II. Backtracking
"I don't like it when you hover." Crunch. "It makes me nervous; whenever you're in one place for too long, things start blowing up and we have to save the world again." Crunch.
"Shut up, Foaly."
"What!? It's true!" He popped another carrot into his mouth and bit down. Crunch. "In fact, people have started betting on what horrible disaster's gonna happen next. I have the list somewhere if you want to see it." Crunch.
"No – Foaly…"
"No, it's actually kinda funny, here – gimme a min." Crunch.
There was a clopping of hooves, some shuffling of papers, and the sound of heavy metal objects hitting the sleek and shining floor.
"Here we go." Foaly swallowed the last bit of carrot, cleared his throat with a low whinny, and began reading. "You know, there are a lot of bets on Opal getting out of her crazyhouse for some strange reason."
"Foaly, you realize I don't care, right?"
"Absolutely," he said with an irritated-sounding huff. "You're just here to bug me about checking up on little Arty for you, see how he's doing over your little gift, maybe switch on the camera installed in the bathroom."
"Foaly!" Holly shouted, cheeks instantly blazing. The centaur in question continued on as if his name hadn't just been yelled loud enough to make his special triple-thick flexi-windows shudder.
"And I'm winding you up and ignoring your reactions because I want to make this as long and painful for you as possible." He peered at her from just over the large piece of paper. "Not that I want you to suffer or anything; I just want you to know whose time you're using up with these little errands, and would like a 'thank you, Foaly', 'you're a genius, Foaly', 'here's an extra-large carton of carrots for you, Foaly' every once in a while. Just to show some appreciation, or something." He shrugged his hairy shoulders, and his eyes vanished behind the paper once more.
"Foaly…"
"Another Goblin Rebellion," Foaly said loudly.
"I-"
"Atlantis sinking for real."
"What-"
"The three major Dwarf gangs coming together and taking the entire Emergency Hostage Fund."
"Foaly," Holly said, cutting him off before he could cut her off, "what will it take from me to get through this with as little pain as possible?"
Two calculating brown eyes appeared back over the paper and stared at her. Foaly's back leg clopped against the titanium floor as he thought. Finally, he said, "Beetle juice, aged just over one week – no more than two weeks, because then it gives off this weird aftertaste that sticks to the roof of my mouth. Something with the bacteria, maybe."
"Beetle juice, well-aged, check."
"Three cartons of carrots, Mud-man grown."
"Three cartons of slimed-up carrots, check."
"Cheerios."
Holly blinked. "Cheerios?"
Foaly nodded, attempting to hide his eagerness. "Mud-man cereal. Comes in yellow boxes at their local grocery stores – wonderful stuff, especially the honeyed kind."
She looked at him for a moment longer before shrugging and nodding. "Okay, Mud-man cereal, check."
"And some more tin foil." The centaur put a worried hand to the metal cap that served about as much purpose as a toilet to a Dwarf. "I'm running out."
"Paranoid-o-rama tool number fifty-six, check. I'll get a surface visa as soon as I can."
"Excellent," Foaly said happily, tossing the paper to the side and clip-clopping back to his specially-designed swivel seat. He sat and, with a few quick keystrokes, a relatively small window popped up on his wall-to-wall screen. "He's been hiding out in his private computer room for the last few hours."
The camera angle was awkward – not well-placed, it showed Artemis sitting in front of a computer, the screen away from view. He had a large pad of paper sitting on the table to his left and a regal-looking pen on top of that. The image detail was amazing, and even from the distance Holly could see the unnatural crease stuck fast in Artemis' brow; she'd never seen him looking so frustrated before.
He picked up the pen and, without glancing away from the computer screen, wrote a number of sentences into the notebook.
Holly nodded her head at the screen and asked, "Can you get a closer look at what he's writing?" Foaly gave a hairy-shouldered shrug and tapped two keys, and the image magnified immensely. The amount of detail stayed the same, and the words, inked in black, jumped out from the contrast of the slightly-off-white paper. He flipped the image around so the words were right-side-up and squinted.
"You know," Foaly said, a bit put-out, "you'd think a genius would have better handwriting than that."
Holly craned her neck and squinted with the centaur. Her eyesight being far better than Foaly's, and more used to unintelligible scribbles, she was only silent for a few seconds before she began to read in broken strings of words.
