

Beckett beamed. ‘Yes! You are a genius, brother. Step one, swap barks for whistles.’

Myles sighed. Now his twin was whistling at a dolphin, and they would once again fail to get to bed on time.

Myles stuffed a handful of seaweed into his bucket. ‘Please, Beck. My brain will never reach optimum productivity if we don’t leave now.’ He tapped the right arm of his black plastic spectacle frames, activating the built-in microphone. ‘NANNI, help me out. Please send a drobot to carry my brother home.’

‘Negative,’ said the house system in the strangely accented female voice that Artemis had selected to represent the AI. It was a voice that both twins instinctively trusted for some reason.

Myles could hear NANNI through bone-conduction speakers concealed in the arms of his glasses.

‘Absolutely no flying Beckett home, unless it’s an emergency,’ said NANNI. ‘Mother’s orders, so don’t bother arguing.’

Myles was surprised that NANNI’s sentences were unnecessarily convoluted. It seemed as though the AI were developing a personality, which he supposed was the point. When Artemis had first plugged NANNI into the system, so to speak, her responses were usually limited to one-word answers. Now she was telling him not to bother arguing. It would be fascinating to see how her personality would develop.

Providing NANNI doesn’t become too human, thought Myles, because most humans are irritating.

At any rate, it was ridiculous that his mother refused to authorise short-range flights for Beckett. In tests, the drone robots had only dropped the dummy Becketts twice, but his mother insisted the drobots were for urgent situations only.

‘Beckett!’ he called. ‘If you agree to come back to the house, I will tell you a story before bed.’

Beckett flipped over on the rock. ‘Which story?’ he asked.

‘How about the thrilling discovery of the Schwarzschild radius, which led directly to the identification of black holes?’ suggested Myles.

Beckett was not impressed. ‘How about the adventures of Gloop and Angry Hamster in the Dimension of Fire?’

Now it was Myles’s turn to be unimpressed. ‘Beck, that’s preposterous. Fish and hamsters do not even share the same environment. And neither could survive in a dimension of fire.’

‘You’re preposterous,’ said Beckett, and went back to his whistling.

The crown of Beck’s head will be burned by the evening UV rays, thought Myles.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Gloop and Angry Hamster it is.’

‘And Dolphin,’ said Beckett. ‘He wants to be in the story too.’

Myles sighed. ‘Dolphin too.’

‘Hooray!’ said Beckett, skipping across the rocks. ‘Story time. Wrist bump?’

Myles raised his palm for a bump and wondered, If I’m the smart one, why do we always do exactly what Beck wants us to?

Myles asked himself this question a lot.

‘Now, brother,’ he said, ‘please say goodnight to your friend, and let us be off.’

Beckett turned to do as he was told, but only because it suited him.

If Beckett had not turned to bid the dolphin farewell, then perhaps the entire series of increasingly bizarre events that followed might have been avoided. There would have been no nefarious villain, no ridiculously named trolls, no shadowy organisations, no interrogations by a nun (which are known in the intelligence community as nunterrogations, believe it or not) and a definite lack of head lice. But Beckett did turn, precisely two seconds after a troll had surged upwards through the loose shale at the water’s edge and collapsed on to the beach.

Fairies are defined as being ‘small, humanoid, supernatural creatures possessed of magical powers’, a definition that applies neatly to elves, gnomes, sprites and pixies. It is, however, a human definition, and therefore as incomplete as human knowledge on the subject. The fairies’ definition of themselves is more concise and can be found in the Fairy Book, which is their constitution, so to speak, the original of which is behind crystal in the Hey Hey Temple in Haven City, the subterranean fairy capital. It states:

FAIRY, FAERIE OR FAERY: A CREATURE OF THE EARTH. OFTEN MAGICAL. NEVER WILFULLY DESTRUCTIVE.

No mention of small or humanoid. It may surprise humans to know that they themselves were once considered fairies and did indeed possess some magic, until many of them strayed from the path and became extremely wilfully destructive, and so magic was bred out of humans over the centuries, until there was nothing left but an empath here and there, and the occasional telekinetic.

Trolls are classed as fairies by fairies themselves, but would not be so categorised by the human definition, as they are not magical – unless their longevity can be considered supernatural. They are, however, quite feral and only slightly more sentient than the average hound. Another interesting point about trolls is that fairy scholars of their pathologies have realised that trolls are highly susceptible to chemically induced psychosis while also tending to nest in chemically polluted sites, in much the same way as humans are attracted to the sugar that poisons them. This chemical poisoning often results in uncharacteristically aggressive behaviour and uncontrollable rage. Again, similar to how humans behave when experiencing sugar deprivation.

But this troll was not sick, sluggish or aggressive – in fact, he was in remarkable physical health, all pumping limbs and scything tusks, as he followed his second most powerful instinct: REACH THE SURFACE. (Trolls’ most powerful instinct being: EAT, GOBBLE, DEVOUR.)

This particular troll’s bloodstream was clear because he had never swum across a chromium-saturated lake and he had never carved out his burrow in mercury-rich soil. Nevertheless, healthy or not, this specimen would never have made it to the surface had the Earth’s crust under Dalkey Island not been exceptionally thin, a mere two and a quarter miles, in fact. This troll was able to squeeze himself into fissures that would have made a claustrophobe faint, and he wriggled his way to the open air. It took the creature four sun cycles of agonisingly slow progress to break through, and you might think the cosmos would grant the fellow a little good fortune after such Herculean efforts, but no, he had to pop out right between the Fowl Twins and Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, who was lurking on a mainland balcony and spying on Dalkey Island through a telescopic monocular, thus providing the third corner of an irresistible triangular vortex of fate.

So, the troll emerged, joint by joint, reborn to the atmosphere, gnashing and clawing. And, in spite of his almost utter exhaustion, some spark of triumph drove him to his feet for a celebratory howl, which was when Lord Teddy, for diabolical reasons which shall presently be explored, shot him.

Once the shot had been fired, the entire troll-related rigmarole really got rigmarolling, because the microsecond that NANNI’s sensors detected the bullet’s sonic boom, she dispensed with her convoluted sentences and without a word upgraded the villa’s alert status from beige to red, sounded the alarm klaxon, and set the security system to siege mode. Two armoured drobots were dispatched from their charging plates to extract the twins, and forty decoy flares were launched from mini mortar ports in the roof as countermeasures to any infrared guided missiles that may or may not be inbound.

This left the twins with approximately twenty seconds of earthbound liberty before they would be whisked into the evening sky and secured in the eco-house’s ultrasecret safe room, blueprints of which did not appear on any set of plans.

A lot can happen in twenty seconds. And a lot did happen.

Firstly, let us discuss the marksman. When I say Lord Teddy shot the troll, this is possibly misleading, even though it is accurate. He did shoot the troll, but not with the usual explosive variety of bullet, which would have penetrated the troll’s hide and quite possibly killed the beast through sheer shock trauma. That was the absolute last thing Lord Teddy wanted, as it would void his entire plan. This particular bullet was a gas-powered cellophane virus (CV) slug that was being developed by the Japanese munitions company Myishi and was not yet officially on the market. In fact, Myishi products rarely went into mass production, as Ishi Myishi, the founder and CEO, made quite a lot of tax-free dollars giving a technological edge to the world’s criminal masterminds. The Duke of Scilly was a personal friend and possibly his best customer and had most of his kit sponsored by Ishi Myishi so long as the duke agreed to endorse the products on the dark web. The CV bullets were known as ‘shrink-wrappers’ by the development team, and they released their viruses on impact, effectively wrapping the target in a coating of cellophane that was porous enough to allow shallow breathing but had been known to crack a rib or two.

And then there is the physicality of the troll itself. There are many breeds of troll. From the three-metre-tall behemoth Antarctic Blue, to the silent jungle killer the Amazon Heel Claw. The troll on Dalkey Island beach was a one-in-a-million anomaly. In form and proportion, he was the perfect Ridgeback, with the distinctive thick comb of spiked hair that ran from brow to tailbone, and the blue-veined grey fur on his chest and arms all present and correct. But this creature was no massive predator. In fact, he was a rather tiny one. Standing barely twenty centimetres high, the troll was one of a relatively new variety that had begun to pop up in recent millennia since fairies were forced deep in the Earth’s mantle. Much in the same way as schnauzer dogs had miniature counterparts known as toy schnauzers, some troll breeds also had their shrunken varieties, and this troll was one of perhaps half a dozen toy Ridgebacks in existence and the first to ever reach the surface.

Not at all what Lord Teddy had been expecting. Having seen Brother Colman’s scars, the duke had imagined his quarry to be somewhat larger.

When the little troll’s heat signature had popped up in his eyepiece like an oversized gummy bear, the duke had exclaimed, ‘Good heavens! Could that little fellow be my troll?’

It certainly matched Brother Colman’s description, except for the dimensions. In truth, the duke couldn’t help feeling a little let down. He had been expecting something more substantial. That diminutive creature didn’t look like it could manufacture enough venom to extend the lifespan of a gerbil.

‘Nevertheless,’ muttered the duke, ‘since I’ve come all this way …’

And he squeezed the trigger on his sniper’s rifle.

The supersonic cellophane slug made a distinctive yodelling noise as it sped through the air, and impacted the toy Ridgeback square in the solar plexus, releasing its payload in a sparkling globule that quickly sprawled over the tiny creature, wrapping it in a restrictive layer of cellophane before it could do much more than squeak in indignation.

