Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl. The Opal Deception

Argon nodded. He remembered Grub Kelp now. The LEP officer was very particular about his possessions. He had already written two letters of complaint to the clinic board about a protruding floor rivet that had scratched his boots.

Argon consulted Koboi‘s chart. The plasma screen on the wall displayed a constantly updated feed from the sensors attached to her temples. There was no change, nor did he expect there to be. Her vitals were all normal, and her brain activity was minimal. She’d had a dream earlier in the evening but now her mind had settled.

And finally, as if he needed telling, the seeker-sleeper implanted in her arm informed him that Opal Koboi was indeed where she was supposed to be. Generally the seeker-sleepers were implanted in the head, but pixie skulls were too fragile for any local surgery.

Jerbal punched in his personal code on the reinforced door’s keypad. The heavy door slid back to reveal a spacious room with gently pulsing floor mood lights. The walls were soft plastic, and gentle sounds of nature spilled from recessed speakers. At the moment a brook was splashing over flat rocks.

In the middle of the room, Opal Koboi hung suspended in a full body harness. The straps were gel-padded and adjusted automatically to any body movement. If Opal did happen to wake, the harness could be remotely triggered to seal like a net, preventing her from harming herself.

Argon checked the monitor pads, making sure they had good contact on Koboi’s forehead. He lifted one of the pixie’s eyelids, shining a pencil light at the pupil. It contracted slightly, but Opal did not avert her eyes.

‘Well, anything to tell me today, Opal?’ asked the doctor softly. ‘An opening chapter for my book?’

Argon liked to talk to Koboi, just in case she could hear. When she woke up, he reasoned, he would have already established a rapport.

‘Nothing? Not a single insight?’

Opal did not react. As she hadn’t for almost a year.

‘Ah well,’ said Argon, swabbing the inside of Koboi’s mouth with the last cotton bud in his pocket. ‘Maybe tomorrow, eh?’

He rolled the cotton bud across a sponge pad on his clipboard. Seconds later, Opal’s name flashed up on a tiny screen.

‘DNA never lies,’ muttered Argon, tossing the bud into a recycling bin.

With one last look at his patient, Jerbal Argon turned towards the door.

‘Sleep well, Opal,’ he said, almost fondly.

He felt calm again, the pain in his hip almost forgotten. Koboi was as far under as she had ever been. She wasn’t going to wake up any time soon. The Koboi fund was safe.

It’s amazing just how wrong one gnome can be.

Opal Koboi was not catatonic, but neither was she awake. She was somewhere in between, floating in a liquid world of meditation where every memory was a bubble of multicoloured light popping gently in her consciousness.

Since her early teens Opal had been a disciple of Gola Schweem, the cleansing coma guru. Schweem’s theory was that there was a deeper level of sleep than that experienced by most fairies. The cleansing coma state could usually be reached only after decades of discipline and practice. Opal had reached her first cleansing coma at the age of fourteen.

The benefits of the cleansing coma were that a fairy usually awoke completely refreshed but also spent the sleep time thinking, or in this case plotting. Opal’s coma was so complete that her mind was almost entirely separated from her body. She could fool the sensors and felt no embarrassment at the indignities of intravenous feeding and changing. The longest recorded consciously self-induced coma was forty-seven days.

Opal had been under for eleven months and counting, though she wasn’t planning to be counting much longer.

When Opal Koboi had joined forces with Briar Cudgeon and his goblins, she’d realized that she needed a back-up plan. Their scheme to overthrow the LEP had been ingenious, but there was always a chance that something could go wrong. In the event that it did, Opal had no intention of spending the rest of her life in prison. The only way she could make a clean getaway would be if everybody thought she was still locked up.

So Opal had begun to make preparations.

The first was to set up the emergency fund for the Argon Clinic. This would ensure she was sent to the right place if she had to induce a cleansing coma. The second step was to get two of her most trusted personnel installed in the clinic, to help with her eventual escape. Then she began siphoning huge amounts of gold from her businesses.

Opal did not wish to become an impoverished exile.

The final step was to donate some of her own DNA and to green light the creation of a clone that would take her place in the padded cell. Cloning was completely illegal and had been banned by fairy law for over five hundred years since the first experiments in Atlantis. It was by no means a perfect science. Doctors had never been able to create an exact fairy clone. The clones looked fine, but they were basically shells with only enough brainpower to run the body’s basic functions. They were missing the spark of true life. A fully grown clone resembled nothing more than the original person in a coma. Perfect.

Opal had had a greenhouse lab constructed, far from Koboi Laboratories, and had diverted enough funds to keep the project active for two years, the exact time it would take to grow a clone of herself to adulthood. Then, when she wanted to escape from the Argon Clinic, a perfect replica of herself would be left in her place. The LEP would never know she was gone.

As things had turned out, she had been right to plan ahead. Briar had proved treacherous, and a small group of fairies and humans had ensured his betrayal led to her own downfall. Now Opal had a goal to bolster her willpower: she would maintain this coma for as long as it took, because there was a score to be settled. Foaly, Root, Holly Short and the human, Artemis Fowl. They were the ones responsible for her defeat.

