The Atlantis Complex Page 12

  The owner was a certain dwarf called Barnet Riddles who ruled the roost with a certain wheedling panache that made him a likeable host in a sleazy sort of way. And if wheedling panache was not enough to calm a troublemaker down, then Barnet would follow it with a tap from a stolen LEP buzz baton.

  The Sozzled Parrot was a dwarf hangout, and the club motto was: If you are not welcome there, then you are welcome here, which meant that every exiled criminal or slumming fairy in North America sooner or later turned up at The Sozzled Parrot. Barnet Riddles made the perfect host, as, by some freak of nature, he was one of only a tiny percentage of fairies who were over four feet tall. And so, as long as he wore a bandanna to cover his ears, Barnet was the ideal go-between with the humans, who supplied him with liquor, slightly turned beef for his quesadillas, and as much firepower as he could shift out of the back room.

  The early hours of this morning in The Sozzled Parrot were pretty much the same as any other. Dwarfs sat hunched over tankards of ale in one of the booths. A couple of sprites were playing video crunchball on their handhelds, and half a dozen elfin soldiers of fortune were trading war stories by the pool table.

  Barnet Riddles was deep in conversation with a dwarf at the bar.

  “Come on, Tombstone,” he wheedled in a charming way. “Buy a couple of guns. A grenade at least. All you do is sit there and drink creek water. Isn’t there someone you’d like to shoot a couple of times?”

  The dwarf grinned, baring his trademark tombstone teeth. “It’s getting that way, Riddles.”

  Barnet was not discouraged—then again this particular dwarf was a born optimist. Who else would set up a bar for photosensitive dwarfs in sunny Miami?

  It’s the last place the Leppers will look for us fugitives from justice, he often explained. They’re up freezing their LEP tails off in Russia, meanwhile we’re sinking beers here in luxurious air-conditioned surroundings.

  Luxurious was a stretch. Even clean would have been a stretch. But The Sozzled Parrot was somewhere for fairy soldiers of fortune to meet and exchange war stories day or night, and so they were prepared to put up with Barnet’s exorbitant prices and his constant sales pitches.

  “How about a computer implant?” persisted the innkeeper. “Everybody has implants these days. How do you keep tabs on the LEP?”

  Tombstone pulled down the brim of his felt hat so that it covered his eyes. “Believe it or not, Riddles, I’m not on the hot list anymore. What you are looking at now is a one hundred percent legit citizen. Heck, I’ve even got a visa to be aboveground.”

  “Groomchunks,” said Barnet doubtfully.

  Tombstone slid a plastic square across the bar. “Read it and weep.”

  Barnet squinted at the Gnommish writing and checked the official hologram.

  “Looks pretty real,” he admitted.

  “That is because it is real, my beer-watering friend.”

  Barnet shook his head. “I don’t get it. If you can be anywhere, why are you here?”

  Tombstone tossed a handful of beezel nuts into his cavernous mouth, and Barnet swore that after each crunch there was an echo.

  “I am here,” said Tombstone eventually, “because of the clientele.”

  Barnet was even more befuddled. “What? Thieves, mercenaries, extortionists, and forgers?”

  Tombstone’s grin was wide and bright. “Yep. My kind of people.”

  Barnet checked on a pitcher of toad sludge that he was fermenting for the pixies.

  “You are a riot, Tombstone. Do you know that?”

  Before Tombstone could answer, a plastic parrot on the bar opened its beak and squawked.

  “New post,” squawked its animatronic mouth. “New post on the message board.”

  “Excuuuuuse me,” said Barnet Riddles, with exaggerated politeness, “while I check this extremely handy implant I have in my head.”

  “Handy, until you pass a microwave and lose ten years of memory,” commented Tombstone. “Then again, you spend so much time in here that you probably wouldn’t miss the odd decade.”

  Barnet was not listening. His eyes fogged over as he checked the illegal implant that had been hotwired directly into his cortex by a disbarred doctor. After a couple of “hmmms” and one “really,” he returned to the here and now.

  “How are the brain cells?” enquired Tombstone mildly. “I hope the message was worth it.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Hundred Percent Legit,” said Barnet briskly. “This one is for us criminals.”

