mesmerize the human. But this particular Mud Man seemed to have the will-power of a hungry hog faced with a trough of turnips.
Luc held two wads of cash in his fists. ‘This money. It’s mine? What do I have to do?’
‘Nothing. The money is yours. Do whatever you want.’
Now Luc Carrere knew that there was no such thing as free cash, but that voice. . That voice was truth in a micro-speaker.
‘But there’s more. A lot more.’
Luc stopped what he was doing, which was kissing a hundred-euro bill.
‘More? How much more?’
The eyes seemed to glow crimson. ‘As much as you want, Lac. But to get it, I need you to do me a favour.’
Luc was hooked. ‘Sure. What kind of favour?’
The voice emanating from the speaker was as clear as spring water.
‘It’s simple, not even illegal. I need batteries, Luc. Thousands of batteries.
Maybe millions. Do you thinkyou can get them jor me?’
Luc thought about it for about two seconds. The banknotes were tickling his chin. As a matter of fact, he had a contact on the river who regularly shipped boatloads of hardware to the Middle East, including batteries. Luc was confident that some of those shipments could be diverted.
‘Batteries. Oui, certainment, I could do that.’
And so it went on for several months. Luc Carrere hit his contact for every battery he could lay his hands on. It was a sweet deal. Luc would crate the cells up in his apartment and in the morning they would be gone. In their place would sit a fresh pile of bills. Of course, the euros were fake, run off on an old Koboi printer, but Luc couldn’t tell the difference. Nobody outside the Treasury could.
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 Carrere went from a one-room studio to a fancy loft apartment in St Germain. So naturally, the Surete 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. fa ra?’
‘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 Carrere blearily.
‘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.
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 Par is’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 mugshot on the screen. ‘Foaly got a match on his Interpol files. Luc Carrere. Disbarred attorney, does a bit of PI work.’
She printed off a card. ‘Here’s his address. He just moved to a swanky new apartment. It could be nothing, but at least we have somewhere to start. I need you to immobilize him, and show him this.’ Holly handed the bodyguard what looked like a diver’s watch.
‘What is it?’ asked the manservant.
‘Just a com screen. You put it in front of Carrere’s face and I can mesmerize the truth out of him from down here. It also contains one of Foaly’s doodahs: a personal shield. The Safetynet. A prototype, you’ll be delighted to know. You have the honour of testing it. Touch the screen, and the micro-reactor generates a two-metre diameter sphere of tri-phased light. No good for solids, but laser bursts or concussion shocks are OK.’
‘Hmm,’ said Butler doubtfully. ‘We don’t get a lot of laser bursts above ground.’
‘Hey, don’t use it. Do I care?’
Butler studied the tiny instrument. ‘One-metre radius? What about the bits that are sticking out.’
Holly thumped the manservant playfully in the stomach. ‘My advice to you, big man, is curl up in a ball.’
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ said Butler, cinching the strap around his wrist.
‘You two try not to kill each other while I’m gone.’
Artemis was surprised. It didn’t happen very often. ‘While you’re gone? Surely you don’t expect me to stay behind?’
Butler tapped his forehead. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll see everything on the iris-cam.’
Artemis fumed for several moments, before settling back down into the co-pilot’s seat. ‘I know. I would only slow you down, and that, in turn, would slow down the search for my father.’
