A/N: I'm putting this chapter up relatively quickly to get you all off that nasty cliffy, so I haven't had a chance to respond to comments yet. Thanks to everyone once again for your support. : )

Disclaimer: Not mine. Eoin Colfer's.

CHAPTER 4

And then, Artemis found the pattern.

That he hadn't found it earlier was a testament to how effective the measures in place to prevent him from thinking were. After what seemed an eternity of automatically counting the seconds between each flash, however, with his brain sitting on idle, the progression had suddenly clicked.

Of course the light was flickering according to a predictable pattern; it was being deliberately controlled. Most likely by a computer somewhere.

Computers were, by definition, exactly predictable, meaning that true random numbers were impossible to come by even with the most powerful computers. For many applications a pseudo-random number generator gave an adequately random output. The sequences generated by a good algorithm would never repeat in practical terms, seemed entirely unpredictable without knowledge of the seed values, and appeared statistically random. No algorithm, however, had ever been built that could compete with the sheer unpredictability of a simple coin-toss.

When random numbers were needed for gambling, or other purposes relying on truly random input, a computer could seed input from another source, such as the decay times of a collection of radioactive isotopes. But such systems were probably no more standard among the fairies than among humans – whoever did Artemis' captor's technical work had obviously not seen the need to acquire true randomness.

More the fool him.

The system controlling the light wasn't even particularly complex as far as pseudo-random number sequences went; it was a recognisable variant of an algorithm that had been outdated years ago, even in the human world. The very idea of using such an algorithm was anathema to Artemis. If something was worth doing, then it was worth doing properly – cutting corners on something important only ever ended up creating more problems down the track, as his captor was about to find out.

It still wasn't simple. Most people would still have said it was impossible to predict, impossible to mentally compute at speed, and certainly impossible to derive on the fly from the sequence of numbers it produced.

Most people were not Artemis Fowl the Second.

Artemis took in a deep breath and let it out again in something that he hoped sounded more like a sob than the grunt of triumph it was. The flashes were still annoying without the element of surprise, that was undeniable, but without the tension of wondering when the momentary darkness was going to come they simply didn't have the same effect.

With a part of his mind almost subconsciously predicting and counting off the flashes, and the constant buzzing whine having by now receded to little more than an irritating triviality, Artemis was finally able to relax, letting himself hang from his bonds and fall into a deep state of meditation.

"What do you mean, bad news?" I demanded, my heart sinking. This whole overly-complicated plot hung by a thread and bad news was the last thing I wanted to hear now that we were already committed to the most dangerous part of the plan.

"I can't say exactly what the problem is," said Foaly, looking supremely embarrassed. "I couldn't isolate the frequency until he'd already been captured, because Sool's planted one of his cronies into my department, and Rheeson reports back to him on everything I do."

The centaur's hands flew up to pat his foil hat nervously, as though to make sure it was still there and, reassured, he went on. "I couldn't risk doing any unauthorised work with him watching, so I didn't start until he left with your convoy. And I may be the best there is, but even with the specifications Mud Boy sent down via Butler, it's non-trivial to tap into an encrypted passive transmitter that he seems to have designed specifically to evade my technology. At least he seems to have learned from his mistakes and didn't make it entirely impossible, like he did the C Cube."

"So?" I prompted him impatiently.

"My part's definitely working now," he said. "I can track you anywhere, but I still can't get a lock on the Mud Boy's transmitter. It could be malfunctioning – or maybe he's in some kind of shielded location? I can't be certain."

I nodded hopelessly and then closed my eyes, letting the babble of useless suggestions from various fairies wash over me without paying much attention.

It was hard not to feel some irritation with the paranoid centaur but, really, it wasn't his fault. Arty hadn't counted on there being any issues with finding him once he had been captured, otherwise he would have mentioned it to Butler to pass on. I had managed to get into the habit of not thinking for myself over the past few hours – of trusting too much in Arty's hasty plan. The main reason that Arty's plans always worked, though, was that there was always a contingency plan for every possible problem. Always. But there had been no time to conceive a Plan B; there had barely been time for Plan A.

The idea that everything was going according to plan had been the one thing holding me up throughout all this madness and I now felt somehow adrift. Fairies? Magic? Prophecies? Pandora's box of all things? I would have been pinching myself to make sure I was awake if the whole thing wasn't so completely beyond the realm of my imagination that it simply had to be real. Now my son was alone and in danger, still trusting in his plan, still trusting that we would rescue him, there was no way we could communicate with him, and it was up to me to represent him to his allies in this unfamiliar world.

I felt the Major's absence more strongly than ever; there was something about having a seven foot tower of highly trained muscle at your shoulder that made any situation feel a little less dangerous.

Butler. That was at least something I could do.

