The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

earlier.

      Lord Bleedham-Drye knew that, logically, he should maintain his surveillance on the soon-to-be-unguarded Dalkey Island, but his instinct said follow the Fowls.

      The duke trusted his instinct; it had kept him alive this long.

      After all, it would be child’s play to follow the troll, for each Myishi CV round was radioactively coded, and Teddy had programmed the individual codes into his marvellous Myishi Drye wristwatch, which had over a thousand functions, including geo-pinned news alerts and actually telling the time. The Drye series was the gold standard in criminal appliances. It included watches, exercise machines, a gorgeous porcelain handgun, a line of lightweight bulletproof apparel, a light aircraft and a range of communication devices. Each item was embossed with a copy of the famous Modigliani line portrait of the duke from 1915. In return for his sponsorship, Teddy had a yearly credit of five million US dollars with the company, and a fifty per cent discount on anything above that amount. The slogan for the Drye range was Stay Drye in any situation with Myishi. It had been a most successful arrangement for both parties. And, in truth, Lord Teddy would have long since declared bankruptcy without the Myishi Corp sponsorship deal. For his part, Ishi Myishi had the seal of approval from one of the most respected criminal masterminds/mad scientists in the community, which shifted enough units to easily pay the duke’s tab.

      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 child squealing 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?