THE SOUTHBANK CENTRE,

LONDON

MYLES FOWL HAD TRAVELLED TO LONDON TO present a lecture to the Coroners’ and Pathologists’ Association of Southern England, or CORPSE, in London’s Southbank Centre on the river. Beckett had tagged along because he thought CORPSE was a fabulous name for a group, plus he instinctively felt that a coroners’ convention in London was exactly the sort of setting where a classic Fowl Adventure might kick off, and he would be simply devastated to miss the initial stages.

Also, Myles had promised that he could wear a disguise.

Beckett was absolutely right to tag along, for a Fowl Adventure did in fact kick off in the Southbank Centre. However, it was not to be a classic Fowl Adventure, as those generally tended to ramp up towards an explosive climax, whereas the Fowl Phantom Solution (as the affair would be named in fairy Lower Elements Police files) started with a big bang, followed by a series of smaller bangs, then another big bang.

Myles Fowl stood front and centre on the lacquered wood of the Southbank main stage in an auditorium that was packed with the cream of Europe’s coroners and pathologists. For even though CORPSE was a British organisation, doctors had flown in from all over the world to hear the Fowl prodigy speak, and Myles had not disappointed. Unless one were disappointed by the fact that the pompous twelve-year-old dressed in a formal tuxedo, bow tie and gleaming patent-leather loafers had not tripped over his own inflated ego and fallen flat on his smug face. Myles had expertly covered molecular pathology, computational pathology and the clear advantages of medicological investigators being recognised as first responders, and he was finishing up with some coroner-related puns.

‘And so my examination is over,’ he said, deactivating the laser pointer in his eyeglass frames. ‘And, while I am certain there will be many postmortems in the bar, unless there is an inquest, this twelve-year-old body must be released.’

Not exactly hilarious stuff, but the members of CORPSE were not expecting stand-up comedy and so, for the most part, they were content to applaud politely. But not everyone was content. A hand shot up from the clumped gloom of the audience.

‘Before you go and hang out with your amazing and much more interesting brother …’ said the short man attached to the hand. He wore thick glasses and sported a bushy moustache. ‘Maybe I can ask you a question, Master Fowl?’

Myles appeared to fall for the bait. ‘I hate to stand on ceremony,’ he said, ‘but I do prefer to be addressed as Dr Fowl when the occasion calls for it, or even Professor Fowl in specialist situations like this.’

The man stood, his head jutting into the beam of Myles’s spotlight, and read his question from a card. ‘That’s just it, isn’t it, Master Fowl? I’ve done a bit of digging, and you may have doctorates in other areas, but it seems that your PhD in criminal pathology does not exist. It seems very much like you are here under false pretences.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Myles, as though misrepresenting himself were nothing. ‘I can explain that.’

This admission was met with gasps and chatter. Could it be that Myles Fowl was, in fact, a charlatan? A fake?

The questioner flicked to a second card and read the statement written there: ‘I think we would all very much like to hear you try.’

Myles gave his full attention to the moustachioed man who had dared to question him. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that earlier this morning I had no official qualification in pathology. But if you’ll allow me a moment to check my email …’ Myles switched his focus to the lenses of his graphene smart glasses and refreshed his mail feed. ‘Ah yes, here we are. As promised by University College London, my doctorate was conferred several minutes ago. I think you’ll find that I actually achieved an unprecedented perfect score.’

With a series of blink commands, Myles cast the email to the large screen behind him. The attendees saw a copy of Myles’s latest doctorate along with an animation of a digital Myles in a cap and gown, this supplied by NANNI, the Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system that lived in his spectacles.

The questioner was melodramatically aghast. ‘Are you telling us that you qualified during your lecture?’

‘That is true,’ conceded Myles.

‘What kind of poopy-headed move was that?’

Myles frowned. ‘Poopy-headed move? Is that the question you were instructed … I mean, is that the question you wanted to ask?’

