The Fowl Twins

Good old Myishi, thought Lord Teddy now, and his marvellous gadgets.

The duke and Ishi Myishi had been associates as man and boy. Or, more accurately, since Myishi was a boy who had lied about his age to join the Japanese Army and Teddy Bleedham-Drye was a British Army officer. The duke had discovered young Myishi breaking out of a prison shed in Burma, defending himself with a shotgun the lad had cobbled together from the frame and springs of his cot. Teddy recognised genius when he saw it and, instead of turning the boy in, he’d arranged for him to study engineering at Cambridge. The rest, as they say, was history, albeit a secret one. By Teddy’s reckoning, Myishi had repaid his debt a hundred times over.

Make that a hundred and one, Teddy thought, for one of the duke’s sponsorship perks was a hunter-tracker system that could be bounced off several private satellites. And so, wherever in a several-hundred-mile radius that troll went, Teddy could easily follow.

The Fowls will never hear me coming, he thought. And they will never hear the bullets that kill them.

THE ARMY HELICOPTER

Lazuli Heitz could not figure out the black-haired Fowl boy.

He just sat there, smiling at her, as though she were absolutely visible to him. But that could not be, for the other occupants of the chopper were completely ignoring her. The second boy was making bird noises at passing seagulls, while the woman in black plied the bespectacled kid with questions that he blithely ignored, maintaining both his eye contact with Lazuli and a broad grin.

That child radiates smugness, Lazuli thought. I don’t like him already. At the first opportunity, I shall retrieve the troll and get far away from these people.

In truth, she was beginning to regret her decision to board the helicopter in the first place. Perhaps she should have simply waited for LEPrecon to show up. But the decision was made now, and there was no point regretting it. Plus, her pedalling mechanism had been injured by the fall and she had barely managed to make it to the helicopter. Her wings had folded themselves into their rig as a sign that there would be no more flying until her suit regenerated. So now she needed to concentrate on her next step.

As her angel had told her: ‘There is no future in the past.’

Which meant that obsessively second-guessing your own decisions was a waste of time. At least, that’s what Lazuli took it to mean.

And so she had, minutes before, dragged herself from the seaweed, feeling as if she had endured a severe beating due to the effects of the Filabuster, and pedalled her way to the chopper’s altitude. The ad hoc plan had been to clamp herself on to the skids, but there were already armed soldiers occupying those spots, so Lazuli had no choice but to slip between the troops, careful not to nudge against the automatic weapons, for it was a universal truth that warriors of any species do not like their guns being touched. She crawled under the jump seat, hoping the filaments did not drop off and expose her. Although it felt like the chromophoric camouflage strands were embedded in the fabric of her jumpsuit, not to mention patches of her blue skin, and would never wash off. Which was currently a good thing.

Lazuli hunkered under there in the shadows, trying to take stock.

Learn as much as you can, Specialist.

More advice from her angel.

A friend once told me that gold is power. But he was wrong for once. Information is power.

Information: Lazuli had precious little of that currency.

And after more than a minute she hadn’t picked up much more, apart from the fact that the bespectacled boy was still looking right at her.

If he’s looking, why isn’t he telling?

Lazuli sincerely wished she could have done a little homework on this family before embarking on her exercise, but the Fowl file was locked up tighter than a dwarf’s wallet.

The strange boy’s smile is not a friendly one, she realised. It is the smile of a boy who has a secret.

As for the second child, he was apparently a simpleton who cawed and screeched down at seagulls as the chopper whupped overhead.

Perhaps three minutes later, Lazuli had picked up two potentially useful nuggets.

One: they were headed south-east towards mainland Europe.

And two: as a magic-free zone herself, Lazuli had been forced to study hard just to barely pass the gift-of-tongues exam, and so she realised that the human childsquealing at seagulls was not as simple as she had assumed he was.

Her train of thought was derailed by the bespectacled boy, who cleared his throat noisily.