"Vladimir, Russia… Saga, Kyushu, Japan… Durban, South Africa… Nagano/Yamanashi/Saitama, Honshu, Japan… Kohala, Hawaii… Cairo, Egypt is circled," she told Foaly, "and it has a question mark at the end of it. The other four are crossed out." She looked over at the half-horse just long enough to see a frown pull at his lips before she went back to reading. "The word contact, old friend, and arms dealer are circled. Eighteen thousand dollars, an arrow pointing up, question mark. Air, land, and water – land's crossed out. Oh, he crossed out the whole thing." She descended into mumbles. "Butler…twenty-thousand…Vietnam…Ho Chi Minh…Bangkok…"
"Did you say 'Ho Chi Minh'?"
Holly blinked and looked back at Foaly. He was looking at the screen with a sort of baffled curiosity, so she returned her gaze to Artemis' writings and reread the last bit.
Butler, contact. Trustworthy?
Twenty-thousand US dollars / Fifteen-thousand US dollars.
Meeting in Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City…fits.
Plane, joint flight, Bangkok.
She looked up to Foaly. "Yeah," she told him.
His very-large teeth were worrying his lower lip, and he appeared to be thinking very hard.
"Foaly?" she prodded.
Foaly nibbled on his lip a little more before answering slowly, "It may be nothing, but…"
"This is Fowl, Foaly. Even if it were nothing, I wouldn't believe it was nothing, not with that rotten little brat still alive. What is it?"
"Well…" He began typing, and the light clacks that the keyboard let off seemed to calm him down a little. "Well," he tried again, "every so often, no matter how hard we try, humans and fairies meet. Sometimes they kill each other, sometimes they ask for a wish, sometimes they just go out and get pissed together. As you know, drinking with Mud Men is a no-no from the Book, and we have to kick them to the curb. We keep records of who we boot out, or who gets lost or something-or-other. And we keep tabs on them after they're left up in the mud; every three to six months, a representative of the fairy people – sometimes LEP, sometimes a councilmember, sometimes one of the gnomes on permanent garbage duty – is sent aboveground to check up on the evicted ones. Depending on their threat level, they can either stay as they are or we have the authorization to send out a hit team to take them out.
"We have one-hundred and thirty-two loosed fairies in Asia, the majority of them scattered among the islands. There's twenty living in China, five in South Korea, eight in North Korea. There are three fairies in Vietnam: an elf, a sprite, and a very miserable dwarf, all of them bathing in mud for more than fifty years now."
"Foaly," Holly said evenly. "Point?"
The centaur gave a very large and completely unconvincing sigh and grumbled about how nobody appreciated a good dramatic delivery. "Three in Vietnam, Holly," he said, "but there's only one fairy registered within the walls of Ho Chi Minh City." He hit a key with pronounced flourish, and a new window opened up.
It was a file. The attached photo showed a tired-looking female sprite with wispy black hair hanging down across her face. Holly stared hard at her for a long moment before shaking her head and saying, "I don't know her."
"I didn't expect you to know her," Foaly replied. "But Artemis Fowl the Second, at one point, might have."
It was exactly 10:42 am when Artemis pushed himself away from the computer terminal. He swallowed past the suspicious lump in his throat and looked down at the pad of notepaper he had been writing his findings on. His eyes were a whirlwind of confusion and anger, and of the eager thrill of a hunter on the trail of its prey.
Things had started coming apart a little over three years ago. Actions that he had taken, according to what he had written down, had begun making less and less sense to him. He jumped all over the world with little to no rhyme or reason; mysterious business meetings, and business transactions, where the items being discussed or traded failed to be written down; flights to foreign countries that went largely unexplained; loss of equipment, of large sums of money, with no further written accounts given as to what happened to them.
If he thought hard about those times, those times that he did not know about, he discovered that a large portion of those times were just…gone. They were deemed acceptable memories if he didn't focus upon them – his mind passed over them easily, as if it did not matter too much, because the journey did not matter, it was the end result that was cherished, such as retrieving his father from the Russian Mafyia. Artemis knew, when just idly thinking back upon it, that he and Butler had gone to Russia and hidden in the snow, and they had shot Fowl Senior to distract the thugs guarding him, and retrieved him and escaped.