  He pounded the bar with his buzz baton, sending sparks rippling across the length of the brass rail.

  “Cruik,” he called across the room. “You have a ship? Right?”

  One of the dwarfs at the end booth raised a grizzled head. Beer foam fell in blobs from his beard. “Yeah. I got a gyro. A bit of a crock, but she runs okay.”

  Barnet clapped his hands, already counting his commission. “Good. A job came in on the board. Two humans, kill ’em dead.”

  Cruik shook his head slowly. “No killing dead. We may be criminals but we’re not humans.”

  “The client will accept a full wipe. Can you stomach that?”

  “Full wipe?” interrupted Tombstone. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  Barnet sniggered. “Not if you keep your fingers away from the electrodes. Two humans, brother and sister by the name of Butler.”

  Tombstone twitched. “Butler? Brother and sister?”

  Barnet closed one eye, consulting his implant. “Yeah. I’m shooting the details across to your gyro, Cruik. This is a rush job. Top dollar, as the Mud Men would say.”

  The dwarf called Cruik checked the charge in an old-fashioned blunderbuss Neutrino.

  “These Mud Men won’t be saying much of anything by the time I’m finished with them.” He pounded the table to summon his warriors. “Let’s go, my fine fellows. We have brains to suck.”

  Tombstone stood quickly. “Do you guys have room for one more?”

  “I knew it,” chuckled Barnet Riddles. “One hundred percent legit, I don’t think so. As soon as I laid eyes on you, ‘This guy has history,’ I said.”

  Cruik was buckling on a belt loaded with spikes, shells, and dangerous-looking implements with fuses and capacitors.

  “Why should I take you, stranger?”

  “You should take me because if your pilot gets killed to death by these Butler humans, then I can take his place.”

  An uncharacteristically skinny dwarf looked up from the romance novel he was reading. “Killed to death?” he said, lip trembling slightly. “I say, Cruik, is that likely?”

  “I’ve had experience with the Butlers,” said Tombstone. “They always go for the pilot first.”

  Cruik sized up Tombstone, taking in his powerful jaws and muscled legs.

  “Okay stranger. You take the copilot’s chair. You get a junior share and no quibbling.”

  Tombstone grinned. “Why quibble now when we can quibble later?”

  Cruik thought about this statement for a moment until his brain ached.

  “Okay. Whatever. Everybody take a sober pill and mount up. We have some humans to wipe.”

  Tombstone followed his new captain across the bar floor. “How good is your mind-wiping equipment?”

  Cruik shrugged. “Who cares?” he said simply.

  “I like your attitude,” said Tombstone.

  Cancún, Mexico; Now

  The Butlers in question were of course the very same Butlers who had escaped the mesmerized wrestling fans, and who were now, thirty minutes after Cruik took on his new copilot, taking a moment to catch their breath in the morning sunshine on the shore of Cancún’s lagoon. These two were being pursued by Turnball Root more for his own entertainment than the possibility that they could actually interfere with his plans. Though it was possible that opponents as formidable as the Butlers had proved themselves to be troublesome. And Turnball’s plans were delicate enough without adding troublesome humans to the mix. Better to wipe them
, at least. Also, they had escaped the first time, so Turnball was irked, which he did not like.

  Juliet squatted just above the waterline, listening to the sounds of party laughter and the tinkling of champagne flutes stream across the water from a passing yacht. “I have an idea, brother,” she said. “Why don’t we ask Artemis for a million dollars and just retire? Well, I could retire. You could be my butler.”

  Butler sat beside her. “Frankly, I don’t think Artemis has a million dollars. He’s put everything into this latest project. THE PROJECT, as he calls it.”

  “What’s he stealing now?”

  “Nothing. Artemis has moved on from crime. These days he’s saving the world.”

  Juliet’s arm froze halfway through the motion of throwing a pebble. “Artemis Fowl has moved on from crime? Our Artemis Fowl? Isn’t that against Fowl family law?”