Beckett Fowl spotted the cartwheeling toy troll, and his first impressions were of fur and teeth, and consequently his first thought was, Angry Hamster!

But the boy chided himself, remembering that Angry Hamster was a sculpture that he himself had constructed from chewed paper and bodily fluids and therefore not a living thing, and so he would have to revise his guess as to what this tumbling figure might be.

But by this time the troll had come to rest at his feet, and Beckett was able to snatch it up and scrutinise it closely, so there was no need for guessing.

Not alive, he realised then. Doll, maybe.

Beckett had thought the figure moved of its own accord, perhaps even made a squealing noise of some kind, but now he could see it was a fantasy action figure with a protective plastic coating.

‘I shall call you Whistle Blower,’ he whispered into the troll’s pointed ear. The boy had chosen this name after barely a second’s consideration, because he had seen on Myles’s preferred news channel that people who squealed were sometimes called whistle-blowers. Also, Beckett was not the kind of fellow who wasted time on decisions.

Beckett turned to show Myles his beach salvage, though his brother had always been a little snooty when it came to toys, claiming they were for children even though he was patently a child himself and would be for a few more years.

‘Look, brother,’ he called, waggling the action figure. ‘I found a new friend.’

Myles sneered as expected, and opened his mouth to pass a derogatory remark along the lines of, Honestly, Beck. We are eleven years old now. Time to leave childish things behind.

But his scorn was interrupted by a deafening series of honks.

The emergency klaxon.

It is true to say that there is hardly a more alarming sound than an alarm klaxon, heralding as it does the arrival of some form of disaster. Most people do not react positively to this sound. Some scream; some faint. There are those who run in circles, wringing their fingers, which is also pointless. And, of course, there are people who have involuntary purges, which shall not be elaborated upon here.

The reactions of the Fowl Twins could seem strange to a casual observer, for Myles discarded his seaweed bucket and uttered a single word: ‘Finally.’

While Beckett spoke to his new toy. ‘Do you hear that, Whistle Blower?’ he asked. ‘We’re going flying!’

To explain: designing the security system had been a fun bonding project for Myles, Artemis and their father, so Myles had a scientific interest in putting the extraction drobots through their paces, as thus far they had only been tested with crash dummies. Beckett, on the other hand, was just dying to be yanked backwards into the air at high speed and dumped down a security chute, and he fervently hoped the ride would last much longer than the projected half a minute.

Myles forgot all about getting to bed on time. He was in action mode now as the countermeasure flares fanned out behind his head like fireworks, painting the undersides of passing cumuli. NANNI broadcast a message to his glasses, and Myles repeated it aloud to Beckett in melodramatic tones that he knew his brother would respond to, as it made him feel like he was on an adventure. And also because Myles had a weakness for melodrama, which he was aware he should at least attempt to control, as drama is the enemy of science.

‘Red alert!’ he called. ‘Extraction position.’

The twins had been drilled on this particular position so often that Beckett reacted to the command with prompt obedience – two words that he would never find written on any of his school report cards.

Extraction position was as follows: chin tucked low, arms stretched overhead, and jaw relaxed to avoid cracked teeth.

‘Ten seconds,’ said Myles, slipping his spectacles into a jacket pocket. ‘Nine, eight …’

Beckett also slipped something into his pocket before assuming the position: Whistle Blower.

‘Three,’ said Myles. ‘Two …’

Then the boy allowed his jaw to relax and spoke no more.

The two drobots shot from under the villa’s eaves and sped unerringly towards the twins. They maintained an altitude of two metres from the ground by dipping their rotors and adjusting their course as they flew, communicating with each other through coded clicks and beeps. With their gears retracted, the drobots resembled nothing more than old propeller hats that children used to wear in simpler times as they rode their bicycles.

The drobots barely slowed as they approached the twins, lowering micro-servo-cable arms that lassoed the boys’ waists, then inflated impact bags to avoid injuring their cargo.

‘Cable loop in place,’ said Myles, lowering his arms. ‘Bags inflated. Most efficient.’

In theory, the ride should be so smooth that his suit would not suffer one wrinkle.

‘No more science talk!’ shouted Beckett impatiently. ‘Let’s go!’

And go they did.

The servo cables retracted smoothly to winch the twins into the air. Myles noted that there had been no discernible impact on his spine, and while acceleration was rapid – zero to sixty miles an hour in four seconds according to his smartwatch – the ride was not jarring.

‘So far so good,’ he said into the wind. He glanced sideways to see Beckett ignoring the flight instructions, waving his arms around as though he were on a roller coaster.

‘Arms folded, Beck!’ he called sternly to his brother. ‘Feet crossed at the ankles. You are increasing your own drag.’

It was possible that Beckett could not hear the instructions, but it was probable that he simply ignored them and continued to treat their emergency extraction like a theme-park ride.

The journey was over almost as soon as it began, and the twins found themselves deposited in two small chimney-like padded tubes towards the rear of the house. The drobots lowered them to the safe room, then sealed the tubes with their own shells.

NANNI’s face appeared in a free-floating liquid speaker ball, which was held in shape by an electric charge. ‘Perhaps this would be a good time to activate the EMP? I know you’ve been dying to try it.’

Myles considered this as he unclipped the servo cable. Villa Éco was outfitted with a localised electromagnetic-pulse generator, which would knock out any electronic systems in the island’s airspace. The Fowls’ main electronics would not be affected, as the entire villa had a Faraday cage embedded in its walls, and the Fowl systems had back-ups that ran on optical cable. A little old-school, but, should the cage fail, the cable would keep systems ticking until the danger was past.

‘Hmm,’ said Myles. ‘That seems a bit drastic. What is the nature of the emergency?’

‘Sonic boom detected,’ said NANNI. ‘I would guess from a high-powered rifle.’

NANNI is guessing now, thought Myles. She really is developing.

‘Guessing is of little use to me, madam,’ said Myles. ‘Scientists do not guess.’

‘Oh yes, that’s right. Scientists hypothesise,’ said NANNI. ‘In that case, I hypothesise that the sonic boom was caused by a rifle shot.’

‘That’s better,’ said Myles. ‘How certain are you?’

‘Reasonably,’ replied NANNI. ‘If I had to offer a percentage, I would say seventy per cent.’

A sonic boom could be caused by many things, and the majority of those things were harmless. Still, Myles now had a valid excuse to employ the EMP, something he had been forbidden to do unless absolutely necessary.

It was, in fact, a judgement call.

Beckett, who had somehow become inverted in the delivery chute, tumbled on to the floor and asked, ‘Will the EMP hurt my insects?’

Beckett kept his extensive bug collection in the safe room so it would be safe.

‘No,’ said Myles. ‘Unless some of them are robot insects.’

Beckett pressed his nose to the terrarium’s glass and made some chittering noises.

‘No robots,’ he pronounced. ‘So activate the EMP.’

For once, Myles found himself in agreement with his brother. While the sonic boom could possibly be the by-product of a harmless event, it also might herald the arrival of an attack force hell-bent on wreaking vengeance on one Artemis or the other. Better to press the button and survive than regret not pressing it just before you died.

So, thought Myles, I should activate the EMP. But before I do …

Myles rooted in the steel rubbish bin until he found some aluminium foil that he had been using for target practice with one of his many lasers. He used it to quickly wrap his spectacles then stuffed them down to the bottom of the bin. This would protect the lite version of NANNI that lived in the eyeglasses in the event that both his safeguards failed.

‘I concur,’ said Myles. ‘Activate the EMP, NANNI. Tight radius, low intensity. No need to knock out the mainland.’

‘Activating EMP,’ said NANNI, and promptly collapsed in a puddle on the floor as her own electronics had not yet been converted to optical cable.

‘See, Beck?’ said Myles, lifting one black loafer from a glistening wet patch. ‘That is what we scientists call a design flaw.’

Lord Bleedham-Drye was doubly miffed and thrice surprised by the developments on Dalkey Island.

Surprise number one: Brother Colman spoke the truth, and trolls did indeed walk the Earth.

Surprise the second: the troll was tiny. Whoever heard of a tiny troll?

Surprise the last (for the moment): flying boys had sequestered his prey.

‘What on earth is going on?’ he asked no one in particular.

The duke muttered to himself, ‘These Fowl people seem prepared for full-scale invasion. They have flare countermeasures. Drones flying off with children. Who knows what else? Anti-tank guns and trained bears, I shouldn’t wonder. Even Churchill couldn’t take that beach.’

It occurred to Lord Teddy that he could blow up the entire island for spite. He was partial to a spot of spite, after all. But, after a moment’s consideration, he dismissed the idea. It was a cheery notion, but the person he would be ultimately spiting was none other than the Duke of Scilly, i.e. his noble self. He would hold his fire for now, but, when those boys re-emerged from their fortified house, he would be ready with his trusty rifle. After all, he was quite excellent with a gun, as his last shot had proven. Off the battlefield, it was unseemly to shoot anything except pheasant, unless one were engaged in a duel. Pistols at dawn, that sort of thing. But he would make an exception for a troll, and for those blooming Fowl boys.

Lord Teddy loaded the rifle with traditional bullets and set it on the balcony floor, muzzle pointed towards the island.

You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys, he thought. And the moment you poke your noses from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.

He could wait.

He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: one must spend time to make time.

