V. Divulgent

Juliet was concerned.

Since they'd left the Menard Correctional Facility (and Jon Spiro) behind, Artemis had been quiet. Not that it was unusual for Artemis to be fairly quiet, but since he'd said his goodbyes to his imprisoned foe he hadn't spoken a word; no orders, no questions, no out-loud theories or abrupt speculations. Nothing. The only noises to be heard were the rumbling of the beat-up old truck she was driving down a long stretch of empty road, the gentle tapping of her fingernails against the steering wheel, and the low warbling of an Illinois news station on the radio.

Juliet was a lively, upbeat girl. She couldn't do the stern, silent bodyguard shtick that her older brother had honed to an art form, or at least not for very long. She'd been holding it for almost 30 minutes now, not including her silence while in the prison, and she was almost at her limit.

It wasn't a full two minutes later before her resolve cracked and she broke the silence. "Arty?"

"Artemis," her charge corrected distractedly. Juliet ignored him.

"Are you okay?" she asked carefully.

"Perfectly fine, Juliet," he replied, a little more focused. He looked over at her. "I look forward to getting changed once we reach the runway, but other than that – why do you ask?"

Juliet glanced over at him, looked straight into his hypnotizing blue eyes before turning her attentions back to the road. "You're quiet."

"I'm not a socialite, Juliet," he responded promptly. "I'm quiet rather often."

"Not this quiet. You're thinking."

"You were sitting directly next to me while we were inside, Juliet. You heard the conversation I had with Jon. You should know that I happen to have a substantial amount of things to think about."

"Not that sort of thinking," she disputed. "Something different."

He looked at her for a few long, silent seconds before turning away without speaking to stare out the window at the passing fields. Juliet sighed and tapped her nails on the wheel in mild agitation.

After a period of several minutes had passed, though, he surprised her by speaking up voluntarily. In an almost contemplative fashion, he said, "I've done the impossible, it seems, in these last few years, and I don't have a recollection of any of the most vital parts. I simply find it…upsetting."

'Upsetting' was perhaps one of the more underwhelming words he could have chosen. He was, of course, far more than just 'upset'. If he felt at all capable of allowing his emotions so much leeway, he might have had to choose to describe himself as 'absolutely livid' instead. 'Scared out of his wits' would also work, as well as 'eager', insofar as a shark is when blood is in the water.

The few things that he and Jon had managed to discuss had him feeling so many emotions at once in a sort of chaotic whirlwind of thought that he wasn't entirely sure where to start or how to sort through them all. He had never been that close to his emotions, and thus they were some of the few things that he wasn't entirely sure how to handle.

If he were a weaker man, he would wish for some form of alcohol to take his mind of the troubles for a period of time; however, he was underage. Not only that, but he was Artemis Fowl the Second, and he would not run away from his problems and hide in a bottle.

His mother had done that when they had thought his father dead, and it had only helped push her already-breaking mind completely over the edge.

Artemis frowned slightly at the trail of his thoughts and glanced over at Juliet. She was still looking over at his every few seconds, concern in her eyes. He sighed inwardly. She was as talented as Butler was when listening to him speak. She knew he wasn't lying, per se – she tended to confront him if he was – but she knew he wasn't telling her everything. And although a burden shared, as the saying went, may be a burden halved, he did not feel it important to reveal the weakness of his musings to her. Because if she thought him weak, even for a moment, then that would lead to doubt.

Artemis did not stand for doubt. Not of his plans. Not of his character. He had too many people in his life look down on him because of his age alone – and even though the majority of the civilized world had learned their lesson well enough because of his numerous achievements thus far in his life, there was still the occasional uninformed plebian whom he had to rather ruthlessly educate.

Just last month, he had bought out a relatively small telecommunications company that was dangerously close to failing. The owner had blustered and railed against him for whatever inane reason he had concocted – Artemis was not particularly interested why he wanted to go down with the ship, so to speak, and in fact did not particularly care if he did; he was quite capable of picking up the company and getting it running again once it had completely flopped, after all, it was just more work that way. So it had fallen upon him to inform this ignorant old man who, precisely, he was dealing with. The company was his before the sun had fallen that day.

