Chapter 4;
"Artemis?"
Upon seeing the tell-tale sliver of light protruding from beneath the door of Artemis's study, Butler had decided it was time he intervened. Not waiting for a response, he pushed open the door and headed towards Artemis.
"Ah, Butler," the boy said, business-like, without turning. "Just the person I needed to speak with. We will momentarily be executing a rather interesting robbery. Please prepare for-"
"Artemis it's almost five a.m. and neither of us have slept. And I don't think drugging yourself is going to work forever," he added, eyeing the stack of used adrenaline patches residing on Artemis's desk.
"Butler I assure you I am perfectly alert – we desperately need to move quickly if we are to secure the best possible chance of rescuing Captain Short."
The avoidance of Holly's first name was conspicuous – Butler guessed that Artemis was trying to distance himself personally from the current situation. He didn't think he could blame him.
"Artemis…" Butler smiled, his voice softening. "I'm sorry. I know you want to help, but believe me when I say that the best thing you can possibly do for her right now is sleep. I've seen far too many operations go awry because they were rushed or attempted under extreme stress or fatigue. Check over your plans once you've rested."
His bodyguard's demeanor may have been gentle, but there remained a firmness in his words that Artemis couldn't miss. He turned to his oldest friend and regarded him for a long moment.
"Very well," he murmured, "I suppose Trouble won't be able to send anyone for retrieval until tomorrow night anyway. If we delay a few hours, it shouldn't be too catastrophic."
After stumbling to him room, Artemis was claimed by sleep in seconds. He dreamt of darkness. And Holly.
The concrete floor was cold and unforgiving. Holly Short groaned, one eye opening and taking in her surroundings. The sight it was met with wasn't an optimistic one.
Her LEP gear had (as one might expect) all been confiscated, along with any personal affects. She felt oddly naked without her book hung around her neck. Her clothes had been replaced with human pyjamas (in a child's size she guessed) which were decorated with little teddy bears. She was torn between growling at the inappropriateness of this and shuddering at the thought of strangers changing her clothes – she hadn't even been allowed to retain her own underthings.
She pulled herself into a vaguely upright position and opened her other eye, wincing at the pain emanating from both her partially healed leg and badly bruised cheek. She was in a harsh concrete cell, positioned next to a rusty metal cot containing a threadbare mattress (clearly her captors hadn't thought she would be more comfortable left unconscious in the cot). The only other thing in the cramped room was an old bulb bolted to the ceiling that provided light. It was still gloomy, but it was infinitely preferable to the pitch black in which she had found herself before.
On top of that, she felt ill. Radiation, she realized. The tiny particles burned her skin and burrowed deep into her body, slowly poisoning her. Without magic, she would be dead in a week. Perhaps less.
The only way in or out of her prison was an iron door, firmly shut and looking like it was built to withstand a head-on collision with a freight train. Butler proof, she thought, recalling the human in question charging through the reinforced doors at Koboi Labs, and was immediately assaulted with a tirade of unwelcome memories of her human friends. One thought, however, was louder than any other, no matter how hard she tried to pretend it wasn't there.
Frond, I wish I'd chosen to see Artemis before completing the ritual.
Most likely she would have been abducted anyway – unless she had chosen a different site after leaving Fowl Manor – but she would have been taken having just spoken to him. Having just said goodbye. Now she might never get to say that. One of so many things she had yet to say to the Mud Boy… stop it. Stop it. You are not dying here. It won't take long for you to be missed and then the entire LEP will be trying to rescue you. And so will he. When has he ever let you down?
More times than I can count! argued her other side.
Fine, he's not perfect. But he's always come back for you. And he's always succeeded. She remembered his journey into the proverbial lion's den to save her from the extortionists, his miraculous shot into the past on Hybras after she had died. He had rescued her from Minerva. He had returned her finger to her. Together they had fought an entire horde of trolls. And he had saved her from Turnball's thrall. The memories comforted her enormously – whoever had kidnapped her, she realized, was about to have a very bad day.