The moustachioed man cleared his throat and tried another question. ‘So you began the lecture unqualified?’

‘Technically, perhaps, but actually no,’ retorted Myles. ‘I began the lecture without an email from the university. That is all. There was never any doubt I would graduate – after all, I spent three whole weeks on this doctorate. Your quibble should really be addressed to the university’s communications department, as I was promised my degree several hours ago.’

This was met with murmurs of sympathy from the audience members, who had been forced to deal with university communications offices themselves over the years.

‘It is historically true that progress is hindered not by lack of ideas, but by the slow grind of bureaucracy,’ concluded Myles. This actually won him a second round of applause, which did not surprise him, as this entire mini inquisition had been part of his plan, the supposed interrogator being, in fact, his twin, Beckett, in the promised disguise.

‘Thank you, lesser academics,’ said Myles. ‘That concludes my lecture, but just as every killer signs his own kills, and every artist signs his own work, I will sign bound copies of my thesis in the foyer. I have instructed my AI to unblock your phones shortly so that you may tell your children that you listened excitedly to a Myles Fowl presentation.’

And indeed that would have been the most exciting moment in many of the audience members’ lives had there not been a loud echoing bang as the roof peeled back. This was a surprising enough development in and of itself, as this particular auditorium did not have a retractable roof, but it was eclipsed by the appearance of an ultralight aircraft in the space where there had, until recently, been a ceiling. This aircraft dipped inside the theatre itself, hovering at the rear of the hall, and Myles could not help noticing that the craft’s stubby wings were adorned with mini machine guns.

‘Well now,’ said Myles, seemingly to himself but actually to NANNI. ‘That is unexpected.’

This was something Myles rarely admitted, as he prided himself on considering all the eventualities in any situation.

‘What next? I wonder.’

What next was that the light aircraft opened fire with its portside machine gun, obliterating Myles with multiple rounds. Not the actual Myles, but rather the image of Myles on the screen behind him. Still, the message was clear. Myles Fowl was the target here.

Most people would have been petrified by this development, but Myles Fowl was not most people. In fact, he was not even some people – he was unique among twelve-year-olds and grasped the psychology of the moment. If the pilot had wished to kill him immediately, then Myles would be dead. Therefore, this attack was personal.

‘Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, I presume,’ said Myles, though it was not really a presumption. It was a deduction, if one considered the facts:

1. The pilot was an ace.

2. The duke held a grudge against the twins in general and Myles in particular.

3. The flying machine now hovering before him was the very same Myishi Skyblade that Myles had once been suspended beneath.

In conclusion, if it flew like a duke and shot like a duke, then it was probably a duke.

Knowing Lord Teddy as I do, he will grandstand for a while, thought Myles. And then he will kill me.

But, if it was Teddy in that cockpit, then there were a few things his lordship was unaware of.

First, Beckett had shed his disguise and was fashioning a lasso from his shirt and trousers, probably intending to assault an aluminium fighter plane with everyday items of clothing.

And, second, the LEP Fowl liaison officer, Specialist Lazuli Heitz, had been observing the lecture from the stage gantry and had activated her suit’s wing system, obviously intending to disobey the under no circumstances involve the Lower Elements Police in human disputes directive.

Myles should not have been able to see Specialist Heitz, as she was wearing an advanced shimmer suit, but he had developed a very sneaky workaround. (More on that situation later, as it will play a bigger part in his life than even Myles could have envisioned. For now, all we need to know is that Myles had a few more advantages in this situation than others believed him to have but not as many as he thought he had.)

Even so, Myles was a tad anxious because, after all, even Beck and Lazuli could not outrun bullets.

Yet, in spite of the grim nature of his current circumstances, Myles was also nurturing a spark of hope. He was confident that Teddy would indulge himself in a triumphant villain’s rant, thus providing Myles’s Regrettables teammates the seconds they would need to come to his rescue.