The first small steps towards Fowl Industries.

He didn't allow the smile he felt to show upon his face as he contemplated just one of his many future plans.

"Juliet," he said several minutes later, once he had recollected his thoughts. "Once we get back to the Manor, be sure to phone Butler and let him know that he should expect a call within the next few days on his black phone."

"Yes, Artemis."

"We wouldn't want him hanging up on Mr. Spiro simply because of old wounds, would we?"

Juliet frowned, and her fingers tapped away in agitation on the steering wheel. 'Old wounds' indeed; Jon Spiro's flunky had been the one who almost killed her older brother. Hanging up on him would be the absolute least that could be done to the man – in her very firm opinion, Spiro should get shot in retaliation. Eye for an eye. Justice.

But her lips obediently said, "no, Artemis."

It had taken Holly several minutes to explain her and Foaly's actions in full. Surprisingly, the first thing out of Root's mouth was not an expletive, nor was it over one hundred decibels. Instead, it was simply a very long, drawn-out sigh. After a period of time in which he surely must have completely emptied his lungs of air, he followed it up with a miserable, "Why do you do this to me, Short?"

"Sir?" Holly was understandably confused about this apparent break in Root's reaction; he was usually yelling by now, well on his way to giving himself a coronary.

He raised a hand to silence any further comments (although, as both Holly and Foaly's brains were still trying to catch up with the fact that 'Mount Beetroot' had not erupted in a fiery volcanic explosion, there weren't really going to be any further comments for another minute or two) and he lowered himself into a nearby chair. "Let me…" He sighed again and rubbed at his eyes. He looked tired.

"Let me see if I have this right." He pointed at Holly. "You went off-course on a routine Recon fly around, which is against procedure, and disabled your tracking module, which is also against procedure, in order to gallivant across the countryside and make contact with a mind-wiped Mud Man, which is extremely against procedure and most certainly a punishable offense. You were offline for over an hour – an hour of deeming some personal chore more important than your job, an hour of direct dereliction of the duty to which you were assigned. And after that, you shanghaied the centaur into keeping mum about the incident and now you both are keeping watch over the Mud Boy – something which I could almost approve of, had your reasons and methods for it not been so ridiculously far outside of the law, not to mention how much of the decision was conceived completely from emotions and weak logic.

"Now, I have a good handful of reasons here for why I should hang both your careers with the mistakes of the last few days. Unfortunately, to do that I would have to make knowledge of those mistakes public – and trust me when I say that Artemis Fowl is one of the subjects that the Council deeply dislikes even mentioning, let along become an actual issue again. And if I make him an issue again, then I become part of that issue. And that is somewhere I do not wish to be." He ran a hand through his greyed crew cut and rubbed at the back of his neck. He sighed again. "So." He looked at his two subordinates. "What would you have me do here?"

"Not hang our careers with our mistakes," Foaly supplied immediately. "I don't believe I can stress the not-fired thing enough."

"Don't. Push it," Root warned, shaking a thick finger meaningfully. "I don't have to include these misdeeds if I don't want – I've got plenty of those backlogged that I can use to give you the boot should you push me too far."

Foaly's back leg jittered nervously, clop-clopping away on the tiling.

"So, I repeat: what would you have me do?"

"Well…" Holly said, glancing once at her partner-in-crime. "You could help us with this."

Root was silent for a moment. His hand tapped a low rhythm on his leg and he said, "What, precisely, would be my reasoning for agreeing to such a thing, Captain Short?"

Holly winced at the use of her title – he was not happy with this situation whatsoever. But… "Despite how bad it all looks, we can both agree that it is actually the best course of action."

"Is that right."

"Yes," she replied patiently as the centaur beside her stared at her in confusion, "we do."

"And…" Foaly piped up "Why do we, exactly?"

"Yes, Captain, do explain that point," Root growled out.