By the time Holly was wrenched from her thoughts by the door opening, she had no idea no how much time had passed since she had been awoken, let alone since she had originally been abducted.
Three figures were revealed. The first was a heavily tattooed man, face adorned with scars. He didn't look like someone who would brook any argument, and was calmly looking down at Holly through the sights of an AK-47 assault rifle. The second figure didn't look quite as hardened and carried a tray of food, which he rather hurriedly set down in near the entrance.
Far more interesting, though, was the girl. Stunning and looking like she was about seventeen, it was hard to imagine her seeming more out of place. Luscious, waist-length brown hair was pulled into a ponytail and dark hazel eyes rested on Holly. Her good looks and slim frame would have made her seem more like a model than anyone dangerous were it not for the twin swords crossed on her back and the skin-tight black jumpsuit that covered her body, bristling with knives, grenades and other combat related utility. Her face wore a sort of disinterested look of contempt that still somehow managed to look highly attractive.
After putting down the tray, and second person made to leave.
"Wait!" exclaimed Holly with all the strength she could muster, desperate to try and gather some kind of information about her situation that might be useful later when attempting an escape or being rescued (at least she hoped that was on the cards).
The man paused, unsure, looking to the girl for guidance. She is a superior to these men, Holly realized with a jolt.
"Nyet. Mikhail, get out. We do not speak with the package," said the strange girl in Russia, her features twisting into a sneer. Her expression made it clear she considered to be far superior to anyone in her current company. Holly guessed that she considered herself to be superior to more or less everyone.
It was about mid-day by the time Artemis and Butler arrived at the hospital. Of course, they had no interest in the hospital itself, rather the morgue below it that Artemis had discovered contained the body he sought.
They had woken up about an hour ago, Artemis had put the finishing touches on his plan and they had set off in one the Fowl Family's less assuming cars. The plan wasn't a complicated one – this random hospital on the outskirts of Dublin was hardly Koboi Labs when it came to security.
Butler eyed Artemis as the boy strode purposefully up to the receptionist. It was ridiculous really, there weren't even any security guards in the foyer. Just one receptionist; all Artemis had to do was distract her so Butler could access one of the security cameras. And Butler knew that Artemis could be very distracting when he wanted to be. He didn't envy the receptionist.
Doing his best to ignore the slowly increasing volume of the conversation – if it could even be called that, Butler was fairly sure to qualify as a conversation the other person would have to actually be able to respond – the giant manservant sauntered up to one the CCTV cameras and gave it a little wave. He ducked out of its line of sight and wrapped an unassuming cable around the bundle of wires flowing from the unit. Even though he hadn't been there, he knew that Artemis had used these video cables at the Spiro Needle to give Foaly access to the entire security network.
Once he had been rejoined by his bodyguard, Artemis switched from berating the poor girl in reception to asking for the room number of a particular patient. He claimed the patient in question was an uncle, but in reality he had just chosen one at random when he hacked into the database. All too keen to get rid of the merciless teen that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a vampire, the receptionist pointed them to the elevator and offered directions on how to get to the specified room.
Smirking, Artemis headed to the lift. This was child's play. Once inside, he drew his laptop and accessed the security network. He worked quickly to erase his and Butler's presence from the logs and directed the lift to the basement (not that there would be a record of this particular action, he made sure of that). Next, he recorded a short section of film from the cameras in the morgue and set it to replay continuously. They were now undetectable by anything short of being physically seen.
Naturally the morgue was locked, and the only key would be found in the security office. Even Artemis would have had an extraordinarily difficult time retrieving it undetected. Lucky, then, that he didn't need to. Taking from his bag a fairy omnitool that he had once "borrowed" from Holly (not that she was aware of it), he had access in seconds.
He remembered Mulch's voice: That my boy, is talent. Whether through unique bodily traits or technology, the fairies certainly didn't have a very difficult time with basic Mud Man locks.