  Butler didn’t exactly smile, but his scowl definitely grew less pronounced. “This is hardly the time for jokes, sister.” He paused. “But if you must know, the Fowl statutes actually state that a family member caught straying onto the straight and narrow can have his Doctor Evil manual and suction cups confiscated.”

  Juliet snickered. “Suction cups.”

  Butler’s customary scowl quickly reasserted itself. “Seriously, sister. This is a sinister situation we find ourselves in. Pursued by fairy agents and on the far side of the world from my principal.”

  “What are you even doing here? Who sent you on this wild-goose chase?”

  Butler had been thinking about this. “Artemis sent me. He must have been coerced, though it didn’t seem so. Perhaps he was tricked.”

  “Tricked? Artemis Fowl? He has changed.”

  Butler frowned, patting the spot where his shoulder holster would normally hang. “Artemis has changed. You would barely recognize him now, he is so different.”

  “Different? How?”

  Butler’s frown deepened, a slash between his eyebrows. “He counts everything. Steps, words, everything. I think five is the big number. Also, rows. He groups all the stuff around him into little rows. Usually five per row, or ten.”

  “I’ve heard about stuff like that. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD.”

  “And he’s paranoid. He doesn’t trust anyone.” Butler’s head dropped to his chest. “Not even me.”

  Juliet tossed the pebble far into the lagoon. “It sounds like Artemis needs help.”

  Butler nodded. “How about you? You’ve had quite a bit sprung on you in the past hour.”

  Juliet raked the shoreline with her fingers, gathering pebbles. “What? You mean little things like being chased by a mesmerized horde? And the fact that fairies do exist? Those tiny things?”

  Butler grunted. He had forgotten how much his sister made fun of him and how he, for some reason, put up with it. “Yes, those tiny things,” he said, elbowing her fondly.

  “Don’t worry about me, brother. I’m a modern woman. We’re tough and smart, hadn’t you heard?”

  “I get it. You’re coping, is that it?”

  “No, brother. I feel fine. The Butlers are together, and nothing can stand against us.”

  “The new memories aren’t freaking you out?”

  Juliet laughed, and the sound did Butler’s heart good. “Freaking me out? Where are we, the 1970s? And, no, the memories aren’t freaking me out. As a matter of fact, they feel . . .” She thought about her next sentence for a while. “They feel right in my head. They belong where they are. How could I have forgotten Holly? Or Mulch?”

  Butler pulled a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket. They were a little clunkier than the current style, and had tiny solar panels on the arms.

  “With fairies on our tail, we may need these.” Juliet plucked them from his fingers, and the stimulus from the contact brought memories flooding back.

  Artemis made these from disassembled LEP helmets, so we could see through Fairy shields. The LEP are sneaky, but Artemis is sneakier.

  “I remember these glasses. Why did you even bring them?”

  “Boy Scout rule number one: Be prepared. There are fairies around us all the time. I don’t want to accidentally shoot one, or miss one, for that matter.”

  Juliet hoped her brother was being funny.

  “You wouldn’t shoot a fairy,” said Juliet, slipping the glasses onto her face.

  Immediately, something appeared in her vision as though it had popped out of a toaster. The something was certainly not human. It hung suspended from a harness and was aiming a bulbously barreled weapon at her head. Whatever it was wore a bodysuit that seemed to be made of a viscous tarlike substance, which clung to its wobbling torso and coated every hair of its shaggy beard.

  “Shoot the fairy!” she yelped, shocked. “Shoot it!”

  Most people might have assumed that Juliet was joking. After all, what were the chances that a fairy would show up the very moment she donned fairy filters? Not to mention the fact that Juliet was well known for her inappropriate sense of humor and regularly spouted witticisms in moments of mortal danger.

  For example, when Christian Varley Penrose, her sous instructor at the Madame Ko Agency, lost his grip on the north face of Everest and went plummeting earthward with only a skinny girl between him and certain death, Juliet braced herself and called to her sensei as he pinwheeled past: “Hey, Penrose. Surely saving you is worth some extra credit.”