"Watching him and cataloguing his actions is a safer avenue for everyone in the Lower Elements than if we were not watching him at all," she said quite reasonably. "After all, we would have had no idea that he was piecing the puzzle back together again if we hadn't been watching him."

"He wouldn't have been 'piecing the puzzle back together again' if you hadn't broken protocol and made contact in the first place," Root countered.

"It was a very minor role."

"It was the catalyst," he insisted. "It tilted the scales from 'gee, that's strange' all the way to 'something's going on here and I, as a super-genius Mud Brat, have to figure it out'."

Holly was just as stubborn with her argument. "He would have put things together even if I hadn't done anything."

"Yes – later. Not now. Not on the tail-end of the last few goblin round-ups. Not when you're being considered for Major. Not when it all still winds up as my ass on the line."

Holly frowned thoughtfully. "In that case, I apologize, then, sir. I hadn't thought of how my actions might have affected you. However, what I did cannot be changed, and I would prefer to try and find the positives of my error rather than agonizing over the negatives." She said 'error' in such a way that betrayed just how little she thought her actions were wrong or unwarranted. If Root noticed, he didn't remark on it.

"It is safer to be keeping tabs on him," Foaly offered. "In fact, we probably should have been doing it the whole time, anyway – why'd we lift the patrol after 3 months?"

"Council," grunted Root. "Didn't want to have to think about him anymore."

Foaly let out a whinnying snort of revulsion. "Of course not. Can't spend too much time worrying about important things, like our biggest modern nemesis exposing us to the world above all over again – I'm sure they have big piles of money to count."

Root chuckled. "Okay. So. Where's Fowl at right now?"

"On his way back to his jet. He'll be flying back to Ireland within the hour."

"Not physically – in regards to us. His knowledge in regards to us. Where is he at? How far is he from discovering us all over again?"

"Oh," Foaly said, blinking rapidly. "Well. He just finished speaking with Mr. Jon Spiro-"

"Good," Root interrupted with a satisfied grin. "Useless. Perfect. So he's stuck for the moment, then?"

"Er." Foaly, for his part, looked confused. He shared the look with Holly before hesitantly asking, "What do you mean by 'useless'?"

Root raised an eyebrow at the question and frowned. "Fowl won't get anything from a meeting with Spiro, not when his mind's been wiped clean as a whistle." He was met with wide eyes and stark silence. Holly and Foaly just looked at each other wordlessly. Root could feel his blood pressure rising again as his hands curled into fists. "Foaly," he growled, "Tell me Spiro was wiped."

"Um…" His back hoof started tapping anxiously again. "See, about that – we kind of…couldn't…do that."

"Foaly…"

"We didn't get to him in time!" the centaur explained quickly. "He was in custody and in the system quick. And we can't interfere in the process of the law once it's begun no matter who it's regarding; quoting the Book directly: to judge a creature above or below, the power belongs to the creature's birth home, for fate's not decided by one foe or other, but to sentence is done by a creature's own brother. He was protected under the Mud Men justice system – by the words of our own laws, we couldn't touch him."

"D'arvit," Root swore, letting out a dark unamused chuckle and grimacing with a wide array of his teeth bared like an animal. "D'arvit," he swore again for good measure.

"Yeah."

"How much did Spiro know, then?"

"Couldn't have been much," Holly said. "He never saw any of us or our tech, save for Artemis' cube and Mulch – neither of which he had any idea of the true origins of."

"Wait," Foaly almost yelled, flinging a hand up, "wait, wait, stop. Oh dear. I remember. Oh dear, that is not good. That is very much not good. I remember – Spiro found Artemis' iris-cam."

"What!"

"What?!"

Artemis was seated in one of four plush leather seats that graced the main cabin of his private plane. A small rosewood table had been erected in front of him, bearing four things: a bottle with a light dusting of frost stuck to it, a glass glittering with condensation, a thin blue cloth beneath each to prevent watermarks from ruining the lacquered wood, and one newly-purchased high-end laptop computer. The bottle showed signs of having been opened recently, and the glass half-full with a clear liquid confirmed it. The laptop was running, fans filling the air with a faint whine, and the screen was open to an internet search tool.

