Ken was keenly aware that the bartender was keeping an eye on them. She had noticed Robbie’s distress and was starting to walk toward them with intent. Gulping at the thought of the baseball bat under the bar, he pulled a handful of money out of his pocket and slapped it on the bar. Very gently, he helped Robbie to stand up.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested. He put his arm around Robbie and helped her off the bar stool. Casually, he strolled with her out into the neon-glazed night, with one final glance over his shoulder to make sure the bartender wasn’t picking up the phone to call the police.
“Okay,” Ken said, steering her out onto Toulouse. “I know a good place to go.”
“Okay,” said Robbie, biddably, her sorrows forgotten. The drugs were taking effect at last. Ken held out his free arm and gestured toward the sky.
“Now, the lights are coming up. Michael’s already out on the stage with the band. You’re sitting behind your console. Your hand moves toward the control board. . . .”
* * *
Upstairs, in the empty press room beside the control room, a finger of green-tinged power crept out of the metal box containing the transmission lines, down the cables snaking from it to the room next door. Everybody in the control room was too busy to notice the tongue of flame dancing along the black cables. It rippled over to the special effects station, which hummed into life.
“Tone down the mikes on Voe’s drums, Sheila,” Gary Lowe, seated at the lighting station, was saying. He slid several pots and hovered his finger over a button. “We want to hear Dijan’s bodhran here. Bring up Carl’s harp. Lovely. And . . . cue the cascade.”
The green fire blazed into life. The readout on the laptop computer beside the special effects station began to scroll down its long list.
* * *
Liz squirmed back into her place next to Boo-Boo. The American seemed troubled.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, pointing vaguely up toward the ceiling. “It ain’t exactly music.”
Liz listened intently. A chord had added itself to the topmost registers of the music, a disturbing harmonic that set her teeth on edge. Fee and Michael both heard it, glanced at each other, wondering what it was. Michael gestured at the techies with a flattening hand, ordering them to do something about it. They all shrugged. Alarmed, both singers glanced backward to where Liz and Boo were concealed. Boo-Boo waved his hand, showing them there was nothing to worry about.
“What is it?”
“Dunno. Bad mojo on the way. Any minute now, I’m guessin’.”
“Then why did you tell them to go on?”
Boo-Boo’s blue eyes glinted at her. “It’d be worse if they stop.”
Hastily, Liz started chanting the protection cantrip over and over. She hadn’t begun a moment too soon. The cascade of colored lights had just ended, changing Fionna’s white dress to every color of the rainbow. Without warning, there was an explosion at the south end of the stage. Brilliant pillars of white and gold roared up practically under Fionna’s nose. The Roman candles were launching! With shrill whistles, fingers of flame shot up halfway to the ceiling. They burst into sparks that showered down on the wildly yelling crowd. Tiny red embers fell over Fionna’s head, but bounced harmlessly off the bubble provided by the spell.
No one noticed the effect but Lloyd, who glanced toward the agents and gave them a surreptitious thumbs-up. He approved.
Fee looked nervous for a moment, then took the reappearance of the pyrotechnics in her stride. She stretched out an arm toward the fire as though she was invoking power from it. As the rockets launched, she matched them scream for scream. The crowd loved it.
“I thought they were doing this without effects,” Liz said, watching the rockets zip around the huge arena. Mentally, she ticked off the sequence of events as they each appeared on schedule: rockets, lasers, smoke, more lasers, light show. It was as though Robbie had never left.
“Maybe the guys found another special effects technician here in town,” Laura Manning speculated, huddling in behind them to watch Fionna dance. “After all, she left her cue sheet program and all the equipment. Good thing, too. Gary Lowe’s had just one headache after another. It’s bad enough that the lighting director took off, too.”
“What?” the agents asked in unison, turning toward her.
The makeup artist looked from one surprised face to the other.
“Nigel didn’t tell you? Yeah, right after he canned Robbie Unterburger, Kenny Lewis disappeared. Went out to make a phone call, Sheila said, and has never been seen again. I thought he had feelings for Robbie, but she couldn’t see he was alive with the eye magnet over there,” Laura nodded in Lloyd’s direction. “Poor Gary’s running the lights himself.”
Boo and Liz exchanged glances.
“I thought that young lady wasn’t doin’ all this on her own,” Boo said, his mouth set in a grim line. “It just seemed out of character. Now, him I could believe.”
“We’d better check upstairs and make sure,” Liz said.
Hugh Banks thought it was an odd question, but he grabbed his headset mike and inquired. His face was troubled when he looked up. “You’re right. No one’s at Robbie’s desk. The whole thing is working by itself. Is it a ghost in the machine?”
“Could she have mechanized it to work off the cues?” Liz asked. “She had everything listed on a laptop computer.”
“Possibly, but why didn’t she tell us she was doing that?” Banks asked. He turned to the manager, who looked shocked.
“Can they turn it off?” Boo asked. Banks muttered to his microphone again. His usually ruddy face turned pale.
“No.”
“It’s going by remote control,” Liz said, feeling icy fingers gripping her stomach. “She’s making it all happen by remote control.”
“But nothing bad has happened yet,” Nigel Peters said, hopefully.
“I wouldn’t take no bets on it stayin’ that way,” Boo-Boo said. Liz agreed with him. “Can’t do anythin’ now but stay on guard, and hope we can handle what he throws at us.”
Nigel tore at his thin hair. “This is all my fault. I should have kept the silly girl where she was.”
“Should we stop the show?” Banks asked. Boo-Boo shook his head.
“Just do your job, and let Ms. Fionna do hers.”
The star was responding magnificently to having the fireworks and lasers running, however unexpectedly. Privately, Liz thought she must be vastly relieved. No need to show her bare face, so to speak.
The exciting rock number was ending. After a halt of a few beats, the tempo changed to the challenging rhythm of Green Fire’s diatribe against hostile occupation of one country by another. The plaintive wail of the uilleann pipe began to snake in and out of the melody.
The music itself began to sound sinister to Liz. During rehearsal she had put it off to the subject matter of the song. It was a violent protest against partisan hatred, a touchy subject to one of her nationality, yet there was more to it than the theme itself. Something was wrong in the fundamental sound of it. A destructive force seemed to be taking hold within the Superdome, but how was it happening? The girl was not there, had never entered the building at all. Every security guard there had her picture and was on the lookout. Ken Lewis hadn’t been seen either. Neither one was on site, yet it was undeniable that the feeling of the concert had changed. No matter how benevolent the meaning of the lyrics, it was being perverted somehow into bad magic. The figure of a rampant lion etched in green lasers leaped up out of the steam and roared at the crowd.
“Cor! Effects are getting better all the time!” Laura Manning said, wonderingly. “I didn’t know they could do anything like that.”
“They’re not,” Liz said. Cupping her hands around an imaginary bubble of air, she strengthened the ring of protective energy around Fionna. Who was at that moment launching herself forward, toward the front of the stage, step by step, following the lyrics of the song. Liz felt as though she wanted to race out there and pull her back.
It was too late. One more lunging step, and Fee kept moving, right off the end of the stage. Instead of falling into the crowd, she was hoisted up into the air by invisible hands. Her singing turned into more of a scream than usual. The dangling white fringes of her dress went into frenzied shimmying as Fee kicked at the air. Rockets began to blast off again, practically going up her skirts.
The question of how Roberta Unterburger was doing this, with or without Ken Lewis, would have to wait. Other things, like saving Fionna and the band, were more important. The singer was floating higher and higher, until Liz feared she would crash into the Jumbotron. Four gigantic images of her frantic face were being projected on the screens, thanks to the roving cameras in the crowd.