  So it would be quite reasonable to assume that when Juliet yelled Shoot the fairy she was actually joshing her big brother, but Butler did not assume this for a second. He was trained to recognize stress registers, but even if Artemis hadn’t forced him to listen to that MP3 lecture in the car, he knew the difference between genuinely shocked Juliet and having a laugh Juliet. So when Juliet cried Shoot the fairy, Butler decided on a course of aggressive action in the time it would take a hummingbird to flap its wings.

  No gun, so no shooting, he thought. But there are options.

  The option Butler chose was to grasp his sister’s shoulder firmly and push her sideways so that she actually skidded along the pebbled beach, her shoulder plowing a furrow in the stones.

  Scratched shoulder. I’ll be hearing about that for weeks.

  Butler swung both arms forward and used the momentum to pull himself up and into a full-tilt launch at whatever had spooked Juliet. At this point he could only hope that the whatever was close enough to grapple, otherwise there was a fairy somewhere laughing into his face mask and calmly aiming a weapon.

  His luck held. Butler made contact with something squat and lumpy. Something that struggled and bucked like a pig in a blanket, and exuded a particular odor that a person might experience if that person were unfortunate enough to somehow end up facedown in a medieval swill patch.

  I know that smell, Butler realized, holding on grimly. Dwarf.

  Whatever was holding the dwarf up whined and dipped, dunking Butler and his wriggling captive into the lagoon’s waist-high water. For Butler, the dunking was harmless enough—he was virtually clamped around the invisible dwarf, and in fact the cool water felt quite refreshing—but for the shimmer-suited fairy, the sudden dip was catastrophic. Abrasive contact with the sharp scree on the lagoon bed punctured his camouflage suit, breaking the skin, releasing the charge.

  The dwarf, Cruik, was suddenly visible.

  “Aha,” said Butler, hauling Cruik from the surf. “Dwarf head. Good.”

  Cruik had forfeited his gift of tongues along with the rest of his magic, but he had been living among the humans for long enough to pick up a smattering of several languages, and Butler’s simple statement was terrifyingly easy to misinterpret.

  Dwarf head? This Mud Man is going to eat my head.

  Butler was actually glad to see the dwarf’s head because dwarf heads are disproportionately large, and this particular dwarf’s head was even more bulbous than most. It was almost Butler-sized and there was a helmet perched on top of it.

  With a fairy helmet, I can see what this little
guy sees.

  It was the helmet Butler was after, not the meaty noggin inside.

  “C’mere, slippy,” grunted the bodyguard, intuitively snapping the helmet’s seals and popping it off. “Did you just try to shoot my sister?”

  Recognizing the word shoot, Cruik glanced down at his own hands and was dismayed to find them empty. He had dropped his gun.

  Cruik was a career criminal and had lived through many close calls without losing his nerve. He had once faced down a gang of drunken goblins armed with only a jar of burn lotion and three bottle tops, but this bloodthirsty giant with a face of fury and a thirst for brains finally sent him over the edge.

  “Nooooo,” he screamed shrilly. “No brain biting.”

  Butler ignored the tantrum and the musty helmet pong and gripped the protective hat one-handed, as a basketball player might grip a basketball.

  Cruik’s skull was now totally exposed, and the dwarf swore he could feel his brain trembling.

  When a dwarf finds himself unnerved to this extent, one of two things is likely to happen: one, the dwarf will unhook his jaw and attempt to eat its way out of trouble. This option was not available to Cruik because of his suit’s hood. And two: the terrified dwarf will trim the weight. Trimming the weight is an aviators’ trick, which involves jettisoning as much unnecessary cargo as possible to keep the ship in the air. Dwarfs are capable of shedding up to a third of their body weight in less than five seconds. This is obviously a last resort and can only be performed once a decade or so. It involves a rapid expulsion of loose-layered runny fat, ingested mining dirt, and gases through what dwarf mommies politely refer to as the nether tunnel.

  Trimming the weight is mostly an automatic response and will be engaged when the heart rate nudges past two hundred beats per minute, which happened to Cruik the moment Butler enquired whether Cruik had tried to shoot his sister. At that moment, Cruik more or less lost control of his bodily functions and had just time to scream “No brain biting!” before his body decided to trim the weight and use the resulting propulsion to get the heck out of there.