Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex

“And hello to you,” said Adamsson. “Nice to finally meet you face-to-face, if not eye-to-eye.”

Artemis did not rise to the forge-a-relationship lure that Adamsson had tossed out. He did not have room in his life at the moment for yet another friend that he didn’t trust.

“I do not intend to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage, Mr. Adamsson, so I think we can skip over any icebreakers you may feel obliged to offer. Is everything ready?”

Adam Adamsson’s pre-prepared icebreakers melted in his throat, and he nodded half a dozen times.

“All ready. Your crate is around the back. I have supplied a vegetarian buffet and goody bags from the Blue Lagoon Spa. A few seats have been laid out too, as bluntly requested in your terse e-mail. None of your party turned up, though-nobody but you-after all my labors.”

Artemis lifted an aluminium briefcase from the SkiDoo’s luggage box. “Don’t you worry about that, Mr. Adamsson. Why don’t you head back to Reykjavík and spend some of that extortionate fee you charged me for a couple of hours’ usage of your frankly third-rate restaurant and perhaps find a friendless tree stump to listen to your woes?”

A couple of hours. Third-rate. Two plus three equals five. Good.

Now it was Adamsson’s turn to grunt, and the tips of his walrus mustache quivered slightly.

“No need for the attitude, young Fowl. We are both men, are we not? Men are entitled to a little respect.”

“Oh, really? Perhaps we should ask the whales? Or perhaps the mink?”

Adamsson scowled, his windburned face creasing like a prune. “Okay, okay. I get the message. No need to hold me responsible for the crimes of man. You teenagers are all the same. Let’s see if your generation does any better with the planet.”

Artemis clicked the briefcase’s lock snap precisely twenty times before striding into the restaurant.

“Believe me, we teenagers are not all the same,” he said as he passed Adamsson. “And I intend to do quite a bit better.”

There were more than a dozen tables inside the restaurant, all with chairs stacked on top, except for one, which had been dressed with a linen cloth and laden with bottled glacier water and spa bags for each of the five places.

Five, thought Artemis. A good number. Solid. Predictable. Four fives are twenty.

Artemis had decided lately that five was his number. Good things happened when five was in the mix. The logician in him knew that this was ridiculous, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that the tragedies in his life had occurred in years not divisible by five: his father had disappeared and been mutilated, his old friend Commander Julius Root of the LEP had been murdered by the notorious pixie Opal Koboi, both in years with no five. He was five feet five inches tall and weighed fifty-five kilos. If he touched something five times or a multiple of that, then that thing stayed reliable. A door would remain closed, for example, or a keepsake would protect that doorway, as it was supposed to.

Today the signs were good. He was fifteen years old. Three times five. And his hotel room in Reykjavík had been number forty-five. Even the Ski-Doo that had got him this far unscathed had a registration that was a multiple of five, and boasted a fifty cc engine to boot. All good. There were only four guests coming to the meeting, but including him that made five. So no need to panic.

A part of Artemis was horrified by his newfound superstition about numbers.

Get a grip on yourself. You are a Fowl. We do not rely on luck-abandon these ridiculous obsessions and compulsions.

Artemis clicked the case’s latch to appease the number gods-twenty times, four fives-and felt his heart slow down.

I will break my habits tomorrow, when this job is done.

He loitered at the maître d’s podium until Adamsson and his snow tractor had disappeared over a curved ridge of snow that could have been a whale’s spine, then waited a further minute until the vehicle’s rumbling had faded to an old smoker’s cough.

Very well. Time to do some business.

Artemis descended the five wooden steps to the main restaurant floor ( excellent, good omen ), threading a series of columns hung with replicas of the Stóra-Borg mask until he arrived at the head of the laid table. The seats were angled to face him, and a slight shimmer, like a heat haze, flickered over the tabletop.

“Good morning, friends,” said Artemis in Gnommish, forcing himself to pronounce the fairy words in confident, almost jovial, tones. “Today’s the day we save the world.”

The heat haze seemed more electrical now with crackles of neon-white interference running through it, and faces swimming in its depths like ghosts from a dream. The faces solidified and grew torsos and limbs. Small figures, like children, appeared. Like children, but not the same. These were representatives of the Fairy People, and among them perhaps the only friends Artemis had.

“Save the world?” said Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon. “Same old Artemis Fowl, and I say that sarcastically, as saving the world is not like you at all.”

Artemis knew he should smile, but he could not, so instead he found fault, something that would not seem out of character.

“You need a new shield amplifier, Foaly,” he said to a centaur who was balanced awkwardly on a chair designed for humans. “I could see the shimmer from the front porch. Call yourself a technical expert? How old is the one you’re using?”

Foaly stamped a hoof, which was an irritated tic of his and the reason he never won at cards. “Nice to see you too, Mud Boy.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. Maybe four years.”

“Four. There, you see. What sort of number is that?”

Foaly stuck out his bottom lip. “What sort of number? There are types now, Artemis? That amplifier is good for another hundred years. Maybe it could do with a little tuning, but that’s all.”

Holly stood and walked lightly to the head of the table.

“Do you two have to start with the sparring right away? Isn’t that getting a little clichéd after all these years? You’re like a couple of mutts marking territory.” She laid two slim fingers on Artemis’s forearm. “Lay off him, Artemis. You know how sensitive centaurs are.”

Artemis could not meet her eyes. Inside his left snow boot, he counted off twenty toe-taps.

“Very well. Let’s change the subject.”

“Please do,” said the third fairy in the room. “We’ve come across from Russia for this, Fowl. So if the subject could be changed to what we came here to discuss. .”

Commander Raine Vinyáya was obviously not happy being so far from her beloved Police Plaza. She had assumed command of LEPgeneral some years previously and prided herself on keeping a finger in every ongoing mission. “I have operations to get back to, Artemis. The pixies are rioting, calling for Opal Koboi’s release from prison, and the swear toad epidemic has flared up again. Please do us the courtesy of getting on with it.”

Artemis nodded. Vinyáya was being openly antagonistic, and that was an emotion that could be trusted, unless of course it was a bluff and the commander was a secret fan of his, unless it was a double bluff and she really did feel antagonistic.

That sounds insane , Artemis realized. Even to me.

Though she was barely forty inches tall, Commander Vinyáya was a formidable presence and someone that Artemis never intended to underestimate. While the commander was almost four centuries old in fairy years, she was barely middle-aged, and in any terms she was a striking figure: lean and sallow, with the reactive feline pupils occasionally found in elfin eyes, but even that rarity was not her most distinctive physical characteristic. Raine Vinyáya had a mane of silver hair that seemed to trap any available light and send it rippling along her shoulders.