But when he put his famed concentration to those memories, he could not specifically say things with certainty anymore: he did not know how they had gotten to Russia, he did not know how he attained the intelligence that led to his father's location, he did not know how they had remained undetected from the hundred Mafyia grunts patrolling the snowhills around the submarine acting as an exchange-point, he did not know how shooting his father distracted one hundred Mafyia grunts enough to allow he and Butler to extract his father, he did not know how they had escaped from the horde of money-driven killers, he did not know how they left Russia or how they arrived at the Hospital that his father was admitted to…he just did not know.
It was going to drive him insane if he remained unable to figure this out.
Artemis took a long breath, and let it out slowly. He forced his hands to unclench from the fists they had been curled into, and eased his mouth into its usual thin-lipped neutrality.
His eyes remained hard as diamonds.
He took another calming breath and his posture relaxed slightly.
Okay…these points that had been forgotten and passed-over were ones that had been erased by the mysterious 'mind-wipe'. Undoubtedly, the parts missing from the entire memory were the ones that directly involved the unknown persons that conducted the mind-wipe; so it was likely that he had, at times, directly met and worked with the unknown persons. They may have also assisted with some personal problems of his, such as rescuing his father.
How would he accomplish such a thing – gaining the loyalty and help of persons unknown? Blackmail? Bribery? It was laughable that they would do it simply because he asked for it, after all.
But his mind was going off on tangents; as he had done before, he would have to start from the beginning if he were to figure out this trespass. The beginning, where everything began to unravel. It wasn't any of the locations that were crossed out; Cairo, Egypt had been the second-to-last entry, but after reading his notes he decided that he had not found what he was looking for there. That left only one place to go.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
He had written down that Butler had a contact there, and that he, Artemis, was willing to pay the contact up to twenty-thousand American dollars for the information he/she provided; information that was either never received or was now stolen from memory. That meant there was a probability that the information was linked to the unknown persons who had committed the mind-wipe, and was his best option for continuing forward.
Artemis frowned.
How deep, exactly, did this rabbit hole go?
He thumbed a handheld radio and spoke one word into it. "Butler."
"Sir," came the response.
"I require you up in the office."
"Yes, sir."
Thirty-four seconds later, the office doors opened without a sound and a veritable giant of a man stepped through. His eyes flickered across the room, taking in the setting and analyzing for any problems or threats, before resting firmly on his charge.
Artemis turned towards his manservant and gestured to one of the other chairs in the room. "Please, sit."
"I'll stand, sir," Butler replied instantly. A faint smile tugged at Artemis' lips, and he nodded in acquiescence.
"Very well." Artemis straightened up in his chair. "Butler, you recall when I sent you off to Limerick, correct?"
"To ask about the contacts, sir?" Butler clarified.
"Correct."
"Yes, sir, I do."
"I have been perusing my old notes, and I believe that I have discovered several things that can be linked to that." Butler visibly stiffened when the meaning was understood. "Yes," Artemis said in confirmation before Butler could ask the question, "I also believe they are linked to the note found tied to the lo – to the confection, rather, that was discovered on my desk late last night."
"What do you require of me, sir?"
Blue eyes met black, and held them for a long, unwavering moment.
"I need you to dredge up some old contacts of yours," Artemis said, breaking off the contact by blinking freely once more. "Southeast Asia, to be more precise."
"Do I have a name to work with, sir?"
His charge frowned deeply and his brow wrinkled in annoyance and frustration. "No, you do not. For reasons unknown to me, I omitted your contact's name and the reason for why I would meet such a person when I wrote my notes. I can only assume you have a personal list of such men and women that you keep for yourself."
"Would you like to see it, sir? It would take some time to gather all the pieces of it, as the information is spread across four continents and twenty-two different bank vaults, but-"
"No," Artemis cut him off. "It is not necessary for me to view a full list for myself. You have my permission to leave immediately in order to begin tracking your people down."
Butler bowed his head and said, "Yes, sir." When he straightened up again, he met his master's eyes and asked, "What do you wish for me to tell them when I find them, sir?"
"All that should be necessary is my name, and Ho Chi Minh City."
"Vietnam?"
"That is correct. They should know what it is about." Provided that they weren't also subjected to the same mind-wipe that he was.
