And so Lazuli had, minutes before, dragged herself from the seaweed, feeling like she had endured a severe beating due to the effects of the Filabuster, and pedaled 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, aside 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 realized. 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 southeast toward 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 realized 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,” he said. “There is no need to shout into my right ear. It’s here beside you. Perfectly visible.”
It took Lazuli a moment to realize that his comments were aimed at her and not at the nun. When the lightbulb 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 favor?
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 unsavory 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 in her semitruckload 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 color 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 defense himself, who summarily informed Conroy that his squad had been deputized by a top secret intergovernmental organization and he was to follow Sister Jeronima’s orders to the letter until his ID returned to its original color.
“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 was still one of the good guys, if indeed there even were good guys anymore 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 color. 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 in the World Talks Eventually, in which Jeronima laid out her interrogation philosophy.
The thing to remember, she wrote in the foreword, is that everyone is guilty of something.
If pressed on the matter, Jeronima would say that the strangest subject she had ever questioned was Gary Grayfeather, an African parrot that knew the combination to a Cockney gang lord’s safe. It had taken her a few hours and a bucket of nuts, but eventually Gary had spilled the numbers.
The parrot was about to be demoted to second place on the strange-subject list after the Fowl Twins.
Jeronima’s plan was as follows: She would place the twins in adjacent rooms and pose questions to both until some disparity appeared, and then she would use the difference in their stories to drive a wedge between them. Jeronima was aware that Myles was a smart one, but she felt confident that he would crumble quickly in an interview situation.