It was almost unnatural, the way his hands were not busily handling the glassware, or his fingers not positively dancing over the keyboard in order to work his magic; instead, they were carefully cradling his face as he sighed heavily in thought.

There were footsteps as someone walked by his seat, muted by the low carpeting. He spoke without moving from his position. "Depart at the earliest possible convenience, Juliet," he said. "I do not wish to be here any longer than is absolutely necessary."

"Yes, sir," Juliet replied shortly as she made her way towards the cockpit for the pre-flight checks. He suspected she was still upset with his rather careful treatment of Mr. Spiro.

She disappeared through a door and the room was silent again, save for the whirr of laptop fans. Artemis sighed once more before sitting up straight. He ran a thin-fingered hand through his hair in order to tame a few rogue strands and dropped the other down to his neck in order to fix his tie – he'd changed out of those ridiculous clothes and back into a suit the moment he stepped onto the plane – to sit properly against his collar.

He idly ran his thumb over the knuckle of his index before settling the pads of his fingers over the keyboard. With a few deft clicks, his search began.

There were a great many things that struck Artemis as odd throughout his brief conversation with Jon Spiro, but unfortunately the majority of them were non-pursuable avenues of research: security footage was wiped after six months, removing Phonetix security cameras as an avenue for corroboration; the Spiro Needle had since been bought out, renamed, and the inside offices practically rebuilt entirely, destroying any evidence that may have been left behind in the first place; Arno blunt, one of Spiro's biggest brutes, had been sentenced to maximum security after assaulting several officers and a half-dozen fellow inmates within the last five months, unfortunately barring him from a face-to-face visit; and this 'C-Cube' that Spiro spoke of with such reverence and enviousness had likely been seized and put into evidence upon the man's capture.

There was, however, one thing that Artemis could easily and reliably research: the LEP.

Spiro had claimed that Artemis himself had waved it away when it came up, dismissing it as a Lebanese game show tv network – LEbanese Programming or some such. A classic sense of "one of these things is not like the other", a game show from a middle-eastern country had no business showing up in the predominately-white and extremely wealthy section of London where the En Fin restaurant establishment sat, let alone show up in the midst of two intelligence agencies eyeballing a meeting between businessmen suspected of major crimes.

Artemis' explanation of it just didn't fit. It didn't fit the same way so many other things recently hadn't fit, just weren't right, and didn't ring quite true.

So what could it actually be? Another government agency? When, then would he have lied about it, about something so patently obvious? The CIA was already closing in on their location at the time – what could have been the harm in revealing one more in the laundry list of any number of other watchdog agencies? Unless it wasn't a state entity at all – a private organization, then? A secret one?

Artemis leaned back in his chair and wrapped several fingers around the cool lip of his glass. Ice-cold water was tipped into his mouth, tasting of the springs and magic of Ireland, drawn from a small lake in the mountainous regions of his fair land. He had Butler trek there personally twice a year in order to fill several bottles with the isolated rainwater. To the manservant, it tasted pretty much like every other bottled water on the planet. To Artemis, it was liquid heaven – a taste of paradise untouched by humanity's denigration and destruction, more wondrous and pure than the finest of alcohol.

He swallowed, and luxuriated in the feeling and the taste as it slipped down his throat with frozen clarity. It wasn't to last, though, for when he turned back to the computer screen he was greeted by a large and unforgiving 0.

A frown played across his lips for a second-

LEP…

-before it was replaced by a vampiric grin.

A challenge.

"Frond…d'arvit centaur," Root spat. "If these are just the mistakes that've been made while cleaning up a mission, I shudder to think of all the mistakes that will come once we begin the next one." He buried his face into his hands and growled a few more muffled curses into his palms. "Okay," he sighed after he'd finished, looking back up at his subordinates, "okay. This is fixable. It won't be fun or easy, and in the meantime I'll brainstorm on what sort of dead-end jobs I can stick you two into-" Foaly flinched appropriately "-but we can work it out. You've done the best we could do with Fowl so far, keeping him under surveillance, I'll give you that much. As of now, we've got no legal reason to interfere in his business, but make no mistake, once he reaches the right conclusion – and he will, and you know it – I have the authority to zap him and zap him hard. If I have any indications of hostility, I won't hesitate to wipe his mind completely this time. Is that understood?"