"Can you get the Butlers down here?" I interrupted a pointless argument about whether Foaly should have revealed his information sooner. "Your technology may be centuries beyond ours, but a Butler can be an asset in any situation. Besides, Arty's Butler is likely to be upset if he gets left out of the rescue mission, and then I won't be able to vouch for anyone's safety."

Kelp winced in a way that made me wonder if he had previously found himself on the wrong end of Butler's professional labours. He did seem like a nice enough fellow, despite my initial reservations at seeing him holding my wife at gunpoint, but I supposed that only made it more likely that Arty's less-than-legal enterprises had placed them on opposite sides of the fence.

"We'll need someone to fly up to meet them," he said finally, in agreement. "Not you, Holly," he continued, "we might need you down here – you know Fowl the best out of anyone in the LEP. Volunteers?"

The silence was deafening. The fairies around the room exchanged loaded glances, shuffled their feet, but generally made no sound or gesture that could possibly be interpreted as volunteering. One little fellow with green skin actually covered his face with his leathery wings to reduce the risk of accidentally making eye-contact with the newly elected commander.

"No one?" asked Kelp, looking a little desperate. Then suddenly, his face transformed as an idea struck him. "Corporal Kelp," he asked, "why don't you go?"

Grub's coffee-coloured skin paled to the colour of milky tea and he began to shake. "B-b-butler?" he stammered. "The Mud Monster? You can't make me go! I'll tell Mummy you're sending me on dangerous assignments!"

But a wicked grin had spread across Kelp's face. "It wouldn't be dangerous for you, would it?" he asked in an innocent tone. "You're always telling Mummy all about how you defeated the great Butler after he'd beaten the rest of Retrieval One, after all…"

This was a story I had to hear some day. From the delighted expressions of the other fairies in the room, it was one they had heard far too many times, and from that point on, Kelp was swamped with volunteers, all wanting to see Grub's reunion with 'the Mud Monster'. Apparently having been caught in his own trap, Grub offered little further resistance and left with the rest of the small team, trailing betrayed-sounding grumbles about minor household chores in his wake.

"Now," I said, feeling better now that I had made a decision for myself. "I need more information if I'm going to help find Arty – he didn't have time to tell me much at all. What exactly is Pandora's box? Where did it come from? How does it work? I get the feeling we're not talking about the legend I know of the woman who released evil on the world…"

Kelp looked quite relieved to have someone else directing the discussion. "Not quite," he agreed. "But it is where the human legend originated, I would assume. Our story is straight from the Book – but assuming your son hasn't taught you to read Gnommish, I'll see if I can paraphrase for you."

His eyes went distant as he recalled the story.

"The last great king of the Frond dynasty married a Mud Woman named Pandora. The king's views on what many considered the growing human threat made him unpopular with the more traditionalist fairies, and a treasonous coalition of ten powerful warlocks formed, seeking to overthrow him. The Book forbade any fairy to move directly against the king, but they had found a loophole; the queen was not a fairy.

"Pandora was known for her quick mind, at least for a Mud Woman, so they constructed a tribute for her, knowing that she would be delighted by it. It was a puzzle-box, engraved with the royal family's coat of arms on its golden lid and enchanted to be touchable only by human hands. It's unclear whether the coalition truly intended to build such a heinous thing as they did, but it seems unlikely they intended to kill any more than their targets. Either way they were out of the castle by the time Pandora worked out how to open the box and were thus spared the resultant devastation as each member of the royal family and every fairy in their immediate vicinity was killed by the horror inside. Realising she had been deceived, Pandora quickly closed the box again, but only some distant cousins of the royal family, who lived far away, were spared. She was the only survivor inside the royal castle and most of the surrounding area – and she herself had gone from the prime of her life to an old woman in a moment.

"The coalition had not counted on Pandora herself living to tell the tale at all, because they were largely unprepared when the police of the time tracked them down. In a desperate bid to avoid facing the consequences for their actions, they stopped time around their own headquarters, working in shifts to keep the impenetrable barrier always up, while the police waited them out.

"On the third day, however, the outcome of the siege was decided, because Pandora worked out how to control the box herself. She decided that it would be poetic justice to use it against those who had used her as the instrument of her own husband's destruction. She scratched the Gnommish script for 'those who betrayed their king' into the gold lid and, when she opened the box once again, its magic targeted the warlocks of the coalition. Whatever was inside the box passed through the time-stop as though it wasn't even there, eliminating all inside without costing a single additional police-fairy's life.

"Despite the swift eradication of the rebellion, however, the damage was done. The king and all his closest heirs were dead, along with all their advisers and thousands of civilians. Those next in line for the throne were untrained and incompetent, and power-struggles immediately broke out between all of those who had an interest in gaining power. Our civilisation took hundreds of years to rebuild from the lost lives and the resultant near-civil war, and since no one could work out how Pandora had managed to survive, she ended up being attributed much of the blame. She was forced to undergo a complete memory wipe and returned to her own people, although she died of old age only a few months later."