Teddy lay sandwiched between a yoga mat and a veil of camouflage that had served as a hide of sorts for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a millimetre of space for an intruder to hide.

Clever chappies, these Fowls, thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies.

Teddy sat up, fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag, and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes of his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.

He had only reached stroke seven when the duke’s peripheral vision registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.

The island itself had disappeared.

Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye, the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.

Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.

‘I say,’ he said mildly. ‘That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?’

Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.

‘One can’t help but wonder, Teddy old boy,’ mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, ‘if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?’

He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore, by logical extension, magical creatures.

‘And so it is only reasonable to assume,’ Teddy said, ‘that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.’

The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.

One fairy, at least.

But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy responsible for the disappearing-island trick was a far cry indeed from being a wizard, and could no more cast a spell than a frog could turn itself into a prince. She had made a split-second decision to use the only piece of equipment available to her, and was now pretty certain that her decision was absolutely the wrong one.

THE GNOME PROFESSOR DR JERBAL ARGON ONCE presented a theory, dubbed the Law of Diminishing Probabilities, to the fairy Psych Brotherhood. Argon’s law states that the more unusual the subjects involved in a conflict, the more improbable the resolution to that conflict will be. It is possibly the vaguest behavioural theory ever to make it into a journal, and it is really more of a notion than a law. But, in the case of the Fowl Twins’ first magical adventure, it would certainly prove to be accurate, as we will see from the hugely improbable finale to this tale.

The law’s requirements were certainly fulfilled, as this day was, without doubt, one for unusual individuals:

An immortalist duke …

A miniature troll …

And a set of fraternal human twins: the first a certified genius with a criminal leaning lurking in his prefrontal cortex, and the second possessed of a singular talent that has been hinted at but not fully explored as yet.

There are two additional unusual individuals still to join the tale. The nunterrogator, to whom we have already alluded, will presently make one of her trademark theatrical entrances. But the next unusual individual to join our cast of protagonists is more than simply unusual – she is biologically unique. And she made her appearance from above, hovering ten metres over Dalkey Island.

This unusual individual was Lower Elements Police Specialist Lazuli Heitz, who, five minutes earlier, entered the island’s airspace to complete a training manoeuvre in the Fowl safe zone. Usually such safe zones were in remote areas, but in rare cases where there was a special arrangement with the human occupants, a zone could be closer to civilisation and provide more of a challenge for the specialists. A case in point being Dalkey Island, where Artemis Fowl the Second, friend to the LEP, had guaranteed safe passage for fairies.

From a human perspective, Lazuli was unusual simply by virtue of being an invisible flying fairy, but, from a fairy perspective, LEP Specialist Heitz was unusual because she was a hybrid, that is to say a crossbreed. Hybrids are common enough among the fairy folk, especially since the families were forced into close quarters underground, but, even so, they are each and every one idiosyncratic, for all hybrids are as unique as snowflakes and the manifestation of their magical abilities is unpredictable.

In Lazuli Heitz’s case, her magic had resolutely refused to manifest itself in any shape or form. Lazuli’s particular category of hybrid was known as a pixel, that being a pixie–elf cross. There were other species in the ancestral DNA mix too, but pixie and elf accounted for over ninety-five per cent of her total number of nucleotides. And, even though both pixies and elves are magical creatures, not a single spark of power seemed to have survived the crossbreeding. In height, Specialist Heitz followed the pixie type at barely eighty centimetres tall, but her head adhered to the elfin model and was smaller than one might expect to see on a pixie’s shoulders, with the customary elfin sharp planes of cheekbone, jaw and pointed ear. This was enough to give her away as a hybrid to any fairy who cared to look. And, just in case there were any lingering doubt, Lazuli’s skin and eyes were the aquamarine blue of Atlantean pixies, but her hair was the fine flaxen blonde associated with Amazonian elves. Scattered across her neck and shoulders was a mottling of yellow arrowhead markings, which, according to palaeofatumologists, had once made Amazonian elves look like sunflowers to airborne predators.

Unless that elf is a hybrid with blue skin, Lazuli often thought, which ruins the effect.

All this palaeofatumological knowledge only meant one thing to Lazuli, and that was that her parents had probably met on holiday, which was about the sum total of her knowledge on that subject, apart from the fact that one or both of them had deserted her on the north corner of a public square, after which the orphanage administrator had named her Lazuli Heights.

‘I changed the spelling, and there you have it,’ the administrator had told her. ‘It’s my little game, which worked out well for you, not so much for Walter Kooler or Vishtar Restrume.’

The sprite administrator had a human streak and often made barbed remarks along the lines of: The lapis lazuli is a semi-precious stone. Semi-precious, hybrid. I think your parents must have been thinking along those lines, or you wouldn’t have ended up here.

The administrator chuckled drily at his own tasteless joke every single time he cracked it. Lazuli never even smiled.

It was exceedingly exasperating for a pixel not to possess the magical phenotypic trait, especially since her driving ambition was to achieve the rank of captain in the LEPrecon, a post where abilities such as the mesmer, invisibility and healing powers would most certainly prove to be boons. Fortunately for Heitz, her obdurate streak, sharp mind and dead eye with an oxalis pistol had so far carried her through two years of intense training in the LEP Academy and now to specialist duty in a safe zone. Lazuli did suspect that her Academy application might have been bolstered by the LEP’s minority-inclusion policy.

And Lazuli certainly was a minority. Her DNA profile breakdown was forty-two per cent elf, fifty-three per cent pixie and five per cent undeterminable. Unique.

The evening’s exercise was straightforward: fairies were secreted around the island, and it was her mission to track them down. These were not real fairies, of course. They were virtual avatars that could be tagged by passing a gloved hand through holograms projected by her helmet camera. There would be clues to follow: chromatographic reactions, tracks, faint scents, and a learned knowledge of the species’ habits. Once she punched in, Specialist Heitz would have thirty minutes to tag as many virtual fugitives as she could.

Before Lazuli could so much as repeat the mantra that had sustained her for many years and through several personal crises, which happened to be small equals motivated, a pulsating purple blob blossomed on her visor’s display.

This was most unusual. Purple was usually reserved for live trolls. Perhaps her helmet was glitching. This would not be in the least surprising, as Academy equipment was always bottom of the priority list when the budget was being carved up between departments. Lazuli’s suit was threadbare and ill-fitting, and packed with weapons that hadn’t been standard issue in decades.

She blinked at the purple blob to enlarge it and realised that there was indeed a troll on the beach, albeit a tiny one. The poor fellow was smaller than her, though he did not seem as intimidated by the human world as she was.

I must rescue him, Lazuli told herself. This was undoubtedly the correct action, unless this troll was involved somehow in a live manoeuvre. Lazuli’s angel mentor, who directed the exercise from Haven City, had explicitly and repeatedly ordered her never to poke her nose into an operation.

‘There are two types of fast track, Specialist Heitz,’ the angel had said only that morning. ‘The fast track to the top, and the fast track out the door. Poke your nose into an operation where it doesn’t belong, and guess which track you’ll be on.’

Lazuli didn’t need to guess.

A thought occurred to her: could it be that the coincidental appearance of a troll on this island was her stinkworm?

This was very possible, as LEP instructors were a sneaky bunch.

A specialist’s mettle was often stress-tested by mocking up an emergency and observing how the cadet coped. Rookies referred to this testing as being thrown a stinkworm, because, as every fairy knew, if a person were thrown an actual stinkworm and they mishandled it, there would be an explosive, viscous and foul-smelling outcome. There was a legend in the Academy about how one specialist had been dropped into the crater of an apparently active volcano to see how he would handle the crisis. The specialist in question did not respond with the required fortitude and was now wanding registration chips in the traffic department.

Lazuli had no intention of wanding chips in traffic.

This could be my stinkworm, she thought.

In which case, she should simply observe, as her angel would be keeping a close eye.

Or it could be a genuine operation.

In which case, she should most definitely steer clear, as there would be LEP agents in play.

But there was a third option.

Option C: was it possible that the Fowls were running an operation of their own here? The human Artemis Fowl had a chequered history with the People.

If that were the case, then she should rescue the toy troll, who was perhaps three metres away from two children her facial-recognition software labelled as Myles and Beckett Fowl.

Lazuli hung in the air while she mulled over her options. Her angel had mentioned the name Artemis before the Dalkey Island exercise.

‘If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted,’ she’d said literally minutes before Lazuli boarded her magma pod. ‘His instructions are to be followed without question.’

But her comrades in the locker room told a different story.

‘That entire family is poison,’ one Recon sprite had told her. ‘I saw some of the sealed files before a mission. That Fowl guy kidnapped one of our captains and made off with the ransom fund. Take it from me, once a human family gets a taste of fairy gold, it’s only a matter of time before they come back for more, so watch out up there.’

Lazuli had no option but to trust her angel, but maybe she would keep a close eye on the twins. Should she do more than that?

Observe, steer clear or engage?

How was a specialist supposed to tell a convincingly staged emergency from an actual one?

All this speculation took Lazuli perhaps three seconds, thanks to her sharp mind. After the third second, the emergency graduated to a full-blown crisis when a shot echoed across the sound and the little troll was sent tumbling with the force of the impact, landing squarely at the rowdy child’s feet. Beckett Fowl immediately grabbed and restrained the toy troll.

This effectively removed Specialist Heitz’s dilemma. It was just as her comrades had foretold: the Fowls were kidnapping a fairy!