They weren't happy about it – Short looked ready to leap forward and punch him – but they nodded their assent, Short punctuating hers with a bitterly quiet "yessir".

"Good. Now. We can't wipe Spiro, not while he's in prison."

"And he'll probably be there the rest of his life, so we'll likely never get a go at him," Foaly added.

"Even so, make a note. Check on him every six months or so, check to see if his sentencing has changed or anything. Flag him for any IDs, credit cards, the works. If he does get out, we need to make sure he's not a problem. As for the Cube, do we have any idea as to what happened to it?"

"Artemis had it on his person in the Phonetix building where we rescued him," Holly said. "Once we relocated him and his companions to the site where Foaly had prepared his equipment, all humans were stripped of any fairy or fairy-similar technology, the C-Cube being included as such. Given its connection to him, I expect it would have been sent to be melted down."

"That would make the most sense," Root mused. "I want that checked up on. If it was melted down, I want hard-copy confirmation. If not, then I say we track it down so it can be decommissioned properly."

"Yessir."

"And as for the iris-cam…Foaly. Any ideas?"

"That one should actually be fairly simple to fix. While they can't be remotely detonated like most of my tech, they do still respond to specific radio-"

"Why can't they be remotely detonated?" Root interrupted.

"Because there were never any acidic compounds included in the design."

"And why not?"

"Would you want something capable of melting itself and any muscle or tissues it comes into contact with sitting directly on your eye?"

After a few long seconds, he gave a grudging "no".

"As I was saying," Foaly continued, "I should be able to use its radio frequency to lock onto it, maybe get a general location."

"Do that. Make sure it's nighttime over in the States before you do it, though. I don't want you activating anything during the day where it might be in the middle of being researched or something. After you find it, we'll send in a guy. Whip up a data-charge we can give him that'll clean up the electronics wherever it's at. I don't need to find out that Spiro had his guys checked it out and it's been used to upgrade Mud Men cell phones or something."

"Well, Spiro's businesses went belly-up when he was caught – no one particularly wanted to be associated with him anymore – so I highly doubt 'his guys' were doing anything with it," Foaly pointed out.

"His previous competition, then. Whatever."

"I can do that."

"We'd need to go in and retrieve the iris-cam from wherever it may be, as well. The rules about dwellings makes that a bit tricky, though – can't do a direct infiltration."

"The data-charge will self-destruct once it's finished, of course – since the iris-cam can't, I'll just send a liquidator along with whoever you send in. It'll pick up the unique identification signal from my tech, the iris-cam in this case, from over a hundred meters and overwork its micromachinery until it breaks itself apart."

Holly frowned minutely and spoke up. "Will that be enough?" she asked. "The acid in your other gear turns them into a puddle of unrecognizable goo – how well does the 'liquidator' work?"

"Like a dream," Foaly responded with a toothy grin. "The micromaterials that make up some of my smaller tech break apart completely after being subjected to the liquidator for a few seconds. Since the micromaterial is so small – it takes about a thousand of the things to stretch a little more than a centimeter – there's nothing left when it breaks up but a little unrecognizable pile of dust."

"Sounds good to me," Root said, rubbing at his eyes. "And with that, I think we've managed to cover all the disasters you've shared for today. Unless you've got another one or two you didn't bother to mention?"

There were several long, blessed seconds of silence. Then Foaly said, "Actually-"

"Dear Frond, centaur, I wasn't serious!"

"I know!" he exclaimed, alarmed. "I know! It's not that bad, though, so, you know, settle down! Just – calm down."

"I am calm," Root groaned miserably. "So just spit it out already."

"Well…I'd like to go to Atlantis."