Focus, he told himself. Reminiscing won't save Holly. Concentrating instead on the task at hand, Artemis quickly found the body. He had hacked into the local police department records to establish the identity of the young girl, discovered beaten to death and almost naked. He hadn't really needed to, but it had felt important to know her name.
Abigail. It was nice name.
He pulled the tray out to reveal the body. She seemed almost peaceful, lying there with her eyes closed. Or she would have done were it not for the mess of cuts and bruises that covered her form. They had been cleaned, true, but that almost made it seem worse. Clinical.
Abigail. Sweet and innocent.
Artemis tore his eyes away from the corpse and began hunting for a trolley. Butler found one first.
Abigail. Dead and broken.
It was one of the most troubling things he had ever seen, Artemis reflected as he loaded the body onto the trolley. He had seen his fair share of tragedy, and he had been involved many a horrifying situation. But this, more than anything else, felt real. Someone had done this. For the first time, he wasn't trying to save the world. He wasn't trying to gain anything. He wasn't only trying to save his friend; he was going to bring the person responsible for this atrocity to account. There will be justice for this, he vowed.
Artemis shook his head to clear it. He had to focus – the most dangerous part of the operation was yet to come.
Once he was inside the lift along with Butler and the trolley (the body had been covered and the shape disguised), Artemis again took out his laptop. After making sure that the foyer was clear apart from the receptionist, he synthesized an alert that would require the receptionist in question to consult her boss in the next room.
Having watched her leave on the hijacked cameras, they exited the lift. It was like this that Butler and Artemis were able to simply walk out of a hospital, in broad daylight, with a dead body.
As soon as they were safely back in the car, Artemis tapped a few keys on his laptop. Anyone paying especially close attention to the cameras in the hospital would have seen a small cable disintegrate, leaving no evidence it had ever been there at all. When reviewed later, footage from the morgue showed absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, until one of the corpses simply disappeared. One frame it was there, the next it was gone.
Police Plaza, Haven City, The Lower Elements
Foaly rubbed his hands together and attached twin suction cups to the eyes of the mutilated corpse.
"What's the verdict?" asked Trouble, fidgeting impatiently.
Foaly waved dismissively. "Patience, Trouble," he admonished. "Lots to do still. I need to match the retina's engravings to any humans or fairies – it might take some time."
"What have I said about using my first name?" growled the commander. "And you better hurry it up, pony boy – this is Holly's life were talking about here."
Foaly was unfazed. Sure, he was worried about Holly, but the equipment could only work so fast, and what better way to pass the time than annoying the commander?
"No can do, Trubs," he replied nonchalantly, pausing to toss a carrot up in the air and catch it in his mouth. "Still, it sure is lucky you just happened to find this really useful body lying around outside Tara, isn't it? What a great coincidence!"
Trouble's face took on a shade of purple that would have made his predecessor proud. "Trubs? Actually never mind. There was me thinking you were useful, Foaly. No matter, I can always review your budget, eh?" He smiled nastily and Foaly was oddly reminded of one Artemis Fowl. Or a shark.
"No need for hostility," he muttered, his words obscured by carrot.
"Just get. This. Done. I want to be informed the instant you have something."
And with that, Trouble left Foaly to his thoughts.
After about fifteen minutes Foaly's console gave a soft beep, indicating it had completed its allocated task.
"Right," murmured the centaur. Now the system had registered and cached all the eye's images and formed an image database of all known humans and fairies, he could start manually scanning for a match. It would be slow work, but it was the only option. Foaly tapped a few keys on his v-board and the console responded with a low hum.
"Scan for matches with all known fairies and fairy technology," he said, enunciating clearly.
No matches, read the text on the screen.
That would certainly make things harder, since now he had to try establish a killer from the many humans the girl had inevitably seen in her life. Still, Foaly was hardly one to shy away from a challenge.