They have rescued me from more hazardous situations, he realised. But he had to admit, if only to himself, that his life had, in all probability, entered its final hundred heartbeats.

The audience’s reaction to the jet’s arrival was mixed. At the extreme ends of the behaviour spectrum, there were hysterics, who ran screaming for the exits, and deniers, who remained absolutely calm as though nothing whatsoever were awry. In between these two poles, Myles noted some interesting activity. The lighting technician helpfully trained several spotlights on the hovering aircraft. Two visiting Swedish professors engaged in a fistfight, probably believing that this would be their last chance to settle whatever score existed between them. And several eminent pathologists whipped out phones and snapped selfies with the aircraft in the background.

Come on, Your Lordship, Myles beamed at the Skyblade. Tell me exactly why I deserve to die.

The plane dipped its wings, its engines blasting air on the seats below, and Myles saw that the forward windscreen was fogged up.

Show me that royal face, thought Myles. Give Laz some time to work.

And it is a measure of Myles’s stress levels that he shortened Lazuli’s name, as he mostly avoided abbreviations, though he did use Beck on occasion to please his twin.

It seemed almost as if Lord Teddy had received Myles’s thought-cast, for the glass defogged and the duke’s ancient figure appeared hunched over the controls. He opened his mouth to speak, but Myles beat him to it.

‘Lord Teddy,’ he said, his voice still amplified over the house system, ‘so kind of you to attend. Perhaps you had a question for the speaker. The speaker being myself, of course.’

Sometime later, when the twins were summoned back to London for an inquiry about the Southbank affair, a hostage negotiator who had reviewed the tapes set down his Earl Grey tea and said to Myles, ‘You do know that provocation is absolutely the wrong course of action to take in these situations. It might have pushed the hostage-taker towards violent action.’

To which Myles said, ‘Three things, Mr Earl Grey. First, to label Lord Teddy a hostage-taker gives him all the power in this situation and, as we subsequently found out, the duke was not the one with the power.

‘Second, I am reasonably certain, given the battle plane and the dozens of shots fired, that Teddy had already been pushed irreversibly towards violent action.

‘And, third, if you want to talk about the wrong course of action, perhaps you should look in a mirror and ask yourself whether that wispy moustache fluttering below your nostrils might have been the wrong course of action for you personally.’

And that was the end of the conversation.

This little flash-forward tells us that Myles survived the duke’s attack, and now we shall find out just how he did it.

By the time Teddy could get a word in, he was so incensed that he spattered spittle on the inside of the windscreen as he spoke.

‘We meet again, Myles Fowl!’ he wheezed through his ancient slit of a mouth, the shrunken lips drawn back from the teeth. ‘Fowl by name, foul by nature!’

Myles winced. How reduced was the once magnificent duke that he would trot out such a hackneyed insult and spit on the glass while doing it?

‘Is that all you can muster, Lord Teddy?’ he asked. ‘“Fowl by name, foul by nature”? You do know this is being recorded? You could have referred to me as a Naegleria fowleri, which is a brain-eating amoeba. That would have been something. When are you going to realise that you can never beat me and it would be easier on your self-esteem if you simply stopped trying?’

Lord Teddy’s face twisted until it was ninety per cent scowl. ‘I was going to drag it out, you impertinent, ridiculous boy, but I can stomach your jabber no longer.’

And the duke’s bony fingers tightened on the trigger controlling the machine guns, which really should have been the end of the great game for Myles Fowl and yet another trophy for the mighty hunter Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye. But somehow it was not the end, as Myles’s goose was spared a cooking thanks to the Trojan efforts of his twin, Beckett, and their mutual friend Specialist Lazuli Heitz of the Lower Elements Police.

Lazuli and Beckett, being essentially creatures of action, had realised moments earlier that the immediate threat to Myles was not so much the ranting peer with his finger on the trigger, but the machine guns slung on pivots below the Myishi Skyblade’s swept-back wings. And so each Regrettable targeted one of these weapons. Beckett could not actually see the shielded Lazuli, but he trusted that, since he was closer to the starboard weapon, she would take care of the port. And that is exactly what happened, though possibly not exactly as planned.