"We're in the middle of several different crises, and you think now is the best time to go on vacation?"

"Not for personal reasons," Foaly was quick to clarify. "Business. I need to go to the Deeps to talk to Mulch."

"Diggums? Spit it out, centaur – why in Frond's name do you need to talk to him?"

Foaly glanced at Holly. He had just opened his mouth to tell her about it when Root had barged into his Ops Booth, full of misplaced aggression. So…

He took a breath and looked at his companions and said, "To figure out where Fowl's copy of The Book is."

Jonas Eadin Lowrie strode purposefully into the main branch of Bank Hapoalim, the largest banking institution in Israel. He was a big man, only a few inches shy of seven feet tall, who moved with a surefootedness that belied a wealth of combat experience. His head was shaven, his full lips were pressed into a thin line, and his deep blue eyes flickered from one person, door, and corner to another with military precision, always on the lookout for threats, suspicious circumstances, or opportunities.

Jonas Lowrie was not his real name for, of course, this was simply one of Butler's many aliases. He had been known as Xavier Lee not even a day ago when he arrived at the International Deutsche Bank of Germany, after all. And he'd be Alexander Westerfeld tomorrow; and Luca Andrei Nowak the day after that. Such was the life of multiple identities – but one could not travel as a Fowl's Butler everywhere one went, so the trouble was truly a necessary one.

His long stride came to a halt when he reached the front desk, casting a rather large shadow across the polished wood and the diminutive woman standing behind it. She looked up and smiled brilliantly at him, her teeth bright against her tanned skin. A small nameplate stood on the desk – Tahel, it said.

"Boker Tov," she greeted quite pleasantly, not seeming at all intimidated by his size. It almost made him smile; that sort of thing didn't happen very often.

"Boker Tov," he said, wishing her a good morning in return with a short recline of his head. His Hebrew not being the greatest and not wishing to have to stumble through a conversation with her, he quite bluntly queried, "An'glis?"

"Ah." Her voice carried an accent that Butler found as pleasant as her smile as she switched to English. "Of course, sir. How may I help you today?"

"I'm here to make a temporary withdrawal from my safety deposit box."

Root hadn't found Foaly's final remark at all amusing, and the finally got the eruption that they had been waiting for from Mount Beetroot. Going on about 'how did we lose The Book of all things' and 'the screw-ups your incompetence has caused' and 'your career, this time for sure!' Thankfully, Holly had immediately leapt to his defense, hands out and prepared to physically restrain the man in case he decided to lift himself and his considerable paunch out of the seat in order to strangle his furry neck.

Foaly retreated back to a safe distance.

Unfortunately, distance didn't do anything to lessen the sound of the shouting as Holly joined in as a counterpoint to her superior. 'We sort of had a lot of other things on our plates at the time', 'don't blame Foaly when I should have been the one who noticed that in the first place', and 'you never thought of it either after everything was said and done'.

Foaly's hind leg was clip-clopping nervously on the tiling once again as he listened to the two go back and forth. He really didn't want to admit it, but Root had decent points to be made. It was a screw-up, a hugely embarrassing one that should never have happened in the first place, the final straw in a pathetically lengthy list of them, and one for which he'd been feeling immensely guilty about for the last twenty-four hours that he'd known of it.

He didn't particularly feel as though he deserved to defend himself at the moment. What exactly was there to defend? What could he say to redeem himself of this?

So he didn't bother trying.

Ping!

The unexpected noise caused Foaly's ears to perk up on the sides of his head and look away from the quarreling LEP fairies, towards one of his smaller terminals. Something on the monitor was flashing in a slow pulse. It took a few seconds for his brain to catch up and remember what, exactly, he had been doing at that terminal that warranted a cheery-sounding chime – but when it did, it yanked his mind out of the momentary funk he'd been having and into genius overdrive.