"Very good, sir." Butler turned on his heel and stepped out the door, only to stop with one hand lingering on the handle. He turned back and looked at his charge, his stern professionalism softening slightly. "I will call Juliet – she'll be here before the end of the day, and will act in my place until I get back."
Artemis hummed in thought and said, "It has been a while since I've last seen her. No doubt Mother will be pleased for it." He gave a short nod. "Very well. I expect you back within two weeks, at the very latest."
"Of course." Butler gave his charge the smallest of smiles. "Don't get into too much danger while I'm gone, Artemis."
"Perish the thought, Butler," he replied. A smile of his own turned the very corners of his lips up for a brief moment as the door closed, and he was left alone once again. His lips dropped, he sighed, and he returned to his work.
"So why is this sprite chick so important to you?"
"Because she is someone who had taken to drinking spirits with the Mud People; that's something outlawed by the Book itself. So we forced her aboveground, stunted her wings, and let her out into the world. Two months later she settled down in Ho Chi Minh, and didn't move more than five miles in any direction of the city after that. Until three years ago, just after we finished with our first encounter with Fowl." Foaly paused for a long moment, then shook his head and started up again.
"Holly, alcohol has an amplified effect on all fairyfolk. We absorb it faster than humans, it hits us harder, and it screws with our magic. One glass of even the weakest of Mud Man drinks sends us spinning so bad that even the most talented of fairies can't handle the Gift of Tongues without puking all over themselves." He raised a hairy finger and Holly, who had opened her mouth impatiently, grudgingly shut it and stared at him expectantly. "Worst of all, though, is its potency for addiction. One drop of the stuff hits your tongue, you're going to want more."
"Is that why we have such a big alcohol industry?" Holly asked curiously.
"Yeah. The People would rather we got drunk off their stuff, on their terms, than go up and drink with Mud Men and get kicked out forever." He shrugged. "It's fair thinking."
"Okay, so drinking is really bad for us. Go on," she urged.
"So this sprite is evicted for partaking in Mud Man alcohol with Mud Men, right? As soon as she got to the surface, she dove for another bottle of the stuff. Reports from the last fifty years she'd been up there all agreed that she was lucky she hadn't dropped dead; fairy magic may help a lot in keeping you guys from being poisoned by alcohol or drugs, but even that has its limits, and by all rights, she'd passed them years ago."
"A pixie with a liver of pig-iron. That's gotta make things fun."
"And a little shot of magic in the morning takes care of the hangover headache. You fairies have it so good," Foaly whined.
"Focus, Foaly," Holly told him, smiling. "You were ranting about how she should have died from drinking so much."
"Right." The centaur scratched his neck. "Well, as it turns out, she's not dead. Far as I know, she's still up in the land of mud, running around like a stinkworm on sugar." Seeing Holly's raised questioning eyebrow, he explained, "Three years ago, she was in Ho Chi Minh City, in an off-the-beaten-path alley, living off of rice wine and healing warts, boils, and aesthetically displeasing acne. Shortly after we wrapped things up with Fowl for the first time, she flagged down one of her watchers and, lo and behold, was as healthy as a newborn."
Holly frowned, and furrowed her brow in thought. "That's not possible. Even if there were a warlock powerful enough to flush all the alcohol out of her body, she'd no doubt have a failing liver at the least; there's no healing something that's that corrupted – we can't heal tissue that's already dead."
"Of course it's not possible. Even fairyfolk aren't that talented," Foaly agreed. He watched her intently as she thought, her eyes darting back and forth with each idea.
She blinked and straightened and said, "You think Artemis has something to do with it."
"Of course I do," Foaly said blandly. "He goes to Ho Chi Minh, apparently finds what he's looking for, has a copy of the Book that came out of nowhere, and this lone sprite shows up a month later, healthy as can be, asking for another chance with the People?" He scoffed. "It's got Fowl written all over it."
"So you're saying this sprite, living in Vietnam, was where Artemis got his original copy of the Book?"
"Precisely. I don't know what mud-man-magic he performed to heal the sprite, but I think he used that as an opportunity to bribe her. Her copy of the Book in exchange for salvation from her personal hell. I think that that list of locations you read off were previous places he'd visited in search for the People. He chose well; nearly all the places he visited have ties to the People in some way. Here, look." Foaly punched a number of keys and brought up a few different windows on the nearly-wall-wide monitor.