An LEP operative’s first responsibility was to protect life, prioritising fairy life, and so now Lazuli was duty-bound and morally obliged to rescue the toy troll.

The prospect both terrified and thrilled her.

The first thing to do was inform her angel of the developing situation, even though radio silence was protocol during exercises.

‘Specialist Heitz to Haven. Priority-one trans-mission …’

If anyone had been on the other end of that transmission, they would have been left curious, because at that moment dozens of flares were launched from the house, and Specialist Heitz was forced to take evasive action to avoid being clipped. She had barely got her rig under control when there came a rumbling series of booms and Lazuli felt a wave of crackles pass through her body. The crackles were not particularly painful, but they did have the effect of shorting out her communicator along with every circuit and sensor in her shimmer suit. Lazuli watched in horror as her own limbs speckled into view.

‘Oh …’ she said, then fell out of the sky.

Not all the way down, fortunately, as Specialist Heitz’s suit launched its back-up operational system, which ran like clockwork because it was clockwork: a complicated hub of sealed gears and cogs ingeniously interlinked in a series of planetary epicyclic mechanisms that fed directly into a motor in Lazuli’s wing mounts.

Lazuli felt the legs of her jumpsuit stiffen and instinctively began to pedal before she hit the earth like an injured bird. The gears were phenomenally efficient, with barely a joule of energy loss thanks to the sealed hub, and so Specialist Heitz was able to reclaim her previous altitude with a steady mid-air pedal. But she was still quite plainly in the visible spectrum, looking for all the world like she was riding an invisible unicycle.

Though Lazuli’s spine had not been compacted by a high-speed impact with Dalkey Island, she still had the problem of how to effectively engage a sniper when she was operating under pedal power. If Lazuli attempted to approach the sniper, he could take potshots at his leisure.

Visibility was the problem.

So become invisible, Heitz.

But how to become invisible without any magic or even an operational shimmer suit?

There was a way, but it was neither foolproof nor field-tested, though it had been tried in somewhat raucous conditions, those being the communal area of the cadets’ locker room – inside lockers 28 and 29, to be precise. Lazuli knew this because she had witnessed the bullying, and lost ten grade points for repeating the experiment on the bully.

Lazuli reached into one of the myriad pockets in her suit and drew out a pressurised pod of chromophoric camouflage filaments held together by reinforced spider silk. The Filabuster, as it was known by LEP operatives, was rarely deployed, and in fact was due to be removed from duty kits in the next few months because of the unpredictability of its range, but now it was the only weapon in Lazuli’s arsenal that was actually of any use, as it had no electronic parts and came pre-primed.

The Filabuster operated on the same system that certain plants employ to disperse their seeds. The fibres inside the dried egg pull against each other to create tension, and when the silken cowl is ruptured the reflective filaments explode with considerable force, creating a visual distortion that can provide enough cover to cause momentary confusion.

But I need more than momentary confusion, Lazuli thought. I need to be invisible.

Which was where the locker-room antics came in. When a hulking demon cadet had forced a tiny pixie into his own locker and then tossed in an armed Filabuster, the pixie had emerged coated in filaments and practically invisible, and also, it turned out later, battered and bruised.

Perhaps this is not a good idea, thought Lazuli. Then she pulled the spider-silk ripcord before she could change her mind. Now there were approximately ten seconds before the silk surrendered to the internal pressure and exploded in a dense fountain of chromophoric filaments that would adjust to the region’s dominant colour, which ought to be the blue-black of the early evening Irish Sea.

‘D’Arvit,’ swore Lazuli in Gnommish, knowing that this experience was going to be, at the very least, quite unpleasant. ‘D’Arvit.’

But what were a few cuts and bruises in the face of a troll’s life?

Specialist Heitz hugged the Filabuster close to her body and went to her happy place, which was the cubicle apartment she’d recently rented on Booshka Avenue that she shared with one single plant and absolutely no people.

‘See you soon, Fern,’ she said, and then the Filabuster exploded with approximately ten times more force than the locker model.

The sensation was more kinetic than Specialist Lane had anticipated, and Lazuli instantly had more respect for the locker pixie who’d borne the torment without complaint. She felt as though she had been dropped into a nest of extremely irritable wasps that were not overly fond of hybrid fairies. The filaments clawed at every millimetre of her suit, more than a few managing to wiggle inside and tear her skin. This laceration was accompanied by a tremendous concussive force, which sent pedalling to the bottom of Lazuli’s list of priorities and sent the pixel herself tumbling to earth, with only the drag of doubledex wings to slow her down.

As she fell, Lazuli had the presence of mind to notice a ragged shroud of Filabuster filaments assemble around the small island, rendering it invisible to anyone outside the field.

Good, she thought. If I survive the fall, the camouflage filaments should hang around long enough to facilitate a toy-troll rescue.

Though perhaps her thoughts were not so lucid. Perhaps they were more as follows: Aaaargh! Sky! Rescue! D’Arvit!

Whichever the case, Specialist Heitz was correct: if she survived – which was a gargantuan if for a fairy without magic – then the Filabuster drape should afford her time to rescue the toy troll.

And it would have afforded her time if left undisturbed. Unfortunately, mere moments later, an army helicopter thundered over Sorrento Point, the downdraught from its rotors scattering the Filabuster curtain to the four winds. And, just as suddenly as Dalkey Island had disappeared, it returned to view.

Specialist Lazuli Heitz hit the earth hard. Technically she did not hit the earth itself, but something perched on top of it. Something soft and slimy that popped like bubblewrap as she sank through its layers.

Lazuli could have no way of knowing that her life had been saved by Myles Fowl’s seaweed fermentation silo. She ploughed her way through several slick levels before coming to a stop in the bottom third of the giant barrel, and in the moment before the seaweed covered her entirely she watched the lead helicopter hover above and noticed a black-clad figure standing right out on the landing skid, her skirt flapping in the rotor-generated wind.

Is that what the humans call a ninja? Lazuli wondered, trying to remember her human studies. But ninja was not the right word. What had come after ninja on the human occupations chart?

Not a ninja, she realised. It’s a nun.

Then the seaweed slid over Lazuli’s small frame, and, because the universe likes its little jokes, this felt almost exactly the same as being submerged in a brass tub of eels.

INSIDE VILLA ÉCO’S SAFE ROOM, MYLES AND Beckett Fowl were experiencing a shared emotion – that emotion being confusion. Confusion was nothing new to either boy, but this was the first occasion on which they had felt it simultaneously.

To explain: as the twins were so dissimilar in everything except for physiognomy, it was not unusual for the actions of the one to confound the mind of the other. Myles had lost count of how many times Beckett’s attempted conversations with wildlife had bewildered his logical brain, and Beckett, for his part, was flummoxed on an hourly basis by his brother’s scientific lectures.

So, generally, one twin was lucid while the other was confused, but on this occasion they were mystified as a unit.

‘What’s happening, Myles?’ asked Beckett.

Myles did not answer the question, reluctant to admit that he couldn’t quite fathom what exactly was going on.

‘Just a moment, brother,’ he said. ‘I am processing.’

Myles was indeed processing, almost as quickly as the safe room’s processors were processing. NANNI’s gel incarnation may have been a puddle on the floor, but the AI itself was safe inside Villa Éco’s protected systems and was now replaying footage from a network of cameras slung underneath a weather balloon. These cameras were outside the Faraday cage and, unfortunately, had succumbed to the EMP, but before then they had managed to transmit the video to the Fowl server. NANNI had zeroed in on two points of interest. First, the AI located a dissipating bullet vapour trace and followed it back to the mainland to find that there was a camouflaged sniper there, a hirsute chap with an antique Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle, which would be over eighty years old, if NANNI were correct.

‘There’s the culprit,’ she said from a wall speaker. ‘A sneaky sniper near the harbour.’

This was not the source of Myles’s confusion, as the sonic boom had to have come from somewhere, and, after all, the Fowl family had many enemies from the bad old days. The fact that one enemy would employ an antique weapon could relate back to some decades-old vendetta having to do with any number of the twins’ ancestors, most probably Artemis Senior, who had once attempted to muscle in on the Russian mafia’s Murmansk market. This sniper might simply be on a revenge mission, and what better way to hurt the father than to target the sons?

The second point of interest, and the cause of Myles’s bewilderment, was another, much smaller figure that had been captured by one camera. The tiny creature had appeared out of thin air, pedalled to keep herself aloft and then plummeted into the seaweed silo.

Beckett’s confusion was more general in nature, but he did have one question as the brothers reviewed the balloon footage. ‘A pedalling fairy,’ he said. ‘But where’s her bicycle?’

Myles was not inclined to answer, but was inclined to disagree. ‘There’s no bicycle, brother mine,’ he snapped. ‘And I do not happen to believe in fairies or wizards or demigods or vampires. This is either photo manipulation or interference from a satellite system.’

He rewound the footage and froze the figure in the sky, stepping closer for a decent squint.

‘Magnify,’ he told his spectacles, which he had augmented with various lenses pillaged from his big brother’s sealed laboratory. Artemis had set a twenty-two-digit security code on his door that he did not realise Myles had suggested to him subliminally by whispering into his ear every night for a week as he slept. To add further insult, the numbers Myles had chosen could be decoded using a simple letter–number cipher to spell out the Latin phrase Stultus Diana Ephesiorum, which translated as Diana is stupid, Diana being the Roman version of the Greek goddess Artemis, for whom Artemis had been named. It was a very complicated and time-consuming prank, which, in Myles’s opinion, was the best kind.