"Happy story," I said dryly. "What happened to the box after that?"

"It was considered too dangerous to risk trying to permanently destroy it," explained Kelp, "perhaps releasing the restraints on whatever the warlocks had created. It's been under the direct protection of the Council ever since Pandora was mind wiped – at least until it was stolen yesterday."

"And Arty would know the whole story?" I confirmed.

"I would assume so," shrugged Short. "He seems to have memorised most of the Book – and I'd called to bring in his help on figuring out how the box was stolen at least half an hour before I heard that Retrieval One were coming. He almost certainly spent that time refreshing his memory – I know I did."

I thought hard for a few moments, trying to predict what my son would do – the story had explained a lot, slotting into place with the rest of what I knew. Was there any possibility that Arty would cooperate and allow such a dangerous weapon fall into the hands of a madman? Then again, he had warned me that the reflective contacts deteriorated quite quickly out of their protective fluid. By now, they may well be ineffective. Would he be able to help himself?

And then there was that prophecy. I was reluctant to believe in anything that compromised my control over my own destiny, but Arty seemed to have been taking it very seriously. That was not a good sign.

"All right," I said finally. "Since it seems we are otherwise at a dead end, I'll lay my last card on the table. Arty didn't want to say anything because he couldn't be sure who the thief was – but he had a fairly good idea."

Short actually jumped to her feet. "That's right!" she said. "He told me he had some ideas, but I cut him off! Did he tell you?"

"He did," I admitted. "But you're not going to like it. He told me that the thief had to either be a member of the Council – or more likely, Sool himself."

Snorts of incredulity echoed around the office and Kelp shook his head firmly. "That's impossible. Sool may be a appalling leader, but he's a stickler for the rules. He's not about to go on a killing spree."

"Yes," I persevered, "but what if he's not intending to use it on upstanding citizens – what if he wants to wipe out crime for good? Foaly said it earlier – the next inevitable step was to authorise lethal force on fairies. This is just the next step after that. He could surely set the device to destroy 'criminals who have escaped justice' or even just 'criminals'. If the crime wave you have been experiencing was serious enough, the collateral damage might be acceptable to him."

"That's barbaric!" cried Short. "'Collateral damage' is a human concept – no fairy could stoop so low, not intentionally!"

There was a tense sort of silence for a moment as the fairies in the room considered, and then reconsidered. Suddenly, Foaly reared onto his hind legs and spun back towards his computer, tapping at his keyboard. He squinted at the lines of incomprehensible pictograms that turned up as a result, finally shaking his head grimly.

"I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier," he said. "I knew I couldn't trust Rheeson, he reported everything I did straight back to Sool, but I never thought he'd sink so low! He wasn't captured – it looks like he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing."

"WHAT?" demanded Kelp, skidding over to where he could look over Foaly's shoulder at his terminal.

"Look," said Foaly. "Look at his life-signs – heart rate and blood pressure slightly elevated in comparison to the rest of the team, but steady, until this point – then the connection is completely lost, nothing but noise from that moment on. Now, the only way I can think that that helmet could have been so thoroughly deactivated without the point-of-view camera seeing anything or causing any kind of life-sign spikes, would be by a sharp-shot to the battery to pop it out of its groove. But look at this last frame of video the helmet took …"

The image he brought up on the screen showed a wall hung with an array of fairy-sized weapons.

"He was alone in the weapons locker," Foaly explained angrily. "There's no way anyone could have a line of sight on the battery – he must have disabled the helmet himself. He could hardly help but know how to do it, no matter how useless a he was as a tech-fairy. The rest of the crew were incapacitated by a masked fairy, who gained entry to the shuttle by unknown means – well, I think we know who that fairy was now, and exactly how he got in there."

The room swelled with confused babble as the fairies tried to comprehend the possible betrayal of not one, but two of their own.

"So, does this confirm that the thief is Sool?" I interjected ruthlessly. Every moment spent debating was another moment my son spent in the dubious care of a madman bent on destroying his own society. "It sounds as though the missing fairy was particularly enamoured of Sool's view of the world."

"Confirm? No," growled Kelp. "If we start leaping to conclusions without proof, based on circumstantial evidence, personal dislike, and political convenience, we'll be no better than him. But does it give us enough information to officially suspend both of them while the investigation takes place – and bring Sool in for questioning, whether he's on holiday or not? Yes, I believe it does.

"Foaly – put out the wanted for questioning announcements on all networks and make us a prioritised list of any properties owned by Sool – and you'd better include properties of Council members as well. Also anywhere that might have a shielded location, abandoned buildings, and anywhere else you can think of and we'll begin making house checks. If we can't find anything there, we'll start going door to door. We need to find that box before it gets opened. I'll take Retrieval One. Vein, you've got Retrieval Two, as usual. Short, you'll take Retrieval Three. Is everyone clear?"

Everyone was. And so the hunt began.

To be continued...