Beckett quickly stripped down to the gold-thread tie that represented his deceased goldfish, Gloop (#firstpetsforever), and his underpants, which were actually a sumo loincloth or mawashi. He found that the loincloth afforded him the most mobility in the event a stripped-down engagement was called for, something that happened to Beckett at a minimum of twice a week. He tied his trousers and shirt together and scanned the nearby audience members for a launchpad, settling almost immediately on the quarrelling Swedish professors, who were locked together in an accidental base-level grip of a human triangle.

Thanks, guys, thought Beckett, and he made his approach.

He skipped along a row of seatbacks, scuttled up one professor’s back and springboarded from the crown of the other’s head, achieving a vertical lift that could be matched only by Maasai warrior jumpers. Beckett flung his makeshift lasso upwards in what might have seemed like a last-ditch effort, given he was in mid-air when he made the throw, but it was not desperate, as Beckett Fowl was a savant in all things physical and could easily have competed in human or fairy games on an international level. In fact, Lazuli had given him maybe three lessons in the fairy martial art of Cos T’apa, and he had already achieved red slipper level, equalling Lazuli herself, who had been studying the art for decades and was more than a little envious of the human boy’s lightning-fast progress. So Beckett’s lasso-toss landed neatly over the Skyblade’s starboard ski, and Beckett swung himself upwards, hooking both legs over the machine-gun barrel.

‘Hello, Mr Nasty Gun,’ said Beckett, who sincerely disliked guns and most of the people who wielded them. ‘Let’s see if I can’t throw a spanner in your works.’ And then he told the gun, ‘That’s just a figure of speech. I don’t actually have a spanner.’

Lazuli, meanwhile, took a less eventful path to the gun she intended to disable. There was no cobbling-together of ad hoc tightrope equipment. Instead, Lazuli simply nudged the throttle of her shimmer suit’s flight wings so that she lifted off from the stage’s gantry and hovered directly in front of her target weapon. That might seem a reckless place to hover, but Specialist Heitz figured she could shield the human boy with her own fairy body armour, which she had been assured by Foaly could withstand multiple direct hits from anything the humans could throw at it, short of an armour-piercing shell.

Regarding Lazuli’s aim, what she planned to aim was her oxalis pistol, which was a considerable upgrade from the previous model. Nearly all her equipment had been upgraded since the affair known in LEP files as the ACRONYM Convergence (see LEP file: The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges), and, in fact, the centaur Foaly had made her something of a test case for new technology, so she was equipped to the tips of her pointy ears with his latest updates, versions and breakthroughs.

There were those in the corridors of LEP Police Plaza who whispered that the tech-genius Foaly was obsessed with trumping the Fowls’ technological advancements, especially since Artemis Fowl had outshone him comprehensively in previous engagements (see any of the LEP Artemis Fowl files). Foaly denied this, red-faced, but he did not help his case by wearing a lab T-shirt bearing the legend:

FOWL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU.
FOWL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME.

The oxalis organic pistols had superseded the Neutrinos and were named for the weed that ejects its seeds using a ballistichoric system that operates by drying out the fruit walls and getting the layers to pull against each other. The pistols were genetically modified and grown in hydroponic racks, and they could actually be eaten in an emergency. Lazuli’s pistol was third generation and shot seeds rather than bullets or rays. She had a range of seed types to choose from, and for this particular task she selected gumshot from her visor menu. Gumshots were similar to human rubber bullets except they splatted on impact.

The perfect way to block a machine gun, she thought, and to put a slug down Lord Teddy’s port barrel without waiting for aim-assist to lock in on her visor. Her own aim was true, and her seed did not even rattle the sides on its way in. Now she could only pray that the seed had a nanosecond to splat before Lord Teddy had time to pull the trigger.

