Eoin Colfer                         

Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception

Butler flexed his fingers, straightened his tie and got back to work. He was not at all happy with the security of the hotel suite. Hotels were a bodyguard's nightmare. Service lifts, isolated upper floors and totally inadequate escape routes made the principal's safety almost impossible to guarantee. The Kronski was luxurious, certainly, and the staff efficient, but that was not what Butler looked for in a hotel. He looked for a ground-floor room, with no windows and a fifteen-centimetre-thick steel door. Needless to say, rooms like this were impossible to find, and even if he could find one, Master Artemis would undoubtedly turn his nose at it. Butler would have to make do with this third-story suite.
  Artemis wasn't the only one with a case of instruments. Butler opened a chrome briefcase on the coffee table. It was one of a dozen such cases that he held in safety deposit boxes in some of the world's capitals. Each case was full to bursting with surveillance equipment, counter-surveillance equipment and weaponry. Having one in each country meant that he did not have to break Custom laws on each overseas trip from Ireland.
  He selected a bug sweeper and quickly ran it around the room, searching for listening devices. He concentrated on the electrical appliances: phones, television, fax machine. The electronic waffle from those items could often drown a bug's signal, but not with this particular sweeper. The Eye Spy was the most advanced sweeper on the market and could detect a pinhole mike half a mile away.
   After several minutes he was satisfied, and he was on the point of returning the device to the case when it registered a tiny electrical field. Nothing much, barely a single flickering blue bar on the indicator. The first bar solidified, then turned bright blue. The second bar began to flicker. Something electronic was closing in on them. Most men would have discounted the reading; after all, there were several thousand electronic devices within a square mile of the Kronski Hotel. But normal electronic fields did not register on the Eye Spy, and Butler was not most men. He extended the sweeper's aerial and panned the device around the room. The reading spiked when the aerial was pointing at the window. A claw of anxiety tugged at Butler's intestines. Something airborne was coming closer at high speed.
  He dashed to the window, ripping the net curtains from their hooks and flinging the window wide open. The winter air was pale blue, with remarkably few clouds. Jet trails criss-crossed the sky like a giant's game of noughts and crosses. And there, twenty degrees up, a gentle spiralling curve, was a tear-shaped rocket of blue metal. A red light winked on its nose and white-hot flames billowed from its rear end. The rocket was heading for Kronski, no doubt about it.
  It's a smart bomb, Butler said to himself, without one iota of doubt. And Master Artemis is the target.
  Butler's brain began flicking through his list of alternatives. It was a short list. There were only two choices really: get out or die. It was how to get out that was the problem. They were three storeys up, with the exit on the wrong side. He spared a moment to take one last look at the approaching missile. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen. Even the emission was different from conventional weapons, with hardly any vapour trail. Whatever this was, it was brand new. Somebody must very badly want Artemis dead.
  Butler turned from the window and barged into Artemis's bedroom. The young master was busy conducting his tests on The Fairy Thief.
  'Is there a problem?' asked Artemis.
  Butler did not reply, because he didn't have time. Instead he grabbed the teenager by the scruff of the neck and hoisted him on to his own back.
  'The painting!' Artemis managed to shout, his voice muffled by the bodyguard's jacket.
  Butler grabbed the picture, unceremoniously stuffing the priceless masterpiece into his jacket pocket. If Artemis had seen the century-old oil paint crack, he would have sobbed. But Butler was paid to protect the only one thing, and it was not The Fairy Thief.
  'Hang on extremely tightly', advised the massive bodyguard, hefting a king-size mattress from the bed.
  Artemis held on tightly as he'd been told, trying not to think. Unfortunately his brilliant brain automatically analysed the available data: Butler had entered the room at speed and without knocking, therefore there was danger of some kind. His refusal to answer questions meant that the danger was imminent. And the fact that he was on Butler's back, hanging on tightly, indicated that they would not be escaping the aforementioned danger through conventional exit routes. The mattress would indicate that some cushioning would be needed...
  'Butler,' gasped Artemis. 'You do know that we're three storeys up?'
  Butler may have answered, but his employer did not hear him, because by then the giant bodyguard had propelled them through the open double windows and over the balcony railing.
  For a fraction of a second, before the inevitable fall, the air currents spun the mattress round and Artemis could see back into his own bedroom. In that splinter of a moment, he saw a strange missile corksrew through the bedroom door and come to a complete halt, directly over the empty perspex tube.
  There was some kind of tracker in the tube, said the tiny portion of his brain that wasn't panicking. Someone wants me dead.
  Then came the inevitable fall. Ten metres. Straight down.
  Butler automatically spread his limbs in a skydiving 'X', bearing down on the four corners of the mattress to stop it flipping. The trapped air below the mattress slowed their fall slightly, but not much. The pair went straight down, fast, G-force increasing their speed with every centimetre.
  Sky and ground seemed to stretch and drip like oil paints on a canvas, and nothing seemed solid anymore. This impression came to an abrupt halt when they slammed into the extremely solid tiled roof of a maintenance shed at the hotel's rear. The tiles seemed almost to explode under the impact, though the roof timbers held, just. Butler felt as though his bones had been liquidized, but he knew that he would be OK after a few moments' unconsciousness. He had been in worse collisions before.
  His last impression before his senses deserted him was the feel of Master Artemis's heartbeat through his jacket. Alive then. They had both survived. But for how long? If their assassin has seen his attempt fail, then maybe he would try again.
  Atremis's impact was cushioned by Butler and the mattress. Without them he would certainly have been killed. As it was, his bodyguard's muscle-bound frame was dense enough to break two of his ribs. Artemis bounced a full metre into the air before coming to rest on the unconscious bodyguard's back, facing the sky.
  Each breath was short and painful, and two nubs of bone rose like knuckles from his chest. Sixth and seventh ribs, he guessed.
  Overhead, a block of iridescent blue light flashed from his hotel window. It lit the sky for a split second, its belly busy with even brighter blue flares that wriggled like hooked worms. No one would pay much attention; the light could easily have come from an oversized camera flash. But Artemis knew better.
  Bio-bomb, he thought. Now how do I know that?
  Butler must be unconscious or else he would be moving, so it was up to Artemis to foil thair attacker's next murderous attempt. He tried to sit up, but the pain in his chest was ferocious and enough to knock him out for a second. When he awoke, his entire body was slick with sweat. Artemis saw that it was too late to escape; his assassin was already here, crouched, cat-like, on the shed wall.
  The killer was a strange individual, no bigger than a child but with adult proportions. She was female, with pretty, sharp features, cropped auburn hair and huge hazel eyes, but that didn't mean any mercy would be forthcoming. Butler had once told him that eight of the top ten paid hitters in the worlds were women. This one wore a strange jumpsuit that shifted colours to suit the background, and those large eyes were red from crying.
  Her ears are pointed, thought Artemis. Either I'm in shock, or she's not human.
  Then he made the mistake of moving again, and one of his broken ribs actually punctured through the skin. A red stain blossomed on his shirt and Artemis gave up the fight to stay conscious.

Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception © Eoin Colfer, 2005. Published by Pufiin Books.