"Vladimir is one of the oldest towns in Russia, and it's well-known to us as a favored aboveground hideout for the Dwarf Brotherhood, despite the chill. Our guy in the Brotherhood has heard rumors that the bossman was born up near there, when his mother was still active in the black market.
"Honshu, Japan has the Shinano River flowing down from Mount Kobushi, beginning just around Nagano, Yamanashi, and Saitama; it's one of the larger rivers in Japan and is an extraordinarily popular stretch of land and water to spot one of the legendary creatures called Kappa – beings that bear a passing resemblance to some families of water sprites. Saga, Kyushu, Japan is likewise known for being something of a hotspot for Kappa-sightings, with the Chikugo River, the longest one in the Kyushu island, flowing directly through it.
"Kohala, Hawaii is home to the oldest volcano of all the Hawaii islands. At nearly one million years old, the Kohala volcano was old enough to experience the shift in Earth's magnetic fields seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago, a massive event which was directly linked with a sudden change in our magical abilities, and the limitations and restrictions upon them. Because of that link, fairy folk – pixies especially – feel a certain pull to the place, and its relative location, beauty, and unending heat from the still-warm volcano core make it a veritable haven for renegade fairies.
"Cairo, Egypt is in close proximity with the Pyramid of Giza, one of the Mud Peoples' Wonders of the World. The pyramid holds a special significance to the People, dwarves especially; their rock polish helped a great deal in smoothing out the limestone blocks. Cairo itself has always been a point of meeting civilizations, with Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and the People all leaving their own distinct marks upon its architecture and culture. The only failing point for Cairo is its air-pollution problem, something that drives even the most devoted fairies away after just a few hours of time in the city.
"Durban, South Africa is the black sheep in all this; it doesn't have anything to lead someone to the People. It's the busiest port in South Africa, population of 3.5 million, third largest city in the country. I'm sure there's a few fairies stationed there, but there's nothing to attract us there and, thus, nothing to attract Fowl there; I can only guess he had a false lead for this place.
"Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, formerly Saigon. Ho Chi Minh itself is relatively plain; modern, hustle-bustley, crowded sort of place. What's noteworthy is that it stands 340 kilometers from a small town called Ha Tien. Now, Ha Tien has a quote-unqoute 'lake' named Ho Dong, and legend says that fairies dance there when the moon is full. I did some digging, and it turns out that the small village existed far before Saigon showed up, though not officially named as a village back then, and some of our own legends state that fairies cast a protection around the residents of Ha Tien, and that that magic was passed onto residents of what eventually became Saigon, and Ho Chi Minh City. It's not an extraordinarily popular hangout for fairyfolk, but it's busy enough these days that no one would notice a few freaks hanging around the shadier districts.
"If he had gone anywhere else after Vietnam in his search for what-have-you, he would have crossed Ho Chi Minh out, like he had with all the others, and written down his next destination; the only reason he may not have would be because he had grown suspicious or untrusting of the safety of his information."
Holly bit the inside of her cheek as Foaly continued, only to speak up over him a moment later. "Foaly, why wasn't this information wiped out when you swept his house?"
The centaur stopped talking immediately, letting his explanation of why exactly there was no reason the Mud Boy would have grown suspicious of the safety of his little black-business diary trail off mid-sentence. He breathed in and out noisily and let out a whinny of mild irritation. "There's nothing incriminating on the flashdrive, no wording or expressions that even marginally allude to the People. The data charge that I detonated in Arty's network erased any and all mention of fairies, down to the last files that mentioned magic, shields, or even the moon. The great thing about my charge is that, with help from a little magic, it was made to affect all electronic equipment within the predetermined area. That means that all connected computers and hard drives, plus all loosed devices, be they phones – and yes, the charge included possible shorthand words – or those ridiculous palm pilots or stray flash drives or hard drives, would have been entered, searched for any one of a thousand different keywords and, if necessary, destroyed. Mrs. Fowl would have woken up the next day to find out that she didn't have any of the foods that used acorns remaining within her electrical database of recipes, sad as that may be."
"Foaly," Holly said, just a little exasperatingly, "I realize you're a genius, but can you get to the part where what you're saying ties into what I asked? You know how people stop paying attention when you talk too much."