Lazuli could not know this, but Teddy had already pulled the trigger, and the electronic signal was travelling from the cockpit to the machine gun. It was now a very short race against time to see which projectile would do its work first.

And what was Myles Fowl doing while all this was going on? Surely the boy was petrified with fear and, even if he did have motor-function command, there wasn’t enough time for him to actually do anything. But Myles had been in worse fixes and had trained himself to react quickly – mentally, at least. While Lord Teddy was still monologuing, Myles had sent NANNI’s electronic fingers probing the Skyblade to see if he could penetrate the duke’s defences. Unfortunately, they had been rebuffed by one of the famous Myishi closed systems. Simultaneously, Myles initiated Operation Trapdoor, which was a pretty self-explanatory name. Myles knew Beckett and Lazuli were on the job, but, even so, he judged it prudent to remove himself from the line of fire so that he might remain alive and be of some use to his friends.

Oddly, Operation Trapdoor was having a little trouble initiating. Myles was certain he had sent the correct blink signal into his lenses, but still the trapdoor beneath his feet obstinately refused to move, sending back a manual only alert.

Override, Myles blinked, and in five seconds’ time he would dearly wish he hadn’t blinked those blinks, because a man known by backstage crew all over the world as the Trapmeister General had been tampering with the Southbank’s trapdoor, and it did not do what it had been designed to do. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Meanwhile, Beckett was examining the machine gun’s swivel housing with one of his most perceptive organs, that being his left ear.

Ball bearings, he thought. Ball bearings that are ball bearing.

Beckett still had traces of magic in his system from the time he had been inhabited by the spirit of a long-dead fairy warrior (see LEP file: The Last Guardian). The magic had transformed him into a trans-species polyglot or, simply put, he could talk to anyone and anything that could speak. This extended to an uncanny ability to interpret sounds such as ball bearings grinding inside a mechanism – in this case, the swivel mount of a machine gun. The rubber seal had been eaten away by something, possibly salt water, and a tiny section of the inner workings was exposed to the worst possible person to expose workings to.

One of those ball bearings is missing, thought the Irish boy. And if I could slide something thin in there …

Beckett didn’t have anything ideal for the job. However, he did have something a little less than ideal.

Something that was flapping in his face.

Beckett pulled his Gloop tie over his head and said solemnly, ‘I shall never forget your sacrifice upon this day. Farewell, my dearest friend.’

Which was a little melodramatic considering there were dozens of identical Gloop ties hanging in the twins’ bedroom cupboard on the nearby yacht, the Fowl Star.

The portside machine gun got off the first shot, which impacted on Lazuli’s gumshot blockage, inflating it like a bloom of blown glass. Lazuli could actually see the gas and flame roiling inside.

This is a bad idea, Specialist, she told herself. Get out of the way.

But she didn’t. Lazuli’s visor would alert her in the unlikely event she was actually in any danger and then she could move, assuming there was time to move.

She had an idea, which was the most counter-intuitive idea an LEP officer could have.

I should duck my head into the line of fire.

Because her helmet was her most heavily armoured piece of equipment and could withstand any amount of direct hits from human bullets, according to Foaly. She barely had time to move her face into harm’s way when the next projectile blasted through the gumshot gunge and impacted on her headplate. It did not penetrate, but it did knock out some of Lazuli’s systems.

That shouldn’t have happened, thought Lazuli, and she realised that perhaps positioning her head in front of a gun barrel had been a rash move.

I need to shut this weapon down, she thought, selecting an explosive seed bullet from her menu.

But Lord Teddy fired first, and the next slug breached her armoured plating, which was supposed to be impossible and might even have killed Lazuli outright had not her SPAM (Spontaneous Appearance of Magic; see LEP file: The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges) blossomed in an orange corona around her head, absorbing most of the projectile’s momentum so that it lodged in Lazuli’s helmet.

