"You're in N'Awlins now," Boo-Boo said, winningly. "You just about have to. Y'all ought to take it easy. Go on. It'll be easier than you think."

"Well, all right," she said dubiously, rolling the name around on her tongue. "Liz." But she liked it. She hadn't had a nickname since school. "Yes, why not?"

"That's the spirit," Boo-Boo said, leaning back in his chair. "I think we're goin' to get along just fine."

Elizabeth decided it was time that she set a few things straight. "So long as you understand that I am in charge of this mission. Fionna Kenmare's case was assigned to me."

Boo-Boo's eyes glinted their fierce laser-blue at her though his voice stayed mild. "I hate to correct a lady, but you don't have any jurisdiction here without my say-so."

"What? My government asked for your assistance, not to take over!" Liz heard her words echo against the far walls of the room and dropped her voice. "This is my case."

"Well, y'know, there's national sovereignty to consider," Boo-Boo said. "If it was happenin', say, in the British Embassy, that'd be one thing. But we're right here in my city. If y'all want to go home on the next plane it'll be tomorrow afternoon. 'Course, y'all will miss the concert, and that'd be just too bad." His blue eyes flashed with fire. Liz realized that he could make good on his threat. Mr. Ringwall would go apoplectic if she was sent home. She took a deep breath.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Boudreau," she said.

"It's Boo-Boo," he said, the lines of his thin face relaxing. "We shouldn't be fightin', Liz. We both want the same thing."

Yes, Liz thought. Control. "Yes, we do." The last word ended in a yawn. "Oh! I'm sorry." She found herself unable to stop yawning.

"I apologize. Y'all must be frazzled. Are we friends?" Boo-Boo asked, rising to help pull out her chair.

"Certainly," Liz said, rising with a smile for him. He was really quite nice. She'd fight the fight over dominance in the morning, when she had her wits about her once more.

Before dropping her off for the night, Boo produced one more surprise from his pocket.

"You're goin' to need this," he said, placing a cellular telephone the size of a pack of gum in her hand. "Courtesy of Uncle Sam. Yours prob'ly don't work here. You can call home on this, but mostly it's to keep in touch with me." He switched it on and showed her the controls. "My number's set on speed-dial one. G'night, ma'am."

Liz glanced at the clock on her nightstand and did some math. Still too early in London to call in her report. She got into her nightdress, clicked off the lamp, and slid into the blessed embrace of smooth, cool, clean sheets. Sleep ought to have overtaken her like a race car, but she found herself staring at the ceiling in the darkness. She groaned. She shouldn't have drunk that coffee, or she ought to have had a gallon more and just foregone sleep for the night.

Fee Kendale might have been a spoiled brat, but why would anyone seriously want to hurt her? The thought stayed with Liz all that night, and kept her from falling asleep, troubling her even more than the coffee did. What if magic was involved? When, in desperation to distract her brain, she turned on the room television, it was no help. Picking her way through the multitudinous channels available, she found herself watching a chat show where the host and the audience seemed more interested in taunting and shouting at the homosexual guests than in listening to what they had to say. When the host actually rose from his seat to punch one of his guests in the face, knocking him sprawling, she turned it off in disgust.

Hugging her pillow, she drifted off to a troubled sleep, haunted by images of shouting faces contorted in hate.

The dour-faced male announcer stared into the camera lens. "SATN-TV, `The Voice of Reason in the Wilderness,' is now concluding its broadcast day. Thank you for watching. And now, the national anthem."

Over the familiar whine of the horns, the control room engineer, Ed Cielinski, began slamming tapes into the machines to cue up for the morning. The nighttime talk show looked like any one of three hundred others produced anywhere else in the country, but with one big difference. All the trappings were there, the host, the comfy chairs, the audience, but on stage there was also an altar in the shape of a pig. On its blood-red back was an upside-down pentacle, broken crosses and stars, a mangled crescent, plus black candles in holders. The aim of the show was to cause bloodthirsty controversy that almost always broke out in violence.

The police had finally dragged that night's combatants off the studio floor. A couple of them wanted to keep the fight going. The defender—designated victim, if anyone had asked Ed for his opinion—was being loaded onto a stretcher by paramedics with his neck in a brace. The host of the live broadcast, Nick Trenton, smug expression back firmly in place, got up, wiped the blood off his chin and straightened his tie. He strode out of the room. All in a day's work, thought the engineer. Trenton would never so much as glance backward at the problems he caused. It was all good for the ratings, Ed thought sourly.

Ed waited until the camera operators and lighting crew were gone, then turned out the spotlights. The last one, at the rear of the stage, over the gigantic enlargement of the rock group led by the lady with green hair, faded slowly to black. The next designated victim, Ed thought, not without a measure of sympathy. He slapped down the audio monitor switch as his employer, Augustus Kingston, the owner and station manager, walked into the room.

"Everything work okay?" he asked Cielinski.

"Yes, sir," said the engineer. "The frequency didn't interfere with the picture a bit. Went out nice and strong."

"How's reception on that special transmission line?"

"Nothing big. We haven't heard from our contact out in New Orleans yet."

"That won't be for a day or two," the old man said, rocking back on his heels in anticipation. "Let 'em get settled. Got to give it all a chance to build." He pulled a cigar out of his pocket. The engineer winced on behalf of his machines as his boss lit up and blew a plume of cloyingly heavy smoke towards the ceiling.

"Yes, sir, it's like casting your bread out on the waters, Ed," he said, laughing heartily. "You get it all back threefold. When we start casting that there bread out there, we're going to collect plenty back again. Them godless, magic-loving pagans won't stand a chance, now, will they?"

The engineer gulped quietly to himself. "No, sir."

The old man stopped for a leisurely puff, and stared into the ember of his cigar with a pleased look on his creased face. "No. No, they won't. And the justice of it is, they'll do it to themselves."