‘Are you ill, chico?’ the nun asked, to which he replied:

‘I am perfectly fine, Sister Jeronima. There is no need to shout into my right ear. It’s here beside you. Perfectly visible.’

It took Lazuli a moment to realise that his comments were aimed at her and not at the nun. When the light bulb went on, she hurriedly clamped a hand over her right ear.

D’Arvit, she swore internally, which defeated the venting purpose of swearing. Does this mean I owe the human boy a favour?

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AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

COMMANDER DIAVOLO CONROY, OF THE IRISH RANGER team assigned to assist Sister Jeronima in whatever manner she wished to be assisted, considered this particular assignment, i.e. to escort twin boys to a black-site facility in the Netherlands, the second-lowest point of his career.

The absolute lowest point being the time a brigadier-general ordered the entire squad to dress as manga clowns and fly a pony to his daughter’s birthday party. The pony’s name was Buckles, and it was, to put it delicately, a nervous flyer. Commander Conroy still shuddered when he thought back on that day.

But at least he had understood the objective of Operation Buckles: deliver a pony to a child. This assignment – Operation Fowl Swoop, as it had been dubbed – was an altogether more mysterious and unsavoury affair. Two months ago, the Spanish nun had simply driven into the Curragh army camp, swiping her way through several locked gates with that infernal black plastic card of hers, and basically made herself at home with her semi-truckload of high-tech tricks.

That ink-black card was the first thing about Sister Jeronima to give Conroy the creeps. When Conroy had flashed his ID at the nun and asked her to explain herself, she had simply tapped his badge with her card and the black colour had somehow flowed across from her ID to his. While he was still gazing at his altered card in slack-jawed amazement, he received a terse call from the Minister of Defence himself, who summarily informed Conroy that his squad had been deputised by a top-secret intergovernmental organisation and he was to follow Sister Jeronima’s orders to the letter until his ID returned to its original colour.

‘And if I don’t, Minister?’ Conroy had brazenly asked.

‘If you don’t,’ the minister had spluttered, ‘you will find yourself changing the blue latrine blocks in an Antarctic research facility.’

This was a most specific threat, and it helped Diavolo Conroy decide to follow orders.

And so now he and his highly trained men were delivering a pair of Irish twins to an industrial park near Schiphol airport so they could be transported to a black site.

Children in a black site?

Sometimes Commander Conroy couldn’t help wondering if he were still one of the good guys, if indeed there even were good guys any more these days.

‘That will be all, Commander Conroy,’ Jeronima told him as soon as the chopper skids touched down. ‘My people will take it from here.’

Sister Jeronima’s people emerged from two SUVs, not of any make Conroy could identify. Two four-man teams just to transport a couple of sleeping eleven-year-old children.

Overkill, surely,thought Conroy, and for a moment he entertained the crazy notion of defying the minister and pulling the chopper out of there before the payload could be transferred to the vehicles.

But he didn’t because he was a soldier, after all, and soldiers obeyed orders from the chief. Still, it didn’t sit well with Conroy as, after the passengers disembarked, he gave the command to lift off, and he decided to ask some hard questions when he landed back in the Curragh.

The only positive in this entire operation was that Conroy noticed that his ID had shed its skin of black and was back to its original colour. As if the black sheen – or the nun herself – had never been there.

On a side note, Conroy was true to his word and asked several hard questions of the minister upon his return to Ireland, but the answers were wishy-washy at best, so Diavolo handed in his resignation and carried around the guilt for what he considered an abduction until, almost two years later, he got the unexpected opportunity to both set things right with the twins and explain the origins of his unusual first name.

But that is another story, which is, incidentally, even more surprising than this one.

The first rule of interrogation is to question captives separately with the hope that their stories might contradict each other. Sister Jeronima had handled scores of prisoners, suspects and detainees in the span of her long career, and had literally written a handbook on the subject, which was entitled Todo el mundo habla finalmente,or Everyone Talks Eventually, in which Jeronima laid out her interrogation philosophy.