"Scan for matches with all known humans."
Exactly as one would expect, several hundred names flashed up on the screen.
"Exclude matches with direct relation to subject Abigail Ryan. Exclude matches aged under eighteen. Prioritize matches with known criminal record."
Of course it was possible that he had just excluded the murderer, and if he found nothing suspicious he would have to return to the full list and trawl through it more carefully. Regardless, it was a reasonable starting point. Unfortunately, there were still a large number of names. Foaly glanced at the prioritized list, but it was mostly just people with small infractions like driving under the influence or a minor case of assault.
"Prioritize matches with a history of kidnapping?"
No matches prioritized.
D'Arvit. That would have been far too easy. Perhaps he should try a different approach. After about a minute of tapping away furiously at his v-board, Foaly had compiled a list of human organized crime groups. It was a long shot, but where was the harm in trying?
"Exclude matches that have no known connection to groups listed on this document," he said, reaching out a finger to drag and drop the file into the Retimager program.
Two names flashed up. Oleksandr Orlov, a Ukrainian criminal, and Ivan Navolska, an ex-KGB assassin from Russia with a history of extreme violence. Foaly tapped the names excitedly to bring up their known associates. Both were revealed to be part of a small Ukrainian crime syndicate believed to be under the command of an ex-Mafiya Russian called Vladimir Petrenko. Just reading some of the accusations that been levelled against him made Foaly shiver; none of this had stuck, of course. Money and connections could get you out of pretty much anything in Russia and the CIS region. With a little more investigating Foaly discovered that both Orlov and Navolska had recently visited Ireland.
Somehow he doubted it was all a coincidence.
Fowl Manor, Ireland
Artemis Fowl was not in a good mood. He had enjoyed the sense of purpose that he had had while stealing back the body, but now he was stuck with nothing to do and no information. He wanted desperately to be able to do something – anything – to help Holly, but what could he do? His only lead was deep underground with Foaly. He had never abandoned Holly, no matter how bad the situation, and she had never abandoned him. It felt oddly like a betrayal just sitting around twiddling his thumbs.
Fortunately for him (and for the elf in question) he was saved from his predicament by Foaly's face appearing on his laptop screen.
"Honestly Mud Boy, you really need to step up your game. Barely look five minutes to bypass your laptop's security," he announced smugly.
"What happened to being ordered not to consort with me, a possible suspect?"
"Who cares? I'm hardly expendable. And if they do fire me I'll just go work for section eight again. Holly's life is the priority here, and you can help with that. Don't get a swollen head, but we both know it's the truth," he added upon seeing Artemis's self-satisfied expression.
"What exactly can I do to help?"
Foaly smiled. "I've got them. The kidnappers I mean."
Artemis's eyes lit up as the files detailing Foaly's findings arrived on his computer. "This is good… very good," he murmured. "But we still don't have a location for Holly."
Foaly sighed. "Nothing's ever enough for you is it? I'm not even supposed to be talking to you! Trouble needs me doing other things down here, so basically I'm relying on you to find Holly. I traced them to Ukraine, surely you can do the rest. Do that and we can get her back. I promise."
Naturally there was no way Artemis was going to decline to help, but that didn't mean he couldn't milk an opportunity when it presented itself.
"Is that the sound of the LEP admitting they need my help? In fact, admitting that I'm the only person who can solve their problem? A problem that to which not even the great Foaly could find an adequate solution?"
Foaly whinnied. "You're pushing your luck Mud Whelp. Yes, we need you. And that's all you're going to get. So step on it."
The centaur simply disappeared from the screen before Artemis could reply. Slightly miffed, the boy set to work. As had become rather common since Holly's disappearance, he had had very little sleep, but he reckoned it would be enough. For now.
Foaly had tracked the group to Ukraine, more specifically to its capital Kiev, but that was still extraordinarily vague. They didn't even know if they had taken Holly back to Ukraine with them – they could be in Australia for all he knew. He shuddered and hoped not – it was high summer down under and Artemis doubted all that sun would suit him. Not that he was ecstatic about attempting a rescue in the bitter Ukrainian winter either.