Myles is on his own, she thought, as the initial impact sent her cartwheeling towards the rear wall.

Beckett fed his beloved Gloop tie through the break in the seal and into the machine gun’s mechanism, which gobbled it up like a strand of spaghetti. The material quickly jammed the weapon’s gear and set the swivel whining and smoking. It was, as Myles might say, a serious design flaw. The gun itself turned ninety degrees and shot its first projectile at its brother gun under the opposite wing.

Time to go, thought Beckett. Farewell, dearest Gloop tie.

And he unlocked his legs from the ski and dropped towards the auditorium below, judging his mid-air tumble perfectly so that he landed neatly in seat G6.

Over Beckett’s head the port gun’s self-defence programme took offence at being fired upon and swivelled to face its brother. One furious round of aerial blasting later, the machine guns had strafed each other to scrap metal and hung limply decommissioned from their housings.

Myles had not anticipated this exact turn of events and thought that, had he been in possession of either athleticism or a shimmer suit, he would have perhaps handled things differently. But, in any case, he was relieved that the Regrettables remained in the land of the living, and that his Operation Trapdoor would finally be initiated, having made him wait for an exasperating two seconds.

Myles was not the only exasperated person in the auditorium. Inside his cockpit, the ancient Lord Teddy was enraged beyond actual words. In fact, he seemed to have snapped altogether, and he set the Skyblade into a steep dive so that he might ram the Fowl boy into the next life. The aircraft’s nose dipped sharply, and Myles fervently wished that the trapdoor would spring into action, metaphorically speaking.

Metaphorically or not, the trapdoor did indeed respond to Myles’s override blink of a moment before, springing into action. What Myles did not know was that the previous evening’s performer on this exact stage had been the pop superstar Shoshona Biederbeck, on the fifth stop of her very first live tour. Part of Shoshona’s show was her arrival on an animatronic unicorn that weighed more than a tonne. Her stage manager, the aforementioned Trapmeister General, who had rigged trapdoors from Las Vegas to Las Palmas, had performed a little illegal boosting surgery on the trapdoor’s mechanism to ensure that his star and her unicorn arrived safely on to an elevated platform. The Trapmeister had been scheduled to dismantle his trapdoor supercharger on this very evening. However, that was of little use to Myles when the trapdoor panel rushed up to meet him.

Myles’s override blinks had triggered the piezo-electrical ignition source, unleashing the combustion-launcher equivalent of a volcano under his feet. The result of all this technical jargon was that Myles Fowl was propelled vertically to a height sufficient to give him a view across the Thames to Covent Garden.

I can see the Acorn Club from here, he thought.

Thirty metres below, through a wisp of river fog, the Skyblade took a bite-shaped chunk from the section where Myles had been standing and belched the duke’s body through its windscreen and on to the stage.

That person is dead, thought Myles, zooming in with his glasses. Or so it would appear.

It did not cross his mind to worry that he himself might actually die. After all, he could already see Lazuli speeding towards him to perform a mid-air rescue, the orange corona of magic trailing behind her helmet like a comet trail.

Not that she knows I can see her, thought Myles with some satisfaction.

In the guise of straightening his bow tie, Myles raised his elbows so that Lazuli might easily grasp him beneath his arms, which she did with typical skill, matching his descent so that her intervention caused barely a jolt.

‘Thank you, Specialist,’ said Myles calmly. ‘And, may I say, very nice rescue technique.’

Lazuli wanted to ask, ‘How did you know I was here to catch you?’ but she refrained. It seemed like Myles always knew what would happen right up to the moment he didn’t, which was usually when the real problems began.

So instead she said, ‘You’re welcome, Myles. Is he dead, the duke? Can you tell?’

‘It certainly looks like it,’ said Myles, and then he added with some sarcasm, ‘If only there were a coroner or pathologist in the house to tell us for certain.’

Far below them, the stream of coroners and pathologists filing on to the stage looked like ants scurrying towards a lump of sugar.