Artemis Fowl_ The Arctic Incident - Eoin Colfer [4]
‘The main gate.’
‘Good man. I’m on my way.’
Doctor Po whipped off his spectacles. ‘This session is not over, young man. We made some progress today, even if you won’t admit it. Leave now and I will be forced to inform the Dean.’
The warning was lost on Artemis. He was already somewhere else. A familiar electric buzz was crackling over his skin. This was the beginning of something. He could feel it.
CHAPTER 2: CRUISIN’ FOR CHIX
WEST BANK, HAVEN CITY, THE LOWER ELEMENTS
THE traditional image of a leprechaun is one of a small, green-suited imp. Of course, this is the human image. Fairies have their own stereotypes. The People generally imagine officers of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance squad to be truculent gnomes or bulked-up elves, recruited straight from their college crunchball squads.
Captain Holly Short fits neither of these descriptions. In fact, she would probably be the last person you would pick as a member of the LEPrecon squad. If you had to guess her occupation, the catlike stance and the sinewy muscles might suggest a gymnast or perhaps a professional potholer. But take a closer look, past the pretty face, into the eyes, and you will see determination so fiery it could light a candle at ten paces, and a streetwise intelligence that made her one of Recon’s most respected officers.
Of course, technically, Holly was no longer attached to Recon. Ever since the Artemis Fowl Affair, when she had been captured and held to ransom, her position as Recon’s first female officer had been under review. The only reason she wasn’t at home watering her ferns right now was that Commander Root had threatened to turn in his own badge if Holly was suspended. Root knew, even if Internal Affairs wasn’t convinced, that the kidnapping had not been Holly’s fault, and only her quick thinking had prevented loss of life.
But the Council members weren’t particularly interested in loss of human life. They were more concerned with loss of fairy gold. And according to them, Holly had cost them a fair chunk from the Recon ransom fund. Holly was quite prepared to fly above ground and wring Artemis Fowl’s neck until he returned the gold, but that wasn’t the way it worked: the Book, the fairy bible, stated that once a human managed to separate a fairy from his gold, then that gold was his to keep.
So, instead of confiscating her badge, Internal Affairs had insisted Holly handle grunt work – somewhere that she couldn’t do any harm. Stakeout was the obvious choice. Holly was farmed out to Customs and Excise, stuck in a Cham pod and suckered to the rock face overlooking a pressure-elevator chute. Dead-end duty.
That said, smuggling was a serious concern for the Lower Elements Police. It wasn’t the contraband itself, which was generally harmless junk – designer sunglasses, DVDs, cappuccino machines and such. It was the method of acquiring these items.
The B’wa Kell goblin triad had cornered the smuggling market and was becoming increasingly brazen in its overground excursions. It was even rumoured that the goblins had constructed their own cargo shuttle to make their expeditions more economically viable.
The main problem was that goblins were dim-witted creatures. All it would take was for one of them to forget to shield and goblin photos would be bouncing from satellites to news stations around the world. Then the Lower Elements, the last Mud-Man-free zone on the planet, would be discovered. When that happened, human nature being what it was, pollution, strip-mining and exploitation were sure to follow.
This meant that whichever poor souls were in the Department’s bad books got to spend months at a time on surveillance duty, which is why Holly was now anchored to the rock face outside a little-used chute’s entrance.
E37 was a pressure elevator that emerged in downtown Paris, France. The European capital was redflagged as a high-risk area, so visas were rarely approved. LEP business only. No civilian had been in the chute for decades, but it still merited twenty-four seven surveillance – which meant six officers