Foaly kicked up his back hoof and muttered something about intelligent conversation before continuing with, "None of the documents on that flash drive were cleaned out because there's nothing in them to link Artemis Fowl to the People. No references to goblins, opal, lasers, gold, tunnels, invisibility, pixies, fairies, p'shog, ka-dalun, dwarves, elves, sprites, demons – nothing, not one word. As far as we were concerned, there was nothing left that would allow a normal person to rediscover our underground society."
"Normal person," Holly repeated.
"Exactly," Foaly agreed, sighing. 'Normal' was never a word used to describe Artemis Fowl. "It's not like we were expecting him to leave a perfectly-legitimate trail for himself without actually mentioning anything incriminating about us. The only way he'll find out about us is if he continues to follow the path he left for himself."
"Which he will."
"Well, that's obvious. We are talking about a Fowl. And since it's the little Fowl junior we're talking about, it's only a matter of time before he meets the People head-on once again."
Both occupants of the Control Booth were silent for a long time. Foaly tapped his back hoof on the sleek tiling uneasily and Holly fidgeted with her uniform; taking off a patch here, putting it back on, taking it off again, fiddling with her zipper and running her hands over the creases trying in vain to make it lay flat.
It was almost five minutes later that Holly voiced the question they were both thinking.
"Are we going to let him?"
Foaly let out a nervous whinny and sat down in his specially-made swivel chair.
"Foaly," Holly said when he didn't answer.
"I don't know," the centaur snapped back. "Maybe – I don't know." He swallowed loudly and his back hoof started tapping against the tiling again.
"He was almost good when we mind-wiped him," Holly reminded him.
"He may not be anywhere near 'almost good' by the time he figures things out."
"Foaly," the elf protested, unsure of why or what she was, in the end, protesting for, "you've seen what sort of stuff he's been doing since then; the worst he's done is art forgery, and the most evil thing he has planned for the future is stealing a painting out of a bank in Munich. He's not the horrible, rotten, selfish little demon he used to be, even with his memories of us lost."
"Horrible, rotten? No, it doesn't seem so. Nor is he so 'little' anymore. But selfish? He's still lying and cheating and stealing so he can add to his family's fortune, so I'd say he's still retaining some of his old aspects, however few they may be. And the bad guy always reverts back to his old ways if he gets pushed enough."
"Artemis is not a 'bad guy'," Holly disagreed hotly.
"Perhaps not the enslave-a-race, murder-the-firstborn, kill-the-jews bad guy, but still – if he did continue down this little walk into the past that he has going here, and he did find out about us, then there is no doubt in my mind that he would, at the very least, be after our gold. And when Artemis Fowl wants gold, he's pretty much going to do anything he deems necessary to obtain his share of it. We'd be back in Fowl Manor all over again, and he'd just be a little bit taller this time."
"And even if he did do that, we'd have a significant advantage over him, especially considering he wouldn't remember-"
"Possibly wouldn't remember," Foaly interjected. "We don't know when his memories might kick back in."
"Possibly wouldn't remember," Holly conceded, "the first time we went through it. Plus, we'd have Mulch on our side from the very start, and there's no Cudgeon anymore, so no full-grown bull troll to muck everything up. Since we've spent so much time with him in the last year or two, we have a good idea of how he thinks, so even if he differs from the first time, we'd have a general idea of the next moves he'd make." Seeing the centaur scratch his belly – something he only did when thinking harder than usual – and purse his lips in contemplation, Holly grinned and added, "Besides, wouldn't it be nice to be able to talk to someone who can actually understand all your lectures?"
Foaly looked at her for a full ten seconds before bursting out laughing.
"Alright," he said when he could speak coherently between chuckles, "I admit that – it's been far too long since I've had some intelligent conversation."
Holly smiled.
"Okay, so we don't stop him this instant," Foaly conceded, shaking his head in mirth and unable to keep the small grin off his face. "But he does need to be watched carefully, in case bad things do happen. And knowing how things are when we're around, bad things are bound to happen. And as I am the resident genius, I happen to have excellent ways of keeping watch of arrogant, bothersome little Mud Boys." He arched his back, stretching, before settling back down and popping every joint of every finger on both of his very hairy hands. "Now, I think it's time we found out just who Arty's little 'contact' is."