Soon she would be free of this clinic, and then she would visit those who had caused her such despair, and give them a little despair of their own. Once her enemies were defeated she could proceed with the second phase of her plan: introducing the Mud Men to the People in a way that could not be covered up by a few mind wipes. The secret life of fairies was almost at an end.

Opal Koboi’s brain released a few happy endorphins. The thought of revenge always gave her a warm, fuzzy feeling.

The Brill brothers watched Doctor Argon limp up the corridor.

‘Moron,’ muttered Merv, using his telescopic vacuum pole to chase some dust out of a corner.

‘You said it,’ agreed Scant. ‘Old Jerry couldn’t analyse a bowl of vole curry. No wonder his wife is leaving him. If he was any good as a shrink, he would’ve seen that coming.’

Merv collapsed the vacuum. ‘How are we doing?’

Scant checked his moonometer. ‘Ten past eight.’

‘Good. How’s Corporal Kelp?’

‘Still watching the movie. This guy is perfect. We have to go tonight. The LEP could send someone smart for the next shift. And if we wait any longer, the clone will grow another two centimetres.’

‘You’re right. Check the spy cameras.’

Scant lifted the lid on what appeared to be a janitor’s trolley, festooned as it was with mops, rags and sprays. Hidden beneath a tray of vacuum nozzles was a colour monitor split into several screens.

‘Well?’ hissed Merv.

Scant did not answer immediately, taking time to check all the screens. The video feed was from various micro-cameras that Opal had installed around the clinic before her incarceration. The spy cameras were actually genetically engineered organic material. So the pictures they sent were literally a live feed. The world’s first living machines. Totally undetectable by bug sweepers.

‘Night crew only,’ he said at last. ‘Nobody in this sector except Corporal Idiot over there.’

‘What about the parking lot?’

‘Clear.’

Merv held out his hand. ‘OK, brother. This is it. No turning back. Are we in? Do we want Opal Koboi back?’

Scant blew a lock of black hair from one round pixie eye.

‘Yes, because if she comes back on her own, Opal will find a way to make us suffer,’ he said, shaking his brother’s hand. ‘So yes, we’re in.’

Merv took a remote control from his pocket. The device was tuned to a sonix receiver planted in the clinic’s gable wall. This in turn was connected to a balloon of acid which lay gently on the clinic’s main power cube in the parking-lot junction box. A second balloon sat atop the back-up cube in the maintenance basement. As the clinic’s janitors, it had been a simple matter for Merv and Scant to plant the acid balloons the previous evening. Of course the Argon Clinic was also connected to the main grid, but if the cubes did go down, there would be a two-minute interval before the main power kicked in.

There was no need for more elaborate arrangements — after all, this was a medical facility, not a prison.

Merv took a deep breath, flicked open the safety cover and pressed the red button. The remote control emitted an infrared command activating two sonix charges.

The charges sent out sound waves bursting the balloons, and the balloons dumped their acidic contents on the clinic’s power cubes. Twenty seconds later, the cubes were completely eaten away and the whole building was plunged into darkness. Merv and Scant quickly put on night-vision goggles.

As soon as the power failed, green strip lights began pulsing gently on the floor, guiding the way to the exits. Merv and Scant moved quickly and purposefully. Scant steered the trolley and Merv made straight for Corporal Kelp.

Grub was pulling the video glasses from over his eyes.

‘Hey,’ he said, disorientated by the sudden darkness. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Power failure,’ said Merv, bumping into him with calculated clumsiness. ‘Those lines are a nightmare. I’ve been telling Doctor Argon, but nobody wants to spend money on maintenance when there are fancy company cars to be bought.’

Merv was not waffling for the fun of it; he was waiting for the soluble pad of sedative he had pressed on to Grub’s wrist to take effect.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Grub, suddenly blinking a lot more than he generally did.

‘I’ve been lobbying for new lockers at Police Plaza…I’m really thirsty. Is anyone else thirsty?’ Grub stiffened, frozen by the serum that was spreading through his system. The LEP officer would snap out of it in under two minutes, and be instantly alert. He would have no memory of his unconsciousness, and hopefully he would not notice the time-lapse.

‘Go,’ said Scant tersely.

Merv was already gone. With practised ease, he punched Doctor Argon’s code into Opal’s door. He completed this action faster than Argon ever could, due to hours spent practising on a stolen pad in his apartment. Argon’s code changed every week, but the Brill brothers made certain that they were cleaning outside the room when Argon was on his rounds. The pixies generally had the complete code by midweek.

The battery-powered pad light winked green, and the door slid back. Opal Koboi swung gently before him, suspended in her harness like a bug in an exotic cocoon.

Merv winched her down on to the trolley. Moving briskly and with practised precision, he rolled up Opal’s sleeve and located the scar in her upper arm where the seeker-sleeper had been inserted. He gripped the hard lump between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Scalpel,’ he said, holding out his free hand. Scant passed him the instrument.