Even though it was by no means a certainty, Artemis decided that for now at least he would work on the assumption that Holly and her captors were in Northern Ukraine, probably near Kiev. Surely it made at least a little sense to take your prisoner back to the land you knew? That's what I would do, he thought. In fact, that's exactly what I did. Fowl Manor was my territory and that's a large part of how I beat the LEP.
He plotted properties belonging to prominent members of the gang on a digital map and studied it, wondering if any of them made sense as locations for hiding a hostage. But as he stared, he gaze was inexplicably drawn upwards, North of Kiev, towards the border with Belarus. Or more specifically, what was nestled in just below it. An idea began to form in his mind.
If he assumed that the group was either well-informed about fairies or being organized by someone who was – for his part, Artemis strongly suspected that another fairy was masterminding the whole operation – then it stood to reason that they would have an understanding of the fairies' basic strengths and weaknesses. And judging by how well they had executed the abduction and been able to defeat Foaly's technology, this was probably a reasonable assumption to make. Artemis dredged up a memory from several years ago, as he sat in an LEP interrogation room.
Root frowned. "Northern Russia is not good for us. We can't shield because of the radiation."
He remembered Holly wasting no time telling him how much fairies hate the cold after she had pulled his father his father out of the Arctic Ocean.
If you wanted to make a fairy rescue as difficult as possible, where better to hide than the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the depths of winter? The radiation had sufficiently dissipated since the nuclear meltdown that humans could visit most areas, not that winter was a popular tourist season – even though snow was a radioactive insulator so it would technically be safer, no-one really wanted to go on holiday somewhere that was bitingly cold. Fairies couldn't shield and it would be so isolated that any kind of stealth rescue would be more or less impossible to organize. If Holly was there, they would have to fight their way through a gang of well-armed, hardened criminals to get to her.
The more Artemis contemplated the possibility, the more he was sure he was right. Sure, he had no actual evidence, but that could be rectified easily enough.
All in all, it took a little under half-an-hour to hijack Foaly's "Scopes" and maneuver a satellite to study the area. He also "commandeered" a US surveillance drone that was near the area so he would be able to get high-resolution images of a particularly suspicious building or site. Having once again consulted his map, he had reached the conclusion that the long-abandoned town of Pripyat was the most likely place for the gang to hide and so he began his search there.
It didn't take long to hit the jack-pot. Like the rest of the buildings in Pripyat, the "Energetik" or "Palace of Culture" had long-since fallen into disrepair. Once a leisure center and no doubt buzzing with happy residents, it was now dilapidated and forsaken, strewn with debris and falling apart. Unlike the rest of the buildings in Pripyat, it was a hive of activity. Several trucks were parked outside containing building supplies and munitions and what looked like guards were visible outside.
Once his drone was in position to do a fly by, Artemis was able to use the it's zoom capabilities to make things out more clearly. Multiple people stood guard or patrolled the area, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders and Artemis was sure he could see movement inside through windows or holes in the walls. Zooming in further still, he even managed to identify one of the men outside as Ivan Navolska, according to Foaly one of those responsible for murdering the young girl back in Ireland.
Artemis smiled a vicious, vampiric smile. They were never going to be able to hide from him forever.
"We're coming, ready or not."
A/N: For anyone who doesn't know, during the Soviet era the USSR built several nuclear reactors in their occupied and satellite countries, one of which was in Chernobyl. In 1986 it had a meltdown, flooding the area with radiation. Pripyat is a real ghost town, and it's actually creepy as all hell. Sorry for history lesson xD. As you probably guessed, a lot of the action will take place here - hence the title of the story (decay referring to radioactive decay).
Since the plot is really starting to get underway, I would really appreciate some feedback! As usual, many thanks go to those have reviewed already.