‘Yes,’ said Beckett. ‘Magnify.’

And the blond twin accomplished his magnification simply by taking a step closer to the screen, which, in truth, was both more efficient and cost-effective.

Myles studied the suspended creature and it seemed clear that there was, at the very least, a possibility it was not human.

Beckett jabbed the wall screen with his finger, daubing it with whatever gunk was coating his hand at the time.

‘Myles, that’s a fairy on an invisible heli-bike. I am one million per cent sure.’

‘There is no such animal as a heli-bike and you can’t have a million per cent, Beck,’ said Myles absently. ‘Anyway, how can you be so sure?’

‘Remember Artemis’s stories?’ asked Beckett. ‘He told us all about the fairies.’

This was true. Their older brother had often tucked in the twins with stories of the Fairy People who lived deep in the earth. The tales always ended with the same lines:

The fairies dig deep and they endure, but, if ever they need to breathe fresh air or gaze upon the moon, they know that we will keep their secrets, for the Fowls have ever been friends to the People. Fowl and fairy, fairy and Fowl, as it is now and will ever be.

‘Those were stories,’ said Myles. ‘How can you be certain there is a drop of truth to them?’

‘I just am,’ said Beckett, which was an often-employed phrase guaranteed to drive Myles into paroxysms of indignant rage.

‘You just are? You just are?’ he squeaked. ‘That is not a valid argument.’

‘Your voice is squeaky,’ Beckett pointed out. ‘Like a little piggy.’

‘That is because I am enraged,’ said Myles. ‘I am enraged because you are presenting your opinion as fact, brother. How is one supposed to unravel this mystery when you insist on babbling inanities?’

Beckett reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and pulled out a gummy sweet.

‘Here,’ he said, wiggling the worm at Myles as though it were alive. ‘This gummy is red and you need red, because your face is too white.’

‘My face is white because my fight-or-flight response has been activated,’ said Myles, glad to have something he was in a position to explain. ‘Red blood cells have been shunted to my limbs in case I need to either do battle or flee.’

‘That is soooo interesting,’ said Beckett, winking at his brother to nail home the sarcasm.

‘So the last thing I shall do is eat that gummy worm,’ declared Myles. ‘One of us has to be a grown-up eleven-year-old, and that one will be me, as usual. So, whatever I do in the immediate future, gummy-eating will not be a part of it. Do you understand me, brother?’

By which time Myles had actually popped the worm in his mouth and was sucking it noisily.

He had always been a sucker when it came to gummy sweets. In this case, he was a sucker for the gummy he was sucking.

Beckett gave him a few seconds to unwind, then asked, ‘Better?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Myles. ‘Much better.’

For, although he was a certified genius, Myles was also anxious by nature and tended to stress over the least little thing.

Beckett smiled. ‘Good, because a squeaky genius is a stupid genius. I dreamed that one time.’

‘That is a crude but accurate statement, Beck,’ said Myles. ‘When a person’s vocal register rises more than an octave, it is usually a result of panic, and panic leads to a certain rashness of behaviour untypical of that individual.’

But Myles was more or less talking to himself at this point, because Beckett had wandered away, as he often did during his twin’s lectures, and was peering through the safe room’s panoramic periscope’s eyepiece.

‘That’s nice, Myles. But you’d better stop explaining things I don’t care about.’

‘And why is that?’ asked Myles, a little crossly.

‘Because,’ said Beckett. ‘Helicopter.’

‘I know, Beck,’ said Myles, softening. ‘Helicopter.’

It was true that Beckett didn’t seem to either know or care about very many things, but there were certain subjects he was most informed about – insects being one of those subjects. Trumpets was another. And, also, helicopters. Beckett loved helicopters. In times of stress, he sometimes mentioned favourite items, but there was little significance to his helicopter references unless he added the model number.

‘A helicopter,’ insisted Beckett, making room for his brother at the mechanical periscope. ‘Army model Agusta Westland AW139M.’

Time to pay attention, thought Myles.

He propped his spectacles on his forehead and studied the periscope view briefly for visual confirmation that there was, in fact, a helicopter cresting the mainland ridge. The chopper bore Irish Army markings and therefore would not need warrants to land on the island, if that were the army’s intention.

And I cannot and will not fire on an Irish Army helicopter, Myles thought, even though it seemed inevitable that the army was about to place the twins in some form of custody. For most people, this knowledge would be a source of great comfort, but, historically, incarceration did not end well for members of the Fowl family, and so Father had always advised Myles to take certain precautions should arrest or even protective custody seem inevitable.

‘Give yourself a way out, son,’ Artemis Senior had said. ‘You’re a twin, remember?’

Myles always took what his father said seriously, and so he regularly updated his Ways Out of Incarceration folder.

This calls for a classic, he thought, and said to his brother, ‘Beck, I need to tell you something.’

‘Is it story time?’ asked Beckett brightly.

‘Yes,’ said Myles. ‘That’s precisely it. Story time.’

‘Is it one of Artemis’s? The Arctic Incident or The Eternity Code?’

Myles shook his head. ‘No, brother, this is a very important story, so you will need to concentrate. Can you achieve a high level of focus?’

Beckett was dubious, for Myles often declared things to be important when he himself regarded them as peripheral at best.

For example, some of the many things Myles considered important:

1 Science

2 Inventing

3 Literature

4 The world economy

And things Beckett considered hugely important, if not vital:

1 Gloop

2 Talking to animals

3 Peanut butter

4 Expelling wind, however necessary, before bed

Rarely did these lists overlap.

‘Is this important to me, or just big brainy Myles?’ Beckett asked with considerable suspicion. This was a most exciting day, and it would be just like Myles to ruin it with common sense.

‘Both of us, I promise.’

‘Wrist-bump promise?’ said Beckett.

‘Wrist-bump promise,’ said Myles, holding up the heel of his hand.

They bumped and Beckett, satisfied that a wrist-bump promise could never be broken, plonked himself down on the giant beanbag.

‘Before I tell you the story,’ said Myles, ‘we must become human transports for some very special passengers.’

‘What passengers?’ asked Beckett. ‘They must be teeny-tiny if we’re going to be the transports.’

‘They are teeny-tiny,’ said Myles, not entirely comfortable using such a subjective unit of measurement as teeny-tiny, but Beckett had to be kept calm. He opened the Plexiglas door on top of the insect hotel and scooped out a handful of tiny jumping creatures. ‘I would even go so far as to say teeny-weeny.’

‘I thought we weren’t supposed to touch these guys,’ said Beckett.

‘We’re not,’ said Myles, dividing the insects between them. ‘Except in an emergency. And this is most definitely an emergency.’

It took a mere two minutes for Myles to relate his story, which was, in fact, an escape plan, and an additional six minutes for him to repeat it three times so Beckett could absorb all the particulars.

Once Beckett had repeated the details back to him, Myles persuaded his twin to don some clothing, namely a white T-shirt printed with the word UH-OH!, a phrase often employed both by Beckett himself upon breaking something valuable, and also by people who knew Beckett when they saw him approach. Myles even had time to disable the villa’s more aggressive defences, which might decide to blow the helicopter out of the sky with some surface-to-air missiles, before the knock came on the door.

Here comes the cavalry, thought Myles.

In this rare instance, Myles Fowl was incorrect. The woman at the door would never be mistaken for an officer of the cavalry.

She was, in fact, a nun.

‘It’s a nun,’ said Beckett, checking the intercom camera.

Myles confirmed this with a glance at the screen. It was indeed a nun who appeared to have been winched down in a basket from the hovering helicopter.

If we do nothing, she might go away, thought Myles. After all, perhaps this person doesn’t even know we’re here.

Myles should have voiced this thought instead of thinking it, for, quick as a flash, Beckett pressed the TALK button and said, ‘Hi, mysterious nun. This is Beckett Fowl speaking, one of the Fowl Twins. My brother Myles is here too, and we’re home alone. We’ll be with you in a minute – we’re down in the safe room because of the sonic boom. I’m so glad the EMP didn’t kill your helicopter.’

Beckett’s statement contained basically every scrap of information that Myles had wanted to keep secret.

‘Gracias,’ said the unexpected nun. ‘I shall await your arrival.’

Beckett was hopping with excitement. ‘Myles, it’s a nun with a helicopter! You hardly ever see that. This is the start of our first real adventure. It has to be – I can feel it in my elbows.’

Beckett often felt things in his elbows, which he claimed were psychic. He sometimes pointed them at cookie jars to see if there were cookies inside, which Myles had never considered much of a challenge, as one of NANNI’s robot arms filled the kitchen containers as soon as their smart sensors informed the network they were empty.

‘Beck, with no disrespect to your extrasensory elbows,’ said Myles, ‘why don’t we stay calm and stick to the plan? If we can stay, we stay, but, if we go, remember the story.’

Beckett tapped his forehead. ‘It’s all in here, brother. Angry Hamster in the Dimension of Fire.’

‘No, Beck!’ snapped Myles. ‘Not that story.’

‘Ha!’ said Beckett. ‘You snapped at me. I win.’

Myles counted up to ninety-seven in prime numbers to calm himself. One of Beckett’s pleasures in life was teasing his brother until he snapped. It was unfair, really, as it was very difficult to tell the difference between a Beckett who genuinely didn’t know something and a Beckett who was pretending not to know something.

