Artemis Fowl_ The Arctic Incident - Eoin Colfer [26]
Occasionally, the voice on the screen would make a special request. Some fire suits, for example. But hey, Luc was a player now. Nothing was more than a phone call away. In six months, Luc Carrère went from a one-room studio to a fancy loft apartment in St Germain. So naturally, the Sûreté and Interpol were building separate cases against him. But Luc wasn’t to know that. All he knew was that for the first time in his corrupt life, he was riding the gravy train.
One morning there was another parcel on his new marble-topped desk. Bigger this time. Bulkier. But Luc wasn’t worried. It was probably more money.
Luc popped the top to reveal an aluminium case and a second communicator. The eyes were waiting for him.
‘Bonjour, Luc. Ça vaT
‘Bien’ replied Luc, mesmerized from the first syllable.
‘I have a special assignment for you today. Do this right and you will never have to worry about money again. Your tool is in the case.’
‘What is it?’ asked the PI nervously. The instrument looked like a weapon and, even though Luc was mesmerized, Cudgeon did not have enough magic to completely suppress the Parisian’s nature. The PI may have been devious, but he was no killer.
‘It’s a special camera, Luc, that’s all. If you pull that thing that looks like a trigger, it takes a picture,’ said Cudgeon.
‘Oh,’ said Luc Carrère Wearily.
‘Some friends of mine are coming to visit you. And I want you to take their picture. It’s just a game we play.’
‘How will I know your friends?’ asked Luc. ‘A lot of people visit me.’
‘They will ask about the batteries. If they ask about the batteries, then you take their picture.’
‘Sure. Great.’ And it was great. Because the voice would never make him do anything wrong. The voice was his friend.
E37 SHUTTLE PORT
Holly steered the slammer through the chute’s final section. A proximity sensor in the shuttle’s nose set off the landing lights.
‘Hmm,’ muttered Holly.
Artemis squinted through the quartz windscreen. ‘A problem?’
‘No. It’s just that those lights shouldn’t be working. There hasn’t been a power source in the terminal since the last century.’
‘Our goblin friends, I presume.’
Holly frowned. ‘Doubtful. It takes half a dozen goblins to turn on a glow cube. Wiring a shuttle port takes real know-how. Elfin know-how.’
‘The plot thickens,’ said Artemis. If he’d had a beard, he would have stroked it. ‘I smell a traitor. Now, who would have access to all this technology and a motive for selling it?’
Holly pointed the shuttle’s cone towards the landing nodes. ‘We’ll find out soon enough. You just get me a live trader, and my mesmer will soon have him spilling his guts.’
The shuttle docked with a pneumatic hiss as the bay’s rubber collar formed an airtight seal around the outer hull.
Butler was out of his chair before the seat-belt light winked off, ready for action.
‘Just don’t kill anyone,’ warned Holly. ‘That’s not how the LEP likes to operate. Anyway, dead Mud Men don’t rat on their partners.’
She brought up a schematic on the wall-screen. It depicted Paris’s old city. ‘OK,’ she said, pointing to a bridge across the Seine. ‘We’re here. Under this bridge, sixty metres from Notre-Dame. The cathedral, not the football team. The dock is disguised as a bridge support. Stand in the doorway until I give you a green light. We have to be careful here. The last thing we need is some Parisian seeing you emerging from a brick wall.’
‘You’re not accompanying us?’ asked Artemis.
‘Orders,’ said Holly, scowling. ‘Apparently this could be a trap. Who knows what hardware is pointed at the terminal door? Lucky for you, you’re expendable. Irish tourists on holiday, you’ll fit right in.’
‘Lucky us. What leads do we have?’
Holly slid a disk into the console. ‘Foaly stuck his Retimager on the goblin prisoner. Apparently he has seen this human.’
The captain brought up a