Before he even knew he was moving he was halfway across the room, hooves striking loud against the steel floor paneling and the bickering of officers drowned out by the growing buzz of thoughts and ideas crackling to life in the back of his brain. His fingers were twitching in anticipation as he stepped up to the terminal. He didn't sit down; there wasn't a seat available anyway. But that was fine – he couldn't have sat still when he was this excited, anyway.

The flashing screen held a small box at the forefront of the other windows; SEARCH COMPLETE, it said. It was the results of the spider-search he had done, looking for Fowl's original 'help wanted' message when he had begun his quest for fairyfolk. His spider-search had combed the internet, rooting through search engines and digging up deleted files, tearing apart every last inch of webspace that could be found, and brought back a handful of what was left that matched the query given. One result sat above the rest, highlighted. Foaly put his eager fingers to the keys and with one smooth stroke the file opened up, blooming into a new window.

It had a few glitches, a few chunks of data that didn't quite make it through translation, a few packets that were lost indefinitely – so some words were garbled. The formatting was screwy. But it was there. Legible. In large, simple font:

Irish businesman
wil ngto pay
large amnt U.S dollar s for p
roof of0f
existenc of fairy pppxie, lep
rec aun .

Beneath it, the site was set up in the style of a message board; people took a temporary username and posted their thoughts or questions. There was a line of code revealed in plain text, set to hide certain posts from the public eyes; because the code was garbled, though, the hidden messages remained seen. And it was easy to see why they'd been removed from the board – full of swear words, or too short, or just rambling nonsense.

Based on timestamps, it had been set up almost six months before their initial encounter with Fowl. Within those months, he had gotten legitimate-sounding replies from people in Egypt, Africa, Russia, Hawaii, Japan, and Vietnam – the replies he had managed to follow up on, according to the notes they had seen him reviewing – and also from France, North America, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, and Australia.

The post which touted Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as a location for proof was as garbled as the original post was, and thankfully was equally short and to-the-point.

if your looking for those
who prctce magik there's somethingg I t
hink you should s/e in
th all ys of Saigon. Ill meet
you therein th
e c
afé n DongKhai street, at noonone
week f rom today .

-Ngyenn uan

They had a timeline. They had a time, a place, a name – everything. Sure, it was a little messy, and there would need to be some double-checking of those things – the first name was surely Nguyen, but the last name could be Quan, Luan, Xuan, Luang, or a hundred other possible variations – but they had it.

He simply couldn't help himself when he let out a whoop of victory. He did, however, feel immensely embarrassed about it immediately afterwards as the two LEP officers turned away from each other to shoot confused looks at him.

Well, sort of confused; Root looked like he was going to get his second wind and start in on the centaur again. He hurried to explain before that could come to pass.

"It's Fowl," he said, grinning like a loon with his large teeth on full display. "I found out how he decided where to go to find us – fairies, I mean. He had this internet – this website on the internet, and he just put up something like a, uh, like a 'help wanted' sign there, where people answered. It's – it's really very – we have his contact, for Ho Chi Minh! We have the date that he met Fowl there!" He was almost breathless as he stammered over his words to get this out.

Holly took over for him, looking almost as excited. "So with this, we have a timeline of what Artemis did before he originally kidnapped me, as well as information on who he met with. I'm sure that website had his contacts from the other countries as well. And we also have the name and basic details of the sprite that we believe he dealt with when in Ho Chi Minh, whom we believe he got The Book from." She directed this towards Root, whom they had not previously shared this information with.

"With this," she continued, "I think we can definitively have her brought in for questioning. Perhaps she'll have some insight as to what Fowl did to her to get rid of her alcohol addiction and restore some of her magic. If he could come up with something like that at 12 years old, it's likely that someone in the fairy underworld has done something similar is moving it in the black market. If it is, it's something we should be aware of."

The verbal barrage he had been served stopped him short of anything he might have had a mind of saying. His mouth opened and closed a few times as he tried valiantly to come up with something, anything to say; whether he wanted to gloss over everything and get back to the yelling or take charge of this new development. His face was beet red. After several very long moments, though, he just sighed deeply and shook his head and uttered, "Let's just thank the elders that you managed to get something right out of this disaster."