‘Ha-ha,’ said Myles, without a shred of humour. ‘You got me. You’re the big comedian, and I’m just Myles the dunce. But, in my defence, I am trying to keep us alive and out of an army cell.’

Beckett relented and hugged his brother. ‘Okay, Myles. I’ll lay off this time, because you have no sense of humour when you’re stressed. Let’s go upstairs and you can lecture this nun.’

Myles had to admit that sounded wonderful.

A new person to lecture.

As eager as Myles Fowl was to debate, argue with and deliver a monologue to the mysterious nun, he was determined to take his time reaching the front door. It is always a good idea to keep potential enemies waiting, he knew, as they are more likely to expose their real selves if they become impatient. Beckett was not aware of this tactic, and so Myles had to literally hold him back by hanging on to his belt loops. And thus Beckett dragged his brother along in his wake as a mule might drag a cart.

They passed through the reinforced steel door and climbed the narrow stairwell of polished concrete to the main living area, an open-plan quadrangle marked on three sides with glass walls that were threaded with a conductive mesh, which served both to maintain the integrity of the Faraday cage and reinforce the windows. The reclaimed wooden floors were strewn with rugs, the placement of which might seem random to the untrained eye, but they were actually carefully laid out in accordance with the Ba Zhi school of feng shui. The space was dominated by a driftwood table and a rough stone fireplace that ran on recycled pellets. But the main feature of the villa was the panoramic view of Dublin Bay that it afforded the residents. Myles could remember visiting the island with his father before construction of the villa began.

‘Criminal masterminds are always drawn to islands,’ Artemis Fowl Senior had said. ‘All the greats have them. Colonel Hootencamp had Flint Island. Hans Hørteknut had Spider Island, which was more of a glacier, I suppose. Ishi Myishi, the malignant inventor, has an island in the Japanese archipelago. And now we have Dalkey Island.’

And Myles had asked, ‘Are we criminal masterminds, Father?’

His father did not answer for half a minute, and Myles got the feeling that he was choosing his words carefully.

‘No, son,’ he said eventually. ‘But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.’

This, Myles knew, was a metaphor, and as a scientist he felt obliged to dissect it.

‘Fire being analogous to crime,’ he said. ‘So, if I take your meaning correctly, you are saying that on occasion the only way to defeat a criminal is to turn his own methods against him.’

Artemis Senior had laughed and tousled his son’s hair. ‘I’m just thinking out loud, son. The Fowls are out of that game. Now why don’t we forget I ever mentioned criminal masterminds and just enjoy the view?’

A view that was utterly ignored by Myles now as he attempted to slow his energetic brother’s trip to their front door. He felt confident that once they reached the door he would be able to argue legal precedent through the intercom with the waiting nun until the cows came home – or at least until he could fill his parents in on the situation. The problem would be how to contain Beckett.

As it happened, this problem never materialised. When they reached the front door, it was already open. The nun had stepped from the rescue basket and was closing her fingers over a hockey-puck-size device strapped to her palm.

‘There you are, chicos,’ said the nun. ‘The door simply opened of its own accord. Increíble, no?’

Incredible indeed, thought Myles. This nun may not be as virtuous as her clothing suggests.

The woman at Villa Éco’s front door was indeed a nun, but her habit was a little more stylish than one would usually associate with the various religious orders. She was dressed in a simple black linen smock that could have indicated that she liked Star Wars films or had just discovered an amazing young designer. The smock was cinched with a wide satin belt that nodded towards ancient Japanese culture. Her hair was too golden to be natural and was arranged in that bouffant style known in salons as 1980s Newsreader, on top of which perched a veil of black polyester secured with a jewelled hatpin.

‘Buenas tardes, chicos,’ she said. ‘I am Sister Jeronima Gonzalez-Ramos de Zárate of Bilbao.’

Beckett didn’t hear anything after the first name.

‘Geronimo-o-o!’ he cried enthusiastically, throwing up his arms.

‘No, niño,’ said the nun patiently. ‘Jeronima, not Geronimo.’

Beckett altered his cry appropriately. ‘Jeronima-a-a!’ and segued into a couple of blunt questions: ‘Sister, why are you red? And why do you smell funny?’

Jeronima smiled indulgently. These were the questions that most people wished to ask but would not. ‘You see, chico, my skin has the slight tinge because of my order: the Sisters of the Rose. We stain our flesh red with a non-toxic aniline dye solution to demonstrate our devotion to Mary, the rose without thorns. And the odour is from the dye. It is like the almonds, no?’

‘It is like the almonds, yes!’ said Beckett. ‘I love it. Can I stain my skin, Myles?’

‘No, brother,’ said Myles, smiling. ‘Not until you are eighteen.’

Myles was less smiley in his attitude towards the nun.

‘Sister Jeronima,’ he said, ‘it would seem that you have broken into our home.’

Jeronima joined her hands as though she might pray. ‘I am a nun. I would never do this. As I think I said, the door was open. Perhaps your EMP affected the locks, no?’

Myles was glad the rose-coloured nun had lied. At least he knew where they stood now.

‘You are, at the very least, trespassing on private property,’ he countered.

Jeronima waved his point away as though it were a pesky mosquito. ‘I do not answer to your country’s estúpido laws.’

‘I see,’ said Myles. ‘You obey a higher power, I suppose.’

‘Sí, absolutamente, if you like.’

‘A higher power in the helicopter?’ said Beckett.

Jeronima smiled tightly. ‘Not exactly, niño. Let us simply say that I am not bound by the rules of your government.’

‘That’s very nice,’ said Myles. ‘But we are not donating today. Can you please call again when my parents are home?’

‘But I am not here for donations, Myles Fowl,’ said Jeronima. ‘I am here to rescue you.’

Myles feigned surprise. ‘Rescue us, you say, Sister? But we are in the safest facility on Earth. In fact, I am disobeying my parents’ instructions by speaking with you. So, if you don’t mind …’

He attempted to close the aforementioned door, but was thwarted by the nun’s left knee-high leather boot, which she had jammed between door and frame.

‘But I do mind, niño,’ she said, pushing the door open. ‘You are unsupervised minors under attack from an unknown assailant. It is my duty to escort you to a place of safety.’

‘I would like to be escorted in a helicopter, Myles,’ said Beckett. ‘Can we go? Can we, please?’

‘Sí, Myles,’ said Jeronima. ‘Can we go, please? Make your brother happy.’

Myles raised a stiff finger and cried, ‘Not so fast!’

It was undeniable that this was a touch melodramatic, but Myles felt justified in indulging his weakness as there was a rappelling nun at the front door. ‘How would you know we are under attack, Sister Jeronima?’

‘My organisation has eyes everywhere,’ said Jeronima with what Myles would come to know as her customary vagueness.

‘That sounds suspiciously illegal, Sister,’ said Myles, thinking he could stall here for several minutes while he winkled out more information about this mysterious ‘organisation’ they were supposed to simply hand themselves over to. ‘That sounds as though you are infringing on my rights, which is unusual for a woman of the cloth.’

Jeronima crossed her arms. ‘I am unusual for a woman of the cloth. Also, I am a trauma nurse, and I once threw knives in the circo – that is to say, circus. But I am not important now. You are important, and it is true what they say about you, chico. You are the smart one.’

‘And I am the one who can climb!’ said Beckett, blowing his brother’s stalling plan to smithereens by vaulting into the helicopter’s rescue basket and scrambling up the winch cable faster than a macaque scaling a fruit tree.

‘And he is the one who can climb,’ said Sister Jeronima. ‘And most quickly too.’ She stepped back and opened the basket’s gate. ‘Shall we follow, chico?’

Myles had little choice in the matter now that Beckett had taken the lead.

‘I suppose we should,’ he said, a little miffed that his fact-finding mission had been cut short. ‘But only if you desist with the fake endearments. Chico, indeed. I am eleven years old now and hardly a child.’

‘Very well, Myles Fowl,’ said Sister Jeronima. ‘From now on, you shall be tried as an adult.’

The gate was already closed behind Myles when this comment registered. ‘Tried? I am to be tried?’

Jeronima fake-laughed. ‘Oh, forgive me, that was – how do you say? – a slip of the tongue. I meant, of course, to say treated. You will be treated as an adult.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Myles, unconvinced. There was some form of trial ahead, he felt sure of it.

Jeronima made a circling motion with her index finger and the winch was activated. As the basket rose into the night sky, Myles glanced downwards, appreciating the aerial view of Villa Éco, which, when seen from above, formed the shape of an upper-case F.

F for Fowl.

Still a little of the criminal mastermind in you, eh, Papa? he thought, and wondered how much of that particular characteristic there was in himself.

However much there needs to be in order to keep Beckett safe, he decided.

With a tap to the temple of his spectacles, Myles activated the infrared filter in his lenses and noticed that, across the bay, the sniper was packing up his gear.

We were not the target, he realised now. A sniper with even one functioning eyeball could have easily picked us off on the beach. So, what were you after, Mr Beardy Man?

He committed this puzzle to his subconscious, to be worked on in the background while he dealt with Sister Jeronima and the other mysterious player in their drama. A player who was now emerging from the seaweed silo – not that anyone but Myles would notice, for the creature, whatever it proved to be exactly, was more or less invisible.

Invisible, thought the Fowl twin. How mysterious.

