The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

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 colour 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 Defence himself, who summarily informed Conroy that his squad had been deputised by a top-secret intergovernmental organisation and he was to follow Sister Jeronima’s orders to the letter until his ID returned to its original colour.

      ‘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 were still one of the good guys, if indeed there even were good guys any more 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 colour. 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 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 Greyfeather, 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.

      Myles awoke, and quickly realised that all was not right in the Fowl world. For one thing, he was in a chair, which was most unusual for him. Not being in a chair per se, but waking from slumber in a chair, for Myles was not the type of boy to simply nod off; he had not once, since the age of two, fallen asleep in a chair, sofa or recliner.

      To explain: Myles’s brain was so active that he was obliged to perform a nightly relaxation routine in order to disengage his synapses. This routine involved first inserting his night-time mouth guard and then completing self-hypnosis exercises while focusing on Beckett’s unusually musical snores. Beckett’s snores, technically speaking, were not snores at all but a trio of whistles that he exhaled through both of his nostrils and his mouth. This triple exhale was unusual enough in itself, but the really extraordinary thing was that each orifice played a different note. Notes that combined to form a perfect C-major chord, which never failed to remind Myles of Beethoven’s Mass.

      Myles could not hear the chord now and knew that he had been separated from his twin. He looked around to find himself in an underground room with stone columns and vaulted arches. There were no visual cues to suggest that he was underground, but Myles could tell instinctively – something perhaps about the heaviness of the air or a pressure he felt in his skull – that he was below sea level. Myles’s skull was very sensitive, and the least change in atmospherics could precipitate a migraine.

      Sister Jeronima was seated across a table from him. Bizarrely enough, the nun was absently polishing a throwing knife with a chamois cloth.

      Sad, thought Myles. Such a pathetic attempt to intimidate me.

      Jeronima expects me to reference the knife, he realised, thus giving her the upper hand.

      ‘Buenas tardes, Myles Fowl,’ said the nun without looking up from her knife. ‘You must have so many questions.’

      It was true that there were things Myles needed to know, but he had answers too, should anyone care to pose the corresponding questions.

      He could have asked: Where am I precisely?

      Or indeed: Who exactly do you represent?

      Or certainly: What do you want with us?

      Myles knew that, should he pretend to pass himself off as a frightened, witless youth to learn these things, Jeronima would see right through him; after all, his intellect was well documented.

      So, instead of firing off a barrage of questions, Myles said, ‘You sedated us with the helicopter’s oxygen masks. That was a despicable trick, Sister.’

      Jeronima was not in the least abashed. ‘The levels are delicate. Sometimes people fall asleep.’

      ‘And then you are free to smuggle them into your subterranean base without fuss. I would guess we are in Amsterdam. Or perhaps Rotterdam, but I imagine Amsterdam. I do love Amsterdam. The NEMO Science Museum is a marvel, though I do worry about the EYE theatre, architecturally. I have written letters to the board.’

      Jeronima gave Myles her full attention. ‘Very good. How did you know we were in Amsterdam?’

      This would usually have been a simple question for the NANNI chip embedded in Myles’s spectacles to answer. The map of their trip was displayed for his eyes only on the inside of his lenses. Unfortunately, NANNI had lost network outside Schiphol airport, so Myles had been forced to make an educated guess.

      ‘Never mind that,’ said Myles. ‘I’m sure you must have questions.’

      ‘Oh, sí,’ said Jeronima. ‘I have questions, but perhaps some answers too. I can tell you where your brother is.’

      Myles rubbed the scar on his wrist. ‘No need. Beckett is in the next room.’

      ‘You can sense your twin?’

      ‘Our scars twinge like a form of spiritual radar,’ said Myles. ‘Usually I can see him too.’

      ‘Do