And as his father often said: ‘A mystery is simply an advanced puzzle. Thunder was once a mystery. A wise man learns from the unknown by making it known.’

And the wise boy, Father, thought Myles now. He magnified his view of the silo creature and saw that a single body part was visible even without the infrared. Its right ear, which was pointed. Somewhere in Myles’s brain, a light bulb flashed.

A pointed ear.

And then the pointy-eared creature began to pedal, and it lifted off after the ascending rescue basket.

Beck was right, thought Myles, glancing upwards at his brother, who was already boarding the helicopter.

It was indeed a fairy on an invisible bicycle.

‘D’Arvit,’ he blurted, shocked that Artemis’s stories had been, in fact, historical rather than fictional.

Sister Jeronima mistook the blurt for a sneeze. ‘Bless you, chico,’ she said. ‘The night air is cool.’

Myles did not bother to correct her, because an explanation would be difficult, considering that the word D’Arvit was a fairy swear word, according to Artemis’s fairy tales.

Myles silently vowed not to use it again, at least not until he knew what it meant exactly.

Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye was surprised to find his mood brightening somewhat. This would have been a bombshell to anyone who knew him, as the duke was notorious for throwing royal tantrums when things did not go his way. He’d had an emotional hair trigger since childhood, when he would heave his toys from the pushchair if refused a treat. At family gatherings, his father often embarrassed him with the story of how five-year-old Teddy had hurled his wooden horse over the St George cliffs when the nanny served him lukewarm lemonade. And how Teddy had been so antisocial that it had become necessary to send him to Charterhouse boarding school at the age of five instead of seven, which was more traditional among those of the upper class. Now, one and a half centuries later, the duke’s general mood had not improved much, though he tended to take out his frustrations on other people’s property rather than his own and let his irritation fester in his stomach acid. Good form at all times.

And so Lord Teddy was surprised to find himself whistling as he packed his gear.

Whistling, Teddy old boy? Surely you ought to be sinking into your usual vengeful funk.

But no, he was verging on the exuberant.

And why would that be?

It would be, Teddy old fellow, because there is something afoot here. I take a single shot and suddenly the army is swooping in for an extraction?

The Fowls were an important family, but not that important.

The island was obviously under the surveillance of some agency or other.

This confirms my growing certainty that Brother Colman’s lead was sound.

Now Teddy had a choice: he could continue to stake out the island and wait for another troll, or he could follow the Fowl children and find the troll he had wrapped earlier.

Lord Bleedham-Drye knew that, logically, he should maintain his surveillance on the soon-to-be-unguarded Dalkey Island, but his instinct said follow the Fowls.

The duke trusted his instinct; it had kept him alive this long.

After all, it would be child’s play to follow the troll, for each Myishi CV round was radioactively coded, and Teddy had programmed the individual codes into his marvellous Myishi Drye wristwatch, which had over a thousand functions, including geo-pinned news alerts and actually telling the time. The Drye series was the gold standard in criminal appliances. It included watches, exercise machines, a gorgeous porcelain handgun, a line of lightweight bulletproof apparel, a light aircraft and a range of communication devices. Each item was embossed with a copy of the famous Modigliani line portrait of the duke from 1915. In return for his sponsorship, Teddy had a yearly credit of five million US dollars with the company, and a fifty per cent discount on anything above that amount. The slogan for the Drye range was Stay Drye in any situation with Myishi. It had been a most successful arrangement for both parties. And, in truth, Lord Teddy would have long since declared bankruptcy without the Myishi Corp sponsorship deal. For his part, Ishi Myishi had the seal of approval from one of the most respected criminal masterminds/mad scientists in the community, which shifted enough units to easily pay the duke’s tab.

Good old Myishi, thought Lord Teddy now, and his marvellous gadgets.

The duke and Ishi Myishi had been associates as man and boy. Or, more accurately, since Myishi was a boy who had lied about his age to join the Japanese Army and Teddy Bleedham-Drye was a British Army officer. The duke had discovered young Myishi breaking out of a prison shed in Burma, defending himself with a shotgun the lad had cobbled together from the frame and springs of his cot. Teddy recognised genius when he saw it and, instead of turning the boy in, he’d arranged for him to study engineering at Cambridge. The rest, as they say, was history, albeit a secret one. By Teddy’s reckoning, Myishi had repaid his debt a hundred times over.

Make that a hundred and one, Teddy thought, for one of the duke’s sponsorship perks was a hunter-tracker system that could be bounced off several private satellites. And so, wherever in a several-hundred-mile radius that troll went, Teddy could easily follow.

The Fowls will never hear me coming, he thought. And they will never hear the bullets that kill them.

THE ARMY HELICOPTER

Lazuli Heitz could not figure out the black-haired Fowl boy.

He just sat there, smiling at her, as though she were absolutely visible to him. But that could not be, for the other occupants of the chopper were completely ignoring her. The second boy was making bird noises at passing seagulls, while the woman in black plied the bespectacled kid with questions that he blithely ignored, maintaining both his eye contact with Lazuli and a broad grin.

That child radiates smugness, Lazuli thought. I don’t like him already. At the first opportunity, I shall retrieve the troll and get far away from these people.

In truth, she was beginning to regret her decision to board the helicopter in the first place. Perhaps she should have simply waited for LEPrecon to show up. But the decision was made now, and there was no point regretting it. Plus, her pedalling mechanism had been injured by the fall and she had barely managed to make it to the helicopter. Her wings had folded themselves into their rig as a sign that there would be no more flying until her suit regenerated. So now she needed to concentrate on her next step.

As her angel had told her: ‘There is no future in the past.’

Which meant that obsessively second-guessing your own decisions was a waste of time. At least, that’s what Lazuli took it to mean.

And so she had, minutes before, dragged herself from the seaweed, feeling as if she had endured a severe beating due to the effects of the Filabuster, and pedalled her way to the chopper’s altitude. The ad hoc plan had been to clamp herself on to the skids, but there were already armed soldiers occupying those spots, so Lazuli had no choice but to slip between the troops, careful not to nudge against the automatic weapons, for it was a universal truth that warriors of any species do not like their guns being touched. She crawled under the jump seat, hoping the filaments did not drop off and expose her. Although it felt like the chromophoric camouflage strands were embedded in the fabric of her jumpsuit, not to mention patches of her blue skin, and would never wash off. Which was currently a good thing.

Lazuli hunkered under there in the shadows, trying to take stock.

Learn as much as you can, Specialist.

More advice from her angel.

A friend once told me that gold is power. But he was wrong for once. Information is power.

Information: Lazuli had precious little of that currency.

And after more than a minute she hadn’t picked up much more, apart from the fact that the bespectacled boy was still looking right at her.

If he’s looking, why isn’t he telling?

Lazuli sincerely wished she could have done a little homework on this family before embarking on her exercise, but the Fowl file was locked up tighter than a dwarf’s wallet.

The strange boy’s smile is not a friendly one, she realised. It is the smile of a boy who has a secret.

As for the second child, he was apparently a simpleton who cawed and screeched down at seagulls as the chopper whupped overhead.

Perhaps three minutes later, Lazuli had picked up two potentially useful nuggets.

One: they were headed south-east towards mainland Europe.

And two: as a magic-free zone herself, Lazuli had been forced to study hard just to barely pass the gift-of-tongues exam, and so she realised that the human child squealing at seagulls was not as simple as she had assumed he was.

Her train of thought was derailed by the bespectacled boy, who cleared his throat noisily.

‘Are you ill, chico?’ the nun asked, to which he replied:

‘I am perfectly fine, Sister Jeronima. There is no need to shout into my right ear. It’s here beside you. Perfectly visible.’

It took Lazuli a moment to realise that his comments were aimed at her and not at the nun. When the light bulb went on, she hurriedly clamped a hand over her right ear.

D’Arvit, she swore internally, which defeated the venting purpose of swearing. Does this mean I owe the human boy a favour?

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

COMMANDER DIAVOLO CONROY, OF THE IRISH RANGER team assigned to assist Sister Jeronima in whatever manner she wished to be assisted, considered this particular assignment, i.e. to escort twin boys to a black-site facility in the Netherlands, the second-lowest point of his career.

The absolute lowest point being the time a brigadier-general ordered the entire squad to dress as manga clowns and fly a pony to his daughter’s birthday party. The pony’s name was Buckles, and it was, to put it delicately, a nervous flyer. Commander Conroy still shuddered when he thought back on that day.

But at least he had understood the objective of Operation Buckles: deliver a pony to a child. This assignment – Operation Fowl Swoop, as it had been dubbed – was an altogether more mysterious and unsavoury affair. Two months ago, the Spanish nun had simply driven into the Curragh army camp, swiping her way through several locked gates with that infernal black plastic card of hers, and basically made herself at home with her semi-truckload of high-tech tricks.

That ink-black card was the first thing about Sister Jeronima to give Conroy the creeps. When Conroy had flashed his ID at the nun and asked her to explain herself, she had simply tapped his badge with her card and the black colour had somehow flowed across from her ID to his. While he was still gazing at his altered card in slack-jawed amazement, he received a terse call from the Minister of Defence himself, who summarily informed Conroy that his squad had been deputised by a top-secret intergovernmental organisation and he was to follow Sister Jeronima’s orders to the letter until his ID returned to its original colour.

‘And if I don’t, Minister?’ Conroy had brazenly asked.

‘If you don’t,’ the minister had spluttered, ‘you will find yourself changing the blue latrine blocks in an Antarctic research facility.’

This was a most specific threat, and it helped Diavolo Conroy decide to follow orders.

And so now he and his highly trained men were delivering a pair of Irish twins to an industrial park near Schiphol airport so they could be transported to a black site.

Children in a black site?

Sometimes Commander Conroy couldn’t help wondering if he were still one of the good guys, if indeed there even were good guys any more these days.

‘That will be all, Commander Conroy,’ Jeronima told him as soon as the chopper skids touched down. ‘My people will take it from here.’

Sister Jeronima’s people emerged from two SUVs, not of any make Conroy could identify. Two four-man teams just to transport a couple of sleeping eleven-year-old children.

Overkill, surely, thought Conroy, and for a moment he entertained the crazy notion of defying the minister and pulling the chopper out of there before the payload could be transferred to the vehicles.

But he didn’t because he was a soldier, after all, and soldiers obeyed orders from the chief. Still, it didn’t sit well with Conroy as, after the passengers disembarked, he gave the command to lift off, and he decided to ask some hard questions when he landed back in the Curragh.

The only positive in this entire operation was that Conroy noticed that his ID had shed its skin of black and was back to its original colour. As if the black sheen – or the nun herself – had never been there.

On a side note, Conroy was true to his word and asked several hard questions of the minister upon his return to Ireland, but the answers were wishy-washy at best, so Diavolo handed in his resignation and carried around the guilt for what he considered an abduction until, almost two years later, he got the unexpected opportunity to both set things right with the twins and explain the origins of his unusual first name.

But that is another story, which is, incidentally, even more surprising than this one.

The first rule of interrogation is to question captives separately with the hope that their stories might contradict each other. Sister Jeronima had handled scores of prisoners, suspects and detainees in the span of her long career, and had literally written a handbook on the subject, which was entitled Todo el mundo habla finalmente, or Everyone Talks Eventually, in which Jeronima laid out her interrogation philosophy.

‘The thing to remember,’ she wrote in the foreword, ‘is that everyone is guilty of something.’

If pressed on the matter, Jeronima would say that the strangest subject she had ever questioned was Gary Greyfeather, an African parrot that knew the combination to a cockney gang lord’s safe. It had taken her a few hours and a bucket of nuts, but eventually Gary had spilled the numbers.

The parrot was about to be demoted to second place on the strange-subject list after the Fowl Twins.

Jeronima’s plan was as follows: she would place the twins in adjacent rooms and pose questions to both until some disparity appeared, and then she would use the difference in their stories to drive a wedge between them. Jeronima was aware that Myles was a smart one, but she felt confident that he would crumble quickly in an interview situation.

Myles awoke, and quickly realised that all was not right in the Fowl world. For one thing, he was in a chair, which was most unusual for him. Not being in a chair per se, but waking from slumber in a chair, for Myles was not the type of boy to simply nod off; he had not once, since the age of two, fallen asleep in a chair, sofa or recliner.

To explain: Myles’s brain was so active that he was obliged to perform a nightly relaxation routine in order to disengage his synapses. This routine involved first inserting his night-time mouth guard and then completing self-hypnosis exercises while focusing on Beckett’s unusually musical snores. Beckett’s snores, technically speaking, were not snores at all but a trio of whistles that he exhaled through both of his nostrils and his mouth. This triple exhale was unusual enough in itself, but the really extraordinary thing was that each orifice played a different note. Notes that combined to form a perfect C-major chord, which never failed to remind Myles of Beethoven’s Mass.

Myles could not hear the chord now and knew that he had been separated from his twin. He looked around to find himself in an underground room with stone columns and vaulted arches. There were no visual cues to suggest that he was underground, but Myles could tell instinctively – something perhaps about the heaviness of the air or a pressure he felt in his skull – that he was below sea level. Myles’s skull was very sensitive, and the least change in atmospherics could precipitate a migraine.

Sister Jeronima was seated across a table from him. Bizarrely enough, the nun was absently polishing a throwing knife with a chamois cloth.

Sad, thought Myles. Such a pathetic attempt to intimidate me.

Jeronima expects me to reference the knife, he realised, thus giving her the upper hand.

‘Buenas tardes, Myles Fowl,’ said the nun without looking up from her knife. ‘You must have so many questions.’

It was true that there were things Myles needed to know, but he had answers too, should anyone care to pose the corresponding questions.

He could have asked: Where am I precisely?

Or indeed: Who exactly do you represent?

Or certainly: What do you want with us?

Myles knew that, should he pretend to pass himself off as a frightened, witless youth to learn these things, Jeronima would see right through him; after all, his intellect was well documented.

So, instead of firing off a barrage of questions, Myles said, ‘You sedated us with the helicopter’s oxygen masks. That was a despicable trick, Sister.’

Jeronima was not in the least abashed. ‘The levels are delicate. Sometimes people fall asleep.’

‘And then you are free to smuggle them into your subterranean base without fuss. I would guess we are in Amsterdam. Or perhaps Rotterdam, but I imagine Amsterdam. I do love Amsterdam. The NEMO Science Museum is a marvel, though I do worry about the EYE theatre, architecturally. I have written letters to the board.’

Jeronima gave Myles her full attention. ‘Very good. How did you know we were in Amsterdam?’

This would usually have been a simple question for the NANNI chip embedded in Myles’s spectacles to answer. The map of their trip was displayed for his eyes only on the inside of his lenses. Unfortunately, NANNI had lost network outside Schiphol airport, so Myles had been forced to make an educated guess.

‘Never mind that,’ said Myles. ‘I’m sure you must have questions.’

‘Oh, sí,’ said Jeronima. ‘I have questions, but perhaps some answers too. I can tell you where your brother is.’

Myles rubbed the scar on his wrist. ‘No need. Beckett is in the next room.’

‘You can sense your twin?’

‘Our scars twinge like a form of spiritual radar,’ said Myles. ‘Usually I can see him too.’

‘Do not worry, chico,’ said Jeronima. ‘You will be together soon. It was necessary to separate you for a short time, considering your peculiar situation.’

‘And which peculiar situation is that?’

This was a genuine question from Myles. The Fowls had, over the years, been involved in a great many peculiar situations.

‘The fairy situation,’ said Jeronima, and she placed a black plastic card on the table.

Myles did not touch the card and he made no attempt to scan it with his augmented spectacles. Even basic credit cards had photon technology now. Jeronima had presented her card with such a flourish that Myles felt sure it was packed with advanced sensors and would detect a scan. Then he would lose his precious spectacles and he would have no contact with NANNI, as his watch and smartphone were still beside his bed in Villa Éco.

‘Don’t worry, niño,’ said Jeronima, sensing Myles’s hesitation. ‘It is nothing but a card. We are very old-school down here. There is not even the internet.’

Myles engaged his organic scanners, those being his eyes. At first glance, the card seemed blank, but then Myles noticed seven embossed letters.

‘ACRONYM,’ he read. ‘I presume ACRONYM is an acronym.’

‘Sí, correcto, Myles,’ said Jeronima. ‘ACRONYM stands for: Asociación para el Control, la Regulación, y la Observación de los No-humanos y la Magia.’

‘You’re telling me that the acronym for ACRONYM is ACRONYM?’ asked Myles. ‘That sounds a little forced, if you don’t mind me saying. And it only works in Spanish, though the agency name itself is English.’

‘I suppose you could do the better acronym, chico,’ said Jeronima, which was unfortunate, for Myles Fowl had always been a whizz at wordplay.

‘Most certainly I could do better,’ said the bespectacled twin. ‘Let me see … Off the top of my head, what about IMP? Imaginary Monster Patrol. I have added a second layer to the acronym there by linking the word itself to the organisation.’

Jeronima smiled thinly. ‘Most amusing. But also insulting, no?’

‘I take your point. Let’s try another one: ELF. Excellent Leprechaun Force. I could do a few in Spanish if you like?’

Jeronima shrugged. ‘English, Spanish, it does not matter. The name is no importante – it is our actions that count. We are an international intergovernmental organisation charged with monitoring fairy activity.’

‘Los no-humanos,’ said Myles, not bothering to suppress a smirk. ‘So tell me, Sister, if I ignore the ridiculous premise for your group’s very existence, what does your ACRONYM want with us?’

‘Nada. We do not want anything,’ said Jeronima, wide-eyed. ‘We are merely protecting you.’

Myles laughed. ‘From a gunshot? Why would fairy-hunters care about a shot from a human gun? We had a close shave, that is all.’

‘We do not care about this gunshot, but we are most interested in the disappearing island.’

‘There you have me at a disadvantage,’ said Myles. ‘I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.’

Which was not the whole truth.

The nun’s eyes narrowed and she began twirling the throwing knife on the table. ‘After the gunshot, the island simply disappeared, momentarily, then came back into view. We do not have such technology. So it must be magic.’

Myles laughed. ‘Really, Sister? Magic is your first port of call? Why not aliens? Why not alternative dimensions? Your reasoning is fatally flawed, I’m afraid.’

Jeronima thunked the knife into the tabletop, where it quivered and sang. ‘Listen to me, niño. There is another race under our feet with superior weapons and advanced technology. Some years ago, there was an event that shut down the entire world. Airports, hospitals, everything. It took months for civilisation to recover, and it cost billions. Several governments collapsed.’

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